The capability operates at consequential national or sectoral scale and persists beyond one project.
Player’s guide · five minutes
How to read the tech tree.
The board turns seventy years of national development into a playable map of prerequisites, branching paths, and historical unlocks.
1. Each node is a capability
A node represents an ability a country can reproduce at meaningful scale: universal school access, reliable electricity, export-tested manufacturing, applied science, or interoperable public rails.
The five branches are People, Systems, Production, Knowledge, and State. Tiers move outward from the sovereign base. Higher tiers require greater depth, diffusion, and institutional durability.
2. Read the lock state first
Several investments and outputs point in the same direction. Scale, depth, duration, or diffusion is still developing.
The available evidence remains below the board’s threshold for that country and historical snapshot.
Lock state is an editorial classification grounded in the linked evidence. It is open to correction when better data changes the reading.
3. Lines show dependencies
Solid branch lines trace the main sequence inside one family of capability. Curved dashed lines connect branches. Technical training can enable complex assembly; national freight markets can enable supplier clusters; financial rails can support knowledge exports.
Select a node to illuminate its prerequisites and downstream unlocks. The side panel lists the same relationships as clickable links.
4. Time changes the board
The year control moves through seven snapshots: 1960, 1980, 1991, 2000, 2010, 2016, and 2023. “Play timeline” animates the sequence. A node changes state as evidence crosses the unlocking and unlocked thresholds.
The snapshots mark broad historical readings. They do not claim an exact day or single policy caused an unlock.
5. Country overlays reveal sequence
Choose India, China, South Korea, the United States, or Vietnam. Turn on “comparison ghost” to add a ring around every node for a second country. The inner node shows the selected country; the outer ring shows the comparison.
The useful comparison is the order of accumulation: which capabilities arrived early, which ones followed, and which links remain weak.
6. Outcomes trace whole routes
The four outcome cards highlight every prerequisite connected to broad prosperity, production power, frontier invention, or strategic resilience. These paths overlap because national outcomes draw on several branches.
“Next unlocks” finds locked or unlocking nodes whose mapped prerequisites are already unlocked. The result describes the current board and carries no predictive claim.
7. Every node opens into evidence
Select a capability to see its definition, country reading, historical status, prerequisites, enabled nodes, and source links. The source registry explains what each reference supports. The methodology page documents classification rules, limitations, and falsification tests.
8. Disagree in public
The tree is designed for scrutiny. Bring a missing source, challenge a dependency, dispute a historical placement, or propose a state-level and country-level extension.
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