Chapter 1: Tech Level & Constraints

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Tech Level & Constraints for Vehicle Concept Artists — Vehicle Worldbuilding

Tech level is the ruleset that makes your vehicles inevitable. It defines what energy can be stored, what structures can be built, which materials exist, what sensors and computation achieve, and how maintenance happens in the field. For vehicle concept artists—on both the concepting and production sides, across indie and AAA—worldbuilding with tech levels keeps silhouettes consistent, prevents incompatible features from creeping in, and gives collaborators a shared language for trade‑offs. This article frames tech level through era, tech trees, faction identity, and environment fit, then ties those choices to energy density, materials, and concrete deliverables.

Era: The Floor and Ceiling of Believability

Era sets the minimum and maximum capabilities a world allows. A diesel‑age frontier cannot field whisper‑quiet VTOLs that hover for hours; an advanced orbital polity should not rely on cable winches for primary lifts. When reading or writing a brief, state the era in terms of available chemistry (fuels, batteries), computation (mechanical → analog → digital → quantum), fabrication (riveted → welded → cast → additive), and controls (manual linkages → hydraulics → fly‑by‑wire → autonomy). In concept exploration, era translates to silhouette: riveted plates and external trusses read earlier than seamless skins and embedded antennas. In production, the era locks material libraries, panel seam logic, and shader budgets so assets do not smuggle in modern gloss or sci‑fi emissive noise where it does not belong.

Tech Trees: Progress With Constraints

A tech tree is a set of branching upgrades that preserves identity while expanding capability. Define branches for power (ICE/BEV/fuel‑cell/fusion), locomotion (wheels/tracks/hover/VTOL/orbit), protection (armor/materials/shields), and perception (optics/RF/LiDAR/field sensors). Within each branch, state what unlocks what—and what remains impossible—to avoid kitchen‑sink designs. For example, a faction may move from carbureted ICE to turbo‑diesel to hybrid serial generators, but never to silent superconducting motors without a parallel materials breakthrough. On the concept side, tech trees guide A/B/C silhouette explorations for early, mid, and late tiers; on the production side, they define kit inheritance (hardpoint standards, hinge families, livery zones) so variants scale without reinventing structure.

Faction Identity: Culture Expressed as Engineering

Factions are more than palettes; they are manufacturing philosophies. A salvage guild with low‑precision tooling and abundant scrap evokes bolted flanges, external ribs, patchwork panels, and visible hose routing. A technocracy with clean rooms and tight tolerances prefers continuous skins, magnetic latches, and hidden fasteners. A nomadic utility culture prizes repairability and standard interfaces; a military empire prioritizes modular armor, sealed systems, and interoperability. State each faction’s fabrication strengths (casting, forging, additive), QA discipline (tight/loose), logistics (abundant fuel vs. scarcity), and doctrine (speed, attrition, deterrence). Concept pages then reflect these values in silhouette and detail, while production packages lock them into kit rules—fastener types, hinge families, decal grammar, emissive signatures—so the identity survives optimization and live‑ops skins.

Environment Fit: Machines Shaped by Place

Environments dictate stance and packaging. Desert dunes demand high ride heights, large contact patches, filtration and cyclonic pre‑cleaners, radiant heat rejection, and sand‑tolerant hinges and sliders. Arctic tundra asks for sealed electrics, de‑icing, low‑temperature elastomers, block heaters, and tall, narrow patches that cut snow. Jungle requires splash sealing, corrosion resistance, fungal‑resistant coatings, and short overhangs for steep breakover angles. Urban theaters want tight turning circles, short wheelbases, and fender protections; maritime worlds need salt‑proofing, cathodic protection, and hull geometries that shed spray. Air and low‑g environments change the collision story entirely: VTOLs need gear stance and thrust‑vector envelopes; lunar rovers need dust mitigation and radiators sized for vacuum. Concept deliverables should include terrain‑specific silhouettes and cutaways; production deliverables should include material and sealing specs tied to the environment.

Energy Density: What the World Can Carry

Energy density caps range, acceleration windows, and payloads.

