01-05-2017, 03:21 PM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Trouble with Armor and Worldbuilding
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I don't think de Camp mentioned it in that book he wrote afterward (Ancient Engineering?) and he'd done a lot of research that Martin Padway wouldn't have had the chance to do.
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Fred Brackin |
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01-10-2017, 07:31 PM | #32 | |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Sumter, SC
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Re: Trouble with Armor and Worldbuilding
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That said it is interesting that improvements to what the Roman could have done but didn't. Take the Gothic arch for example. Well within the reach of the Romans to do at TL2 and more conservative in its use of stone then the arch the Romans did use...so what social forces were in action that it wasn't developed? |
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01-11-2017, 06:56 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Trouble with Armor and Worldbuilding
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You can have your TL4 come from various places - actual precursor kit recovered from ruins (an ideal source of articulated plate in a campaign where it is otherwise lacking), material from not-Constantinople (somewhere where the old world never quite died) and from others trying to revive the old tech level. This can give you plenty of variety. Tech, of course, spreads slowly due to the system of guild mysteries - each master only teaches a handful of apprentices in his lifetime and they learn in person and by rote (the tech to standardise anything is basically non-existent). Further controls can be applied by restricting access to raw materials and processing - without good quality iron supplies you will have difficulty setting up a place in which armour can be made, let alone developed and poor smelting technology will leave you struggling to make large pieces of plate that will do what you want from them. Decide if you want the price of equipment to be based on how good it is, or how hard it is to make (the two are not necessarily related). Decide whether you want classic fantasy with people running about everywhere in metal armour or whether the gambeson might not turn out to be the standard form of protection as it seems to have been in some parts of history. <pure guess> Might Roman stonemasons have been less skilful? Their engineers might have been using techniques that would take centuries to recover once lost, but perhaps there was nothing as skilled as the master masons that built the great cathedrals. |
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01-11-2017, 12:53 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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Re: Trouble with Armor and Worldbuilding
Getting the idea gothic arch relies on either a fairly good understanding of the distribution of forces, or a lot of trial and error. An extra thousand-or-so years is a lot of extra time for someone to stumble across a good idea.
In part, the cathedrals (among other big things) were built at the very edge of technical capabilities at the time, and sometimes just sliiiiiightly beyond the local capabilities. There were certainly failures, and builders would have to clean up a collapsed wall and try again, hopefully not making the same mistake.
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