Why the long night?

[DangerousThing]

The long night was brought about by the collapse of the interstellar banking system - no banks means no mortgages for ships and no investment in start up colonies.

Planetary governments suddenly having to find huge amounts of real wealth when the electronic shuffling of numbers suddenly can't support itself - sound familiar?

If you are a self sufficient world - or at least close to it - you stop exchanging your goods for worthless monetary promises from other worlds, you want cold hard goods in exchange - interstellar barter at its best

So you're saying that the fictional Long Night was caused by an equally fictional currency collapse?

I would have thought that the 3I would have created a better economy than that. They should at least have local banks for small groups of worlds that are close together, and subsector banks, both designed to be as little effected as possible in case of failure of the more central banking authorities.

 

[rancke]

The long night was brought about by the collapse of the interstellar banking system - no banks means no mortgages for ships and no investment in start up colonies.

Planetary governments suddenly having to find huge amounts of real wealth when the electronic shuffling of numbers suddenly can't support itself - sound familiar?

If you are a self sufficient world - or at least close to it - you stop exchanging your goods for worthless monetary promises from other worlds, you want cold hard goods in exchange - interstellar barter at its best

Ultimately you never exchange the goods from your world for anything other than goods from other worlds. If there is money about that you have confidence in, the process can be made much easier because you can accept money from a buyer and go somewhere else to buy from a seller, but you can't use money for anyting other than buying other stuff with. And that stuff has be physically moved back to your own world before you have any joy of it.


Hans

 

[DangerousThing]

The canonical story is that there was a breakdown in authority and a concomitant upsurge in piracy, making long-distance trade uneconomical. Trade with close trading partners continued. There is also talk of several "false dawns" when one pocket empire or another seemed to be growing big, only to shrink back again. Finally, the point is made that the early Imperium had an interest in portraying the Long Night as darker than it actually was. The story that goes around in the Classic Era is "what everybody knows", not necessarily the truth.


Hans

That makes sense.

 

[Whipsnade]

Am I missing something obvious?

Actually, you're missing a couple dTons of obvious somethings. Let's start from the beginning...

1. Most relatively high population planets are self-sufficient, for the most part.

They aren't or, more accurately, they weren't. The Vilani deliberately fostered economic dependency across the nearly whole of the Ziru Sirka. Relatively few worlds made everything they needed, relatively few worlds even had substantial populations. It's how the Vilani kept their collective boot on the collective necks of dozens of Minor Races for over a thousand years.

I don't know what the TL/populations of planets were right before the Long Night.

And that's why you don't understand the Long Night. Nearly every world had "holes" in it's economy deliberately put in place by the Ziru Sirka and, with the Ziru Sirka enforcing an IP rights regime like something out of your nightmares, those "holes" are there to stay.

Add these "holes" to limited populations and you'll see that a lot of bootstrapping needs to occur when the system runs down.

I tend to agree in the main with John Sneed's article in Freelance Traveller #11, in which he mainly talks about the background tech in Traveller.

Sneed's article is merely an update and elaboration on Loren Wiseman's decades old explanation for the "lack" of things like bio-tech and those seemingly clunky computers.

John has limited nanotech...

Let's stop right there. Repeat after me: Drexlerian nanotechnology is thermodynamic horseshit. Got it? Good. Now we can proceed.

Most of the problems in discussions regarding nanotech can be traced back to the post-industrial society most of us live in. Too many people are completely oblivious with regards to how the many goods they use are actually manufactured, just as too many people are completely oblivious to how their food is produced thanks to our being in a post-agricultural society too.

We're using nanotech right now. We've been using nanotech for decades. Your printer uses nanotech. The dyes in your clothing uses nanotech. I can't even begin to list the ways in which nanotech impacts your daily life right now.

Sneed's vats of gray goo which can be programmed to produce food or steel on a whim are thermodynamic horseshit. Nanotech will be used and nanotech is being used. They just won't be used in the way you foresee. If you want to get a handle on the future of manufacturing, think along the lines of 3D printing. Then take the step that too many people fail to take because too many people aren't involved in manufacturing anymore. Think about the myriad of "feedstock" nanotech and 3D printers will require, think about the materials they'll need to make the things you want, think about the "purity" or "refinement" those materials must posses, and then think about how those feedstocks will be made.

Beginning to glimpse the picture?

