Once and Future Tech

Everyone knows that old sci-fi tech is much more fun.

Okay, yes, some of this is pure aesthetics. It's sometimes cool to look at really hyper-advanced tech, and I love looking at random sci-fi artworks I stumble upon. Heck, I played Eldar and that's a big part of their visual. But you've got to love a big chunky Bakelite computer, or a green screen with little blips on it. A single frame from a security camera that can only take occasional snapshots. Data disks that must be carefully swapped out and can be stolen dramatically. Comms that only provide one-way audio, not a constant video link so you can see the horrible monster eat your buddy.

An all-pervasive network that you can sync to for always-on instantaneous communication is boring. A high-tech communicator with a hundred functions is boring. Why? Because for a lot of us, that's just modern life. I just can't get excited for smartphones, and as a setting detail, the technology does not attract me.

Other things are just a bit too convenient. If you have portable scanners that can see through walls, or laser mics to spy on distant rooms through the vibrations in the glass, or tools to sample DNA from the air, you can deal with a lot of story elements. Of course the elite military force can locate the weird alien in this huge ship and shoot it through the wall, and find the hidden control bunker under a hill, they definitely have that scanner tech. Of course the protagonists can detect which people visited this room from their DNA traces.

Sci-fi settings are in a bit of a bind, though, because we already have things like that. While some are bold enough to simply stride ahead with whatever technology they think would be cool, it often feels necessary to have an excuse for why the tech has apparently fallen behind. So what excuses can we use?

Rugged Space

Especially in settings where people do a lot of remote living, repairability is vital. This works well for spacefaring games. Do you want a spaceship that works like a modern car, where six days into a warp jump it develops an inexplicable fault that can only be fixed by sending away for a full circuitry replacement? Is it okay if your water vapour condenser slowly loses efficiency until you need to buy a new one every two years from the other side of the galaxy? How about your atmosphere dome relies on driver updates from a company that got bought out and the new owners shut down that product line? No, absolutely not.

So you have rugged, repairable tech. You don't just want your tech itself to be rugged and repairable; you need the components to also be available, and you need to be able to replace the tooling that manufactured those components. At the very least you need them on small space colonies and long-trip spaceships.

Things that are not easy to repair and manufacture: microscopic circuit boards with atom-thick layers. All-in-one comm devices produced to tiny tolerances in zero-static dust-free labs without any pesky cosmic rays. Things with 100m of wiring arranged in the one precise arrangement that allows it to fit into the casing which is then welded shut. Anything which requires a specific proprietary anything. You definitely don't want lots of circuit boards which must be replaced completely with an exact duplicate, because you can't store three each of the five thousand circuit boards your ship or habitat needs and most of them will stop working in storage without ever being used.

What you want is big, robust bits of kit that you can actually see, with enough space to get a spanner into them. Devices with ample tolerance because you can't get the replacement part quite in the right place. Machines that can take any 9v battery manufactured across the thousand inhabited worlds and deal with the variance. Big switches. Lots of cabling (with nice big ducts that you can crawl through to get at the problem instead of trying to dismantle the ship halfway through re-entry). Simple screens that might not offer 6000fps in ultrahighdef, but reliably keep working during ion storms and are nearly impossible to break. As much crossover as possible in terms of components and specs, so you only need one jar of Universal Standard Screws and 20m of Universal Cabling.

All of this is even more true in settings where fights happen, because you're not just dealing with routine maintenance, but actual repair and potentially regular replacement of destroyed components.

I feel like the "used space", hard-living space travellers flavour lends itself very well to old-feeling tech.

The Aftermath

Sometimes technologies just vanish. It can be a civilisational thing, but it can also be that specific company going bust. Nobody manufactures the components any more, and the tooling for manufacturing them got recycled years ago. The people who made and repaired them retire. The engineers who knew how to tweak the production lines so the product reliably worked pass away.

Then libraries get closed because of funding cuts, and the archive of device specification found nowhere else on the planet gets shredded because it's bad PR if anyone sees it being dumped in a skip.

Then the digital copies of all the original data files get wiped by a ransomware attack, or somebody uses a fucking "AI" tool that destroys it and all the backups in existence, or the org that owns the servers is bought out and the new owners don't think they need that data. Increasingly troublesome laws and the actions of authoritarian governments lead to fan sites shutting down, and mass archives being crushed by lawsuits, and after a few decades a lot of stuff just isn't there any more. The last few copies on personal devices vanish as people pass away or move house or get burgled or hacked.

And maybe some combination of all these things going wrong, and more, leads to a mass civilisational erasure of technical knowledge, and only fragments can be recovered, and only some are priorities for recovery. This feels depressingly possible with the current state of affairs and I don't personally feel like writing a detailed tech-loss narrative (but feel free to do so!).

So you end up with people travelling space on old-style technologies that survived the crash, and comm devices that can transmit video but not audio, and screens that only work in black and green, and big chunky tech that works well enough but isn't slick.

I think that works. How about you?