Improving furycrafting with the POWER OF SCIENCE!!

[comprex]

Let's see.  We have helicopters that can manage manuvers impractical for a winged aircraft.  I guess winged aircraft became obsolete 50 years ago then.

You just cited yourself the definition of practical angle of attack.   An impractical angle of attack would be one where the condition is not observed, such as at slow speeds.

Of course, those are just semantics and because you don't want to deal with semantics you don't have to deal with definitions.
 

So perhaps a glider designed for a poor windcrafter would have a different wing shape than one for a High Lord.  Kind of like how we have different wing shapes for different aircraft, yes?

I said so myself 5 or 6 posts ago.     Semantics, of course.

 A High Lord can make do with salt bed or a road, even if he makes no use of his VTOL capabilities.

The moment he makes use of those VTOL capabilities, he uses more effort than just landing himself.

and you just gave the reason why high level crafters don't need the runways either, so false dilemma there too. 

Only if you choose to disregard your burden of proof:   That the mental or fury cost saved by a physical wing is greater than the cost of runways or cost of effort required to fly that same wing in non-optimal regimes.

[hassman]

Well, causeways are big and expensive infrastructure projects, and if there's anything squeemonster would have us know, it's that infrastructure projects can't possibly be worth it.  More seriously, I don't really know the transportation capabilities of the causeways.  Obviously, people can quick march over it, and it seems that their horses can make use of it too.  But, I don't see how they can move mass freight.  A dirigible with a few windcrafters as propulsion can be used as heavy lift for cargo too massive or too heavy to be moved on the causeways and there is no waterway available.  Or they can move cargo to locations too remote for a causeway to be worthwhile.  Or they can be used to supply a city under siege, whose causeways have been cut.  Obviously, you'll need air superiority for this to work: all the other ideas freeing up extra windcrafters can help you gain and keep it.

Jim stated that the causeways are roughly equiv. to 1800's railroads and steamships, which basically created the idea of mass freight.

 Quote from: hassman on January 30, 2008, 10:14:51 AM
Transportation grid significantly better than Romans, lowering overall costs for everything.

Not just significantly.  Exponentially.  Using the causeways, you can maintain a speed of 20 mph over a 10 hour travel day on a routine basis.  200 miles a day is /enormously/ productive travel time compared to Roman empire travel time.  Granted, that's for "professional" travelers--but the creation of a dedicated overland shipping industry hasn't exactly crippled our own economy, has it? Smiley  Trucking is still an industry-critical occupation, and while demanding, it's still possible to make a solid living as a trucker--and they're omnipresent, a backbone component of the economy.

(Oh, and while horses can't furycraft, their riders/drivers can use the causeways for them--see the way the holders were using the causeways to bolster the horses in FoC when they picked up Isana and Odiana fleeing from Kordholt.)

Quote
Disaster mitigation present, so a whole lot better than Romans (or us) How many hurricanes has NOAA stopped recently?

Well, NOAA has a different strategy for that kind of the thing.  More along the lines of "dodge" rather than "stop him from throwing the punch."  As someone who was physically present when that F5 went through southern OKC in 99 or so, and who witnessed the deva-frickin'-station afterwards firsthand, I was... well, *astounded* is too weak a word, to learn that no one had actually been *killed* by the thing.  The NSSL and the local news meteorologist folks had been on the air second by second saying things like "the tornado is on the ground between this street and this street.  If you are on those streets or within a quarter mile and you can hear my voice WHY AREN'T YOU IN THE CELLAR RIGHT NOW?"

Okay, but that said, yeah, having people who can just say "No, this earthquake is NOT going to happen" kinda trump even the best early warnings.

Quote
Farming probably better, if just for rock removal.  However, Roman ag was notable for economies of scale, at the mill level.  Not clear if furies help that.

