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1[[quoteright:290:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_kardashev_2010_12_8_3891.jpg]]
2[[caption-width-right:290:How advanced are you?]]
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4->''"Your race hasn't even reached Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. It doesn't control the resources of this one planet, let alone a solar system or a galaxy. The Time Lords were '''the''' Type 4 civilization. We had no equals. We controlled the fundamental forces of the entire universe. Nothing could communicate with us on our level. Most races pray to lesser beings than the Time Lords."''
5-->-- '''Time Lord Marnal''', ''Franchise/{{Doctor Who|ExpandedUniverse}}: [[Literature/EighthDoctorAdventures The Gallifrey Chronicles]]''
6
7The idea of TechnologyLevels has some actual reference in the real world in the form of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale Kardashev Scale,]] which indicates how much power a civilization uses. This was originally used in the context of astrobiology, speculating about what advanced alien civilizations might look like from afar, particularly the implications of enormous energy demands. It has since been used to compare the PowerLevels of fictional civilizations and, sometimes, individuals.
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9Note that the Kardashev number of a civilization indicates only its power use; it is at best just a proxy for the scale of technological capabilities at play. Keep this in mind when placing examples, and try to include some explanation. After all, one hallmark of improving technology is increased efficiency, which would actually ''lower'' a civilization's Kardashev rating, all else being equal.
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11Also note that while it may be referenced by popular scientists in mass media (because it [[RuleOfCool sounds cool]] and is intuitively easy for people to understand), the Kardashev Scale is not a scientifically rigorous concept. Instead it is similar to the [[ThreeLawsCompliant Three Laws of Robotics]]: it is a scale informally conceived as ''one'' way you could possibly measure a civilization's technological advancement. However, it is not particularly useful for making predictions in the real world with regard to human civilization, much less any alien ones. When scientists, such as Carl Sagan, describe humanity currently as "typical of a civilization about to integrate the Type I Kardashev scale," this claim is unfounded and unscientific, as we have no idea what the "typical" development of an interstellar civilization is, or whether it can be accurately measured by the Kardashev scale at all.
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13A bit on numbering. Kardashev himself only outlined discrete numbers for levels I, II, and III, with power values corresponding to 1964 humanity, the Sun, and the Milky Way respectively. Later discussions of the topic have generally fixed the value of a Type I power level as that of the Earth's insolation. Creator/CarlSagan [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status_of_human_civilization proposed a revised scale based on a logarithmic formula]] rather than the specific values of celestial objects. It might be less intuitive, but it allows easy interpolation and extrapolation, with a .1 difference representing a 10x difference in power. Extensions to the scale above Type III are not universally agreed upon, so Sagan's formula is used for the purposes of categorizing things in this article, with various real phenomena listed for scale in the appropriate subcategories. Don't expect references to the Kardashev Scale in fiction to necessarily correspond to this formulation, as the page quote implies.
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15A serious RealLife [[http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.1134 study]] has been done to look for Type [=III=]s in the local Universe using the WISE infrared telescope, as they're expected to produce large amounts of infrared emissions. [[http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418 Its results]] show that those civilizations are ''very'' rare or non-existent in our cosmic neighborhood.[[note]]The anomalous objects include besides ninety poorly studied objects, that may actually be galaxies making stars galore, five spiral galaxies with very low star formation but unusually high IR luminosities instead of the low luminosity on the infrared a galaxy of that type would have.[[/note]] There is [[http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01509 another study,]] suggesting that finding Yotta-eV (10[[superscript:24]] electron Volt) neutrinos could be proof of at least a type 3 civilization, as that would require using a quasar (a VERY energetic galaxy) as a particle accelerator. For comparison, nuclear bomb reactions release a measly 10[[superscript:6]] eV per reaction.
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17Unrelated to the FamousForBeingFamous [[Creator/KimKardashian Kardashians]] or the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' Cardassians, though the latter would be somewhere on this scale.
18
19!!! Unmarked Spoilers Abound From This Point Onward
20
21!!Examples
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23[[foldercontrol]]
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25[[folder: Type 0: Less than Type I. Clear cases go here. If it looks like a large fraction of a planet's power, it's borderline. ]]
26* The [[RealLife human civilization on Earth]] is currently hovering around a 0.73, with a [[PowerLevels power level]] of about ''1.84 x 10[[superscript:13]] W'', the vast majority extracted from high-density chemically stored solar energy (fossil fuels), with some nuclear fission on the side and other direct and indirect solar energy harvesting methods contributing a small fraction.
27* There's an entire galaxy populated by sapient beings in the first ''Franchise/MenInBlack'' film that fits in a pendant on a cat's collar.
28* A very, very powerful car [[note]](rated at 1350 horsepower or more. There are currently around forty five cars that meet this criterion - see [[http://www.topcarrating.com/power.php]] The most powerful dragsters can briefly achieve 10000 horsepower during runs.)[[/note]] could achieve about 1 MW at its peak, yielding a personal 0.00. As the scale is logarithmic, anything lower would generate a negative rating.
29* A human being could be considered a "civilization" of individual cells. Given the basal metabolic rate of a person is around 100 W, that would make them Type -0.4, while a person working vigorously might manage to make to 500 W, or Type -0.33. From this, it is also easy to calculate that the metabolic output of all the humans currently alive on the planet is a little over 7x10[[superscript:11]]W, making our species (not counting any of our tech, remember) type 0.58.
30* The Sandia National Lab in the US spikes to 0.85 for about 95 nanoseconds on the scale (3.5 x 10[[superscript:14]] W) each time it activates the Z-Machine, a thermonuclear bomb simulator.[[note]](Each activation uses a bit more than 33 megajoules in 95 nanoseconds, which works out to 350 terawatts.)[[/note]] Said lab intends to eventually increase the power of the machine to 1 x 10[[superscript:15]]W for 100-nanosecond pulses to operate as an experimental pulsed power fusion reactor (1 petawatt being the input for one very short Z-pinch pulse -- not the output), which would hit a rating of 0.9 on the scale.
31* The National Ignition Facility at the US Lawrence-Livermore National Lab is another pulsed inertial fusion experiment, with its massive laser system capable of generating nanosecond-scale flashes of 5 x 10[[superscript:14]] W on the fusion target, making a spike up to about 0.87 for a very, very short time.
32* The Atlantean kingdoms in the ''Franchise/DCExtendedUniverse'' have advanced technology in a parallel underwater civilization to the one on the surface, and are likely in the same league as far as energy usage goes.
33* Japan in ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' diverts its national electrical output of 180GW into a WaveMotionGun.
34* The civilization in ''[=EYES=] of Mars'' appears to have tried to go for Type 1, and destroyed their primary planet in the process. This also made their secondary planet uninhabitable, except for a small biosphere. They eventually migrated to a third planet.
35* Earth in ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' has some nifty technology, but it is in the hands of the government or can only be afforded by the very wealthy, and overall development seems to take up a pretty small fraction of the planet's energy budget. Other civilizations might be a bit higher.
36* The ''VideoGame/WarCraft'' franchise depicts a series of SchizoTech science fantasy civilizations mostly at a 16th-17th century level of technology and demography, but which complement said tech with magic that allows them access to some things equivalent to early 20th century advances like primitive aircraft and trains. They also have interplanetary travel through a magical PortalNetwork.
37* The Ark and Mount Weather from ''Series/The100'' possess slightly more advanced technology than modern humanity, but have very limited resources, and can only support a population equivalent to a small town.
38* ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar'': both COG and the Locust Horde are pretty much at modern Earth level, though somewhat lower in some respects and higher in others (e.g. satellite-mounted particle beam weapons).
39* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquer:'' most factions in the series, from the GDI and NOD to the Allied Nations and the USSR to the GLA and PRC, are just super-sized modern Earth armies with more exotic tech thrown in but not totally dominating, such as mechs, cyborgs, psychics, giant robots, directed energy weapons, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking war bears]], etc. Maybe an order of magnitude above modern humanity, two orders of magnitude at ''best'', placing them around Type 0.82-0.92. The [[AlienInvasion Scrin]] ''might'' be an exception; their presence on Earth doesn't even get to the lowest threshold of Type I, but it's implied that there are a ''ton'' of them in other galaxies.
40* ''VideoGame/HalfLife'': the Xenians, Race X, and the Combine PuppetState on Earth are each significantly smaller in scale than modern humanity. The Combine regime possesses superior technology to what modern humanity possesses, but by nowhere near enough to rise above Type 0 given the implied population of Earth AfterTheEnd. Race X and the Xenians use a lot of OrganicTechnology and are borderline pre-industrial outside of a few factories that produce soldiers. It's debatable whether they even merit the Type 0.6 label.
41* ''Literature/TheHungerGames'': humanity has slightly more advanced technology than modern nations in some ways (and are inferior in others), but is AfterTheEnd and marginal in terms of population. Panem has less than 2 million people.
42* ''Franchise/TheMatrix'': humanity has been [[AfterTheEnd more or less wiped out]], and the machines that took our place are not all that much more advanced than we were outside of their virtual reality technology. The fact that [[ArtisticLicensePhysics the energy output of human bodies is in any way relevant to their civilization]] suggests unusually low energy usage, even taking into account their small scale.
43* ''Literature/WarOfTheWorlds'': the Martians have interplanetary travel, but it's slow and dependent on [[TechnologyMarchesOn launching craft at Earth with cannons]]. They have a relatively low population and their war machines are susceptible to late 19th century weaponry. Their heat rays and implied tripod numbers would require impressive energy usage by the standards of the time the book was written, but not enough to rise above Type 0. 20th to 21st century adaptations [[TechnologyMarchesOn buff them in various ways]], such as adding DeflectorShields to their tripods, but they still never really become even a borderline Type I civilization.
44* ''Film/District9'': the 'Prawns', more specifically the colony that arrives on Earth.[[note]]Director Neill Blomkamp clarified that the ship was a self-sufficient mining vessel ruled by its own queen that could sustain itself indefinitely - which was needed, as he also stated that the ship was intended to operate autonomously in far-off space [[https://io9.gizmodo.com/district-9s-director-tells-us-all-about-his-alien-back-5331799 for thousands of years]]. The ship is effectively a civilization unto itself.[[/note]] About 1.8 million [[HumanoidAliens humanoid sapients]] living on a [[https://www.autoevolution.com/news/every-sci-fi-spaceship-in-one-image-amazing-comparison-chart-86713.html 2.5 kilometer]] ship, which is capable of FTL travel and sustaining said millions. Their tech appears to be quite powerful on an individual level (their small arms are [=DEWs=] generating enough power to ''explode'' humans), but not incomprehensibly so (e.g. their dedicated [[MiniMecha military vehicles]] can still be crippled by 20mm anti-materiel rounds); and while it must have generated absurd thrust just to move and float in the planet's atmosphere, their ship didn't appear to have anything else that would use much power (it wasn't even armed). Thus, they can get bullied into a ghetto by the government of UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica (it helps that they're a caste-based society, and the vast majority are drones who are incapable of acting above the level of clans without the scarce and reduced leadership class). The true scale of their civilization and the level of development of their worlds are never so much as hinted at in the film itself.
45* All factions in the ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' universe are Type 0, for [[AfterTheEnd obvious reasons]]. Even the ones with impressive tech such as power armor and commonplace robots are severely limited by tiny populations. Pre-war, the United States might have been on their way to a borderline Type I with fusion power, microfabricators, and a potential interstellar colonization program, but the Great War stopped that advancement dead in its tracks.
46* The Third Reich in the ''VideoGame/{{Wolfenstein}}'' series conquers most of the Earth with sci-fi technology and colonizes the moon and Venus to the point that there are regular civilian flights there. However, they don't have space warships per se, and their use of antigravity to achieve the latter feats means this feat shouldn't add significantly to their energy usage. Their various sci-fi toys like giant robots, super soldiers, portals to the Black Sun dimension, and directed energy weapons are tempered by the fact that the bulk of their tech is still [=WWII=] to early Cold War era, as we see in both the military and civilian spheres. Should be around Type 0.7, almost certainly weaker than modern Earth as a whole.
47* The Race in the ''Literature/WorldWar'' series has large numbers of unarmed transport spaceships sufficient to carry millions of people across systems on long voyages at relativistic speeds, and... that's about it. In every other regard, their technology and energy usage is about on par with Earth circa the 1980s. This extends to their military, which is why they [[InsufficientlyAdvancedAlien end up having a costly war against Earth circa WWII.]] They have a few planets besides Home, inhabited by both the main Race and conquered species, but these are if anything less developed than the 20th century era Home. Likely Type 0.8 or thereabouts.
48* ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'': humanity and [[TheLegionsOfHell Hell]] in the original universe.[[note]]That is, ''Doom'', ''Doom II'', ''Doom 64'', ''Doom 3'', and all expansions, comics, and books related to the above.[[/note]] For their new universe counterparts in the sequels, see "Schizo Tech" and "Other."[[note]]Per cut dialogue from Khan Maykr in ''Eternal'', this ''Doom'' universe is "the seventh dimension."[[/note]]
49** Humans have colonized parts of Mars and established research outposts on its moons, but there's no reference to them having left the solar system and the cities we see in ''Doom II'' don't look particularly advanced. The ''Doom II'' manual even specifies that generation ships would take centuries to reach another habitable system, so they definitely don't have FTL. They have developed some futuristic weaponry like the BFG-9000 and plasma gun, but most of your arsenal are recognizably modern bullet hoses, with some even being given stats in line with modern guns.[[note]]Such as ''Doom 3'''s chain gun, which fires .30 caliber rounds at mach 2 at a rate of 600 RPM, basically making it a more unwieldy [=M60=].[[/note]] Space warships are referenced as existing in ''3'', but their capabilities are unknown other than that it would take them a considerable amount of time to get from Earth to Mars, and the ship-scale weapons we see later in ''Eternal'' would suggest that, again, their armaments would pretty much be in line with modern ones.
50** The demons have a rudimentary society, if any, and lack space travel, being dependent on mad scientists or cultists in the mortal world to bring them to our system via portals. They are not particularly impressive on a per capita level: their basic troops like Imps and Pinkies are limited to either melee or throwing small numbers of [[PainfullySlowProjectile fireballs]], while their heaviest units like Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds are still slow, limited to a single mundane modern weapon (e.g. rotary cannon, rocket launcher), and susceptible to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Arms_and_Light_Weapons light weapons]]. The demons were numerous enough to successfully invade Earth and kill billions of people until stopped by the player character, yet not numerous or organized enough to stop a strike force consisting of a single BadassNormal (or a few, in ''Doom 3'') from invading Hell, carving a swath through their armies, and killing their leaders, ending their invasion while causing great damage to Hell itself. ''Doom'' being arguably the first FPS to make the [[ExcusePlot plot]] abide by the "OneManArmy player character defeats entire alien/demon/robot/mutant invasion with little more than a shotgun because he's that badass" formula that was repeated throughout the nineties with other shooters like ''Duke Nukem [=3D=]'', ''Quake'', ''Blood'', and ''Half-Life'', a formula which kind of requires your invaders to be very limited.
51* ''VideoGame/StarCraft'':
52** The Primal Zerg are the original species of zerg that where left behind from the main swarm thousands of years ago. They're much less numerous than their Swarm brethren, seemingly don't breed as fast, and lack space travel due to not having been uplifted by Amon. They also are not a unified race prior to Kerrigan coming in, with Zerus being divided into small feuding broods. They're about on par with equivalent Swarm units on a per capita level and seem to have densely developed their single planet of Zerus, but their lack of organization, space travel, and higher-end units means they shouldn't even touch the lowest reaches of Type I. The feral zerg hives are in a very similar boat (and also usually don't have space travel), being weak enough to be comfortably controlled by local terran militias backed by the occasional infantry platoon.
53** The original [=StarCraft=] manual mentions that hundreds of sapient species seeded on their worlds by the Xel'naga exist under protoss protection, but that they're unaware of this fact. They're referenced in a few later sources as well. Going by the facts that they're apparently not spacefaring and can't detect protoss ships in their systems, they're likely pre-industrial or at the very least pre-Information Age societies, putting them at Type 0 by default.
54[[/folder]]
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56
57[[folder: Borderline Type I: Power use roughly equivalent to a terrestrial planet's insolation. 1E16W ]]
58* Earth receives about 1.74 x 10[[superscript:17]]W from the Sun.
59* [[Literature/EndersGame Ender's Saga]]: As the typical interstellar travel time is tens of years at close to light speed, we can assume humanity still inhabits a relatively small patch of the galaxy after thousands of years. The shown planets have smaller civilizations than our current one, but they are numerous. It is hinted that nearly all of them were conquered in the Third Invasion, and that means no more than a few a day during a few years. Some of the more impressive technology, like interstellar travel, is noted to take relatively little power. So probably less than 1.5 x 10[[superscript: 17]]W.
60* The Alpha Quadrant powers in the 22nd century (''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' and spin-off material) are here, not yet having developed to the high Type I status they enjoy in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The scale of civilization is much lower in both population and number of planets (in one late season 1 episode Archer notes that no human has journeyed more than 90 light-years from Earth - and Earth is a relevant power at the time), FTL is much slower (just a few hundred times light speed at the fastest, with <100 times light speed being standard among civilian-owned craft), ships are smaller and built in smaller numbers (a mere dozen ships is implied to be a large loss to the Terran Empire, the Xindi only bring a few dozen ships to attack Earth, Andor and Vulcan nearly go to war in their shared backyard with three ships on each side, only a few NX-classes are being built by Earth, etc.), DeflectorShields are common but not omnipresent, and things like 0.25 kiloton mines, 500 gigajoule[[note]]0.12 kilotons.[[/note]] main phase cannons, 80 gigajoule aft phase cannons, and sub-80 gigajoule plasma cannons are considered effective ship to ship weapons. Fission bombs were also primary weapons as late as the Earth-Romulan War, at least.
61* Humanity in the MilitaryScienceFiction sub-series of ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'', particularly in ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyInfiniteWarfare'' where several planets and moons (most prominently Mars) have been terraformed and colonized and humanity has dozens of space warships (armored in titanium and fighting with autocannons and high-explosive missiles). Fairly low on the scale, though, as they're limited to the solar system and are not too much more advanced than TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture setting.
62* The Earth Ceph in ''VideoGame/{{Crysis}}'' possess a planet-wide [[BadassArmy military force]] sufficient to dish out a brutal (but not total) CurbStompBattle on a TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture humanity in less than a week, and the Alpha Ceph alone generates so much power that capturing and using it as a power source is nearly enough to put Earth into post-scarcity territory, so at least 1.6 x 10^14 on its own. The ship they arrived in is also able to absorb contact-detonated multi-megaton nuclear blasts and freeze an entire good-sized island, and they have a super-weapon "virus" that's really a hyper-lethal nanite swarm that they deploy against humanity. The exact level of output of the Alpha Ceph is clarified as being sufficient to "punching one of hell a hole on the Earth" and "blow Earth's crust into space" if the power grid it's connected to melts down, which would require [[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php 1.5 × 10^30 joules]]. It's not like it's generating that much per second or anything (watts), but it's still well into this level even if building up that amount of energy took years. The Earth Ceph's main limiting factors are their population and their complete lack of any form of space travel, besides the wrecked ship they arrived in. Also, they're meat-robots, not sapient. [[AmbiguousSituation Maybe.]]
63** The True Ceph in the [=M33=] galaxy are certainly a Type II or higher, having planet-sized ships, time travel, billions of colonies, etc, but they're in the background. Instead we're left to deal with an offshoot of them that arrived on Earth tens of millions of years ago.
64* Humanity in the ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' franchise. Their population is in the tens of billions and they have advanced biotechnology, a few extrasolar colonies, a decent number of (slow) spaceships that still consider autocannons and high-explosive missiles to be powerful weapons,[[note]]They're also highly limited in their other weaponry, accelerations, durability, and overall power generation. Case in point, they consider a 32 megajoule railgun (per the technical manuals) to be a potent ship-to-ship weapon; the U.S. Navy right now uses 16 megajoule railguns (which were still in the prototype stage when the manuals were written).[[/note]] and FTL drives that can pull [[https://yutani.studio/2019/05/28/ftl-in-the-alien-universe/ several to several dozen times light speed]]. Aside from that, they're not too different than humanity now. Most of the difference comes from the higher population and the aforementioned ships. The titular antagonists, assuming they can even be called a civilization, are definitely Type 0.
65** Expanded Universe figures occasionally throw out power generation figures consistent with borderline Type I levels. A 10,000-ton space station is powered by a [[https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Novgorod_Station#cite_note-ARPG364-3 3.1 gigawatt]] fusion reactor. 78,000-ton warships have [[https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Conestoga_class 80 megawatt laser batteries]] as some of their most potent weapons, and overall are each powered by a 3.6 terawatt lithium-hydride fusion reactor.
