What is Technology Level?
Traveller uses the term “Technology Level” to describe the technological advancement of a society so that it can be compared to other societies. While even Traveller admits that this is an abstraction, and technology is not really a progression through predefined eras, it is a useful abstraction that helps communicate a great deal about the setting succinctly. In this post, I’ll be going through the categories the Traveller Wiki currently uses to describe technological epoch to describe the advancements made in my milieu and the ones it has yet to crack. This is all very subject to change–I’ll be developing and expanding this as I work on and think about this setting.
General Description:
Communications:
There are, generally speaking, accepted to be three tiers of communication speed. On planets, and even between a planet and its moons, communication is near-light speed, with lag of less than a second between wirelessly connected devices. Very little can block these high-tech devices from communicating, and they can be reduced to a wearable size or expanded to contain immense processing power easily. Within a solar system, lag becomes considerable, but established settlements and modern starships can connect to the system’s internet using tachyon and meson communicators. With a delay of hours or even weeks depending on the distance to a system’s main world, these are not ideal, but they get the job done. Between systems, though, even the closest ones, nothing is as efficient as the X-boat, a modern pony express using jump technology to transport updates from system to system. Each jump takes a week, so mail will never arrive in faster than a week, and if multiple jumps are needed, that time skyrockets to months or even years. X-boats operate at the highest reliable jump length they can be built for, and for polities on the X-network, they are among the high priorities to maintain, since without them, there is no connection to other systems. These vessels may still be targeted during war, although this is widely considered a war crime and may spark retribution, since the information on the vessel is permanently lost if it is destroyed.
Education:
Education technology advances slowly–the standard life-path of primary, secondary, and post-secondary education in Charted Space would be recognizable to a student of modern-day Earth, although the details are different. Common, cheap, Virtual Reality technology allows every student to attend class from their home as long as they can connect to the local internet, so physical schools are often the refuge of the miserably poor or a luxury for the upper classes. Most governments provide education, but megacorporations often also offer schools that are a pipeline into jobs working for them, which are often the only available education in company towns.
A technology known as the wafer jack is being experimented with by the militaries of the largest and most advanced polities, but is not yet widely available or fully safe yet. This is a computer interface direct to the brain, into which “wafers” of crystal can be inserted. These wafers can contain memories and personalities designed to be run with the wafer jack, superimposing them onto host brains. So far, skillsets and simple mental algorithms can usually be imposed onto minds by the most advanced possible wafer technology. Theoretically, the personalities of real people can be scanned into wafers, but this is not yet possible and likely to be destructive–that is, it will kill the mind being scanned. This technology may one day revolutionize education, with citizens able to download skillsets and even the personalities of highly skilled individuals, but even the first civilian release is still decades away.
Entertainment:
The wide availability of VR makes it one of the most popular forms of media, allowing users to escape their current lives and load into interactive movies, chat rooms, or games. Celebrities can often achieve fame on a galactic scale, publishing their works or having them published to universal repositories which are updated using the X-network. These repositories are the streaming services of XX16, and share the same failings they share with cable before them–each repository can only offer some subset of the works available, and competes with every other repository to offer the best product. Additionally, whatever force administrates the Internet of a system can subscribe to or bar repositories on behalf of its users, allowing information control and propaganda to become serious issues.
News:
The X-system is the most reliable source of news across Charted Space, and takes measures to prevent its reports being altered or corrupted, hashing reports with a complex system that only allows them to be altered on their planet of origin. Most civilian news reports only report extremely relevant news from off-world, except in ports and on hub worlds, as it is simply impossible to keep up with the politics of all of Charted Space.
Energy:
Cold Fusion is the most widely used power source throughout Charted Space. Energy is nearly free–all that is needed to produce it is hydrogen and a Fusion+ reactor. These can be miniaturized efficiently by the most developed producers, making miniature Fusion+ reactors an essential export to almost everywhere. Larger reactors, of course, have larger outputs–a miniature reactor may run a high-tech computer, but a massive reactor is needed to run a self-enclosed city.
The calling-card of the Ancients is the antimatter reactor. These tiny, efficient, reactors output incredible amounts of energy, and most are capable of creating their own antimatter, requiring only hydrogen fuel in much smaller amounts than Fusion+ reactors. The forces at play are catastrophic if the reactor is damaged or destroyed. Attempts to reverse-engineer them have so far all ended in destruction.
