WeberFan wrote: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!
Thanks for the vote of confidence
The problem is not that the steps are missing but that they are critical to making progress to the end state at all. E.g. metal lathes requiring standardised advance screws to be able to conduct mass production. I know the theory for making gunpoweder and Cannon but as the mythbusters have found it is much harder than it looks and the time taken is always an issue.
Having Owl and Merlin pointing things out helps a lot but even if you showed them a metal lathe is should take even an expert like Howmsmyn et al years to get it working correctly these are VERY complex machines even today and they need a controlable power supply from somewhere. Working out how to power them is once of those essential foundation technologies I keep harping on about. In the world we have you need to invent some sort of belt take off from a central shaft and this is NOT a tech the alrady have as weber has a scene talking about how it is starting to spread. Because they don't have this technology we KNOW that they cannot do a whole lot of things a modern person takes for granted which is the whole thrust of my argument.
While we are talking about this the ammount of time required to hand produce single produce parts of guns is massive, I suggest looking at how much work a master gunsmith takes to produce some replacement parts on modern machines when fixing historical weapons.
Making a replacement screw from scratch
https://youtu.be/23dHAq6GxzU?list=PLJvs ... kVEu4i2HAV
Boring out a welded in obscruction as we talked about the issue of cannon boring earlier https://youtu.be/KXvYVI2TGRQ?list=PLJvs ... kVEu4i2HAV
Mass production of these weapons is the real crunch. Even in WW1 it took between 1 and 3 years to set up an effective prodcution line with it taking nearly 2 years for Remmington et al to gear up to produce the Mosin-Nagant for the Imperial Russian army and they are already well equiped with machine tools and have a pool of trained industrial workers to draw on.
This time complaint may seem pedantic but somthing that most authors gloss over and RFC is no exception here is that they massivly condense how long it takes to do ANYTHING in thier story, especially manufacturing and travel times. (Admittedly this is partly to make the story more exciting and flow better)