Naval technology at the time of creation

I just reread most of the series as the new book is not out yet, and during the reading of the first book a thought occurred me. The command crew went to some length to provide the best possible land transportation with draft dragons, articulated wagons with decent springs and the canal system. Likewise, land communication with the semaphore system is far advanced compared to anything earth had before the 19th century.
However ships are far from the perfected land systems the archangels left the colonists. Coppering, fore-and-aft sails and sextants are all innovations that don't violate the proscriptions, not only in wording but also in spirit, so why were these advances left out of the original tech base left by the archangels?
Doing so would have given them several advantages: They expected the population to grow, and settle all continents of Safehold eventually. Good blue-water transportation helps sustaining that population, and at the same time, and assures populations don't get too isolated, keeping them in touch with the rest of the world, and of course provide faster communication to the church, lowering the chance of any remote place becoming too independent.
It also removes the possible disadvantage of allowing a culture of progress and change creep in as all those technologies could have been discovered again even without Merlin helping along.

To make it short: Why didn't the Archangels provide the best possible wooden sailing ships they could to the colonists in the first place?

I don't think that the Archangels wanted the economy to be very efficient.

6L6 wrote:I don't think that the Archangels wanted the economy to be very efficient.

If that were true, they'd have done something about the roads and canals built by the terra-formers. and or placed limits on the size and technology of the wagons and barges.

I can see the "Archangels" wanting to limit expansion beyond the continent of Haven, but not crippling the economy in general.

Whitecold wrote:..snip..
To make it short: Why didn't the Archangels provide the best possible wooden sailing ships they could to the colonists in the first place?

I can think of several reasons.The whole point of the exercise with locking Safehold into a muscle powered society meant that keeping physical transportation to a slow pace also hinders progress. If you have spread out enclaves and a slow transportation network you get far less interaction which helps stop cultural change and new ideas.

If you instead provide the tools for rapid cultural exchange as you suggest, ideas can spread and take root faster. And the semaphore doesn't really count, since it's the church that controls it and the flow of information because of it. If they had have good ships that could navigate accurately from the beginning it would have promoted fast expansion which isn't that great idea if you want to maintain a cultural stasis.

Also, the "archangels" where very leery of providing any kind of technologies without a whole host of divine mumbo-jumbo and dire warnings of using them wrongly because of the potential for someone to start saying "why?". The technology supplied from the beginning was just enough to keep an agrarian muscle powered society to grow.

The canals and the roads works in this context because of the fixed routes, a ship can go almost anywhere.

Maybe they simply didn't understand pre-industrial revolution boats very well or appreciate their problems. In the early days when non-mainland colonies were few and small, mainland transportation would have been much more significant and important.

Joat42 wrote:I can think of several reasons.The whole point of the exercise with locking Safehold into a muscle powered society meant that keeping physical transportation to a slow pace also hinders progress. If you have spread out enclaves and a slow transportation network you get far less interaction which helps stop cultural change and new ideas.

However it also a creates problems with supervision of remote places and allows cultural drift in those places where the desired culture is not being adequately reinforced. Which is just about the genesis of the Inquisition's suspicions of the Out Islands.

Randomiser wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I can think of several reasons.The whole point of the exercise with locking Safehold into a muscle powered society meant that keeping physical transportation to a slow pace also hinders progress. If you have spread out enclaves and a slow transportation network you get far less interaction which helps stop cultural change and new ideas.

However it also a creates problems with supervision of remote places and allows cultural drift in those places where the desired culture is not being adequately reinforced. Which is just about the genesis of the Inquisition's suspicions of the Out Islands.

That's why the church have the semaphores.

Joat42 wrote:I can think of several reasons.The whole point of the exercise with locking Safehold into a muscle powered society meant that keeping physical transportation to a slow pace also hinders progress. If you have spread out enclaves and a slow transportation network you get far less interaction which helps stop cultural change and new ideas.

Randomiser wrote:However it also a creates problems with supervision of remote places and allows cultural drift in those places where the desired culture is not being adequately reinforced. Which is just about the genesis of the Inquisition's suspicions of the Out Islands.

Joat42 wrote:That's why the church have the semaphores.

Which is exactly my point. You can't build any semaphore towers in the middle of the ocean, so you want the fastest ship possible to keep up communication.
And I wouldn't let the spread of dangerous information count. Safeholdian culture started as perfectly uniform, and they wanted to keep it that way using the church.
Isolated populations are what develops new and dangerous ideas in the first place.

SNIP

Joat42 wrote:

Whitecold wrote:..snip..
To make it short: Why didn't the Archangels provide the best possible wooden sailing ships they could to the colonists in the first place?

I can think of several reasons.The whole point of the exercise with locking Safehold into a muscle powered society meant that keeping physical transportation to a slow pace also hinders progress. If you have spread out enclaves and a slow transportation network you get far less interaction which helps stop cultural change and new ideas.

"Wind, Water, Muscle" right?

Honestly, the best answer seems to be, "Because the Archangels didn't give much thought to naval tech at all."

After all, all the historical savvy people seemed to have been part of Shan-Wei's faction. The rest wanted to lock Safehold in as primitive a tech setup as they could get away with. So it would seem reasonable to a bunch of non-sailors who don't know nautical history to limit naval tech to square sails and oars.

On further thinking, I'll bet the Archangels didn't think Safeholdians would need anything more advanced than a coastal fishing boat. Galleons were invented well after Creation when the remaining angels realized that the out islands and other remote settlements that could only be reached by water needed some way to connect with the Church that did NOT involve an angel in an aircar.

Galleys are a logical extension of the rowboat, and likely created to help police coastal areas. And eventually help kingdoms war with each other.

Edit: Furthermore, coppering the bottom of ships is a response to a problem that wouldn't make itself evident to a non-naval minded person until wooden boats and ships have been in operation for extended periods of time. It's an easy thing to overlook until your boat operating flock starts coming to you complaining about the bottoms of their ships being fouled.

By the same token, non-naval minded people wouldn't realize the value of triangular sails or sextants or all the other naval refinements that Charis produced before and after Merlin.