TL 9 microchips?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

But if you're clever, you just specify what a gadget can do and handwave exactly how it does it, using extrapolation of existing scientific principles. If you're doing space opera you can replace the extrapolation with dramatically plausible technobabble.

Giving actual numbers for a gadget, other than basic weights and dimensions, makes it very likely that your predictions will be comically incorrect in just a few decades (but with an infinitesimal chance that you're right and make way more off of patents or stocks than you're ever going to earn from your writing).

On the other hand, simple narrative descriptions will often imply actual numbers. See for example Heinlein's Starman Jones, where astrogation problems are entered into a computer by looking up the decimal numbers in a table of decimal to binary conversions and manually entering the binary numbers!