Technical next steps

OK folks;

In looking over the tech thus far, which has made some fairly strong leaps, I wonder about three or four potential developments, both from the standpoint of usefulness and from the standpoint of possibility. I keep in mind that for all the progress we've seen there are one or two limiting factors. First, a lack of a solid understanding of chemistry, no table of elements mentioned, no standard model of an atom, etc. In short none of the building blocks that allows systematic development. So far everything is sort of a haphazard discovery or Owl/Merlin guided development (Or so the text seems to imply to me anyway). And of course the absolute need to avoid electricity (at least so far).
Even with those developments, however, some things still seem doable. The development of Potassium chlorate or even Potassium perchlorate for priming caps that don't have the problem of mercury poisoning (And are slightly more stable than mercury fulminate which is just a bit touchy at times) Doable I think and a preferable improvement, plus an understanding of the chemistry leads to Ammonium perchlorate, which makes a dandy rocket oxidizer.
Another possibility, the diesel engine (And yes I know we had a loooonnng discussion on this one already.) but not for ships engines this time, instead I'm thinking about Tanks. The gun building and steel making tech is coming into range for this, so the idea of the Tank or self propelled gun certainly doesn't seem far off. And the addition that a refining operation gives to boosting the chemical side development can't be ignored. Diesel engines don't require electric as such (Although glow plugs or a heat coil certainly help). And in the case of electrical use, if you really want an electric glow plug you use a battery and Direct current. Direct current, unlike AC is practically undetectable at any distance whatsoever, especially if generated by a voltaic pile or other battery scheme (Dynamos are a different story of course). Another possible technology is the airship (blimp or dirigible) Now we're talking about possibly running straight into the proscriptions here, but from the standpoint of could they build one, I see no real problems. Steelsilk outer envelope, minor sealant layer of shellac for gas tightness, inner steelsilk layer, use heated air or hydrogen (if they can generate it chemically) as a lift gas. Small diesels or a very light steam engine run on oil to drive a propeller and Voilà airship. Heck, you could use the waste heat from the steam engine to heat the air to lift the balloon/blimp/dirigible.

Oh and the long stretch tech, already mentioned. Electricity. As I said use a battery/voltaic pile to generate a DC field and DO NOT use it to power a motor or any repetitive make/break circuit (Telegraph) that generates a spark, and it's the next best thing to undetectable at any distance. A single push switch to turn a circuit on or off used intermittently would be lost in the background noise of normal ground electric fields. Don't use a dynamo to generate it (Sparking brushes create rhythmic electric pulses that are hard to mistake for any natural phenomena).

One tech to avoid. Widespread gas lamp deployment. Small deployments limited to a local area could be simple ground burn off, but a widespread deployment (city wide) will give off more than enough spectral output for a orbital sensor to measure and detect as the output of a civilization climbing the tech tree. Gas lamps look quite different to a spectrum analyzer than light from a wood fires, coal stoves, or oil lamps. If I was Foghorn Langhorne and company, I'd stomp on widespread deployment of gas lamps as an obvious step in the wrong direction from where I wanted people to go from the standpoint of technological stagnation. (Although a limelight lighthouse might be useful, it's probably also a bad idea)
(You know, as I think about it, I don't remember seeing any mentions of lighthouses anywhere in the text. Darn strange for a planet using sea travel as much as they are)

Just some thoughts all collected together. Pick and choose what you like to shoot back at.

Larry

Gas lighting may well be detectable, but I don't think it's a problem. After all you can get 'town gas' just by heating coal in the right circumstances, and they have had coal since the Creation. I don't think any Proscription against it has ever been mentioned. I seem to have a vague recollection of gas lighting being installed at the Delthak works and in the Tellesburg Docks but I may be wrong.

Randomiser wrote:Gas lighting may well be detectable, but I don't think it's a problem. After all you can get 'town gas' just by heating coal in the right circumstances, and they have had coal since the Creation. I don't think any Proscription against it has ever been mentioned. I seem to have a vague recollection of gas lighting being installed at the Delthak works and in the Tellesburg Docks but I may be wrong.