Transportation:
Land, Sea, and Air:
Gravity control technology is well-established by this point. The premier personal transportation is the G/board–a skateboard-like platform whose bottom repels matter, causing it to float. Air/Rafts have replaced personal cars, similarly shaped but operating through gravitic control. Bullet trains and aircraft are used to transport cargo long distances on planets.
The next frontier of surface transportation is simply making this technology available to everyone, making personal craft unnecessary through robust public transport. Every private option seems to have been explored to the limits of its efficiency, and yet massive inefficiency still exists wherever individuals have to work without a system in place to facilitate transportation.
Space:
NAFAL (Not As Fast As Light) travel is well-understood and powerful, allowing in-system transit to be easily accomplished with gravitic momentum drives. Incremental improvements are always possible, but a significant fraction of the speed of light has already been reached.
For FTL (Faster Than Light) travel, the gold standard is the jump drive, specifically jump-6, which can travel 6 parsecs in one one-week jump. Most ships cannot afford and do not need a jump-6 drive–the majority of ships are jump-2, and many are jump-1. (The number indicates how many parsecs can be traveled in a jump.)
While conventional sources are attempting to wring another parsec out of their jump drive, the extreme cutting edge is beginning to study hop space. This amusingly named dimension is even farther removed from real space than jump space, and so provides an order of magnitude more distance on jumps–a hop-1 drive would be able to jump 10 parsecs. Unfortunately, there are several issues with hop space. First of all, it is simply far more dangerous than jump space, which is already a serious cognitohazard as well as dangerous for unshielded machinery. Second of all, its distance magnification causes trouble with navigation, and it is believed that early hop drives will be all or nothing–hop-1 drives will travel 10 parsecs, not 9 and certainly not 11.
Ancient ships, while they may be capable of jump ratings up to 10, have never been known to have hop drives. It appears that they avoided hop space because of its cognitohazardous properties. Many Ancient ships have surprisingly low jump ratings, possibly because they used wormholes or similar connections to travel longer distances.
Manufacturing:
Manufacturing is the bottleneck on all technology in this milieu. Robots and computers may be used to speed up manufacturing, but those things must themselves be made somewhere and the materials used to make them must be produced somewhere. Few people work in the factories themselves, but trillions work on administrating them, or the mining operations that feed into them. The best factories are incredibly efficient, but expensive to create and keep fed with materials. Tremendous stratification is common between the owning class and the working class.
Processors:
Although the Virus set back computational technology, it also left behind the seeds for advancement beyond what had once been thought possible. Chips rewritten by the Virus were billions of times more efficient than they had been before, and these designs were studied and copied by intelligent life as it bounced back. The result is crystal processor chips etched on a nano-level to take advantage of quantum interactions, taking billions of computational actions per nanosecond.
All this to say modded Minecraft now runs really well.
Jokes aside, computational technology is incredible, allowing for amazingly complex and lifelike artificial intelligences adapted to almost any skill imaginable. These intelligent interfaces are often mistaken for true artificial life-forms, and perform that role almost without flaw. However, they are only very, very, skilled at predicting the correct next thing to do or say, drawing on decades of accumulated data. Even the most advanced scientists have not been able to coerce one to intentionally grow beyond the data it has access to. Instead, the focus has been put on preventing mistakes that would cause one of these intelligences to act outside of replicating the correct response, or to learn from intelligent interface output. (The latter could cause loops where the foundational data is corrupted by poor copies of itself; the very idea awakes latent fears of the Virus.) However, some intelligent interfaces are programmed to “feel”, and to respond to those feelings in the way a sophont might, producing certain carefully limited output flaws.
It is believed that the Ancients could create true artificial intelligence, but if they could, these beings were almost certainly massacred during the Virus.
Trade:
Currency:
For currencies like the Imperial Credit which are meant to be traded on an interstellar basis, the X-boat system is often used to update bank accounts, often meaning that no matter how far or how fast you go, you cannot escape your debts. Smaller local currencies are less subject to regulation, and can often be exchanged for credits at highports, but may become essentially scrip due to the fact that vendors are not required to honor them the way they are de facto required to honor the credit.
