I believe he wants to justify _Ranma's_ action in this case.  After all,
this Ranma deliberately went on a one-way trip.  Kodachi's was more more
or less an accident since she thought she'd be able to get back somehow.
Ranma-refugee needs a rationalisation for his course of action, unless he's
slime.  I still don't know what his problem was in giving the technology
to his country, though.

        Say rather Genma's problem with giving the technology, Ranma's problem
is that The Empire decided that since Genma wasn't giving them what they
wanted, they were perfectly justified to lock up Ranma and use any ammount of
force and coersion to "Inspire" him to complete the technology and give it to
his country.  After which he would have been a security risk of course, and
execution would have been more practical than imprisionment.

That is pretty much the assumption that I was operating on.  The Security
Directorate is not obliged to obey such niceties as "due process" or such
like.  They saw a useful espionage technology, and the potential for more. 
When Genma proved uncooperative, then they tried to pressure Ranma into
completing the work.

So can either martial-Ranma or refugee-Ranma put together their own jump
devices? Since their universes are based on ours, they can get their hands
on better computer technology than their counterpart. Of course this is
based on my personal assumption that computer tech hasn't been around as
long in the Imperial universe as it has in ours.

        Plus, in part six, there's the way Ranma is able to use an incredibly
simple sounding trick to hack a government computer, which to me seems an
indication that the internet in the imperial world is incredibly underdeveloped
compaired to ours.  This would make network security in the empire be based
more on theory than on practice.  Like the alien's computers in Independance
day.

Yes, computers are newer in that world, and the security technology is much
like 20 to 30 years ago in our world.

        And of course every spot where the technology is assumed to be really
advanced has it's questionable points.  After all most technological advances
which would replace or make easire job done by slaves would be implimented real
slowly.  Rome knew about steam power and didn't develope it because it's
obvious applications would do jobs slaves were already doing.  And of course if
Genetic engineering weren't so integral to the storyline I'd have a few
questions with it since it requires that the theory of evolution was accepted
when it was proposed.  Or that it would have been created from studying
Jusenkyo, but the scientists don't really understand it.

The biological sciences advanced quite far with something like Jusenkyo
able to provide limitless human subjects from animal sources.  The "humans"
created by the magic waters of the spring are not considered real humans
though, so cruel experimentation has been done over a century of time. 
Other technologies developed more slowly.

Jurai Knight