What TL is the original Star Trek?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

By “every time”, are you expressing frustration that I keep on advancing the “TL(7+x)” interpretation, or are you saying that it's perfectly fine to just say “TL10” to represent sci-do that originated during the Atomic Age? If it's the former, I'll apologize for being so pushy on the subject; but if it's the latter, I think the areas of divergence don't go without saying, and do need to be pointed out whenever a given sci-fi setting's technology is described.

Among other things, I'm saying first of all that 7+3=10. Divergence only matters when you have some kind of baseline to be divergent from. In a GURPS Star Trek game the Federation is the baseline. So yes, it's fine to say "10" when we have no alternate 10 to compare it to.

This isn't even a situation like that of Lensmen where they held on to vacuum tube technology all the way up to TL 11. While there's a mention in passing that Star Trek's Earth may have been using transistors several decades longer than we did, they did in fact move on to something else and we don't know how or if it's different from integrated circuits in anything but name. It is far more meaningful to say that they are retarded in biotechnology and cybernetics because they're a safetech society than it is to say "they diverged in the 60s", because of course they did.

[doctorevilbrain]

Captain Pike might not have had surgery to control his wheelchair. Maybe the technology to control it was in the wheelchair. Captain Kirk was able to talk to the Companion using the Universal Translator which could read minds and translate from the Companion.That was a lot smaller than the wheelchair. The Jetsons episode that had the device that probed George's body wasn't anywhere near the size of Nanotechnology. If that was the episode that was talked about.

[Crystalline_Entity]

I think the point at which the difference between TL(7+3) and TL10 becomes important is when civilisations with different technological progressions meet each other. Otherwise it's just TL (Star Trek TOS), as someone said upthread.

I'm curious whether TNG/DS9/VOY would be TL(7+5) or TL(8+4) or just TL12; they're a canonical safetech TL12 according to Ultra-Tech, but given that they're further into the future from TOS you could justify saying it was actually TL(7+5), or since the show was based on early TL8, TL(8+4) could make sense.

I'm trying to think of cases where the split TL would make a difference; obviously a dimension-hopping "Infinity Patrol meets Captain Kirk" would, but even the difference cultures in Star Trek seem to have similar technologies to the Federation; the Klingons and Romulans might have cloaking devices, but they appear to be roughly the same TL whether that's split or not.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Obviously, and I've never said otherwise. The issue isn't whether or not they try; it's how well they succeed.

The TL(x+y) notation isn't just for deliberate Retrotech settings; it's for any setting where technological development makes a break with the standard progression at some reasonably well-defined point, after which it ends up missing some fundamental developments from the standard progression yet somehow managed to achieve competitive results through some other means. This is in contrast to either a flat-out lower TL (if the technology reaches an earlier point and then just stops) or a split TL (where one area can be higher or lower than the rest), though it can be combined with the latter.

As a side note, “TL(7+3)^" is redundant: the “some other means” that defines it as a divergent path isn't necessarily superscience, but it can be; and you don't have to explicitly now that it is to make it so.

I think the idea that any TL(x+y) is superscience (something that sometimes appears in 4e) is from Steamtech. To paraphraze:

'From these definitions, devices labeled TLx or TLy should be real inventions; devices labeled TL(x+1), TL(y+1), or TL(y+n) should be fanciful' ie superscience.

But the very next line states "But it's not that simple. Real inventions of the early 20th century that fit the 19th century's technological idiom, such as airships, are classified as TL(5+1); devices that apply real 19th-century technology in cinematic ways, such as the lunar shell (p. STM83), are classified as TL5"

Then you have the little gem of "Sulfanilamide is classified as TL(5+1), but it was also a TL6 medication; no penalty should apply to the skills of Chemistry/TL6 or Physician/TL6 for working with it."

Having TL(5+1) in some cases not be divergent tech just muddied the waters about what divergent tech is in GURPS. Just say that TL(5+1) and TL6 could coexist instead of doing this handwaving.

Originally Posted by dataweaver

As another sidenote, I do personally distinguish between TL9+ and TL(8+x). The distinction I draw is if the science fiction includes enough TL8 stuff that it's clearly not TL(7+x), but still manages to miss stuff that we're now fairly confident will be part of TL9 and yet is still clearly more advanced than what we have now. The single best example I can think of for a TL(8+x) branch would be Cyberpunk: it got the IT stuff mostly right, but completely missed the biotech and nanotech possibilities.

But there's no such thing as TL(9+x); and there won't be until we're well into TL9.

True though if you have two cultures with wildly different technology to each other then TL(9+x) does make sense. Though most of the well known scifi setting are TL(6+x) ala Starcraft or Lensmen or TL(7+x) ala Star Trek or the Aliens franchise.

Originally Posted by dataweaver

All true. That said, such things were largely the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, Atomic Age science fiction didn't put much emphasis on IT or the sciences of the small. And when they did, it was often a case of “a stopped clock is right twice a day” — that is, it was one prediction they got right among a mountain of predictions they got wrong. I don't take the Jetsons seriously at all (not should I; it was made to be a comedy) let alone as a predictor of what the future will be like; so let's not start with the really long list of things that it got wrong… (such as being able to reach through a video screen and physically interact with what's on the other side)

I think that is largely because "Atomic Age" science fiction was largely just a continuation of what became called "Dieselpunk". Aside from the atomic power (which Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers had in the 1930s) and the transistor what technologically is there there of TL7? Very little.

