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Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?

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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Graydon   » Sat Dec 20, 2014 11:50 pm

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n7axw wrote:I'm not suggesting that things are going to be identical, Graydon. Especially with Merlin in the mix there are going to be shortcuts that wouldn't otherwise possible along with other variance. I do believe though, that the progression will be from water to steam to oil as in our own time line, however the details might vary.


I think the Empire of Charis is headed to oil-fired steam, and the Republic of Siddarmark possibly a lot of coal-fired steam. I don't think they're headed at Otto-cycle engines under the Proscriptions; they need spark ignition. Diesels aren't of obvious benefit until metallurgy and machining improve by about a generation. I'm not at all sure there won't be some other external combustion engines in part because the Stirling cycle is such a good refrigerator; run one backward and you can get liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Since that gets us to the Return of the Arch-Angels and who knows what, I don't think it's profitable to speculate beyond that; we might see a big spate of hydroelectric plants going in and a bootstrap to basic fusion once Federation records become available. (And if you think anti-nuclear protestors are bad now, imagine what they're like when they sincerely believe you're dealing with the actual devil.)
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Keith_w   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 10:17 am

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Graydon wrote:
Keith_w wrote:I take your point that at this point in time on Safehold there are none of the drivers that encourage personal vehicles, but how long did it take for us to go from horse and wagon, to railroad to automobile? Just because at this time there is no where to go and nothing to do once you get there doesn't mean that in the not so distant future there won't be. At the rate of change that Chris is embracing, it'd bet that it won't be a week after the war is over before someone is building his first Howsman Steamer.


Stephenson's Rocket is 1829. Model T Ford is 1908. That looks like 81 years; three whole human generations.

There's a limit to how much change people can cope with, even with the prospect of being destroyed by the Church to concentrate their attention; people can only learn stuff so fast. (Anybody who has ever done support for the second major critical software upgrade in a single year will know this...) You've only got so many people available to teach, too; we get texev of this as the Delthak works is having serious, serious trouble replicating their QA genius clockmaker into enough inspectors fast enough. If it takes two years to train one of those guys (which is pretty good for stuffing a mech eng degree into somebody), and then another two years paired with an experienced guy before you dare let them off on their own, you're going to have trouble creating enough inspectors for a generation because you're starting with fifty. If fifty doubles every year, in ten years you've trained fifty thousand. Given populations in the millions that's not enough; Siddarmark needs some, too.

The economy can only grow so fast because you've got to make all the bits that make the bits. What's happened so far is a narrow, narrow focus on marine steam engines, steel plate, and gun barrels. No one has, for example, had to figure out how to make automotive brakes or steel-rod spoked wheels or pneumatic tires -- pretty sure the bicycle doesn't have those, it has a sprung seat -- or better glue for the carriage work or paint or a small engine with good power-to-weight. Even if you can make a relatively cheap car, you have to expand the economy enough for people to afford it; average US wage in 1908 is between 200 and 400 dollars a year. A Model T was sold for 500 dollars.

Average US per-capita GDP in 1860 was somewhere around 160 dollars. (Wage figures a problematic for that period.) I'd say Charis is somewhere between 1860 and 1908, economically; they're just starting their industrial revolution (1800!) but are pre-conditioned for growth by a much more capable incumbent economy than the economy of 1800. Even at steady 5% growth, it takes 14 years to double the value of the economy. 5% growth is hard to sustain when your overseas markets may not be willing to trade with you, you filthy heretics, are having economic convulsions, and there's the devastation of war everywhere. (The Empire is a nice big internal market with much growth potential. Sustaining 5% growth is still hard. The control problem -- are we adding enough capital to the economy in the right places? Are we training enough chemists in Corisande? -- is very hard.)


All that is true, there are limits to growth, however, unless you are running a command economy, people are going to do stuff anyhow. And even though the Rocket was in 1829, Locomotion 1 preceded it in 1825 as the 1st railway engine to have paying passengers. (Side note, my mother worked at Stephenson's Darlington yards late 1940's to early 1950's when she was distracted by me :D ) Additionally, although the Model T was undoubtedly the 1st commercially available vehicle for the masses, the 1st automobile is credited to Carl Benz, 1886. with the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, 61 years later.

