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Sometimes, an adventurer may encounter primitive weapons from an isolated or recovering culture, antiques from Old Earth, or divergent technology paths taken by other societies that had been cut off from the Verge for centuries before re-contact.
- Pre-Industrial
- Age of Sail: The boundaries between ages are often fuzzy, and what is and is not part of the age of sail can be disputed.
For our purposes, we will consider the age to start with the Portugese expiditions down the coast of Africa, for trade and for conquest; and the Castillan capture of the Canary islands which set in motion one of the key economic drivers of the age – sugarcane plantations on the islands worked by African slaves bringing goods and profits to Europe.
It was these journeys that kicked off a rush for discovery and the subsequent drive for over-seas colonies.
It was this age that saw rise of new ways of thinking, the beginnings of modern science, and the birth of new democracies after millenia of autocratic rule.
Technology advanced by leaps and bounds, so that any list of equipment must necessarily cover a range of devices from the relatively promitive to the more advanced.
We will end this age with the first steam ships and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
- Age of Steam:
We can roughly bracket this age as beginning with the first steam powered ships, and ending with the first internal combustion powered cars and airplanes.
During this age, the world becomes smaller. Steamers and railroads and telegraphs knit together the lands and the seas, encouraging trade and migration as never before.
And the world became stranger, with new ideas such as micro-organisms and the germ theory of disease, of extinction of species and the discovery of the antideluvian monsters that came before, of evolution as a result of natural selection, of the invisible fields of electromagnetism that can make the very light that we see, of the flows of heat and how an abstract quantity called energy can never be created or destroyed, the enumeration of the chemical elements, and of the overturning of the classical geometry of Euclid with investigations into the geometry of curved surfaces and spaces.
- Age of Industry:
This age roughly begins with the use of internal combustion engines in mass produced cars, thus ending steam as the motive engines and ushering in intensified industrial production.
It saw a dizzyingly rapid development of technology, leading to social upheaval and rampant optimism for the future.
Steel framed buildings produced the marvels of the first skyscrapers, allowing cities to rise up as well as expand outward.
Widespread rail, electric trolly cars, and the first airplanes and airships and inexpensive automobiles revolutionized transporation.
Mass production and assebly lines led to consumer goods becoming more available than ever before.
And electrification of cities allowed household conveniences that could barely have been imagined before – machines for washing clothes and washing dishes and keeping your food cold enough to preserve it for weeks, machines for sucking dirt off the floor, phonographs to play music, electric lights that did away with the inconvenience and danger of open flames, and telephones that could let you talk instantly to your friends across town, or across the continent.
And if you wanted to step out of your hose for entertainment on the town, motion pictures provided an entirely novel form of entertainment.
Meanwhile, the foundational sciences became ever more incomprehensible to the average person. The theories of relativity broke down formerly immutable barriers of time and space into bizarre gurved geometries where distance could rotate into the future and vice versa. Investigation into the structure of matter brought the mind-bending and ultimately incomprehensible theory of quantum mechanics, where nothing is certain and things only approximately exist somewhere and solid objects actually move as waves.
Even pure math threw cold water on the beliefs of pure reason from the previous ages, with inevitable paradoxes in any formal system of logic that fancied itself to be complete.
- The World at War: The most destructive war the world has ever seen makes for a convenient transition from the previous Age of Industry to the following Atomic Age. It was a period of rapid innovation, so while it had a fair amount of overlap between the later part of the previous age and the early part of the subsequent, there is enough distinction that much of its equipment can be listed here.
- Atomic Age:
The atomic age began in the last days of the Second World War, with a blinding flash over mainland Japan leaving over a hundred thousand civilians dead in an instant and the city of Hiroshima a smashed, flaming, radioactive ruin.
During this age, we see a fluorishing of this new atomic technology, producing energy for a society weary of war but also deadly weapons that held civilization on a precipice.
It saw more than atomic technology, however.
Jet engines allowed rapid mass air travel.
Rockets allowed humanity to begin its first forays into outer space.
Electronic computers advanced from limited, mostrous machines occupying enormous halls used by only a few in academia or government to small and widespread household appliances orders of magnitude more capable and with far more intuitive user interfaces primarily used for playing games and keeping records.
Television revolutionized entertainment, bringing the magic of moving pictures into the home.
The Atomic Age is considered to last up until about the end of the Cold War.
There is a bit of an awkward period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the widespread social changes created by the spread of the internet which is intermediate between the Atomic Age and the Information Age; we trust that referees will be creative enough to handle this transition.
- Information Age:
The Information Age started with the development of a commercial internet and the first implementations of the world wide web.
But it really took off with the rise of web-based commerce.
Wireless communications and data transfer becomes common, even ubiquitous in urban areas, and instant access to the global telecommunications networks becomes taken for granted across much of the globe.
Corded phones are abandoned for portable cellular radio-phones merged with computers, so that people can connect to the net wherever they go.
Advances in transportation include ubiquitous satellite navigation, reusable rockets, and the rise of electric automobiles.
The energy sector sees a turning away from fossil fuels and the rise of solar and wind power.
Unmanned vehicles are used for a variety of purposes, from hobbyists to surveyors and wildlife monitoring and package delivery.
These drones revolutionize warfare, able to surveil an area, spot for artillery, deliver explosives, or fire missiles without putting human lives in danger.
Advances in gene sequencing allow for improved agricultural yields, hardier crops, and more nutritious crops; as well as rapid advances in medicine from gene therapy to more responsive development of vaccines.
- Automation Age
- Expansion Age
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