Very true, and quite literally, to my mind that's playing with fire. If Langhorne, et al. intended to keep humanity bottled up in the triangle edges of wind, water, and muscle, then they have to be aware when the wheels could potentially come off. If they knew history at all, then coal gas would be one of those points. It's not terribly difficult to produce, and on a small scale, not troubling. A small scale amount of light from burning coal gas could come from simply a larger than normal forge or blacksmith's as a purely unintentional byproduct. Widespread illumination with it, however, means a gas works, and a gas works is trouble. First because clearly someone is going over the wind, water, muscle triad into distributed power, and second because the questions and ideas that coal gas illumination leads to are absolutely, and unavoidably, going to cause even worse. Coal gas, means an industrial process that creates coal tar, and that means organic chemistry in fairly short order. Thinking about coal and reacting it with various acids, even if just by accident, will produce all kinds of compounds some of which are damn profitable. Which means it gets studied, and studying leads to innovation, which leads to technological progress, which leads straight back to where the phoney archangels didn't want it all to go. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification Esp. the section on byproducts.) If a large area is illuminated with it, you have a problem.
Now one thing I can assure you that a satellite in orbit can see is illuminated cities. And it can do a spectral analysis. If that ain't candle light providing that light, then friend you have a problem (at least if your the Langhorneite type). I'm only guessing, but I think it's a safe guess, that the OBS isn't a dumb system. An AI or even an expert system that was well programmed is going to see that as a problem. The AI doesn't know (and shouldn't care) what decisions about the proscriptions bribe-able officials of the priesthood have made. Widespread coal gas use should be a trigger point.
Of course if anyone but an idiot programmed the OBS observation and automatic response computer, so should steamships, but that's a different story. (I'm hoping to find out that whoever set it up was secretly a model railroader and wanted trains and steam engines.)

Just my two cents.

Larry

Larry wrote:OK folks;

Another possibility, the diesel engine (And yes I know we had a loooonnng discussion on this one already.) but not for ships engines this time, instead I'm thinking about Tanks.
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Another possible technology is the airship (blimp or dirigible)
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One tech to avoid. Widespread gas lamp deployment. S

OK. Tanks won't be forthcoming in the short to medium term. My understanding was that the development of tanks was driven by the trench warfare of WW1. I'm pretty convinced that the ICA will probably not be faced with a situation where they are running into trenches they can't attack but by tanks. Moreover, the machine gun hasn't yet been introduced - and it's the machine gun that ultimately created the need for tanks. As to Diesel engines: Could be a possibility, but not in this war. The infrastructure for producing diesel fuel is simply not there; that alone is a multi-year venture.

Regarding airships: Technologically apparently feasible (although hydrogen supply will be limited). But their tactical advantage will be rather limited for the ICA, because the major field commanders have direct or indirect access to SNARC Information. So, not impossible but rather unlikely.

Gas lamps: They are already there, and they are there to stay. Tellesberg, e.g., should have street lights like major European and American cities before the introduction of electric lighting. And there's nothing in the Proscriptions we know about, which might trigger the Rakurai. (That automated system is certainly not intelligent - otherwise Tellesberg would be a smoldering crater already...)

You aren't wrong.

Gas lights are already in large-scale use in Charis.

Their signatures aren't actually any more diagnostic of technology, although, as pointed out, in a different way, than those of steam engines. [BTW, I don't remember any details of the description: are these mantle lamps or open flame lamps? It makes a huge difference to the spectral distribution.] If the system had been set to detect and stomp on the one, it wouldn't have ignored the other - and the description of Merlin's little test set makes it very clear how visible steam engines are to Federation sensors.

It remains possible that there is a threshold set by the combination of a complex of signatures and extent of use, which hasn't been crossed yet, but I'm inclined to believe that they have in fact been set far higher up the technological ladder, in the 'produces emissions detectable at long ranges' region. Or, that they haven't been set at all, and everybody involved [except RFC, of course] has been overthinking this whole business. Doing so is simple wisdom on the part of the Inner Circle, after all, but consider: the winners of the WAtF were convinced Langhornites, signed on to the notion that he and Bedard were such masters of sociology and psychology that they had created the perfect static society with all the control mechanisms needed to freeze it the way it should be for all time. Given their [his, more likely] own modest little tweaks to the Masters' creation, why should they be concerned about something that would never happen anyway? Not, at least, without an outside intervention that was now clearly impossible. These were not, you will have noticed, people given to self-doubt or uncertainty about their competence. The fact that the OBS is still up and running, and able to defend itself, could actually be artefacts of the circumstances of the War itself, which would have been fought in part against those who wielded at least some TF tech of their own, and don't indicate that it was actually expected to remain operational indefinitely or take any further part in Safehold's development.