As for brakes, the earliest brakes were similar to those used on wagons - and on Safehold, where dragons can drag a huge tonnage, they presumably have brakes that can hold cargo wagons on hills if necessary. Additionally, as with early automobiles, they will probably use wagon wheels as the guide, which means wooden spokes. They are already using bicycles at the Delferak works, although RFC did not mention the spoking technology there, Howsmyn was wishing that pneumatic rather than solid rubber tyres were available.

The American economy grew by leaps and bounds during WWII, even thought the only external market was for war materiel (can we say "goodbye depression"?), and maintained that growth for 20+ years afterward, as first the post-war recovery in Europe required massive amounts of materiel and investment and then non-European markets decided to develop.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Graydon   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:23 pm

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Keith_w wrote:All that is true, there are limits to growth, however, unless you are running a command economy, people are going to do stuff anyhow.


Not on Safehold. They're going to have to figure out if what they want to do is religiously acceptable. There's an immense social pressure not to innovate. Take away the the threat of jihad and that religious unease will get stronger; Father Paitr is going to have to come up with something theologically cohesive (rather than cynical) sooner or later. Old Charis isn't especially subject to this by Safeholdian standards but many other components of the Empire sure are.

Plus the established nobility will be just delighted to sneer at profit motives. (Legitimate wealth comes from the land they coincidentally have already got all of.)

Keith_w wrote:And even though the Rocket was in 1829, Locomotion 1 preceded it in 1825 as the 1st railway engine to have paying passengers. (Side note, my mother worked at Stephenson's Darlington yards late 1940's to early 1950's when she was distracted by me :D ) Additionally, although the Model T was undoubtedly the 1st commercially available vehicle for the masses, the 1st automobile is credited to Carl Benz, 1886. with the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, 61 years later.


I picked the Model T because it's the first automobile that starts to rearrange the economy; there were less than 200 miles of paved road in the US in 1908. ("Metalled road", different sizes of gravel rolled to a hard surface, is different, and works well with tall narrow steel-tyre wheels and terribly with pneumatic wheels. It's a big change and you need a larger economy to afford tarmacadam roads.) There were all sorts of pre-model T car designs, but they didn't much count for anything in the overall economic sense.

Keith_w wrote:As for brakes, the earliest brakes were similar to those used on wagons - and on Safehold, where dragons can drag a huge tonnage, they presumably have brakes that can hold cargo wagons on hills if necessary. Additionally, as with early automobiles, they will probably use wagon wheels as the guide, which means wooden spokes. They are already using bicycles at the Delferak works, although RFC did not mention the spoking technology there, Howsmyn was wishing that pneumatic rather than solid rubber tyres were available.


The earliest automotive brakes worked badly, too, and were a major safety problem. There's a reason there's all those ads for the better brakes in the 30s! It would also be a reason for Father Paitr to say "no", this is clever but not safe. No putting widows and orphans and the maimed into the care of Mother Church, back to the drawing board with you!

I'd expect dragon wagons use chocks for hills. It's not clear that a human, even with a big lever, can hope to hold a friction brake on something that heavy. I can imagine hydraulic or geared brakes, but if those existed gear-cutting would be better and bolt-action locking lugs much less of a challenge.

Wooden spokes are compression spokes; they're slotted into the rim with mortises. Wire spokes are tension spokes; this works a lot better, produces a much stronger wheel, and is pretty much required for actual bicycles, where you're transmitting force from the hub to the rim, rather than a draisine, where you're not pedalling.

Keith_w wrote:The American economy grew by leaps and bounds during WWII, even thought the only external market was for war materiel (can we say "goodbye depression"?), and maintained that growth for 20+ years afterward, as first the post-war recovery in Europe required massive amounts of materiel and investment and then non-European markets decided to develop.


The US economy was already industrialized and had buckets of unutilized capacity. Not the position Safehold is in; they've got the war, the willingness and ability to spend, but not the pre-existing industrialization. Nor, for that matter, the electricity. No telegraph is going to be a big deal for railroads.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by fallsfromtrees   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:53 pm

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Graydon wrote:snip

The US economy was already industrialized and had buckets of unutilized capacity. Not the position Safehold is in; they've got the war, the willingness and ability to spend, but not the pre-existing industrialization. Nor, for that matter, the electricity. No telegraph is going to be a big deal for railroads.