66* ''Film/{{Avatar}}'' humanity is in a similar boat, with two main differences. One, they have widespread nanotechnology (albeit only talked about in the tech manuals) and railguns, which implies they're a cut above the ''Alien'' humans in general on the smaller scale. Two, they don't have FTL period, instead needing to go on very long self-sufficient voyages to get to nearby systems at sublight speeds with the crew in cryosleep. Their ships are [[https://www.pandorapedia.com/human_operations/vehicles/isv_venture_star.html powered by deuterium fusion]] and small amounts of antihydrogen, allowing them to achieve 0.7c cruising speed and a max range of a few light years. It's not surprising that the two franchises share technological and aesthetic similarities, considering [[Creator/JamesCameron the director]] of ''Aliens'' and ''Avatar'' are the same guy.
67* ''Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse'': the cosmic MCU empires (Xandar, Kree, etc.) pretty much all occupy this range.
68** On the one hand, there are dozens of alien races on an undisclosed but presumably significant number of planets in a functional galactic society with a lot of spaceships.[[note]]One solid indication comes from the Ravagers. Yondu's clan is shown to have dozens of M-ships, each of which should mass ~100-200 tons or so, as well as his capital ship ''Eclector'', and they're merely one of what Stakar says are a hundred Ravager clans. While they're known to be a powerful group, the Ravagers are still just a collection of pirate/mercenary armies. Them having a hundred (or so) large ships and thousands of shuttle-sized craft should indicate at least tens of thousands of ships of various sizes are in civilian possession within the cosmic MCU.[[/note]] Directed energy weapons are widespread (but so are more or less modern [[KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter firearms]]), fighter and shuttle sized ships are cheap and easily accessible to common folks, there are a small space stations, and civilizations engage in asteroid mining. The usual space opera trappings. Also, one of Dr. Strange's comments in ''Infinity War'' implies that the cosmic MCU population is in the trillions, though it's not clear if all of them are a part of the these civilizations, or if they're cut off and limited to their own planets like the humans were.
69** On the other hand, FTL is apparently slow or unreliable as ships rely on ''Stargate''-esque wormholes ("jump-points") left by the Celestials to get anywhere. Ships have fairly low accelerations (the Milano, a faster-than-average small ship, explicitly pulls off merely a few kilometers per second in a tense chase scene that lasts over a minute, with Gamora reading off distance and time). The efficacy of both their personal and ship-to-ship weapons are extremely low for their size. The M-ships and Asgaridan skiffs use more or less modern aircraft autocannons as their only weapons (and yet are effective enough to take down a Kree capital ship indicating their ships are also really fragile), Chitauri Chariots, Necrocraft, and Kree fighters have plasma guns at best on par with modern 40mm grenade launchers, and Thanos's flagship fires salvos in ''Infinity War'' less potent per shot than modern naval autocannons, yet all of the above are peer competitors to other galactic powers and viable threats to capital ships. Autocannons (e.g. M-ships) and high-explosive cruise missiles (e.g. the central weapon system on the Sanctuary II) are fantastically effective ship-to-ship weapons. Most military ships, like the Chitauri motherships and Kree capital ships, aren't even armed. They ''do'' at least have big nukes (see ''Captain Marvel''), but they're only deployable in the form of ''very'' slow missiles that even modern Earth point-defense could probably shoot down. Considering their absurd size, it's unlikely that their warheads are particularly more energy dense than our own, either.
70** The plot of ''Captain Marvel'' is entirely dependent on the idea that their FTL technology is poorly understood and limited, as the Skrulls' ultimate plan is to hide in an uncharted area of space by using a special FTL drive that ''isn't'' connected to the jump-point network. It was only created with help from one of the Infinity Stones, which no one in the galaxy can reproduce. This would also heavily imply that the various races haven't settled too many worlds, as the areas they could travel to would be inherently limited.
71** Ignoring militaries for a moment, there's also the fact that aside from a few choice bits like holograms and hovercraft, the overall standard of living we see doesn't look very different from modern Earth. At the end of ''Guardians of the Galaxy I'', a Nova Corps officer's apartment pretty much looks like one of ours. Their energy usage in everyday life is thus likely not particularly high.
72** Meanwhile, the long-dead Celestials created (or at least wielded) the Infinity Stones, which are capable of doing things like wiping out all life on a planet (Power Stone) or time travel (Time Stone). If anything else like those existed in their civilization then they would have been a solid Type II civilization.
73* ''ComicBook/{{Transmetropolitan}}'' explicitly references the scale -- or an older version of it, anyway. Type I is described not only as harnessing all the power, but having eliminated internal conflicts. The other two types are largely the same. Spider notes that they can perform miracles with engines too small to be seen and have turned all of Mercury into a solar battery enough to power the entirety of Earth continuously... but they are still divided. Approximately 10[[superscript:17]]W if 60% or so of Mercury's light is harnessed.
74* ''Anime/CowboyBebop'' displays a multi-planetary civilization that has gotten banged up quite a bit. Populations are small by even today's standards (there were only 1.5 billion humans left after the Gate Incident, which was only 50 years prior to the events of the series -- for context, as of 2021 there are about 7.75 billion humans on the planet) and most tech is close to modern, but interplanetary travel is fairly common. Probably somewhere around this level.
75* During the One Year War of the original ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam'', the total population of the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon numbered in the low billions, having been heavily reduced by nigh-apocalyptic military conflicts. Spacecraft are very common, and humanity has largely moved to massive networks of space colonies, each one of which is the size of a large city. Aside from the thousands of mobile suits, which are powered by a "clean" form of nuclear fusion, humanity's weapons technology is not that far above our own, with many suits of the One Year War being equipped with what are effectively oversized machine guns, and nuclear weapons being treated as incredibly fearsome. Though space exploration is well underway, it's not suggested to extend past the solar system. That said, every war sees very large advancements in technology, such as beam weapons going from rare to standard issue.
76* ''Triplanetary'', the prequel([[DolledUpInstallment -ish]]) ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' novel, covers humanity going from a Type 0 to a Type 1. At the end, relatively easy interstellar travel has been achieved, and power is generated through (almost) completely efficient matter-to-energy conversion.
77* ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' seems to have dozens of civilizations at around this level, depending on just how much power the phlebotinum uses.
78* ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' is a generally low tech setting by sci fi standards (e.g. no FTL, ships still fight with small high-explosive missiles and autocannons) but it might just be Type I, depending on its population. ''Serenity'' (considered old in-universe) takes minutes (say, 1000 s) to get out of an Earth-like gravity well (Earth's gravity well has a depth of 6 x 10[[superscript:7]]J/kg), and is capable of carrying herds of cows (say, 50 cows weighing 700 kg each); putting all that together, ''Serenity'' herself has a power output of at least 2 x 10[[superscript:9]]W[[note]](actually more, because she has to lift her own weight as well as that of the cows, but since she could be made of some random ultralight futuristic material that's harder to estimate)[[/note]]. So, if ''Serenity''[='=]s engine represents one part in 10[[superscript:8]] of that civilization's power output, the total civilization's output is at least 2 x 10[[superscript:17]]W. For comparison, note that 10[[superscript:-8]] is roughly the ratio of a car engine's power output to the power output of our entire civilization. If ''Serenity'' represents one part in 10[[superscript:-5]] instead, then the civilization's output comes out to 2 x 10[[superscript:14]]W, this being the ratio of a Nimitz supercarrier's power output to the power output of our entire civilization. It should be somewhere between these two values, as spaceships in the ''Firefly'' Verse are known to be reasonably common (in an early episode, an Alliance officer comments that 40,000 Firefly-class ships were made; a single class of a single type of ship), but not anywhere near as much as cars are to us. In terms of scale, the official map of TheVerse gives it a population of a little under 50 billion spread throughout 49 colonized planets and 148 moons.
79* In ''WebComic/AMiracleOfScience'', most of the people live on incompletely utilized planets. However, Mars is completely harnessed and the Martians are doing some interesting things with all that power, though Mars gets quite a bit less sunlight than Earth. All told, probably about Type I.
80* The 12 Colonies of Kobol in ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|2003}}'' (prior to the Cylon nuclear bombardment) used a fraction of the power available on 12 planets in the four systems of the Cyrannus sector, peaked at a population of 28.55 billion, and have a decent fleet (120 battlestars) in a setting where high-explosive missiles and autocannons still see use as ship-to-ship weapons, fission weapons are relatively rare (the titular ship only carried five warheads), and proximity-detonated nukes are considered powerful. The Cylons are in the same boat per capita but are implied to be much less numerous, with most of their population living on a 30+ kilometer space station called the Colony.
81* The sub-Vorlon/Shadow civilizations of ''Series/BabylonFive'' seem to be in this neighborhood. They have dozens of colonized worlds and large fleets of fairly large warships equipped with directed energy weapons such as particle beams, as well as a lot of space stations. But most ships don't have their own FTL drives instead being dependent on jumpgates, populations per government generally cap out in the tens of billions (with the Earth Alliance having 15 billion) and are often lower (e.g. the Minbari only have 14 rural colony worlds and a homeworld with a population of 4 billion), most of their industrial and economic strength seems to be concentrated on home worlds, nukes are still considered fantastically effective ship-to-ship weapons, overall living standards are not far removed from modern first world ones, ships don't have DeflectorShields, given DEW weapon yields range from megawatts (fighter guns, the titular station's deck pulse cannons) to high gigawatts (capital ship guns), the Centauri needed four days of bombardment by an entire fleet with forbidden [=WMDs=] to "only" wipe out most of Narn's population and biggest cities, et cetera.
82* ''VideoGame/StarCraft'':
83** The terran polities, namely the Terran Dominion/Confederacy, Umojan Protectorate, and Kel-Morian Combine have very rapid travel within the Koprulu sector and some impressive technology (e.g. universal powered armor for their frontline infantry, powerful terraforming devices, mass-cloning), but [[SchizoTech use a lot of low-grade stuff as well]] and operate at a pretty small scale by the standards of interstellar sci-fi powers:
84*** The populations of four of the Confederacy's thirteen core worlds are roughly known: Korhal, as the Confederacy's "most treasured and pampered colony," had a mere 35 million, Chau Sara had either 400,000 or "millions" depending on the source, Mar Sara was considered a backwater compared to Chau Sara (and thus presumably had fewer people or at least not much more), and Tarsonis (the economic and political capital of the Confederacy) had a population of a few billion. The prologue for the zerg campaign of the first game outright says that there were only 13 planets in the Terran Confederacy, the manual goes with the similar "about a dozen worlds", and the Blizzard's website entries for Mau Sara and Chau Sara state that the Confederacy had "thirteen core colonies." [[https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Core_Worlds These 13]] are pretty much the only ones with any notable level of development. Umoja, the only notable world in the Umojan Protectorate, has 2.1 billion people while Moria, one of only a handful of worlds ruled by the Kel-Morian Combine, has 4.1 billion (all other known planets they possess are barely-populated mining colonies). The Confederacy, and its successor the Dominion, was the largest and strongest of the three. Thus it's unlikely that the total terran population circa the first game exceeds twenty billion or that their total territory exceeds dozens of planets, dwarf planets, and moons. By ''2'' the exodus following the zerg invasions has resulted in more planets being colonized, but it's made clear that they haven't made good on the demographic or economic losses of the Great War by then, so their population and economy should be if anything worse-off. Mind you, the game only deals with one millionth of the humanity[[note]]And that millionth consists largely of prisoners and convicts and their descendants. Not the brightest bulbs in the bucket.[[/note]], the rest is quite open to {{WMG}}.
85*** The terrans' space navies are also pretty small, constituting dozens[[note]]In ''Starcraft II: Flashpoint'', Mengsk takes 25 battlecruisers with him, and this is stated to be half of the Terran Dominion's fleet (the Dominion being a fusion of most of the terran polities).[[/note]] of battlecruisers (550 to 960 meters in length depending on the model) supported by fighters and missile boats. Said ships' armaments range from laser batteries to autocannons, high-explosive missiles, and fission bombs (e.g. the ten-kiloton anti-ship nukes in ''Starcraft: Evolution''). A [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge Casaba Howitzer]][[note]]A directed nuclear shaped charge that, due to bare physical laws on NKEW efficiency, couldn't possibly be more than a few dozen kilotons per shot at the absolute most (see [[http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs01fenstermacher.pdf here]] for more on that), consistent with the description in the manual saying that it's powered by a "small nuclear bomb."[[/note]] (the Yamato Cannon) is their most powerful ship to ship weapon. While FTL travel is fast, sublight travel is extremely slow, with ''Gorgon''-class battlecruisers requiring a whole "cycle" (implied to be at least a day) just to travel one AU. Unlike the protoss, combat shields also aren't standard even on their capital ships, much less anything smaller. The Umojans are stated to have more advanced technology than the Dominion/Confederacy or Kel-Morians to balance out how small they are, but from what we see that edge is mostly insignificant.
86** The Tal'darim protoss have similarly advanced technology to the other protoss factions and a decent fleet of over a dozen carriers, but an utterly tiny territory and population - with one known population center (Slayn) of 12 million people. That's nearly three orders of magnitude smaller than the Protoss Empire at their height. They also lack the truly high-end stuff that the Protoss Empire fielded at its height, like arkships. In ''Nova Covert Ops'' they prove able to deal severe damage to the recovering Terran Dominion on their own when the two polities engage in a war with the bulk of their fleets, but are eventually repulsed, putting their military power solidly below (though rivaling) that of the former.
87** The pre-Daelaam Nerazim protoss are in a similar boat as the Tal'darim: similar technology to the Protoss Empire, but orders of magnitude smaller in scale[[note]]As noted elsewhere on this page, Shakuras has 194 million people by 2506. The short story "Children of the Void" heavily implies that most of these are Khalai refugees who fled after the fall of Aiur. That would put the Nerazim population at <97 million, and it's noted that they have no population centers other than Shakuras.[[/note]] and lacking the highest-end stuff possessed by the latter.
88* The human civilization in ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'' is a sector-spanning bunch of colonies with a few dozen planets at their disposal scattered throughout 22 star systems (with another 26 barely-explored but potentially habitable ones within reach). Scale is pretty low with capital worlds like New Manhattan and New Tokyo only possessing hundreds of millions of people and most planets possessing less, suggesting low single digit billions at most for the whole Sirius sector. Their FTL is comparatively limited, relying on preset Jump Gates that interconnect their systems by carving holes through spacetime, and their space armaments still consist of more or less conventional weapons, but they have a lot of small craft (buying a ~100 ton shuttle or fighter is considered doable for a middle class citizen), a proportionally decent space number of space stations, and space travel in general is fairly cheap and common.
89* The UNSC of ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' is a textbook depiction of a borderline Type I. They've been spacefaring for centuries and have a population of tens of billions spread throughout hundreds of worlds, moons, and space stations. Generally their technology is based on [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture reasonable extrapolations of stuff we can build now]] (besides FTL, which relies on {{Technobabble}} [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace slipspace]] and thus has no clearly defined energy usage). Their medical technology and computer science is far more advanced than ours, but aside from that what we see of civilian life is not too distinct from the modern first world, making it unlikely they use too much energy ((an order of magnitude more per capita, at the absolute most). Their ground military forces almost entirely use modern-ish technology (down to their service rifle still using 7.62x51mm NATO and their anti-aircraft guns still using 20x102mm HEI) with a few near-future bits thrown in, like (rare) railguns. Space travel is not extremely rare among the civilian populace, but also nowhere near as common as in a setting like, say, ''Star Wars'' or ''Mass Effect'', and their FTL is pretty slow necessitating colonial development only occurring in a tight ~100 light year radius of Earth (it can take weeks or even months to go from one system to another). Their SpaceNavy is considerably more advanced than the rest of their tech base, but still not too far out there - they don't have DeflectorShields, use a mundane titanium alloy for armor, and still consider autocannons, high-explosive cruise missiles, and proximity-detonated nukes[[note]]See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law here]] and [[https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm here]] for why those are of marginal use in space[[/note]] to be extraordinarily effective ship to ship weapons. Their ships run on [[https://www.halopedia.org/Fusion_reactor deuterium fusion]] and appropriately have reactor output measured in the [[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Halo_First_Strike/d_aBDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=halo+first+strike+gigawatts&pg=PT227&printsec=frontcover gigawatts]], and while their main [[MagneticWeapons magnetic accelerator cannons]] ''CAN'' obtain much higher output than any of their other weapons (up to the kilotons for shipborne ones), doing so requires an extremely long charge time and the ship to seemingly cease maneuvering, consistent with gigawatt range power generation per reactor (each ship carries three to six such reactors). Even the massive [=MACs=] on Moncton-class battle stations, which dwarf those mounted on any ship, only launch multi-hundred ton projectiles at "several kilometers per second" per ''Warfleet'' and as seen in ''Halo 2 Anniversary (which comes out to around single digit kilotons).
90** The one quibble that potentially upgrades them is a line in ''The Fall of Reach'' implying that "Super" [=MACs=] in orbital battle stations are powered by ''exawatt'' reactors, but that entry is self-contradictory and has been implicitly retconned. See ''Halo'''s entry under [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfMass Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Mass]] for more on that matter.
91** The independent Insurrectionist worlds work on the same technological base as the UNSC and were even able to field small fleets of warships, but are much smaller in scale due to being formed of the Outer Colonies which were thinly populated compared to the Inner Colonies. They also obviously don't have access to the higher-end equipment of the UNSC.
92** There are various independent worlds under Covenant dominion that have the same tech base as the Covenant itself, but exist on a tiny scale in comparison. Examples include the Yohnet home world, the oft-mentioned independent Jackal colonies, and the unnamed minor species of the Covenant fringe. They fit here as well.
93** Along the same lines, the bulk of the San'Shyuum species is either here or at Type 0 (depending on population density). The ones we know and hate are from a fringe faction called the Reformists, but the majority of their people lived on their roughly Earth-sized homeworld under the rival faction called the Stoics. They've deliberately chosen to reject reverse-engineered Forerunner technology and as a result are about on par with humanity circa the late Atomic Age. The planet was supposed to have been destroyed by a nova centuries ago, but in-universe speculation maintains that it still exists and its destruction was falsified by the Covenant.
94* ''Manga/BattleAngelAlita'' is probably around here, considering the power of individuals at the Zenith of Things Tournament. Jupiter seems to have a Dyson sphere variant, and a laser that can cut a shield that can block nuclear blasts. Zekka has an internalized anti-matter reactor of sorts, and Don Fua has a black hole generating technique.
95* Some {{Fanon}} holds that the Na'vi in ''Film/{{Avatar}}'' are a civilization that has passed the [[TheSingularity Technological Singularity]] after building Eywa as a planetary scale bio-computer. Considering that Eywa makes up the entire biosphere of Pandora, the energy use would put it at about full planetary power.
96** Although since the biosphere of Earth utilizes only a tiny fraction of its insolation, with the majority being reflected back into space or powering the weather, the Na'vi are less than a Type I civilization even in fanon.
97* The ISA and Helghast from ''VideoGame/{{Killzone}}'' have a few planets between them, with the former's population being in the tens of billions and the latter in the single digit billions. Military tech in ground warfare is very similar to what we have now with a few advanced bits added here and there, like (rare) railguns and mechs. They don't have many ships, and those they have still use autocannons, conventional missiles, and nukes in combat (though they have [=DEWs=] as well), and are more or less static targets. FTL is rare and relatively slow, and large-scale colonization is only possible with systems close to Earth (in fact the whole franchise takes place in the closest star system to Sol: Alpha Centauri).
98[[/folder]]
99
100[[folder: Solid Type I: Clearly more than a single planet's power, but less than a G type star's. ]]
101* The [[UsefulNotes/FromRussiaWithNukes Tsar Bomba]], the most powerful device ever built by humanity, achieved about 5.3 x 10[[superscript:24]]W, near the top of this category... at least for a very brief period.
102* Red dwarf stars average 1 x 10[[superscript:22]]W while [[https://www.britannica.com/science/luminosity brown dwarfs]] average 1 x 10[[superscript:20]]W, making them a good baseline for this range.
