[Agemegos]

High technology is not just a matter of using newly-discovered scientific and engineering principles. The higher a tech level goes the more sophisticated its products become, which means that each product has many sub-assemblies, many, many components, scads of materials etc.. These are all produced by different special refining, fabrication, and assembly processes. And the range of different products also rises dramatically with tech level. All of which means that as tech level rises the number of different refining, fabrication, and assembly operations, special skills and tools, machines, factory layouts etc. required rises sharply. Now, it is well-known that each worker, tool, machine etc. is most efficient and productive when he concentrates on or it is specialised for a single operation. Generalists and general-purpose manufactories are dramatically more expensive that hyperspecialists working in assembly lines or distributed manufacturing enterprises.

It follows that an ultra-tech economy can only produce ultra-tech items economically if it has enough workers and capital employed that each worker and machine can be fully specialised to the degree that the sophisticated products require and fully employed in that speciality. Integrated over the range of special materials, fabrications, sub-assemblies, and products, this means that there is a minimum economic scale for each tech level, which rises with tech level.

It is a feature of my SF setting (conservative hard SF with radical touches and a minimum of superscience) that the development level of different colonies depends largely on the extent to which they are able to integrate their economies and achieve the scale that will let producers specialise. Depending on population, population density, physical and institutional infrastructure, peace, appropriate regulation, and government honesty, the development level of a world ranges from TL1 to TL10, and the average income with it, also the real exchange rate.

Almost all the worlds participate in the interstellar economy to some extent, but the ill-developed ones are only able to do so by exporting comparatively crude products, which compete with locally-made equivalents on highly-developed world by being sold cheaply. TL2-development economies export agricultural products (these are higher-value than you might think, because of legacy biotech) and even minerals. High-development economies import copper and plastics, not because they can't make them locally, but because of Ricardo's Law. They concentrate on making, and therefore export, the fabrications, components, subassemblies, and assemblies that require vast fab plants and hyperspecialised workers.

A further feature of the setting is that there is a small group of worlds called "the Suite" that specialise their individual economies and integrate them with interstellar transport, allowing a scale of production larger than any one world economy could achieve, and consequently the specialisation to make products of a sophistication greater than that which any merely planetary economy could achieve. Each planetary economy supports in effect one sector of the integrated economy of the Suite, and the Empire is the transport sector that permits this integration. The worlds of the Suite are consequently rich.

Certain worlds develop into the Suite or decline out of it from time to time. The Suite is generally growing (and slowly becoming able to sell products that were unknown even on Old Earth!). At 541 PDT (AD 2926) it consisted of Tau Ceti, Xin Tian Di, Paráiso, Aeneas, Esbouvier, Todos Santos, Jungfrau, New Earth, Vanaheim, and the Empire. At 603 PDT (AD 2988) it consists of Tau Ceti, Xin Tian Di, Paráiso, Aeneas, Esbouvier, Todos Santos, Jungfrau, New Earth, Eden II, Vanaheim, and the Empire. The Suite has a scale of economic integration about one order of magnitude larger than the population of a TL10 planet, and each planet in the Suite supports one sector consisting of about 10% of a ~TL11 economy.

The question arises from time to time of which colony specialises in what. The Empire specialises in starships, naturally. It has been established that Tau Ceti makes the best beam weapons (probably optical phased array emitters rather than actual lasers) and holographic equipment. Todos Santos has been noted for psychology, pedagogy, brain-hacking, mind-emulations, mind uploads and downloads, and computer software. Esbouvier has been noted as the place for artificial species, parahumans, and the like.

Before I commit myself any further, I'd like to sort out a reasonable division of an Ultra-Tech economy into about ten sectors each making up about 5–15% of economic activity. Would anyone like to suggest a likely division or a few likely economic specialisations for worlds?