Imagine wanting the nanotech/3D printers on Arglebargle-IX to produce iPod-5700s. You've got the schematics, the instruction sets, everything you need except for some rhenium feedstock. Making maters worse, the rhenium needs to be in powder form, particles at X microns with Y variance, washed a certain way, degaussed a certain way, suspended in a certain colloidal form, plus a dozen other requirements and no one on the planet knows how to make it. No one on the planet has even mined rhenium before.

You've got a TL12 marvel of "additive engineering" ready to crank out your consumer goods and you can't even feed it correctly. Can you even begin to imagine the industries, techniques, and technologies you'll have to re-invent, re-learn, and re-create just so you can feed your mini-facs?

Therefore, most systems with enough population to need large-scale manufacturing should have it.

As you should be beginning to understand, that assumption is totally unsupported.

On a final note, the Long Night is what the Third Imperium perceives the period between the Rule of Man and Year 0 to be. We perceive the period between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Renaissance to be the "Dark Ages", but it really wasn't. You should look at the Long Night in the same manner.

Traveller has always been about wheels within wheels, about looking beneath the labels and at the core of things. Look at the Zhodani or the Major Race issue for example. Stop taking in-game descriptions and labels at face value and start thinking about the same. It's what makes the game so much fun.

 

[mike wightman]

So you're saying that the fictional Long Night was caused by an equally fictional currency collapse?

I would have thought that the 3I would have created a better economy than that. They should at least have local banks for small groups of worlds that are close together, and subsector banks, both designed to be as little effected as possible in case of failure of the more central banking authorities.

Emm, the long night was the period that followed the collapse of the Rule Of Man or Second Imperium.

The infrastructure of the empire was still that of the Vilani First Imperium.

 

[Whipsnade]

So you're saying that the fictional Long Night was caused by an equally fictional currency collapse?

No, he isn't.

Traveller Wiki is a google search away and most of the game's early library data can be found there. Why don't you do some reading? It should answer most of the questions you've asked here.

Mike was referring to an event which 3I historians point to and say "The Second Empire collapsed at this time...". It's deliberately similar to actual historians pointing to an event in 476 CE and saying "The Western Roman Empire collapsed at this time...".

The event had to do with one sector bank refusing a money draft from another sector bank. That led to the end of long distance trade you've already been told about and, when long distance trade collapsed, the economic system the Vilani had deliberately fostered to maintain political control began creaking to a halt.

I would have thought that the 3I would have created a better economy than that.

Seeing as the 3I wouldn't yet exist for over a thousand years when this financial upset occurred, it's rather hard for the 3I to have prevented it don't you think?

They should at least have local banks for small groups of worlds that are close together, and subsector banks, both designed to be as little effected as possible in case of failure of the more central banking authorities.

Gee, it's almost as if decades-old canon doesn't already hint about financial firewalls built into the 3I banking system...

Check out the Wiki.

 

[mike wightman]

Ultimately you never exchange the goods from your world for anything other than goods from other worlds. If there is money about that you have confidence in, the process can be made much easier because you can accept money from a buyer and go somewhere else to buy from a seller, but you can't use money for anyting other than buying other stuff with. And that stuff has be physically moved back to your own world before you have any joy of it.


Hans

That's pretty much my point.

 

[DangerousThing]

Actually, you're missing a couple dTons of obvious somethings. Let's start from the beginning...

1. Most relatively high population planets are self-sufficient, for the most part.

They aren't or, more accurately, they weren't. The Vilani deliberately fostered economic dependency across the nearly whole of the Ziru Sirka. Relatively few worlds made everything they needed, relatively few worlds even had substantial populations. It's how the Vilani kept their collective boot on the collective necks of dozens of Minor Races for over a thousand years.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize this. Where is the source for this? I thought that everything that long ago was pretty much rumors. Obviously I was mistaken. It happens occasionally.

I don't know what the TL/populations of planets were right before the Long Night.

And that's why you don't understand the Long Night. Nearly every world had "holes" in it's economy deliberately put in place by the Ziru Sirka and, with the Ziru Sirka enforcing an IP rights regime like something out of your nightmares, those "holes" are there to stay.

Add these "holes" to limited populations and you'll see that a lot of bootstrapping needs to occur when the system runs down.

Again, I'd like to know of a *published* Traveller source for this. Not a wiki. Not an interpretation of a small remark in a book. Not one of the developer telling us things, but an official source.

