It still says I need to wait 24 hours
No need for that, Iāll just wait it out or ask them to send me a pm instead. You can revoke it now
Is TL 3 actually a thing?
The more Iāve read things by Dan Howard and the more Iāve studied history on my own, the more I wonder if TL 3 shouldnāt just be folded into TL 2, and reflects what amounts to a European bias towards the culture that came in the post-migration age Europe.
Page 512 of GURPS Campaigns suggests that:
TL 2 transportation includes the saddle, roads, the trireme
TL 2 weapons and armor includes iron weapons, iron armor, chainmail and siege weapons
TL 2 power includes horses and water mills
TL 2 Biotech includes bleeding the sick and chemical remedies.
TL 3 transportation includes the stirrup and oceangoing sailing ships
TL 3 weapons include steel weapons, early firearms, plate armor and castles
TL 3 power includes heavy horses, horse-collars and windmills
TL 3 Biotech includes crude prosthetics and anatomical science.
By the numbers: The stirrup might have been a genuine development, but ocean-going sailing ships, as far as I can tell, is pretty much centered on just the vikings until we hit TL 4. The ability cross oceans is, to my mind, a typical marker of TL 4 technology.
From what I can tell from Dan Howard, the Steel/Iron difference isnāt really a thing. The difference between early iron age steel and medieval steel basically amounts to the fact that early iron age steel was just Cheap (in GURPS terms). A scramasax isnāt crap because itās iron, but because itās a scramasax. We do start to see things like pattern welding in the dark ages (TL 3 stuff), but thatās really just making Fine and Very Fine blades.
Plate Armor isnāt TL 3. Itās TL 4.
And Castles are typically what I mean. People have been building fortresses and city walls for ages. The Europeans perfected it after the fall of the Roman empire and dotted their lands with them, but it 's not like if Rome had survived and āadvancedā into TL 3 that suddenly it would have castled everything up in a way different to how it had been doing things already. We had so many castles because Europe was so balkanized.
āHeavy horsesā is not an advance. Anyone can bread heavier horses. The European Warhorse was, as far as I can tell, a real achievement, but it was also uniquely European. Itās not like China hit TL 3 and suddenly had heavy horses. I canāt speak to windmills, but they seem more a TL 4 thing (and indeed, we see āImproved Windmillsā at TL 4).
Finally, TL 2 medicine is everything I would associate with medieval medicine, while whatās listed as TL 3 medicine seems more like TL 4 medicine.
To my eye, TL 3 is really just āLook, this is what medieval Europe looked like, and hereās how itās different from Rome,ā but it wasnāt more advanced than Rome, just different. We used chain, they used lamellar. We used castles, they just walled their cities and built forts. We had knights, they had legions.
Are there real advances that can and should be cataloged under TL 3, or is it just TL 2 with knights and fantasy flavor?
I surrender.
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Only Xblade and Bots have TL 4 here.
Is there a TL 5? Iād guess not.