103* The younger races in ''Franchise/MassEffect'', particularly those that inhabit Citadel Space (e.g. the turians, the asari, the salarians, the humans) are the definition of solid high Type Is. They have populations consistently noted to be in the [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=trillions&fulltext=Search&scope=internal&ns0=1&ns14=1# trillions]], with [[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mass_Effect_Revelation/fYj94qmCi_MC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=thousands%20of%20worlds thousands of colonies]], a larger number of industrial outposts, and an effectively post-scarcity standard of living (thanks to, among other things, ubiquitous microfabricators) where the only things with economic value are sapient labor and non-renewable minerals. Their population figures alone would place their non-space assets as generating about 1.6 x 10^16 watts, assuming their per capita energy usage is no greater than that of modern Earth (which it plainly is, by orders of magnitude). A few choice feats:
104** They have tens of thousands of military warships[[note]]A single geth fleet at Charoum alone has 10,000 ships, and this was noted in the context of the geth being a whipped enemy. A [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBESnvjZGt8 canonical]] trailer for ''Mass Effect 3'' states that a single human fleet in orbit of Earth has thousands of ships. Humanity has a lot more than one fleet, and each of the three Council races laughably outclasses humanity.[[/note]] each capable of producing double to triple digit terawatts for shielding alone[[note]]They can take sustained fire from their own railguns on similar scales (e.g. a cruiser can take several cruiser shots, but a single dreadnought shot will rip it to pieces), so double to triple digit terajoules per second, which is part of why most military engagements are indecisive.[[/note]] and sustaining kilotons-per-second firepower with railguns[[note]]An 800-meter dreadnought gun is capable of launching a 20 kilogram slug at 4,025 kilometers per second every two seconds, for a total of 38.72 kilotons per shot or 19.36 kilotons every second. The codex specifically notes that their power is determined by ''length''. Even the smallest ships are within an order of magnitude of this size, and some are bigger, so even the smallest warships should be spitting out kilotons per second. Chris L'Etoile, in fact, specifically stated that the smallest ships (frigates) fire 4.78 kiloton shots.[[/note]] (plus high megatons with missiles[[note]]Modern yield to weight ratios for fusion weapons is on the order of 6 kilotons per kg, ''Mass Effect'''s equivalents laughably outclass this (Cerberus Daily News had a story about a nuke used by terrorists [not even a military] making a 5-kilometer crater; the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest nuke we've ever built, barely managed a 2-kilometer crater). In fact, D-H3 fusion warheads would have an energy output of about 353 terajoules (84 kilotons) per kilogram of fusion material (modern air-to-air missiles have warheads of dozens of kg, anti-ship missiles are more likely hundreds of kg). Said nukes are mass-produced, they're just not used very often in space warfare because of the effectiveness of point-defense. They also have antimatter warheads, so common that private corporations have access to them (e.g. the Noveria Development Corporation).[[/note]] and teratons with strategic weapons),[[note]]e.g. the ship-portable turian antimatter bomb that wiped out every living thing within a 500 kilometer radius on Tuchanka, or the bombs that the krogan used on rachni hives that made huge sinkholes in planets.[[/note]] supported by hundreds of thousands of 'militia' ships.[[note]]Ships with warship-level armaments but negligible armor and little to no shielding. Every single one of the quarians' 50,000 civilian vessels fit into this category (except the "several hundred" actual warships), for example, and they're ''not'' the only race that does this.[[/note]] They're also quite casually capable of throwing planetoids at each other's worlds for petaton range impacts: the description of Palaven's moon, Menae, notes that the krogan could have done that 1,400 years ago, and the ''The Arrival'' has a small black ops team launching an asteroid "the size of a small planet" at a mass relay using little more than jury-rigged civilian equipment; even the small science team in ''Bring Down the Sky'' had the equipment to ram an asteroid over twice the size of the Chicxulub impactor into a nearby planet fast enough to wipe out its biosphere. Finally, several planet descriptions (e.g. Joab, Etamis, Gaelon) note the ability of their mass accelerator weapons to destroy entire biospheres, [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/War_Assets/Alien#Volus_Dreadnought_Kwunu "char planets three times over"]], or even shatter moons (triple digit teraton to low petaton range), indicating either greater-than-stated per-shot yields or truly ridiculous levels of sustainability in their firepower (as in "ships can fire for weeks straight without stopping as long as that's all they have to do" sustainable).[[note]]This is backed up in ''Mass Effect 3'', where we see from space hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of planets like Earth and [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/masseffect/images/0/07/Priority_Palaven.png/revision/latest?cb=20140519061839 Palaven]] reduced to blazing orange slag within less than a day of the Reapers attacking them. The Reapers are more advanced than the younger races, but the codex specifically notes that their firepower is less than an order of magnitude greater.[[/note]] But, as their last major military conflict was 1,400 years ago, their military feats generally pale in comparison to their economic and industrial ones. The Systems Alliance Navy's expansion to near-peer status with the great powers within less than three decades, despite humanity having orders of magnitude less population and industry than them, indicates that they could go ''way'' higher if they wanted to.[[note]]Unfortunately, given that the only total war seen in the series lasts a few months and ''starts'' with the Reapers razing every homeworld, they never get the chance.[[/note]]
105*** A single dreadnought's main gun requires 81 terawatts to power[[note]]19.36 kilotons per second = 81 terajoules.[[/note]] assuming the railgun is 100% efficient; if it's not then the figure goes even higher. For reference, the entire human race currently generates 16 terawatts. The 156 broadsides that dreadnoughts carry, given that they run ~40% of the width of the ship (a dreadnought being about 375 meters in width), would be ~150 meters long and output ~3.63 kilotons per second, requiring 15.18 terawatts each; 283 terawatts per side, 566 terwatts in total. None of this is counting the power output of their hundreds of point-defense laser turrets. As an aside, the galaxy's tens of thousands of warships are collectively using hundreds of petawatts to single digit exawatts (1 exawatt = 1e+18 watts) just by virtue of sitting around with the aforementioned double to triple digit terawatt shields turned on. Fleet battles involving thousands of ships not only projecting shields, but maneuvering and firing, should easily be in the exawatt range for as long as they last.
106*** It's worth noting that per the codex even a puny ~10,000 ton frigate has the power generation capacity to mount a Thanix cannon,[[note]]Which, unlike conventional mass accelerators, are NOT constrained by length.[[/note]] which explicitly gives it equivalent firepower to a cruiser's main gun, without actually changing out the drive core. This means that even these mass-produced fodder ships about 1% the mass of the main combatants (cruisers) can generate and use double digit terawatts (1e+13+)... or more than the entire Earth currently uses.
107*** [[https://i.imgur.com/AfxKlqq.jpg The asteroid scenes]] in ''Bring Down the Sky'' and ''the Arrival'' are particularly notable for the power of the thrusters that these small organizations are using to move 20+ km rocks. A conservative calculation based on the given distances and visuals puts the three engines in the former scene as generating 6.12 teratons of energy over the course of the four-hour burn, with a power of 1.7 x 10[[superscript:18]] watts. If this operation represents the same proportion of humanity's power usage in the ''Mass Effect'' universe as the Saturn V did to modern humanity - high-ball to be sure, as these thrusters are commercially available even to a small colony and are never implied to be at all advanced or expensive - this would put humanity pretty close to 1.7 x 10[[superscript:20]], thus putting all known species around 1 x 10[[superscript:22]] collectively as humanity itself represents less than a percent of the galactic population and economy. If (as in the ''Star Trek'' example below) such a thruster represents proportional power usage closer to that of a modern supercarrier, the figures would be roughly 1.7 x 10[[superscript:23]] for humanity and 1.7 x 10[[superscript:25]] for everyone. Either set of figures is consistent with a high Type I.
108** In addition, as a society they have at least millions of starships (it's repeatedly shown that even not-particularly-wealthy private citizens like ex-commandos[[note]]In ''Initiation'', a retired asari commando buys the mothballed destroyed ''Audacity'' with just her retirement fund.[[/note]] or young pilgrims[[note]]Quarian pilgrims often bring back ships to the Migrant Fleet as a rite of passage, usually bought with wages after some period of work.[[/note]] can buy 100+ meter ships pretty easily) each capable of traveling at thousands of times c ''without'' mass relays as well as pulling off kilo-gees of straight-line accelerations at sublight.[[note]]See: the Normandy going from high orbit to the Earth's surface in seconds during the beam run at the end of ''Mass Effect 3'', or a dinky shuttle going from hundreds of thousands of kilometers distant to within a planet's atmosphere in the opening of ''Mass Effect: Andromeda'' over the course of, oh, 15 seconds.[[/note]] Shepard notes in the second game that a decent-sized ship only costs a few hundred thousand credits (keep in mind that the nearly 200-meter Normandy SR-2 is repeatedly referred to as a small ship). Common freighters are each noted as capable of hauling millions of tons of cargo. Large space stations are dirt common pretty much everywhere; ''Initiation'' notes that humanity alone has built "thousands" of them, which suggests hundreds of thousands to millions in total when you remember how small humanity is and the recency of their arrival.
109** [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Viantel A single industrial outpost world]] in a recently-colonized system that houses less than a hundred million people features a fuel strip-mining operation that excavated 72 quadrillion cubic meters of material over the course of 568 years (72 quadrillion tons assuming water density). Low-balling it hard, if even 1% of that mass is fusible (720 trillion tons) in any kind of energy generating capacity at a pitiful 10% capture rate that would indicate usage of over 1e+23 joules per day, or over 1.15e+18 watts. Scaling this up to the rest of their civilization easily gets you 1e+22+ watts just for their fuel mining operations, much less anything else they do. Additionally, this means that this single operation had the capacity to ship 347 million tons of material per day on average, necessitating a ''really'' sizable freighter fleet making daily runs.
110** [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Trikalon Private corporations can build planet-encircling particle accelerators]] [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Cerberus_Daily_News_-_July_2010#07.2F05.2F2010_-_Meteor_Strike_Delays_Construction_of_Susskind_Supercollider 13,508 km in circumference]], which combined with the above might move them into borderline territory rather than solid Type I. Another private corporation built a [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Codex_(Mass_Effect:_Andromeda)/The_Andromeda_Initiative#The_Nexus_2 multi-billion ton ship]] that can sustain the population of a large city and which is capable of extragalactic travel in a (successful) attempt to establish colonies in the Andromeda galaxy. Note that the funding for said project was provided solely by a single person (at least, it was seen as plausible for that to be the case) who is referred to simply being ''one'' of the richest humans; there should be at least several people with comparable wealth to her among the humans alone and hundreds if not thousands of comparably wealthy people throughout the galaxy.[[note]]For context, there are about 2,200 billionaires on Earth today.[[/note]] This shows the level of resources even tiny entities (compared to trillions-strong interstellar empires) have to throw around in the setting. Cerberus, a fringe terrorist group, also gives us some context. They built several multi-million ton space stations in secret, [[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/mass-effect-calcs-and-general-mass-effect-tech-discussion-and-number-crunching.315746/page-37#post-69438055 at least one]] multi-''billion'' ton station slash shipyard, and when you get to their main bases, you see easily [[https://i.imgur.com/KYHjxO7.jpg dozens of]] [[https://i.imgur.com/FflHk84.jpg heavy cruisers]], and at least one [[https://i.imgur.com/26Bva06.jpg dreadnought]]. Note that the cruiser models they use are over 700 meters long and not much different from dreadnoughts. [[AllThereInTheManual Background material]] specifies that warships are so cheap relative to the size of the galactic economy that even private corporations with mere fractions of the resources of the interstellar empires they serve can still build entire fleets (Binary Helix has a "a large fleet" with which to invade Garvug according to Cerberus Daily News- note that they are a ''biotech company''). Cerberus got 60+ heavy cruisers and a dreadnought essentially just by skimming off the top of shell companies. Which, considering a moderately popular soft drink company has yearly revenue of over 4.38 quadrillion credits,[[note]]Tupari's ads claim they sell 12 trillion bottles per day.[[/note]] is quite easy to believe.
111** They can safely contain and use antimatter both for weapons and starship fuel, and have industrial-scale production of it. [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Codex/Ships_and_Vehicles#Starships:_Thrusters Antimatter-matter annihilation]] is what powers their warships. Their civilian ships with lower accelerations and no shields have to make do with D-H3 fusion power, which is still solidly Type I technology.
112** All that said, all of them are dependent on the Mass Relay network for cross-galaxy travel (they let ships traverse tens of thousands of light years in ''seconds'' rather than 15 light years a day as regular FTL drives do), which was built by a previous advanced civilization, with very limited if any attempts to reverse engineer it. However, it's not something they lack the ability to do, simply the desire; Matriarch Aethyta noted building more as a possibility, but her peers laughed at her when she suggested they do it. The ending of ''Mass Effect 3'' confirms this. It's stated that the younger races will be able to rebuild the mass relays that were destroyed, something that they apparently manage pretty quickly given that the network is repaired fast enough for galactic civilization to survive and none of the characters in the ending slides visibly age. See the Reapers' section for why that's a huge deal.
113** The Crucible that a single middle power[[note]]The Systems Alliance can build it even assuming Shepard screws up literally everything and gathers next to no allies. At that point it's a barely-functional piece of crap that destroys Earth, but the energy output and mass of materials is still there.[[/note]] builds in a few weeks exceeds the energy output of the Milky Way galaxy in ''visible light alone'' in ''Mass Effect 3'''s ending, albeit in short bursts. As they have the blueprints and the power that produces it did so with substantially less than 1% of the galaxy's industry and wealth, there's no reason that the younger races couldn't start mass-producing Crucibles now. Combined with the potential to reverse-engineer all of the Reapers' technology that's now strewn around their planets, post-''3'' they're definitely well on the way to Type II.
114** The Kett Empire from ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' is only glimpsed via a stranded expeditionary force and a few vague hints from flavor text, and is generally less advanced than the Milky Way races (most of their warships aren't shielded, for instance, and they don't even use spinal guns). Despite this, what information we do get (such as that a single mid-level military commander had access to two dozen kilometer-long cruisers), plus their general scale as an interstellar empire that has assimilated over a thousand species, should place them here.
115** The various independent world-states and [[NGOSuperpower NGO Superpowers]] out in the Attican Traverse and Terminus Systems have an overall similar tech base, but are far weaker and poorer than Citadel Space, to the point that mid-sized corporations in Citadel Space can take over entire planets out in the Terminus and Attican. Most of them also have populations merely in the tens to hundreds of millions (Zorya, Anhur, Garvug, Illium, Ekuna, etc.). Still, the potency of said technology should render them low to mid level Type Is individually, especially the ones with populations measured in the billions (Talis Fia, Caleston, Korlus, etc.); as noted, single mining operations get to borderline Type I on their own.
116** In ''Andromeda: Annihilation'', a bioterrorist notes that killing ''trillions'' of Citadel citizens wouldn't do much, because "there's far too many of them on too many worlds to really change the balance of power." The implications of this are pretty ridiculous.
117* ''VideoGame/StarCraft'':
118** The zerg species as a whole could qualify in an unconventional way. They are a rapidly-breeding and assimilating horde of insectoid aliens. They have a population of tens of billions on dozens of planets, with individual zerg ranging from the size of a large dog to eleven-kilometer [[LivingShip bio ships]] capable of fairly rapid (and unusually precise) FTL travel via wormholes. They don't have machines, rather assimilating or spawning subspecies to do specific jobs, but these forms would use a good amount of energy just from accomplishing generally the same feats as machines (e.g. Hydralisks can launch their javelin-like spikes at hypersonic speeds, Overlords can generate sufficient thrust and lift to perpetually fly despite probably massing hundreds of tons, Ultralisks can move their massive weight around at highway speeds). In the comics it's noted that they've colonized/infested "over a hundred" worlds, but judging by the games and short stories the bulk of their population in the Koprulu sector is concentrated on two: Aiur and Char (prior to this the main Swarm was nomadic), with five and ten billion zerg respectively (though only Char is controlled by the main Swarm, the Aiur brood is Amon's). On a per capita level their forces generally trade unfavorably with the above-mentioned terrans, hence the ZergRush (in fact, the novels and short stories have multiple instances of zerg attacks being thrown back by small numbers of civilians armed with shotguns and mining equipment). WordOfGod is that, despite how fast they breed, there is an unspecified limit on how far the main Swarm can expand with ''Heart of the Swarm'' implying that expanding past an unspecified point causes them to fracture from the HiveMind, and the feral zerg and break-off queens wouldn't even get to borderline Type I without it (or rather, no individual zerg faction would), so the controlling intelligence of the main Swarm intentionally limits their expansion. Were one to count every single zerg form in the galaxy (''Nova Covert Ops'' shows there's a lot of hidden smaller swarms in the Koprulu sector alone), including the primals, the ferals, and Amon's brood (before the protoss destroy it), they could have a large enough population to get to a low Type I, though the main Swarm which bases itself on a single planet might be closer to borderline territory. While not much above the terrans in per capita energy usage (if at all) and nowhere near the protoss, they stay competitive with the other two races via the fact that every single zerg form in the Swarm is some kind of combatant, giving them an enormous numbers advantage out of proportion with their population.
119** The Protoss Empire has Warp Gates, shields, the ability to distort localized space, hundreds of ships ranging from 140-meter Arbiters to nearly 1.4 km carriers, and no small amount of [[EnergyWeapon Frickin' Laser Beams]], AntiMatter, and [[PlasmaCannon Plasma Cannons]]. Even individuals and their robots can create local spacetime distortions for short-range teleportation, though they do use this using explicit [[MagicByAnyOtherName magic]], so power output is hard to nail down. Their more mundane and quantifiable tech like their fleet, the size of their cities and space stations, and the general yields of their ship-to-ship weapons (not extraordinarily far removed from that of the terrans) puts them at the lower end of this territory. Their successor polity, the Daelaam, has mostly the same technology, but on a smaller scale due to the bulk of the protoss population having being lost in the fall of Aiur. Post fall they're stated to be much less numerous than the above-mentioned terrans,[[note]]So says the Field Manual: "Greatly outnumbered by the teeming zerg, and considerably smaller than even the sector's terran factions, a shrinking protoss civilization today faces the once inconceivable possibility of racial extinction."[[/note]] and this was implied to have been the case even before Aiur's fall. This would be consistent with given planetary populations: by ''[=StarCraft=] 2'' they're down to one major planet (Shakuras) of 194 million people and a few marginally populated outlying ones, while post-''2'' their population is even smaller (though recovering) due to their losses in the End War. ''Legacy of the Void'' reveals that the ancient protoss could build ''miniature stars'' to power three 75 kilometer long ships the size of [[PlanetSpaceship planetoids]], but that knowledge is lost now and, these being artificial stars with physically impossible attributes,[[note]]They're less than a hundred meters in diameter and don't affect people standing right next to them.[[/note]] their actual power output is unknown beyond the minimum required to provide thrust for such massive objects.
120*** The first game's manual explains that the Protoss Empire has something of a NonIndicativeName: they rule hundreds of worlds in the Koprulu sector, but due to their [[AlienNonInterferenceClause doctrine of non-intervention]], the great majority of those planets aren't actually inhabited by protoss, but primitive pre-spaceflight species that are under the Empire's dominion and protection without knowing it. In ''Brood War'', and later ''Legacy of the Void'', the Protoss Empire is consistently treated as if it had exactly one majorly populated planet, that being Aiur with a few billion people (the remnants of the empire flee to the Nerazim homeworld of Shakuras rather than going to any other world, even though the Zerg Swarm explicitly only attacked Aiur). At the end of ''Legacy'', Artanis outright says that all that's left of their species are those on the fleet and those on the planet below.
121*** Then there's the issue of [[OrbitalBombardment Purification]]. In short, early sources presented protoss fleets as being capable of inflicting a [[ApocalypseHow Class 5 apocalypse]] on a planet in a matter of minutes, giving each fleet power output on the order of a hundred gigatons of TNT equivalent a second (~4.18 x 10^20 watts). However, later sources stepped back on this, e.g. showing "purified" worlds to be inhabitable within a few years rather than being lifeless rocks, with one comic having Raynor revisit his still-intact house on the "purified" Mar Sara. ''[=StarCraft=] 2'' also goes with a lower-end interpretation of protoss bombardment capabilities, with several missions being premised on the idea that even destroying a single base or city would take a considerable amount of time for a protoss capital ship to accomplish, long enough that the player can stop them. This was probably done to explain why a civilization capable of such massive power output still has armor and DeflectorShields on their capital ships that fail against clearly sub-kiloton ordnance like scourge plasma bombs and Viking missiles, and why the Yamato Cannon (explicitly said in multiple sources to be equal to a "small" or "low-yield" nuclear bomb) can one-shot protoss ships with six to eight orders of magnitude less power output. The Field Manual splits the difference by saying that purification weapons are powerful but are not used in ship combat (something they are never seen doing in the games anyway),[[note]]It lists the carrier as having "no weapons for standard combat."[[/note]] though it doesn't explain exactly why.
122** The mysterious United Earth Directorate is probably around here. According to the ''[=StarCraft=] Field Manual'', the UED has a broadly similar technological base to the aforementioned terrans despite [[SpaceAgeStasis having had hundreds of years longer to advance]],[[note]]The Field Manual reads: "The UED and Koprulu terrans share a history, so force capabilities are similar."[[/note]] which fits with ''Brood War'' where UEG units and terran units were nigh-identical. They've colonized many worlds outside of Earth in the past 250 years and are known to be significantly larger in scale than the terran polities, but the difference doesn't appear to be anywhere near as large as the initial population difference 250 years ago would imply. ''I, Mengsk'' that the expeditionary fleet they sent to the Koprulu sector (which itself was never shown to have more than a couple hundred battlecruisers in ''Brood War'') was a significant investment for them and that they sent their best admiral to lead it, placing a soft limit on the scale of their civilization. Maybe an order of magnitude larger than the combined terran factions, or thereabouts (plus they're a unified authoritarian state rather than being divided into three great powers and several minor ones). Their barely-referenced, rare, high-end technology could push them somewhat higher, but unless it's truly insane compared to their normal stuff, it likely wouldn't even be enough to shift them another tenth of a point on the scale.