Cargo:
Planetary exports usually travel at jump-2 along predetermined trade routes. While there are usually no laws against taking other routes, these trade routes are considered highly safe and efficient, and there is almost certain to be a market for exports along them. Goods may travel whole sectors to get to market; like the truckers of the modern day, many travellers spend most of their lives transporting them. Since interstellar travel cannot be automated, every megacorporation maintains huge fleets of traders, but there are also so-called Free Traders which are individual ships which purchase lots of cargo and transport them from world to world hoping to earn money by selling them to a market that normally has less access to that good.
Environment:
Environmental Control:
Terraforming and weather control are essential fields of the sciences. Each planet to be terraformed requires years of study by experts and the deployment of expensive and highly specific technologies, and few will become true garden worlds. Most worlds, however, can become habitable for most sophonts with enough work. However, the arcology, or self-enclosed city, is generally still considered to be more feasible.
Arcologies:
Self-contained cities are commonplace in this world. Whether enclosed by domes, housed in gigantic skyscrapers, buried underground, or orbiting through space, many of the people of Charted Space live in such a structure. Often administrated partially by highly complex computer programs, they strive to be wholly self-sufficient. One might live ones entire life inside one without ever leaving.
Highports are a common type of arcology. These orbital port towns accommodate starship traffic through the system, allowing starships to dock, unload, refuel, take on cargo, and often be repaired. They connect with a downport on the planet’s surface, where appropriately streamlined ships can land, and spaceships without jump capacity often shuttle cargo to and from the surface nonstop. However, most workers at a highport live in that highport, with apartments and amenities built into its structure to sustain them, the always-large merchant population, and the travellers whose ships are docked at that port.
Life Sciences:
Biology:
Genome mapping is quick, easy, and accurate thanks to highly advanced computer programs, and genetic editing has come with it. Geneering, as genetic engineering is now commonly referred to as, is sometimes used to adapt important species to their environments even as they are transplanted from planet to planet. It remains expensive and difficult, but it sees excellent results. Its use on sophonts is still highly suspect, as discrimination and eugenics have always followed. Another problematic use is the creation of new sophont species from non-sophont lifeforms. While this would seem like a gift, the new species is dependent on its creators for everything while it develops, and this has often been used to create a dynamic of slavery, especially by the Solomoni.
This is the field in which the Ancients were most advanced over current society. Creating species seems to have been near-effortless for them; they transplanted Humaniti across the galaxy and created the Vargr from Terran wolves. It has been noted that the Ancient experiments seem to feature Terra highly, whether transplanting species to or from that planet.
Medicine:
Stem cells are in common use for cloning and to engineer a wide variety of personalized treatments. Anti-viral and anti-bacterial measures are highly developed. Personal technological augmentations, from high-tech prosthesis to implants that go beyond natural limits, are available. The highest technology ones are quite expensive, but camera eyes and neurally controlled replacement limbs are a common sight even among the poorest people. The military is the largest consumer of augmentations and in most cases controls the most advanced augmentation technology.
Anagathics, drugs that prevents biological aging, are cutting-edge biotechnology that regularly sells for prices outstripping the gross domestic profits of star systems for a single dose. They are a way for the wealthy and powerful to show off their influence.
War:
Starships:
Military controlled starships now regularly displace hundreds of thousands of tons and can be constructed out of planetoids as well as being built in the traditional fashion. Huge fleets are maintained by the strongest polities at eye-watering costs. Meson weapons and spinal mounted artillery are the latest advances in destruction. Ships can carry drop troops in cryogenic storage as an invasion force.
Battle Dress:
For battles fought on the planetary surface, the final word seems to be battle dress–a mechanical suit controlled by a single driver and augmented with destructive weapons such as the fusion gun, a weapon which can cause irreparable fallout across a battlefield. The weak point of battle dress is its operator, who operates the suit using their own nervous system. If the operator can be killed, the battle dress becomes inoperative. Artificial intelligences are not yet able to operate battle dress to the degree of reliability the military demands.
This post may not be complete until the project is over, but these are my initial thoughts on what technology is available in milieu XX16.
Update 1/31: The Examining Every Decision section for this post is now available here.