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alt title(s): Arms Race; Exponentially Escalating Arms Race; Sky Shattering Arms Race
This is what happens when two nations attempt to prove that My Kung Fu Is Stronger Than Yours or build a Bigger Stick.
If a military conflict goes on long enough in a high-tech setting, each side will be struggling to gain and keep a technological advantage over the other. Sometimes, this process of escalation goes way over the top (especially with Soviet Superscience).
The trope title and best example of this trope comes from E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels (making this Older Than Television). Over the course of a decades-long struggle (that was only the surface of a deeper, eons-old war between cosmic beings using mortals as pawns), Civilization and Boskone went from ordinary starship battles to star-powered lasers, antimatter bombs, planets used as missiles, antimatter planets, faster-than-light missiles, faster-than-light antimatter planet missiles...
Truth In Television, naturally. Moore's Law is this trope applied specifically to computer technology, stating that every eighteen months, roughly, we see a doubling of transistor density (and thus hardware capabilities); the pace has slackened a bit recently in regards to clock speed, but has only accelerated for memory and disk space. And of course we see dramatic escalation in real life arms races.
See also: Plot Leveling, So Last Season, Sorting Algorithm Of Evil.
Not to be confused with Escalating War.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Mobile Suit Gundam (original Universal Century timeline): The Principality of Zeon launches a war with their mobile suits (at the time, a new technology). At the start of the first series, the Federation has just produced the RX-78 Gundam
 , a Super Prototype Humongous Mecha with the armor and weaponry roughly equivalent to that of a battleship. By the end of that war, only a few months later, Zeon has begun mass producing mobile suits that are almost even with the Gundam. Seventy war-filled years later, the Victory 2 Assault Buster Gundam is 3 meters shorter than and half the weight of the RX-78, and boasts an inertialess drive system, a force field and more firepower than every Mobile Suit from the One-Year War put together.
- In Code Geass, the first example of Real Robot technology was used in combat seven years before the series; ground-based Knightmare Frames armed with machine guns, recoiless rifles, and cannons. At the start of the series, these have been replaced with a newer generation of Knightmares, but they are still limited in their abilities. The second episode introduces the first Seventh-Generation Knightmare, a Super Prototype with experimental weapons and technology, but still ground-based. New technologies are introduced as the show's first season progresses, including flight packs, radiation waves and hadron cannons. By the middle of its second season, the main named mecha in the show are flying Super Prototype with radiation waves, hadron cannons or Beehive Barriers ... one year after the end of the first season. The final battle does have something of a welcome subversion of this trend, mind you.
- To be fair, this is after the Black Knights start their rebellion, thereby necessitating more powerful mechas to fight them.
- Add to that the Wave Motion Gun and Bee Hive Barrier technologies were already known in theory. The rebellion split the three foremost experts on the tech between both sides, and they kept trying to see who could prove their formerly abandoned pet theory first.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann does this with the titular Humongous Mecha. The heroes start out with a little robot the size of a car (the Lagann), but by the end of the series, it becomes the nucleus of a gargantuan battle beast that can hurl galaxies as shurikens. It also does this with awesomeness.
- Hand Waved on the grounds that the entire universe is powered by Spiral Energy, which causes the scale of events to spiral outward like this. Of course, it helps that every major upgrade save the last one is achieved not through actual technological development but rather by stealing technology from enemies or finding technology of the defeated previous Spiral Warriors.
- It's heavily implied that at least some of it isn't even "real" technology at all, but rather Spiral energy made manifest.
- Gun Buster engages in some of this as well, going from fairly sci-fi standard space vessels and Gundam-ish robots to using Jupiter as the core of a Black Hole Bomb to destroy the center of the galaxy to wipe out the race that wants to kill humanity.
- There's an absolutely hilarious parody of this in the fifth episode of the first season of Rozen Maiden. It has to be seen to be believed.
- "It is a delicious strategy."
