> The people invented the game had no clue about > anything. (Except how to make a game people still play thirty years > later, > which isn't nothing.) The science is a joke, the economics are > non-existent.
An unfair characterization. The original Little Black Books paid about as much attention to economics as Dungeons and Dragons did to the ecology of dragons in 10'-square dungeons. It didn't even specify if the Imperium were the good guys or the bad guys. GURPS Traveller Far Trader used as much economy as you will find outside university textbooks to explain why rich planets bother to trade with poor worlds. That's the comparative advantage part. > (Comparative advantage, at least at the level that far trader manages to > assume it exists, is a joke, of course, because it assumes that there's no > mobility of capital nor any incentive to change what factors of production > you have available. Mobility of capital may, or may not exist, as might > mobility of labor. But the assumption that there's no incentive to change > factors is nonsense, for many reasons.) For changes in society over time, look at GT First In. It talks about import tech levels, base tech levels, area tech levels, and progress. TLs don't change by dropping a shipload of TL12 textbooks on a TL2 world. Area tech levels do not deviate much from the base TL of the world. > this is another thing that doesn't make sense. Vacuum tubes are a) heavy > b) > unreliable c) consume *huge* amounts of power d) shed lots of heat (see > c.). They could also be swapped. When a modern circuit board has ANY fault, you dump it ... > You're ignoring Japan in the 19th century. Or China in the present one. > Technological progress can happen very fast, if there's a reason for it, > and > there's little reason to go from A to Z by passing through B,C,D... if > you > can jump straight to Z. > David Scheidt It actually proves my point. Despite a huge industrialization effort, by 1900 Japan still had less than half the per-capita of Europe. Heavy industrialization took several generations and a deliberate push by the government. They couldn't jump over all intermediate steps. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
