Krdytkyu

Here are what I wants in my world:

• Early generation of computer with a bulky size and very limited capability, like the text-based computer in Fallout universe.


• Limited guidance and detection system. Missiles are exist but the range is very limited and could be avoided with countermeasures or even by a skilled pilot. Radar & sensor exist, but like above, the range is limited and might show a false alarm.


• Early generation of jet engines that slow enough for the fighter pilots to occasionaly engages in machine gun dogfight.


• Colored television exist. So does the handheld transciever.


• BONUS: No atomic bombs and no space exploration.

The problem is I want the electronic devices in this world to stay in early cold war era for as long as possible. Let's say, it need a thousand years or more to discover smartphone, or even better: NEVER.

Since magic does exist in this world, I had been thinking about making the people in this world (or even the world itself) to emits Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) that would fry any electronics that use transistor but not the other one that use vacuum tube so they'll only have the "classic" electronics.

Does the EMP really works that way? Does the absent of transistor really matter for a world to move foward the era? Or actually the vacuum tube is enough to recreate the world we currently living in? Do you have more plausible solution to this problem?

EDIT: Even though I'd used the "cold war era" term in here, it doesn't have to be about the alternative reality where the conflict between "USA vs Soviet" happen, instead, I mean it to be simply a technological era in the middle 20th century. Think about it like medieval era; This era can be related to the alternative reality universe like Assassin's Creed or a fantasy universe like Lord of the Ring.

In order to halt the development of electronics, you could remove silicon (and German and gallium) and force technology to stay with, or return to, vacuum tubes.

In my proposal, I'm not going to remove it, rather make it unfit for purpose.
Silicon is one of the most abundant elements in the crust. It will therefore be a great feeding substrate to an alien species of bacteria that landed on earth with one of the meteors impact during the late 40s, early 50s. For instance, in February 1947, a large bolide impacted the Earth in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, Primorye, Soviet Union. It may take a decade for the bacteria to expand throughout the planet and start happily munching silicon and related compounds. So, even if you discover transistors, they'll degrade quickly, eaten by our visitors, and far too quickly to be used in any meaningful manner. Of course you could encase the circuits in plastic, but these nasty bacteria can sense the silicon within and will perforate the casing with the ease and restlessness with which their earthly cousins go about making oral cavities.

Natural EMP sources in the environment. Call it an excessive sunspot activity. That means microcomputers and integrated circuits are extremely unreliable, it takes individual transistors or better vacuum tubes to work reliably.

You would have to handwave why hardening methods are not applied in your setting, but it could be explained as chicken-and-egg. Microchips never work for long, and so nobody bothers to build and shield them.

You say magic exists in this world. This gives you great license to pretty much do whatever you like.

First of all, the fact that magic even exists could have the knock on effect of making electronics a lot less interesting and less in demand. Many of the "nerds" who would have been researching electronics are a lot more interested in magic and so things like transistors and furthermore electronics are left unexplored. There is no great push for this kind of thing because magic can do many of the jobs that early electronics could do.

Colossus, for example, would never have been invented if someone could magically decode the enigma messages in WWII (and Enigma might never have been used if the Germans magically encoded their transmissions in a way that was beyond the capability of any computer, or found a way of magically delivering messages that couldn't be intercepted).

Alternatively, perhaps magic itself emits a sort of EMP or maybe some sort of electromagnetic pollution that renders transistors or other electronic components useless. If this were the case, it would have been very difficult to even invent them, if we assume that people wouldn't know about the pollution until the electronics stopped working around spells, if they never worked in the first place, they'd have no reason to suspect magic as the cause or even that electronics could have worked.

A simple one that has come up in a few stories I've read (and at least one I've written) is that magic bends physics, just a little.

Magic, at its most basic, is the ability to violate the usual laws of physics. As such, using magic has a measurable effect on its surroundings - the laws of physics fluctuate when magic is used. Not much, but enough to mess with things. Simple things, like the relationship between voltage and current, or the speed of light in a vacuum, or the exact size of a Planck length, are altered. The alterations are small (using whatever definition of "small" makes this work), so on a macroscopic scale, you don't really notice much. Perhaps you feel dizzy, or see distortions in the air, etc. However, it can wreak havoc on delicate machinery. The more delicate and finely-tuned, the more damaging the effects.

So, a large machine won't mind if its gears change size by a millimetre or two, but a microchip, whose internals (in our world) are built to tolerances measured in nanometres, will stop working entirely. Biological processes are a little more resilient, and unlike machines, living things can heal. You could even say that magic is tied to life force, so living things are protected from these effects by their own magic (to a certain degree).

This effect is always present, with the usual ambient magic that drifts about the world causing continual subtle shifts in the fundamental physics of the world - small enough to be unnoticeable on a macro scale, random enough to largely average out over time, but juuust enough that there's a limit to how small or delicate any electronics can be. A modern-day microprocessor simply cannot function in this environment, and any large magical exertion amplifies the effect to the point where it can ruin even the relatively robust components of earlier computers if they're caught nearby.

Simply adjust the size thresholds between "totally unusable", "feasible, but destroyed by large magical outbursts" and "resilient enough to be viable" to wherever your story needs them to be.

How about high static energy? So the electric energy does not come from the People or the World itself, but exists in the athmosphere.. if you walk, you are loaded with a little energy and if you touch something metallic, it is released.
Electronics are very easiely destroeyed by this. In the real world, you unload before working with electronics. In the setting's World, there could be so much static energy that it is not possible to unload enough to let electronics survive.
Vaccuum tube electrics are much more resistant to this.

So you can have any Tech that will not be destroyed by electric energy, but no transistors, no CPUs and so on.

While the moon landing was computed with the equivalent of a 386, it would be hard to impossible to do this without integrated circuits.

This should prevent nearly everything from your list, but with atomic bombs I do not see why they should not work - on a 1945-1955 level. You could still have drop-down-bombs, but no ICBMs, no cruise-missile.