Quote:
Originally Posted by tanksoldier
The feel I got from 2300 was similar to Firefly...
...the Core has extremely high tech but the outworlds don’t see much of it.
Cyberpunk probably exists on Earth but most of the adventures are taking place on the frontier.
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Eh, kinda-sorta-maybe, as far as your description goes, anyway.
In the 2300 AD setting, multiple polities existed and the main coalitions had set out in different directions from Earth. Each of them controlled their own "arms," or paths to and from various colonies. The Earth-based polities governed some colonies, others had gained independence, and many planets had colonies created by either the the main colonizing power or by favored clients.
Friendly clients sometimes had their own colony worlds, corporations and NGOs had others, and sometimes paths ("fingers") branched off from the main polity's "arm" and led to those colonies.
In a few cases, planets had been settled by rival powers, which resulted in considerable inter-colony tension, and sometimes even nasty little localized proxy-wars.
So, yeah the core worlds (of which there were only two) had technological advantages, but the equipment available to the colonists partially depended on the initial investment made by the sponsor, as well as local conditions.
In many cases (and this makes it my favorite setting), the writers recognized the impracticality (or even impossibility) of installing at the colony, from the get-go, an industrial infrastructure. That means the equipment used on each planet varied a lot, and depended on available resources and distances from the colony hub.
So, yeah, I'd call the core planets TL10, with just enough super-science to have relatively inexpensive space travel and "slow" FTL speeds.
(Even an unmanned, light and fast messenger drone couldn't travel much faster than about 1 ly in 12-24 hours or so, IIRC, but it's been awhile and my books are packed in boxes.)
That said, I will note that, wholly
unlike Firefly, privately-owned starships didn't really exist in vanilla 2300 AD. Most starships were owned by governments, NGOs (of which 2300AD had many) or large corporations.
A few billionaires owned private yachts with stutterwarp capabilities, but that's it. No independent merchants struggled to keep flyin' in their ramshackle ships. If the PCs needed to travel, they booked flights and bought tickets.
I'd agree that computers are retarded, by modern standards, and think the TL 7+1 suggestion is pretty good. Also, nobody had conceived of cell phones, at the time GDW created the setting, so radios were the best they could do.
Most colony hubs had TL 9 available to them, but that dropped off as distance increased. I remember the vehicles mostly used hydrogen fuel cells, buildings used solar panels, advanced colonies had central powerplants of some sort, and guns outside the Core mostly used chemical propellants.
I'd say a significant fraction of colony equipment qualified as the equivalent of TL8, but with far less integration of computer technology, and no information networking to speak of. The books noted that a lot of the small-arms used by the colonists were former military weapons that had been phased out in favor of more advanced replacements, and then dumped in the surplus market.
In some cases, if the environment supported it and allowed for more self-sufficiency, the outlying colony areas might even use TL7 equipment -- especially if it was simple, durable, and easily maintained and repaired with the resources on hand.