roseembolism (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roseembolism) wrote2008-11-11 04:49 pm
roseembolism) wrote2008-11-11 04:49 pm
Entry tags:
Leonardo and the Resources/Power Crunch
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.
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.
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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?
Re: Ah, so you're going for the Ohmu "vend-a-cockpit" approach to critter design?
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.