I tend to agree in the main with John Sneed's article in Freelance Traveller #11, in which he mainly talks about the background tech in Traveller.

Sneed's article is merely an update and elaboration on Loren Wiseman's decades old explanation for the "lack" of things like bio-tech and those seemingly clunky computers.

Again, I have noticed other articles similar to John's article, but John's article talked about nanotechnology.

John has limited nanotech...

Let's stop right there. Repeat after me: Drexlerian nanotechnology is thermodynamic horseshit. Got it? Good. Now we can proceed.

No, we can't proceed. Drexler's nanotechnology is based on true prototypes: viroids (viruses without casing), as well as much of the machinery of life. Machines built on a molecular level can work.

I'm not saying that the entirety of Dr. Drexler's will work. He was one of the initial proposers of an entirely new area of technology.

However, stating that it won't work because of thermodynamics is ridiculous. Again, if you're going to do this, please quote accurate sources. Maybe then you'll convince me.

Most of the problems in discussions regarding nanotech can be traced back to the post-industrial society most of us live in. Too many people are completely oblivious with regards to how the many goods they use are actually manufactured, just as too many people are completely oblivious to how their food is produced thanks to our being in a post-agricultural society too.

We're using nanotech right now. We've been using nanotech for decades. Your printer uses nanotech. The dyes in your clothing uses nanotech. I can't even begin to list the ways in which nanotech impacts your daily life right now.

First, I do understand manufacturing, transportation, and economics fairly well, thank you. At least I understand them for the current day and have to extrapolate to the future. I'm not an expert, though, and I do get things wrong.

Sneed's vats of gray goo which can be programmed to produce food or steel on a whim are thermodynamic horseshit.

First, why? Second, there are no vats of gray goo. Gray goo is a horror story of nanotechnology. At TL-12, his vats are composed of general purpose assemblers which only assemble the nano-tech needed to do a job.

Nanotech will be used and nanotech is being used. They just won't be used in the way you foresee. If you want to get a handle on the future of manufacturing, think along the lines of 3D printing.

Nano-materials are being used right now, but not true nano-tech.

Then take the step that too many people fail to take because too many people aren't involved in manufacturing anymore. Think about the myriad of "feedstock" nanotech and 3D printers will require, think about the materials they'll need to make the things you want, think about the "purity" or "refinement" those materials must posses, and then think about how those feedstocks will be made.

Beginning to glimpse the picture?

Not yet, sorry.

Imagine wanting the nanotech/3D printers on Arglebargle-IX to produce iPod-5700s. You've got the schematics, the instruction sets, everything you need except for some rhenium feedstock. Making maters worse, the rhenium needs to be in powder form, particles at X microns with Y variance, washed a certain way, degaussed a certain way, suspended in a certain colloidal form, plus a dozen other requirements and no one on the planet knows how to make it. No one on the planet has even mined rhenium before.

Yes, if you don't have one of the raw ingredients then your SOL. Though perhaps if you have good programmers, you can substitute something else, or you just make a different item.

Also, I picture two different ways to get around this problem. Assuming a source of rhenium can be found and the specs on the exact form, then you program you input to take another form of rhenium and convert it to the correct form, or change the program so it takes the rhenium you have. Yes, it might take longer to get to the finished product.

You've got a TL12 marvel of "additive engineering" ready to crank out your consumer goods and you can't even feed it correctly. Can you even begin to imagine the industries, techniques, and technologies you'll have to re-invent, re-learn, and re-create just so you can feed your mini-facs?

Again, I think that you may be thinking too linearly, that a nano-vat can only perform one thing at a time.

Therefore, most systems with enough population to need large-scale manufacturing should have it.

As you should be beginning to understand, that assumption is totally unsupported.

Sorry, but I disagree with so many of your basic assumptions about nanotechnology.

On a final note, the Long Night is what the Third Imperium perceives the period between the Rule of Man and Year 0 to be. We perceive the period between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Renaissance to be the "Dark Ages", but it really wasn't. You should look at the Long Night in the same manner.

Traveller has always been about wheels within wheels, about looking beneath the labels and at the core of things. Look at the Zhodani or the Major Race issue for example. Stop taking in-game descriptions and labels at face value and start thinking about the same. It's what makes the game so much fun.

Finally, this is something that is actually informative. Unfortunately while I have a great deal of information about the 3I setting, I don't see or I have missed small casual references that you seem to take so strongly about the prehistory of the 3I.

