Except that, for what it's worth, the Traveller universe has actually surprisingly bad importing. It's slow. I can get a new car customised* from Korea in 6 weeks if I have the money. Making the same deal between Wypoc and Regina is at least 4.2 weeks... 1 week for the request to get there, another for the response, a third for the cash, a day or two at the plant, and another week to get it to wypoc.‡ While that's shorter, I don't know until it shows up that they got the money... And it's likely to take 3-4 weeks to get it into the cue. Meanwhile, if I really throw money at it, I can have it real world in 4 days...
Of course the same arguments for going off planet with automation apply to staying on planet in "less friendly" environs. There's a lot of cheap land in the heartland today that could provide the acreage for heavily automated facilities. Simply, there is less need for nearby demographics to support the plant, freeing up the geography on where the plant can go. At best the plant would need a rail head.
Multinational companies are TL7.8 because they have the experts. Countries that have the universities and technical colleges that can churn out the critical mass of experts.
Every country in the world can access the information thanks to the interwebs, training people to master it is another thing entirely.
Of course the beauty of training people is that, first, the people can come to you and, perhaps better, the trainers can go to them. Even better, you can have people come to you, you can train them, and then they can go off and train others. Obviously there is some loss in translation, but it's enough to start an industry up that can develop it's own local expertise over 5-10 years.
There is also the consequence of automation, you lose craftsmen.
Here in the north east of England we used to have a world leading ship building industry.
Most experts admit there is no longer the skill base to open up even one shipyard without bringing expert craftsmen from abroad to train apprentices to build ships.
I think you're downplaying the capability of "general purpose" automation. Simple example, a craftsmen can hand cut dove tailed drawer joints. A modern carpenter today may not be able to cut the joints by hand, but with a $100 worth of jigs and routers, he can machine excellent dovetail joints. Obviously a piece of rote automation can do that all day long, for thousands of drawers. But a piece of "general" automation (i.e. a robot) can, in theory, "hand cut" the joint, with craftsmen like skill -- the first time.
One of the things that always made me itch, from gear-heady POV, in the early SW movies, was how utterly worthless the "droid" army was. As a human, eye hand coordination and muscle memory, all things necessary to provide accuracy, especially with something like a firearm, those are "soft skills". Through training and what not, we can develop those neural pathways and train the eye and hand to be accurate, and be accurate quickly.
A machine doesn't (shouldn't) have that problem. A machine has complete self awareness. Its knows at what angle it's wrist, elbow, shoulder, waist and legs are at, as in relationship to each other, as well as to the ground. With higher resolution sensors, higher frequency calculations, a droid should be able to instantly compute the ballistics and change anything necessary to make the "perfect" shot within the inherent accuracy of the weapon and its internal components. Ye Old hostage situation with the assailant holding the hostage would be a trivial matter for a droid to safely make the shot, and it will do it within milliseconds of the command and the propagation delay to the mechanics of the firearm. When it comes to manual motor tasks, whether it's shooting, cutting a board, or pounding a rivet, a machine should be able to do that within the limits of its mechanical capability.
Now, to the point, I would not call the robot an "expert". But you could call it a craftsman when it comes to mechanical skill. To me, an expert doesn't just know how to do something, they know to fix something when something goes wrong. A $10 book from the auto parts store can tell you how to replace a transmission, but you still likely want an expert to actually do it. No matter how good the steps are in that book, it's likely incomplete in terms of what's actually needed to accomplish the task.
So, it begs the question of how much craftsmen are needed. You need artisans, for sure. You need engineers and designers. But mechanical skill, patience, "eye for detail", alls aspects of craftsmanship, I think less and less. I look at the wood work at the county fair each year, and it's all amazing. It's beautiful, creative, perfectly finished. But a lot of it is just the time invest transforming rectangular pieces of wood in these beautiful shapes. Something a CNC machine can do in 1/2 hour of machine time. Imagine if all of your workers were simply portable CNC machines that could replicate any shape you show them. "Make this" and hand them the result of the CAD drawing that's been 3D printed as a prototype. Or the clay figurine you hand crafted and fired.
The OTU has a millennial Imperium that has been TL12 since the start, TL14 for over 400 years and TL15 for over 100. High TL stuff in everywhere, expertise in high TL stuff is everywhere, the hard part is explaining why every world isn't a TL12 minimum,
A question that has long vexed me is why would any world in the Imperium invest or develop a fossil fuel based economy?
Yea, I agree. I have no problem with systems having divergent TLs, but not after the thousand plus years of "stable" civilization. 10's, even 1 or 2 centuries. But, after that? Nope. Makes no sense outside of academic examples "Hand off the indigenous population".
