I like this a *lot* - it also goes a long way to explaining the cannon TL disparity. You’d end up with mooks on the TL5 rock having TL5 gear and the rich folks using AirRafts and lasers.
My only issue is that TL5 rock with out a survivable biosphere. Then, they cannot locally produce the food and essential gear that they need locally to survive - so all of the environmental suits, air scrubbers etc need to be shipped in. You can explain a few of those away using the “it’s a outpost” hand wave. Then trade need to be large cargo shipments of essentials arriving like clockwork. a few small traders might be able to keep up once the colony is established, but I have a gut feeling that the volume of trade is going to be large.
Hmm, the more I think about it, the higher tech gear is going to drive trade. Everyone is going to want the Tukera iPhone 103+++ when it comes out. There will be scarcity, however after a while it’s still going to even out.
I guess that’s been one of my issues with OTU. I think that the local production TL is the worlds TL, however savvy merchants are going to bring cases of the new gear from the local high TL production center to those mooks and sell them at a margin. IMHO over a thousand years, TL is going to level out at some base (TL9? 10? 12?) and the higher TL systems will bring up the TL in a sphere of influence around them.
tbh, I see pocket empires more defined by higher TL systems then anything else. That’s where the Imperial Nobles for the area would want to live after all - do you want to live in a shack or have all of the automation and comfort a fully supported TL15 house and infrastructure would bring?
I believe that it's possible to have an interstellar economy of scarcity and limited interstellar trade volume at one and the same time, AS LONG AS that trade primarily involves luxury goods. By "luxury" I mean that on the sale end of each trade transit the particular cargo being carried can't be locally produced (or at least can't be locally produced in economical amounts), yet it also isn't essential to life or even to comfort. Cargo such as this is what the top 1% of consumers on the destination world can afford.
Given the glacial annual economic growth rate of the OTU (I think GT:FT puts it at ~0.25%), the aggregate demand for luxury cargo would be relatively restricted and pretty much rock steady along a given route. A situation like RL modern China - where a less-wealthy economy suddenly becomes substantially wealthier in a relatively short time span - would be extremely rare. Since both the number of possible consumers and the scarce supply of any given luxury good is largely fixed, so is the low demand. All that will change on a noticeable scale is *which* luxury good is in current demand. Staying abreast of fashions in high-end consumer goods (at least in the markets that they frequent) thus becomes highly important to interstellar traders.
BTW, a low-trade OTU still justifies a large Imperium. Such an Imperium exists in order to encourage the development of luxury trade among systems which are largely self-sufficient economically. It does so in order to foster a sense of interstellar community among these worlds. Absent such a sense of interstellar community (limited though it might be), there is no reason for any particular set of close-neighbor worlds to *care* about helping defend any particular other set of close-neighbor worlds from external attack. The Imperial Core Worlds wish to remain safe, yet don't wish to spend the enormous amounts of cash necessary to actively garrison a sprawling frontier. So they finance their protection by selling the Frontier Worlds on the social concept of, "Hey! We're all in this together, gang!"