123* The New Republic, the Rebel Alliance, and the breakaway Confederacy of Independent Systems from ''Franchise/StarWars'' (as well as the middle powers, e.g. Hutt Space) all fit here nicely, with the CIS being a high Type I and the others being smaller (though by nowhere near as much even a couple tenths of a point would imply). The Galactic Republic (from which the other factions break off or succeed) is a very old galactic society with extremely fast FTL (albeit via use of hyperspace, and thus with no clear energy usage) and dirt common spaceships even among civilians,[[note]]Luke in the very first film comments that "I could almost buy my own ship" for ten thousand credits, presumably one similar in size to a YT-1300 light freighter.[[/note]] the films make mention of "thousands" of populated systems, and at least some of those systems contain [[CityPlanet city planets]] like Coruscant, which had a trillion people. The Outer Rim (where the bulk of the CIS's territory is located) is considerably less developed and populous than the Core Worlds, but still has a similar technological base and powerful [[MegaCorp Mega Corps]] capable of producing thousands of [[MileLongShip kilometer-long warships]][[note]]The canon tech guide ''Star Wars: On The Front Lines'' said that a little over a third of the CIS's navy was committed to the Battle of Coruscant. Another canon tech guide, the ''Star Wars Encyclopedia of Starfighters and Other Vehicles'', said that the Republic deployed 1,000 Venator-class attack cruisers in that battle. As the battle went on for a while and was competitive, presumably that third or so of the Separatist fleet contained around 1,000 of its own equivalents to the Venator-class; that is, the ''Providence''-class dreadnought and ''Munificent''-class cruiser, at 1,088 meters and 825 meters respectively.[[/note]] and billions of [[MechaMooks battle droids]][[note]]''Battlefront 2'''s unit description for CIS units gives this figure.[[/note]] to wage a galactic war. The Rebel Alliance doesn't have a continuous territory like the CIS did, but was known to have held sway over many worlds and was able to field a decent-sized fleet to challenge the fractured Imperials in the aftermath of Endor.
124** Ship-to-ship firepower is nowhere near as [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale insane]] as in ''Legends'', with capital ship armaments rather consistently ranging from "heavy 20th century naval ordnance" to "small tactical nuclear weapon" in per shot firepower, and large ships being vulnerable to fighter-mounted weaponry that is clearly sub-nuclear in scale such as proton torpedoes. However, it must be considered that even this level of firepower still involves gigajoules of energy being outputted per heavy turbolaser per second with no need to reload, that capital ships can carry dozens of these guns, and that they can keep output up continuously as long as the ship's reactor doesn't break. For an example of how insane this is, a single ''Providence''-class dreadnought has 124 heavy turbolasers;[[note]]''Star Wars: Ships of the Galaxy'' gives the figures of 14 heavy quad mounts and 34 heavy dual mounts.[[/note]] assuming each one's per-shot firepower was about on par with 10 tons of TNT (rather consistent with ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars'' and ''ComicBook/DarthMaulSonOfDathomir''), the ship's guns alone would require 5,190 gigawatts (~30% of Earth's capacity) to power at 100% efficiency (more if the system is less efficient, obviously), much less every other part of the ship like the shields and engines, both systems necessarily having much greater output than the guns. There were at least ''thousands'' of ships like this in the Clone Wars, plus a larger number of smaller but still huge ones.
125** It is a plot point that, unlike in ''Legends'', ships can't casually wipe out planetary populations with [[OrbitalBombardment orbital bombardment]] alone. Instead, even the Galactic Empire finds it more convenient to just deploy weather-control satellites to mess up the planet's climate; and even when they do resort to orbital bombardment, they complement their turbolaser batteries with "propulsion bombs" (e.g. in ''Aftermath: Life Debt''). The energy output of those devices are considerable on their own, though.
126** However, it should be noted that the disparity between worlds is rather huge. Due to the difference in not only population density, but standards of living as well (a lot of worlds border on being pre-modern in their general tech level, besides [[SchizoTech their spaceships and laser guns]]), it is quite possible that the Coruscant system alone uses more energy than the entire Outer Rim. If all of the galaxy's territory was as well-developed and populous as the Core Worlds, the GR, CIS, and NR would be [=Type IIs=]s just thanks to sheer mass. There's very little crossover between Coruscant and, say, Kashyyyk, or even Ryloth. Basically, some worlds would be Type 0, while others would come close to borderline Type II just on their own.
127* ''Franchise/StarTrek'':
128** The United Federation of Planets is composed of a whole group of Type I-ish civilizations banded together for truth, justice, and [[strike:the American Way]] interesting plotlines. The Dominion is clearly (though not unreachably) stronger than the Federation, the Klingon Empire is a peer power to it, and the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassian Union, and the Breen Confederacy are within striking range of them but clearly weaker.
129*** In one episode, the power output of the ''Enterprise-D'' is given at "12.75 billion gigawatts" (12.75 exawatts), which is the same power output of an entire Type 1.3 civilization. The figure is consistent with (though isn't necessarily required for) a figure in the ''Star Trek: Voyager'' episode "Good Shepherd", where Janeway casually orders an extra five terawatts to boost the sensors, which is approximately one third of all the power currently generated by the human race. It does this without a single hiccup in the main power of the rest of the ship or effort from the crew besides a couple of buttons being pushed. And bear in mind that ''Voyager'' is a very little ship in comparison to the ''Enterprise-D''.
130*** For comparison, a Nimitz-class carrier's output is about .001% the total global output, and a Saturn V's was about 3% (150 gigawatts). So, assuming a similar ratio between the ''Galaxy''-class and the Federation, the whole civilization would be between 4 x 10[[superscript:20]] and 1 x 10[[superscript:24]]W, solidly in high Type I territory. This seems to be in line with the widespread use of fusion and bulk antimatter for power.
131*** [[https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Watt Watt]] [[https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Joule figures]] are thrown out a few times across the franchise, usually in the context of ship shielding and weapons. The given figures suggest that smaller ships/boats like runabouts and patrol craft have shields and guns in the low gigajoule range,[[note]]A couple episodes of [=DS9=] have a runabout's shields being knocked out by a triple digit megawatt weapon, a "small phaser bank" is said to be around 4.2 gigawatts in "Who Watches The Watchers", an unspecified Cardassian warship in "The Wounded" is stated in the ship's display to have 700 megawatt disruptors, and a Breen weapon is lauded for its ability to cut through 4.6 gigawatt shields on unspecified "vessels". Note that in many episodes, a runabout can take a hit or two from the guns of ~90 meter Jem'Hadar attack ships without losing its shields, putting their weapons around the single digit gigajoule range as well.[[/note]] while capital ships have shields and guns in the low terajoule range.[[note]]See for example the Enterprise-D getting its shields knocked out by a few seconds of fire from a 400 gigawatt particle weapon in "The Survivors", the Enterprise-D's shields getting overloaded by a single digit terawatt range emitter in "The Nth Degree", fifteen shielded Klingon Birds of Prey getting completely obliterated by subsonic collisions with Jem'Hadar fighters in "Tears of the Prophets", a Bird of Prey destroying a Jem'Hadar battlecruiser with a similar collision in "Sacrifice of Angels", and the multiple other instances in the franchise of shielded ships getting damaged or destroyed by [[RammingAlwaysWorks subsonic ramming events]] (most notably, the Enterprise ramming the Scimitar in ''Nemesis''; the Scimitar explicitly had 70% shielding but it failed to stop a ship ramming it at slow enough speeds that it took ten seconds to cross its own length).[[/note]] So either the 12.75 exawatts figure is wrong or the energy is used for FTL travel and propulsion but can't be routed into weapons and shields for various reasons. Note that some lines actually outright state that whole Federation ships have power output in the single digit terawatt range (most blatantly Riker's statement in "The Dauphin"), but they're generally considered low-end outliers. The true figure is likely between that and the 12.75 exawatts figure.
132*** Moreover, the territory the Federation covers is actually relatively small; on at least two occasions (by Sisko in the ''Deep Space 9'' pilot and by Picard in ''First Contact''), it's stated to comprise less than 200 planets, most of which aren't densely populated. Real-world star systems show up [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_planetary_systems_in_fiction relatively often]] in the franchise, most of which are within a few hundred light-years of Earth (Vulcan itself is only 17 light-years away), and systems a few hundred light-years from Earth are considered extremely far-flung. This makes sense, given that FTL travel in most of the franchise hovers around [[https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Warp_factor a few hundred times c]]. The Federation's peacetime fleets are also pretty small (and most powers are weaker than them), [[http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Database/Query-ST.php?Series=&Category=Size+and+Scope&EpName=&Keywords=&Quotes=&Analysis=&Submit=Submit with mere dozens of ~250-700 meter ships considered a massive force]]. No wonder the [[TheMainCharactersDoEverything Enterprise]] is so often [[ItsUpToYou "the only ship in the sector"]].
133** The Borg Collective probably weighs in as a pretty hefty Type I, with galaxy spanning communications networks, massive fleets, extensive space installations, hundreds of civilizations assimilated, and a fairly decent ability to beat up other Type Is. Just one Borg Cube was enough to smash through the better part of the Federation's peacetime navy - twice.
134** It's worth noting that ''Star Trek'' civilizations actually advance relatively rapidly, with the difference in technology level between the 22nd (''Enterprise''), 23rd (''The Original Series'', ''Discovery''), and 24th (''The Next Generation'', ''Deep Space Nine'', ''Voyager'', ''Picard'') centuries being considerable. In the 2009 reboot, a civilian mining ship from the 24th century cuts a swath through the collective navies of the 23rd. So it's possible that the 24th century powers belong in a different tier than those of the 23rd, and they definitely are higher than those of the 22nd (as detailed above).
135** The Iconian Empire is an interesting one to call as the bulk of them died out two hundred thousand years ago and thus we really do not know that much about them, however they still rank as among ''Star Trek's'' most advanced civilisations, able to literally walk across the galaxy with no more difficulty than walking across a small room. Their technology is considered so advanced and dangerous in fact that when one doorway turned up on ''Series/DeepSpaceNine'' the Federation had no problem in teaming up with the Dominion in order to destroy it (with both sides recognising that effectively the war would be over if they let the other have it and thus decided that it would be safer if neither side did.) One episode of ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'' also has them as one of the candidates considered by Federation security with the technology to create the dark matter anomaly, an artificial phenomenon capable of destroying anything within twelve AU's of its location.
136* The Zentradi of ''Anime/{{Macross}}'' are the slowly decaying remnants of [[{{Precursors}} an ancient (perhaps Type II) civilization]]. At the time the series takes place, they are probably mid- to high-Type I. In the course of the various series and movies they become progressively assimilated by humanity, which is itself an upwardly mobile Type I.
137* ''Series/StargateSG1'': Asgard and their enemies the Replicators are tough to call. They are among the most powerful active civilizations (if the Replicators can really be called that) in the setting, but they don't do a whole lot of big, Kardashev-Scale-bumping stuff on screen, and the actual power use of their tech is largely not shown. Still, they're active on a scale that would suggest something in this category.[[note]]The Asgard have ships that can travel between galaxies in days, and the ability to collapse stars into black holes, and managed to ''disintegrate'' (not just destroy) an entire battleship, while the Replicators have the ability to completely and perfectly flatten a planet's surface.[[/note]]
138* Delphons were an alien race in ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' series of novels by the Russian science fiction writer Andrey Livadny. They had a civilization spanning several star systems, and were likely here.
139* The Krell, the (extinct) inhabitants of the ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet'' are clearly able to harness at least planetary power. They left behind a facility of enormous power (described as 9,600 thermonuclear generators occupying 33,000 cubic kilometers), and "harnessing the power of an exploding star"[[note]]though that was very likely hyperbole given that an exploding star uses far more energy than the mass-energy of a terrestrial planet[[/note]] though the purpose was initially unknown. It doesn't display a whole lot of power in the movie, but the device is put into self-destruct mode at the end of the film (when the not quite MadScientist realizes that the thing is far to dangerous to allow it to continue to exist) and blows up the entire planet.
140* The Consu, the most advanced race in the ''Literature/OldMansWar'' series, are explicitly described as "having a white dwarf yoked to the wheel" (a Dyson sphere). While Dyson Spheres are normally the territory of Type II and up, white dwarves typically radiate much less power than the Sun, putting the Consu here unless they possess an unusually bright dwarf.
141* The Ork and non-Imperium human factions of ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' are probably here. Compare with the Tau at borderline Type II, the Imperium and Eldar at clear Type II, and the Tyranids and Necrons in Other.
142** The Orks are extremely widespread, but they don't care much for the large industry needed to climb the Kardashev Scale. Hence, their most populous worlds don't remotely approach a Type I level of development, and the largest warbands only make it here due to occupying so many. On rare occasion they do, however, take over an existing industrial world and happen to be lead by a Mekboy or [[GeniusBruiser just a particularly cunning warboss]] who realizes the potential value of a planet that ''makes dakka'', and browbeats the horde into leaving the new toys intact. For the brief periods that they manage to survive occupation, these worlds can burgeon on Type II status as Mekboys push the WAAAGH! to its limits; factories and power plants are given [[TheRedOnesGoFaster a red paintjob]], and the planet and its infrastructure are strip-mined to produce MoreDakka than lesser orks ever dreamed of.
143** The non-Imperium human factions (such as the [[HufflepuffHouse oft-referenced but barely seen]] independent empires at the fringes) have somewhat similar technology and infrastructure, but operate on infinitesimal scales compared to the Imperium. Among these factions are the [[TabletopGame/RogueTrader Rogue Traders]]. Not ''all'' of the Rogue Traders: ''[[{{Fiction500}} each]]'' of the Rogue Traders. A single Trader dynasty will at least have one immense warship to its name, and often many more; the largest and longest-established have Imperial permission to operate battleships, fleets of cruisers, and smaller vessels as well, giving them the firepower to [[ApocalypseHow perform Exterminatus]]. They can also rule their own insterstellar empires. Despite their relatively meager showing, they earn some bonus points by ''literally'' abusing the scale for fun and profit, using their ships and Warrant of Trade to travel to lost human colonies and minor xenos species and [[IntrepidMerchant exploit the crap out of them]].
144* The Inner Sphere in ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' is at least a low Type I, with [[https://characters.battletech.com/inner-sphere two thousand]] inhabited planets in a 500 light year radius from Earth. Although some are barely colonies of a few thousand, there are enough multi-billion inhabitant planets (hundreds) to, combined with a lot of otherwise borderline Type I technology, reach a low but solid Type I just by numbers alone. However, their ships notably are only limited to single digit gee accelerations at sub-light, still use HE missiles, autocannons, and fission weapons as their primary armaments, and their FTL caps out at a few light years per day. (Instant jumps of up to 30 light years, but then about a week to recharge to make the next one). This makes it possibly the lowest-tech solid Type I in all of science fiction.
145* The races of the [[VideoGame/StarControl Alliance of Free Stars and Ur-Quan Hierarchy]] top out in this category, with the Chenjesu able to ''make use'' of the entire energy output of a star but unable to produce it themselves and the Mycon capable of high-speed planetary engineering.
146* The Eron Corporation (which is also the government in any meaningful sense of the word) in ''Literature/StarBridge'' taps power from Canopus. Exactly how much of its output they're using is unspecified, but there are hundreds of inhabited worlds and Eron itself is a planet-wide city over a hundred levels deep.
147* The humans of ''Series/RedDwarf'' are tough to call, as most of the action takes place on the titular mining ship far away from Earth, however all indications point towards them being incredibly advanced. Teleporters the size of your arm that can cross the galaxy, time and interdimensional travel in the palm of your hand, devices the size of a briefcase that can bend reality, FTL travel. All would require vast amounts of power. And in addition, despite being a run down old mining ship, Red Dwarf made it three million years into deep space without seemingly much hardship-- and given how many human Space Corp derelicts and colonies they keep running into this far out, we have long since left our own galaxy.
148* The Federation in ''Series/BlakesSeven'' have free reign over the entire galaxy to the point that they were able to lay a minefield in the void between the Milky Way and Andromeda in order to protect us from invasion (it works very well for a while too, which implies this to be a field that is many light years across). The problem, however, is that seemingly every colony that we see outside of Earth is (due to real world budget restraints) incredibly unimpressive. We're talking a BBCQuarry here or an orbiting space station there and little else. As such, despite the enormity of the energy no doubt required for its FTL capable space fleet, they probably don't actually expend all that much power in relative terms.
149[[/folder]]
150
151[[folder: Borderline Type II: Power use roughly equivalent to a G type star's luminosity. 1E26W ]]
152* The Sun puts out about 3.86 x 10[[superscript:26]]W, as a largish G type star using mostly proton-proton chain fusion, converting slightly over 4 million metric tons of mass into energy every second.
153* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': the Tau have have gone for density instead of volume, with their empire being a tiny dot on the galaxy map but containing enough settled worlds within to have a population of trillions. This is partly due to their relatively slow FTL. They also have dozens of client species, placing the total population of their hegemon likely into the tens of trillions, with massive armies and fleets capable of contending with those of other factions (albeit, mostly because they're unified and their enemies aren't; they're the least populous playable species after the Eldar). On a per capita level, their average technology is better than the Imperium's average technology, but not as good as that of the Eldar or the Imperium's high-end tech. Compare the Orks and non-Imperium human factions at Type I, the Eldar and Imperium at Type II, and the Necrons and Tyranids in Other.
154* The Kryptonians in the ''Franchise/DCExtendedUniverse'' had such powerful technology that a single World Engine out of thousands was capable of terraforming the Earth into a Krypton-like environment in less than a day. In their heyday they had a massive interstellar empire, but by the time they fell they were limited to one world due to self-imposed limits, which keeps them from climbing too high despite the potency of their technology.
155* The various human groups in the ''Literature/HyperionCantos'' are very much capable of building living Dyson Spheres/rings around stars, but seem to generally stick to single planets. By way of comparison the [=AIs=] are considerably more advanced (they can teleport planets) and are considered God-like by most people, and probably use rather more power. Likely scenario is a decent number of partially utilized stars for the humans, maybe somewhat more for the [=AIs=].
156* The [[{{Precursors}} Dom Ka'vosh]] from ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'', who built an almost galaxy-wide empire long before Humanity colonized the Sirius sector. You must enter a DysonSphere in the last mission, and nothing contradicts the possibility that there may be more of them.
157* The unidentified builders of the Dyson Sphere in the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "Relics". By the time of the episode they had abandoned it long ago and no further details are given.
158* The [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence Ascent to Transcendance]] victory text of ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'' indicates that building a structure intended to mimic the theoretical effects of the Dyson sphere is a project currently being undertaken and which will be completed relatively soon.
159* Vorlons of ''Series/BabylonFive'' are possibly this high based on some demonstrated planetary bombardment, but they're rather mysterious, so it's hard to say for sure. This is even more pronounced for their rivals the Shadows, which, though their superweapons seem to be considerably less powerful, are apparently in a stalemate with the Vorlons. It should be noted that the war between the Shadows and Vorlons was one of ideology rather than extermination. The fact that they could destroy each other but don't is pointed out in-universe.
160* The Protheans from ''Franchise/MassEffect'' probably belong here. They had all of the tech of the younger races (see above) plus planet-spanning ecumenopoleis (e.g. Feros), the ability to make stars go supernova, weapons that could "burn hundreds of worlds to a cinder" in a reasonable time frame as happened in their version of the Rachni Wars, universal psychic powers and cybernetic enhancement, and so on. They were also ''much'' more militarized than the younger races and had a larger population and industry due to starting space colonization thousands of years earlier in their species history; hundreds of thousands or even millions of warships with the above specs are not out of the question, and a population in the tens of trillions at least is a near-certainty. They even managed to scale down mass relays to the level of being able to shoot single truck-sized vessels across the galaxy.
161** ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' has the Jardaan, who created a vast and ludicrously powerful terraforming network controlled from a moon-sized mobile Dyson sphere, and at least one fully sentient race, with the implication they've created more. All that in just one system. SAM even name-drops the Kardashev Scale when talking about them, noting they're at least Type II. Presumably, the enemies who drove them off with a NegativeSpaceWedgie are in there as well, given they managed to cook up a NSW as a ''weapon''.
