11-11-2016, 05:02 AM | #21 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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A draft animal that doesn't eat much, or can get enough from grazing and not compete for grain, and thus lowers the cost of food transport away from waterways would be nice for letting you increase the population density on more marginal cropland too.
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-- MA Lloyd |
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11-11-2016, 05:16 AM | #22 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Roads Not Taken
The essential problem for contact fuses is you need to control the orientation of the missile in flight, otherwise you may not get the *contact*. Hand grenades (and smoothbore shells) are poor at that. Payload arrows might work, though fairly limited without a lighter explosive than gunpowder.
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-- MA Lloyd |
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11-11-2016, 08:49 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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11-11-2016, 08:59 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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In fact there were folding knives as early as pre-conquest England; I just saw an Archeological photo in a book I read. It was ivory-hilted so it was probably for a gentleman.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 11-11-2016 at 10:19 AM. |
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11-11-2016, 09:41 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Sep 2013
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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TL 8 means, among other things. lasers. Which means advanced optics. Which leads to good microscopes. Which leads to an understanding of germs and diseases. And TL 6 medicine means an advanced knowledge of anatomy and biology, something that simply cannot be reached with sooth sayers and witch doctors. Progress is not a single road, it is build on all the knowledge of a society, and you can never guess where in which way one discovery will lead you. A good show that explained it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connec...28TV_series%29 |
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11-11-2016, 10:11 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_eland (The common eland is also an option, if not quite as good.) -Milk richer in proteins and fat? Check. -Prospers on marginal fodder? Check. -Docile and domesticable (if more difficult than cattle)? Check. -Immune to many diseases that affect cattle? Check. About the only drawback is that I don't think they make good draft animals. Even oxen are better (and, compared to collared horses, oxen suck). So, put your POD in Classical Egyptian times, when the pharaohs moved up the Nile so as to prevent Nubian raids. As a consequence, they opened trade with an alternate-Punt (Somalia) in which the basis of agriculture was wheat. as well as meat and milk product from a domesticated giant eland. Soon recognizing the benefits of the animal, the Egyptians adopted the giant eland as their own, and within a few centuries it had all but replaced cattle in Nile agriculture. From there, it spread to Mesopotamia, and from there into southeast Europe. It was quickly and enthusiastically adopted in Greece, where an animal that produces such top quality meat and dairy products on marginal land is seen as a gift from the gods. By classical antiquity, domesticated giant elands have essentially replaced bovine agriculture throughout the Mediterranean Basin, the Black Sea Littoral, and across southern Asia to India, where it stops abruptly due to the sacred nature of cattle in Hindustan. Some possible impacts: -The ability to feed giant elands on marginal lands, combined with their superior intelligence and wariness, makes them incredibly inexpensive to maintain (although they were much harder to domesticate, in the first place). That means they're more widespread than cattle. -Their greater distribution makes top-quality dairy available to a larger percentage of the population, either through direct use of milk, or the consumption of top-quality cheeses. -Infant mortality rates drop signficantly, as compared to OTL. Human populations are higher, and recover from losses more quickly. -The absence of cattle, however, means (relatively) low cost animal muscle is more scarce. -That means human labor -- in greater supply than in OTL, anyway -- becomes even more widely utilized, until the advent of horse collars. --Increased slavery during times of high population growth? --An even greater value for labor when population drops due to plague or warfare? --Since areas that have domesticated giant elands have lower infant mortality rates, does that make agricultural societies even more resistant to nomadic barbarians? --Do crop-based agricultural societies able to manage giant elands displace pastoral nomads (who would struggle to herd "open-range" antelopes that can run faster than their horses) even more quickly? --The population density permitted by rice agriculture means Alexander probably gets stopped in India, as he does in OTL, although he might make it a bit further. However, does Rome ever fall? -Also, how much does the introduction of a highly-valued, highly-competitive, non-native species affect local biomes? I've had a lot of fun with giant elands in various threads, and this is why. If cattle weren't so very much easier to domesticate, and sub-Saharan Africa so very isolated from Mediterranean civilization, the world might be a very different place. One domesticated animal could make a huge difference. :)
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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. Last edited by tshiggins; 11-11-2016 at 01:03 PM. |
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11-11-2016, 10:50 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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On the other hand, it's not so simple to be sure that particular connections are necessary...especially if your justification amounts to early people being stupid. TL2 has plenty of capability to do dissections and many macro-scale biological experiments. They probably can't actually observe microbes, but they're still real - if somebody has the right idea, the observations will fit. Dunno whether they could actually manage the chemistry requirements, though.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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11-11-2016, 11:12 AM | #28 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Roads Not Taken
Absent a remarkable lack of curiosity, it's hard to avoid noticing bacteria once you have microscopes. Viruses are harder to detect, but the basics of epidemiology are "these people all got sick, what do they have in common", and that sort of analysis is broadly applicable.
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11-11-2016, 12:07 PM | #29 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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TL3 medicine has an extremely marginal grasp of epidemiology. Which actually might be a point of incompatibility with TL8 - you very likely can't get there without the conceptual technology to do better than that. And of course you can't have TL8 agriculture as we know it without considerably better than TL3 animal medical technology.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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11-11-2016, 12:18 PM | #30 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Roads Not Taken
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Well, meat production is fairly optional, though biotech crops are obviously out so you're probably capped at TL 7. |
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Tags |
divergent technology, technology |
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