Where's the Helium?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I mentioned Starships but I leartned a lot about gas mixtures during the playtests for Atlantis, TS:Under Pressure and Blue Planet. What I mostly learned though is that they're a lot of trouble and still quite limited. A diving hardsuit based off of powered armor tech would probably make deep sea diving with special gas mixetures obsolete on the basis of simplicity alone.

The main problem is the same as spacesuits, only in reverse and many times the magnitude: you have many many atmospheres of pressure which are resisting any attempt to increase volume, meaning you either need suits that don't change volume when you bend or straighten limbs (difficult from a limb design perspective) or significant counterforce (and at 300 meters, that's 30 atmospheres of counterforce).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Helium has some uses that seem unlikely to go away at high tech levels.

For example, it has the lowest boiling point of an substance and the lowest freezing point (if it has a freezing point at all, which I'm not sure about). That makes it uniquely suitable as a low-temperature coolant.

It's also extremely unreactive, which would make it attractive for establishing inert atmospheres for high-temperature applications if it were competitive with argon on price.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Anthony

the Traveller concept of tech level isn't credible for a setting with trade (Traveller has significant narrative roots in the cinematic British Empire

But then, the British Empire had trade, and also had a tech imbalance.

To me, the SoD is more the length of time that the situation has been (apparently) static. It's one thing to have a tech differential at any moment in time, especially with a frontier. But the low tech areas are going to catch up, and it won't take thousands of years. Rather than randomly scattered low tech planets uniformly through sectors, I'd think there's be diffusion from the higher-tech areas. That's just another consequence of generating independent random UPPs.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

But then, the British Empire had trade, and also had a tech imbalance.

Well, yeah. That works for the M0 setting too. It doesn't work for the M1115 setting.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

But then, the British Empire had trade, and also had a tech imbalance.

Indeed, and a look at British colonies and trading zones illustrates the point. Economic development was pretty poor, except in primary industries such as minerals, logging, and tea-planting. You could buy Manchester cottons, Sheffield knives, and Birmingham nick-knacks anywhere, not to mention soda-water from my great-great-great grandfather's factory in Chiltern. There were telegraphs and railways all over the place, and steam engines imported from England were running bore-drills in the Simpson Desert and sawmills on the Carrai plateau. sepoys and shikaris in the most backward places had weapons that had been British Imperial Army issue only thirty years before, and the local elites had degrees from Oxford and sporting arms from Purdy. Nowhere still looked like TL 3 after the British had traded with it. Didn't much look like TL 4 or 5, either.