A general comment regarding this debate, not any specific post: Historic examples are (a) a historically grown infrastructure and (b) from a world with roughly 3,000 times the population of Blue Planet. That affects even places where commo infrastructure is built pretty much from scratch, e.g. parts of Africa.
Further more, Blue Planet is largely a waterworld - towns are separated by stretches of deep (often 1000+ m) ocean. That makes the placement of both 'landline' and repeater stations more difficult. While historically underwater cables were used even if a land connection exists (e.g. Europe to Asia or Europe to Africa), I suspect that is to blame on political boundaries and the cost of land for a cable. Nobody would seriously try to route a Spain-to-South-Korea line through North Korea ... Next, any imported technology arrives in orbit. Landing it on the planet costs extra, as opposed to the astronomical cost of launching a commo sat at TL7. In addition to these setting-specific points, GURPS makes high TL radios ridiculously cheap for their range. At TL7, you need a 200-lb. station drawing 100 W to cover 3,000 miles. At TL10, a 0.25-lb handheld drawing 10 W does the job, easily added to any mobile computer. My gut feeling is that a lower population density makes cables less viable, both between towns and within towns. Cities like Haven are different, of course. Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
