Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?

[rust]

Originally Posted by malloyd

And anyway, he doesn't even touch what are probably the two biggest distinguishing innovations of TL4 - guns and printing. Nobody is going to give up guns ...

I am not so sure, mainly because there is the historical example of Japan, a
culture which did give up almost all of a well developed firearms technology.
As for printing, this depends a lot on the degree of literacy and the size of
the population, with too few people able to read there is simply no sufficient
market for printed books to keep the craft alive. Overall I think that an iso-
lated, low population society of TL 4 would become far more "rural" than our
world's historical examples of this technology level, with a technology deve-
lopment and slow progress focussed mostly on fields like for example agricul-
ture, mining and the basic crafts and little change from previous technology
levels in its culture and in the theoretical sciences - more a kind of slow im-
provement of the late Middle Ages than a Renaissance.