The Navy of God against Charis naval superiority

Safeholdian technological capabilities — I'm speaking here of metallurgy, toolmaking, and the availability of skilled craftsmen — were probably on a par with, say, 1850 without steam power or electricity.

May i just say that it's almost completely unrealistic? Without steam power, arabic numbers, newton theory and something like unified measure system it's almost completely impossible.

That's what readers need to understand if they want to put the Safeholdian rate of progress into context with the historical rate of progress here on Earth in real life.

The main problem is a educated workforce. How many people in the Charis able to at least read and write?

You keep trying to pigeonhole Safehold into one terrestrial era. Safehold has no equivalent historical era; it is one giant mishmash. While the Safeholdians are ignorant, they still have quite a lot of practical knowledge thanks to everything written down in the various archangels' Books. They might not know everything about the why or how (at least outside of Charis), but they have lots of things that work because they've done it by rote for generations without failure.

Dilandu wrote:

That's what readers need to understand if they want to put the Safeholdian rate of progress into context with the historical rate of progress here on Earth in real life.

The main problem is a educated workforce. How many people in the Charis able to at least read and write?

Genuine literacy in Charis probably approaches 50% of the total population and more like 75% of the skilled work force. Why do you persist in trying to make this fit a terrestrial model? It specifically doesn't. You refer in your last post to the lack of a uniform standard of measurement. If someone in Charis is trying to make a part for a reaper in Siddarmark which was manufactured in Dohlar, this is going to be a major problem. If a particular manufacturer is making parts for hisreapers, with measurements consistent with his own in-house units, then it becomes as least as practicable for his manufactory as Eli Whitney's so-called "interchangeable parts" were for his rifle-making facility. When Charis needs to hugely expand its capacity, it exports a genuine system of standardized measures which replace the existing nonstandard measures. It's not as if they had to invent the concept of measurement from scratch, and with the Church getting behind and pushing, implementing the new standards sailed through pretty darned quickly. Yes, it was a problem for them for a couple of years, but it was building on a well established platform of concepts.

This isn't Earth; there is a much larger skilled work force even before Merlin comes along; the starting points for metallurgy and other aspects of the technological infrastructure are much further advanced (although by "rote" learning, in many respects) than you are willing to allow/grasp; and the technological tool box includes capabilities which are substantially more advanced than the starting point you seem to insist on imposing upon the planet. Let me try this one more time. Safehold didn't have to invent any of its basic pre-Merlin tech. It didn't have to figure out "how" it worked; it only had to accept that it worked because the Archangels taught them how to do it. That meant that Safeholdian artisans --- of which there were many times as many, proportionately, as any Old Earth preindustrial society could have supported because of the agricultural advantages which have been repeatedly pointed out --- had a very good practical knowledge of processes which took centuries to develop from scratch in our own experience. What Merlin and Howsmyn have done is to take that basis of existing, practical, "rule of thumb," "divinely inspired" capability and impose understanding of the "why" upon it, with the help of the Royal College and the enthusiastic support of the Church of Charis.

Whether Langhorne realized it or not, he stuffed Safehold full of the launch pad for a genuine industrial revolution because of the information packed into the Writ. The only things which kept his master plan from spinning out of control so long were (1) the fact that the Writ also provided a "divine" explanation for why things worked which precluded a systematic examination of processes and natural laws to figure out how to do things even better and (2) the fact that the Inquisition was riding shotgun on the Proscriptions and making sure no one transgressed them on any organized scale.

What part of that do you not understand?

I,for one, will admit that, with the possible exception of Charis, I had Safehold comparable more to 17th century Europe before the age of industrialization than to the 19th century.

I suspect what is happening here is that when we think of the Writ, we tend to think only in terms of the proscriptions rather than the guidance it provides in such areas as chemistry and agriculture. Much of what Safehold takes for granted, we on Earth had to figure out a step at a time.

