MWadwell wrote:
I agree.
It's not just the practical experience! (I.e. with no institutional experience, all maintenance is going to be "learn by doing". Which means that a LOT of steam engines are going to be run to death, because no-one knew what preventative maintenance was required).
It's also theoretical knowledge as well.
Exactly!
Generally, what we have in Charis? We have workers and engineers, that - exept for the tiny portion of "Inner Circle" - simply could not understood what they are building and why exatly that way. And they are Charisian, not the Harchongese serfs, wich means, that they would not just mindlessly "follow the orders and don't ask any questions". They WOULD ask questions. They would ask questions about "why this should be build like that?", "why are you thinking that it's right thing to do?" and even "how could you came to this, this isn't the obvious solution?!"
And what could be the respond? They surely would find that pretty strange, if so much of perfect solutions "just appeared" from a relatively few group of peoples. The best that they could assume - is that the Archangel Langhorne truly send the knowlege to the faithful, and you should be chosen to became a vessel of divine knowlege. They wouldn't be able to assume that the design of KH's isn't divine gift, because something SUCH FLAWLESS as the instructions, given to them, couldn't be just created by mortals.
There is a major problems here. As colleague MWadwell mentioned before -
Unless OWL is able to tell every designer how to correctly design something that has never been done before (i.e. ventilation / lighting / counter flooding, etc) then the design is going to be a white elephant.
And unless OWL is going to sit on every construction workers shoulder, and tell them how to do the job properly, the inexperienced workforce/ships crew are going to make mistakes that will result in the ship being quickly sunk by its own crew....
- the KH's simply would not work in case any of its component would be build perfectly.
So:
- If we gave peoples the perfect instructions how to build KH's. the Safeholdians would just assume that this knowlege is truly divine. Because they understood perfectly, that something such advanced and innovative could not be designed perfectly by just mortals. Peoples aren't fools - especially engineers. If they see something big and innovative that just designed perfectly, they would start to have doubts, how exactly it was designed.
I must remind you, that for Safeholdian point of view, the perfect knowlege could came either from Archangels, either from Shain-Wei. Given the Charisian position, they would probably assume the first... and this is actually bad, because the main reason of all this mess on Safehold is to tech peoples to think for themselves, not to await that some genius would be "blessed by the divine knowlege".
- If we gave peoples just the main directions to work - it would be much better, because peoples would be able to actually design thing themselves, not just "aquire the blueprints from some Langhorne-blessed genius". they started to think themselves, to learn...
The only problem, that they wouldn't be able to create workable KH's this way. Too many problems would appeared, because the task is enormously complex. To learn by themselves, peoples should make mistakes. In KH's project, the mistakes would mean that the awful lot of money and resources was wasted on the ship, that wouldn't work at all.
