Photography?

shaeun wrote:I can see photography also being useful in an academic setting, creating situations where remote analysis of structures, troop deployments, crops etc. are carried out by individuals without access to OWL. If the idea is to teach the ability to think and analyze, the correct approach is not necessarily the most efficient. Photos can even be moved by telegraph by using a pixel replacement scheme - those to use it over a visual telegraph related to the Historical Chappe Telegraph is probably a bad idea.

I see photos being useful for textbooks, newspapers, service manuals, detailed reports about technology and as a way to document exactly what a captured document said without having to copy the entire document by hand.(though that will come with time, not more efficient to start with)

That said - the downstream effects are wonderful - but int he end is it a must have? I am not sure i would say yes.

RFC needs to start our protagonists down the road to fiberoptics (closed light semaphore), hydraulic/mechanical computers, digital math/pixel coding, and photography so that long distance sharing of technology can happen instantly while still under the proscriptions.

The first under sea fiberoptics cable for Emerald to Charis to Corisande to Zebediah to Chisholm to Siddarmark for the new universities and public communication and the innovation genie is never going back in the bottle EVER!!

Thendisnia wrote:
RFC needs to start our protagonists down the road to fiberoptics (closed light semaphore), hydraulic/mechanical computers, digital math/pixel coding, and photography so that long distance sharing of technology can happen instantly while still under the proscriptions.

The first under sea fiberoptics cable for Emerald to Charis to Corisande to Zebediah to Chisholm to Siddarmark for the new universities and public communication and the innovation genie is never going back in the bottle EVER!!

I am not certain that the optical medium for fiber optic cables could be made pure enough to allow for the transmission of information over long distances. I am also not sure that the decoding of said light impulses would be easy either.

Over short distances a hydraulic or air link could be made that would (slowly) communicate information between mechanical or hydraulic (or more likely a mechanical/hydraulic hybrid) computing mechanism.

For long distance communication compressed air tubes could be used to push small shuttles that contain messages. It would be manpower intensive and prone to issues, but it would be faster than any type of messenger post. Since the semaphore telegraph is already being used - it would not be much more manpower intensive than that.

This would remove the need for pixel mapping as the images themselves could be sent as opposed to an encoded representation.

Of course - this is highly speculative. There are so many things that can be obtained as derivatives of the items that are already in the EoC that it boggles the mind! (Heat Pumps Powered by Steam?)

shaeun wrote:That said - the downstream effects are wonderful - but int he end is it a must have? I am not sure i would say yes.

I would say yes.

I'll grant that as far as immediate military applications are concerned, photography would have been at best a minor assistance in Charis's war with the Group of Four, but that war never Nimue's prime mission, just something necessary to achieve her prime mission.

Both photographs and phonographs would be primarily civilian technologies that would be helpful in altering the mindset of Safehold towards technology in general. It would even be possible to develop sound cinematography that didn't use electricity, though the challenges of sound amplification without electricity would limit audience size.

Early sound cinematography used phonographs, but the difficulty in keeping it synchronized with the cinematography quickly led to developing other methods, but those methods require electricity and thus aren't available until both the prescriptions and the rakurai are gone.