Silverwall wrote:EdThomas wrote:Some questions.
Assumption - steam engine development so far has been in relatively slow engines. Is the metallurgy available to develop high speed engines and the complex transmissions they require?
I think the development of fuels for these faster engines would be considered as new uses of allowed procedures, i.e. distillation. I believe petroleum refining is a form of distillation which makes it an allowed process.
How do the Proscriptions deal with "new" knowledge developed in Universities? For example, germ theory.
Is the chemical makeup of granular powder the same as the original meal powder. If not, is it a proscriptions violation?
Same question for chocolate powder, smokeless powder and "Lewisyte".
According to RFC the answer to these answers is YES.
However myself and others feel that based on what is described the answer should be NO.
Basically there are a great many hidden steps needed to get from the technology level described in the first book to where RFC took them in story.
If you ever watch a programme called Connections (Either version) you see how interconnected this knowledge is.
Furthermore most stories like this. Sometimes called the 'Giving radio to the Romans" storyline ignores what has been said by many philosophers of science. Specifically that most inventions need both physical and social conditions to flourish. Steam engines in particular can reasonably be traced back to Ptolomaic egypt and temple miracles. However it wasn't until 2000 years later that a compelling need (Mine pumping) became widespread enough to cause widespread adoption of the technology.
Also in the interest of good storytelling he has massively compressed how long it takes a technology to become truely ubiquitous. In our world even cellphones took 30 years to mature as a technology from 1980 to about 2010 and that is not even counting the "Smart phone" aspect but just the phone aspect.
Another example is how long economics caused sail powered craft to linger. Despite steam becomming common in the 1830s and 1840s the final death knell for sailing coasters wasn't until the U-Boat depridations of WW1 where thier very low spead made them excessivly vulnrable to the subs.
One than that is criminally under-discussed in the book and should be holding both sides back is the lack of machine tools. Especially the modern steal cutting lathe which is essential to making everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_lathe This is a technology so core to all the advancements in bolt actions and complex steam engines it really should have been discussed much more.
Great post, Silverwall.
Interesting that you bring up Connections... I remember watching the series and eventually bought the entire series on DVD. Fascinating work!
But thinking about your post, and about the "Connections" connection, and reading some of the other posts in this thread it seems that the common theme is that it's just not taking long enough to develop a new technology. There are "too many missing intermediate steps."
In my mind I'm thinking "Of COURSE the intermediate steps are missing." The essence of our technological development on Earth is incremental, linear, step-by-step advancement because A) we don't understand the ultimate possibilities of our work - we're blinded by our own lack of imagination and creativity; and B) we have no idea how to get where we're going - we're hamstrung by the need to "figure it out."
But what if those two statements were no longer true? What if we already knew what we were trying to create and already knew how to create it? What if the only thing holding us back was trying to pretend that the development path WAS slow and incremental?
In my mind, the entire tedious, circuitous, blind-alley-strewn development path could be bypassed. We could go in a straight line from A to Z. Well, we might want to throw in the occasional dud just so we couldn't be accused of being demonspawn... But all the fruitless intermediate steps... All the non-value-add intermediates... could be bypassed.
In one of the other posts in this thread, there's a comment about the metal lathe. Good example. What if you didn't have one already, but could SEE one? What if you could SEE how one is built? What if you could SEE one in operation? What if you could ask (and have the question answered with 100% accuracy) what it was made out of and how it was made? What if you could ask how to make the high-strength steel necessary to make the machine tools and get those questions answered? What if you didn't really NEED to experiment to find the answers for yourself? Would that speed up the development of steel lathe technologies? MWW has already told us in textev a number of times how Owl has enabled advances in base technology (providing the CALIBRATED crush gauge for determining bore pressures immediately comes to mind).
With Owl and his library database I think all that is possible. The only thing standing in the way is the (temporary) need to include some blind alleys.
Personally, I think this is one of the better threads on the board. But my conclusion is that Howsmyn and the entire nascent company of technology innovators will begin entire new lines of innovation in the new book. And I for one am really, really looking forward to seeing where that might lead!