Power Armor and Mecha Tech Levels

[TwinBahamut]

Maybe I would get a better idea if you told me what you don't agree with on the tech levels. The reason that I have it set up this way so far is to include as many scifi settings as I could. I'm not worried about it being perfect but any ideas would be great.

Well, I guess the issue is just my personal preference for sci-fi settings that don't go for the "include everything" approach. Which is a bit incompatible with your ideas...

As for some more broad suggestions...

I guess my issue is that it is fairly arbitrary on your part to put many "cyber" technologies as chronologically before many "fusion" technologies. I mean, outside of the limitations of the energy cost of putting things into Earth's orbit from Earth's surface, we pretty much have the technology right now to build things like large-scale space stations capable of supporting millions of inhabitants and large-scale lunar mining operations. Such technology is certainly more low-tech than the terraforming you equate it with, at least.

Generally, things like computer development, cybernetics, and Ai development progress a lot slower than people expect. They also have a habit of having much dramatic impacts on the daily life of a setting's inhabitants than other technologies. That is why I always prefer to push them a bit further into the future than being the next major step of human progress.

Also, as your technology levels go past 10 or so they start getting really hard for me to really "get". I suppose lots of ideas of sci-fi that are fairly incompatible are being combined, and often in places that our out-of-place relative to the technology of their original settings. I mean, Star Trek transporters feel out of place as a technology more advanced than the ability to rearrange star systems. Another case is grasers, which logically speaking are no different than lasers other than scale and power, so really belong much better in the Fusion Age than all the way in the Late Gravitic. Direct manipulation of time and space should provide far more powerful and distinct weapons, like Black Hole Cannons (yes, mecha anime and games have Black Hole Cannons), or even just Gravity Cannons.

Anyways, if I had to develop a tech level system of my own, it would probably look more like this:

TL 0: Pre-Pre-Civilization
The state of humans before the supposed development of "behavioral modernity". The state of pre-homo sapiens hominids and early homo sapiens (if you accept certain theories, which I'm not sure I do).

TL 1: Pre-Civilization
Hunter-gatherer culture. Society possesses religion, art, culture, and traditions in a form that is recognizable to modern man.

TL 2: Agricultural Age
After the development of civilization and the original agricultural revolution and development of the idea of "domestication". Stone-working, metal-working, writing, philosophy, city-building, etc.

TL 3: Early Modern Age
Emergence of large nations with strong centralized authority and sophisticated industry. Coal mining, international commerce, global exploration, the printing press, and the beginnings of the transition from "natural philosophy" to actual science. Transition from traditional warfare to gunpowder warfare. Starts in roughly 12th century China and spreads outwards from there in human history.

TL 4: Modern Age
The product of the industrial revolution and the full-scale harnessing of fossil fuels and other energy resources. Rapid development of countless technologies and the rapid improvements of transportation and communication technologies. Basically everything from the development of the steam engine until now.

TL 5: The Near Future
The realm of near-future technology. Defined by any number of technologies that seem plausible in the modern day, but we don't quite have yet. The world is still plagued by the same issues of scarce-but-necessary energy that define the modern world, but otherwise can be radically different. Development of the Moon and Lagrange Points and the early exploration of other planets in the solar system is feasible. Robotics and genetic engineering go through significant improvements. Mecha are possible.

TL 6: Free Energy Age
The first realm of total fantasy as far as technology goes. Somehow, a system of generating and storing massive quantities of cheap, renewable, clean energy is developed. Whether this is Fusion power, a byproduct of space development, or both, it transforms what is possible with technology. Large scale colonization of the entire solar system becomes possible, and early attempts at terraforming and extra-solar travel can begin. Nanotech-based machinery becomes widespread, though with reasonable limits. Holographics (including the solid kind), energy weapons, and energy shields eventually become common. Antimatter becomes an effective method of storing large quantities of energy. Such a civilization can eventually spread across the galaxy, albeit slowly.

TL 7: Impossible Age
Manipulation of spacetime becomes possible. Gravity control, FTL travel, and time travel are all consequences. Rapid space exploration becomes easy. People figure out how to ignore the Heisenburg Uncertainty principle, allowing molecule-by-molecule assembly of anything. Teleportation is easy. Anything is possible.

Yeah, probably too coarse for what you are looking for. It's hard to really break it down any further without making arbitrary choices, though... As it is, the difference between Early Modern and Modern is fairly arbitrary!

 

[ValhallaGH]

One of the reasons that FTL is so problematic for Tech Levels is that space travel is, quite literally, a Plot Device. It happens at the speed of plot, in a manner that doesn't interfere with the plot, and has whatever limitations that the writer deems a) easy to work with, and b) interesting for the plot being written right now.

Ender's Game? Sub-light speeds, because the author could wrap his head around that and the time distortion allowed him to make a more interesting story (Ender shows up just in time to run the war, because the ships arrived exactly when Card's story needed them to).

