02-09-2019, 05:58 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Making Synthetic Rubber in an AtE/AH/Lest Darkness Fall Situation
tshiggins, I came across a possibility that the ASNs could actually make synthetic rubber. I don't have a clue how long it would take them to set up any kind of production, though. For all I know, it could be months, it could be years or it could be decades.
So, depending on how hard it is to manufacture synthetic rubber when you have men who've recently ran a slave factory that did just that, but no longer have the TL7 economy of tens of millions that made it easy to acquire everything you needed, the ASNs might or might not have to switch over from rubber tires. They'll have a couple of tons of spares, at first, and plenty of materials to patch tires, and they'll aim to set up manufacture of synthetic rubber as soon as they've set up exttaction and/or manufacture of all the raw materials required. Quote:
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02-09-2019, 11:03 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: Making Synthetic Rubber in an AtE/AH/Lest Darkness Fall Situation
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I'm certain it could happen eventually, but you'd know better than me if the existing supplies of rubber tires (already in very short supply in Germany by the end of the war) would last until the ASNs could set up a petrochemical industry and associated supply chain as sophisticated as what Germany had in the 1890s. That said, anything they could do to preserve existing stocks would help, right? If the ASNs perceive the development of wooden paths and roads as a "doable" transportation network that could be achieved with in situ resources, early on, they might go for it. All it needs is wooden planks, 15x15 cm posts (6x6s, in GURPS terms), cheap nails, simple iron brackets, flat stones at the bases of the posts to keep them out of the mud, and labor. What they get is faster transportation than anybody else, on wooden paths and roads that help the bicycles (and eventually horse-carts) last longer with less maintenance. Once they get access to petroleum (or even rubber and sulphur chemicals), then yeah, make rubber tires again. But that'll take awhile, and by then they'd want to have shifted to Roman roads, anyway.
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02-09-2019, 12:03 PM | #23 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Making Synthetic Rubber in an AtE/AH/Lest Darkness Fall Situation
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The ASNs will even have taken all the small tools and machines of these synthetic rubber factories that would be hard to make without a TL7 infrastructure with them. After all, they are planning to have a TL7 chemical industry again as soon as possible and they are bringing 30,000 tons of supplies that are designed to enable them to maintain a military supremacy and to help them bootstrap industry. Depending on how long it takes to get such materials again, it's possible that the experts who had extensive experience at setting up the factories might have forgotten some things that made the manufacture more efficient, some of them might have retired and others would have died, but unless there is no chance of somehow obtaining the chemicals that are needed within half a century or earlier, there would still be living people with experience at this. No matter how long it took to build up to the capacity to make such chemicals, by the time it had been achieved, there would be extensive written blueprints, production notes, guidelines and textbooks written by Bütefisch and his staff that were designed to allow the creation of synthetic rubber plants by the Antarctic Space Nazis, that would have been revised all through their lifetimes to incorporate knowledge of the current state of the art in ASN economy and industry, and their access to raw materials and infrastructure to make any tools and machines needed. Quote:
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And until they have bred hundreds of thousands of powerful horses (the local variety averages twelve hands in height) from the few thousands they brought as breeding stock and made correspondingly large numbers of well-designed wagons and carts, bicycles will remain a convenient alternate method to move people and cargo over level or mostly level ground. Quote:
I imagine that wooden roads are simple enough to do with mostly native labour so that they'd be preferred for some routes with naturally level terrain that is both close to sources of wood, but not actually in thick forest itself, and no convenient waterway that goes the same way. The Hellweg between the Rhine and the Weser, for example. Quote:
Any military movements that are overland tend to be auxiliary natives just providing security to supply routes of economic importance. And waterways and canals are better for moving heavy loads, anyway. That isn't to say that they'll never build Roman roads, just that roads are below other vital infrastructure projects on the priority list.
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02-09-2019, 01:00 PM | #24 |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: ... Lest Darkness Fall ...
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02-09-2019, 01:07 PM | #25 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: ... Lest Darkness Fall ...
Game?
I'm thinking of L. Sprague de Camp's Alternate History / Time Travel / Science-fiction novel, which has been influential enough among people who write and speculate about this sort of thing so that it can almost be termed a template for the genre (even though it is not technically the first).
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02-10-2019, 01:05 AM | #26 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: ... Lest Darkness Fall ...
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02-10-2019, 12:28 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: ... Lest Darkness Fall ...
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Some of his values seem jarring, to those of us raised after the 1960s Civil Rights era, but the protagonist (although a bit of a Marty Stu) is a decent enough sort.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. |
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02-11-2019, 12:37 PM | #28 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Carrying lots of stuff on bicycles
Checking my copy of Bicycling Science (first edition), Table 7.4, I see that rolling resistance for a 150 lb. man is 58 newtons, while rolling resistance for a cyclist at the same speed, total weight 170 lbs., is 4 newtons. Scaling up the resistance for the man to 170 lbs. gives 58 x (17/15) = 66 newtons, which is about 16.5x as much. So riding a bicycle divides by 16.5. I think it would be close enough for gaming purposes to divide by 15, halfway between a cart (divide by 10) and a wagon (divide by 20).
This ignores wind resistance/drag, which seems reasonable for walking speed, which you might have for a bicycle carrying a heavy load. Once you get up to 20 mph (Move 10), drag becomes hugely more important than rolling resistance. I'm not sure how to represent that; maybe it's best handled as a Top Speed rather than as carrying capacity.
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02-11-2019, 01:16 PM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: Making Synthetic Rubber in an AtE/AH/Lest Darkness Fall Situation
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For instance, construction of Erie Canal mostly took place before the U.S. industrialized and depended entirely on human and animal labor. In addition to the several hundred skilled masons brought from the German principalities, the canal needed thousands of diggers, teamsters and draft animals. Even with all that, it took eight years to build a single canal 363 miles long, through terrain carefully chosen to present the least amount of topographical difficulties. A canal network such as Germany's takes many decades to complete. Until it's done, other modes are needed. I can't imagine Germans would settle for dirt tracks, so I figured I'd list alternatives in order of difficulty, based on the available resources and skill levels of the labor force and those supplying materials. Canals eventually, absolutely. But until then, people need roads. What are the best roads to start with, given available resources and labor?
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. |
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02-11-2019, 01:42 PM | #30 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Making Synthetic Rubber in an AtE/AH/Lest Darkness Fall Situation
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