Depends on where you are.  The longer the land has been settled, the easier it is to work and the more fertile it is.  (IE, the more the furies there have been shaped by the folks living there, and adapted to their needs.)  The Amaranth Vale is kinda a paradise not because it's particularly nice all by itself, but because it was the first place Alerans settled.  So the weather there is mild and kind, fields are receptive to crops, wildlife tends to avoid causing problems, nature pretty much never indulges in natural disasters, and it's generally very easy to make a living, which makes for more leisure time, which makes for more time to make things pretty and nice with fury craft, which in turn makes it even nicer and easier to live with, etc, etc.

If you get out into other areas, farming can be something just as difficult as in Roman times, or "merely" as difficult as modern farm work.  (Anyone who has ever worked on a farm will laugh maniacally at any reference that talks about how easy modern farming is.  Or slug you one.  Actually, probably not.  If he's a farmer, he's too busy to waste his time on that kind of nonsense.)

Farming in the Calderon valley is tough, but less so than in many places, partly because of the strength of the furycrafters there--but even so, Bernardholt was primarily a livestock farm, rather than an agricultural place.  They grew enough to live on, and to feed the stock, but they weren't big into selling crops for profit.  Their herds were their money crop.

Quote
Medical technology significantly better, if the Calderon can be taken as baseline.

You can't.  Isana is world-class, though even she hasn't really realized the full extent of her ability.  And Calderon in general is a friggin' powerhouse.  Pretty much everyone there, if they're applying themselves at all, is sitting at the low end of Knight level ability in at least one or two aspects of their craft.  Living out on the frontiers of the realm, they're gathering furies that no one else has ever had or used or homogenized into malleability.  They tend to be wilder and more unpredictable, to have more of a "personality" of their own, but also to be a great deal more potent at what they do.

Bernard, for example, was not considered to be a great deal stronger at furycraft than the other Steadholders in the Valley.  That's partly because Bernard doesn't feel a need to show off--but also partly because there are some serious talents in the valley.  Most of them don't feel the need to show off, either.

Quote
Metals are a soso, as metal crafting does not seem to apply to large scale processes.  One of Rome's advantages was (relatively) plentiful and cheap iron.

Large-scale is something that has been missed almost completely by Alera's development--mostly because of their complete reliance on furycraft.  Furycrafting is so highly individualized that organizing it on the large scale is problematic at best.  The causeways are the closest thing they have to large-scale furycrafted projects (plus the Shieldwall, which isn't much different, when you get down to brass tacks--it's just taller), and those were an enormous investment that took centuries to complete.

However, on the small scale, they're way more capable than Rome.  I mean, they have individuals who have the skill to, for example, create all the pieces you'd need to make a fine Swiss watch.  They just don't have the knowledge you'd need to know why you'd need to make those pieces in the first place.  Passing down knowledge from one generation of crafter to the next can be very difficult, because crafting is such an individual art, and many times things that one crafter can do can never quite be duplicated by another and are simply lost.

Quote
Environmentally, the jury is pointing to the Romans.  It appears that the Alerans have created a group of hostile furies that only bother them.  I view this as sentient hazardous waste.

Couple of big assumptions, there. Smiley  One, that Calderon is a baseline, and two, that they made the problem with the windmanes.  I'll let the facts unfold in the books, but you know what they say about assumptions.  When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and . . . . and umption.

Plus the Romans managed to make their own hazardous waste at times--lining their own water pipes with lead springs to mind. Smiley

All in all, the quality of life for your average Aleran varies wildly, depending on where he lives and whether or not the Citizen in his immediate area gives a crow's feather about his well being.  If you live in Kalare's territories, or Rhodes'?  Good luck.   Maybe you're one of the rare holders who has a Lord or Count who is trying to do right by you, but odds are good that you're scraping by as best you can at what is probably a medieval standard of living.  There are Russian serfs who had it better than you.