  • Fossil fuels (30–50 MJ/kg chemical; ~10–12 MJ/kg delivered): Great for sustained power; impose tanks, lines, exhaust, cooling, and fire safety.
  • Batteries (0.3–1 MJ/kg today; speculative higher): Great for torque control and regen; impose heavy packs, thermal management, and HV isolation.
  • Hydrogen (120 MJ/kg fuel; system-level is lower): Light per kg but bulky per liter; impose high‑pressure tanks or cryo storage and stack humidification.
  • Fusion (speculative high MJ/kg): Extreme energy density but huge heat rejection and shielding; silhouette must feature radiators and protected cores.
  • Field/anti‑grav (fictional): “Energy” becomes field strength and capacitor banks; impose emitter geometry, safety envelopes, and fail‑safe descent modes. Concept‑side, choose energy density first and let it govern silhouette promises (radiators vs. sealed noses, thick sills vs. thin); production‑side, lock pack/tank volumes, cooling cores, and keep‑out zones so modeling and physics can budget mass and CG honestly.

Materials: What You Can Shape and How It Ages

Material capability changes everything from panel thickness to wear patterns.

  • Steels & Aluminum: Rivets, weld beads, affordable repair, visible bracing. Edge wear is metallic and local; corrosion needs coatings and drains.
  • Titanium & Nickel Alloys: High temp, thin sections; expensive; distinct heat coloration; fasteners are specialized.
  • Composites (CFRP/GFRP): Continuous skins, large stiff panels, ply orientation cues, visible weave or painted finishes; damage is delamination and cracking rather than dents.
  • Ceramics & MMCs: High‑temp surfaces (leading edges, brake rotors); brittle failure, chipping.
  • Smart Materials/Metamaterials (speculative): Morphing surfaces, variable porosity heat sinks; require power and control routing in cutaways. Material libraries influence silhouette (hard shoulders vs. soft crowns), panel seam logic, and shader costs. Concept pages should state allowable radii and seam widths per material; production callouts should include thickness ranges, fastening schemes, and repair access.

Tech Level Through Deliverables

  • Silhouette Boards: Early/mid/late‑tier silhouettes per faction with distance‑band readability; annotate energy density cues (radiators, emitter rings) and material cues (panel seams, ribbing).
  • Metrics Sheets: Proportion bands that track with tier (e.g., later tiers shrink radiators with better heat sinks or lengthen wheelbase for cargo branch).
  • Cutaways: Power core placement, cooling flows, structure tied to material logic (ribs for metals, sandwich cores for composites), and field emitter geometries for speculative tech.
  • Exploded Views: Moduleization that matches tech tree nodes (swap armor tiles, nacelle pods, battery trays, sensor masts) and faction hardpoint standards.
  • Material & Livery Guides: Roughness/reflectance bands by era and environment; decal grammar that avoids anachronism (no modern safety iconography in diesel‑age worlds unless justified).
  • Camera‑Read Boards: Era‑appropriate lighting (torch/filament/halogen/LED/emissive fields) tested at gameplay FOV with fog/dust appropriate to environment.

Guardrails: Avoiding Anachronisms and Power Creep

Write a short “cannot” list for each era and faction. Diesel‑age cannot have seamless monolithic canopies or silent hover; composite‑rich technocracy cannot show random bolt‑on patchwork unless it is diegetic damage; fusion‑age cannot overheat in a cold drizzle but must display heat management at high output; anti‑grav cannot ignore ground effect or magnetic interference near structures. Enforce cost: high‑tier materials and power have scarcity and maintenance risk; low‑tier parts are heavy but field‑repairable. These rules protect gameplay balance and art direction.

Indie vs. AAA: Cadence and Scale

Indie teams benefit from a single evolving “World Rules” board per project: top row defines era and energy/material limits; middle rows show faction tech branches; bottom rows illustrate environment fits and silhouettes. Production notes live on the same canvas: pack thicknesses, radiator areas, emitter spacing, and material seam widths. AAA teams distribute rules into a World Bible: chaptered PDFs for era, faction grammar, tech trees, environment kits, and material/lighting. Each chapter ships with template deliverables (metrics, cutaways, camera‑reads) and a change log that records rule updates, so hundreds of artists can stay synchronized.

Concept vs. Production Mindsets

Concept guards the fantasy by choosing tech rules that produce striking silhouettes and coherent families; it prototypes a hero vehicle per branch to test constraints. Production guards feasibility by encoding those rules into orthos, callouts, kits, and naming standards that survive optimization and skins. Both roles agree on what must never change: silhouette anchors, energy and material cues, and environment‑fit geometry.

Closing

Tech level is not flavor text—it is the physics and culture your vehicles live inside. When era, tech trees, faction identity, and environment fit are explicit, energy density and materials become design tools rather than afterthoughts. Your silhouettes look native to their world, your cutaways read like engineering, and your production packages carry rules others can trust. That is how vehicle worldbuilding turns from a collection of cool machines into a believable fleet players will recognize—and remember—at a glance.