[IW] Seeds for high divergence high tech worlds

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ericthered

still wrapping my head around the ideas. The tech is... interesting. A little much foreign though. As for the states, the Justicariate may work in conjunction with clovis-2, as an underground city run by an AI. It would likely be smaller, but make for a fun (or at least interesting) element.

For the record, the Justicariate has undergone at least two major reworks before arriving at the current incarnation. Perhaps the most important point is making sure it is neither an eutopia nor dystopia.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by ericthered

And if you want to make things really scary for infinity, make the damping tech work off a form of parachronics: its moving an area onto another world where nukes don't work. The people have no idea thats whats going on, but it should make for a nice time bomb in the background.

Presumably such a field could also have unintended side effects, especially on processes that make use of Strong or Weak interactions (nuclear power plants, atomic clocks) or various quantum effects. This could make advanced computers and similar high technology very difficult to build and use (within the field of course), resulting in a retrotech feeling for those settlements. Then again, quantum weirdness (or the lack thereof) could be used as a handwave in the other direction, justifying computers of exceptional reliability and efficiency.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Drifter

I knew something was rattling around in the back of my skull! Of course! Nuclear dampers so nukes are just an annoyance. And a reason to cluster around the towers even if you don't live in them.

If the field is so localized and so expensive that you need to 'cluster', just set of the nuke just outside it and let the pressure wave do its work.

How about the dampers affect a fairly wide area, but require extremely careful control of the EM fields in the area it applies and a very specific "antenna" that works as the superstructure of the tower.

Inside the tower, high tech. Outside the tower, no electronics, radio, or conductors - the field literally fries them - and everything is under a weird pervasive gloom. And the dampers only work in areas with certain soil/bedrock compositions.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Very large spaceships are very vulnerable targets and it would cost a hundred times more to put the same sized reactor on a mobile platform.

It could also be a hundred times more useful. For example it could attack a hundred different places in series rather than defending just one.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by martinl

Still, for giggles, a very rough outline:

Fabius is killed in a tragic stylus accident, and Carthage Wins the Punic Wars. Carthage ends up in control of the Western Med, while Rome is a historical footnote full of interesting propaganda about baby-roasting.

Alexandrian successor states last longer, and eventually the Ptolemies unite the Eastern Med in a deft series of Diplomatic and Military maneuvers.

The Carthaginian Empire Skirmishes with them over North Africa and the Balkans, but a combination of mercantile interests and natural barriers keep them from all out war.

Carthaginians end up economically colonizing Western Europe. Ptolemaics go east, re-take Persia and India, and collapse withing two generations into a vicious civil war.

Carthage uses this as an opportunity to take the entire Med, but in a bit of a surprise, the Indian faction of the Ptolemies survives as head of a United India.

Somewhere around this time, an obscure Persian man comes up with a very infectious take Zoroastrianism, which I shall call Zedvirusism.

Fast-forward through two kiloyears, and in 2012:

~India(5 different countries), ~Indonesia, and ~Chinas (3 different countries) are TL7 world powers, many of which have significant chunks of the New World as completely incorporated parts of their nation.

Europe and North Africa are up and comers, throwing off the lingering effects of Indian Colonialism and Zedviral Theocracies to enter the First World. They are commonly seen by First Worlders as commercially oriented but untrustworthy.

Central Asia and the Mid-East are still dominated by Zedviral Theocracies.

Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia are restive colonies of the world powers.

The Greek Influence on India is considered of vital historical importance to locals, but to a homeliner who is not a historian, it is as detectable as the Mongol influence on OTL China.

Thank you for the seed idea. I looked at it and realized that WHERE it diverged simply needs to be a Strong India. Then I started looking at where one would put the five Indian Kingdoms, looked at traditional indian states, and realized India's problem was constant western invasions from the west.

So I think this setting works well, particuarly if I decide that the industrial revolution starts in Indonesia and spreads to its neighbors. The trick then comes with cultures and the political "feel". A defining recent war is a good idea as well... hmmm.

The problem with orbital platforms as beam weapons is they are EXTREMELY predictable and it costs a lot to shield them. Not only can it attack 100 other sites, they can attack it.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Thank you for the seed idea. I looked at it and realized that WHERE it diverged simply needs to be a Strong India.