But, if you live in somewhere like Placida, Ceres, or Aquitaine, odds are good that you live in a home that's heated in winter, has internal plumbing, that you have an ample supply of clean water, a knowledge of how to handle food in relative safety, and the werewithal to store it for at least as long as we can in present-day USA, to make sure there's plenty to last you over the winter.  You probably have relatively decent medical care available to you--broken bones can be set right by the next morning, most physical trauma can be righted very quickly, and only very complex injuries, infections, or long-term diseases are a real concern.  Your standard of living probably falls between the late nineteenth to latter twentieth century eastern USA.

Heh.  Of course, if you're a Citizen, your standard of living falls somewhere in Golden Age Mount Olympus. Smiley

Overall, it depends greatly upon the labor being done, where it's being done, and the individual talents who are doing it.  A lot of work gets done with pure sweat and muscle, still, which is why there's a slave industry.  A lot of work, though... just doesn't.  Mining as we know it, for example, is almost nonexistent.  What's the point of a shaft-driven mine when earthcrafters can just have their furies haul up a few tons of iron through the ground?  Logging?  Logging is *easy* when your wood fury can weaken the wood at the base of a tree until two minutes of effort with a sharp ax will bring it down.

The real challenge is trying to find ways to work the differences into the story smoothly. Smiley  I mean, it's being told from the character's perspective.  They look at a bunch of guys in a circle focusing intently on the ground to the slow, steady beating of a drum, and go "Oh, iron mine," and think nothing of it.  They have no idea what the concept of a shaft driven mine even *is*.  So it makes it a little difficult to work into the story ways to explain the differences to a reader, without having someone go utterly out of character and start thinking about some utterly bizarre alien concept. Smiley

Jim

[Ididit]

Up to you show that the speed limitations and infrastructure limitations and operation limitations  you impose with the wing is actually saving anyone much of anything.

The moment he makes use of those VTOL capabilities, he uses more effort than just landing himself.

Up to you to show that VTOL limitations is actually costing anyone much of anything. 

[Ididit]

Wow that is a giant quote... maybe you could've put in a link instead?

[Shangrila]

You just cited yourself the definition of practical angle of attack.   An impractical angle of attack would be one where the condition is not observed, such as at slow speeds.

Of course, those are just semantics and because you don't want to deal with semantics you don't have to deal with definitions.

I don't have a clue what your argument is here.  That once a glider gets built, it must thereafter be flown only under conditions where it can't fly?  I thought this was how science could improve things, and you know, science often involves testing.

The moment he makes use of those VTOL capabilities, he uses more effort than just landing himself.

Ah, yes, so that he has to make use of a bit more effort to lift his glider at the beginning and end of an hours long trip means that all the effort saved during the flight are worthless.  It seems that in your world, all aircraft are optimized solely for behavior at takeoff and landing, cause you know, any extra effort expended at those moments would massively outweigh any possible savings in a many hours flight.

Only if you choose to disregard your burden of proof:   That the mental or fury cost saved by a physical wing is greater than the cost of runways or cost of effort required to fly that same wing in non-optimal regimes.

Except as previously demonstrated, runways are not necessary except for a rare few, all of whom have ways to get around the need for runways themselves too.  And your concern about flight characteristics under nonoptimal circumstances is yet another false dilemma.  For some reason, you can't seem to comprehend that this is in addition to furycrafting, not replacing it.  A High Lord might choose to use a glider for a long trip under constant speed designed for optimum efficiency.  If he wants to just hover around and enjoy the sky, he can lift himself up just like he did before.  Under combat situations, where rapid changes in direction and speed might be necessary, he can also jetison the glider and do it the old fashioned way.  He would certainly be more rested than he otherwise would have been, and thus have a better chance of victory and survival.  And I note that you can't put up any defense for your previous false dilemma regarding people that can't otherwise fly.

[Zolt]

Ah, yes, so that he has to make use of a bit more effort to lift his glider at the beginning and end of an hours long trip means that all the effort saved during the flight are worthless.  It seems that in your world, all aircraft are optimized solely for behavior at takeoff and landing, cause you know, any extra effort expended at those moments would massively outweigh any possible savings in a many hours flight.