And to me, the history of the game universe isn't something that a player or GM should have to guess at. If it's important, it should be written out.

As for the Zhodani or Major Race issue, they are something to get into at another time. Both of these are clearly propaganda issues that the 3I have a vested interest in continuing. IMTU I don't even bother with Major/Minor race idea and my Zhodani analogs (The Aquarian Federation) is normally a fairly peaceful race of genetically enhanced superhumans who think the Empire is is an evil, expansionist, race of thieves, cowards, and criminals. So people being people, propaganda works both ways.

I've gotta run, my tiredness is catching up to me big-time.

 

[Poppyseed45]

DT, if I may comment on some of what WS is talking about I'll try, in simple terms if I can.

First of all, he is correct in saying that, if we take nanofacs at face value, then they are, unless ones supply chain is endless and unbroken, almost useless. There are two reasons for this.

To create the materials necessary for your nanofacs to work, you have to have certain components of certain mixtures at certain densities (or other properties) to correctly, get what you want. To make a touchscreen for a tablet PC, for example, takes indium tin oxide of a specific grade. On modern Earth, there is only one place to find it, basically (in China if I remember correctly). And the amounts are terribly, terribly small. If the supply chain runs out on that, then we're screwed. So, if the Vilani really did make their supply chains have holes, then it stands to reason that entire product lines would wink out of existence overnight.

However, WS is alluding to another issue, in this case, the fact that you need to invent "the tools to make the tools." So, for example, let's say you run out of indium tin oxide. Maybe you know a source of it on your world, somehow, or find it. Do you have the technology to mine it? How about the techniques to mine it? Have you invented the necessary tools to identify the particular grade you need of it?

Does that make sense? Having nanofacs is, without a doubt, actually silly (to ME), since the actual techniques for making something are "unknown" (in this case, being programs in the device itself). Should I touch on hardware/software issues as well (that is, data is not immortal in computer form; it degrades)?

Or, what if your nanofacs break (not if actually; they WILL). Do you have the supply chain to manufacture them? The knowledge to rebuild them? The machines necessary to build the nanofac in the first place? The software programming capability?

So, tl;dr, in light of the supply chain holes, the Long Night can make a lot of sense, especially if populations are kept small on many worlds (so, the few experts die and don't pass on their knowledge, or the small number of machines wear out finally and no one can replace them).

 

[Vargr]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out why, when the 2nd Imperium and the Rule of Man fell there was such a long "Long Night".

What Long night? There was no Long Night.

Or at least, no Long Night as it is commonly perceived, a horrible dreadful age of doomed people living in fear on backward planets warming their cold hands on bonfires and looking with dread to the starred sky, or something.

Some of the most vibrant polities existed during the Long Night and lasted longer than any modern polity on Earth. Some lasted until the 3I came along with a carrot and stick, and some want both to just go away. And ask any true Solomani, he would jump at the opportunity of having no more Empire around, which is THE defining factor of the long night: no gigantic human polity spanning thousands of systems.

There were many "false dawns" before Sylea, but just because none was successful (assuming they were even attempting to do it in the first place) in reforming a huge empire of 11,000 suns tells us nothing about the quality of life or attitudes of the people within them. If you are living in a TL11 world does it make any difference to the common man if it is part of a polity of 10, 100 or 1,000 systems?

I bet most of the worlds, after adapting to fall of RoM and patching up the control-and-command economical insanity that the Ziru Sirka had forced on everyone at gunpoint for millenia, were better-off before the 3I came (rich corporatists excepted). They were masters of their own destinies with everything within possibility tailored to their specific needs and wants, rather than having to answer to a distant central government.

Most systems that had not become true hell-holes with the fall of the Rule of Man must not have been too happy about the return of the Imperial taxman in its third incarnation.

Didn't Imperial wars of expansion began even during the Cleon I lifetime? If systems have to brought kicking and screaming from the "darkness" of the Long Night to the "light" of the Third Imperium, what does that tell us about the "Long Night"?

It was certainly long and quite dark, from the perspective of Statists. For those born and living in it it was normal life. For us, trapped in a single planet of a single system, even a small multi-system polity would seem mind blowing.

Now, as for why Year 0 happened when it did and why it took X amount of time until it happened the answer is: causality and happenstance.

Cleon had the tools, the talent, the ambition and the luck, so it just happened. If he had missed any Sylea would just have been another "False Dawn", or a smaller Sylean Empire would still be around. Would Syleans be better or worse off? Happier or Sadder? Who can tell?

