Leonardo and the Resources/Power Crunch

[roseembolism]

When I visited the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum this last Sunday, one of the major things that stuck with me was how ingenious the Renaissance engineers were as a whole. They had a good practical grasp of physics, and put their knowledge of Euclidean mathematics to incredibly elegant and complex ends, as the designs for cathedrals, hoists, springs and other items in the exhibit hall show. They did not lack for intelligence and learning; they were not crippled by their culture. Indeed, I could see them performing great feats of mechanics, at our level of complexity, if not for two basic limitations.

The first limitation they had to deal with was materials. They were limited to various types of wood, rope, animal skins, and small amounts of wrought iron. As a result, the structures they made were heavy and bulky; consider this model of a crane by Leonardo's mentor Filippo Brunelleschi, to see both their ingenuity and material limitations:



The model points out another limitation that they faced: power. For power sources, they were limited to low-density sources like muscle (human and animal), wind, and water. Again they did highly ingenious things with what they had (as witness to aqueducts and proposals for siphons crossing mountains), but the power limitations combined with the heavy and bulky available materials to limit what they could accomplish. So no flying machines or submarines; many of their sketched out inventions that seem feasible to us, were toys or daydreams, because they lacked proper power sources, and the material scientists of the day were busy trying to turn lead into gold.


So, why does this post have an "Under the Green Moon" tag if it's about Renaissance inventors? Well, I've been trying to set the technological milieu of UTGM, and I'm thinking that for the most advanced Daemon states, the late Renaissance will work for the appearance of a lot of the engineering. This isn't so much a direct parallel, as a result of how I conceive a number of resources to be in short supply; specifically metals.

Since UTGM is set 30,0000 years in the future, nearly all the extractable resources will have been used millennia previously. And while most metals will still be around, many of them will be in a refined state that any low-tech civilization will have a hard time using. Consider how much difficult high-test steel is to smelt compared to pig iron- and now consider having to separate it from high-test concrete, or even higher-tech materials. And a lot of those metals will be in landfills or ruined cities where there's plenty of hazards for enterprising scavengers, ranging from pitfalls, to toxic materials.

So even before the current era, I see civilizations turning more toward natural substances; woods, fibers, ceramics, chitin. Unlike the Renaissance, I can imagine that with genetic engineering and eons of materials science, some of those materials could be very advanced; imagine wood as light as bamboo, yet as strong as steel.

The Daemons and other races have other advantages the Renaissance engineers don't have; they have magic. While the magic is far from all-powerful, and really resembles classic descriptions of psionics more than anything else, it can provide a fairly intense source of heat and motion.  While I don't see industrial level smelting, magic could power vehicles or the like.

All of which is saying that I can still have a more fantastical version of the Renaissance; I can have my zeppelins and other inventions that came about much later in history.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

It definitely sounds like the upper reaches of tech will be on the borderline between seriously advanced pre-industrial tech and steampunk. Zeppelins are definitely cool and definitely seem a must for that sort of setting. Guns are a more difficult question. With excellent materials, airguns might be more popular, since it's far easier to build what amounts to a bolt action air-rifle than a bolt action gunpowder rifle if you have materials that can be used to make a sturdy and leak proof pressure vessel. Steam cannon are also fairly obvious if you have the right sort of materials tech. Better yet, neither air rifles nor steam cannon lead to machine pistols, high powered rifles, or modern artillery particularly well and gatling guns will remain huge and limited, given the air reservoir needed to power them. So, weapons tech remains pre-20th century, thus making combat something that won't look much like the lethality of modern warfare.

You could also loot Benford's Beyond the Fall of Night/Beyond Infinity for ideas - a biologically rich and diverse solar system is nifty, especially with biological spaceships and space life. I quite like the idea of steam zeppelins docking at a biological beanstalk that lets people off in a living space station that living ships dock with.

Throw in biological street and home lighting as well as good quality plumbing, sanitation, and heating, and you have what is (to me at least) an absolutely wonderful setting for adventure - acceptably civilized in the civilized areas, but with the obvious potential for deadly wilderness and savage kingdoms (and a lack of weapons that allow the PCs to play nastiness like British troops vs. Zulu warriors particularly effectively).

It would be interesting if they didn't particularly use electricity. Also, if they had electricity, then aluminum would be in abundant supply, since even in 30,000 years, humanity is unlikely to make much of a dent in the amount of aluminum that's available - it's really abundant. Also, no electricity + high quality materials means that babbage engines might exist (or not, since they might be higher tech than you want).

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

You made a lot of interesting points!

I am indeed going for a more seriously advanced pre-industrial tech. The main thing being that they don't have large-scale mass production.

As far as gunpowder is concerned, I'm running with the idea that it is one of a number of "Lost technologies" like heavier-than-air flight that periodically get forgotten as replacements come down the pike. I'm doing this partially out of the purely practical reason of gunpowder not fitting with the tone of the game, but it's also something I can use to enhance the "alien future" aspect of the world. Besides, I'm going to have repeating crossbows, and that's close enough to guns for me.

As for electricity, I see them at the "Playing with lightning phase, partially because the magic will make some things much easier than they were in history. And no babbage machines; if I want a computer analog, I have ELFs.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Zeppelins are cool, but if you don't have good power sources, how do you move them? From what I've seen they're actually a lot less energy efficient than planes, at least at standard speeds; pushing a giant sausage through the air at 100 mph is harder than keeping an airfoil in the air. Obviously the zeppelin can hover far more easily.

10 mph zeppelins would still be cool and beat walking, though you also need enough power to fight off wind. Or else clever use of wind currents, rather than zipping from point to point.

(yes, I know this is 4 years old. Going through old posts.)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Alcohol fuelled steam engines would power airships quite well, and the advantage of airships is that you don't need to get the power to weight ratio down nearly as far as you do for functional airplanes. 10 mph seems quite slow, but a 50 or 60 mph airship would be exceptionally useful and can clearly be done with fairly limited tech.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Not just chitin, but keratin (horn, hooves) and animal skin should be exploited, and fruit-ivory such as tagua or coconut shell. Examples abound in real-world aboriginal tool use-- sharkskin sandpaper, porcupine quill embroidery and decoration (imagine a porky big enough to make lances from its quills!), you name it.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

And don't forget the coconut tree, which could had nearly every part of it being used for various products.

I will do an entire section on biotechnology, since one of the major Ancestor cultures to arise and disappear was the Lifemakers, who regarded living forms pretty much the same way the Romans regarded gypsum, limestone and clay.

Note that the animal substances will be heavily modified to fit a pseudo-industrial economy. We're talking animals with leather flaps hanging off their sides for easy, non-fatal removal, trees that give milk or any number of other drugs, chitin and horn modified to be strong enough to be a structural material, etc..

Exalted's heroin-pissing dinosaurs will have NOTHING on me.

Ah, so you're going for the Ohmu "vend-a-cockpit" approach to critter design?

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Having cows with molt cycles shouldn't be TOO far-fetched?

Re: Ah, so you're going for the Ohmu "vend-a-cockpit" approach to critter design?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, and then some! Molt seasons would be nice- we could also have cow-equivalents shedding their skins like snakes.

Part of this of course is a result of the Lifemakers having to deal with various resource issues; it was far harder to get any number substances historical cultures took for granted, and so they went with what they had.

I'm also hoping to start with people having an "Oo, they were so COOL!" reaction to the Lifemakers, and then having to eventually revise that opinion.