Well, there may be a point there. We've seen Amara get exhausted from a couple of big crafting, whereas she could spend the whole day flying at high speed and still be feisty enough by the evening. Crafters, and people in general, fare better with a steady effort over a period of time that with big bursts of strength.

Anyway, I'm still not convinced that standard aerodynamics apply with windcrafters: they move their own air mass with them, hence have basically no airspeed and don't generate lift this way.

[Sebastian]

Would it really?  I mean, if you have a weak windcrafter who can only fly thanks to the glider, then yes.  But I don't see how a strong windcrafter would be any more vulnerable.  At worst, he can jettison the glider and fly the old fashioned way, and either way, he would be more rested than he would otherwise have been.

I'm reasonably certain the passengers would object.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, I meant that if the crafter could lift more he would 5 people instead of 4, and such.

[jimbutcher]

Their society is based on military necessity -- actually much like the very, very early Romans.  When Rome was a city state, surrounded by hostile enemies, they had a much more rigid social structure. 

Precisely.

Okay, this is information that has been largely lost to Aleran history (and therefore doesn't show up much in the books) but I figure you guys might like it.

When the original Roman legion arrived in what is now Alera they basically dropped into a hot LZ.  There were multiple sentient species vying for dominance of the land and a strong presence of what would come to be called "feral" furies.

There were not many Romans, and a whole LOT of other races, so they did what Rome was really good at:  Divide and conquer.  They survived by becoming, as a society, a military machine that left the rigidity and brutality of Sparta eating their dust.  They really became more of a death-cult, as a /nation/, than anything else.

There were relatively few women with the Legion when it came through, and it was immediately recognized that without them, there would be no chance at all for survival as a race.  (And their enemies saw them as an obvious weakness to attack and exploit.)  As a result, women wound up becoming subject to some truly insane levels of cloistered security, a legacy which has been mostly forgotten by history, but which is visible in several pieces of Aleran culture where women are still often held to second-class-citizen status because of those ghostly old security measures.  You can also see it in the custom of mandatory military service for the men and mandatory civil/military service for unmarried women.  When the Romans first got there, women were not given a choice about whether or not they would have children.  Without enough children, the Romans were doomed.  And if a woman didn't have a husband, well then.  Off to the Legion camp with you.  There are plenty of legionaries who will be happy to solve this particular problem.

In any case, it took them about a thousand years to overcome their most immediate neighbors and develop furycraft, and that whole time their society as a whole was held together by (perhaps justified) paranoia and xenophobia against inhuman beings who wanted to destroy them.

(Fear of the Other is /great/ at forging a cohesive and rigid society.  You can forget your quarrel with your neighbor right quick when a gang of a dozen shambling hulks that look vaguely like bipedal elephants come charging down on your farms.)

In any case, that extremely militant mindset was a necessary survival tool.  For the outrageously outnumbered early Alerans, might /literally/ made right.  Whatever got the job done was the morally necessary thing to do.  And those guys... I mean damn.  They were some psychotic, cold, calculating SOBs.

Well, once the major enemies were taken care of, suddenly the force that held their society together disappeared.  And, as can often happen when mutual enemies go away, the enemy of your enemy mutates back into your enemy again.  Civil war ensued.  Entire cities were put to the sword and torch.  It was gruesome on a scale our world has rarely seen.

Until the original Gaius Primus entered the fray, killed everyone who challenged him, and forged Alera into an early version of what we see in the books.  Over the next thousand years or so, Alera battled newcomers to Carna, made lots of fun new enemies, and further developed furycraft to a degree where they had a serious qualitative advantage over their foes.  Once /that/ was done, their society began to relax a bit.  It moved from a military monarchy to an aristocratic Republic.  But the guiding principles of "protect the women" and "might makes right" were bedrock to how that society developed.