From the perspective of the Sylean Emperor and all the political sociopaths that need to rule over others, it would be a dreadful situation. The "Long Night" of not lording it over trillions, but just a few measly billions would still be in effect.

So yes, I fall into the camp that thinks "Long Night" is mostly Imperial propaganda. Looking at it with gamer's eyes, I would say the heart of the Long Night would make for a better RPG experience than 3I, where the setting is under the same cultural paradigm for years in travelling distance around.

During the long night you could have multiple Spinward Marches all over the place each with their own peculiarities.

 

[mike wightman]

I doubt if the Zhodani were too bothered by the Long Night

 

[Spinward Scout]

The rise of the Second Vilani Empire in the MegaTraveller timeframe suggests that the Long Night was improbable. The bureaucracy of the Vilani would probably have recovered even if the Solomani didn't. The Solomani didn't fill out the proper paperwork for that interstellar collapse.

 

[BytePro]

I'm trying to figure out why, when the 2nd Imperium and the Rule of Man fell there was such a long "Long Night"
....
So I have an answer that works for MTU, but not for the OTU.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something obvious?

Issac Asimov.

(Hint: the psionic robot deemed it was necessary in accordance with the zeroth law!)

 

[Carlobrand]

(Hint: the psionic robot deemed it was necessary in accordance with the zeroth law!)

You know, Grandfather has psionic robots, and it would be just like him to pull something like this.

 

[Shonner]

What does a planet, with a billion people who don't produce anything, do when ships no longer visit their starports? And if they did have a working ship in orbit, how would they use it without a trained crew? And where would they go to with the ship if all the nearby systems were having civil wars or infrastructure problems as well?

That is just a tip of the iceberg of The Long Night.

 

[Shonner]

I would have thought that the 3I would have created a better economy than that. They should at least have local banks for small groups of worlds that are close together, and subsector banks, both designed to be as little effected as possible in case of failure of the more central banking authorities.

Why would you think that? These days, countries are hoping for a world bank and a world currency. So what happens when that world bank goes under because governments controlled it and compromised it? I see the Rule of Man repeating our history which we are repeating.

 

[far-trader]

What does a planet, with a billion people who don't produce anything, do when ships no longer visit their starports?

I know you can roll that, but it's a patently ridiculous scenario. It should be one of those UWPs that makes you go "WTF? Gotta fix that... "

And if they did have a working ship in orbit, how would they use it without a trained crew?

ONE ship?! Unlikely. Hundreds or Thousands more like. Crews? With a billion people you can't find a few score or hundreds with the skills? Unlikely.

And where would they go to with the ship if all the nearby systems were having civil wars or infrastructure problems as well?

Why would they all be suffering such so suddenly? Was the long night caused by a rapidly spreading plague of insanity?

That is just a tip of the iceberg of The Long Night.

There are no icebergs.

 

[DangerousThing]

So you're saying that the fictional Long Night was caused by an equally fictional currency collapse?

No, he isn't.

Sorry, my quote about currency collapses weren't a game artifact, but the fact that most currency values are based purely on peoples' perception of the value of a currency. When people have no faith in a currency, it collapses.

So, therefore, currency collapses, along with stock prices, are purely fictional. Actually the price for most things are fictional until you actually go to buy or sell something. For instance, those of us who own our house have some sort of idea what it's "worth". The government, of course, has a value it believes in and taxes us on every year. However, until I actually sell my house, it has absolutely no fixed value. So what right does the government have to tax me on a fictional value which tends to go up each year when I live on a fixed income that doesn't? California home owners pretty much rebelled until their situation was at least somewhat fixed.

Traveller Wiki is a google search away and most of the game's early library data can be found there. Why don't you do some reading? It should answer most of the questions you've asked here.

Thank you, I shall do this.

As I've said, I'm mainly curious in the general sense because this is a common SF meme. For MOTU I have a real reason (the collapse of most advanced technology due to an engineered bacterium that ate certain things).

Mike was referring to an event which 3I historians point to and say "The Second Empire collapsed at this time...". It's deliberately similar to actual historians pointing to an event in 476 CE and saying "The Western Roman Empire collapsed at this time...".

The event had to do with one sector bank refusing a money draft from another sector bank. That led to the end of long distance trade you've already been told about and, when long distance trade collapsed, the economic system the Vilani had deliberately fostered to maintain political control began creaking to a halt.

