TL10 Campaign

[Gadget]

What would TL 10 look like without inexpensive fusion power

[David Johnston2]

<shrug> Like one that used a lot of fission reactors and solar power satellites.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Gadget

What would TL 10 look like without inexpensive fusion power

Transhuman Space with fewer megaprojects, and the Second Age of Sail still going (basically remove the Martian Beanstalk and everything in Deep Beyond from canon).

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Transhuman Space with fewer megaprojects, and the Second Age of Sail still going (basically remove the Martian Beanstalk and everything in Deep Beyond from canon).

THS has a few superscience aspects and rare TL 11 nanotech items. I wouldn't use that setting as a guide for generic Gurps TL 10.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Gadget

What would TL 10 look like without inexpensive fusion power

Not much different at the character level. A bit different for the infrastructure of societies. Spaceships might be a bit underpowered comparatively, but not horribly so.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

THS has a few superscience aspects and rare TL 11 nanotech items. I wouldn't use that setting as a guide for generic Gurps TL 10.

Okay, sure, very slightly less nano. But I doubt without the opportunity of a beanstalk anyone would bother terraforming Mars, so the issue of TL^ would solve itself.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Okay, sure, very slightly less nano. But I doubt without the opportunity of a beanstalk anyone would bother terraforming Mars, so the issue of TL^ would solve itself.

It's the speed of terraforming that's superscience, not the concept itself.

[Flaco76]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Transhuman Space with fewer megaprojects, and the Second Age of Sail still going (basically remove the Martian Beanstalk and everything in Deep Beyond from canon).

This sounds interesting, I would like to see it.

[Darklim]

I'm working on exactly one of those (except I let FTL travel creep in - but not FTL communications, processors or anything else - because I want the PCs to travel from star to star moderately fast. One to two days to get from a star to another, a month or two to get from a defined area to another).

Obviously, with no convenient energy source or matter conversion, it would mean that we're still stuck with our current problem of resources and energy. My assumption is that beamed solar power became the worldwide Next Big Thing in energy, and that asteroid are getting mined dry. There are two options:
- If the setting is going to be limited to a single or a few star systems, it's likely that a (few) megacorporation(s), a (few) state(s) or any macro-thing control the asteroid minage process, while trying to calculate when they'll have to rely on something else - and pray that it's as far in the future as possible.
- If, like mine, the setting span on a whole sector of the galaxy (personnaly I assume that there are about 250 stars that the PCs will be able to go to, for various reasons), then asteroid mining can be an activity that any freelancers can indulge into; and the borderworlds might trade local goods for energy cells, since they don't have any kind of masssive power generators yet.
Also, I forgot about fission generators. My bet is that they are certainly used in most of the important planets, but ecology movements might prevent them from being built on lesser planet - especially if said planet is fit for life.

Apart from that, you'll have to decide if cybernetics or not. Also, the omnipresent complex AIs have a great chance to be a thing. I'm not only talking about friendly androids, but about any kind of AI: the one in your TV that you can program to hunt for a specific show to record, the one in your gun able to identify the correlation between heat and shape and warn you if it looks like a human body or a warmachine - or connect itself to other people's electronic systems in order to avoid friendly fire -, the one in your credit card that can be used to force you to keep a specific budget on things (food, emergencies, car, bills, this project about opening your own theater and enough money to treat your date well), et caetera...

What can I say... The industry. More resistance, more lightness, more cutting-edge, more variety, more more. That is, if you're optimistic about the economy. If you're not, then it will certainly be the same old we have now. The medicine should take some leaps, what with gene therapy being able to solve genetic deficiencies in-utero and computer-aided surgery making the blind see once again.

Overall, apart from the energy and resources that we'll still have to hunt for, I'd say that it could be very similar to our world, only way more diverse.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Darklim

My assumption is that beamed solar power became the worldwide Next Big Thing in energy, and that asteroid are getting mined dry.

How did you managed to mine dry the asteroids? Is the Solar System vastly overpopulated, or is asteroid mining really that old?