If TL means "what can be produced locally", how can that reliance on Imports be true?
There are 2 in Core Sector alone.
Zan (Core 0519) B100103-F
Ye-lu (Core 1123) A100134-F
I didn't say it could necessarily be produced locally.
It's a matter of: if I step out the door, what do things look like? Do I see rickshaw out autonomous driving vehicles, bronze tools or nanomachine swarms. At larger scale, that becomes difficult to support with imports, but on a planet of few people, it's something that comes in off the
boat ship. If you're going to do math based on economics, the Pop 2 world is a rounding error, so it doesn't matter whether its related to what can be produced, but it is still likely what can be fixed, or bought with the (imported) tools on site.
It becomes more important when you're looking at worlds where the TL minimum comes into play, like TL8 for vacuum, TL10 for Insidious. There, those are the tools required for survival. So think of it more like: what is the Tech Level 'feel' of the place and what TL can be supported in that place. I think we could consider that to be true for every non-industrial world (so anything Pop 6 or below). It may be that none or very few of those actually produce large quantities of equipment of the TL that's rated. But that's the TL of the stuff you find on the street.
The sentence in the core book says:
"The Tech Level measures the average technology presence on the planet and gives an idea of local production and repair capability."
So presence, yes, for sure. But if there is no local production facility at all, then the 'idea' of it is rather irrelevant. For those two example Core systems, a single subsidized trader arriving every few month is what 'produces' the goods, and 'repair' is the person with the TL15 equivalent of the smart phone repair booth at the mall who has tools and parts imported on those freighter runs, not from a factory in the back. But from a consumer point of view, it's a TL15 world. You're not likely to find someone able to fix an internal combustion engine, but someone might be able to fix that TL15 pocket computer, or even repair the implant that's causing you to hear a buzzing noise all of the time. And with that level of population it's likely a person named Gus with Electronics-0, Mechanic-1, and maybe Jack-of-all-Trades-1.
<Tangent alert: This is why I don't like the way Electronics is implemented in MgTv2: Electronics and it's cascades. I'd rather have each of those have it's own skill and Electronics be a non-cascade skill for fixing stuff with circuits - or get rid of a non-cascading version of it entirely and replace Mechanics with 'Repair' />
