Quote:
Originally Posted by Alonsua
No, no, you can also raise their personal TL.
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Modern scientific research, technological invention, design and, obviously, manufacturing, is not carried out by one genius or even a few people. It's a massive organisational process and everyone involved in this process, in GURPS terms, needs the right TL for the task, or else you're going to have penalties (and if only one person out of the whole group has TL11 and the rest have TL8, the penalties will make the task functionally impossible).
Gadgeteer is specifically the GURPS Advantage that makes inventing function like it does in comic books. Without it, there are no world-changing supergeniuses who can somehow do everything that in real life takes a whole society to accomplish and can't be controlled or predicted.
In order to be able to work on TL10 or TL11 inventions, let alone make anything that is TL10 or TL11, you need a society of millions (at minimum) and probably an entire economy of billions, who
have TL10 or TL11. There is effectively no
realistic way for an individual or small research team
in absolute secrecy to manage to produce any TL10 or TL11 projects on any kind of scale without the economy of a whole TL9 or TL10 world available to them. That requires Gadgeteering.
In real life, experimental R&D projects are, at most,
one Tech Level ahead of the world and even then, they need the resources, knowledge and backing of a lot of people who in that very limited field, effectively have science and technology skills of one TL higher. That's normal, as technology is usually in an experimental stage for a long time before it's available to the public, which is what determined what GURPS TL the world is set at. But while blue sky
ideas are a dime a dozen, no one is secretly manufacturing TL10 technology in the real world.