First TL-9 items

[Tom Mazanec]

With the Basic Set giving TL-9 as ~2025 what items now in R&D are likely to be the first of this TL on the Market? AR glasses? Self-driving cars?

[Phantasm]

As far as I'm concerned, we're already TL9 in computer technology. My own hope is that bionic prostheses come along soon.

[whswhs]

Apple computers with the new custom made chip.

Thorium fission reactors.

mRNA vaccines, pushed ahead a bit by recent events.

[Fred Brackin]

We probably crossed over into TL9 levels of DR for the vest and trauma plates styles of armor some time ago. See Kenneth Peters' update on the subject in Pyramid 3/57 (itself 8 years old).

There are some limited production guns that exceed UT's numbers for conventional firearms even without electrothermal technology. They just use higher pressures without electrothermal.

Actually the not-so-rare S&W .500 Magnum pistol exceeds Gurps TL9 numbers and is more than a decade old. I know of a 7.5mm pistol that does about 4d P which is a little more than a UT TL electrothermal in that caliber (without goign from P- to P too).

The thrust-to-weight ratios for Spacex's current rocket engines exceed any given for any TL in Ve2.

[Rolando]

Those guns may just be TL8 high quality or some such. They are still TL8 technology, just a very good design.

I think prosthetics and robotics are already in early TL9 though.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Aren't we using artificial retroviruses to do genetic engineering? Or am I just misinterpreting how that works?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Rolando

Those guns may just be TL8 high quality or some such. They are still TL8 technology, just a very good design.

.

Nope, quality bonuses do not raise firearms damage. We might be looking at a place where Gurps has mis-estimated where the limits of firearms damage are but materials, weight and chamber pressure are where all the important differences in firearms between TL6 and TL8 are. If crossing one breakpoint takes you from TL 6 to 7 and then to 8 then crossing another might well take you to 9.

[warellis]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

We probably crossed over into TL9 levels of DR for the vest and trauma plates styles of armor some time ago. See Kenneth Peters' update on the subject in Pyramid 3/57 (itself 8 years old).

There are some limited production guns that exceed UT's numbers for conventional firearms even without electrothermal technology. They just use higher pressures without electrothermal.

Actually the not-so-rare S&W .500 Magnum pistol exceeds Gurps TL9 numbers and is more than a decade old. I know of a 7.5mm pistol that does about 4d P which is a little more than a UT TL electrothermal in that caliber (without goign from P- to P too).

The thrust-to-weight ratios for Spacex's current rocket engines exceed any given for any TL in Ve2.

Regarding ceramics and body armor, there was advancement in how they're made:

The price of ceramic armor dropped dramatically starting about 10-12 years ago in the US, though it's taken time for that to proliferate around the world. The reason for this is instead of hot pressing the ceramic powder into the plate we can now do it cold and just use mechanical pressure to create the binding effect. The prior high temperature precision process was very expensive in energy, and required rather expensive equipment to do the heating correctly with more potential for error in general.

This is also why you now see dramatically more use of ceramic armor on all kinds of light armor vehicles as applique as well as ships, aircraft and lol, Turkey built a new armored train with ceramic armor recently.

The other aspects of body armor have also come down in cost but in a more progressive fashion. In practice though the US didn't use this technology to make the armor cheaper, it held the cost about equal and used it to make the armor better, as improvements in the microstructure of the armor went hand in hand with gaining the ability to cold press it. Other people have gone for the cheap option and you can now get Level III ceramic plates for under 300 dollars US while in the not so long ago past they cost a thousand or more.

In general though ceramic armor of all sorts gets more expensive per weight the thicker the actual plates. Which is itself a disincentive to reducing weapons calibers and thinking that will somehow defeat armor. You don't just let the enemy use lighter armor at that point, they'll also inherently spend less money on the material.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Apple computers with the new custom made chip

Slow to the thread, but I'd like to point out this is not cutting-edge technology. Making a custom integrated circuit with a processor and peripherals of your choice is fairly old school. (They're usually called "ASICs", for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, but of course the processor itself is pretty general purpose. It's the other stuff you choose to put on the die that makes it "application specific", if indeed the chip winds up being specific.)

The processor core was designed by ARM (their v8.3-A 64-bit processor core, or so Wikipedia tells me). ARM (originally "Acorn RISC Machine", later "Advanced RISC Machines") makes most of their income from providing processor cores and other components for chip designers to integrate onto a single die to do whatever they want to do. ARM's occasionally tried to sell computers (the Acorn, for instance), or already-manufactured standalone processors, but their real strength is in licensing the core to other companies. ARM's really good at making it easy for other chip designers to use their products -- good products, good marketing, good support. The particular ARM cores used by Apple (the Cortex A53 and A57, again according to Wiki) date back to 2012, so themselves aren't particularly advanced.

The process is more akin to picking out components for a company to use when assembling a PC for you than it is to designing a new processor from scratch. There are a huge number of chips out there that use ARM cores, and at least a dozen other companies that license cores for other processors of various capacity.

(For a point of comparison, in my last job starting about 20 years ago now, a networking chip startup, we did about six chips in ten years with a staff of around 10 chip designers; two of those chips had no CPUs, three had various ARM cores, and the last a different sort of CPU, all along with the networking logic which was what the company was really designing. Only one of those ten designers actually dealt with integrating the CPU core -- as only part of his work at that. The CPU cores pretty much just drop into a space on the die with an interface specified by ARM. And the tech and business environment for building ASICs wasn't particularly new even in the year 2000 when that company started.)

In other words, go Apple, but this isn't a milestone event marking a TL 9 transition. It was routine business for TL 8. Might make a good marker for moving from TL 7 to TL 8 computing, though maybe it's better as one of those fractional techs in early to mid TL 8.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

As far as I'm concerned, we're already TL9 in computer technology. My own hope is that bionic prostheses come along soon.

IMHO computer technology is more a refinement of TL 7-8 with a few TL 9 advances be made. Apple's M1 for example is a refinement of a chip design developed back in the 1985 that Apple has been improving for a about a decade.

One issue is unlike the TLs before it TL 9 doesn't really have "signature" tech

Never mind, in the real world the boundary between TL x and TL x+1 is fuzzy as all get out. For example does Watt's very small improvement to the Newcomen atmospheric engine (TL 5) make it the the first TL 6 steam engine or was it just a refinement of TL 5?