- The Macross franchise appears to be heading in this direction; having begun with five-million-ship armadas that can easily devastate the surface of a planet in minutes, Macross Frontier introduces planet-disintegrating bombs and self-replicating organic remote controlled space fleets.
- Transformers Super Godmasterforce has one of these between the Autobots and Decepticons, as both sides develop more and more powerful upgrades for their commanders.
- Gao Gai Gar escalates rapidly, especially when the show starts Growing The Beard. When the series starts, a single monster mostly threatens a skyscraper, the enemy spends most of it's efforts to make a single Zonder metal plant, and at the end of the arc, nearly transforms 75% of the city into one. By the end, nearly every monster is its own plant, and the final battle is fought against the moons of Jupiter
- The villains of Gao Gai Gar Final takes the logical next step by creating an evil duplicate of the Solar System, powered by a sun made of G-Stones.
- To which the heroes respond by revealing what they'd built to deal with threats at the level of the aforementioned battle on Jupiter: a a hammer that crushes the sun.
- Based on the booklet of StrikerS Sound Stage X, this trope led to the destruction of Ancient Belka in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. With the Ancient Belkan War entering a deadlock, the various factions promoted weapon research more intensely. Eventually, a weapon that proved too powerful was either used or became unstable, and the Ancient Belkan empire, together with the majority of its people, was wiped out, prematurely ending the war.
- Which has apparently happened repeatedly in this universe. Al-hazard destroyed itself; survivors settled Belka. Belka destroyed itself; survivors settled Midchilda. Midchilda... almost destroyed itself, but turned back in time. So far.
- ...which is probably a natural consequence of having a civilization in which ten-year-old girls can go around befriending each other with a Wave Motion Gun.
- Getter Robo starts off with a single Humongous Mecha fighting monsters, to every nation on Earth having them and engaging in conflicts of World War proportions, to epic wars in space between galaxies. The action grows in scale and the mecha in size rapidly from there, and peaks at the point where one of the mecha is larger than galaxies and can stand toe-to-toe with God.
- This series is actually something of a Deconstruction of the idea. The main characters are trapped in a Lensmans Arms Race because the Getter Rays, the energy of evolution, keeps pushing them forward regardless of the consequences for the universe. The antagonists are fighting them to prevent this, but by attacking humanity they only make them stronger. This results in a vicious cycle of increasingly escalating power that will eventually destroy the universe.
Comic Books
- Parodied in a Transformers Animated comic called "Everything Must Go". It's a parody of the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches, just replace the Sneetches with Lugnut and Blitzwing, the merchant with Swindle, and the stars on their stomaches with every other weapon in Transformers mythos. This ends with the destruction of New Kaon, after which Lugnut and Blitzwing catch on and rip Swindle apart.
Film
- The Doomsday Weapon from Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was built by the soviets to reach an insurpassable upper hand. However, General Ripper launches his attack on Russia before the weapon is announced, creating the Foregone Conclusion to the movie.
- In the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, and the book its based on, and in real life, the United States Army started research on new age and psychic powers because they heard Soviets were researching those things as well. The Soviets supposedly started the research because they heard a rumour the Americans has started research...
Literature
- Lensman also gave us the Sunbeam; a whole star system altered to function as core, coil and vacuum tubes for a beam that directs the full power of the star into a fleet- and planet-annihilating beam...
- A second, in some ways even more ridiculous, example from Smith is his lesser-known Space Opera Skylark series. By the final novel in the sequence, our heroes destroy two entire galaxies by teleporting every star from one into the close vicinity of every star in the other, causing each pair to collide and go nova, meanwhile teleporting every non-hostile world in the area to safe orbits around stars in a third galaxy, all while they themselves are safe in yet another galaxy entirely...! And all this only four books after the human protagonists discovered space travel!