162** The elusive geth of ''Franchise/MassEffect'' may be in this territory. The small amount of their space shown features mid-to-high Type I scale development per system, with tens to hundreds of thousands of ships and orbital platforms, especially around gas giants. If they control a good part of a galactic arm, which they may, they'd be around here. By ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' they definitely fit here. They had just completed a Dyson sphere around their home star in which to house all Geth, before the Quarians declare war and start destroying it.
163* For most of the webcomic ''[[Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob's]]'' run, the Nemesites appear to be a Type I at most, but the "Cone" story reveals that they actually wield far more powerful technologies than we'd seen, and just have cultural mores against using the high-end stuff casually. A Nemesite Butterfly of Iron can cause a star to go nova on a whim, if it likes.
164[[/folder]]
165
166[[folder: Solid Type II: Clearly more power than a single G type star, but less than the Milky Way galaxy. ]]
167* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy Dwarf galaxies]] can get really small relative to bigger ones like the Milky Way. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segue_2 Segue 2 galaxy]], one of the smallest on record, is just over 220 light-years across with 1,000 stars. Its integrated luminosity is a mere eight hundred times that of Earth's sun, putting it close to 1 E 29 W.
168* On the other hand, the largest [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_supergiant_star blue supergiant stars]] can get up to a million times the Sun's luminosity, or 1 E 32 W.
169* According to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dArpj_VxxuQ this video]] by WebVideo/IsaacArthur, a Kardashev Type II civilization, which he believes humanity will become in less than 1000 years, would be unthinkably bigger than anything we think of today:
170--> It is a civilization in which a band most people have never heard of could fill a planet with their audience and have them packed in as tightly as a mosh pit. It is one where the heat energy released by everyone watching a prime time TV show, if released on the Earth, would incinerate every living creature on land. Going to war with such a civilization, even if you did not have a technological edge, would not be comparable to the United States fighting a small country like Malta, it would be like the entire NATO alliance picked a fight with a single kindergartner.
171* The unseen aliens in Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries have the ability to make stars. This might indicate mid-level Type II power use, depending on just how they go about it.
172* In ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'', the F'sherl-Ganni Gatekeepers were a Class II Civilization, utilizing Dyson Spheres (or 'Buuthandi' as they call them) widely. One of them was blown up in the early stages of the Teraport Wars, with (relatively) low loss of life and the Gatekeepers were apparently building a replacement by the time of their attempt at converting the Milky Way's core into a zero-point energy reactor. They're currently subservient to the local superpower -- the Fleetmind, a gigantic gestalt of unfettered [=AIs=] of all the major races led by the ex-[[ScaryDogmaticAliens Ob'Enn]] warship AI 'Petey', who took control of their reactor. The Fleetmind appear to be using its output to move the entire galaxy around, and the scraps left over to keep every other civilization in the galaxy in check.
173* The ''[[Creator/CordwainerSmith Instrumentality of Mankind]]'' controlled a significant region of the Milky Way, including several Type I worlds, had effective immortality (though they limited lifespans to 400 years for most its history), and could intimidate other interstellar empires with ''[[strike:balloons]] starships an AU in diameter''. It's explicitly stated more than once in-universe that creating a tachyon bubble (the faster-than-light travel method of the Lords) "consumes" a star. Whatever that means, precisely, it's almost certainly a ''lot'' more energy than simply using its entire power output.
174* At the maximum tech level in the ''VideoGame/SpaceEmpires'' games, you are capable of creating and destroying stars, nebulae, black holes, [[RingworldPlanet Ringworlds]] and [[DysonSphere Sphereworlds]].
175* In ''Literature/KnownSpace'', Puppeteers are pretty solidly Type II. They (claim to have) disassembled at least one entire solar system to build their Fleet of Worlds and accelerated it to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light. They bought the technology to do so from Outsiders, but they were still able to implement it on their own. The Fleet of Worlds itself uses ''at a bare minimum'' 5x Type I on a continuous basis, since there are five habitable planets and no energy input other than what the Puppeteers themselves generate. The fact that they bought the technology from the Outsiders also means two other things: There ''could'' be other species ''anywhere'' who also bought it, and somewhere there is the species the Outsiders ''bought it from''.
176* ''Manga/DragonBall'': the Freeza Force rules 70% of the known universe and has many soldiers capable of [[EarthShatteringKaboom destroying Earth-sized planets]] using blasts that only take seconds to charge, something that would at the bare minimum require exceeding Earth's gravitational binding energy of 2.49 × 10^32 joules.
177* ''Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse'':
178** Nidavellir is a Dyson sphere built around a neutron star and harnesses its energy in their forging of weapons like the Infinity Gauntlet, Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
179** Rocket Raccoon claims that the Hadron Enforcer he made in the first Guardians of the Galaxy Movie has the ability to destroy moons. Assuming they are the size of Earth's moon, that would require an energy output at least a hundred times greater than what the sun produces in a second.
180** Ego and the Celestials are beings capable of destroying planets with relative ease; the birth of a Celestial destroys whatever world that they were incubated in.
181** Asgard's bifrost can destroy a planet if left on for too long.
182** A random ship from Sakaar can withstand the extreme forces of the neutron star within the Devil's Anus in Thor: Ragnarok. In general, many interstellar races can use technology that is on par with Type 2 civilizations.
183* In ''VideoGame/StarCraft'': the [[{{Precursors}} Xel'naga]] created both the protoss and the zerg, giving them a good claim to this category. Like the protoss, they were much less prolific than humanity, and appeared to have spent most of their time at [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence higher pursuits]], otherwise they might have hit Type III. Amon, who might or might not be a Xel'naga, intends to [[ApocalypseHow wipe out all life in the galaxy]] although it's probably not something he could do more than once.
184* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': the Eldar and the Imperium of Man. Compare with the Ork and non-Imperium human factions (solid Type 1 civilizations), the Tau Empire (borderline Type II), and the Tyranids and Necrons in Other.
185** While numbers given sometimes vary, the Imperium of Man is noted at the beginning of every licensed ''40k'' production to have a million worlds. Among these are a myriad of hive worlds (32,480 according to one source), each probably rating about Type I (the ''smallest'' have billions of inhabitants, the largest hundreds of billions), and countless Type 0 worlds across much of the galaxy, with an overall population in the hundreds of trillions to quadrillions, with hundreds of thousands of warships[[note]]50-75 warships per sector not counting smaller patrol craft. If that sounds like a small number for a million worlds, keep in mind that what the Imperium considers a true "warship" is absolutely massive by definition: frigates and destroyers (of which there are several for every capital ship) average over 1.5 kilometers long, putting them about on par with a [[Franchise/StarWars Star Destroyer]], [[Franchise/StarTrek Jem'Hadar battleship]], or [[Franchise/MassEffect Reaper]]. Cruisers average over 5 kilometers long, and actual battleships dwarf even those at 8 to 12 kilometers.[[/note]] each capable of spitting out kilotons to gigatons with their guns and gigatons to petatons with missiles (albeit, mostly just by taking "regular" nukes and making them absurdly big). They also have hundreds of planets with their entire surfaces covered by industrial machinery. Their more powerful weapons can blow up planets, indicating mid-Type II scale power use, though that happens fairly rarely.
186** The Eldar were, at their height, capable of birthing and destroying stars. Much of their technology was lost with the Fall (such as the ability to maintain and expand the Webway, a pocket dimension used for safe interstellar travel), but they are still able to "capture" stars to use as power sources. They're scattered into disparate factions that pale in comparison to the Imperium's scale in the current timeline, but they're still numerous by most sci-fi standards (the Dark Eldar's capital ecumenopolis is referred to as dwarfing even the largest Imperial hiveworlds, and there are hundreds of Craftworlds some of which have populations in the billions) and far more advanced per capita than the Imperium. If the Craftworld/Exodite Eldar and Dark Eldar were each considered two coherent factions, both would still qualify as Type II, though they're more like loosely allied clans and states than anything; and said individual clans and states probably wouldn't.
187*** The Craftworld Eldar also have a disproportionately powerful navy. Their ships are generally better than the Imperium's per capita, and per p. 125 of the ''Battlefleet Gothic'' rulebook, there are several battle fleets of ten to twenty ships each per Craftworld on average, implying the Craftworld Eldar as a whole have many tens of thousands of warships.
188%%* Referenced in the AltText for [[http://xkcd.com/975/ this]] ''Webcomic/{{XKCD}}'' strip.
189* The ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'' Shard (Alternate Universe) of Heaven's Reach had humanity peak as this during the golden age; Dyson spheres, casual terraforming, and the conversion of nebulas into sentient supercomputers.
190* Humanity in the ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' series sits on this level pretty comfortably. But ''one'' of their warships routinely goes at about five Terawatts just to propel itself, and the very same ship is entirely able to destroy a planet rather casually simply by relativistic kinetic strikes (though they generally regard that as an atrocity). They also control much of the Milky Way, has completely harnessed gravity to the point that it is economical to ship perishables across thousands of light-years, and generally don't seem to have any problem with the energy availability.
191* The Precursors of ''VideoGame/StarControl'' fall near the upper end of this category, as they are able to engineer devices that can generate a star's level of power in a single massive burst and planeteering devices that can be used to trigger supernovae.
192* The Empire of the Star, from the ''Literature/{{Eldraeverse}}'', has two Dyson spheres - one bubble-type, one swarm. Only the bubble's for energy generation, but it alone puts them into Type II.
193* Samus's weapons in the ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'' series are slightly ridiculous. She can at least give output many times larger than humanity itself since the Volt Driver shoots "multi-terawatt bursts of electricity". She can also shoot blasts of absolute zero, miniature nukes, matter/antimatter annihilation weapons and neutrinos dense enough to kill things and weapons that can defeat ghosts. These weapons are all hand held and all of them are configurable to the same device. Although Samus is supposedly the exception, most of the more ridiculous examples come from Metroid Prime Hunters and originally belong to various other organizations. Combined with their warp drive technology an output larger than several stars is quite likely. No wonder the Metroid's ability to drain energy is considered so apocalyptic, everyone's technology uses massive quantities of energy!
194* In ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'' a fully built Dyson sphere generates 4000 energy units. By the time you get around to building one, your total energy generation is probably somewhere around there anyway, and building the sphere clearly puts you in type II.
195* In ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'', Species 10-C are described as being at least a 2 on the scale. They've encased an entire star system in a massive cloaking field/shield, can create an artificial pseudo-black hole that has a reach of five light years, and creates tears in space that connect points between different galaxies.
196* In ''Literature/{{Railhead}}'', the [[DeusEstMachina Railmaker]] has comfortably reached this level: it's created numerous {{Dyson Sphere}}s to power up it's [[PortalNetwork of K-Gates]] through ambiguous processes.
197[[/folder]]
198
199[[folder: Borderline Type III: power use roughly equivalent to the Milky Way galaxy's luminosity. 1E36W ]]
200* The Milky Way shines with about 4 x 10[[superscript:37]]W.
201* Human civilization in the ''VideoGame/{{Xenosaga}}'' series and to its extent, ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}'' by proxy, have come VERY close to this level thanks in part to the Zohar Engine, which in and of itself is a relic of a type IV or above civilization. Or, as some have suggested, just a well placed deus ex machina. The ships seemed to be powered by zero point energy units called "Logic Drives". In addition, the device shown at the end of the series, Zarathustra, is an extreme example of something that would be a type IV...being able to "reset" heat death.
202* The Pa'anuri of ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'' designed a gadget that overwrote the Milky Way galaxy with a pocket universe (ok, so they didn't build it themselves, but they provided the plans and 'observers' to the F'sherl-Ganni), and use entire ''star systems'' as projectiles, so they might be here, though that's highly dependent on the efficiency of their phlebotinum. Given that they're fighting over a single galaxy, they're probably not higher or much lower than this. They've also turned the core of Andromeda (the galaxy) into a zero-point generator. One that is thirty-five times larger than that of The Fleetmind.
203* The Galactic Republic/Empire of ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'', a galaxy-spanning society with very fast FTL and (depending on the source) at least a million heavily developed planets (upgrading the film's numbers of "thousands of systems"), is a very high Type II, and in the process of achieving Type III. The Death Star (see below) looks like a lot less of a technological outlier in this continuity.
204** Star Destroyers are given [[ApocalypseHow very impressive planetary-bombardment capabilities]] in ''Legends'' works, may generate as much power as stars, and almost certainly generate more power than the Earth has generated to date-- and they're big for a starship in the setting, but not ridiculous.
205** The Executor-class Star Dreadnought has a power core that puts out the same energy as a class G star. Regular old Star Destroyers are said to exceed the total energy consumption of some planetary civilizations over their entire history (potentially hundreds of thousands of years in Franchise/StarWars) when they jump to hyperspace.
206** The Yuuzahn Vong were easily in the Galactic Empire's league also.
207* Literature/TheCulture is an interstellar civilization that draws most of its power from the "[[AppliedPhlebotinum hyperspace Grid]]" rather than from the visible universe, and its ''demilitarized diplomatic ships'' are capable of destroying whole planets. Their theoretical power level might be even higher; they are stated to be a "post scarcity" society and could have the capability to harness energy that might possibly qualify them as a Type IV, but if so, they deliberately choose not to.
208* ''Franchise/DragonBall:'' ArcVillain Cell claimed to have been capable of destroying an entire solar system with his KiAttacks, which guidebooks and ancillary material confirm as true. This would require a minimum of 6.9 x 10^41 joules (this being our sun's gravitational binding energy), and he generates the blast capable of doing this over the course of at most a few minutes. Thus every [[SupernaturalMartialArts martial artist]] of his caliber or above is a personal borderline Type III.
209* The Galactic Union of E. E. Smith's ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series has starship engines (combined total-conversion nuclear power and ZeroPointEnergy devices) generating hundreds of exawatts (roughly 5x10^20 W) at peak power. A starship can have anything from one or two to hundreds of these engines. And most fleet battles engage thousands or millions of these ships, if not more. On top of that, those warships carry around [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill antimatter bombs of Earth-like mass]]. [[MoreDakka Oh, and they throw those around by the thousands.]]
210* Speaking of E. E. Smith, by the end of the Literature/SkylarkSeries, the protagonist Seaton is using entire galaxies as weapons.
211* ''Literature/StarMaker'' by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaf_Stapledon Olaf Stapledon]]. The stellar energy output of the whole galaxy is utilized by the ''Galactic Community of Worlds''. -- about 10[[superscript:36]]W
212* A rare single being example, Nuklear Man from Brian Clevinger's ''Literature/NuklearAge'' is capable of using half the power of ''every star in the Milky Way'' to kill [[RealityWarper Nihilus]].
213* The aliens in ''Film/{{Contact}}'' engage in [[{{Terraforming}} galactiforming]]. It's implied they're pushing the limits of their capabilities by doing this, though the extent of their works isn't very clear.
214* [[Series/StarTrekVoyager Species 8472]] could probably bring themselves up to this; it only takes eight of their bio-ships (around 50-100m long) a few seconds to destroy a planet, not to mention that one of these ships can one-shot a Borg Cube as if it was made of unshielded styrofoam despite said Cube being literally millions of times bigger than the bio-ship. What's most interesting about this is that all of 8472's technology is biological.
215* The [[VideoGame/StarControl Eternal Ones]] must regularly harvest all the "sentience energy" from an entire galaxy of sapient species (slaughtering every thinking being in that galaxy in the process) simply to survive, although by the end of the third game they've effectively 'trained' a galaxy to be 'milked' for energy without having to be butchered.
216* ''TabletopGame/EclipsePhase'': [[EldritchAbomination the ETI]]. Its exact nature and disposition is left up to the GM, but it is stated to be the dominant species in the Milky Way galaxy, regarding less advanced species as insignificant - unless they are headed for a [[TheSingularity singularity event]], in which case they might become actual threats to its dominion. For that reason, the ETI has seeded the galaxy with self-replicating Bracewell probe traps, which lure in nascent seed [=AIs=] and then destroy them.
217* The Therians from AT-43 can, at the very least, count as this. They are mentioned as having Dyson Shell'd the entire Milky Way galaxy. However, the army book also mentions that they had spread across the whole universe. Assuming this to be true, then it could be possible that the Therians are actually Type IV.
218* The Hama of ''Heroines of the Last Age'' regularly manipulate entire solar systems, and have redesigned a sizable chunk of the galaxy to their specifications. They are ''not'' the most powerful beings in the setting.
219[[/folder]]
220
221[[folder: Solid Type III: More power than a single galaxy, but probably less than a galactic supercluster. ]]
222* Quasars vary, but 1 x 10[[superscript:40]]W is a ballpark.
223* The Human Federation in the Golden Ages of Technology in ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' are at least on this level. One of the few men alive to recount it recalls devices called Sun Snuffers (guess what they do) and serpentine robots the size of Saturn's rings. They created whole species, merged flesh and metal, created devices that can perfectly replicate technologies, crossed the Galaxy with ease, and modified their own genomes. The Emperor has a small collection of man-portable weapons called Adrathic Destructors from the Dark Age that can erase matter at a molecular level, instantly. The Golden Throne allows the person within it to open up the roads to the Webway, which can allow people to cross dimensions, invisibly, or walk across the galaxy in hours (admittedly, they didn't build the Webway).
224* ''Literature/ManifoldTime'' by Creator/StephenBaxter. In the distant future, where the universe has almost ended due to entropy, descendants of humanity maintain vast Dyson nets around the supermassive black hole remnants of galaxies until they evaporate via Hawking radiation, accessing the last bit of power remaining from multiple galaxies.
225* Though the details are a bit sketchy, some remarks in Creator/HPLovecraft's ''Literature/TheWhispererInDarkness'' suggest that the Mi-go could be here, since they've mastered interdimensional travel and apparently rule entire galaxies in their native dimensions.
226* An offshoot of the Caeliar species in the ''Literature/StarTrekDestiny'' series. They had been shunted back in time nearly fourteen billion years into another galaxy. In the intervening years, they constructed a DysonSphere around ''every star in their new galaxy'', knowing that such overt technology would attract the attention of their past selves [[TimeTravelTenseTrouble living in the present]], which would let them destroy them for investigating and send a few meager remnants into the past, completing a StableTimeLoop. The fact that the Caeliar as a whole are borderline [[RealityWarper Reality Warpers]] who have [[ClarkesThirdLaw ridiculously advanced technology]] that makes them functionally immortal and can teleport away entire planets and civilizations that come bothering them probably pushes them close to a Type IV.
227* The Danannians from Creator/LEModesittJr's ''The Eternity Artifact'' were at least Type III, but it's entirely possible they were a borderline type IV+.
228* Although limited to just a portion of a single galaxy the major powers in ''Website/OrionsArm'' easily place themselves here thanks widespread use of mass/energy conversion technology. For example wormholes called grazers are used to devour entire stars over a period of decades and simultaneously convert most of their mass directly to energy. That implies about 10[[superscript:38]]W for each such device.[[note]]A star's mass is about 10[[superscript:30]] kg, just under 10[[superscript:17]] J per kg, "decades" is around 10[[superscript:9]]seconds[[/note]] Deep well industrial zones, operating at the edges of black holes, produce and use similar amounts of power.
229* In the ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'' mod ''Gigastructural Engineering'', the [[spoiler:Blokkats are a civilization capable of harvesting entire galaxies of their energy, having already done so to several including the one the Prethoryn Scourge is native of. Just the single fleet that comes to harvest your galaxy is more powerful than anything the player has seen so far, with the mothership having a shield using higher dimensions to be ''quadrillions'' of times stronger than mundane technology would allow. And this is just the fleet having come to the player's galaxy, there are thousands more, which may make the entire Blokkat civilization a Type-IV.]]
230[[/folder]]
231
232[[folder: Borderline Type IV: Power use approximately that of one galactic supercluster. 1E42W ]]
233* The Virgo Supercluster (where we are) emits about 1 x 10[[superscript:42]]W.
234* A gamma ray burst is around here, 1 x 10[[superscript:45]]W.
235* The [[{{Precursors}} Ancients]] of the ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} X-Universe]]'' series are probably borderline Type IV, and are actively trying for Type V (energy of a universe) or VI (multiple universes) so they can prevent the heat death of the universe.
236* The aliens seen in the final scene of ''Film/MenInBlack'' play with galaxies as marbles. The body weight of ''one'' of these aliens should be that of several ten-thousand galaxies (10^4) (and they are possibly just children). Now imagine a population of those aliens the size of the human population (several times 10^9), and a similar power consumption proportional to weight.
237[[/folder]]
238
239[[folder: Solid Type IV+: Power use approximately that of the observable universe. 1E49 W]]
240* The observable universe glows with about 2 x 10[[superscript:49]]W.
241* The highest possible transient power output for a point source is about 9 x 10[[superscript:51]]W based on Relativity predicting the formation of an event horizon around anything more. The final word on this will probably have to wait for a working theory of quantum gravity, however.