No telegraph is going to be huge. In fact, either the railroads are either going to be daylight only, so that the semaphore can be used for signaling, or they are going to have to double track everything, so that traffic only runs in one direction. Then the night time signalling can be handled with lanterns, albeit at a much lower bandwidth.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by PeterZ   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:56 pm

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Who will decide what is religiously acceptible? Will it be the inquisition that did its best to turn Charis and Siddermark into an abattoir? Or the heretical Church of Charis? Neither will be universally acceptible.

An ecumenical solution is necessary. Perhaps if the CoGA accepts that part of the Writ that asserts an individual's personal responsibility to choose what God wills for him. The clergy would responsible for teaching but individuals are responsible to choose the teachings he will embrace.

The current system of empowering the Inquisition with the powers of police, judge, jury and executioner is simply too effective at corrupting the people charged to run the system.

Graydon wrote:
Keith_w wrote:All that is true, there are limits to growth, however, unless you are running a command economy, people are going to do stuff anyhow.


Not on Safehold. They're going to have to figure out if what they want to do is religiously acceptable. There's an immense social pressure not to innovate. Take away the the threat of jihad and that religious unease will get stronger; Father Paitr is going to have to come up with something theologically cohesive (rather than cynical) sooner or later. Old Charis isn't especially subject to this by Safeholdian standards but many other components of the Empire sure are.

Plus the established nobility will be just delighted to sneer at profit motives. (Legitimate wealth comes from the land they coincidentally have already got all of.)
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by PeterZ   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 2:02 pm

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fallsfromtrees wrote:
Graydon wrote:snip

The US economy was already industrialized and had buckets of unutilized capacity. Not the position Safehold is in; they've got the war, the willingness and ability to spend, but not the pre-existing industrialization. Nor, for that matter, the electricity. No telegraph is going to be a big deal for railroads.

No telegraph is going to be huge. In fact, either the railroads are either going to be daylight only, so that the semaphore can be used for signaling, or they are going to have to double track everything, so that traffic only runs in one direction. Then the night time signalling can be handled with lanterns, albeit at a much lower bandwidth.


Between a semaphore in daylight and big limelights to send Morse code at night and messages can be sent. Either process is more labor intensive that telegraphs but are workable.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Zakharra   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 4:13 pm

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Keith_w wrote:
Zakharra wrote: Think of it this way: in our own world, someone born at the beginning of the last century (1900s) would have if they lived to be 100 years old, the development of airplanes, tanks, radios, to jets, computers, to the internet, the birth of rocketry and the landing of people on the moon, probes leaving our solar system and landing on other planets, an entire cultural evolution, and more.

You mean like our parents and grandparents lived from the last days of sail to men on the moon? From abaci to calculators to computers, from telegraphs to telephones and email? From our grandmothers and mothers shopping everyday for fresh food to cook on coal or wood stoves to fridges, freezers and electric stoves/cookers? From beating carpets in the back yard to vacuum cleaners? From boiling water on the stove/cooker to hot water heaters? From outdoor toilets, chamber pots and tin tubs in front of the fire to luxurious salles de bains with showers, soaker tubs, flush toilets and bidets? From walking to nationwide bus and train services and electic cars to IC cars, jet planes, and electric cars (oops, not exactly new)

So what are we going to see that comes anywhere near what changes they lived through, and in many ways the changes that Charis and Safehold are about to go through as this stuff leaks out.



Pretty much, yes. It's going to take time to change the mentality of the population so they can accept the more modern stuff. That's why I think they will have to go through the intervening steps from steam to the IC engine even with its problems (although with the technological database they have they can reduce that damage by a lot).


Keith_w wrote:
Graydon wrote: quote="Keith_w" Personal land transportation on Safehold includes carriages and horses, currently limited to the wealthy and for the non-wealthy, their feet. Does anyone think that the non-wealthy do not aspire to getting somewhere where only personal transportation of the not-feet variety can take them? quote

Given that Safehold has good roads, no sprawl development (they haven't even got to streetcars yet, never mind car suburbs), that cars are going to be brutally expensive for a good long while -- industrialization is just starting! think 100,000 USD equivalent for the basic model when production starts ten years from now -- and that the Empire's rulers are sneaky populists, I'm expecting a mass outbreak of bicycles. Howsmyn already has at least one built, it's just a matter of getting the things into mass production.

(Our history had a lot of bicycle infantry. I won't be the least surprised if the Empire fields some.)

