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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ArchfiendBobbie" data-source="post: 6989316" data-attributes="member: 6867728">Why would we find it irrational? Humans do such all of the time, and there are several conflicts right now spawned by that motivation.I would say it depends on the tech. Advances in farming tech would probably be the biggest items people would use espionage over. Advances in weaponry... not so much. If a weapon is old and easily built and maintained, but still has the power you need, you're not likely to phase it out fully and will find internal resistance to getting rid of it. The M1911 is a prime example of this.And, trust me, your tech level is not the minimum required for an interstellar empire. A more feudal system is much easier to maintain at a lower level of tech, and more likely to pop up in the real world.And even then, I doubt they'd risk starships. If anything, small strike teams or spies that know how to infiltrate a culture would be used.Now, note I do disagree with the idea the wars would be fought in cyberspace over tech. That would happen only if the system was, and please forgive me for the bluntness of this, designed by people who should never be allowed near anything top-secret. Any civilization with a clue about cyberspace is not going to have their advanced research computers with an internet connection. It's much more secure to keep those offline and have the labs send out couriers with the physical prototypes. Yes, it's much less convenient, but if it's a high-enough priority that you're worried about some alien race stealing it you're not concerned about convenience.That's assuming anyone at home is interested in investing the resources to make it themselves. Amazingly, this doesn't happen in real life, despite modern-world technology being advanced enough that there really is no reason why nations with modern technology should be trading with each other for food. Of course, that's because the infrastructure of most modern nations won't allow it.The main issue with this is you have to consider infrastructure. That is everything to a civilization. What foundations are the cities built on? How did the cities grow? How did the small towns grow? How did shipping grow? If the infrastructure of a civilization doesn't allow them to produce smeegle domestic, it doesn't matter that the tech exists to do so.The main suggestion I'm going to make: Either don't explain how the FTL works, or make it dependent on physics we've not discovered yet. But even if you go with the second, don't explain it. The players don't need to know how most of the tech works. People in the real world don't know how most of modern tech works, so there's no reason why a future culture should be any different.</blockquote>

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