John Harris
Initiate Douchebag
Posts: 19
Preferred Game Systems: What have you got?
Currently Playing: L5R
Favorite Species of Monkey: Capuchin
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Post by John Harris on Jan 26, 2014 17:32:49 GMT -8
I just picked up MGT. I’ve created a few characters and started on a sub-sector. I hope to let the players create their home worlds within this sub-sector.
The problem I am having is that a number of the planets I have generated are lower tech worlds. TL 4,5,6 ect. I am having trouble figuring out why a TL 5 planet:
TL 5: (Industrial) TL 5 brings widespread electrification, telecommunications and internal combustion. At the high end of the TL, atomics and primitive computing appear. Roughly on a par with the mid–20th century.
would have a Class C starport? What is a character from this tech level going to think of the space faring universe that is out there? Am I doing world generation wrong?
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Post by gandalftheplaid on Jan 26, 2014 18:59:02 GMT -8
I think reasonable analogs exist here on earth in the form of interactions between 1st and 3rd world countries. You can have a country with crappy infrastructure, education and no advanced industrial base of its own, but there could still be trade with this country. Oil, diamonds, various agricultural products... Life (and tech level) in a port city will look very different from life in country.
A planet with tech level 5 does not mean no one there has heard of higher tech levels. It's meant to indicate the level of technology the planet is able to produce and maintain on a relatively large scale. There could be some people using advanced communication devices, but it likely had to be imported and if something breaks they may just have to toss it. The book calls this "Environmental Limits".
Seems reasonable to expect that advanced tech would be something the public would notice, but not necessarily attribute it to magic or divine power unless you're getting perhaps 3 or less. Owning high level tech may be a status symbol. Also, reaction to advanced tech may be very different near the star port than a few thousand miles away. On a low tech planet, people near the star port could have a basic understanding of what's going but a tribe a thousand miles away may treat your air car as a chariot of the gods.
Now if you managed to have a tech level 2 planet with a class B port, well then there's got to be something rather interesting going on. There must be something important/valuable to justify the port. But the local population may have some sort of anti-tech or xenophobia thing going on in their culture. Strife seems likely.
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fredrix
Master Douchebag
Posts: 2,142
Preferred Game Systems: Fate, L5R, Pendragon, Gumshoe, Feng Shui
Currently Playing: Pendragon, Song of Ice and Fire, L5R, Feng Shui, Traveller
Currently Running: Fate, Coriolis, Nights Black Agents
Favorite Species of Monkey: 1970's NTV, dubbed by the BBC (though The Water Margin beats it)
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Post by fredrix on Jan 29, 2014 0:16:26 GMT -8
Yes. I used to have a lot of difficulty with tech levels when I was playing traveller in my teens. If they had trade, how come the tech level didn't rise to the highest available. But Gandalf is right, the analogies are right here on Earth-that-was. It hit home for me when I was in China about 15 years ago (china is changing so rapidly I can't say it's the same now, though). Here's an illustration of what I mean - we left China on a fast catermarran from Wuzhou (I think) to Hong Kong, which was still then UK run. The ferry terminal at Wuzou was a new construct, huge like an airport. We checked our luggage and put it on a conveyor, which went about five yards before your actual genuine "coolies" slung it on a bamboo pole and walked it down flights of stairs to a rickety old jetty that might have been there in 1300.
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Post by guitarspider on Jan 30, 2014 22:16:02 GMT -8
Key Word here is colonial economies. "3rd World Planets" will likely have a basic economy, that allows people there to subsist and export most every raw resource that can be turned into something valuable. Those resources are the reason the Starport is there in the first place. The planet as a whole is not rich, so why export the really fancy stuff to that planet? You're going to sell cheap-ass stuff adapted to what people there want, likely at their tech level (cheap to make!), which means further syphoning off of funds and no real tech development. That cheap stuff will still be treated as something a bit special on the planet itself.
Most Americans will be familiar with the case of the pre-civil-war South. If you consider the South its own country, you can easily see how it was a colonial economy: industrialization was relatively scarce, the North produces almost all the industrial stuff (from textiles to ammunition), and they fund it all with exporting agricultural products, most prominently cotton. The South was not terribly backwards compared to other countries at the time, but the basic pattern of a colonial economy was still in place and it lagged far behind the North when it comes to modernizing.
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Post by guitarspider on Jan 31, 2014 6:30:25 GMT -8
Didn't have time to type everything out this morning, so here's the rest:
It may also be that people genereally reject the new tech for political, cultural or religious reasons. Maybe there's a mining operation which the natives try to kick off the planet, or they feel this fancy tech stuff destroys their way of life, or they don't value what the tech could offer them, or they just consider it the devil's stuff. Lots of ways to explain "backwardness" other than economics.
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Post by the_virginian on Jul 27, 2014 7:15:51 GMT -8
I know this is an old thread but need to add my two cents.
It was touched on already, but having the knowledge of the how to make things doesn't mean that you have the ability to make those things.
The world, simply, does not have the infrastructure in place to build hi-tech gear. If the planet has not been settled for generations, it probably can't build factories to produce the goods. They have the knowledge, but have had to start from essentially nothing. You would need heavy equipment, power plants, refineries, and a myriad of other things to even start modernizing your planet. You can only import so much equipment before to the cost becomes prohibitive. For example, you can import a bulldozer but you can't build it. Or manufacture replacement parts. Or refine the fuel it uses. And so on.
Tech level is lower because the cost of shipping "modern" goods is too costly. If the only way for the world to have the latest or current tech is from imports, the cost of the goods would be very high.
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