: Re: How can I describe technology while avoiding problems with scaling? Worldbuilding chat has pointed me to this stack because it's less about defining the technology and more about how to express

@Debbie451

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If you've worked out the tech, why haven't you worked out the scale? Isn't that part of "working out the tech"?

Just coming up with the idea of "a rocket that goes to the moon" isn't sufficient. You have to come up with how it goes to the moon. If your story is meant to be realistic, then you have to do enough hard-science research to determine how a rocket could actually get to the moon. You need to understand thrust, weight, the layers of the atmosphere, velocity vs. vacuum, orbits, and so on.

If your story is fantasy (relying on magic, for example), then you still have to cover the mechanics of getting to the moon, and your magical system has to be logical to a certain extent. (This is what I call the Heroes Power Conundrum. The show Heroes had people developing abilities like being able to heal from any wound, or flying, or turning invisible. But those gifts never seemed to require power. If the cheerleader grew back a toe, the energy to create that toe had to come from somewhere. She should have been constantly eating cheeseburgers to fuel her healing.) So just "casting a spell to put the rocket on the moon" is insufficient. You have to establish how such a spell is learned or created, where the magic comes from, who can use it, if there's backlash, et cetera.

The short answer is, to avoid problems with scaling, figure out how the tech would really work, or as close to it as possible. If you put a bomb in a building, do research on how much C4 you need to take out a building of that size, or how much more damage your chosen amount of C4 would do. And so on.

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