Oh, and watch the mainland realms have to figure out brazed steel tubing, wire spokes, freewheels, cutting consistent chain rings and sprockets, pneumatic tires, small fasteners, fine steel cable, and making consistent drive chain; that process had a lot to do with the industrialization of Japan. It'd function as an excellent on-ramp to making more complex machinery.


I take your point that at this point in time on Safehold there are none of the drivers that encourage personal vehicles, but how long did it take for us to go from horse and wagon, to railroad to automobile? Just because at this time there is no where to go and nothing to do once you get there doesn't mean that in the not so distant future there won't be. At the rate of change that Chris is embracing, it'd bet that it won't be a week after the war is over before someone is building his first Howsman Steamer.



That's my thought too. In time, people will want to have their own private transportation. Unless you want cities that are -huge- and restrict all transportation to the public type, I fail to see the benefit of that. Letting people have their own vehicles (bicycles to automobiles) only helps the economy grow, plus it lets people spread out so you don't need to have everyone packed into factory town apartments 10 to a room and sleeping in shifts. A growing economy will demand that the common person have access to their own vehicles.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Keith_w   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 5:34 pm

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Graydon wrote:
Keith_w wrote:All that is true, there are limits to growth, however, unless you are running a command economy, people are going to do stuff anyhow.


Not on Safehold. They're going to have to figure out if what they want to do is religiously acceptable. There's an immense social pressure not to innovate. Take away the the threat of jihad and that religious unease will get stronger; Father Paitr is going to have to come up with something theologically cohesive (rather than cynical) sooner or later. Old Charis isn't especially subject to this by Safeholdian standards but many other components of the Empire sure are.

Plus the established nobility will be just delighted to sneer at profit motives. (Legitimate wealth comes from the land they coincidentally have already got all of.)

Keith_w wrote:And even though the Rocket was in 1829, Locomotion 1 preceded it in 1825 as the 1st railway engine to have paying passengers. (Side note, my mother worked at Stephenson's Darlington yards late 1940's to early 1950's when she was distracted by me :D ) Additionally, although the Model T was undoubtedly the 1st commercially available vehicle for the masses, the 1st automobile is credited to Carl Benz, 1886. with the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, 61 years later.


I picked the Model T because it's the first automobile that starts to rearrange the economy; there were less than 200 miles of paved road in the US in 1908. ("Metalled road", different sizes of gravel rolled to a hard surface, is different, and works well with tall narrow steel-tyre wheels and terribly with pneumatic wheels. It's a big change and you need a larger economy to afford tarmacadam roads.) There were all sorts of pre-model T car designs, but they didn't much count for anything in the overall economic sense.

Keith_w wrote:As for brakes, the earliest brakes were similar to those used on wagons - and on Safehold, where dragons can drag a huge tonnage, they presumably have brakes that can hold cargo wagons on hills if necessary. Additionally, as with early automobiles, they will probably use wagon wheels as the guide, which means wooden spokes. They are already using bicycles at the Delferak works, although RFC did not mention the spoking technology there, Howsmyn was wishing that pneumatic rather than solid rubber tyres were available.


The earliest automotive brakes worked badly, too, and were a major safety problem. There's a reason there's all those ads for the better brakes in the 30s! It would also be a reason for Father Paitr to say "no", this is clever but not safe. No putting widows and orphans and the maimed into the care of Mother Church, back to the drawing board with you!

I'd expect dragon wagons use chocks for hills. It's not clear that a human, even with a big lever, can hope to hold a friction brake on something that heavy. I can imagine hydraulic or geared brakes, but if those existed gear-cutting would be better and bolt-action locking lugs much less of a challenge.

Wooden spokes are compression spokes; they're slotted into the rim with mortises. Wire spokes are tension spokes; this works a lot better, produces a much stronger wheel, and is pretty much required for actual bicycles, where you're transmitting force from the hub to the rim, rather than a draisine, where you're not pedalling.

Keith_w wrote:The American economy grew by leaps and bounds during WWII, even thought the only external market was for war materiel (can we say "goodbye depression"?), and maintained that growth for 20+ years afterward, as first the post-war recovery in Europe required massive amounts of materiel and investment and then non-European markets decided to develop.


The US economy was already industrialized and had buckets of unutilized capacity. Not the position Safehold is in; they've got the war, the willingness and ability to spend, but not the pre-existing industrialization. Nor, for that matter, the electricity. No telegraph is going to be a big deal for railroads.


