What's stopping people from sharing high-tech information...

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flyingsandwich said:
...with lower-tech worlds? Most of the worlds I'm generating here some out as Pre-Stellar or lower, so I can only assume that this is by design. Which raises the question of how there are so many lower-tech worlds. Surely you could just have teams of very patient teachers going around the galaxy giving 'Welcome to the Future' classes to these worlds' scientists, covering stuff like grav drives, Jump Drives, whatever counts as a processor at Stellar level, etc.

Instead we have whole civilisations that are seemingly left in the dark, still trying to figure out how to make their diesel trucks more efficient while interstellar travellers are opening up pocket dimensions right over their heads!

Is there some sort of Imperial edict prohibiting this kind of technological helping hand? What happens when a civilisation says "Now hold on, you stingy bastards, how about a laser pistol or two?"
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Knowing HOW to build something and being ABLE to build something are two completely different fruits.

For instance, nearly every nation on the planet knows HOW to build an atomic bomb, but to build one requires the development of many other supporting industries.

For example, just to make simple copper wire in quantity requires:
Chemical industry to create your light industry.
Light industry to create your heavy industry.
Heavy industry to create your mining equipment, oil rigs, foundry and refinery.
Petrol industry to create your plastic industry.

Only now you can start to make copper wire in quantity.
And that's just the copper wire!
Not included are the schools of learning and expertise on how to do any of this.

TL is a reflection of what can be locally produced and maintained given the availability of raw materials.
Just because a planet is one tech level does not mean that there won't be higher tech level imports.
Government type and wealth will generally determine who gets these shinny toys if any at all.
In most cases the local government security forces will be equipped several TLs above the local.

Also the relatively low populations of most planets makes higher tech levels difficult.

A smuggler adventure anyone!?



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Pyromancer said:
Or, as someone else put it: TL isn't about knowledge. TL is about Gross Domestic Product.
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No it is about inherent infrastructure.

GDP is all about how much money is available per capita, i.e. a diamond bed in the sand produces a lot more cash with TL1 rakes then many other Higher TL operations.....

Now if you had said something like HDI (Human Development Index) you would have been closer to what y'all mean.....
 
As can be demonstrated by the East Asians, it's the ability to extract knowledge, and build up your infrastructure and industrial base, and somehow finance it and secure the resources.

Since they'd be able to extrapolate a roadmap they can follow to fasttrack their technological development by having that foreknowledge with eyes and teas they'd have to tick or cross, if not having imported that knowledge through technological transfers, industrial espionage and employing expatriate experts.
 
Condottiere said:
As can be demonstrated by the East Asians, it's the ability to extract knowledge, and build up your infrastructure and industrial base, and somehow finance it and secure the resources.

Since they'd be able to extrapolate a roadmap they can follow to fasttrack their technological development by having that foreknowledge with eyes and teas they'd have to tick or cross, if not having imported that knowledge through technological transfers, industrial espionage and employing expatriate experts.
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China is a perfect example of this. They were able to bootstrap their economy in just a few decades. But they also were highly focused on it. They had foreign companies trade tech for entry into their market, and now they are competitors.

But, it's also a perfect example of having illustrating how having the tech <> knowing how to do something. Their space program didn't understand how to make shrouds work on missiles until the Hughes engineers showed them their mistakes. They still are having issues building a 737-equivalent airliner on their own even after a near decade of getting info and some help from the West. They are great at assembling electronics, or manufacturing them, but notice that the underlying tech to build the chips and machines to make the chips still originates in the west. It's like the US is still where the majority of the computer languages are created while countries like Japan lead in overall lines of code being written (embedded mostly).
 
The rocket incident is a famous case of economics trumping national security; though my theory is that once momentum reaches a critical mass, technical development can feed itself.
 
Condottiere said:
The rocket incident is a famous case of economics trumping national security; though my theory is that once momentum reaches a critical mass, technical development can feed itself.
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Yeah, Hughes paid a fine and the Long March started taking away business from Western launchers (once they could, yanno, actually make it into orbit). And it helped their military program too. Profit before security!

