Quote:
Originally Posted by Jean_Sexton
First of all, I know you wanted the tech levels to be different. However, GURPS plainly says we can create our own. The SFU clearly diverged from the tech levels in GURPS 4e in the 1960s. Up until that point, I used GURPS 4e.
From TL7 to TL8, we cover the time period from 1951-about 2050. That is two tech levels for 100 years. Then we still have over 200 years of technology to cover. Tech levels 15 and 16 are what the people in the SFU think they can do and dream about doing. The rest (five tech levels for two hundred years) help define what the people in this universe can and cannot do without TL penalties. If some one from the TOS era tried to work on an Early Years ships found abandoned, the GM needs to know what sort of penalties to apply. If they find a space probe launched in the 20th century, there are penalties (-5 to be precise) to working on it.
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Familiarity (B159) addresses this without stretching out the TL scale. Heck, all different TLs penalties are is a special form of Familiarity.
Going back to my Newcomen vs Watt steam engine example they are both TL5 but there would be familiarity penalties going from one to the other and likely more then the -2 the Basic Set suggests.
For a more extreme real world example compare the Speaking Mutoscope aka
Kinetoscope TL(5+1) with the Sound on Film method (TL6). These two things many have been both TL6 but the were radically different from one another that the familiarity penalty going from one to the other would be ridiculous.
Yet the very early sound films used some form of Kinetoscope including
The Jazz Singer (1927) while the first attempt at the sound on film method, Phonofilm (1919-1929), was turned into Cinephone which was used for Steamboat Willie (1928). Kinetoscope, which had been kicking around in one form or another since 1900, quickly died after that effectively becoming a "dead end" divergent technology.
As for the time a TL covers you can have a lot of Kinetoscope like developments - useful but something better came among at that TL and the original innovation became a "dead end" divergent technology.
I should mention that per "Space Seed" TOS Earth had Hibernation Chambers (TL9) in the 1990s. Of course once warp drive became available Hibernation Chambers even though they are in the GURPS standard TL scale also became a "dead end" technology. Heck, in "The Devil In The Dark" Scotty remarks that he hadn't even seen a PXK pergium reactor in 20 years. Even Spock calls it antiquated.