Hi Imperatorzor,
Actually Perry brought a small scale railroad, on which the local Daimyo's sat on the engine cab as it sped around a circular track in part to demonstrate their courage.
As planned, after the treaties were signed, it was left in Japan for them to copy, along with other examples of then modern technology, as part of the American intention to treat Japan as an equal, not a dependent colony as Europe did.
Thus in less than 40 years the US Congress was passing laws restricting imports of Japanese machine made cloth.
One of the points of the series is how a nation forced to focus on survival can innovate quickly despite a near millennia old culture opposed to invention, perhaps you prefer a more sedentary set of stories, though who'd write such boring stuff?
Father Paityr has been approving patents for lots of other inventions we haven't seen, do you want RFC to waste limited writing space listing them all?
L
imperatorzor wrote:n7axw wrote:Then, remember that Howsmyn's people did not have to fumble around with experimenting and blind alleys to come up with a workable design because that came courtesy of Owl. Instead the first steam engines are proof of concept rather than experimentation.
So was the case for the Japanese when they built their first steam engines and steamship. They saw western "black ships" off their coasts chugging along and how they performed in the Opium Wars and had bought some books on how they work, but relented on building one due to fears of crossing the line until the gates of japan were opened. The Japanese did not have to muck about with atmospheric engines and similar intermediate states.
cralkhi wrote:And actually, now that I think of it, Safehold got to cannons and matchlock muskets in less than a century after the invention of gunpowder. It took significantly longer on Earth - IIRC guns proper are something like 300 years after gunpowder (fire-lances came earlier).
I wonder if this is related to another 'hidden' brotherhood...
If you want to go with guns in the sense of the Lock, Stock and Barrel design, its more to the effect of 500 from the first Song Dynasty experiments with bamboo tubes filled with gunpowder and pebbles to proper matchlock muskets.
Zor
