Ultratech ships

[marvo]

At TL20, I think you are getting towards the level in books by Iain M Banks. By that level there is some radical revolution in propulsion technology. It's never really explained but 90 mile long ships with FTL drives sure don't run on liquid hydrogen.
If anyone's read 'Excession', the alien ship in that book exists in 2 parallel universes/dimension and draws almost infinite power from the polarity between the two. (Which explains how the Tardis works

)

Or how about some kind of dark matter/dark energy drive? The farther you are from a gravity well, the faster you go.

 

[mike wightman]

One thing I've never liked much about the Traveller TL progression is how little changes between TL12 and TL15.
Power plants become more efficient, weapons and jump engines, screens and armour are all improved, but there is no new technology.

I've toyed with condensing the TL scale, or using the GT:ISW method of having a low end of the TL and a high end of the TL conversion for Traveller TLs.

I actually prefer the Alternity/d20Future progress levels, the Traveller TL scale of TL10 to TL16 would fit as being progress level 7.

 

[Plankowner]

Sigg, I agree with you. I compressed all of the Traveller TL9-15 into 1 TL, then used a decimal if I needed to differentiate.

I used a 10 point system with TL10 being godlike.

Nuclear Weapons came in at TL 6 (like Traveller), Jump Drive at TL 7, Ultra-Drive at TL 8 (Galactic level games, force fields FTL comm etc). TL 9 was intergalactic in scale. TL 10 got into Energy Beings and Transcended states that were not really playable.

If figured Traveller TL 9 was my TL 7.0 and TLF was my 7.9 (or maybe 7.8). That left most of the Traveller detail, but let me get very course on the big TL breaks.

Maybe I was just reinventing the wheel that other games have already been using.

Where you run into problems with that kind of condensation is that there are BIG differences between TLs. I mean setting shattering differences between TL7 and TL8. VERY hard to Referee unless you are VERY careful.

Think about a TL 5 plane (WW1 biplane) vs a TL 6 plane (WW2 Zero) or a TL 7 plane (F22). In each case the lower TL opponent doesn't stand a chance. How to you Referee something like that? How do you keep your ONE Ultra Tech civilization from taking over EVERYTHING?

Even in SciFi it gets hard. Harry Turtledove in his "In the Balance" books used WW2 technology vs "modern" technology. One STL spaceship almost conquered the entire planet. It took several plot gimicks (interesting but maybe unrealistic) to keep the poor 1930s humans from being wiped off the face of the Earth (literally). Expand that to a Galactic scale and it gets even worse.

If the Ancients achieved TL 25+, they should have been all over the galaxy, not just in our small little Charted Space area.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Jet vs biplane is very tricky - the jet is *so* much faster neither pilot would have time to use guns, and the biplane would be almost invisible to IR/radar-guided missiles...

 

[parmasson]

Don't forget the jet will need fuel sooner rather than later.
Can you land an F-22 on a grass strip?

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by Valarian:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Kurega Gikur:
PCs in charge of a uber-tech supership?

Sounds like the plot of Blake's Seven.

[EDIT]
Oops - point already made (Note to self - must read rest of thread before replying to something)
</font>[/QUOTE]Yes, but any point already made is always worth re-making if it involves invoking Blakes 7.

 

[marvo]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
One thing I've never liked much about the Traveller TL progression is how little changes between TL12 and TL15.
Power plants become more efficient, weapons and jump engines, screens and armour are all improved, but there is no new technology.

Yup, that was kind of what I was getting at. In the standard traveller TL's things just improve with increasing TL. The other thing I have an issue with is the one thing thing that doesn't improve. Fuel consumption.

I think there should be some radical new technologies somewhere between TL 10 and 16.

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

I compressed all of the Traveller TL9-15 into 1 TL, then used a decimal if I needed to differentiate.

I did almost the same thing. Everything up to TL 7 is compressed, that now equals TEK 1. Stardrives come in at TEK 1.5, and things like shields show up at TEK 3 or so. Humans cannot construct stargates (dimensional portals) until TEK 8, which is about off the scale. Makes it a lot easier to shoehorn in 'historical' references, etc.
As far as technology goes, in my early days I gave a 'miniaturization' bonus for what I considered off-scale development. For example Battlestar Galactica (the old version) was rated at 20%. Means fuel provided 5x standard EP, engines/batteries were only 20% of standard size. Nothing like a thousand years of war to stimulate technology advances...
Was it an old Paranoia Press book that talked about an 'eternity circuit' module? Basically, this device would read the configuration of the ship when it was installed, and if it took and damage, it would gradually restore it on its own. No doubt your 'Cobalt ship' would have something similar, only needing to return to repair for severe damage.
As far as new devices, look at the development of things like aircraft and automobiles, and adapt them. You could call each advance a tech plateau, and extrapolate from there.