How do you do the multiple quotes that allow inline responses without hitting the quote limit?

Anyway, I knew why you picked the Model T, but the point that I was trying, poorly obviously, that Henry Ford, without the prior 20 years of automotive experimentation and sales to the wealthy, would probably not have been able to found his 3rd automotive manufacturing company. And if he hadn't invented the assembly line and increased the wages to his workers, the Model T would only have been affordable to the wealthy.

As for the unused industrial capacity of the US, vs, the currently barely (?) sufficient industrial capacity of Charis, Charis is currently expanding it's industrial capacity by leaps and bounds, even competitors of Mr. Howsmyn are adapting his changes. When the war ends, they will then have a vast amount of under used capacity which they will want to put to good, or at least profitable, use.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Graydon   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 6:22 pm

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Keith_w wrote:How do you do the multiple quotes that allow inline responses without hitting the quote limit?


The BBCode markup for quotes can be repeated; if I stick in a close quote,
[/quote]

type some stuff, and repeat the quote start/attribution

[quote="Keith_w"]

the board thinks it's all one big quoted block so far as I can tell.

Keith_w wrote:Anyway, I knew why you picked the Model T, but the point that I was trying, poorly obviously, that Henry Ford, without the prior 20 years of automotive experimentation and sales to the wealthy, would probably not have been able to found his 3rd automotive manufacturing company. And if he hadn't invented the assembly line and increased the wages to his workers, the Model T would only have been affordable to the wealthy.


Absolutely true. By the same token, Charis is going to have at least twenty years of development to get to that same "we can make and sell lots of these" point in industrial development; they're going to need the same kind of runup Ford had, only probably not the full 1860-onward fifty year one from our history.

Keith_w wrote:As for the unused industrial capacity of the US, vs, the currently barely (?) sufficient industrial capacity of Charis, Charis is currently expanding it's industrial capacity by leaps and bounds, even competitors of Mr. Howsmyn are adapting his changes. When the war ends, they will then have a vast amount of under used capacity which they will want to put to good, or at least profitable, use.


I disagree with "vast"; they can plate a bunch of barges and build three (3) steel-hulled ships, so far as we've seen. That's not very much industrial capacity compared to, say, a need for railway rails and rolling stock. Or a steam-driven merchant fleet, or even just fast passenger liners. (Borrow a trick from CP and name them "Empress of Charis", "Empress of Emerald", "Empress of Tarot", "Empress of Corrisand", and so on. Cayleb would like that.)

It's a really good start, the engines are excellent, but it's still going to take substantial time to build up in terms of volume.
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Re: Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?
Post by Captain Igloo   » Sun Dec 21, 2014 7:56 pm

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The main obstacle is money - the Harvey shop represented an obscene amount of investment. At Carnegies Homestead works, of the estimated $3 million (1895 dollars!) cost of the Armor Plate Department, only $500,000 represented the company's own money. The remaining cost was financed by the Navy in the form of inflated prices as high as $625 a ton. In his biography of Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Wall cites an 1897 letter from Schwab to Carnegie reporting on a difficult armor order that would cost $ 175 a ton to make. The steelmen glossed over the amount of subsidy built into the old prices and pointed to the size of their investment and overhead costs as justifications for the prices. The low export prices , they argued, were necessary in order to keep the armor plants open in depressed times and in lieu of a guaranteed level of Congressional expenditure.

The price of armor was not, as one historian has noted, a function of market forces, but of political negotiation. Members of Congress became outraged upon learning that Bethlehem had contracted to supply armor to the Russian Navy at $250 per ton (later raised to $524).

This became clear when in 1897 both Bethlehem and Carnegie refused to bid on a contract to supply armor at $300 per ton. As a further gambit in the negotiations over price, both companies offered to sell their armor plants to the government. Carnegie was willing to sell the Armor Plate Division for $2 million — $1 million less than "cost" — claiming that the capital could be better used in other product lines.

The impasse was quickly, but temporarily, resolved in the spring of 1898 with the naval buildup for the Spanish-American War. Carnegie and Bethlehem split the orders at an average of $400 per ton. After the war, the debate resumed until Congress authorized the construction of an armor plate plant in South Charleston, West Virginia, during World War I.
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