But, looking at the rules as written...why do you think the drive letters are on the tech chart if not to limit their construction with low TL than indicated? Why else would they be there--multiple entries for the drives on different TL's?
Why wouldn't the list just have something that indicates Jump drives available at TL 9+ and that's it?
As I noted earlier, the Tech Level charts also provide a cap for any given setting a Referee creates. If the TL of an interstellar community is capped at TL 12 then Drives P and above are not available. In the same way if someone wanted to develop a Trappist-1-type setting of several earth-like worlds around one sun, some of which have interplanetary travel but none of which have interstellar travel, technology might be capped at 8 or a soft-9, indicating research on Jump drives and allowing other TL 9 items.
The point of the Tech Level, as written, is to encourage the Referee to make
choices about his or her settings. It is a range of options. Not everything on the TL table is available in every campaign. (Or, perhaps more specifically, not everything is available to the PCs and the core setting -- but other, stranger elements of higher TL might arrive or be discovered. For example, in the Trappist-1 setting I just described, aliens might arrive with Jump Drive tech, even though the campaign has been running without such tech for eight months of play.)
Is there an argument to be made against this point of view? Because I'm honestly not seeing it.
RAW, you can't build drive L on TL 9 worlds.
A
world of a TL 9 can't build L Jump Drives. But that does not mean external forces/entities/groups of one stripe or another can't be building Drives using a technology above the quality of the local world.
We know this is possible -- by the rules -- because we know we can end up with starport classes that can produces goods above the local world's TL index.
All this means is that there are worlds out there -- perhaps off the subsector map if needed -- that
do have the technology to produce drives. They have sent technicians, expertise, and tools -- for whatever reason -- to a world in order to build a particular class of starport.
I understand this "breaks" the idea that TL "determine the general quality and capability of local industry." But then the whole point of the UWP sysgen is to create exotic and unique circumstances to foster exotic and unique situations and settings for SF adventure stories. By the time the Referee has worked out why an A-class starport has been set up on a TL 8 world (daydreaming upon the UWP, and the other worlds of the subsector, and the overall setting beyond the subsector) he will invariably have come up with more of a look and feel if the world as well as one to five plot hooks for adventure possibilities.
I need to reiterate here that I do not take the UWPs as
literally as some people here do, for reasons
I outlined earlier.
If I roll up a resource-rich world with a TL 8 with an A-class starport I can decide that a corporation backed by a noble has annexed a portion of the world and is taking those resources with troops backed with laser rifles. I could further decide the corporation is conscripting the planet's citizens for labor as the planet's economy falls apart. I am both using the rules exactly as intended and providing grist for adventures all in one fell swoop. The world population does not have the tech to build drives and starships. But an extra-planetary entity has arrived and built the infrastructure to do exactly those things. The reasons why this is happening are endless. The disjointed nature of the situation will offer conflict, destabilization, and crisis. Which is awesome for PCs and RPGs in general.
(I need to add, I suppose, that the above example is only one of a gazillion available and not even that interesting yet.)
The trick is to not make mismatched starport TL and world TL go by without comment or thought. That would be a shame. But by asking questions (again, what the system wants you to do) one comes up with interesting results.
