Aviation: The Discovery of Flight

[AdamBlue]

If anything the addition of magic would add enough new realms of discovery and application that the few discoveries we didn't have to make because of them would be tiny in comparison.

The truth is Zalanthas is varied and strange and not wholly realized in every aspect. Making comparisons to earth never really hold up.

To come back on topic the best flying contraption I could imagine for Zalanthas is a krathi/whiran hot-air balloon team, but nothing mechanical like a plane or helicopter.

Yeah, hot air balloons seemed more like they'd make sense, actually. And they would be probably easier to code due to the fact it would be very difficult to crash one like a plane. It's simple. Up and down, and then you let wind take you. This would make the direction wind blows super fucking important.

[CodeMaster]

Oh, I think it's fair to say that some of these basic queries have been established as facts, such as distance, and the like. We're way past that point. The thing is, we're not really to the point of Di Vinci's work, yet, though I'd surmise we're only about ... a thousand years or so back.

Da Vinci was famously literate and so might not be the best reference point.  (I feel so nerdy beating this dead fantasy horse but I'm going to keep writing...)

So I agree a templar leading an army would have these distances, and might even have logistic formulas for relating the size of an army to the amount of distance it can cover in a day.  And sure, leaders of cities and villages evidently have access to the technological (or magickal) know-how to build windmills.  But what these upper classes know is in their (concealed) documentation and is probably influenced by access to ancient libraries and magick.

I guess what I want to argue is that "what a mundane commoner knows" should be the baseline in these discussions when we're talking about inventing things.

Think about this: maybe you've been hiking in extremely varied terrain, looked at your map and seen "5 miles", and then realized how completely uninformative that number actually is to you.  It's a meaningless abstraction that can't even be used to gauge how long the journey will take.

Likewise, to your average Zalanthan commoner, "237 miles" would mean nothing to them; "2 days of travel by inix" is what people would tell each other and know.

Zalanthan commoners just don't have any kind of foothold into the abstract thinking required to invent a lot of these things that seem self-evident to us in the 21st century.

[Inks]

What is a better question is why are firepots npc only?

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

Oh, I think it's fair to say that some of these basic queries have been established as facts, such as distance, and the like. We're way past that point. The thing is, we're not really to the point of Di Vinci's work, yet, though I'd surmise we're only about ... a thousand years or so back.

Da Vinci was famously literate and so might not be the best reference point.  (I feel so nerdy beating this dead fantasy horse but I'm going to keep writing...)

So I agree a templar leading an army would have these distances, and might even have logistic formulas for relating the size of an army to the amount of distance it can cover in a day.  And sure, leaders of cities and villages evidently have access to the technological (or magickal) know-how to build windmills.  But what these upper classes know is in their (concealed) documentation and is probably influenced by access to ancient libraries and magick.

I guess what I want to argue is that "what a mundane commoner knows" should be the baseline in these discussions when we're talking about inventing things.

Think about this: maybe you've been hiking in extremely varied terrain, looked at your map and seen "5 miles", and then realized how completely uninformative that number actually is to you.  It's a meaningless abstraction that can't even be used to gauge how long the journey will take.

Likewise, to your average Zalanthan commoner, "237 miles" would mean nothing to them; "2 days of travel by inix" is what people would tell each other and know.

Zalanthan commoners just don't have any kind of foothold into the abstract thinking required to invent a lot of these things that seem self-evident to us in the 21st century.

I agree that maybe, maybe, the average commoner who spends their entire life in the city might not understand distance well, but any hunter would. Conversely, any farming foreman would understand the average time it takes a well-bodied adult human to pick a row of ... wheat. So, these common folk, without books, could figure out things like how long it would take a group of people to travel to Luir's, given the average amount of raptor attacks, gith ambushes, feed and water breaks, etc, that they have personally experienced. The farmer could figure out how long it would take to clear a field, and, how many people he needs to get the job down in X number of hours.

