All of this is irrelevant to my criticism. The Atlantaeans had their solar crystals, so it was like getting the benefits of steam power without having to go through the difficulties of developing it. Once you have the Free Power, you can see the disadvantages of slaves – you gotta feed them and keep them from revolting – which is a major and usually overlooked hassle. Being given Solar Power, they would have used it, and slavery would’ve declined. No one has to cut and stack cordwood, or grow plants and press the oil. No one has to haul carts when you have motive power. All of this would have powerfully affected the civilization of Atlantis. Even if the kept slaves for the still-existing grunt work and stuff requiring human knowledge and intervention, it would have been very different. No need to keep large cadres of leopard-skin-dressed soldiers to beat and whip huge numbers of slaves and go Mwa-ha-ha to show your evil intent.
They didn’t have the principle. A Hero engine is only a toy. You can’t make anything useful out of it. If you scale it up, then you just have a bigger toy, one that doesn’t work very well any more.
I’ve often heard the claim that they had a steam pump to pump water to the top of the Pharos. Exaggeration, wild exaggeration, or hogwash?
But, yeah, for a real steam engine you need precision metalworking, so you can make cylinders and pistons that have a close-to-watertight seal. Without lathes, that’s close to impossible, and lathes require a lot of precision engineering of their own.
They might have been able to build a voltaic pile, which would have jump-started that branch of technology by nearly 2,000 years. Copper and zinc disks, acid, and wires – all within reach of Greek smiths.
Am I wrong in having my doubts as to the actual sophistication of the (reconstruction of the) Antikythera mechanism? Scientific American had a lovely article on how astonishingly advanced and complex it all was, but I can’t tell how much of that is speculation, and how much is solidly evidence-based. I’m skeptical…but am I wrong for that?
I don’t agree. If you’re trying to fight by floating in space with insignificant movement control and no solid object to clamp onto, then you’ve screwed up horribly. An army should not base its weapon choice on ‘what won’t avoid one really specific problem if we go into a highly unlikely and stupidly bad situation’. And if your systems for managing movement are so bad that they can’t handle you firing a gun, then you’re in real trouble if you get hit with anything. If recoil from your own weapons causes so much trouble, then your opponent should really be into projectile weapons, because even if you’re armored against bullets a hit is going to impart completely unexpected spin and movement that you’re REALLY not going to be prepared for, and if you’re unarmored hits that would cause only a minor wound will leave your troops spinning out of control.
Better metallurgy would help with things like weapons and armor, which they (and later the Romans) certainly had use for. They had plenty of impetus to develop better ability to handle metals, but it’s not something that’s easy or quick to do. And without better metalworking, they couldn’t make strong enough boilers, pipes, and cylinders to handle doing real work with a steam engine on a significant scale.
You also need to make cylinders and pistons, and especially boilers out of materials that can take the stresses of a steam engine without exploding. The metalworking techniques needed to do this consistently just didn’t exist.
PADDs (personal access display devices) on Star Trek seem to be capable of holding only one document at a time. Then along came the Amazon Kindle. Hell, along came the laptop.
Yeah, you’re reaching. We aren’t talking about “an army,” we’re talking about someone operating in a specific environment, eg the security force on a space station or troops specialized in fighting in such conditions. And MMUs aren’t magic. Even with a sophisticated computer guidance system, they wouldn’t be able to respond without any delay to an unpredictable thrust in a given direction. Particularly if they were totally manually controlled, which most probably would be, since it’s not like you could program in a course when you’re in the middle of a zero-g combat engagement.
No-recoil weapons would have a decisive advantage in such an environment.
I was giving you a pass by talking about an army, because armies tend to have to cover a wide variety of conditions. If you’re talking about a specific environment like a space station, floating around without a proper spacesuit or wall to anchor to becomes even more unlikely. The only part of Babylon5 that operated in 0g without a spacesuit was the center of the station where the train from end to end ran, and firefights floating in that area were more than a little rare - and would generally be fatal to the fighters, as they’d drift off-center and end up hitting a fast moving wall.
Again, your idea requires that scenarios where people are fighting in 0g without any way to brace to a solid object and without any kind of combat-ready space suit are common, and I don’t see that they actually occur much at all in most SF universes, certainly not enough to drive weapon choice.
