I tried to take a real-life survey of all the professional publications relevant to the issue of industrial infrastructure. I came up with 115 prestigious scientific journals. If I were seriously going to read journals, I might be able to read a dozen.
There could easily be a thousand prestigious journals generated by the real world's six-billion-plus humans.
In the real world, rapid communications means that instantly updated databases can correlate new science journals from around the world.
In a Traveller setting, computers and AI are less available, communication is limited by jumps, population is much higher than six billion, and planets are feudal. This would imply that there could be a considerable employment opportunity for scientists, bureaucrats, law enforcers, etc. Their jobs would all have essentially the same description -- sit in an office and read the latest dispatches from elsewhere; notify the appropriate planetary office with professional judgements as to the urgency and relevance of incoming news.
This is probably not a heavily guarded institution. It might be minimal on poor worlds with some tech presence. E.g. a military outpost would definitely have an office to process military news and advise planetary commanders and quartermasters, but it wouldn't have an office to keep up with particle physics research.
The Empire would probably be very eager to have such offices wherever educated classes existed. People who are bright enough to be educated are bright enough to cause trouble -- but give them 9-to-5 jobs and the hope of a pension, and they might even be willing to submit to constrictive dress codes and lifestyle polygraph tests.
Adventurers would be interested in such an office because it might hold the details of the latest McGuffin technology, or they might need to kidnap, bribe, or otherwise subvert an analyst.
There could easily be a thousand prestigious journals generated by the real world's six-billion-plus humans.
In the real world, rapid communications means that instantly updated databases can correlate new science journals from around the world.
In a Traveller setting, computers and AI are less available, communication is limited by jumps, population is much higher than six billion, and planets are feudal. This would imply that there could be a considerable employment opportunity for scientists, bureaucrats, law enforcers, etc. Their jobs would all have essentially the same description -- sit in an office and read the latest dispatches from elsewhere; notify the appropriate planetary office with professional judgements as to the urgency and relevance of incoming news.
This is probably not a heavily guarded institution. It might be minimal on poor worlds with some tech presence. E.g. a military outpost would definitely have an office to process military news and advise planetary commanders and quartermasters, but it wouldn't have an office to keep up with particle physics research.
The Empire would probably be very eager to have such offices wherever educated classes existed. People who are bright enough to be educated are bright enough to cause trouble -- but give them 9-to-5 jobs and the hope of a pension, and they might even be willing to submit to constrictive dress codes and lifestyle polygraph tests.
Adventurers would be interested in such an office because it might hold the details of the latest McGuffin technology, or they might need to kidnap, bribe, or otherwise subvert an analyst.
