Chou Senwan, on 26 May 2012 - 07:47 AM, said:
I dunno. Maybe the authors of the novels just didn't paint the universe as dark and gritty enough. "Mankind wars itself back to the Industrial Revolution" could explain some stuff, but I can't imagine a planet of billions of people not having scientists who can advance technology.
Oh, and also, the game came out before the internet and SIRI. Mechs should all be drones. But that's a change that would make the game less fun.
Well, there's two things you have to remember.
First, NAIS wasn't the first of it's kind, it was the first to be built since the Star League era. The years between the fall of the Star League and the building of NAIS weren't kind to science in general, between the Succession Wars destroying the Universities and supporting infrastructure that allows advanced research and Comstar killing those who understood the technology enough to teach others how to understand it.
Second, NAIS wasn't a normal university. There were other universities out there all along, but not in great numbers and most had to rely on whatever their planetary governments could scrounge up for research and development. NAIS was different because it had the backing of an entire House as well as the ruling family and funding was not a problem. Also, NAIS was founded on the information that was recovered when the SLDF library on Halstead Station was discovered and recovered before the Draconis Combine could claim it all for itself. Even the data that Kurita did recover, though, led to the Combine opening a scientific research University of it's own that rivaled the NAIS.
Other Houses have their own research facilities as well, but they've suffered greatly during the Succession Wars.