- In both the Lensman and Skylark series, Smith combines fast evolution of weapons with a crazily short R&D cycle. The antimatter bombs go from theory to practice in a few months. In his proto-Lensman novel Triplanetary, agents of the Triplanetary fleet refit their own side's guided missiles to accept guidance from a totally new, recently-discovered means of communication... in the middle of a battle. And it works. Of course, the crazily short R&D cycle was something of a commonplace in all the pulp science fiction of that era, and is echoed by accomplishments in WWII a conflict which started with prop-driven biplane fighters, 3- and 5-tonnes machine-gun armed tankettes and a general level of technology not much distanced from WWI and ending (six years later) with the battlefields bristling with 55-ton armoured behemoths, jet powered fighters and bombers, flying bombs, ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs.
- In Skylark, the Lensman Arms Race only really gears up when the protagonists encounter a very ancient civilization whose Hat is Science. They have worked out pretty much everything thousands of years ago... too bad they didn't have any of the atomic catalyst until the heroes showed up...
- The Honor Harrington series by David Weber, though nowhere near as over-the-top as Lensman. As well, much of the "new" tech is actually existing tech being used in new ways; the realism of this is hotly debated.
- The series started out as a Recycled In Space retelling of English and French naval battles, and the technology advances mirror actual advances in naval warfare, from cannons (missiles) to armor ("bow and stern walls" energy shielding) to aircraft (LACs) to radio (faster-than-light comms) to guided missiles (project Ghost Rider). Submarines have not yet been completely emulated although advances in stealthing indicate they're not far off.
- The submarine has creeped up with the Messans new spider drive.
- This trope is showing up in classic form now that the Mesans have revealed two new super-duper space drives, an entirely new biological "mind control" weapon, and that's just the first few things ve seen so far coming from their centuries-long supersecret R&D program.
- Weber's Starfire series showcases realistically depicted arms races spurred on by the current conflict, with specific technologies and tactics being designed to counter the enemy's latest gimmick, while at the same time still managing to follow the respective races' (often) wildly divergent military doctrines.
- This seems to be Author Appeal for Weber; it also shows up in a Connecticut Yankee set-up in the Safehold books, and in his standalone novel The Excalibur Alternative.
- See Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book for a version of this trope in poem form as a satire of the Cold War.
- Subverted in the Arthur C Clarke short story "Superiority", where the side which tries out the new technology in battle (without adequate field tests) loses. This was a clear allegory for World War II and the German investment in "superweapons" as compared to the Allied investment in, for lack of a better term Mnogo Tanks (for both the US and USSR).
- "Computer War", by Mack Reynolds, is a similar story. For example, the advanced side uses alarms that can detect laser fire to help guard their buildings — which are useless, as the saboteurs use bows and arrows to kill the guards. Also, although this side has a massive conventional military advantage, the weaker side is winning by fighting guerrilla-style, and only in easily defensible terrain (mountains, swamps).
- Played with in Philip K. Dick's The Zap Gun, where a pair of weapons designers, one on each side of the Cold War, are continually coming up with what are ostensibly new weapons. In reality, though, everything they come up with is immediately repurposed into harmless knick-knacks. This helps keep the Cold War cold, but proves disastrous once aliens invade, and the world is defenseless. They end up getting the aliens to leave by getting them addicted to a video game.
