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Message: <blockquote data-quote="garrowolf" data-source="post: 5482097" data-attributes="member: 31900">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.</blockquote>

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