They aren't cavemen. And even 'two days by inix' is far from an abstract concept, given that inix will, to those who are experienced riding them, generally stop the same number of times, cover the same terrain in the same amount of time(ish), etc.

I agree that knowledge isn't wide spread, and that people don't know a ton about stuff outside their experience or limited education, but in a mundane's field of experience, I have no issue thinking that they know details consistent with 4-6th Century RL earth knowledge.

[IAmJacksOpinion]

Late to the game, but yeah - this is definitely a dwarf focus, not a thing for the game.

Don't tell me that you don't want to see a group of the Arm taking off from a massive tower with specialized two-person gliders, ...

I don't. It's a hang glider. If you jump off of Teks Tower, you'd have a range of like... a mile? What are you attacking? The ranch out by the West Gate?

All else aside, I think the biggest hinderance to scientific progress is the fact that less than 1% of the population can actually read and write. There's no way, really, to record and share ideas. You could draw it out on paper, but few people (apart from Master Crafters) are going to risk carrying paper around, since the cost of looking like you know how to read is death.

I agree that the windmills are probably the most advanced bits of machinery evident in Zalanthas. And, surprise-surprise, they're in Red Storm. >.>

[Desertman]

Talia, you may not give me flying machines. That is your decision, but you should know:

[CodeMaster]

I agree that maybe, maybe, the average commoner who spends their entire life in the city might not understand distance well, but any hunter would. Conversely, any farming foreman would understand the average time it takes a well-bodied adult human to pick a row of ... wheat. So, these common folk, without books, could figure out things like how long it would take a group of people to travel to Luir's, given the average amount of raptor attacks, gith ambushes, feed and water breaks, etc, that they have personally experienced. The farmer could figure out how long it would take to clear a field, and, how many people he needs to get the job down in X number of hours.

I wikid around real quick to be a jerk and it's worth mentioning that "averages" (and decimal fractions) as we know them were not understood during the period you mention.  Any Zalanthan using the term would probably be using it in the informal "speculative intuitive guesstimate" sense that might be accurate for small questions but no better than dead reckoning for larger questions.

They aren't cavemen. And even 'two days by inix' is far from an abstract concept, given that inix will, to those who are experienced riding them, generally stop the same number of times, cover the same terrain in the same amount of time(ish), etc.

I meant to say that "two days by inix" is something Zalanthans would grasp, preferentially to distance, and that it's not an abstract concept in the same sense that distance is.

I agree that knowledge isn't wide spread, and that people don't know a ton about stuff outside their experience or limited education, but in a mundane's field of experience, I have no issue thinking that they know details consistent with 4-6th Century RL earth knowledge.

I have no idea about 4-6th century RL knowledge in general (which I'm sure depends on which country you lived in at the time) so maybe we are agreeing.  I'm out of my depth, and you seem to know more history than I do.

But it's a fun exercise to think very carefully about what a character might know in this world, because it really makes me realize how much we benefit from the centuries of increasingly abstract human thinking that precede us.

[Talia]

Talia, you may not give me flying machines. That is your decision, but you should know:

I'm not sure why Mal seems to be standing in the doorway of the Tardis there, but I hope you know I would never even try, Dman.

But it's a fun exercise to think very carefully about what a character might know in this world, because it really makes me realize how much we benefit from the centuries of increasingly abstract human thinking that precede us.

Exactly!

I agree that knowledge isn't wide spread, and that people don't know a ton about stuff outside their experience or limited education, but in a mundane's field of experience, I have no issue thinking that they know details consistent with 4-6th Century RL earth knowledge.

I don't have an issue with this either, but I think that's a really far cry from calling it "science." I think we're agreeing here. A farmer knows how much seed it's going to take to plant the field (probably equivalent to everything she managed to save up from the last shitty harvest), but that's different from R&D on seed development and patenting your crops.

