Stewart Johnson writes:
>Something I forgot from last night. Aren't the TLs a bit out
>at lower levels? TL4 is c1850 whilst TL5 is c1930. Thus WWI was
>officially fought at TL4 wasn't it? I tend to find it easier to
>think of TLs in terms of weaponry and the first single-shot rifles
>can into service c1860-1880. Certainly we Brits were using Martini-Henry
>rifles in 1879 to fight Zulus with, and the Winchester probably
>predates that?
You touch on a pet peeve of mine. IMO those TL to Terran dates mappings
are NOT meant to be taken to litterally. The dates are only a rule of
thumb to help Refs estimate the TL of stuff that isn't explicitly
mentioned. Anything explicitly mentioned is independent of Terran dates.
Thus I believe that a TL 8 computer corresponds to the state of the art
on Terra today. We may be at TL 9 or 10 already - with respect to
computers. We obviously aren't wrt. space travel. Single-shot rifles
are TL 4, and will remain so even if historians discover a working
medieval single-shot rifle (design by da Vinci, perhaps? ;-).
(Incidentally, rifles were used in the Napoleonic war; some multi-shot
pistols were made in France around 1760 (They were revolved by hand,
and never really caught on)).
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"A subsector official pompously states that the
subsector armed forces have four Kinunir class
ships in service, each with enough troop strength
to put down any military operations that threathen
the peace of the Imperium."
---Adventure 1, The Kinunir