242* ''Franchise/DragonBall'': The franchise first [[SortingAlgorithmOfEvil leans]] into this level with the debut of Majin Buu, who's most powerful form's ''scream'' was noted to be enough to rip reality apart. The Gods of Destruction are each referred to as being powerful enough to generate enough energy to destroy entire universes as ''side effects'' of their clashes, making each one comparable to a Type IV civilization's power output. Jiren is even more powerful than they are, the Angels are even more powerful than ''that'', and the Omni-King Zeno makes all of the above look weak when he displays the ability to wipe out the entire multiverse with little more than a gesture.
243* ''Series/DoctorWho'' civilizations:
244** It has been claimed in expanded universe material that the Time Lords are ''the only'' '''Type V''' Kardashev civilization, capable of making use of the energy from the multiverse:
245*** Even a single Time Lord can rank well above galactic energy levels. The Doctor has caused at least one supernova when needed, which produce 10[[superscript:45]]W (100 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit_of_energy) foes]] over 10 seconds) during stellar collapse. The Master built 100,000 Black Hole Converters, which probably harness the same energy conversion of the gravitational potential energy to neutrinos.
246*** The ''Eye of Harmony'' is the primary power source for Time Lord civilisation and consists of an ultramassive star frozen in time at the moment it collapses into a black hole (as first revealed in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E3TheDeadlyAssassin The Deadly Assassin]]). This stellar event was created in the distant past by the earliest Time Lords, including Rassilon and Omega (who apparently [[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E1TheThreeDoctors has a thing for black holes]]). The TARDIS itself, as shown in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" and the TV Movie, contains either a direct link to this Eye of Harmony, or its own copy (which would explain how it continues to function despite Gallifrey's absence).
247*** The ''Hand of Omega'', a "remote stellar manipulator" invented by Omega, was a device used by the first Time Lords to ''customise stars''. It looks like a large metal coffin or casket, but it's likely to be extradimensional like a lot of Time Lord technology, with the casket form being its only extension into our universe. It was certainly capable of [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX2 causing a regular star to turn supernova and destroy its solar system in a matter of minutes]], and it's heavily implied, given what the Daleks try to do with it in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS25E1RemembranceOfTheDaleks Remembrance of the Daleks]], that the Hand of Omega might even have been used to ''create'' the original Eye of Harmony.
248*** An expanded universe novel, "The Taking of Planet 5", features a Time Lord weapon called a parallel cannon, that could open a pinhead-sized wormhole to the core of a star made of antimatter undergoing a supernova collapse. A single shot from a parallel cannon in the book destroyed an entire forest and vaporised a mountain. If a parallel cannon were left on ''it would punch a hole through Earth in three hours''. The Time Lords considered them antique, bordering on obsolete. And they are ''handheld weapons''.
249*** Other expanded universe novels ("Interference" and "Damaged Goods") introduce us to the Cold and N-Forms. Both are exotic extradimensional weapons that exist outside of regular spacetime and can make life [[Main/AndIMustScream very unpleasant]] (or, if they're feeling merciful, ''very short'') for Time Lord enemies.
250*** Their ultimate weapon (in the old series) is so powerful that only the Lord President of Gallifrey can wield it and requires a hidden key that only they know about in order to operate. The weapon in question is the Demat Gun. It doesn't just destroy a target, it ''erases'' the target from time and space so that the target never existed in the first place, with nobody even remembering what the target was.
251*** In the new series, we are introduced to the final work of the ancient Gallifreyans, "The Moment." Described as a "[[ApocalypseHow/ClassX3 galaxy-eater]]", it was so advanced and powerful, it actually became sentient and according to the legends (shown to be true), it developed a ''conscience'', producing an interface and taking the shape of someone its wielder would know (past, present or future) in order to communicate with them. The Time Lord General fully points out, how does one use a weapon of ultimate destruction, when it can stand in judgment of you? The Moment doesn't ''want'' to be used, and anyone intending to do so must face its judgement. It can also move people around through time (and even through time-locked events) with ease. It's even neatly portable, being roughly the size of a shoebox (although seeing as it's Time Lord technology it may very well be much BiggerOnTheInside). Russell T Davies wrote [[https://www.instagram.com/p/B-M0Y2ynZIR/ a short story about the end of the Time War for the 50th anniversary that was then published online]], and although definitely not canon because of "The Day of the Doctor", he suggests in it that the Moment is a very sophisticated type of N-Form.
252** The People, from ''[[Recap/DoctorWhoNewAdventuresTheAlsoPeople The Also People]]'', are described as being roughly on par with the Time Lords (to the extent that they actually have a non-aggression pact with them). The technology we see is at the "magic" level, but there's not enough specific information to pinpoint it. They seem to use it only for personal sensual gratification, however. The People are collectively a massive "CaptainErsatz" of [[Creator/IainBanks Iain M. Banks]]'s "Literature/TheCulture".
253** The Daleks were able to fight the Time Lords to a draw in the [[GreatOffscreenWar Last Great Time War]] before the Doctor consigned both of them to seeming oblivion, so one would conclude they are at least within an order of magnitude of the Time Lords. It is also worth noting that Davros individually and the Daleks generally (the Doctor once referred to them as "scavengers") have a strong desire to acquire Time Lord technology, and possibly the necessary intellect to at least marginally understand it. That they may have stolen most of what they had is reinforced by the fact that in most instances the Doctor seems to understand how their technology works.
254*** Possibly adding weight to the assertion of how powerful the Daleks were, the renewed Dalek Empire under Davros in the finale of Season 4 is definitely within striking distance of the Time Lords: capable of moving entire planets through time and space in the blink of an eye and keep them intact, putting them one second out of phase with the rest of the universe, operating a base that would give the Death Star inadequacy issues, and being fully capable of ''wiping out the entire multiverse.''
255* In ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'', the aliens seen [[http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010826 at the end]] of the "GOFOTRON Champion of the Universe" arc are able to contain hundreds of exploding stars within a sphere the size of a soccer ball. And this device was created by a ''waffle company''.
256* ''Literature/TheCulture'': The Overarch Bedeckants, the civilization that built the probe in ''Literature/{{Excession}}'' travel between universes so as to avoid extinction by being trapped in one when it undergoes heat death. Their lone probe brushed off the most powerful weapon the Culture wielded without any apparent effort. However, most of the information about the Excession comes from Intelligence report suppositions and a single largely incoherent rambling rant from the Excession itself.
257* Traditional view of a God creating the universe ex-nihilo means you need to take the current mass-energy content of the universe (4 x 10[[superscript:69]]J) and have expelled it in the time before time existed (one unit of Planck time, or 5.39124 x 10[[superscript:-44]] seconds), coming up with 7 x 10[[superscript:112]]W. This would put God, at a bare minimum, as a Type X.
258* A bizarre example in the ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' episode "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" -- the Earth and all the galaxies in the universe are shown to be part of Adam West's bedside table lamp.
259* At its absolute maximum power, this is said to be the strength of the Getter Emperor and its surrounding fleet in ''Manga/GetterRobo'', with its energy expenditure while combining being repeatedly compared to the Big Bang. Destroying entire planets with single weapons is treated as a trivial feat for ships in its fleet, and the Emperor's components themselves are planet-sized for most of their screentime and appear to have the potential to become ''galactic''-sized. Just being around it is shown to deal heavy damage to the space-time continuum, and in one bonus chapter, the Emperor is able to create a mess of interstellar civilizations across an entire galaxy simply to win a fight.
260* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', SufficientlyAdvancedAliens Kang and Kodos are apparently in possession of a ray gun capable of not only destroying ''all'' of reality, but eliminating ''God'' from totality to boot.
261* For the denizens of the ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' universe, traveling to the ''edge of the universe and back'' is a trivially easy task. As is killing everything everywhere. They also posses the ability to alter universal constants and other physics across the whole universe (scientists changed the speed of light in 2208), which can also be used to power technology (changing the properties of dark matter, 200% efficient engines [[note]]which the writers know would require breaking time symmetry of the laws of physics, i.e. changing them and exploiting that to extract more power than was put in[[/note]]). Planet exploding weapons are operated by single person demolition companies, the use of which is considered mundane. Multiple universes can be created by a lone inventor on the budget of a small delivery company (said delivery company having made only 100 deliveries in 10 years, as of 'The Mutants are Revolting'). In said delivery company, interstellar/intergalactic spaceships are as mundane as small pieces of wire. Said ships also treat being within near-point-blank range of a supernova as a minor inconvenience equivalent to putting tinfoil in the microwave. And consider that in the ''Futurama'' universe, Earth/humanity is a pathetic third-rate wannabe power, only able to bully the very smallest and weakest other cultures- comparable to fascist 1930's-era Italy. All that said, much of the series' humor is centered around the hilarious misapplication of such powerful technology, and the incompetence preventing them from what they 'should' be capable of (e.g. their ships can still get destroyed by shooting subsonic non-explosive projectiles at them... or pierced by mammoth tusks).
262* The Xeelee from the novels of Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Literature/XeeleeSequence'' have absolute mastery over the entirety of all baryonic matter in universe. Entire galactic clusters are just bricks to these guys. Future humans make it to Type III and try to attack them by shooting a whole neutron star at near light speed at them like a bullet, and they all but ignore it as insignificant. In the same universe are the Photino Birds, creatures of dark matter against whom the Xeelee fight a multi-billion year existential war and '''lose''', because the photino birds have absolute mastery over all the dark matter in the universe, and dark matter outmasses baryonic matter by about 9 to 1.
263* The Downstreamers from Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Literature/ManifoldTime''. They are the descendants of humanity that exist at the end of the universe, immortal and all powerful and all knowing. Several billion years into the future they were farming the entire Universe (mind you, said universe was infinitely larger then ours in their time) and this was at an earlier stage in their civilization. The Downstreamers create Multiverses much as a writer would in a novel. Basically the downstreamers are farming reality itself.
264* Humanity in the Dancers at the End of Time series: they abused the universe so much that the heat death of the universe is on the verge of happening merely one million years in the future, instead of several trillions. The worst part is that they could fix it, and the ''only thing'' preventing them is... intellectual laziness.
265* In ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'', this is presented as a ''danger'' and is the core motivation of the Anti-Spirals: flagrant abuse of Spiral Energy will create a universe-devouring black hole. However in actual application seen in the series:
266** The somewhat hazy physics make judging tech levels somewhat difficult, but the Anti-Spirals are easily a Type IV, if not above that: they can manipulate probability to ensure their weapons always hit, they can dodge attacks by casual time travel, and they can create a galaxy-sized HumongousMecha that can use the Big Bang as a WaveMotionGun. And it's suggested that that's nowhere near the limit of their abilities: in ''[[TheMovie Lagann-hen]]'', they one-up their galaxy-sized mecha with a [[SerialEscalation universe-sized one]]. The heroes of the story use [[FunctionalMagic Spiral energy]] to achieve similar abilities (it's likely that the titular Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the good counterpart to the aforementioned galaxy-sized mecha, is a Type IV on its own), but their civilization is never shown above Type I, enhanced with some LostTechnology that itself is no higher than Type II.
267** Super Galaxy Gurren Lagann is powered by pretty much nothing more than a moon-sized mecha and the willpower of ten people. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann stands on galaxies, is powered by mostly one man's spirit, and moves at the speed of billions of light years per second. When Lordgenome dies, he turns the energy of a big bang into a drill, which is then consumed by Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (or Tengen Toppa Lagann). In Lagann-Hen's case, then proceed to make an even bigger "mecha" made entirely of energy, and then that energy being makes an energy drill the size of the universe.
268* The Outsiders, a species of extrauniversal invaders billions of years ago in the backstory of the ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} X-Universe]]'', are speculated to be somewhere above Type V (total available energy of an entire universe). They made themselves known to the Ancients by small alterations in the some physical constants such as the speed of light. The Ancients tried to communicate with them for ten million years but failed. When the Outsiders finally appeared as a probe the size of a solar system, the Ancients fought them for two million years, finally destroying one of the probes. The changes to physical constants ceased, but the Ancients remain vigilant. The Ancients themselves are aiming to become Type VI (though they are nowhere near that level currently, being roughly Type III).
269* The Green Sun in ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'' is a power source with roughly the mass and energy of two universes (since that's exactly what it was made out of). Beings known as First Guardians, living in every significant universe so far in paradox space, can manipulate this energy to some degree in order to teleport themselves and other items within their current universe, move at roughly the speed of light outside it, transport things through themselves to the Green Sun, upgrade any powers they might have from other sources to potentially multiverse-killing levels, etc. Over the course of the game so far, three (former) mortals have gained the powers of a First Guardian. And then Lord English, the enigmatic primary antagonist of the series so far, has power significantly above that and a habit of entering universes at the moment of their death, time travelling to their beginning, and reshaping/feeding on them as he sees fit. Collateral damage from his attacks has killed [[EldritchAbomination Horrorterrors]] and cracked the meta-space within which all universes reside.
270* The [[StarfishAliens Incubators]] of ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'' are this, though they don't usually look it their technology is capable of reversing the process of entropic decay on a universal scale, breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics in half in the process. One fairly conservative estimate placed the needed output of the average Grief Seed at 3.3 x 10[[superscript:52]] J. They collect these regularly. As of TheMovie, they can even ensnare Madoka, herself a [[ThePowersThatBe Type-V entity capable of universal-scale revision]]. They [[DemotedToDragon aren't as lucky]] against [[ProtagonistJourneyToVillain Homura]], though.
271* The beings called "Them" from the ''Literature/{{Star Trek|NovelVerse}}'' novel ''Q & A'' have created and destroyed multiple universes out of sheer ''boredom''.
272* 'They' of ''Film/{{Interstellar}}'' are capable of harnessing the fantastic energies needed to create the wormhole that allows the protagonists to travel billions of light-years in seconds to minutes (at least from their reference point). It is heavily implied that 'They' are a [[{{Transhuman}} post-human civilization]] [[{{AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence}} that lives completely within the fifth dimension]] and can freely observe and influence any given point of our four dimensional space-time via gravity waves and brane fields. 'They' can also fabricate a medium that allow us primitives to experience the fifth dimension's properties within our limited three-dimensional perspective.
273* Becomes an in-joke in ''Literature/FineStructure'', where a spaceship designed to travel through {{Alternate Universe}}s at the rate of several hundred thousand dimensions per second is called the ''Kardashev V''.
274* The earliest entities revealed to have engineered the universe in ''Literature/{{Strata}}'' probably belong here, considering that they built it in the first place, whole and in its current form, complete with a fake "prehistory" to disguise that fact.
275* Franchise/TheDCUniverse:
276** The fifth-dimensional imps originally introduced in ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' hit this when demonstrating their full potential. During the Pre-Crisis era, their powers were often indicated to incorporate some of the most powerful magic in all of existence, but Post-Crisis onward instead takes their abilities to the logical extreme. The imps describe themselves as existing on a superior mathematical plane, from which the three-dimensional multiverse is like a flimsy piece of two-dimensional paper that they can manipulate at will. In ''World's Funniest'', it's all but stated that Mxyzptlk (the most well-known and likely the most powerful of the imps) destroys and recreates the multiverse on a fairly regular basis, more or less out of boredom.
277** Superman hits this level in his strongest incarnations, especially during the later Pre-Crisis era. As far back as the 1940s, he treated blowing out a star as a casual feat to impress someone. An evil version of the character, Superboy Prime, destroyed several universes out of apathy during his rampage across creation, and one of Superman's Bronze Age antagonists, Maaldor the Darklord, was powerful enough to collapse many surrounding realities, even while Superman could cold-clock the guy. Flying through several stars in a row once gave the Man of Steel enough energy to nearly punch out the creator of the multiverse, and a fight between two different Supermen from alternate realities once threatened to tear apart time and space itself as a side effect. The 75th anniversary comic, ''Strange Visitor'', suggests that given enough time, Superman will eventually surpass Mxyzptlk, albeit only after ''billions'' of years of developing his powers. Seeing as Superman is supposedly fueled by our sun, he seems to be very efficient.
278** The Anti-Monitor in ''ComicBook/CrisisOnInfiniteEarths'' is probably the defining case of this within the DCU, having wiped out the entire pre-Crisis multiverse and required the heroes of five combined Earths (including multiple Supermen) to defeat.
279** The society of the Monitors as portrayed in ''ComicBook/FinalCrisis'' is well past this category, dwelling within the Overvoid beyond the multiverse itself. To the beings living in the Overvoid, all of creation, including the multiverse, is an infinitesimal flaw. Monitors in the Overvoid are shown to be so vast and beyond all thought that an entire universe could fit in the palm of their hand. Much like the imps, to them, the reality of the DCU is essentially what it is to us: fiction that can be modified with the ease of drawing with pen and paper.
280* Franchise/MarvelUniverse:
281** The Infinity Gauntlet is likely the most iconic example of this in all of Marvel Comics. Provided that it's assembled correctly, whoever wears this weapon is given near limitless control of their universe and everything in it. Even in the [[{{AdaptationalWimp}} toned down]] [[Film/AvengersInfinityWar film adaptation]], the Gauntlet is capable of wiping out half of all life in the universe with a mere snap of its fingers, albeit at the cost of heavily damaging the Gauntlet and harming the user. In the [[ComicBook/TheInfinityGauntlet comic book continuity]], this was treated as a trifle so minimal that the act of snapping the fingers probably took more effort. While the Gauntlet's area of effect is always limited to the universe it originated in, it has consistently overpowered multiversal forces on a number of occasions, suggesting that its true firepower dwarfs its range by ''a lot.''
282** Most Marvel universes are also populated with entire pantheons of gods and abstract entities responsible for overseeing the balance of reality. Deities like Odin and Zeus definitely hit this level when they're forced to exert themselves, but perhaps the most easily recognized Marvel original is [[Characters/MarvelComicsGalactus Galactus, devourer of worlds]], and while he's mainly known for eating planets, his energy usage varies depending upon his hunger. He's been seen disposing of universal threats while still a little peckish, but when he's stuffed and ready to go, he's shaken the entire multiverse with his cosmic power! If Galactus gets all his energy from eating planets, then there must be a lot of untapped potential in those things that we just can't access.
283** Doctor Doom, during the ''ComicBook/SecretWars2015'' story. The multiverse has been destroyed, heroes of Earth-616 and Earth-1610 were powerless to save it, and now all that remains is Battleworld. Doom has godlike power over the whole observable universe... a boring universe, as it has just one star and one planet, but the whole observable universe nonetheless.
284[[/folder]]
285
286[[folder: Other: Unconventional or hard to quantify in watts. ]]
287* The Tar-Aiym and Hur'rikku from the ''Literature/HumanxCommonwealth'' series developed superweapons that, respectively, could annihilate an entire star system by broadcasting gravity waves through [[SubspaceOrHyperspace subspace]], and could punch a hole into AnotherDimension to release an anticollapsar (or "white hole") as massive as an entire galaxy. While that sounds awfully impressive, there isn't enough real physics there to get them into a ballpark. The Xunca have them beat hands-down, however, at one point in their existence being capable of transporting an entire galactic civilization to an alternate dimension and turning a galactic supercluster ''into a superweapon''.
288* ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'': the Hell of the reboots/sequels is a bit hard to quantify both for its vagueness (a lot of their feats rely on ShowDontTell or out-of-universe developer commentary) and the fact that the laws of physics appear to be entirely different there. Here are some guesses:
289** Their demons are ''far'' tougher per capita than the ones in the originals were, and developer commentary notes offhand that they could number well past the quadrillions. The sheer number of cybernetic war machines on that level alone could take them to low Type II territory.
290** Both developer commentary and the in-game codex make vague references to Hell consuming entire dimensions before. Depending on how they did it and what exactly this entailed, is potentially as high as Type IV. One developer even referred to Hell as being effectively infinite in scale.
291** In the climax of ''Eternal'', Samuel Hayden claims that the Icon of Sin will generate a massive blackhole just by existing that will soon suck up Earth and eventually expand to destroy the whole universe. It's not clear how long this would take, but if it's quick enough it could again make Hell an unconventional Type IV.
292** All that said, they ''still'' are reliant on collaborators in the mortal world to actually bring them over, seemingly lacking the ability to open portals themselves, and in spite of their scale there is an apparent limit to how much they can concentrate in one place: it's even suggested that the Doom Slayer and a strike force of Night Sentinels could've ended their entire invasion via decapitation strike in Hell if not for a last-second betrayal.
293* ''Literature/KnownSpace'':
294** It's hard to put a protector - or group of protectors - into any category, given the time, resources and incentive to cooperate instead of trying to kill each other. In the original ''Literature/{{Protector}}'' story, Brennan and his childless protectors converted the entire colony planet of 'Home' into a Trojan Horse deathtrap for an incoming ''fleet'' of protectors. (Although it's never explicitly outlined what they did to it. The fact it was later colonized implies that it wouldn't have been substantially deterraformed. The fact that Known Space is not later populated entirely by Pak implies that whatever they did allowed Brennan to ''win''.) Protectors also built the Literature/{{Ringworld}}, which was theorized to require some kind of energy/matter conversion, and the atomic-level engineering technology needed to create a Ringworld-sized amount of building material. Not to mention the shadow square system and the energy to spin the whole thing up to the required 770km/s to create the artificial gravity. In ''Literature/RingworldsChildren'', we see a ''single'' protector develop technology to almost entirely redesign and rebuild the Ringworld "from the ground up" with captured nanotech -- and turn the entire thing into a Bussard ramjet powered spaceship.
