CoGA submarines

Dilandu wrote:
I didn't considered Safehold or Charis as pre-industrial society. But there is a different level of industrial society. The Britain in 1801 were industrial more than enough - in most industrial spheres beyound pre-Merlin Charis - but still could not do anything on the Charisian scale. And per-Merlin Charis didn't have:

- Arabic numbers and advanced mathematic - at all
- Newton mechanics - at all
- Scientific approaches - almost completely nothing. The "Royal College", in comparsion with early-XIX century level is completely insignificant.

With all respect, this is far too much. It's below not just the 1800th, but 1700th and even 1600th level.

I think you are making too much of the differences, tech changed rather slowly prior to ~1830. The biggest difference in the cannons used in the English Civil War ~1660, and the Napoleonic wars was that the powder had gotten a lot better (gun sizes had crept up also). One big question that has never been answered, where are they getting all the gunpowder they need, specifically saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder. Some of the most detested agents of the French crown before the revolution were the petermen (who dug up peasants privies for the saltpeter).

A whole lot of this is about whether you want RFC to write best selling novels that put food on the table and support his family or an economic/technological history book about the industrialisation of Safehold, which might sell about 1000 copies.

I think the background thinking is there, in much greater depth than many other post-apocalyptic style books, but as the developments widen there is less room to show us the detailed argument for every step of the process. RFC already gets slated for the number and length of infodumps.

Another aspect of this is that Dilandu seems to me to have a particularly fixed and inflexible view of how industrialisation must occur, and what value judgements the Inner Circle must take about their priorities and to be unwilling to accept that RFC's different viewpoint may have any merit nor to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.

Randomiser wrote:A whole lot of this is about whether you want RFC to write best selling novels that put food on the table and support his family or an economic/technological history book about the industrialisation of Safehold, which might sell about 1000 copies.

I think the background thinking is there, in much greater depth than many other post-apocalyptic style books, but as the developments widen there is less room to show us the detailed argument for every step of the process. RFC already gets slated for the number and length of infodumps.

Another aspect of this is that Dilandu seems to me to have a particularly fixed and inflexible view of how industrialisation must occur, and what value judgements the Inner Circle must take about their priorities and to be unwilling to accept that RFC's different viewpoint may have any merit nor to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.

Bravo on your first paragraph! Spoken like a true Scotsman!

Don

There is also a substantial misapprehension, which is by no means unique to Dilandu, I've noticed, about the courses of the "Scientific" and "Industrial" "revolutions" and how they interacted. I'll spare you the 10-page essay I was starting to compose, and simply point out that it wasn't very much at all - and most of it in the direction of Science, at that.

Randomiser wrote:A whole lot of this is about whether you want RFC to write best selling novels that put food on the table and support his family or an economic/technological history book about the industrialisation of Safehold, which might sell about 1000 copies.

I think the background thinking is there, in much greater depth than many other post-apocalyptic style books, but as the developments widen there is less room to show us the detailed argument for every step of the process. RFC already gets slated for the number and length of infodumps.

Another aspect of this is that Dilandu seems to me to have a particularly fixed and inflexible view of how industrialisation must occur, and what value judgements the Inner Circle must take about their priorities and to be unwilling to accept that RFC's different viewpoint may have any merit nor to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.