- In the German pulp Sci Fi series Perry Rhodan (started in 1961 and still running), the story started with the titular character, Perry Rhodan, being the first human to land on the moon. 10 issues in, he was commanding an interstellar cruiser, and in another 10 issues in he achieved immortality. More than 2000 issues followed and stuff grew grander and grander in scale: Cosmic Powers of Order and Chaos, called "Kosmokrats" and "Chaotarches" by the less-advanced races, are forever fighting for supremacy, using mortal species and even ascended beings as chess pieces because they cannot interfere directly. The Chaotarchs try to literally unmake the laws of physics and return the multiple universes to a state of ur-chaos where they can thrive, while the Kosmokrats seed life and sentience throughout the galaxies and try to defend the "cosmic code" from tampering. While the Kosmokrats appeared to be the Good Guys in the beginning (sponsoring space-faring races, granting immortality to certain exceptional individuals to further their plans) it became more and more apparent that they behaved like the Vorlons from Babylon 5 in that they treated "lesser" races like chess pawns, and reacted badly to anyone trying to leave their service. As they claimed, they saw a bigger picture. Existing outside time and space, these trancendent entities were no longer able to imagine or sympathize with the plight of mortal races, even though they had started out as whole races of mortal species eons ago. Turns out the cosmic superweapons of the Kosmokrats were often just as destructive as those of the Chaotarchs; in one instance, servitors of the Kosmokrats were ordered to destroy a whole galaxy (and all civilizations in it) down to the subatomic level rather than seeing it fall into the Chaotarchs' hands. Somewhere in midseries, Perry Rhodan showed them the finger in parallel to what happened in Babylon 5.
- Steven Baxter's Ring: The Xeelee use cosmic strings to build a Kerr metric with which they can escape into another universe. This structure (the Ring) is so massive that it is pulling all galaxies for quite some distance towards it, at high speed. The Xeelee's antagonists, the Photino Birds, go one up on this by arranging galaxies around the Ring to form a resonance cavity that will shake the Ring apart.
- Subverted in Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream." The body of the book is (ostensibly) an award-winning novel from an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler migrated to the United States and became a science fiction writer. Over the course of the novel-within-the-novel, the hero and his cohorts develop (or reinvent) technology at an astonishing pace until a final confrontation with the villain unleashes nuclear weapons and forces the heroes to invent cloning technology and interstellar space travel in no time flat. The book deliberately takes advantage of established tropes in science fiction and fantasy to try and force a comparison with Nazism. Although it is patently satiric, some readers have taken it at face value (including the American Nazi Party), thus subverting the subversion.
- In a rare fantasy example, The Wheel of Time. The first book has fireballs and single bolts of lightning as enormous feats of power, and the idea of facing down 1500 Trollocs is an earth-shattering prospect. By the book 11, we're at uses of magic that can melt the planet if performed incorrectly, and an attack by 100,000 Trollocs is considered an assassination attempt.
- In Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe, this occurred between two Precursor races in the series' Back Story. The Tar-Aiym were individually powerful, warlike, and technologically advanced; while the Hur'rikku were prolific and persistent. Panicked by the Hur'rikku threat to use their planet-destroying anticollapsar weapon on Tar-Aiym worlds, the latter embarked on a hurried program of weapons development. The program eventually led to the release of a "photonic storm", a plague that travelled from world to world, wiping out all life forms more complex than single-celled organisms over a vast region of the galaxy, including the Tar-Aiym and Hur'rikku themselves. 500,000 years later, this region becomes known to the expanding Commonwealth as the Blight.
- In the Eschaton Series by Charles Stross, this is slated to happen at some point in the future. Albeit one-sided as Eschaton, in a simple display of its power drew humans from all different time periods and scattered them across the stars. The other side in this arms race is a Nazi cult that uses mind uploads to store knowledge. Somehow in the future they're able to get power fast enough to avoid being warped into a blackhole. The "present" of the series shows that whatever they developed, it was stronger than Eschaton and that it was achieved pretty quickly in order for it to beat Eschaton's omniscience and omnipresence.
- Something of a subversion in the Frank Herbert short story Cease Fire. The war is in something of a standoff, with both sides using small manned stations. A techie invents a device to detect and remotely detonate the power supplies in these hidden bunkers, ending the fighting at a stroke. The military top brass are deeply upset at this discovery, because they know that Humans Are Bastards and destroying the effectiveness of this relatively clean style of warfare will only mean that in a generation or two humanity will escalate to something worse in order to wage war. They're proved right by the afternote, which implies that biological weapons became dominant in the next major conflict.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek: Voyager followed this trope to some extent in their clashes with Borg vessels. At the end of the 3rd season of ST:TNG, a single Borg cube destroyed the bulk of the Federation's fleet and nearly destroyed the Earth. By the middle of Voyager, the titular starship was single-handedly blowing Borg cubes out of space — and they had to create the technology to do so while stranded 70,000 light-years away from the Federation.