In fact, it is this stuck in the past mentality of sci-if in the 1980s that was the whole reason behind The Gernsback Continuum short story. Scifi was largely still stuck in that 1930s like reality and would largely remain there.

Part of it IMHO from the late 1970s on was the get on Star War bandwagon mentality which was inspired by the likes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers and so was bringing with it a 1930s view of high tech.

The broken clock situation is true of all science fiction. Everybody talks about HG Well's prediction of the atom bomb in The World Set Free but ignores the details he got wrong.

But science fiction tends to be a social commentary or adventure/horror romp with the technology just window dressing going as far as to ignore things that mean that the story simply cannot happen as presented.

This why you see canals on Mars well past the point where it was clear there weren't any even before Mariner 4.

Look at the huge rockets that people land on planets in the scifi up to the 1960s. The spider episode of From Earth to the Moon points out this is ridiculous as space travel is all about weight - so why take a whole rocket to the surface when you can take a smaller vehicle?

Heck we are seeing a revival of this. Look at Doctor Who's "Kill the Moon" which when you get right down to is a retelling of a story that appeared in EC comics from the 1950s. Of course Doctor Who left any effort at tech predictions a long time ago but it shows that science fiction will tend to throw out any semblance of prediction for the sake of a good story.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by maximara

We had a long talk over at the Traveller wiki about how GURPS and Traveler TLs matched up Traveler tech effectively caps out at TL9^

No, it really doesn't. LBB Classic Traveller's lasers are solidly TL10. MegaTraveller has explictly x-ray lasers, which are GURPS 4e TL11 (and if we assume they can't be real x-ray lasers because they work in an atmosphere, the next nearest GURPS UT equivalents are also TL11). Traveller also has functional man-portable plasma weapons, which GURPS considers TL10 with superscience.

Traveller fits well as TL10 safe-tech with certain super-science and awful computer tech. Calling it TL9 still requires the super-science, still requires the safe-tech, still requires the awful computer-tech, and requires a whole lot more exceptions into the bargain - GURPS' smallest TL9 fusion generators are too big for late Third Imperium models.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Rupert

No, it really doesn't. LBB Classic Traveller's lasers are solidly TL10. MegaTraveller has explictly x-ray lasers, which are GURPS 4e TL11 (and if we assume they can't be real x-ray lasers because they work in an atmosphere, the next nearest GURPS UT equivalents are also TL11). Traveller also has functional man-portable plasma weapons, which GURPS considers TL10 with superscience.

Traveller fits well as TL10 safe-tech with certain super-science and awful computer tech. Calling it TL9 still requires the super-science, still requires the safe-tech, still requires the awful computer-tech, and requires a whole lot more exceptions into the bargain - GURPS' smallest TL9 fusion generators are too big for late Third Imperium models.

Traveler's TL seems to have changed over the years and the TL information provided in T5 (pg 501-507) is absolutely horrible compared to what GURPS even in 1e gave you.

The whole purpose of a table is to provide a quick glance reference and yet here are huge swaths of empty space in the Traveler 5e TL tables which defeats the whole purpose of tables in the first place

And don't get me started on the insanity of Society and Environ having TLs (never mind that even a brief look shows Traveler is talking nonsense there. Kingdoms and Cities don't appear until the middle ages?!? Say what?)

I can see that back in the days of the original Traveler (1970s) but in 2015?! GURPS borrowed the idea of your TL system so why not borrow how the TL is organized from GURPS? And of the love of sanity correct the TL decriptions so the early TLs don't look 12 kinds of stupid because it makes you wonder on how good the future TLs are.

[Boomerang]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's not what that opinion was based on. The question is not the "look" of the technology. It's that many of the charactteristic inventions listed in HT for TL8 are not in evidence, and that, in particular, the primary theme of TL8 innovation, the intensive processing of information—whether digital or genetic—is not emphasized.

The "TL(m+n)" notation was invented to fit steampunk, in which we start out from actual Age of Steam technology and project advances from it; it includes advances projected by writers of the time, such as Shelley, Verne, or Wells. In their time, if GURPS had existed, things like Nemo's super batteries would have been called "TL6," the same way power cells are now called "TL9." But since the steampunk genre emerged later, and looked backward, the "TL(5+1)" notation indicates that its advanced technology is different from the advanced technology that actually emerged. It's treated as TL6 for most purposes, but the m+n notation indicates that an actual TL6 engineer like Fessenden or Shannon would find it unfamiliar and have to spend some time getting up to speed.

But that same argument applies to the technology of the Star Trek world. The original show was made at TL7, and its projected future (had GURPS existed then) could logically have been called TL8, TL9, TL10, and so on. But now we've reached actual TL8, and it's clearly different from the TL8 that Roddenberry envisioned, as embodied for example in the derelict ship in "Space Seed": ICs instead of transistors, no cold sleep, no eugenically created supermen, no spacecraft capable of interstellar flight. An engineer from our world would find their technology strange and need to get up to speed on it. So it's just as logical to call it TL(7+1), and for the same reason: We've moved on past the era of original Trek, just as we've moved past the era of the voyages extraordinaires or the edisonades.