Don

runsforcelery wrote:
Sixth, you appear to be assuming that a 22'4" draft means that they can't come in close to engage coastal defenses. In most instances, they certainly can; if there isn’t deep water handy, people don’t tend to build heavy coastal fortifications that need heavy guns to suppress them. The King Haarahlds draw less than a foot more than USS Constitution, a 44-gun frigate built at the end of the 18th century, and more than 3 feet less than HMS Inflexible drew at Alexandria in 1882, and the water in most of the harbors where they are likely to be engaging heavy defenses is ample to permit them to come within point-blank range of the defenses. At that point, they will be effectively invulnerable to the shore guns and be able to engage targets ashore with 10" guns capable of penetrating 10” of Howsmynized steel armor and 8" guns capable of penetrating 7.5” of Howsmynized armor (all penetrations at 6,000 yards), each firing a round at least every 20-30 seconds or so as opposed to one round every 10 minutes or so. The current-generation Charisian 6" can penetrate only 4” of Howsmynized steel armor, by way of comparison between the weapons' performances.

To give a couple of illustrations of where most coastal defences are located. The primary coastal fort (there are two more) protecting Philadelphia PA (and Wilmington DE) is Fort Delaware located on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River. The original brick fort is beside the main shipping channel and combined with the Fort on the NJ side of the river would have engaged any ships attempting to pass in a cross fire (cannons placed in both forts would have been capable of reaching the other fort). The fortifications of old San Juan PR have as their strong points El Morro which over looks the shipping channel (and held the heaviest guns), and San Cristobal which is the larger and more complex preventing overland attack. Fortunately San Juan's fortification were not subjected to the insults of Fort Delaware where three 12" rifles were installed that could fire down river. I believe that these guns were not installed because due to the cost of building the mounts and the priority afforded to PR meant that by the time they got to installing large disappearing guns there, the airplane had proved itself sufficiently that building airfields and stationing air wings there provided cheaper and more effective protection.

Dilandu wrote:

That's what readers need to understand if they want to put the Safeholdian rate of progress into context with the historical rate of progress here on Earth in real life.

The main problem is a educated workforce. How many people in the Charis able to at least read and write?

Dilandu , why don't you have a look at the FAQ titled 'Overview of education on Safehold' It's on the second page of the Safehold FAQ's

runsforcelery wrote:
Why do people persist in describing Safehold as "an industry that has only recently begun industrialization"?

Because we don't have access to your mind and what we know is the only yard stick we can measure by, in other words we are the CoG being dragged into the future by you the CoC .

Also laziness, i know i do a half assed search to see if anyone has broached an idea yet, and there is no index of your posts/nuggets with (new and improved) OWL to search them for us. And search and reading just take sooooo long not to mention comprehending, it makes my brain hurt, just easier to whip of a post with no research.


laz

runsforcelery wrote:I will readily admit that I am making some optimistic assumptions about the process in Charis, but I don't think they are unreasonably optimistic. You may disagree, but my understanding of the starting point for the society and the planet I created as the backdrop for this entire story tells me that Charis' accomplishments — and the tsunami of shockwaves they are sending out across the rest of an essentially static planetary society — are completely in line with the capabilities of that society. Nobody on Safehold, including Merlin, truly realized the extent to which the entire planet was a compressed spring, waiting to launch a furious spate of innovations and technological advances which had been dammed up by the Church for the better part of 800 years, given that Safehold started with a far more sophisticated toolbox than Old Earth enjoyed anytime prior to the end of the 19th century. That's what readers need to understand if they want to put the Safeholdian rate of progress into context with the historical rate of progress here on Earth in real life.

I think that's a really fascinating & key insight - it's surely going to underpin what we will see in the next book or so

n7axw wrote:I,for one, will admit that, with the possible exception of Charis, I had Safehold comparable more to 17th century Europe before the age of industrialization than to the 19th century.

I suspect what is happening here is that when we think of the Writ, we tend to think only in terms of the proscriptions rather than the guidance it provides in such areas as chemistry and agriculture. Much of what Safehold takes for granted, we on Earth had to figure out a step at a time.

Don

Like you, I mentally had the mainland around late 17th century real world in industry pre-Merlin. Mainly due to the repeated emphasis on what is prohibited and on how difficult it is for new innovations to be approved. I DID think of them around 19th century RW in agriculture. So I guess I was half-right.