thoughts on Terradyne (3E and 4E)

[combatmedic]

Terradyne


There are older threads about Terradyne, but I think thread necromancy might be inappropriate, so I'll start a new one.

I'm looking for feedback about the setting, notes on how others have used or would use it, spin offs and new ideas, etc.


I'll start by going over some aspects of the worldbook/setting and my take on them:




History
What are your thoughts on the history of the setting?
Do you think the events leading to the creation of the UPOE are plausible?
I’m not sure if I buy the use of a single nuclear weapon as being the catalyst for the formation of a new international order. A limited but very destructive nuclear/WMD war might work better. Maybe Israel, Syria, and Iran all got trashed? Israel doesn’t seem to get mentioned again after the Golan Heights nuke attack, and the existence of the Islamic Bloc implies a weakened Shia influence (or it does to me, at any rate).
What about other events and trends? Anything you like, hate, or just don’t get?

Technology
Is the advanced stuff mature TL 8 (in GUPRS 4E terms) or early TL 9?
Does anyone have other comments or feedback on the tech stuff?

Planetology and terraforming
How plausible does this stuff look? How accurate is the planetology and physics material?
Does the question of scientific plausibility really matter much to you? Would it affect your enjoyment of a Teradyne game?


Religion
Sidebar page 34
This could be fun if expanded upon.
The neo-pagan stuff seems to indicate that far from becoming less religious, the world is undergoing a period of paradigm shift, in which new or revived religions are gaining ground as more established traditions lose influence.
In addition to the reconstructionist or neo- pagan/neo-heathen traditions mentioned in the sidebar, we might see stuff like:
• Pentecostal Shamanism (a fusion of various Amerind shamanic traditions with Pentecostal Christianity)
• Cyber-Vodun (emerging in West Africa after one of the two major world data nets goes up there)
• Gnostic movements of some sort
• Gaea worship/an environmentally focused religion



A minor quibble--
Family partnerships
Page 33, 34
Aspects of this strike me as hard to swallow. Maybe the authors were trying too hard to make the future different or maybe it’s just not a well written paragraph. I don’t buy the line about same-sex and multi-party unions being ‘’nearly as common’’ as a man and a woman joined in marriage. Legal in various countries? Sure, maybe. That common? No, I don’t think it’s plausible. I could easily see Terradyne corporate policy as accepting a wide variety of domestic arrangements, though.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I don’t buy the line about same-sex and multi-party unions being ‘’nearly as common’’ as a man and a woman joined in marriage. Legal in various countries? Sure, maybe. That common? No, I don’t think it’s plausible.

Humans have a strong tendency toward "multi-partner unions." As of my last look at the literature, anthropological research supported the view that our species naturally favors polygyny. That was back in 1994, though . . . it's 20-year-old information. Still, add in same-sex unions and the text may well ring true, in the "1 + 2 is nearly 4" sense. The problem is that people are unlikely to be truthful about the answers to questions about such preferences, which is why you get disparities between the percentage of people identifying as non-heterosexual or non-monogamous and the percentage supported by actual observation. That lets everybody with a stake in the actual statistics claim a number that supports their claims.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Humans have a strong tendency toward "multi-partner unions." As of my last look at the literature, anthropological research supported the view that our species naturally favors polygyny. That was back in 1994, though . . . it's 20-year-old information. Still, add in same-sex unions and the text may well ring true, in the "1 + 2 is nearly 4" sense. The problem is that people are unlikely to be truthful about the answers to questions about such preferences, which is why you get disparities between the percentage of people identifying as non-heterosexual or non-monogamous and the percentage supported by actual observation. That lets everybody with a stake in the actual statistics claim a number that supports their claims.

Sure, it's possible that legally recognized polygyny becomes more common.

Guys are often horny devils, if that's what you mean by 'strong tendency.'
But stable family and marital institutions need to actually fight or channel this tendency, not go with it.
Even Islamic polygamy is something that the religion allows under restrictions.

'Anything goes' is a quick route to everything falling part and catching on fire.

Besides, there just wouldn't be enough women to go around to make really frequent/widespread polygamy possible in most socieities. I'm not suggesting that there are or can be no exceptions to this.

[combatmedic]

page 24
China has gone from the ‘old communist’ regime to a ‘new socialist’ regime, according to the notes on page 24. This could mean a number of things.
Mao out and Confucius back in, with socialist elements retained?



USSR
page 23
Really? I recall thinking the USSR was not long for this world when I saw the Berlin Wall go down on TV. By the time GUPRS Teradyne came out, the USSR had been dissolved for a few years (USSR dissolved in 1991, and I believe that Terradyne was published in 1995). But of course the material may have been developed prior to the dissolution of the USSR, or it could be an intentionally alternate history.

If I ran a game with the setting, I might just rename the diminished future USSR as the ‘Eurasian Commonwealth’ or something similar to that. There is a certain Gibsonian 80s sci fi appeal in keeping the Soviet Union around in some form, though.

There’s probably no way that a Marxist-Leninist state with a centrally planned economy could last into the 22nd Century, because the economics underpinning the whole thing are fundamentally stupid and broken. Beyond that, and maybe more importantly, Marxism failed as a quasi-religious ideology. In all, it just didn't work.