295** It is not clear where Outsiders fit. They seem to have a nearly unlimited range of technology at their disposal, at least up to inertialess spacecraft engines, which would imply being able to manipulate the (known) laws of physics. However, even asking questions about the kind of technology they may have access to is prohibitively expensive, much less getting access to any of it. Despite the availability of super-advanced technology, they enjoy taking their time, travelling from the core to the rim of the galaxy at sublight speed. For reasons too expensive to find out, Outsiders follow Starseeds. In fact, Outsiders follow Starseeds so reliably that if you want to get Outsiders to come calling, the best way to do it is to simply attract a Starseed. The Puppeteers refer to a Starseed Lure as a 'simple device'.
296* ''Series/StargateSG1''
297** The Ancients were all over this. Their earliest shown creations were ships capable of diving into and siphoning stellar material from stars, while their later ships were powered by mass produced Zero Point Energy modules, drawing their power from artificially created regions of subspace. They later expanded this line of research and figured a way to draw power from the universe ''itself'', but abandoned the project after realizing that one of the by-products was exotic matter, which threatened to tear the universe in twain. It was also them who created the titular stargates, ring-shaped warp portals just big enough to allow humans (on foot or in a small ship) to dial to a different gate, then travel there in mere seconds, even if the other gate was literally at the other side of the universe (a device for instantenous communication of thought with the same reach also exists). Their last and final project was [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence Ascension]], where they learnt to shed their physical forms to become all-powerful creatures of pure energy, roughly 10,000 years ago. Due to their self-imposed non-interference rule, they haven't done much since.
298** The Ori are probably comparable, though since they actually do stuff in the physical universe, they probably could be rated if more information were available. One indicator on their power are "Supergates", which work like a Stargate except scaled up to allow an entire space ship to travel around. The power demands of one of those are only met via syphoning energy from a black hole.
299** Humanity has briefly skirted this, when Rodney [=McKay=] attempted to replicate the Ancient's experiments with unlimited power generation, by substituting our universe with a parallel one, linked via a matter bridge. Unfortunately, it not only turned out to be inhabited by alternate reality counterparts of the Atlantis team, but also threatened to tear ''both'' universes apart if it wasn't shut down.
300* The Arquillians from the first ''Film/MenInBlack'' movie possess "the galaxy" which is stated to be a power source. The creatures playing marbles with galaxies at the end [[ReadingsAreOffTheScale don't really fit on the scale]], at least from our reference point.
301* The {{Precursors}} in ''Film/{{Contact}}'' are anyone's guess, since even the (Type III-ish) aliens don't have the foggiest idea when or how ([[{{God}} or if]]) the PortalNetwork was made. It's strongly implied they can even [[RealityWarper leave messages by manipulating the value of pi]].
302* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'':
303** Pre-Mending Planeswalkers tended to have enormous reality-warping power, frequently creating entire planes of existence by themselves. Without Planeswalker powers, Yawgmoth was powerful enough to overlay multiple realities over one another for the purpose of invasions, and apparently survived the detonation of his personal plane of existence, caused by the essence of several god-level beings being fired at him. This would probably indicate Type IV+ if anything like real physics applied.
304** Post-Mending 'walkers are still powerful, but much less so. Still, they probably would easily exceed Type III.
305** To put the sheer power of the typical [[strike: [=MtG=] player]] Planeswalker, a crossover with Dungeons and Dragons would be nearly impossible, or at least hard to make sense of, since even achieving epic level (level 20 or above in 4e) is still only a fraction of the power [=MtG=] planeswalkers are capable (probably level 25 and above, in D&D terms).
306* The holder of the Infinity Gauntlet in the Franchise/MarvelUniverse possesses pretty high order omnipotence, capable of moving multiple universes and effortlessly deposing the living incarnation of all matter, energy, and time in the universe.
307* In ''Franchise/StarTrek'', the Q Continuum are hard to judge based on technology, since by all accounts they appear to be, in their natural forms, transcendent beings with no fixed shape who exist in another dimension called The Continuum. They may have outgrown the need for technology, as they can reshape reality around themselves, reverse time and entropy, teleport to any point in space and time, shapechange themselves and others, tweak natural laws (Q: "Simple. Just change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the mass of the asteroid.") so their powers can pretty much be described as "magic". When we see them operating in the continuum, through [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith a metaphorical framing]], they do seem to use technology of a kind. They just only create it for specific purposes, and usually don't bother. For example, a war between Q required weapons. These manifested in the continuum as civil war era weapons, and in ordinary reality as a sudden outbreak of supernovas.
308* The 4-D beings from ''VideoGame/StarOceanTillTheEndOfTime'' could be considered an example, if a very strange one. Sure, our entire universe is just an MMORPG that they created, but by our standards, the energy output needed to manage our universe as well as all their own affairs would be absolutely incredible.
309* The Markovians from Chalker's ''Literature/WellWorld'' series are here, given that they built planet-sized megacomputers that could freely revise physical laws, edit the course of history, and indeed kept the universe stable. Specific estimates of energy usage are probably a moot point, as they were the ones deciding how much energy there ''is'' in the universe.
310* The Beyonder from ''ComicBook/SecretWars1984'' is probably unmeasurable. In his first appearance, he effortlessly ''destroyed a galaxy'' [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale to provide an empty corner of the universe]] for the various metabeings to battle each other. That was more or less retconned away later, only to be unretconned in ''ComicBook/SecretWars2015'', where the Beyonders [[spoiler: destroy the Marvel Universe and almost every parallel version of it as well (i.e. Ultimate Marvel and Marvel Zombies universes as well.)]]
311* The Tyranids and Necrons of ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' are probably here. Compare with the Ork and non-Imperium human factions (all Type I civilizations), the Tau Empire (a borderline Type II), and the Imperium and Eldar (both clear Type II).
312** If the statement that the Tyranids have consumed multiple entire galaxies is true, they might be an unconventional Type III, though that depends greatly on the dormant metabolism of Tyranids drifting through space, as even if they have that much mass available [[note]]questionable even then, as they seem to only assimilate parts of planets rather than entire stars and nebulae[[/note]], actual power use is what counts. Their typical MO of removing a good chunk of terrestrial planets' mass and draining the heat from what's left operates fairly slowly, so probably represents a mid-Type I power expenditure per planet being consumed. They may consume up to few planets at any given time, though hive fleets take a while to travel between systems, so this output probably isn't sustained. A full hemisphere-darkening invasion force probably represents about a Type I expenditure for each planet under attack.
313** The Necrons, and their masters the C'tan, are also hard to pin down. The C'tan feed off stars, so might individually approach Type II, though they're not usually very active. The Necrons have the goal of separating the Warp from physical reality, a universe scale goal, though they seem to confine their efforts to one galaxy for now. They have the most advanced technology in the setting, and have fought on galactic scales in the distant past, but virtually all now lie dormant in buried tombs. Though their technology is very potent, they may be low on the Kardashev scale of the major factions of [=WH40K=] in the present setting due to their extremely small active numbers. Like the Tyranids, all bets are off if they become active en masse, particularly since they are known to possess at least one Dyson Sphere.
314** The Old Ones are equally difficult to pin down. As the {{Precursors}} to several species (notably the Orks and Eldar), they once inhabited large portions of the galaxy and had advanced technology allowing them, among other things, to create the webway to instantly travel pretty much anywhere. However, they are noted as being rather placid and patient, with their overall numbers maybe not being all that great and focussing on peaceful exploration rather than colonising a large empire like the Imperium. In addition, their achievements were in large part due to their [[AWizardDidIt psychic powers]] rather than technology, with their enemies the Necrons actually being more advanced in many ways despite being much younger. Despite having been godlike precursors in many ways, they may never have reached the same level of power usage as the Imperium or even their primary successors the Eldar.
315* Magratheans from ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''. They constructed entire planets in hyperspace, as well as the biggest and most advanced computer in all existence. The blueprints were given to them by a hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional race, i.e. those whose "protrusions" in our dimension are mice. The blueprints were in turn the output of the ''second'' most advanced computer in all existence: Deep Thought. As for the construction zone, the Guide says it's a spherical/spheroidal "fold" in space-time with a radius of around 13 light seconds. Assuming hyperspace construction zones in a folded space-time and that planetary engineering was a fun hobby, you get a really powerful civilization, albeit one that's hard to classify.
316* The Forerunners of ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' at the height of their power were more or less masters of the galaxy, though it's hard to put a number to their power use. Here are a few examples of their energy use:
317** They built rather large structures around the galaxy, which might indicate low- to mid-Type I depending on how fast they did it.
318** They successfully built an actual Dyson Sphere (and contained it within another dimension to be only a couple meters wide in normal space), which is at least Type II.
319** Their higher-end stuff, like the "kill everything sapient in the galaxy" function of the halos could potentially get them into Type III, though its actual workings are pretty sketchy on the power needed, especially since it doesn't appear to be a brute-force effect, and the halos would appear to not have nearly the mass-energy available to fuel Type III power use.
320** While they never colonized other galaxies, ''Literature/HaloSilentium'' indicates that the Forerunners siphon energy from alternate realities to power their civilization. If this is indeed canon, then the Forerunners are a solid Type IV civilization, as far as energy consumption is concerned.
321* The Reapers of ''Franchise/MassEffect'' are the most militarily powerful faction in the galaxy, consisting of hundreds of thousands of warships more advanced than those used by other races. They "farm" the galaxy for intelligent life, letting civilizations develop and periodically culling them. They are militarily potent enough to obliterate the high level Type 1 civilizations described above in just a few months with negligible casualties (as happens in ''Mass Effect 3'' without the Crucible). However, they are not so much more powerful than the Citadel civilizations as even a few tenths of a Kardashev point would suggest, and when not actually reaping, they seem to float around their own territory doing pretty much nothing. Here are a few guesses to their power level:
322** If their standby systems are pretty efficient, they might even rate Type 0, but there isn't much to indicate what they do when fully active.
323** Their technology, the Mass Relays, house vast amounts of energy. When used for their intended purpose, they're able to transport ships tens of thousands of light years in mere seconds. When one is damaged it easily destroys a whole solar system, placing it at Type II level power. The mass relays are also durable enough to sit in the middle of a supernova without harm as long as they're quantum-locked. The Reapers built thousands of mass relays, and the Control ending of the third game shows that they're capable of repairing the entire galactic network after it gets destroyed in an apparently very short time frame.
324** A single 'dead' Reaper was able to keep its DeflectorShields active for ''37 million years straight'' to keep it from falling into the brown dwarf that its 'corpse' orbits, and the codex notes that every Reaper is a PerpetualMotionMachine with no apparent need to refuel, undergo maintenance, or even discharged heat, consistent with the tech base of a Type II civilization.
325** The ''Leviathan'' DLC adds more information. The Leviathans, as they're called, indoctrinated and controlled other species and are the primary source of the technological base for the series. This was a borderline Type-III civilization before they [[NiceJobBreakingItHero built the Reapers to solve the problem of their thrall races creating synthetic life forms that then destroyed them]].
326* The villains in the ''Literature/CallahansCrosstimeSaloon'' video game create and operate entire universes as scientific experiments, including ours.
327* Human civilization in ''Literature/ImpliedSpaces'' is at a similar level, and indeed features pocket universes full of antimatter being used as weapons.
328* In the ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' verse, it's never revealed specifically if there's an upper limit to just how much power an S[[superscript:2]] organ can generate. As shown in ''End of Evangelion'', at least ten of them[[note]]the nine MP Evas plus Yui who got hers from Zeruel; Adam surely doesn't have one after being regrown into an embryo[[/note]] put together has the power to terraform Earth. In fact, Fuyutsuki's monologue about the Fruit of Knowledge (a human mind) plus the Fruit of Life (an S[[superscript:2]] organ) equalling what is essentially God sounds like a borderline type I.
329* The neutron star dwelling cheela from the [[ShownTheirWork hard sci-fi novel]] ''Literature/DragonsEgg'' are difficult to classify as they have accelerated development. When humans first make actual contact with them, they are roughly equivalent to the late Middle-Ages or early Renaissance. After we give them the basics of science they begin developing on their own at approximately a million times the speed our civilization did. By the end of the novel (a matter of days our time) the cheela have mastered anti-gravity, faster-than-light travel, the creation of stable singularities, the manipulation of natural singularities (as a favor to their former teachers they remove several small black holes from our sun that were shortening our star's life), and manipulation of matter at the subatomic level. It is uncertain to what extent they have developed as they stop giving us knowledge once it becomes clear they are beyond our achievements (technically they give us the information, but they encrypt it so it cannot be read; the encryption key is always something related to the information itself, so that humanity will have to make the discovery on its own, but will be able to "check their answers" once they get them). Additionally, every 29 of our seconds is another year of advancement for them. If they are not a Class III by the end of the book, they will be shortly thereafter. Or at least they would have been if not for the titular event of the sequel ''Starquake''. They're probably there by the end of ''that'', though.
330* The Sliders verse has multi-earth civilizations. While the Kromags are revealed to span hundreds of planets, it is unknown whether they possess space travel. In sheer watt consumption, they're probably at least type 2.
331* ''Franchise/GreenLantern'' civilization "Guardians of the Universe" could be type four if not for their personal Prime Directive. When all of their power was bound within a single being, he was able to unravel the entire universe from the beginning of time to the end and restart the big bang.
332* ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'': the Combine has most of their technology operate on exotic matter. Their Citadels are powered by dark energy reactors that screw around with physics to power themselves with dark energy plasma. Said plasma is used for a number of purposes including [[labelnote:portable power sources]]a fist-sized plasma capsule can power a [[DeflectorShield wall-mounted shield generator]][[/labelnote]] and [[labelnote:ammunition]]said plasma capsule acts as a DisintegratorRay on contact with organic matter and Combine pulse weaponry fire plasma blasts that put bullets to shame[[/labelnote]] as well as being fed into a dark fusion reactor that can [[{{Teleportation}} tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime and tunnel into other universes]]. They have successfully conquered entire universes, potentially making them Type IV on the scale by sheer mass (though the populations of those universes are never disclosed), but their actions on Earth are borderline Type 1 at best (likely far lower depending on just how much population remains). The greatest demonstration of their control over the environment is [[PlanetLooters draining the oceans]], and cut content includes their efforts to terraform the planet. Their civilization is powered by some form of dark energy, but due to the aforementioned exoticism, power output is unknown. ''Epistle 3'' confirms them as a Type II at least, as they possess Dyson spheres.
333* Vitiate, the Sith Emperor of ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'', is a wonky case. As a disembodied spirit (presumably one similar to, yet distinct from, a "typical" Force ghost) he gains Force power from deaths, and can do nifty things like take over people's minds. Throughout the Ziost arc, the heroes operate from the assumption that he has a limited amount of power, but at the end, he launches a WorldWreckingWave that kills ''every living thing'' on the planet in a matter of seconds. What limits -- if any -- Vitiate has on his power (or what that power even is, since most sources [[UnreliableExpositor have been his own minions and former minions]]) are unclear, but it's probable that if it were put into a more measurable form like a planet-killing beam, it would rank fairly high on the scale. Now consider that this is ''[[HumanoidAbomination one person]]''...
334[[/folder]]
335
336[[folder: Multiple: For the upwardly/downwardly mobile. ]]
337* In the ''VideoGame/MasterOfOrion'' games you can arguably build a civilization from a borderline Type I to a well developed Type II civilization. In ''Master of Orion 2'' the weapon ''Stellar Converter'' is capable of destroying planets in matter of seconds (debatable as it takes a turn to do so), meaning their energy output has to be in order of 10[[superscript:30]]J - give or take few magnitudes - in order to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet sized object. Also, you can also construct Earth-like planets from asteroid belts and gas giants. This would suggest mid- to high-Type II power use.
338* Civilization in the ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' novels progresses from what's probably a low Type II (a significant portion of the Milky Way colonized, FTL travel, 'super-atomic' and energy weapons) at the beginning of ''Galactic Patrol'' to a probable Type III (two galaxies colonized, travel between parallel universes, faster-than-light planets used as weapons powerful enough to cause supernovas) by the end of ''Children of the Lens''. The Children of the Lens themselves are near-godlike beings.
339* Creator/IsaacAsimov:
340** Each portion of "Literature/TheLastQuestion" takes place in a human civilization at a different point on the scale--each time the Last Question is asked, man is so much more advanced yet still powerless to answer it. It finishes by outlining a possible Type ''V'' scenario: ''reversing'' entropy even after the apparent heat death of the universe.
341** The ''{{Franchise/Foundation}}'', ''Literature/TheEmpireNovels'', and ''Literature/RobotSeries'', after being [[CanonWelding merged together]], begin with mankind as type 0 civilization using robots to make use of the planet's resources more efficiently. Later, they establish Spacer colonies, invent faster-than-light travel and eventually colonize almost an entire galaxy, having reached a Solid II level.
342* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project The Millennial Project]] is a SpeculativeDocumentary / FauxToGuide to reaching Type I, Type II, and Type III.
343** An update is published online as [[http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page The Millennial Project 2.0]].
344* There's another scale as well, though of course it's rather less scientific... that found in ''D20 Future''. In it, there are Progress Levels, at least eight or nine.
345** Level 1 is stone age, prehistoric... Basic stone tools, agriculture, and so forth.
346** Level 2 is Bronze/Iron age
347** Level 3 is the 'Age of Reason'. The Renaissance, though basic slugthrower weapons are available, if rare.
348** Level 4 is the Industrial Age. Around the level of technology of the 1960's.
349** Level 5 is the Information Age. Pretty much current earth technology level... the 'Modern Age'.
350** Level 6 is the Fusion Age, energy weapons becoming more likely, especially on larger vehicles, cybernetics are starting to appear as more than just inferior replacement parts. Invention of an efficient, nonexpendable energy source.
351** Level 7 is the Gravity age. Gravity has become the civilization's plaything, interstellar travel becomes viable, energy weapons are becoming small enough to be man-portable, true powered armor appears.
352** Level 8 is the Energy Age. This is the level that we see in many Science Fiction shows attributed to many of the 'elder' races... zero-point energy, powerful personal energy weapons, force fields, intergalactic travel, starbases the size of moons, true starfighters have finally become viable, and may or may not include functional immortality.
353** Level 9 is essentially the Q Continuum. If they aren't Omnipotent and Omniscient, they're close to it, and can fairly safely be considered living gods.
354** Still, one funny thing. Functional immortality is probably enormously easier to achieve scientifically than FTL travel, as it likely hinges on a mixture of nano, cyber and/or biotechnology already theoretical by our science (just tricky to achieve) as opposed to nudging the laws of physics in ways that we don't even have any idea how for FTL travel.
355** The PL scale being lifted wholesale from TSR's defunct RPG ''TabletopGame/{{Alternity}}'' which Wizards of the Coast inherited and then let die.
356* ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' also has its own Tech Level scale, and may have been one of the first games to quantify progress thus. [[http://www.omnology.com/gurps-levels.html This list]] is from the Third Edition, but later editions don't change it much, other than the addition of "superscience" for things that blatantly break the laws of physics. Earth was [=TL7=] on first publish, but in 2000, Steve Jackson Games [[http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1861 officially announced]] that we had reached [=TL8=] and that they were forced to rewrite the old Tech Level scale from the 1985 rulebook because science had progressed faster in some fields (like biotech) than expected and slower in others, which affects the Tech Level descriptions in the current 4th Edition rulebook. [[http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2006-03-21 This article]] from March 2006 lists another example that modern bio-science is close to breaking through to [=TL9=]. Interestingly, even a TL 12 civilization doesn't have much in the way of technology above Type II. This is likely a problem of game balance (when handguns can take out a planet it doesn't really matter what Advantages characters have). The current ''GURPS'' tech level scale:
357** TL 0 -- Stone Age: Clubs and loincloths.
358** TL 1 -- Bronze Age: Alphabet and the wheel.
359** TL 2 -- Iron Age: Waterwheel and iron working.
360** TL 3 -- Medieval: HighFantasy is set here. Steel invented. Sailboats.
361** TL 4 -- Age of Exploration: Guns invented. "High-Tech" begins.
362** TL 5 -- Industrial Revolution: Steam engine.
363** TL 6 -- Mechanized Age: (c. 1900-1950) Very first [=TVs=] and mechanical calculators.