- File under garden-variety Villain Decay, endemic to Star Trek in general.
- Borg cubes were still a problem before future Janeway gave them the 25th century weapons and armour in the final episode. In First Contact, it took an entire fleet to destroy a cube, and even then, they were losing until the Enterprise arrived. A better example would just be the level of advancement generally between TOS and TNG, and even more so between ENT and TOS.
- ''[[Stargate SG1 In Stargate SG 1, it is initially a difficult feat for humanity to figure out how to use a piece of alien technology, namely, the Stargate. Early on in the show members of SG 1 have to use ingenuity to adapt what little alien technology they understand into methods of combating the much more advanced Goauld, which controls most of the galaxy by using their technology to pose as gods. In less then a decade, the SGC goes from special ops missions, and firing missiles through the stargate to commanding a fleet of home built interstellar starships. At about this time, the Goauld start to look pretty lame with their highly inaccurate staff weapons and complete ignorance of camouflage. Its at this point a new opposition, the Ori steps in. The Ori basically are gods. They're incorporeal, immortal beings that gain power from people worshiping them. Their followers have super stargates that can transport huge fleets across intergalactic space, and their ships and weapons are capable of curb stomping anything seen in the previous seasons of SG 1. Fortunately the forces of Earth have a solution, they obtain weapons that can kill immortal incorporeal beings.
Professional Wrestling
- This has happened to professional wrestling as a whole, although it has been most drastically visible outside of WWE in the past decade. Moves that were considered devastating once-a-match nearfalls in the 70s, like the piledriver and the vertical suplex, have since become mundane moves. The powerbomb, considered the scariest and most dangerous move in the business when it was popularized in the mid 90s, is occasionally used as a mid-match move by modern wrestlers like Samoa Joe. WWE eventually took measures to curb this by implementing a "safe style" in 2005 in order to minimize the health hazards of the more dangerous moves being invented (as well as ensure that classic finishers like the Stunner, choke slam, and power bomb still looked effective), but the wrestling world outside WWE continues to invent crazier head drops and more spectacular flips. This has the double effect of making older moves look weak and threatening wrestlers' health.
- The Dragon Gate promotion has been the worst offender in recent years. CIMA's Schwein went from instant victory to repeated nearfall in just three years; Naruki Doi's Bakutare Sliding Kick was reduced to The Worf Barrage; and SHINGO's Last Falconry was replaced by an upgraded version that failed to keep opponents down (the renamed Original Falconry became a low-level impact move) while his death finisher, MADE IN JAPAN, suffered such Badass Decay that SHINGO's rival Bx B Hulk was able to survive three of them.
Video Games
- Although it's often possible to win through peaceful means such as election or Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, this is usually what happens in 4X games round about the midgame. In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for example, it's entirely possible to start a vendetta with a Chaos Gun (level 8 offense) and have a Quantum Laser (level 16 offense) by the end, and that's if the vendetta finishes relatively quickly.
- This also occurs over the course of the X-Com games. The first game maxes out with weapons that can burn through almost anything and small-scale explosions that are practically sub-nuclear, as well as ships that can travel to Mars. The second game features much the same thing, but underwater (it's basically a carbon copy of the first game, so no advancement is expected). Chronologically, we then travel to The Frontier(TM) region of space with lasers, and by the end of the game, we can travel through black holes to reach pocket dimensions, and have a bomb that can force supernovas from suns. And then Apocalypse just goes nuts.
