I mean that Old Earth was ForeSight tech level 8.0, limited by the extent of its markets, and died when someone built and activated a TL8 faster-than light drive. The worlds that are at DL 8.0 can practically manufacture anything that was in commercial manufacture on Old Earth; Flat Black has TL 8.5 stuff because the critical bits and pieces are made in the Suite. Further development will rely on actual innovation. It’s not way ahead: it caught up forty-odd years ago and is half a DL (practically, that means half a TL in commercially available technology) ahead.
The Eichberger device is one of those things that is not as technically demanding to make as its late invention would suggest. Whomever-it-was who invented it in Buenos Aires in 2353 did so in a TL 8.0 economy, but Tomitomo Eichberger was able to re-invent it in a DL7 economy. Because even though Mayflower was only development level 7 it was technology level 8.
I’m glad you noticed. It is a design feature that the setting as a whole doesn’t have much going on on a wide scope. I don’t want grand-strategic issues casting PCs into the shade.
There are no worlds that are great powers either. The setting has been carefully crafted to have no great-power-like conflict on the interstellar stage, because I don’t want to do space opera. I’m trying to emulate Vance’s Oikumene, Gaean Reach and Alastor Cluster material. They didn’t have any history, and they were better off without it.
There might very well be worlds that were wealthy and highly developed until fairly recently and are now holes in the ground. The steady trickle of Imperial interventions suggests that there are some, and the adventure 9,401 (which I ran at Phenomenon in '05) was set on one where it was happening. I’ve only said that none of the richest and best-run 1% of colonies has had such a catastrophe in the last seventy years.
Remember that there are a thousand worlds. The collapse of one of them is just local history, it is not global history. Fighting does not spread across borders. Refugees do not stream in their hundreds of thousands. Great powers do not send huge armies to intervene. The Korean War does not end up with Americans and Turks fighting against Chinese.
Oh, there are certainly places that went to pieces in the Formation Wars! You asked about collapse of members of the Suite, and there was no Suite until eighty years after the Formation Wars.
Nope.
The Empire is too young to have seen the life cycle of civilisation play out on any planet. It is only 120 years old. It has certainly seen several worlds go through economic miracles of recovery. It sees several collapse every year. Civil wars break out. It gets intervention acts. It sends in marines. Quite often it borrows and Imperialises armies of peacekeepers lent by other colonies. It’s just that something that happens several times every year is news but not history.
You asked whether any member of the Suite had collapsed. That’s a group of the 0.6% most highly-developed worlds, and has been in existence for about forty years.
There are 200-odd nations in the UN. The richest 0.6% is the USA. The fact that no region of the USA has been taken over by the Chavistas and brought to ruin in the last forty years does not tell you that there has been peace and prosperity in Venezuela.
So what history has there been?
- The Senate tried to strangle the Empire in its crib by refusing to enact taxes or pass appropriations
- Eichberger Spaceways contracted its operations to the most lucrative routes, all in the Core.
- The Empire concentrated on building up its commercial fleet and organising and establishing its basic institutions.
- After nearly thirty years of apparent torpor, the Empire revealed the vast financial resources it had accumulated and its unintended independence of the Senate’s financial control. Eichberger Spaceways restored services to about sixty world in the Periphery.
- The Navy attempted a survey mission and cocked it up.
- Survey was established as a joint program, with suitable specialists for safe first contact. Over five hundred first-contact operations were carried out.
- The Empire founded a dozen or so assistance services founded to help colonies discovered by Survey.
- The Senate grew to hundreds of members, most of them having no background in the original intention of Senate supremacy.
- New Athens, last colony in the Core to hold out against the Empire, ratified Treaty of Luna.
- The Empire set up system of sectors with reinforcement depots in the Periphery.
- The Empire officially opened the Capitol, its ceremonial capital in a huge orbital habitat.
- Eichberger Realty started terraforming uninhabited worlds in the Beyond.
- The Senate passed establishment acts to allow new worlds to be settled.
- The Imperial Council started co-opting princes who had been trained from birth for the role.
- The Senate assented to legislation that created a system of Imperial courts and established an independent commission to enforce Imperial criminal law in the colonies
- There was a struggle between Imperials trying to make the Commission for Justice a success and opponents who wanted to make it fail.
- Everyone figured out that all the new worlds that Eichberger Realty was creating would eventually appoint senators and that these were on track to completely upset the balance of power in the Senate. For five years no new Establishment Acts could pass, and no new settlements were founded.
- The Empire and factions in the Senate reached agreement on a compromise to allow new settlements to resume — it involved further new worlds being established with an agreed-upon range of different forms of government and other features.
- For the first time, one of the princes trained from birth to rule succeeded as Emperor.
- With the date drawing near for the first new worlds to become independent and appoint their senators, a frenzy of secret operations to influence their politics broke out.
Meanwhile, 625–1,000 worlds had worlds full of history that seemed to them far more important than the stuff they heard about from outer space. But the view from on high is that it was all just grit.