Another problem in general with Zalanthan technology is that there's no metal. So many of the things that we've invented and rely on on a daily basis are based on metal. I just can't wrap my brain around technological and industrial development without metal. Metal is more pliable, more durable, more conductive, more resistant to damage, and lighter (for its properties) than any of the other materials that Zalanthas has to work with. I suppose a flying machine could theoretically be built out of light-weight wood and cloth, but would it survive in Zalanthan weather? (I don't think it would. Maybe I'm wrong.) I mean, we're already stretching it with obsidian swords.

On a personal note, would I love it if Armageddon was more of a low-fantasy, weird-tech, sci-fi steampunk type environment? Yes, I would. But this game isn't about my personal preferences, it's about staying true to the vision of the world as it is.

[Patuk]

Who exactly would the Zalanthan aviators and scientists even be? It scarce has formal education, let alone actual science. The amount of people who could feasibly even be scientifically interested at all wouldn't even be a thousand, and those generally have a lot of other things to do as well.

[Nyr]

Who exactly would the Zalanthan aviators and scientists even be? It scarce has formal education, let alone actual science. The amount of people who could feasibly even be scientifically interested at all wouldn't even be a thousand, and those generally have a lot of other things to do as well.

Space vestrics, obviously.  11 karma has to go somewhere.

[Saellyn]

I call BS Talia. Obsidian swords in this game are so much more durable than titanium-steel. Just another attempt by Staff to mislead and stifle us.

Go to your dreams, Dman! Build the flying aeroplane!

[ibusoe]

I'm trying to imagine a world that functions without science and it just isn't jiving with my brain. Bad science is still science. Experimentation, deduction, hypothesis, conclusions... These things have been around for as long as mankind has been around, even if we didn't have names for them. Every dude who got some crotch-rot is gonna try different shit out until they find something that cures it. Science. Units of measurement, taxonomy, general classification and naming... All things that are in the world right now. All Science.

I don't think I'll be able to buy that Zalanthas doesn't have science.

Nor should you have too.  Let's say that you had a scientific question.  The established people to ask would depend on your class.  Lower class people would ask a Templar.  Upper class people would ask a logistician (associated with accounting or law) or a mage or a really old person, depending upon whom they thought would have a good answer.

Worth noting is that none of these professions emphasize testing out their theories before applying them, nor do they emphasize safety testing. 

Part of the nature of the apocalypse is that people won't typically invest in pure research due to a preference to solve problems not with knowledge, but with direct and brutal violence.  Progress, sustainable growth and hope for the future are incompatible with the game theme.

[Revenant]

Since flashpowder has been retconned you can no longer rocket jump, and that is why there's no non-magickal flight.

[original]

Just sayin', man. Somebody's gotta realize that if you drop a feather, it'll fall in a certain way, and then think, 'why is it that the feather falls all weird and shit when rocks don't sway to the side? what if I have a ton of feathers and do this? why does sometimes cloth act like feathers? hey, you guys notice when I floof a blanket it falls kinda slowly?'
[/quote
Very smart, except you're from a world without magic.

Im arm, when a feather falls a certain way, it is because Whira likes to play with feathers. If I want to fly, I ask Whira to make me fly. Either Whira ignores me, and I pout, or I fly... then a Templar shoots me down for my magic XD

[lostinspace]

I mean, dark sun did have cliff gliders, which were essentially dudes who killed big flying things, preserved the spine/wings/ribs. And then crawled into the ribs and controlled the wings with a couple of poles. I think the idea was rigor mortis kept the wings fully extended, and the guy just tilted them to change direction when gliding.

[Asche]

In a world where healing magic exists, we'd never have created medicine. The mere presence of an exploitable supernatural in any universe severely diminishes scientific progress within that universe. Why would anyone bother investing the money to develop the telephone when everyone is telepathic? Now, all THAT said. Flight is something we aspire to on a primal level, and its likely a product of a lack of literacy to establish a tradition to work with that we haven't developed a hang glider yet. There are no giants to stand on the shoulders of in this universe, intentionally, so that none may empower themselves to challenge the Highlord.