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Old 11-11-2016, 05:02 AM   #21
malloyd
 
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TL8 with TL3 medicine would be interesting (and would probably involve a very fatalistic world-view). In contrast, TL 6 medicine might fit into TL 2 with a bit of a shove.
The biggest hurdle is probably a world trade in drugs. A lot of the good stuff is only available locally until late TL4 or later. Otherwise most of early TL6 medicine is probably doable any time after the invention of cloth and metal (or tough plastic or other substitute that will take edges and omnidirectional stresses) surgical tools.

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Likewise, food production and transport (and, therefore, population density) might control the average speed of technological advancement, but it could be tweaked. The classic Roman Potato Scenario falls under this category.
Potatoes are also good for the protein source problem. Unlike grains, if you eat a diet of nothing but potatoes, if you get enough calories you also get enough or nearly enough of all the essential amino acids. Europe was oddly behind the rest of the world in adding a staple legume or other crop with a different amino acid profile, possibly because lactose tolerance allowed milk to cover a lot of the gap. An easy to grow, weather resistant crop producing something like complete nutrition would be a big deal. For humans anyway, it's mostly a problem of lousy biochemistry, doing a better job of interconverting amino acids and not failing to manufacture all the essential bits and thus not needing vitamins is clearly possible in other species.

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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Old 11-11-2016, 05:16 AM   #22
malloyd
 
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Reliable contact fuse grenades edging out the musket.
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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Wire fences in the Middle Ages. Wire springs in hollow bows(like a Kernmantle rope). Allowing Sedentarists to gain an edge over Steppemen much sooner then they did.
Wire fences require some really serious advances in metallurgy, not just in wire production, which is harder than it might look, but just in amount of metal produced - you need a lot of metal for a fence - and cheap metals in those sorts of quantities has other uses that come before wire. Getting any improvement from bows by adding metal parts requires supermaterials, metal springs are still inferior to even poor woods, let alone good ones or sinews. A modern super spring will be made of rubber (or in occasional instruments spider silk), not a metal for a good reason.

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Medieval Multitool knives.
What is this supposed to do? The advantage of a multitool is you can carry several specialized tools around in a light package. It's essentially useless in a society where most people don't routinely need a lot of specialized tools in the first place, and not particularly valuable to (the vast majority of) craftsmen who don't move around a lot.
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Old 11-11-2016, 08:49 AM   #23
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Medieval Multitool knives.
I could see these being useful if they're large knife, saw, scaler, etc, like a Bowie knife, but there's not much use for a folding knife/tool until the invention of pockets.
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Old 11-11-2016, 08:59 AM   #24
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I could see these being useful if they're large knife, saw, scaler, etc, like a Bowie knife, but there's not much use for a folding knife/tool until the invention of pockets.
Why should not there be pockets? Travelers have used hidden pockets for ages to keep away thieves. Then too a sheath was well within their capacity.

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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Old 11-11-2016, 09:41 AM   #25
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Medicine could do a lot. The study of how the body works doesn't really need to be tied to many other TLs.

TL8 with TL3 medicine would be interesting (and would probably involve a very fatalistic world-view). In contrast, TL 6 medicine might fit into TL 2 with a bit of a shove.
And in reality, this is simply not possible.

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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Old 11-11-2016, 10:11 AM   #26
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(SNIP)

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.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!

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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Old 11-11-2016, 10:50 AM   #27
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And in reality, this is simply not possible.

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
We know some of the connections that are possible. We can only speculate about whether they're inevitable...yes, advanced optics mean you can see microbes, but does that really make germ theory and subsequent developments unavoidable?

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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Old 11-11-2016, 11:12 AM   #28
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We know some of the connections that are possible. We can only speculate about whether they're inevitable...yes, advanced optics mean you can see microbes, but does that really make germ theory and subsequent developments unavoidable?
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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Old 11-11-2016, 12:07 PM   #29
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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.
Noticing bacteria exist and proceeding to draw the conclusion that they're responsible for disease aren't the same thing. At least marginal awareness of microbiology is pretty unavoidable by that point, yes. Becoming aware of some human cellular biology is probably also an inevitable result.

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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Old 11-11-2016, 12:18 PM   #30
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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.
Yeah, that was sort of my point. You have to be willfully blind to not to better than TL 3 epidemiology with TL 8 analytics.
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And of course you can't have TL8 agriculture as we know it without considerably better than TL3 animal medical technology.
Well, meat production is fairly optional, though biotech crops are obviously out so you're probably capped at TL 7.
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