Even with? Seriously, lasers that are man portable, including their energy source, and can cut through a typical modern police bulletproof vest* are way more ‘magic’ than an MMU computer that can sense and compensate for recoil in a reasonable time. With a simple sensor on the gun or arm it can tell orientation and number of rounds fired, and countering that is pretty simple to program. Totally manually controlled MMUs is just bad technology all around, and really kind of silly in an environment when technology has advanced so that lasers better than we could mount on a car are casually man-portable.
- If they’re not as effective as unmodified rifles against basic body armor, then you’re using weapons worse than our current tech.
Having an advantage in an environment that you don’t actually end up in isn’t actually useful.
The Capitol *building *or the capital city? :dubious: 
Couldn’t they have taken something like an Archimedian screw and produced a kind of steam turbine engine?*
The important thing is that Hero, like Savery 1700 years later, realized steam can exert pressure.
Of course, they then would have had to solve the problem of supplying a steady stream of fuel in order to produce a useful device.
Oil? Coal? Wood? Charcoal? Cow patties? :dubious:
*For that matter, couldn’t they have applied Archimedian screws in reverse to produce water-powered turbine engines?
I don’t think they could have made one that was precise enough to hold steam. The agricultural types (we see them even today!) leak terribly. They only need to hold some water, for a short time.
Agreed! He hit upon a really key physical principle, and started mucking around with it. If he’d had Thomas Edison’s gumption, he might have made a breakthrough.
Wood or charcoal should be enough. We ran railroads on wood for a while.
re the afterthought, same problem: the seals just aren’t tight enough until much later in engineering history.
If you have an entire continent whose eastern half is covered with pristine forests, wood is an acceptable solution … for a while.
Pitch makes a pretty good seal. So do a lot of natural fibers. Sealing joints at temperatures around 100 degrees C shouldn’t be that much of a problem.
This is my point - once you have slaves, you’re never going to see the advantages of Free Power.
In one of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories, a new settlement on the frontier is using wood for fuel, but the settlement’s leader considers it fairly urgent to find a coal seam, because they’re going to run out of wood sooner or later, but with coal, they’d have fuel forever.
I disagree. In the film, the Atlanteans saw the advantage of Free power to power their submarine. This should also have lead to ships powered by the solar crystals (as in C.J. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s 1900 novel The Lost Continent), and from there to crystal-powered trucks. These respond without urging or beating and don’t have to be fed and clothed and monitored against revolt. The advantages would be obvious.
Just a quick note about that alleged bug-hurled asteroid in SST: I thought that was clearly a fake pretext so as to start the war in the first place-yes, human military leadership would knowingly hurl disaster at their own people to spark a conflict against a distant species which had in fact zero blame. Open to a cite proving me wrong tho.
Or maybe they resigned themselves to having to use Crystal Power because there’s no practical way to power a submarine by human power alone?
Maybe it’s outweighed by the *disadvantage *that you can’t feel superior to a crystal, or revel in a crystal’s pain.
Or in other words, I think it’s a mistake to think people have or had slaves primarily because of the practicalities of slave labour. Sometimes, they have slaves so they can be dicks to other human beings. Maybe the Atlamteans were master dicks.
Don’t get me started on those Anime swords with the 8-10" wide sheet metal blades 5-8’ long.
Disregarding the ludicrous weight, the air flow around the blade as you swung it would make it super unmanagable in a fight. Especially outside in any kind of wind.
Forget the sword, I’m more concerned about getting impaled on the guy’s hair!
The asylum which houses dangerous killers in Fahrenheit Indigo Prophecy has doors that have a small chance of opening whenever there is a power outage, of which there are many, apparently more than “six times a day”.
Here is the outage in question, but it’s better to watch the whole video.
Indigo Prophecy is actually a very good game, though. Jim Sterling at one point played about 3/4 of it, and then quit for some reason. The storytelling and atmosphere is extremely good, the animations and voice acting is surprisingly high quality for a game of it’s age, and the characters talk and act very realistically. Some of the scenes made me think it was actually real life…
The YouTube series “Man At Arms” did an episode on the Buster Sword. They made it mostly to show that they could, but yeah, they acknowledge throughout just how ridiculously impractical it is.