Someone should design an IC that can fit inside a tube enclosure, maybe with an LED to give off some faint orange light, including a power transistor - the whole nine yards. It won't soft clip in an audio amplifier but down the road I think we'll need such a device. You might be able to program it with rfid to emulate any tube at all with an equivalent pinout. Then tube-amp owners would just to stock one or two of these devices per socket :-)
Tubes becoming hard to get?
An article in today’s WSJ talks about tubes for both guitar amps and stereo gear becoming scarce due to Far East and Ukraine/Russian tensions saying most tubes originate from China, Slovakia, & Russia. As such, people are beginning to Hoard and retailers are beginning to limit purchases.