As an aside, I will note that I've been wondering for quite some time if Schueler counts among the _victors_ of the War, something that others have speculated about in part, but that I've not seen pulled together in one place. It would seem that he and Chihiro were at least allies during the primary phases, but while that would have to mean that he was a Believer, it doesn't necessarily follow that he drank _all_ the Kool-Aid. If the final phase of the War was actually a contest between Chihiro and Schueler over the form and nature of the Church, fed perhaps by growing doubt about the inevitability of the Plan or perhaps just by the fact that Schueler was a much nicer _person_, it's clearly one that Schueler ultimately lost. Not, however, one he was at all sanguine about losing, or intended should remain lost. Whence his creation of the Wylsynns and their Key. And, also very likely when you think about it, the Return, as well. Note that the Church in general has no millenialist tradition - it's confined to the Wylsynns, who must have received the info from Schueler. If the Archangels in general had intended any such road show, why wouldn't they have made an appointment? And why isn't Clyntahn at least looking forward to showing off the marvelous outcome of his stewardship of the Church's purity to them? [I'm sure it wouldn't cross his mind that he might actually need their help] If the return is something Schueler cooked up on his own without inviting Chihiro [or maybe without telling him he was coming along?], then, whatever he intended by it, it is actually possible that the function of the Key is indeed to invoke it early - and that huge file is either not a personality or one expected to be needed only in the 'off the rails' scenario.

Randomiser wrote:Gas lighting may well be detectable, but I don't think it's a problem. After all you can get 'town gas' just by heating coal in the right circumstances, and they have had coal since the Creation. I don't think any Proscription against it has ever been mentioned. I seem to have a vague recollection of gas lighting being installed at the Delthak works and in the Tellesburg Docks but I may be wrong.

Larry,

Electricity is out of the question--not because it might trigger the Rakurai, but because it is explicitly prohibited by the Proscriptions. There is simply no way to introduce even electric batteries without breaking the Proscriptions in the most obvious way. The entire world would turn against them if they did that--including most of the Charisian Empire. Merlin and the Inner Circle will not even consider introducing electricity until the Proscriptions have been thrown down.

Larry, the basic understanding on Safehold is that God, through the Archangels, is beneficent, faithful and fair. To that end the Prohibitions clearly lay down how God's Children are to live and anyone who breaks them will get in trouble, up to and including getting smitten by the Rakurai. However the converse of that is also true, God will not punish people for doing things which are not Prohibited, because that would be capricious and unfair and undermine the understanding of God's character on which the whole society is based. The heros in the Vicarate may not play by those rules, exactly, but the Archangels did, because they understood the cost if they didn't.

There is a general suspicion of innovation, but it is not actually prohibited as such. Burning coal for heating and for various industrial processes, think all kinds of metal production and working, is clearly allowed. Burning coal gas is very little different. Playing Chemistry with the coal is quite different and may be covered by a proscription on the limited uses of acids etc. Or maybe not, since proscriptions that are too detailed lead to interesting lines of enquiry if one is so minded.

RFC in posts has indicated that various people in Safehold's history have started to play with electricity and have been hammered by the Inquisition for it.

I figured I'd post this here and see where people take it. Steam lorries: http://youtu.be/mi4oJLqFMI8

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RunsInShadows wrote:I figured I'd post this here and see where people take it. Steam lorries: http://youtu.be/mi4oJLqFMI8

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God Bless you my friend for posting that link. I've been a nut for steam engines and steam trains since I was a little kid. Gave me a new show to look for episodes of as well as introducing me to a marvelous part of history! Well done, sir, well done. Brings me back to the annual Steam show that the Carroll County Farm Museum would do. All manor of steam tractors and vehicles, and of course a steam calliope! Don't recall ever seeing a steam lorrie though. Marvelous find!

And yes, by all means, Safehold needs Steam Lorries!

Larry

Larry wrote:

RunsInShadows wrote:I figured I'd post this here and see where people take it. Steam lorries: http://youtu.be/mi4oJLqFMI8

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God Bless you my friend for posting that link. I've been a nut for steam engines and steam trains since I was a little kid. Gave me a new show to look for episodes of as well as introducing me to a marvelous part of history! Well done, sir, well done. Brings me back to the annual Steam show that the Carroll County Farm Museum would do. All manor of steam tractors and vehicles, and of course a steam calliope! Don't recall ever seeing a steam lorrie though. Marvelous find!

And yes, by all means, Safehold needs Steam Lorries!

Larry

I couldn't agree more! Mundane use, and armored battle wagon. Much like the KH was based off of a mundane platform.

I foresee many hours of my time watching that show.
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