02-11-2019, 02:41 PM | #31 | ||
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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In the first few years of ASN settlement, it 'costs' them less to devote a few hundred skilled masons and maybe 20,000-30,000 slaves, living and Kadavergehorsam, to a project than it does to devote 1,000-2,000 people who have the technical skills needed to make TL5+ roads to a task. Yes, I know that Roman roads are probably officially TL2, but it's stupid to class them as TL2 technology when almost no other TL2 culture had them and it wasn't until late TL3 or even TL4+ that technology was reproduced and not until TL5 that their scale started to be matched. In a lot of ways, Romans had higher TL in economic infrastructure and civil engineering than most European cultures did until the Early Modern Era, simply because they controlled a 'global' (of their known world) trade network over the Mediterranean that made them a larger economy than other European polities at later dates in history. As for Roman roads for the ASNs, the local cultures don't build them. They use tracks, navigate rivers or sail the seas. Some of them have beautiful TL3 boats, others have wonderful, swift small horses of TL3 animal husbandry and many of the Celtic-esque ones have individual artistic and craftsmanship that reaches TL3, but in macro-scale industry, they are very much a close-to-the-earth type of people and either unable or unwilling to do much in the way of imperial scale megaprojects. In fact, the pseudo-Celt culture blending of artistic or craft skills with magic is probably a big reason why they can even reach TL3 craftsmanship and count as TL3 in several other fields, but have a societal structure that is closer to early Iron Age peoples in Northern and Central Europe. Basically, if there was no magic, they'd likely be TL2 and an early TL2 at that. Which, I guess, makes the local TL a TL2 to TL2+1 and sometimes a TL2+1^, if we want to be accurate. And, technically, there are surviving TL1+1^ and TL1+2^ cultures, though none of them are located near the ASNs. There are cultures in this world where road-building has been known for centuries, but the ASNs aren't settling among those people, they're settling among magic-using analogues to pre-Roman Celtic and Germanic tribes. So the ASNs will only have comparatively few slaves or hired experts from cultures where brick, stone or otherwise paved roads are built, in comparison with the absolutely huge numbers of local slaves they seize during their version of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul. So even the TL2-3 people they have available as unwilling workers would mostly be unfamiliar with the skills required to make a Roman road, though no doubt they could be taught. It's just that if teaching them to do this requires higher numbers of TL6-7 Germans than managing a much larger canal-digging operation would require, it's a net loss. From what I can find, canals are far superior to Roman roads for transporting industrial quantities of coals and other supplies, and while they require more work to construct, they don't actually require higher numbers of the TL6-7 Germans, just higher numbers of people of TL1+ who will dig and do hard physical labour.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-11-2019 at 09:19 PM. |
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02-11-2019, 04:00 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Carrying lots of stuff on bicycles
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However, 4N is a rolling resistance coefficient of 0.0053, which is possible for racing tires on pavement but not ordinary tires on dirt. |
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02-11-2019, 05:23 PM | #33 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Carrying lots of stuff on bicycles
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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02-11-2019, 05:32 PM | #34 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Carrying lots of stuff on bicycles
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! |
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02-11-2019, 06:14 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Carrying lots of stuff on bicycles
Legs and bicycle wheels do not have anything like the same scaling for different surfaces. Best case approximation on a good modern road gives around a factor of 50 advantage to the bike; on the other hand, the most efficient way to get a racing bike through a mudpit is picking it up and carrying it.
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