Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinumon
Given the above circumstances, and discounting the occasional piece of Old Tech that has been kept operational, what is the effective, realistic limit on technology?
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Basically, I'm trying to avoid having to go through High-Tech page by page and decide what is and isn't off-limits
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You've set incompatible goals. There simply is no way to apply "realistic" limits to technologies outside of a historical setting without deciding item by item. It actually isn't realistic even in historical settings, because not everything in a TL is available everywhere in the world for its full historical span.
There is always a lot of tradeoff between what's possible, what's affordable, what requires non-local resources we may or may not be able to import, what's in enough demand there is actually anybody making it.
The TL4 limit you usually see in post-apocalyptic discussions is actually something more like "if it was widely available at TL4, a post-apocalyptic town could make something at least this good if they needed one, and they probably do since it wouldn't have been widely available in the first place in a TL4 economy (which isn't exactly generating huge surpluses) if it wasn't pretty useful". It doesn't say there aren't things that were possible but rare at TL4 nobody bothers to make, nor does it say there aren't higher TL solutions that are easy enough they'd be made instead, just that once you know how, most TL4 solutions demand few enough exotic resources or hyperspecialists that even fairly small states don't have to settle for anything less.
There's a lot of higher TL stuff that is also likely to survive - medicine is a big one, it's well into TL6 before it really starts needing specialist machinery or synthetic drugs, though natural drug availability can be patchy without world trade). There are substantial TL5 printing improvements that are no more complex than Gutenberg's press, though the big limit there is more likely paper than presses. Radio may well survive - hand build receivers are easy, and transmitters aren't enormously complex, and you don't need a lot of them for it to be really useful. There are likely dozens of things like that, especially in your scenario where the crash is a gradual one of energy availability. It's hard to justify any actual lost knowledge in your case, and lots of high TL stuff isn't very energy intensive. Or is a net gain - insulating foam may take some effort to manufacture, but the energy savings over time....