It drives civilian tech advancement, but that's not the only thing that can drive civilian tech advancement.
Quick comments while I'm thinking about it... agree with rob's wrinkle on design, and maybe something in there about allowing, say, single prototypes as design articles too, and not counting them until they're capable of loading live hardware, though obviously that's fiddly with some designs and I'm just throwing it out there. Also very much yes with Cobalt bringing up rotating stuff to the scrapyard or to being severely demilled if factions want to introduce new classes of stuff. Part of my thought with leasing stuff to GJ instead of outright selling it (at least at first) is to get the factions making the stuff to eat part of the maintenance (etc) costs... less of a drain on the Convention (possibly) and encourages, over the long term, stuff that Works and requires less resources to keep working, thus being less of a drain on the Convention, and also sort of a subtle encouragement to scale back production and development that results in expensive prototypes and the like.
For "what gets retained for factions personal use"... maybe by tonnage?
Quick comments while I'm thinking about it... agree with rob's wrinkle on design, and maybe something in there about allowing, say, single prototypes as design articles too, and not counting them until they're capable of loading live hardware, though obviously that's fiddly with some designs and I'm just throwing it out there. Also very much yes with Cobalt bringing up rotating stuff to the scrapyard or to being severely demilled if factions want to introduce new classes of stuff. Part of my thought with leasing stuff to GJ instead of outright selling it (at least at first) is to get the factions making the stuff to eat part of the maintenance (etc) costs... less of a drain on the Convention (possibly) and encourages, over the long term, stuff that Works and requires less resources to keep working, thus being less of a drain on the Convention, and also sort of a subtle encouragement to scale back production and development that results in expensive prototypes and the like.
For "what gets retained for factions personal use"... maybe by tonnage?