Well, one of the common complaints about the UF universe is that it isn't very futuristic, and there is probably an element of avoiding the above in that. Basically, as Geoff alluded to, there isn't a set policy or hard rule for how we handle this. For myself, I tend to go with what feels right for a given situation, and quite often that takes the form of extending the outcomes from technologies rather than the technologies themselves. What I mean by that is that I like "future" technologies that seem familiar, rather than the completely off-the-wall, unimaginable-before-it-happened shapes that future technologies will almost undoubtedly take in real life.

For example, I like things like transportation and military technologies still to seem like machines, however improbable it is that they really will in the 25th century, and this is largely accomplished by projecting advancements in materials science that enable machinery as we recognize it today to function in ways that it patently cannot. Giant fightin' robots are a good example of this. Thanks to our almost-universally-disregarded-in-SF friend the square-cube law, a human-shaped robot the size of an office building cannot possibly work (leaving aside the separate and very valid question of why it would even be worth trying)—so to have a universe that has them, we (the writers and the audience) must tacitly agree that future metallurgy and composites technology has developed so that such structures don't simply collapse under their own weight, as they undoubtedly would.

(In the world of Pacific Rim they are evidently also building civilian supertankers out of these materials, but I digress. :)

Similarly, starfighters are an absurd concept in anything like reality—jet fighters have already reached the point where they're too capable for the fragile blobs of water that operate them to come along for the ride—so we must embrace that old pulp SF dodge, the mysterious gadget that Does Something About Inertia, to have them. It isn't mysterious to some people inside the setting, of course, any more than the inner workings of a hard disk drive are unknown to the engineers who design them, but it must be to us because such a thing does not (and probably cannot) really exist.

People riff on Star Trek for its tendency toward technobabble, but the simple fact of the matter is that Space Adventure can't happen without it—without lots of it. The thing Star Trek does that is really annoying the people who bitch about it is putting it in the foreground, as opposed to, for instance, the way it works in Star Wars, where it's just how stuff works and, as in real life, the people using it don't question it. Trek has to provide a justification for paying the actors who play the engineers, is all. :)

Actually, now that I think about it, Star Wars is a pretty good comparison for the way these things work in the UF universe generally. The general tech level in Star Wars is not rising at anything like the rate it does in real life; their base technologies plateaued literally thousands of years before the stories are set. Hyperdrive to the people of the Galaxy Far, Far Away is like the wheel to us—so ubiquitous as to be simultaneously invisible and obvious. A lot of the underlying assumptions in UF are like that.

I guess you could call it a kind of technological conservatism on my part, mostly unconscious, over the years. I just tend to shy away from some common SF tech tropes because I don't like the way they taste. For instance, I've tried to avoid using TNG-style "replicators" in UF (though there are other things that get called that sometimes), because it's always struck me as kind of... cheaty to be able to just make whatever the hell you want out of whatever protons and electrons are available. About as far as I care to go in that direction would be something like the fabricators in the survival game Subnautica, which seem to work on a similar principle, but at least require you to have base materials that are vaguely related to what you're trying to make—silver ore to make a computer chip, and suchlike. Or there have been a few background references in UF to ships taking on "protein slurry" for their food processors, which build tasty various foods out of it.

Also, a lot of things are just about making characters' lives easier and/or tasks quicker, in the interest of moving things along to the stuff that's actually important. Take the autotailors mentioned early in Symphony of the Sword. They're really just there because no plot purpose is served by explaining that Utena had to go to the school-approved tailor's shop in town and get measured, and her new uniforms should be in by Friday. Just dress her up according to the school's regulations and let's get the hell on with it. :)

None of which is probably an actual answer to your question, but that's because it doesn't really have a straight answer. The UF universe's technology doesn't develop along straight lines a lot of the time, any more than the real world's does—which is, I suppose, at least one point of realism. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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