Quote:
Originally Posted by VIVIT
I think 4e borked up the TLs a bit by moving the beginning of TL8 back to 1980. It's kind of a funny choice (though understandable, given the zeitgeist of the early 2000's) to set the beginning point for TL8, which was considered the "cyberpunk future" TL back in 3e, to a date before the publication of Man-to-Man. We're certainly in a different TL now than we were back then, but I don't think the world of 1980 was in a different TL than the world of 1950. My adjusted TLs timeline would put the beginning of TL8 around the time of Y2K and the dot-com bubble. Alternatively, it could be put at the time of the publication of GURPS 4e! That would preserve backwards-compatibility between 3e and 4e such that no technology that 3e classes as TL7 would be classed by 4e as TL8 -- though there might be plenty of technology classed as TL8 by 3e that 4e would need to class as TL9 or above -- or, alternatively, as TL7+1. Continuing this idea, I think it would be more appropriate to call the TL9 described in 4e TL8+1!
|
With the clarification on how TLs progressed and refinements that didn't exist in 3e (Borderline technology, Split technology, Borrowed (familiar) technology, and superscience) and the facts
good hunks of that 3e called TL8 already existed when Man to Man came out in 1985 meant pushing back the TL made perfect sense:
* Slower-than-light space travel (Spaceships) - Gemini and Apollo programs (1960s), spaceshuttle (1981)
* implants - internal pacemaker (1958)
* cloning -
first animal clone (1885)
* Bionics - velcro (1941)
Sean Punch even wrote a
piece regarding the change that he summed up as "Tech level 8 did not really happen quite the way we thought it would".
More over the TL scale before 4e was heavily influenced by Traveler which put TL8 (Digital Age) as starting roughly 2000 even though anyone actually paying attention would have realized the digital age had actually started in the late 1970s.