- If series like Gundam and Getter feature this, surely putting the two of them together in Super Robot Wars games, along with a ton of other mecha, leads to this in spades. Let's put it this way: In one game, you get the Zeta Gundam (fresh off the production line, plans drawn less than a month ago) and the mass-produced version of the Zeta Gundam, the Re-GZ, at the exact same time. In Alpha Gaiden, Kamille Bidan comments that Heero Yuy's Wing Zero must have been developed before mobile suits were even invented. This isn't counting the fact that the V2 Assault Buster Gundam, mentioned above, is rolled out of the factory within a few years of the original RX-78 Gundam. So Yeah.
- This is also found in Galactic Civilazations II. In fact, since one of the game's major gimmicks is the detailed customizability of the player's units, a great deal of the game is spent not just advancing up the (broad) tech tree, but also finding new and effective weapon and defense combinations for individual ships. The expansion packs, of course, add even more ridiculous technology, until by the end of the last expansion, you can build your own customized Death Star.
- Eve Online is heading to this direction with the proliferation of Titans, ships so large that their gravitational pull can mess with the tides of the planet they're orbiting. The current count for Titans owned by players is measured in hundreds, and the NPC empires are implied to have even more.
- There is an implied arms race in the Halo series. The Covenant species who make extensive use of energy shields also carry the weapons best adopted to defeating energy shields. One gets the impression that they must have been shooting at each other at some point.
- It's pretty well-established that the Covenant isn't a very strong one. Note that in Halo 2, Arbiter is assigned with taking out a colony of Covenant separatists, and the conflict between Elites and Brutes.
- Homeworld actually manages to incorporate the Lensman-like game mechanics directly into its plot (and incidentally, the game is heavily inspired by the Lensman books).
- in Star Control the spathi backstory is that they were peaceful primitive people when some new predator showed up and started eating them, in an attempt to deal with the new threat they progressed from stone tools to atomic technology in less then a 100 years...
- In Master Of Orion II the player starts out with electronics, nukes, titanium armor, and lasers. By the endgame, they will be messing around with mining shafts that reach into a planets core, electron-state computing, artificial planets, neutronium, phasing cloaks, and low-level time travel.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Parodied in The Tick. The US military made a sentient mustache because "The Russians were working on a beard!"
Real Life
- The advances in airplane technology in World War I and the advances in airplane and tank technology in World War II are incredible. To put it succinctly: 1914, the Bristol Scout. Top speed 94 miles an hour, 16,000 foot ceiling, and one .303 machine gun. A single generation later in 1944; Me-262, jet powered, top speed 541 miles an hour, 48,000 foot ceiling, four 30mm cannons. Or looking at it another way, a pilot could have started off his career armed with a pistol to shoot at other aircraft and manually tossing bombs out of the cockpit. His son, at the end of his career, would be flying an aircraft going faster than the speed of sound armed with missiles and remote-guided smart-bombs.
- And theoretically, his son could have landed on the moon. From canvas-and-wire biplanes in the 1910's to spacecraft capable of moon landings in 1969! That's, frankly, astonishing.
- Early WWI planes often carried no mounted weapons at all, forcing the pilots to improvise. This resulted in an Allied scout complaining to his wingmates that a German pilot had thrown a brick at him.
- In fairness, there was a whole lot of advancement in peacetime too, with planes in the 20s and 30s lasting for only a few years before being obsolete. Compare the B-2 Condor with the B-17 Flying Fortress, which was actually in service before the war began.
- The Cold War. Starts off in 1948 with only one side having nukes at all (and not even h-bombs!), ends up by 1989 with one side with over 40,000 nukes, mostly H-bombs, and the other with a bit fewer nukes but better delivery systems.
- Also curiously averted in some respects. The B-52 and Tu-95 bombers are designs from the 1950s, the RAF flies 40 year old planes for maritime reconnaissance and a mid-1960s aircraft (the MiG-21) is still around in a few air forces. Aircraft top speeds leveled out at about Mach 2.5 in the late 1960s after it was discovered that you needed pretty expensive materials to go beyond that and it wasn't much use in combat anyway.
