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I'm working on a story that takes place in a sci fi world that was disinterested in space travel. So while in some ways it has things we could only dream of its also missing many things that we take for granted.
I'm just as happy to get obvious answers as I am obscure ones, since I might not have thought of them yet.
I'm just as happy to get obvious answers as I am obscure ones, since I might not have thought of them yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 01:06 am (UTC)That's the big one people forget about all the time.
Edit: GPS affects everything from airplane and container ship navigation, to the convenient maps in cars and smartphones, to the entire sport of geocaching (much more difficult without coordinates) to agriculture (automated tractors are fully reliant on GPS) to search and rescue.
It's almost easier to find domains GPS *hasn't* touched.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 02:20 am (UTC)(My dad was involved in space weather, which in the US was born out of the need to figure out how to predict the solar storms that played merry hell with telegraph lines in Alaska.)
Edit: The problem with ground-anchored balloons in both perspective/wayfinding is that they require either actual land as an anchor point, or artificially built land. So tiny islands could become strategically important in modern shipping, as would making artificial land -- or at least something anchored buoy adjacent. I would imagine that a balloon system would need a base station with [insert gas of choice -- helium or hydrogen, likely, each with their downfalls] to maintain it, so you couldn't just tie a balloon to the ocean floor without either some land to house the equipment, or some very specific ships.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-21 08:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 01:17 am (UTC)But it's not anything like definitive. Here's a link to the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
Every time I look at this list, I see some other crucial technology that transforms everyday life.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 02:37 am (UTC)And it occurs to me that while some of the technologies are space-specific, the real reason for a lot of them was a whole lot of money getting poured into a big project that involved smaller, lighter, faster, stronger -- which could be applied to any military goal, really. So OP could probably invent a particular race-for-profits (maybe gold rush adjacent? or some other scarce resource that was suddenly in great demand, and whoever could find/mine/exploit it faster had the edge) that involved a high-budget, high-creativity funding spree. And then any technology that it would be useful to have could be attributed to some offshoot of that.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 01:31 am (UTC)Weather monitoring and prediction
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 02:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 02:33 am (UTC)That's not a tech answer, but....
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 03:11 am (UTC)Intercontinental broadcasting. Rural/remote internet. Remote area communications at all (no satellite phones). Emergency communications when mobile/cell phone network is overloaded. International phone calls will remain more expensive.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 06:40 am (UTC)some thoughts
Having said that, radio, radar, and lidar aren't necessarily technology related to space travel, and alternative methods of speeding communications would presumably have been developed. And even now, lots of weather monitoring stations are along major roads, because those are easy to get tech crews to, so that aspect wouldn't change.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 01:55 pm (UTC)Depending on whether or not the planet's atmosphere allowed bouncing radio signals, continents separated by oceans wouldn't have real-time communication without laying underseal telecommunication cables.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 04:29 pm (UTC)Besides NASA, a lot of the early R&D for micro-electronics happened at AT&T Bell Labs and IBM, or was funded by DARPA. Does the other timeline have a telephone monopoly and effective computer monopoly? Does it have a defense-industrial complex? I would expect that any timeline will eventually have micro-electronics, but the path to it could be completely different, and it could be decades behind ours.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-23 09:54 pm (UTC)I'm undecided on missiles. I had been thinking of including advanced missile artillery because missiles are cool. But this comment of yours+your GPS reply is making me rethink this. I don't want to undermine one of the core concepts.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 01:12 am (UTC)The American Snark missile, actually similar to a V1, could carry a small nuke, but its navigation (using stars etc. since there was no GPS) was very poor and it was 20 miles or more off target in a lot of long-range tests.
But if you want actual ballistic missiles without GPS there was always the German V2 which wasn't so much guided as aimed in the right direction, with gyroscopes keeping it more or less on course until it left the atmosphere.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 01:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 01:39 am (UTC)Atomic Rockets
Date: 2024-12-24 03:22 am (UTC)"The point of this website is to allow a science fiction writer or game designer to get the scientific details more accurate. It is also to help science fiction readers and game players to notice when the media they are enjoying diverges from scientific reality. Because sometimes it is hard to tell."
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-24 10:32 pm (UTC)GPS/GLONASS is definitely one of the big ones, though.