Babylon 5? Hyperspace travel happened at the speed of plot (Joe Straczynski is on record as saying this). Journeys that would take days or weeks under other circumstances were completed in hours.

Star Trek? Star Wars? Same deal.


TLDR:
Space Travel is setting specific and has little or no relationship to physics (or consistency). The method may always look the same, but the speed of travel is whatever the story requires it to be.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Ender's Game? Sub-light speeds, because the author could wrap his head around that and the time distortion allowed him to make a more interesting story (Ender shows up just in time to run the war, because the ships arrived exactly when Card's story needed them to).

To help your argument even more, FTL communication in Ender's Game is even more a product of plot device more than physics. Combining sub-light travel speeds with FTL communication should result in almost accidental violations of causality as messages get transmitted backwards and forwards through time because of relativity, but that possibility is never even addressed in the book...

Far too few people truely understand the ideas of relativity enough for FTL travel to be anything but a plot device. The simple fact that most sci-fi works make FTL travel out to be easier than time travel is proof of that, when half the point behind the idea of a light speed barrier is that FTL travel is time travel according to relativity.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with total plot devices in Science Fiction. They make things fun. But it does do a lot to create problems for big charts of future technology...

 

[garrowolf]

Okay but the point of the tech levels is to break down general science fiction eras so that I can convert vehicles and technologies from many settings. Many different settings skip a lot of these steps in various ways but not all of them do. Others have most of something in a tech level with a few things missing. By doing it this way I can just set a setting as an "Age" and add a few details and run a game.

Many of the steps between points came out of wanting to show the tech level differences in one technology to another such as the different tech levels shown in Babylon 5. The Narn and Centauri have their tech level at the same pont because of a long war, the Minbari are higer then them, not needing even thrust in their engines (gravitic drives). The Vorlons were able to bend hyperspace around themselves. All three had artificial gravity but they were developing different and more powerful ways to use it.

Hyperspace and Warp drives are both within our understanding of physics now. Neither of them requires a violation of relativity.

Hyperspace is just a spatially compressed nearby dimension. If you can get in and out of it then you can use it. It has no speed of it's own. If you travel 100 km there and it has a compression rate of 100:1 then when you come out you have traveled 10,000 km. According to some scifi you can access this as early as the Fusion Age if someone shows you how such as the Centauri showing the EA. Several other settings have Hyperspace entry only at "jumppoints" but are still traveling in hyperspace. I am putting actual Hyperspace development with early artificial gravity control because I would think that it would require the ability to distort space in order to open a hyperspace window. But that is naturally developed access in it's earliest.

Warp drive has been figured out by a mathematician to be possible. It would require the ability to graviticaly compress and stretch space around the ship. The ship doesn't actually move by itself within the field. The field moves carrying a section of warped space. There is no limit to the speed of the movement of space and since the object is not gaining any inertia then nothing is actually "moving" according to relativity.

This reminded me of the warping of hyperspace by the Vorlons so I thought it would make sense at or after that point.

Now the flip side of this is that this project has made me realize however much I love Star Trek, the tech level is ridiculously high, which is one of the problems the writers had with it.

Anyway this means that Time Travel is still very far away and I can limit a few cultures to it and actually make this tech level system work well for a Doctor Who game as well. (yay!)

As for the mechs, I was only planning on making use of hard scifi and soft scifi setting mechs. Some settings have transforming mecha without a good reason to transform and usually at too low a tech level to create such a thing (in my opinion). So I push these to a higher tech level.

Anyway that is some of the logic I've been using to create the tech levels in Nexus.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Okay but the point of the tech levels is to break down general science fiction eras so that I can convert vehicles and technologies from many settings.

So why does their chosen method of plot-speed travel matter?

Ignore FTL. Pull it out of the listings entirely. Space travel, in any form that shows up in a game or fictional source, is a plot device. It does not conform to any rules except those the plot requires. As a game designer, you need to accept that, and then tailor your system (and the presentation) to include that.

I can equip infantry soldiers with muzzle loading muskets, have personal transport on the level of steam wagons, and include a 1 million light-years / second space drive. And I can make it a consistent and logical setting. The only part of the tech level (late Gunpowder Age; about 1860) that seems off is the completely plot-device space travel, and I can work up a setting story that makes it fit.



When setting the technology level of a setting, plot devices never matter. Ever.

 

[garrowolf]

Yes I know that FTL systems are effectively speed of plot but you should still put some general numbers there. The "speed of plot" in an RPG could be between two sentences. In a TV show it would be time to review the subplots.
Even if you define a specific speed then you can make up the distance between plot points just as easily.

I created a chart that basically gives general FTL rates by how far across the galaxy you want the characters to move in a certain period of time (week, month, years). I tried posting it but the chart just now but it didn't want to show up right.

Anyway I'll get it up there on my website eventually.