While that was going on, the aristocracy--the Citizens--realized that there were a lot more people with modest talent than there were with serious crafting skills.  And, as aristocracies have done over and over again in history, they set out to make sure that they would keep their power.  To some degree, that was probably the most practical way to do it.  When one man literally has the power of ten thousand, if matters devolve into violence, that man is going to tend to come out on top in any case.  Why make him kill ten thousand freemen to prove his point?

In any case, innovation and exploration of furycraft and its applications was strongly discouraged.  The Citizenry really liked being the only ones with the powers of demigods, and they didn't want the freemen working out ways to make dinky furycraft as dangerous as the rarer talents of the Citizenry.  Besides.  Everyone knew that furycraft had reached its absolute pinnacle, trumping all other forms of power--military, economic, you name it.  Why improve upon it when it was already the supreme power in the world?

The Academy system put the nails in the coffin of innovation, too.  The most capable crafters of the realm were all being trained to think of furycraft in the same terms, with the same set of preconceived assumptions.  Oh, sure, there was progress--but it was mostly very sedate, very polite and orderly progress which did not make the aristocracy nervous.

Plus, as more of Alera was settled and the number of unclaimed furies dwindled, it became more and more difficult to change social strata.  The Citizenry already /had/ all the really powerful furies, and it wasn't like you could just go out and find one of your own, even if you had a natural gift.  It locked them into stasis, or something that changed so slowly that it looked like stasis--which is exactly what the Citizens wanted.

Civil wars came along every other generation or so, but they tended to be brief, explosive clashes that were resolved with ridiculous amounts of carnage and unleashed furycraft, generally won by whoever had the stronger crafters.  Rapid transit of information and rapid military transportation (the causeways) meant that the First Lord could jump on almost any rebellion before it could take root.  Word would come back of a buildup of force, flown in by a Cursor, and legions would be dispatched immediately, covering between 200 and 300 miles in every day of marching on the causeways.  Civil wars never became protracted affairs that necessitated innovation.

Um... think of it as the late medieval/early renaissance civil wars in England.  There wasn't a lot of innovation going on for quite a while, there.  Everyone knew that they had the finest military bodies available.  Battles became almost formalized, because everyone knew the steps of the tactical dance so well.  There are records of battles which were won because one captain had managed to put a gentle wind at his back, and positioned his archers with such precision that the enemy was withing range of his own shooters, while the hostile arrows fell three feet short of the toes of the first rank of troops.  Fuedal Japan had a similar situation. 

Oh, eventually circumstances and technology forced both societies to innovate and adapt--but those stasis periods were definitely present, and heartily encouraged by those in power.

[Zolt]

*gasps* collective nerdgasm for everyone following this thread.

There's definitely material for more short stories in Alera's past and future, although I get the feeling we're going to learn more about Primus and the "deal" he made with Alera in First Lord's Fury.

I sure didn't think the stagnation/decadence period had gone on for so long. Though when you think about it, any civilization that leaves pricks like Arnos in charge of any military or academic matter or importance has to be pretty far gone. * looks at newspapers* Oh, yeah, not that we're in a position to criticize.

Wow: The "Children Of The Sun" were newcomers to Carna??

Feudal Japan? I'd think more about classical era China (the battle of Red Cliff and stuff), they really knew their stuff then. The battles in Japan in the civil war of the 1300-1400s were more like some kind of disorganized, backstabbing, free for all brawl that degenerated into an arms race when the western traders started coming in. All that until some guy called Nobunaga built a gun factory and pretty much pacified everyone. Shortly after the country settled down into the more gentile, classical Samurai era, and was more or less purged of guns and christianity. On the other hand, no serious battle was fought in the country until the modern era. But I'm just being a prick about this. Maye that's because I'm getting married to my Japanese fiancee this week near Osaka, which does involve a certain amount of nervousness.

[Shecky]

*pumps fist in air* AWRIGHT! Backstory ROCKS.