- Case in point: the SR-71A Blackbird Reconnaissance plane - Mach 3.5, made out of titanium and uses special fuel. See here
- How about the Space Race? Started up with the Soviets putting up an orbiting ball that went 'beep'; just over ten years later — Saturn 5 rockets and men on the Moon. A couple of years later, we have Pioneer and Voyager, deep-space probes. And then it ended with the collapse of the USSR, and things have slowed down massively - mind you, we still haven't gone to Mars.
- The private sector, on the other hand, has progressed very fast.
- There were a lot of deep-space probes pre-Voyager. Sputnik was October of 1957. The USSR did a lunar flyby less than 18 months later. The US did a Venus flyby at the end of 1962 and Mars in 1965.
- This is forgetting that some difficult aspects of spaceflights, the calculation of orbits and the testing of rocket design, are the same for both launching a small satellite and a lunar flyby. The problem is mainly to improve said rockets to carry the heavier payload.. From 1930 onwards, the development of rockets and calculations had already begun. Still impressive, of course!
- The "war" on software piracy is rapidly becoming this- 3 legal installs on the same machine before you have to contact customer service, anyone?
- Not really, since pirates have been reliably releasing DRM-free copies within hours of a product's release date for well over a decade, and nothing has managed to change that. Although you could say that software companies are in an arms race with their customers, with them developing more advanced methods of punishing their customers and customers developing more advanced Stockholm syndrome.
- In case you haven't noticed the trend: the late 19th and all of the 20th century in general. It took humanity approximately 200,000 years to go from stone-tool use and hunter-gatherer behavior to farming and crude metal tools; it took a still-impressive ~10,000 years to go from basic metal tools to the very first, very simple powered motors. The time from the first major railroad in the world to right this moment, with widespread use of atomic power and advanced microelectronics? Less than two centuries. At this point, the majority of major human invention and innovation has occurred in the past two centuries, with no sign of slowing down.
- Suspiciously averted in firearms as well: personnel firearms have progressed very slowly and change relatively little. Despite centuries of development. It took two centuries to go from matchlocks to flintlock, and another two hundred plus years before flintlocks went out of style. The revolver and manual repeater rifles are still in use in certain capacities, many with minimal changes a century after introduction. Once automatic and semi-automatic weapons became efficient to mass produce they've gone largely unchanged. Weapons dating to WWII and beyond can be only fractionally less capable then more modern weapons. All of these still use the same principle of a confined powdered explosive to propel a piece of metal at high speed. For that matter physics and chemistry largely ensure guns will never advance much more then they are right now, or become obsolete.
- Case in point: the AK-47. The Kalashnikov rifle dates back to 1947 and is still pretty much the most popular gun ever with anyone who isn't America. You probably can't even recognize its updates like the AK-74 without being told.
- Target firearms have advanced considerably based on fine tuning of lots of minor factors. It's simply impractical to over-engineer a weapon that will be used in an actual war because of the stresses that get put on it. Meanwhile progress is being made in magnetic guns (which will require really awesome batteries for field use) and electrothermal-chemicals as a replacement for gunpowder.
- Music instruments averts this hard. Most electric guitars today are based on designs of the 50's or 60's. The classics like the Fender Telecaster (1952), Stratocaster (1954), Gibson Les Paul (1952) and the Gibson S G (1961) have remained more or less unchanged since then. Even more "modern" guitars like Ibanez R G were made during the 80's, based on a Strat. The electrics may have modernised, but it's common to reissue models that are made to the specifications of an older year. The basics are exactly the same, with the rest being small tweaks. The instruments professionals use are in most cases vintage instruments. And if you move into classical instruments? The most famous of all violins are Stradivariuses, which were made 200 years ago.
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