A ‘Soviet Union’ that doesn’t really give a crap about Marx and Lenin but has simply appropriated some old Soviet symbols in the service of Russian nationalism might work. The hollowness of such a regime would fit with the overall decline in Soviet influence that the world book describes; it’s a bit of a sham and most people see this. Inertia, military force, and the limited prosperity brought by the twin factors of heavy manufacturing and an agricultural expansion on thawed lands have kept the ‘Soviet’ regime in power despite the loss of most of the Soviet Empire beyond the Russian core.

Maybe…

[vicky_molokh]

I remember looking through Terradyne a long, long time ago, back in the year when I was first shown GURPS. Vague memory for some reason pushes me to try seeing it as a prealpha of THS, which is of course nothing of the sort. You're on the brink of making me search through my old stash to see if I actually have it.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I remember looking through Terradyne a long, long time ago, back in the year when I was first shown GURPS. Vague memory for some reason pushes me to try seeing it as a prealpha of THS, which is of course nothing of the sort. You're on the brink of making me search through my old stash to see if I actually have it.

I don't think it's much like THS at all, aside from including space colonies and being set in the future.

The 'transhuman' elements are mostly not there in Terradyne.


It could probably be combined with GURPS Cyberpunk to make an 80s sci fi future.

The tech section makes multiple references to GURPS Cyberpunk.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I don't think it's much like THS at all, aside from including space colonies and being set in the future.

The 'transhuman' elements are mostly not there in Terradyne.


It could probably be combined with GURPS Cyberpunk to make an 80s sci fi future.

The tech section makes multiple references to GURPS Cyberpunk.

Yeah, I know, because the prealpha THS is actually GURPS Biotech. It's just the associative link that my memory gave me after almost a decade of silence on the topic.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Yeah, I know, because the prealpha THS is actually GURPS Biotech. It's just the associative link that my memory gave me after almost a decade of silence on the topic.

Sure.

You aren't the only one who sees it that way.

I don't really think THS counts as 'hard sci fi' in the way that Terradyne does.
That's not to say it isn't cool.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I don't really think THS counts as 'hard sci fi' in the way that Terradyne does.
That's not to say it isn't cool.

I pretty much gave up on hardness arguments beyond a certain level of precision. To me, hardness is a non-linear classification that can be (very roughly) summed up by the stuff in the setting belonging to one (or more) of the following categories:

• Stuff that somewhat clearly works according to plot requirements only. (Arg!)
• Stuff that is incompatible with laws of nature as we know them, but the author somehow missed the incompatibility.
• Stuff that is neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproved to be possible, and likely requires a shattering breakthrough. E.g. current: stable wormholes; past examples that proven to be possible: transmutation of elements (nuclear reactions). This is the stuff that usually gets into arguments whether it deserves a ^.
• Stuff that is generally considered impossible, but might become through a grand paradigm shift, but will cause one heck of a mindscrew to the science community when it happens. E.g. current: practical reactionless drives, FTL without time travel; e.g. from past: pretty much the whole field of quantum mechanics. This is the stuff which typically gets 'strong' TL^ when viewed from the past and may lose the ^ in the future.
• Stuff from the above which the author admits is ubiquitously considered superscience, but wants to explore the consequences. E.g. adventurous travel between parallel worlds.
• Stuff that's been shown to work, though perhaps with a misguessed magnitude of future improvement. E.g. microprocessors.
• Stuff that some significant part of humanity thinks works now and another thinks doesn't work. E.g. Keynsian & Austrian economics, Freudian and Rogerian psychology, souls and deities etc.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I pretty much gave up on hardness arguments beyond a certain level of precision. To me, hardness is a non-linear classification that can be (very roughly) summed up by the stuff in the setting belonging to one (or more) of the following categories:

• Stuff that somewhat clearly works according to plot requirements only. (Arg!)
• Stuff that is incompatible with laws of nature as we know them, but the author somehow missed the incompatibility.
• Stuff that is neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproved to be possible, and likely requires a shattering breakthrough. E.g. current: stable wormholes; past examples that proven to be possible: transmutation of elements (nuclear reactions). This is the stuff that usually gets into arguments whether it deserves a ^.
• Stuff that is generally considered impossible, but might become through a grand paradigm shift, but will cause one heck of a mindscrew to the science community when it happens. E.g. current: practical reactionless drives, FTL without time travel; e.g. from past: pretty much the whole field of quantum mechanics. This is the stuff which typically gets 'strong' TL^ when viewed from the past and may lose the ^ in the future.
• Stuff from the above which the author admits is ubiquitously considered superscience, but wants to explore the consequences. E.g. adventurous travel between parallel worlds.
• Stuff that's been shown to work, though perhaps with a misguessed magnitude of future improvement. E.g. microprocessors.
• Stuff that some significant part of humanity thinks works now and another thinks doesn't work. E.g. Keynsian & Austrian economics, Freudian and Rogerian psychology, souls and deities etc.

All I can say to this is 'yeah, pretty much that'