You'd think that about critical mass, but it's not always the case. Sometimes the technological aspects are part art, part tech. And without the right foundation of technology and experience, one can't always get past the threshold.

A few years back a US sigint plane had to make an emergency landing in China. They destroyed the papers, but the US bemoaned the fact that the Chinese were going to be able to learn more about where to place antenna's and other equipment on the aircraft - something they were still trying to figure out on their own. It turns out that how you do it affects the quality of your sigint, so being able to make those measurements helped them a lot. Though they still don't have all the underlying knowledge of WHY you'd put something here and not there - which gets back to the art comment. But the more you do know, usually the faster you can pick up the rest.
 
And then you have the British, who essentially made it up as they went along. It's the willingness to accept the occasional (or more often) failure as you gain that experience, that will push that envelope.
 
Condottiere said:
And then you have the British, who essentially made it up as they went along. It's the willingness to accept the occasional (or more often) failure as you gain that experience, that will push that envelope.
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I've always like the British. Except their Comet 1's, which had some major design flaws. They never really recovered from that, and Boeing pretty much became the defacto jet airliner manufacturer.
 
Boeing was a major benefactor from the subsequent research that they did to investigate the cause of the crashes. But you get the feel that a lot of British aviation was very amateurish, whereas the Americans had their eye on the ball.
 
The great technical aspect that the Americans did push was standardisation. Europeans of the period were much more "craft" in outlook, which made mass production much, much harder. Standardisation also allowed the simplification and in-production correction of quality-issues and design flaws.
 
In theory, postwar the British should at least have been a more or less equal competitor with the US in both civilian and military aviation, but they threw it away.

The last great gasp was the Harrier, which they could have developed further and cornered the market to supply the fighter component for light carriers, and possibly, USMC requirements, especially when unit costs would be half or a third of the JSF.

Ironically, the JSF freed from the STOVL requirement, might have had a faster, smoother and cheaper development phase.
 
I won't share my tech with those Primative Folks, if they knew I was a tech guy they would stop worshipping me as a god:)
 
Jacqual said:
I won't share my tech with those Primative Folks, if they knew I was a tech guy they would stop worshipping me as a god:)
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Have you seen the "Miracle Engineer" career?

Certainly by the time you get to TL12 or TL13, you can put biometrics into a personal device that a <TL8 civilisation wouldn't recognise. Take a modern tablet as a case in point; a touchscreen must be completely 'magic' to someone without a technological background because there literally are no visible moving parts, and nor is there a visible control interface until it's "summoned". Pair that with...what? Facial recognition for a camera? Both of which are well within today's technology...

Condottiere said:
In theory, postwar the British should at least have been a more or less equal competitor with the US in both civilian and military aviation, but they threw it away.
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There have been several cases like this, and not always voluntary (at least for the aerospace industry). The Sky Flash air-to-air missile is another one.

The most extreme example is the M.52; Miles (the manufacturer) was instructed by the UK Ministry of defence to host a delegation from Bell - and then immediately afterwards to break up all the jigs and send all the design data on the M.52 to Bell, who "drew inspiration from*" the design when building the X-1.

* i.e. pretty much plagiarised and renamed. Engine and Tail particularly.

Somebody said:
Actually the Brits where rather professional just often "pushing the envelope" in the 1930s-50s era with units like Spitfire, Mosquito, Meteor and Comet being the "first and/or top performance planes" of their time. The US followed some month-years behind and often with knowledge of the british work and it's problems. They relied more on the "single genius" rather than the "anthill" approach of the US but that wasn't uncommon in other parts of Europe either (look at Kurt Tank as an example)
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Agreed. At the time, there wasn't an equivalent Boeing aircraft - the 707 came along nearly ten years later. It was part of the reason the fatigue cracking was so ill-understood; it was pretty much the first pressurised aircraft (military planes tended to be unpressurised and have breathing aparatus for the pilot instead).
 
Air racing, and racing in general, was a popular pursuit between the world wars, and was where several of the icons of WWII design got their head starts.
 
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