Arg. This is why I should have stopped after saying a full featured plausible ATL was hard work.

The proposed ATL deleted the Roman Empire, something that would completely reshape not only history, but society[1]. However, without multiple pages of timeline, tech notes, society notes, and "Indo-Hellene IV's Life of the Mind" sidebars, it came across as "Strong India," an ATL that could have diverged in the last century. That's even a fair evaluation, since the docco was so sparse.

Describing Shikaku-Mon as "Strong Japan" would be vile slander, because it had the documentation, and is awesome. If you want to do a significant divergence ATL you need to do the documentation, or otherwise it will all be summarized into a misleading soundbyte.

[1] Minor knock on effects included deleting Christianity and the Renaissance.

[Anonymous GM]

Not sure if this is high-enough divergence, but I've always thought it'd be interesting to swipe the divergence-point for Gernsback, but have it follow a more plausible real-world trajectory. That is, Gernsback is a world modeled on mid-20th century scifi stories. But you could take that same premise and wind up all sorts of places.

Take the basic idea - Tesla gets solid backing and gets to actually implement his ideas. Beyond wireless electrical broadcast, this also likely means a global, wireless information network 50 years early. Imagine a world that got the internet in the 1930s.

There's all sorts of ways this could go, but it's pretty much a justification for a wide variety of high-tech worlds. I'd probably include a whole sequence of worlds like this.

Gernsback becomes Tesla-1. Tesla-2 is up to 1984, and is a grim 80s cyberpunk dystopia - Bladerunner, Neuromancer, and Robocop all rolled into one. Tesla-3 is Transhuman Space, in the year 2012. And so forth, for as many variations as you feel like including.

Other, higher-divergence ideas:

* Vimana - In real life, there is evidence that advanced civilization arose in India even earlier than in the fertile crescent, and that the technology level was relatively high compared to the rest of the world for thousands of years. Get into myth and pseudohistory, and you've supposedly got religious scriptures about flying machines and laser guns. Make it real history and a world where this hypothetical ancient Indian civilization never fell, and you get Vimana, a world that hit 20th-century-equivalent technology at several-thousand BC, and is today an exceptionally advanced civilization based on Indian culture, colonizing the solar system in super-advanced flying saucer-esque spaceships. (If you really want to mess with your players, these guys have parachronic travel, and are the origin of the flying saucer myth on Homeline.)


* Rex - A ludicrously high-tech world, and one which is considered essentially off-limits by both Infinity and Centrum. Believed to have diverged at least 70 million years ago, when a dinosaur species evolved both sapience and technology. By the time the dino-killer asteroid hit, they had already been a technological civilization for millions of years. They had been through multiple technological singularities, thoroughly colonized the solar systemand several of the closer exoplanetary systems, had branched out into multiple coexisting, intelligent species through both standard evolution and trans-dinosaur modifications.

70 million years later, the whole galaxy teems with intelligence in forms too myriad to count. Technology is on a level approaching Clarke-tech, so advanced that the first explorers in this world thought they were in a high-mana universe. The intelligences in this world are difficult - possibly impossible - for humans to even comprehend. They started out inhuman, and they've had intelligence-enhancement technology compounding on itself since the Cretaceous period.

[samd6]

A few months ago, I went a wee bit crazy with the IW world tables.

As far as I can figure, in this world the renisance flourished in the middle east and the russias, but petered off in the italys.

Q5, far paralell TL7, Orthodox( Unitary Dictatorship ) Islamic(Multipolar 8, 2tribal, Technocracy, Fuedal Dictatorship, Dictatorship, 2 Oligarchies, RepDem)

OP wanted no magic, I assume that means no psi, super, or TL^

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by samd6

...the renisance flourished in the middle east and the russias, but petered off in the italys.

...

Pun on Peter the Great?

[Flyndaran]

There's always the lone alien(s) stranded deciding to uplift humanity technologically. Even if they know they won't live long enough to send a distress signal home.

Or interdimensional traveler that kicked off an early tech renaissance.

Or for whatever reason rational atheism became a fad and kicked off scientific analysis without religion acting as a brake.