Fubarnii techs list?

[Jubal]

Is there a list out there of techs that the little guys do/don't have?

DO HAVE
- The wheel
- Steam engine
- Good metallurgy
- Balloons

BASIC STAGES
- Medicine
- Explosives/Firearms
- Goggles/glasses

KINDA HAVE BUT CAN'T REALLY USE
- Electricity

DON'T HAVE
- Internal Combustion Engine
- Heavier than air flight

[TheGremlin]

You could probably find something in the twilight ramblings on the forum of doom, but we could use this thread to collect and collate the info.




Have the funbarnii invented the wheel? Or rather, do they implement it widely? I imagine they have, but would they have carts? If they did, would enuk(plural) or Barak pull them? I'm working on a trader caravan.

[Carcharoth]

Lots of big questions there... No time to answer them all now (I'm already late home for the dinner I'm meant to be cooking...), but I'll try to add some occasional updates and answer specific questions.

Fubarnii do use the wheel. When travelling across parts of the Empire the roads are sufficiently messy that it is far far easier to carry stuff on animals than it is to use a cart. Devanu also make a habit of disrupting any attempts to build good quality roads.
You will get trader caravans with carts, but they'll often just load stuff onto the back of poor baruk or belan. You could probably do a cart pulled by either baruk or enuk, but it would be a bit mean to use a fully laden baruk to pull your carts! Be inventive - that's the approach that the Fubarnii would approve of.

[Gethuch]

A list of technologies they don't have? Hmm.
As Mike mentioned, their transport network is a bit rubbish.
No internal combustion engines, although they have a variety of steam engines and heat engines instead.
Their knowledge of electricity is way behind ours. They know it exists, but all their tech for it is clumsy and primitive.
Their medicine isn't great, either. It's not such an important subject for them, since they're not as feeble and sickly as us.
If any of them have managed heavier-than-air flight, they're keeping very quiet about it.
Oh, their explosives! Because of their excretory plumbing (shared by all the members of their class), they never had a ready source of nitrates to hasten the discovery of explosives. Hence, they're at a very early stage with them. Plus, the chronic inability of their elderly engineers to remember basic personal safety leads to a mysteriously high death rate among those who get interested in the topic...
They're good at metallurgy. They have a natural advantage (compared to humans) thanks to their multichromatic vision. Plus, some engineers consider furnace-building to be a competitive sport

If I think of any other glaring omissions, I'll try to remember to mention them here!

[Jubal]

Started a list. 

[Brandlin]

where do they stand on glass making/blowing/floating?

odd they don't have nitrates when they farm mushrooms... fertilizer of fungi is almost pure nitrates... little or no pot ash as you are not encouraging flowers.... this is one of those examples of cross fertilisation (pun intended) of technologies. We know how technologies progressed on earth, because we have history and can see the connections. It's both informing and restricting to compare a mythical system with our known one ot judge its internal consistency. I believe philosophers refer to this as the "alternate earth conjecture"... basically imagine an earth just like our where despite the likelihood, just one thing is different. Now imagine what all the associated consequences might be. Try it. Imagine an earth with no grass - what would be different.

There's an interesting paper i once read entitled something like "Why tea stopped the Chinese Industrial Revolution!" I'll dig it out if i can. Its a serious academic paper on the processes and causes of technology development (i had to critique it). The basic reasoning (supported with good rational argument and evidence) was...

China with all its wonderful technologies never had an industrial revolution the way the west did.

China were extremely good at making fine porcelain. Their favourite drink was tea and culturally they put great store by tea, tea ceremonies, cups, porcelain and all the technologies that those things require. They lived in a land with earthquakes so they made a lot of their buildings light and easy to rebuild, to let light in they moved a bamboo or paper wall out of the way.

In the west we drank wine and beer and such... and lived in a land where the earth didn't move so had solidly built houses. Our culture promoted fine objects as status symbols just as much as the chinese but we never really discovered the materials or the techniques for fine porcelain.

The difference?

Glass.

There is almost no glass used in either drinking implements or windows in china. there was no demand or need so the development of glass never really occurred in China.

