u/Enthropic-Cap2291

Imagine a Tom Clancy or Brad Thor technothriller. It's primarily cutting edge tech and geopolitics, with a smidge of scifi. Yet if you wrote that in the 1600s, it's going to be incomprehensible fantasy.

Horseless carriages? Flying through the sky? Talking to others far away and taking pictures with a flat box that fits in a pocket?

But none of that is fantasy. And from our perspective, none of that is even Clarketech scifi. It's what we're using right now.

So how do you explain internal combustion engines, let alone hybrid engines? Electronics, computers and global telecommunications, to an audience in the 1600s? I don't want to use 'technobabble'. That's just handwavium with extra sauce on top. And chapters of exposition wouldn't serve the story for non-technerds.

I could write the tale 'straight', with zero exposition, and it would be very weird fantasy. I could try to explain what's behind the cellphone's magic screen, and it would be exposition heavy, like a David Weber scifi infordump.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

It just keeps piling up. Started as a space station, then a shipyard, then a spare parts salvage depot. Grew to be the mass of a large asteroid by the 5th generation. Skeletal 3d trusswork with all manner of hulks moored every which way. By the 50th generation, it wasn't a moon, but a ring. With craft from multiple empires and dynasties that have risen and fallen. A lot of them are derelicts from various wars. It's the sector's only combination museum, tourist venue, and junk yard. And they can sell you a 4th Empire dreadnought. It's the one where the hangar is a gift shop with Secession Wars memorabilia.

Inspired by the episode: Derelicts and Trash Worlds

https://preview.redd.it/km8fu3nz4bzg1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=a90897f7d1b1d39842c05c6337471ef5a0c6601f

Start with a Station. Dependent on Earth for everything. Short term stays, minimal facilities.

Become a Base. A more permanent staffed facility, with rotating crews. Some local repair capability. Still fully supplied from Earth. Like the ISS. Primarily research and experiments.

Become an Outpost. Mining, refining, ISRU, some local manufacturing. Semi-permanent staff. Early attempts at self sufficiency.

Settlement. A place with semi-permanent to permanent residents. Not just staff. Families, schools, local governance. The first generation born on the moon.

It never becomes a colony. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon or any other celestial body. A colony implies a mother country holding territorial claim, and sovereign jurisdiction.

But private entities can own what they build, and what they extract. The current interpretation allows private mining and manufacturing. Private corporations, even with government backing, can use the land, without claiming the land itself.

And when you build a lunar industrial settlement, you own the settlement, and de-facto *control* of the territory built upon, even if not de-jure ownership of the environs.

If a settlement cannot legally become a 'colony' in the classical imperial definition, then its next evolutionary step is an *independent city-state*. A lunar polity. One separate from Earth polities (at least in theory), and hence not under the jurisdiction of Earth laws.