Re: Sci-fi Interstellar Empires and Tech Regression
How about the idea of the plague taking down most of the precursor empire, but not hitting an isolationist, safetech enclave at a lower (but still space capable TL)? If, for example, you had a computer virus that attacked AIs and people with direct neural interfaces, you could knock out the mainstream, augmented society, but not the planet of anti-AI, anti-augmented holdouts - who, for an added wrinkle, might still be into biotech transhumanism. They then form the new empire - mopping up and colonising the survivors of the plague in the surrounding worlds, leaving all sorts of caches of equipment that wasn't plugged in or switched on when the plague hit and frontier worlds full of people with regressed TL (possibly rebuilt from 4 in some cases and trying to iterate back to pre-fall capabilities).
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