In the west we went for glass in a big way for drinking from and to put big (comparatively) holes in our solid houses to let light in and then filled in the hole with glass.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that chinese scientists and engineers lived a fair bit longer than their western counter parts. (better medicine and diet). But, and this is the crucial part, the portion of their lives that was constructive, where they created and invented and developed and refined was far far shorter - often a couple of decades.

The difference was spectacles.

In china spectacles were incredibly uncommon, whereas in the west our command of glass meant good spectacles with proper focal lengths made to fit became (comparatively) common and easy to get. The result was that the wests engineers and inventors were able to continue working for far longer becasue they were not stopped by pure eyesight. I remember a graph in the paper which showed the availability of spectacles in china took a step change when they started buying them from the west in exchange for porcelain. I rememebr thinking opium and glasses must have been the only things we exported to them.

Becasue the westen guys could work longeer, they achieved more, finished more projects, refined more technologies and a whole raft of technologies and advancements came at the same time and ultimately lead to the explosion of the industrial revolution.

In china this never happened and the rate of progress was therefore considerably slower.

Now there are a thousand and one additional issues between the west and china, not least availability of materials in the countries, need, and massive cultural and political ideological differences. So its not a simple glass/no-glass issue but i do believe in the significance of this kind of causality.

It was a great read, and the best example i can think of the interconnectedness of many of the subjects we discuss here. Its what i refer to when i say internal consistency. If you can do X and you can do it well then why isn't it present in this part of life enabling you to do Y.

For example i find it hard to justify a good metal working industry when the roads are so poor in anyaral as the materials necessary to successfully make iron are often found considerable distances apart so in order to build one you need the other. That's not to say it's not possible at all, but that in the only system we know (earths technological history) that's not how it happened and there are reasons for it to be unlikely or improbable.

Anyway you can probably tell i get off on these discussions and  love the investigation, supposition and debate... but i suspect i am rambling now so i'll stop.

[Rick]

No, they just don't have an abundant supply of it from bodily wastes. I'm not a chemist, and can't remember a lot of the organic side of things, but nitrates occur naturally in other places; some vegetables produce it and (I think) it can occur in caves as a chemical reaction? I think there would be an available supply, just not quite so widespread as in our world.

Nice idea about the advances in tech - guess we need to start taking what we know of the fubarnii tech and working backwards - each technology is the tip of a pyramid of other technologies that may be needed to get it to work.

[Brandlin]

No, they just don't have an abundant supply of it from bodily wastes. I'm not a chemist, and can't remember a lot of the organic side of things, but nitrates occur naturally in other places; some vegetables produce it and (I think) it can occur in caves as a chemical reaction? I think there would be an available supply, just not quite so widespread as in our world.

Yeah i worded it badly. What I meant was they have a great need for nitrates to help mushrooms (their primary food source) grow, so I'm a little surprised they haven't figured out how to make it, and therefore it might be abundant. That's not to say they MUST have it.
I'm no chemist either, but if memory serves we produce nitrates by oxidising ammonia (NH₃) into nitrites (NO₂) and then into nitrates (NO₃). The most readily occurring source of ammonia we have is urine. So if the fubarnii don't have that, you're right, they may be screwed. Although Nitrates are also produced by plants. Legumes (peas and beans) make lots of it in their roots which is why they are dug-in whilst still leafy and green to feed the next crop. So there are other options in our world. Whether that happens in Anyaral and whether an enterprising engineer/farmer has figured it out is a different story. You'd think that for a civilization which supports Gar Loren - a city of some million Fubarnii - they'd have control and advancement of their food chain though.

Nice idea about the advances in tech - guess we need to start taking what we know of the fubarnii tech and working backwards - each technology is the tip of a pyramid of other technologies that may be needed to get it to work.

That's a good way of expressing it, as long as you remember all those pyramids are interlocked, overlapped, stacked and co-dependent.

[Jubal]

The Fubarnii must be pretty good with glass, to have made the engineer's goggles. Also we think they have telescopes, right?

[Brandlin]

The Fubarnii must be pretty good with glass, to have made the engineer's goggles. Also we think they have telescopes, right?

yes that's what i was thinking but they have very small windows (to stop devanu getting in) so i'm wondering if its something they can only make in small accurate amounts?

