I re-read “The Spectre General” is the other day and it still is an amusing tale that delivers in it’s golden age sci-fi context. The wiki gives a thumbnail sketch of the scenario. In the story the premise of why they have remained in training mode in a harsh area of the planet vs more habitable areas of the planet for over 500 years is the fear that if the living is too easy they will fall apart as a nominally civilized society and descend into primitive savagery.
All children in this battalion group are required to go to tech school and train until their mid to late teens to repair items they have no real life contact with and regard as largely mythological. The higher ups realize the empire has probably dissolved and they are on their own but hang onto the pretense they are still a valuable military unit to keep the group together.
I realize you have to accept certain things for the story to work but allowing your group to descend to the point of using stone age tools in a confined, harsh environment for 500 years because it will keep you tough and together when you should be re-establishing metal working and basic industry and pioneering the planet seems kind of an untenable premise.
Whether or not the scheme is morally justifiable, the system described is unsustainable in that the smarter members of the society are either discouraged from pursuing jobs worthy of their skills because they are lethally punished for making mistakes at them. Regardless of how much ritual they observe, the second they face an actual attack from anyone or a rebellion from within, their tech level will be so low that they’ll have no defenses at all. I predict a similar fate for the super-state of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, the society so aggressively turned against the individuals within it that decay and collapse (and loss of the means to maintain control) are inevitable.
On reread, I may have confused the side that has the ships (but no techs) with the side that has the techs (but no ships). The former will be prone to collapse for purging its smartest members.
Just as a whimsy I’m trying to think how this could be turned into decent little sci fi movie and what would need to be changed so it does not seem absurd in 2015.
I just reread the story because of this thread. I think the point Cogswell was making was about preserving knowledge. Starship repair may have seemed like a useless body of knowledge to preserve for five hundred years but it turned out to be both practical and vital. During a dark age, it’s easy to just keep knowledge that’s immediately useful and abandon the rest. But that wider body of knowledge is important and is worth the work of preserving it.
So the terrain was just a metaphor. A community that was willing to live on a mountaintop when there were easier alternatives available would also be a community that was willing to maintain its tech schools when there was no immediate reward for doing so.