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Old 10-15-2021, 12:18 PM   #11
Christopher R. Rice
 
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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Originally Posted by Phil Masters View Post
(And yes, I've done a bit of dangerous numeric juggling in places like the GURPS Steampunk books. So I'm speaking from experience here.)
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As co-author of the Low Tech series, I endorse this message.

You want to fiddle numbers because you want, say, your power plant to be a little smaller than standard for the nominal TL but not so small as the next TL up? Feel free. But don't confuse reasonable variation (which happens in the real world anyway) with the false precision you get from declaring something like fractional TLs. TLs are broad categories telling players "here's what parts of the equipment list you can use." They are not precision instruments.
I'mma "me three" this message with my fellow authors. TLs (like a lot of things that look complex or detailed in GURPS) are mostly guesstimations. They are abstract gameable approximations that are used as shorthand to get an idea across - "TL0 is when we will be starting the campaign" "So the stone age then. Got it."

Picking them apart to break them down further is generally not a good idea. If you must then the best the system has to offer is "early" "mature" and "late". And those should work just fine.
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Old 10-15-2021, 05:15 PM   #12
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

There’s also the problem that TL qualifiers on skills don’t work that well on the detail level (and skills certainly shouldn’t gave fractional TL qualifiers). To take an obvious example — I, like many people here I think, lived across the TL 7-8 transition. But I can’t say I noticed at the time.

Supposedly, by the GURPS rules, a lot of people who learned to drive in the 1970s, or on older cars in the 80s or even the 90s, should be mildly befuddled when driving modern cars. But they aren’t, partly because much of the thrust of technological progress in that time was to make cars easier to drive, partly because the basic technologies didn’t actually change much, and partly because interfaces were deliberately kept much the same because why change them and alienate your customers? Conversely, stick a young driver of today in a 70s car and, assuming that they’d learned on a manual gearbox, they’d just grumble a little about the crankiness of the thing and maybe flood the engine once, but they’d probably get there.

(Now, stick even me in a 60s car with no synchromesh on first, and you can expect some screams of frustration. But let’s not move the TL boundary for that one technology around…)

I gather that similar comments would apply to planes and guns, to mention two technologies of some interest to gamers.

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James Watt might not have been able to invent the steam engines from 40 years later from scratch, but he would have understood them, and learned a lot from them if given a chance to take them apart.
Actually, he’d probably have rather disapproved. All yon messin’ aboot wi’ high pressure is jest gonna blow up in your face, ye ken. Nay good can come o’ such things…

But I digress.
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Old 10-15-2021, 06:47 PM   #13
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

I agree that fractional TL’s are needless (if not useless) for actual gaming. I can maybe see an argument for using them just for some variety if used solely in formulas for Vehicles or whatever, particularly if it was a situation where you wanted to generate a lot of designs spanning centuries or something and wanted them to be subtly different in a consistent way. But I’m not sure the trouble would be worth it when you could just make more advanced things a few percent lighter or more efficient and the result would nearly the same
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Old 10-15-2021, 08:12 PM   #14
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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I gather that similar comments would apply to planes and guns, to mention two technologies of some interest to gamers.
Not planes. There was a big shift around 1940 with metal-hulled monoplanes with lots and lots of instruments which meant that just crewing an aircraft had become a different kind of task which required less intuition and physical sense and more reasoning and quantitative thinking. I think there have been similar things with the transition from mechanical to electronic instruments and the introduction of automation. Flying a small plane might be pretty similar in the 1940s and 1990s but flying a cargo plane or a jet fighter I am not sure.
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Old 10-15-2021, 09:00 PM   #15
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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T
I gather that similar comments would apply to planes and guns, to mention two technologies of some interest to gamers.
It might be harder to say with planes because you have both generational revolutions side-by-side with older generations staying in service. Sometimes through multiple generations. I saw a TV documentary about the DC-3/C-47 in the 90s saying that 2000 out of the 10,000 DC-3s built in the 30s and 40s were stil in service in the late 90s an d this was after the C-130 had taken a major leap past the DC-3 as a military transport and the C-130 had been surpassed by the C-17. Even now I'm sure there are at least some DC-3s still flying and there'll be C-130s flying at least through the mid-point of this century and quite paossibly tot he end of it.

You do get the generational revolutions with aircraft but the new aircraft fly in different regimes of speed and range while the old aircraft keep flying in their old niches.