Sorry about the slow reply.

You've made some good points there and I will concede that your argument is not based on the "look" of the technology, but rather sound logical arguments.

I still have some concerns about calling Star Trek TL7+3 for example as opposed to simply TL10. I think looking at the nitty gritty of individual episodes is the wrong approach as it leads ultimately to contradictions. I think the right approach is to look at this from a wholistic perspective and concentrate on broad themes and what Gene Roddenberry intended. It was clear that Roddenberry intended for humans to be centre stage, not be genetically modified superhumans or cyborgs or replaced by artificial intelligence. He also wanted his characters to face challenges that resonated with audiences in the 1960s. It wouldn't work for every threat to be an anticlimax because McCoy could simply use medical science to reverse every problem. So it is reasonable to conclude that Star Trek has a relatively low TL for medicine and this idea seems to be consistent throughout the original series. In other areas, like transportation, computing etc. this does not appear to be the case. What they have is TL10+ with additional superscience elements. The intention was for Star Trek's miraculous technology to be a consistent extension of our own real world technology not a weird divergence like steam punk. I think that is why we see things retconned in later series and movies where the original series contradicts our real world history.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Boomerang

The intention was for Star Trek's miraculous technology to be a consistent extension of our own real world technology not a weird divergence like steam punk. I think that is why we see things retconned in later series and movies where the original series contradicts our real world history.

Sure. But in the same way, the marvelous technology of Verne and Wells and even Burroughs was intended to be a consistent extension of the real world technology of their era. Since then, though, we've learned more about the sciences, so that we know, for example, that Lowellian Mars never existed, and that batteries can't provide as much energy as the Nautilus required, and that you can't enhance an animal's intelligence by reshaping its body; so the plausibility of their stories has gone down. (Though Wells clearly knew that some of his premises didn't really work; I've read a letter he sent to another writer that explained why his Invisible Man was impossible, and as a biologist he knew all about the cube-square relationship.) So when I wrote GURPS Steampunk I used "TL(5+1)" to denote science and technology that grew out of Victorian science and technology, but not along the same path that happened in the real world.

I think what has happened in our own lifetimes (mine, at least; I don't know if you were watching television when Star Trek was originally broadcast) is that technology and science have progressed in ways that Roddenberry's writers didn't anticipate—which has both given us devices that they never anticipated (the way Verne and Wells never anticipated liquid fuel rocketry or radio) and made some of its projections less credible (for example, it's now clear to us that Earthlike planets with oxygen atmospheres without life make no sense at all). So Star Trek is a technological future that isn't going to happen, and the early path from 1966 to Stardate whatever has already not happened. So classic SF in the style of the 1960s is just as retro now as steampunk is.

Of course, within a single timeline, you could just as well call a world with Babbage machines TL6 or 7, or call the Federation TL10 or 11, as use the + notation. That notation's main use is to represent how the tech looks to agents of a paratemporal agency who have to figure out those alternate worlds. Though I would suggest a secondary use: To remind the reader that the world's technological history diverged from ours a way back, and that just because the GURPS tech books say you have radio at TL6 or networked computers at TL9 doesn't mean that your game world has those devices—the technology isn't dictated by looking gadgets up in a GURPS book but by worldbuilding.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Sure. But in the same way, the marvelous technology of Verne and Wells and even Burroughs was intended to be a consistent extension of the real world technology of their era..

The difference is that that Star Trek's divergences are far more subtle outside of the cosmetic features of switches and superfluous chirping noises. I mean people were carrying tablet-type devices and by design we have no clear idea of their capabilities and limitations. They're just something officers scribble in as part of their work. The only weird thing is that the captain doesn't have is own PADD and instead needs to have a hot chick carry one for him.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The difference is that that Star Trek's divergences are far more subtle outside of the cosmetic features of switches and superfluous chirping noises. I mean people were carrying tablet-type devices and by design we have no clear idea of their capabilities and limitations. They're just something officers scribble in as part of their work. The only weird thing is that the captain doesn't have is own PADD and instead needs to have a hot chick carry one for him.

They don't seem all that subtle to me. I can see that there are certain technologies and certain concepts that are never mentioned, and certain capabilities that are not in evidence but that we now would expect to be in evidence. And most of the sfnal tropes go back to the Campbell era of the 1940s. We don't see such tropes as netrunning or hacking or DNA sequencing or genetic engineering or nanotech or the threat of gray goo or even (till STTNG) virtual reality and holography, which are all through post-2000 SF.

In fact, if anything, the cosmetic features make Star Trek look more familiar than it actually is, because the people who created cell phones and other electronic devices were all influenced by the original show, and went for a similar look and feel in their devices.

Other than that, Verne and Wells looked a lot less unlikely in the late 1930s than they do now. We're fifty years out from Roddenberry's future, and more than twice as far from Verne and Wells. So you'd expect more divergence, and if you don't allow for that your metric is biased.