Here I had made a mistyping about why would 3I economics permit this. I would have thought that everybody would have realized I meant 1I or 2I because of the question I asked which predated the 3I.

Seeing as the 3I wouldn't yet exist for over a thousand years when this financial upset occurred, it's rather hard for the 3I to have prevented it don't you think?

Oh well, there I go underestimating human nature again. Silly me.

Gee, it's almost as if decades-old canon doesn't already hint about financial firewalls built into the 3I banking system...

Check out the Wiki.

Again, you're talking about hints rather than actual statements. I've heard a lot of things from people about how they think it works, but not from anybody who can point to an actual source. I obviously use game adventures differently than most people here. I want to run a game that's fun, not one that has me solving riddles to figure out the financial system.

So I see an adventure, and use it for play. I've never compared any adventure I've run in Traveller to another GM who's run the same adventure, because nobody else has. I think the closest adventure I've ever stuck with has been Prison Planet, but that's because that was the first LBB adventure that seemed to me to be more than a simple dungeon crawl with a rumor table. (The bolding is just to make it obvious that I'm expressing an opinion rather than stating a fact. I also believe it was bought out of order.)

 

[DangerousThing]

Is nanotech strictly canon? There are serious doubts in the real world about whether it is a genuinely viable technology - that is "true nano" as described in SF. however, 3D printing seems to fill the same niche.

I doubt that any book has talked about nanotechnology. But has there been a book about Factories and Home Appliances yet?

And yes, if 3d printers could lay down atoms in such a way that they combine into molecules, at the atomic level, then yes, 3d printers will serve the same purpose, though probably not as efficiently.

The way I see Light Nano-tech working is at TL-12. At that point it would be mostly a factory thing. The advantage of a nano-fact (I believe that Whipsnade used a similar words and I like it) over conventional manufacturing is that it can be retooled much easier.

I also believe that a nano-fact (at all levels) doesn't require the purity of feedstock that normal factory processes or 3d printers require.

For example, to make a steel beam in a traditional 3d printer (non-atomic level) requires, well, steel. This is laid down and extruded to create a steel beam which then required hardening and so forth to get the crystallography of the beam correct for hardness and so forth.

My vision of a nano-fact at TL-12 is such that nano-machines of any sort cannot survive in the real world due to competition from bacteria, light sensitivity, and just general fragility to our worlds.

So, as I see it, the nano-fact would have various hoppers. These would take in raw materials of various types and feed them to the disassemblers, which would take in the various types of raw materials and break them up at an atomic level and store them in the nano-tech matrix. Each hopper would be programmed for a different type of material, but if you give it the wrong material, or in an unexpected form it should only slow things down because one would have extra disassembers around for extraneous materials and an incorrect feedstock should throw an error rather than break the machine. The smaller you can make your material, say by grinding it down, the faster it could be processed. Also the closer the feedstock is to what is programmed, the faster it could be processed. Each molecule of feedstock would be stored into the storage matrix. There would also have to be feedstock to create more nano-tech.

Then there is the programmable assemblers. These would be in a specific environment with access to the storage matrix and access to the programming. They would create specific types of nano-assemblers which would use the materials in the storage matrix to assemble (right out of the protected zone) whatever was programmed. This would be assembled at the atomic or molecular level. There might be some sort of holding material in the assembly area to support the extruded output.

Eventually the extruded product is finished and the holding material is washed off, and we have a finished, or almost finished product.

Perhaps with gavitics there would be no need of a holding material, by making it Zero-G in the assembly area.

It won't be instantaneous, which would require too much energy and also produce too much heat.

The interesting thing is that a nano-fact should be capable of producing everything from J-Drives to a steak dinner.

Again, at this TL it is just a *really* improved 3d printer.

Imagine a merchant ship that had the instructions to produce many different types of cargo and a decent amount of feedstock. One could find out what a planet is short of and have a large amount ready in a few days. This would only work, of course, on low-tech systems or perhaps with absolutely new licensed products like the latest fashions on Capital.

 

[BytePro]

I'm no RW historian - and my knowledge of the OTU might stretch to 2 paragraphs... but, I think the most likely thing to cause a period of tech relapse and stagnation and dissolution of a unifying government would be government policy... such as some combination of stupid trade/tech and ownership edicts.

Restrict, hinder or take away peoples incentive to do things and systems fall apart.