@faraday There's also just making a policy that states 'unless you are more than passingly familiar with tech and science, don't make a tech or science officer on this game' if it truly is that important to you.
What you're missing is that things like clothing -- or the comic book history of a character -- are just as important to those players as tech and science are to you. Your immersion isn't any more precious and special as any of theirs is, and just like they don't get a pass on making demands beyond an everyman-with-minor-primers-and-research understanding on the player level, neither do you.
In short, no, science and tech aren't any different from any of those things, and this is exactly the problem I've been trying to describe as a barrier to entry, and a genre in which the behavior that is typically called out as negative is instead embraced.
Again, I don't expect people to even know there was once such a thing as a 'sumptuary law', let alone what any of those laws were, or why they came to be, but to me, 'sumptuary laws are a thing' really is, internally, very basic rudimentary knowledge about clothing. My internal baseline for 'basic', however, is far afield of the average person. Being aware of this is actually important, and managing expectations based on it is even more important, because no game is all about (generic) you and (generic) your sensibilities unless you say so right up front.