[Klute]

Hmm while I also like everything to have a tangible and totally plausable solution as to its being, I also think that there comes a point when we have to introduce elements into a made up world that are themselves "made up".

For example, the fungi on Anyaral may have a totally different growth system than the fungi on Earth.

[Jubal]

You could explain it by saying that Anyaralese fungi have symbiotic relationships with nitrate-fixing bacteria in the same way that legumes do on Earth, but that the nitrate is pretty much used by the Fungi so the Fubarnii can't (or at least haven't worked out how to) use it separately?

[Carcharoth]

Great discussions here. Very interested in the china/tea story - I think I've heard it before, but that may have been from Alan!

Internal consistency is a thing that I highly value for Twilight - my focus is slightly different in that I want everything to look and feel right, while Alan and Tom tend to get down into the weeds and occasionally reign in my crazier ideas. That makes a good team, as long as both sides are occasionally willing to compromise (<cough> mechanical legs <cough>).

I have always thought that Anyaralese* fungi are a bit different to Earth ones, but never investigated in detail. I would imagine that some fungi may fill the niche of fixing nitrogen (possibly by a symbiotic relationship), while others make use of that ability, but I'm sure a biologist could step in and come up with a more complete system.

As for glass - I've mooted the idea that some engineers played around with making clear resins from certain types of garkrid (good for goggles etc), but I'm not sure if that sort of material could be practical for larger items like telescope optics. The fact that telescopes are part of the Fubarnii religion could actually drive developments of glass/optics rather more strongly than would be expected. They might not drink out of glasses (not sure about that), and I'm not sure what they use in windows, but they are keen to build accurate lenses and reflecting surfaces to enhance their religious studies. I could see that having a strong knock-on effect.

Roads - when I mention roads I am generally thinking of roads across the breadth of the empire. Those don't really exist. Within the central empire is a different matter - they have very little issue with Devanu and they have many structures that would be impractical in the outskirts of the Empire. They have lots of roads there, and all the infrastructure they need to transport metal and resources around. I imagine the area is about the size of England (but I'm sure Alan or Tom will correct me if I'm getting that wrong). The Empire is huge, so it is easy to make generalisations about the technology when in fact there are huge differences simply due to geography and difficulties with travel. It is safe to assume that most inventions come from the central empire and then slowly make their way to the outskirts of the Empire on the back of heavily laden baruk and belan.

*I think Jubal is the first person to use that word...

[Jubal]

A little reading around reveals that some fungi can fix nitrogen to an extent on their ownsomes - not as well as the legume/bactieria relationship, but enough for their own needs...

Which metals do the Fubarnii use mostly? Do they have significant coal/oil reserves? Also, how good is their clay and pottery work?

[Gethuch]

where do they stand on glass making/blowing/floating?

Making and blowing - pretty good. For some reason I think they don't have float, but I can't remember why...

odd they don't have nitrates when they farm mushrooms... fertilizer of fungi is almost pure nitrates... little or no pot ash as you are not encouraging flowers....

There's another mention of the fungi further down - I should write more about them. For now, suffice it to say their shape is an example of convergent evolution on Earth fungi, and they're quite different biochemically. Species exist which metabolise all sorts of weird stuff, like iron. Some species have symbiotic photosynthetic bacteria in them...

Imagine an earth with no grass - what would be different.

They had to do that to film "Walking With Dinosaurs" - no grass back then. O'course dinos didn't base a civilisation on it.

There's an interesting paper i once read entitled something like "Why tea stopped the Chinese Industrial Revolution!" I'll dig it out if i can.

Hey, I read that! Cool paper, very interesting.

<Snip "China">

For example i find it hard to justify a good metal working industry when the roads are so poor in anyaral as the materials necessary to successfully make iron are often found considerable distances apart so in order to build one you need the other. That's not to say it's not possible at all, but that in the only system we know (earths technological history) that's not how it happened and there are reasons for it to be unlikely or improbable.

Gah, I need more time! Can't understand why I don't have more time...
The short answer is that they have better quality mineral deposits than Earth has seen for a few thousand years. The longer answer will have to wait, but mentions the Traders, and why they don't encourage the building of better roads.