On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Greg Nokes <greg@nokes.name> wrote:
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.

If the settlement is burrowed into solid rock - in order to give it easily-maintained hermetically-sealed caverns - then a decent-sized population can easily be supported by a native TL of 5. It just wouldn't be *Earth's* TL 5. Rather than smoke-belching coal-fired power plants, it uses massive fuel cells (first invented in 1839). Rather than open air fields of crops, it has carefully-maintained greenhouse wells covered by sheets of thick glass; the gardeners for Emperor Tiberius (42 BC - 37 AD) constructed the first recognizably-modern greenhouse.
 
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.

The local mooks don't have either economic or political power. That's why they are mooks. Off-world merchants aren't going to be interested in them, particularly given the high interstellar transport expenses of the canon OTL.
 
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.

Probably. But then the populace of those planets have stopped being mooks, assuming they've acquired at least indirect economic and political power.
 
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?

At TL 15 it's easy to build an estate that's totally self-sufficient. Imperial High Nobles can therefore live anywhere they wish, even completely alone in the middle of an otherwise-empty asteroid belt. Depending upon their personal Paranoia Quotient, they may not *want* populated planets surrounding their homes. :)

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