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
) 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.
