When I ran this (for 12 years - my longest campaign to date!
) I used a combination of Classic and GURPS Traveller Tech Levels, since I have never liked how granular CT was with certain decades in the 20th century. I used this scale:
- TL0 Stone Age
- TL1 Bronze Age (3500 BCE+)
- TL2 Iron Age (1200 BCE+)
- TL3 Medieval (CE 600+)
- TL4 Age of Sail (CE 1450+)
- TL5 Industrial Revolution (CE 1730+)
- TL6 Mechanized Age (CE 1880+)
- TL7 Nuclear Age (CE 1940+)
- TL8 Digital Age (CE 1980+)
- TL9 Microtech Age (CE 2025+)
- TL10 Interstellar Community (CE 2070+)
- TL11 Average Imperial
- TL12 Average Imperial
- TL13 Above Average Imperial
- TL14 Above Average Imperial
- TL15 Technical Maximum Imperial
- TL16 Beyond
You can see how creative I was with TL11+ "Era" names
. I intended to create a detailed equipment chart for each tech level, for a very technical Hero, er, "issue." It's not an issue with the system; rather, when people convert high-tech things, they generally go with "more dice = better," which leads to rolling buckets of dice at high tech levels. I wanted to avoid that for sheer logic reasons -- I feel that a flintlock musket, an AR-15, and a TL13 Gauss rifle will all kill you dead about the same level. Instead, I decided every 2 Tech Levels above a defense item that a weapon was, it got a level of "Penetrating." This is a Hero System advantage that says you must do a minimum amount of damage based on how many levels of Penetrating the attack has. So, an AR-15 is TL8, while Plate Armor is TL3-4. So, at a minimum, an AR-15 will have 2 levels of Penetrating on a suit of plate armor, and will probably still do a significant wound on the target. One of the things I love about Hero System is the flexibility to use "quality instead of quantity" to represent different advantages or limitations on a piece of equipment or whatever.