Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

[Pursuivant]

The thing about extremely advanced tech levels is that the technology doesn't necessarily change, it just improves.

For example, if you've got matter transmitters, fast FTL space travel, and energy to matter conversion that allows just about any item to be created from nothingness, the difference between TL12^ and TL13^ isn't that there are new technologies, but that the technologies get better, cheaper, and more effective.

For example, that's why Star Trek: Discovery was able to successfully port the franchise from the 23rd century to the 32nd century - the basic clunky or experimental 23rd century tech was conceptually similar to extremely mature 32nd century tech. For example, rather than transporters that take up an entire room, it's possible to have personal short-ranged transporters built into comm badges, and personal gear that materializes as needed because it's imbedded in miniaturized transporter pattern buffers.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

The thing about extremely advanced tech levels is that the technology doesn't necessarily change, it just improves.

For example, if you've got matter transmitters, fast FTL space travel, and energy to matter conversion that allows just about any item to be created from nothingness, the difference between TL12^ and TL13^ isn't that there are new technologies, but that the technologies get better, cheaper, and more effective.

For example, that's why Star Trek: Discovery was able to successfully port the franchise from the 23rd century to the 32nd century - the basic clunky or experimental 23rd century tech was conceptually similar to extremely mature 32nd century tech. For example, rather than transporters that take up an entire room, it's possible to have personal short-ranged transporters built into comm badges, and personal gear that materializes as needed because it's imbedded in miniaturized transporter pattern buffers.

The problem with superscience TL is that it totally messes up comparing TLs in GURPS. TOS era Trek was very TL(7+x)^ and has become TL(8+(x-1)) as time (and tech) marched on.

It is like claiming that Nemo's ship was actually nuclear powered ie TL7 (what the pilot The Return of Captain Nemo did) rather than the TL(5+1)^ it currently has has (Vehicles: Steampunk Conveyances).

Sure the argument could be made that the Nautilus was nuclear powered but nuclear power some time before 1854 (16 years previous to The Mysterious Island set 1865 to 1869) is itself superscience and would likely still be TL(5+1)^ not TL7.

Heck, this disconnect is even canonical — antimatter bombs are normally TL9, though admittedly insanely expensive to use as such (Ultra-tech p 6, 88, 156) and yet Britannica-5 is TL5^ not TL5^ (antimatter bombs TL9-10).

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

So, planning a sci-fi campaign, basically a Star Trek thing, and I was thinking about the Tech Level. While I do appreciate the simplification of 4e's Tech Level reworking, I feel that ending the rankings at TL12 kinda limits things. Especially when GURPS Ultra-Tech ranks Star Trek as a "Safe-Tech TL12", which implies the Federation is at the limits of its tech evolution, when the setting is full of precursors with "god-like" tech.

TL seems to me more to indicate an aesthetic: the way the science looks. So you don't have anything higher than TL 12 because then you get into either "alien" or "magic" aesthetics that humans can't categorize with their feeble monkey brains.

This isn't how TL is supposed to work, but I'm not even going to try to contribute to that discussion vs. people who are way more GURPS-ified than I am.