Guns and particularly pistols are different. There hasn't been anything like aircraft's revolutionary advances in gross performance. You get much more evolution . Revolvers kept being viable choices against semi-autos for such a long period for decently valid reasons and not just conservatism.

Before 1980 you just did not trust semi-autos to reliably load HP ammunition. Around 1990 you could start trusting HP to reliably expand even at pistol velocities so the old game mechanics about expanding HP from High Tech 1e weren't necessary any more.

Some time between then you start getting affordable semi-autos with double digit magazines so the "Wondernine" was born for comercial purposes even though the FN HP went back to 1935.

But in terms of basic operation? It'd be much easier to take someone from using a M1911 to a Sig 320 than to take them from actually shorter period of time between the DC-3 and the C-17.
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Old 10-15-2021, 09:03 PM   #16
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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It's often tempting to play with fractional TLs, usually because somebody has studied a historical technology in detail and observed the specific progression path, with measurable advances below the level of resolution of a GURPS tech level.

But it's a trap. That way, madness lies.

Remember, tech levels do not exist in material reality. They're an abstract model of the immensely complex pattern of historical and predicted developments in the vast range of entangled fields which we call "technology". They're a useful tool, especially for a generic ruleset like GURPS, but you shouldn't become a slave to your tools. And the more you try subdividing these imaginary things into smaller and smaller fractions, or feeding the arbitrary numbers you've assigned them into complex equations designed to model reality, the messier things will get.

(And yes, I've done a bit of dangerous numeric juggling in places like the GURPS Steampunk books. So I'm speaking from experience here.)
I fully agree with all this. This was the mistake Traveler 5e made with things like TL 1.3, 1.6, 3.3, 3.6 which in GURPS are the much saner TLs 1, 2, 5, and 5-6.

We have enough problems nailing down just when an automobile (TL6) gets improved to the next level (TL7) so trying to push the TL system any further than that is just asking for a migraine.

Never mind where certain inventions go is an issue even in canonical sources. High-Tech puts personal (desktop) computers at TL8 while High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics puts the IBM PC (ie IBM Personal Computer) at TL7.

Look at the steam engine. What separates a TL5 steam engine from a TL6 one? I have no idea and I don't think my players would give a darn.
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Old 10-15-2021, 10:24 PM   #17
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

You know, this is what I get for posting ideas before I go to bed, sure I don't need up checking it every half-four for the rest of the day hoping for replies and instead wake up to a bunch of replies, but it seems like I always miss a thing or two, in this case I forgot to say that I'm only thinking of using it for formula's for gear (and the like), that is for stuff like weights, volumes and costs in Vehicles
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Old 10-16-2021, 07:27 AM   #18
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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You know, this is what I get for posting ideas before I go to bed, sure I don't need up checking it every half-four for the rest of the day hoping for replies and instead wake up to a bunch of replies, but it seems like I always miss a thing or two, in this case I forgot to say that I'm only thinking of using it for formula's for gear (and the like), that is for stuff like weights, volumes and costs in Vehicles
You could easily say that one manufacturer is cutting edge at +0.2 TL for weight and performance, but the price is doubled and anyone without their proprietary diagnostic gear is at -3 to repairs. While another manufacturer operates at -0.5 effective TL, but has a reputation for running indefinitely with "monkey with a ball-peen hammer" levels of maintenance.
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Old 10-16-2021, 08:08 AM   #19
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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OK, I was mucking around with some stuff for Vehicles, I want to make hyperdrives a lot bigger/heavier to achieve a Dune or BT like approach where hyper capable ships are surrounded by flotillas of carry-ons, but that's another thread.
It seams that you want it setting specific so why are wee talking about tech levels at all? Just make the hyperdrive size a setting specific thing & be done.

It seems counterproductive to start splitting tech levels when it's not all available in the setting.
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Old 10-16-2021, 02:07 PM   #20
Christopher R. Rice
 
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Default Re: Fractional TL's

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You know, this is what I get for posting ideas before I go to bed, sure I don't need up checking it every half-four for the rest of the day hoping for replies and instead wake up to a bunch of replies, but it seems like I always miss a thing or two, in this case I forgot to say that I'm only thinking of using it for formula's for gear (and the like), that is for stuff like weights, volumes and costs in Vehicles
Most of the same advice still applies. If you need to, just use the rules for superscience generation from p. 8 of GURPS Psi-Tech. In fact, Psi-Tech gives a great breakdown on when tech might appear in a very concise form on p. 6
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