Yeah, the series of posts immediately after I put the chapter up has only led me in very quick hindsight to the realization that I picked something with a lot more oomph than I'd originally estimated.
Welp, time to improvise. Which, to be fair, is a lot of how I write normally.
To minimize the amount of research you need to do, and to keep this story from becoming a purely Battletech/Traveler crossover, maybe Sophia could focus on the highlights of the techbase. Aka the jumpdrive and FTL communications, and then offload the development of the rest of the techbase onto the general Commonwealth itself.
What I mean is; the Battletech game has rules for making your own power armor, mechs, vehicles, spaceships, aircraft, space stations, buildings, and super vehicles (think mobile anti-orbital fortresses). Sophia does not have the time to literally write down and re-invent everything for the Commonwealth, I'm sure she wants to move onto other techbases, but the entire Battletech techbase would provide a great general boost to the Commonwealth. Yet, as she noted in this update, she doesn't really understand the needs of the Commonwealth. So, why not have Sophia work around this?
Have her deal with the invention and building of the jumpdrive and FTL communications while also inventing Battletech
materials. Things like ferrocrete (super concrete), myomers, and endo-steel, its stuff she'd probably need to "invent" to build the first jumpship anyway. Maybe she could write a series of "How to books". How to build a vehicles/dropships/spacestations whatever with current and newly invented materials. She doesn't need to sit around drawing up the next big thing, just give other people the tools necessary to design the stuff they know they need. It wouldn't eliminate development time but it would probably greatly decrease it.
Then you, as the writer, can just "steal" designs from the Battletech wiki and say someone in the Terran Confederation developed something similar. No need to learn the Battletech creation rules, no need to create a reason for Sophia to abandon the Battletech techbase, and no reason to tie yourself as a writer or Sophia as a character to the Battletech knowledge. It can just be something in the background that slowly grows on its own.
Who knows? Maybe later she returns to Terra and at the bus station she sees little sign saying the bus is fusion powered. Maybe the she sees buildings like this being raised in the capital.
She doesn't have to abandon the Battltech techbase, but she doesn't have to chain herself to it either. Just developing the various unique materials of the setting and releasing guideline books would do wonders without her supervision.
Both. Although her mother is starting to come up on the age where if she wants more kids, she'd better get started.
Well... Sophia does have the knowledge of how to make iron wombs now. So that might help?