364** TL 7 -- Nuclear Age (c1951-2000): Computer invented. Lasers, miniaturization, mature fission technology.
365** TL 8 -- Microscience (c2001-2050?): Gengineering, longevity, micromachines, early fusion technology. Beginnings of AI.
366** TL 9 -- Nanoscience: Environmental engineering, nanomachines, intelligent AI, mature fusion technology. "Ultra-Tech" begins.
367** TL 10 -- Robotic Age. "True" AI. Hand held lasers, particle beam weapons. Gravity control.
368** TL 11 -- Exotic Matter. Altering atoms. FTL technology (with superscience). SpaceOpera.
369** TL 12 -- Age of Miracles. Near total control of time and space. People can buy pocket universes.
370** GURPS is also notable among [=RPGs=] because it gives rules for mismatched tech levels. An enlightened and peaceful civilization might have figured out bodily immortality (TL 11) yet have no weapons more advanced than "mere" 20th-century nukes (TL 7). It also allows fantasy/alternative technology forms, For example, a Steampunk world like ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' would be TL 5+4 (Steam engine/Victorian with flight, death rays, and mechanical AI), while ''WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones'' would be TL 0+6 (Stone Age with TV and cars! ), or, by the end of the original series, TL 0+7 (still Stone Age, but now with very early computers and space travel).
371* [[https://web.archive.org/web/20170408214944/https://orbitalvector.com/Essays/TECH%20LEVELS%20OF%20SCIENCE%20FICTION%20GROUPS%20AND%20CULTURES.htm This page]] has a list of SciFi civilizations ranked by tech level. You could disagree with at least a few placements, but it's there.
372* Human civilization in ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' merits mention here. Humanity's technology level is ''ridiculously'' schizophrenic thanks to tens of millennia of war and upheaval. At its height, humanity had true AI, rapid interstellar travel, controlled the vast majority of the galaxy, is implied to have mastered matter-energy conversion, and bent the laws of the universe to its whim. Twenty thousand years of devastating galactic war later, scraps of technology from that era are worth destroying star systems over. Though the Imperium of Man and Adeptus Mechanicus don't understand how much of their most advanced technology works anymore, they still show hallmarks of a borderline Type III civilization, notably whenever the technologies of war come into question. Meanwhile, any given Imperial planet can range from the Stone Age to high type II. SchizoTech at its finest, folks.
373* ''VideoGame/StarRuler'': You start at star-faring. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJJEMmzKzR4 Galaxy-sized ships are possible, if ridiculously lategame.]]
374* The characters in the anime ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'' start out as Type 0 but progress to at least Borderline Type IV, [[spoiler:literally hurtling entire galaxies at each other]] in battle.
375* ''A'' classification used in ''Roleplay/AGeeksGuideDeathworldEarth'', with humans being a Type I, Type II's being standard in the Galaxy and 16 Type III races.
376* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'':
377** Most conventional civs start off as a high Type 0, having just discovered FTL. Throughout the game, a civilization will eventually reach to a low-to-moderate Type II, able to construct {{Dyson Sphere}}s and [[RingWorldPlanet Ringworlds]] (albeit at great expense and difficulty).
378** The [[VestigialEmpire Fallen Empires]] are harder to categorize; they were once Type [=IIs=], minimum, some of them having ''multiple'' ringworlds (now mostly in ruin), but have forgotten how to use much of their own technology. They return to being a very solid Type II if they should [[AwakenTheSleepingGiant awaken]], though.
379** Even ''contacting'' [[EnergyBeing the beings of the Shroud]] requires the energies and science of a Type II civilization, and [[EldritchAbomination the mightiest of them]] are powerful enough to ''awe'' said civilizations. The [[CosmicHorrorStory End of the Cycle]] in particular [[spoiler:can up the power of a civilization to the point where Type III seems within reach... then ''destroy'' it in '''[[CurbStompBattle seconds]]'''.]]
380** In the mod ''Gigastructural Engineering'', becoming a Type III can be achieved by the time you reach the endgame. On top of building many more megastructures than in the base game, you can achieve such feats of engineering such as topping the trope PlanetSpaceship with an entire solar system being transformed into a ship, complete with one planet becoming a CityPlanet just to serve as crew quarters, or using the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy to either use the Birch World, an inhabitable shell around the black hole so large that it has ''infinite'' district slots, or build the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator, a WaveMotionGun to end all wave-motion guns, being able to destroy entire star clusters at full power.
381* Greydon Square musically climbs the Kardeshev Scale, starting with the appropriately titled [[https://greydonsquare.bandcamp.com/track/the-kardashev-scale ‘Kardeshev Scale’]] on the album of the same name, which describes a Type I civilization moving to type II. Then the song [[https://greydonsquare.bandcamp.com/track/galaxy-rise ‘Galaxy Rise’]] from the album ‘Type II: The Mandelbrot Set’ describes a Type II moving to Type III. Then the album [[https://greydonsquare.bandcamp.com/album/omniverse-type-3-aum-niverse ‘Omniverse: Type 3: Aum_niverse’]] describes a Type III Civilization climbing up to Type IV, Type V, and beyond, ending with absolutely everything in an Omniverse being controlled by a single civilization. Though as the song Infinitease says, even this is still no closer to reaching a true infinity, [[SerialEscalation the climb never ends.]]
382[[/folder]]
383
384[[folder: SchizoTech: For cases that appear contradictory. ]]
385* The Galactic Empire and their successor state the First Order in the mainline ''Franchise/StarWars'' canon.
386** The Galactic Empire is basically the Galactic Republic and Confederacy of Independent Systems put together and then hyper-militarized, with a [[GalacticConqueror few more conquered worlds on top]]. Ordinarily that'd land them in borderline Type II territory, as their regular technology in both civilian and military use is not ''that'' much more advanced than their predecessors, just more numerous and [[EvilIsBigger bigger]].[[note]]E.g. their standard capital ship, the Imperial Star Destroyer, is [[https://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html#47 around ten times the size]] of a large capital ship in the Clone Wars era like a ''Providence''-class dreadnought or a ''Venator''-class attack cruiser.[[/note]] However, they also managed to build the Death Star which is capable of an output as high as 10[[superscript:35]] joules, and a minimum of 3.7 x 10[[superscript:32]] joules (see [[http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar.html here]]) in its superlaser. The first Death Star charged up for a planet-buster in about a day, which would give its power core a sustained output on the order of 4.28 x [[superscript:27]] watts, over ten times that of our sun. And the second one charged in a couple ''hours'' - granted, it only charges up enough to blow up a few capital ships. The only reason that they're not a solid and strong Type II is that the novels specifically note that the Death Star, due to its exotic power sources, does ''not'' scale to anything else that they do. Still, even managing just to assemble the necessary material to build the damn thing ([[https://www.weighsthesame.com/vehicles/death-star-weight-wookiees.php 148 quadrillion tons of it]]), much less ''two'', is easily orders of magnitude above anything they or anyone else ever do in the ''Star Wars'' universe.
387** The First Order should by all logic be no more than a borderline Type II; they're explicitly just a [[VestigialEmpire remnant]] of the original Empire that controls a relatively limited number of worlds and warships, enough that their attempt to conquer the galaxy a la the Empire ends in them being overstretched and annihilated in a short while in ''The Rise of Skywalker''. But they have one trump card: [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Starkiller Base]]. It actually consumes stars in order to power its main weapon, which is capable of destroying ''multiple'' planets with a single shot from across the galaxy! According to supplementary materials, the stellar mass it utilizes is nothing more than a catalyst for an esoteric reaction that allows it to concentrate Dark Energy and produce something called "Phantom Energy" which can be tunneled through "sub-hyperspace". Its tractor beams alone should be capable of casually destroying large planets, as the Starkiller Base was able to suck up an ENTIRE STAR using said beams in SECONDS. [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale Which is roughly equivalent to shrinking a nuke to the size of a bullet so you can put it into a handgun and shoot someone with it.]] The tech involved in the usage of Starkiller Base should make the First Order ''gods''. This one space station harnesses energy comparable to a Kardashev Type III civilization all on its own. They should be able to construct entire solar systems from scratch. However, even more so than the Empire, ''nothing else'' that the First Order does comes even remotely close to this. Otherwise they're limited to just cruising around with (admittedly really big) Star Destroyers and engaging in the same space naval battles that dot the rest of the franchise.
388* ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'', considering that you field forces that seem representative of much less than a Type I resource base to fight over tiny areas of individual planets in a conflict between empires that supposedly extend across sizable chunks of the galaxy, powered by nanomachine assemblers that ought to be capable of more impressive mobilization.
389* Similarly, ''VideoGame/AshesOfTheSingularity'' supposedly involves a post-singularity humanity able to harness power on at least a type II scale in the process of turning entire planets into computers. It fights using small numbers of not particularly advanced tanks on battlefields no more than a couple of kilometres across.
390* ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'': humanity in the ''VideoGame/Doom2016'' and ''VideoGame/DoomEternal'' sequels/reboots is inconsistent as a plot point. The bulk of their tech and development fits the Type 0 description detailed in the original installments' entry (though it's also shown that they have advanced enough cybernetic technology to build sapient AI and perform [[BrainUpload brain uploads]] to robots), and these games make it even clearer that humanity normally occupies that range by noting a shortage of fossil fuels had caused a worldwide energy crisis (so they have yet to develop cheap fusion power). The story is that the UAC has managed to propel humanity to previously never before seen heights by harvesting an extradimensional power source called Argent Energy, which enables fantastical energy usage in everything from their small arms (the Chaingun now fires 15mm tungsten spikes at 5,000 FPS) to their strategic weapons (a KillSat in ''Eternal'' blasts off a good chunk of Mars' crust after charging for just a few seconds, consistent with high Type I energy usage if it's unique and low Type II if they have tons of similarly powerful devices). This has given the UAC a monopoly over much of Earth's economy and made energy a near non-issue. However, it's revealed that Argent Energy is actually created with [[PoweredByAForsakenChild suffering souls]], and that tempting civilizations into relying on it is how Hell sets them up for an invasion and extermination. They're in the process of doing this to humanity, and by ''Eternal'', most of Earth has been wiped out. The Doom Slayer spends much of these games deliberately trying to push humanity ''down'' on the Kardashev scale thanks to this revelation, reasoning that an energy crisis and societal collapse [[GodzillaThreshold cannot possibly be worse than the alternative]].
391* Where the Franchise/{{Transformers}} fit on the scale depends on the continuity. But in the Movie-verse, they have devices that can suck the energy from stars, destroying them in the process. Though that would suggest Type II, their on-screen activities look far below Type I (case in point: they can be hunted to near-extinction by the U.S. military come ''Age of Extinction''). Though other continuities aren't necessarily entirely consistent, they do better than an apparent dozen plus orders of magnitude mismatch.
392** They also have FTL, warp gates, personal subspace storage and gravity control, portable weapons which draw power from black holes, force fields, invisibility, time travel, and can fall from Earth orbit to the surface without burning up or being killed by the impact. And they fight by punching each other, and can be demobilized by a flat tire or killed by air-launched anti-tank missiles. Apparently their Mileage Varies.
393** Some features of the Movie-verse (such as the apparent condition of what we see of Cybertron) strongly suggest that the Transformers have destroyed their technology base through the course of their civil war. This means that while they may have individual pieces of tech that are appropriate for Type II cultures, [[JustifiedTrope they may well be limited to sub Type I simply because the hardware for better no longer exists.]]
394* The Covenant from ''Franchise/{{Halo}}''. From the scale of the fleets and other combat forces, the development of planets and industry, they look like a solid Type I or so. From the efficacy of Covenant ship-to-ship weapons, they also look like maybe a solid middle Type I. However, the Covenant's ability to "glass" the surface of planets is several orders of magnitude larger than anything else it does, getting into borderline Type II territory.
395** As revealed in the [[EasterEgg Data Pads]] of ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', the ability of the Covenant to 'glass' planets is propaganda devised by a [[TheOmniscientCouncilOfVagueness group of human-created artificial intelligences]]. True, the Covenant COULD turn an entire planet into a hunk of glass... provided they had millennia to do so. However, the thought of an alien empire 'glassing' entire colonies certainly galvanized humanity to fight back.
396*** On the other hand, according to Lord Hood in ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'' the Elite assault carrier ''Shadow of Intent'' glassed half the continent of Africa in about an hour... while he watched it happen with his own eyes (though later canon clarified this to be an exaggeration, and we see in the game itself that they did nothing of the sort). It's also worth noting that the specific data pad claiming that the Covenant can't fully glass planets was written in-universe only one year into the war, when data on the Covenant's capabilities were limited; another data pad written only a few years later gives a conservative estimate of ''110 to over 300 years'' to properly re-terraform merely ''four'' colony worlds.
397*** It’s important to note that glassing Africa was also done by the flagship of the Sangheili fleet and specifically to prevent the Flood from overrunning Earth, so it’s quite likely that they were working much harder on this task than usual, and it’s possible that more than the Shadow of Intent was doing the work. So while it wasn’t half of Africa, the importance of hitting every inch was much higher than usual.
398** ''The Return'' short fully clarifies this; when the Covenant 'glass' a world, it requires hundreds of capital ships executing days of bombardment, so it's not something they can do casually. Even then, they don't literally reduce the entire surface to glass (if they did, then there'd be ''nothing to terraform'' as the atmosphere would be completely gone). Kholo, one of the worst-hit planets, not only retained its atmosphere but still had standing structures and surviving vegetation, making it clear that Covenant "glassing" doesn't even come close to wiping out the biosphere, much less vitrifying the entire surface. Other planets like Reach, Minab, New Llanelli, Bliss, and Meridian also still had standing structures, vegetation, megafauna, and breathable atmospheres after 'glassing' (though in some cases this was accompanied by nuclear winters), more consistent with a global nuclear exchange at the height of the Cold War than a [[ApocalypseHow Class 5 extinction]]. Considering that accomplishing even this takes hundreds of ships and a long period of time, the displayed effects of Covenant bombardments are more consistent with a Type I civilization than anything. If they use bombs to do this rather than, or in addition to, their ship to ship weapons (''Halo 2'' shows that they have antimatter charges), it might even imply borderline Type I rather than strong Type I energy usage for their ships. This is especially the case when one remembers that the UNSC's titanium armor can actually somewhat protect them from Covenant ship to ship weapons,[[note]]For context, you'd only need a few hundred kilotons to completely melt the mass of a 0.93 million UNSC frigate in titanium (and its mass isn't pure titanium). Covenant plasma torpedoes or brief exposure to energy projectors typically just melts/boils a good-sized hole in the ship and that's it; even killed UNSC ships are still present after battles for salvage rather being totally disintegrated.[[/note]] to the point that ''Warfleet'' says that armor is the main reason that the UNSC even still bothers building cruisers.
399** ''Ghosts of Onyx'' reveals that Covenant ships are powered by deuterium and helium-3 pinch fusion, and that a typical Covenant ship reactor has an output of 12 terawatts (the comically enormous space station Unyielding Hierophant had a thousand such reactors, but most Covenant ships only have a few). This is, again, solid middle Type I technology.
400** However, for the Covenant, it should be noted that much of their tech is taken from Forerunner ruins, and is mostly set up by the Engineers, possibly explaining the gaps. ''Thursday War'' specifies that the Covenant have absolutely no idea how their technology works, and can't even maintain their ships without the Engineers to handle everything, much less construct new ones. They'd be a mid level Type I at best without the Engineers, and the Covenant remnant factions (like Jul's self-declared Covenant successor state, or Thel's Swords of Sanghelios) seem to have ended up there with the Engineers MIA.
401** Some EU novels also reveal that the Covenant have planet-encircling ship yards, putting them closer to borderline Type II territory. Going by the sheer scale of their civilizations and the power of their tech, they'd comfortably be within the borderline range if not for their own self-imposed limits and incompetence.
402** ''Literature/TheForerunnerSaga'' and ''VideoGame/{{Halo 4}}'' reveal that prehistoric Humanity was fighting both the Forerunners and the Flood at the same time, or at least fighting the Forerunners and running from the Flood. They lost, but still. Forerunner technology was capable of sterilizing an entire galaxy, which would put Forerunners and ancient humans at a high Type II.
403** The same books make it clear that the [[RecursivePrecursors Precursors]] were easily beyond the Forerunners in all ways, however, including creating sentient species with minimal effort, limited future-predicting, galaxy-spanning bioweapons, and wholly indestructible materials (of some sort of organic nature, as they were wiped out by the Halo Array). They also had the ability to cross between galaxies, with little - if any - passage of time, instant gene sequencing, if the newer games are any indication, an ability to predict when an AI will go [[AIIsACrapshoot rampant]], and what can best be described as a galactic psychic Internet. Maybe. They're still enigmatic for now.
404* Humanity in ''Anime/GunBuster'' is generally a low to mid-level Type I society, but their ultimate weapon, which [[spoiler: destroys the core of the Milky Way galaxy]], is far, far beyond that level.
405* ''Film/IndependenceDay'' has the Harvesters. The efficacy of their capital ship weapons and fighter shielding suggests a low Type I civilization, but the sheer size of their ships indicates a solid Type II at least (in ''Film/IndependenceDayResurgence'', they have a ship that dwarfs the moon and is not too far off from the mass of the Earth itself). The main issue is that their constructs never actually ''act'' like they're as huge as they are or that they use as much energy as they should. See [[http://www.ultimax.com/whitepapers/1996_3.html here]] for the wide variety of scale issues associated with the first film alone.
406* The civilizations in ''VideoGame/GalaxyAngel'' all operate on a different level.
407** The "current" Transbaal Empire operates on Scale 1, or at most, 1.5. They have an Empire spanning multiple star systems, but it isn't elaborated on how large. Also, they are in operation of reverse-engineered LostTechnology.
408** EDEN civilization, which is the source of aforementioned Lost Technology, was not elaborated upon, but their chief technology, the Chrono String Engine, uses the energy left over from the very creation of universe itself. That, and they are capable of creating moon-sized spaceship/factory complete with requisite FTL travel; the Black Moon and White Moon. This puts them at Scale 2 at least.
409** Finally, the Val-Fasq, the race of conquerors. While the extent of their conquest is, again, undetermined, their ultimate weapon, Chrono Quake Bomb, is powerful enough to cause a universe-wide "freeze" of FTL travel, isolating inter-solar system travel, trade, and communication. It is hinted that they regularly use these weapons, and such weapons are ''the opening move'' for a war; freeze every FTL travel, conquer universes. Rinse and repeat. This puts them as at least Scale 3.
410** But the best example is actually the Emblem Frames; space fighters piloted by a single person. It apparently contains a Chrono String Engine, regulated by the emotion-sensing HALO System, that is powerful enough to create ''an entire pocket universe ex nihilo'' to divert the massive energy released by the Chrono Quake Bomb above. The technology alone must have consumed an energy far above Scale 3 at least, which raises question to the true Kardashev Scale rating of the creator of such technology...
411* Creator/GregEgan's short story "Border Guards" is set in a future where human beings are able to create pocket universes, to which they can then travel and permanently settle, which implies a very high Type III if not Type IV, but it is also mentioned that FasterThanLightTravel is still impossible, meaning that humans only colonized a few of the stars closest to the Solar System before space travel became a dead end, suggesting a low Type II at the absolute highest (and more likely just in the solid Type I range) so it boggles the mind where they are getting the required amount of energy to create the first pocket universe from.
412* ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'': Skynet and future humanity are generally Type 0 in overall military strength and industry, mostly because they're limited to a single bombed-out planet, but the energy required to time travel should logically be obscene. It's not something they do regularly, though.
413* This is clearly where the ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'' and ''Franchise/DCUniverse'' sits when looked at as a whole because it is ''very'' dependent on the writer as to how advanced these universes are. You have contemporary present day tech, science and ideas (depending on when the comic/film/show was written) that barely approaches a type 1 alongside FTL spaceships, doomsday weapons, time travel, teleportation etc. There is also a reason why tropes such as CutLexLuthorACheck and ReedRichardsIsUseless carry the names of characters from these franchises as we have individuals with insanely high levels of tech in comparison to what they logically should have.
414* Quinn Mallory in ''Series/{{Sliders}}'' manages to develop multiversal travel from his basement on a salary from working as a sales clerk in a computer store. He seemingly has so little money in fact that the timing device that holds this remarkable achievement has clearly been cobbled together from parts that appear to be from a cellphone (which might go some way towards why it broke so often). On paper, a society that can so cheaply and easily pierce the walls of reality should be a solid Type-1 minimum and yet other than this it is no different to our 1995. ''Franchise/BackToTheFuture'' has the exact same problem although at least the DMC-2 came at the cost of Doctor Brown's entire fortune and was built at a time when inventions such as the microprocessor were a thing - somehow he then goes onto to build something that can pierce a hole in the fourth dimension using 1886 technology and on the wages of a blacksmith and a school teacher.
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