A turbine requires precision balancing and fitment machining, it also requires precision bearings.
Things they did not have the capacity to do.
They would have more realistic potential to pull off a crude piston steam engine, but to get something strong light and efficient they would need to acquire the ability to work cast iron with a degree of precision i think.
True, but realizing something with no incentive to make it a functional work device, doesn’t lead anyplace.
They had no incentive i guess to invent a steam tractor or water pump etc.
I have a feeling lack of things to burn would be the least of their issues
The screw works good for low speed lifting, i dont think though that it works well for power generation? I dont think you can force the screw nearly as easy as the screw can lift?
If you have the tech to travel faster than light all the other tech they show is laughably outdated. But what really bothers me is flashlights. No matter what future century it is if somebody is in the dark they use a handheld flashlight.
Once you know the general principles, it becomes a matter of finding engineering solutions and developing the technology. I guess they simply had no incentive for doing so.
Within the context of the movie Starship Troopers, I would think it entirely plausible, but I can’t prove it one way or another short of a definitive statement from Paul Verhoeven, because the movie doesn’t say one way or another.
But the novel? Doubtful.
Of course they did, which is why it only took them a few thousand years to work out the technology and engineering. If they didn’t have the incentive, we’d still be using slaves and mules today.
People always get angry with me in this forum whenever I scoff at the slow-moving swords which by reason of their reduced velocity bypass shields, as depicted in *Dune. *
I had a look at the original a couple of months ago, in the museum in Athens; it is very complicated, and helpfully covered in etched instructions (most of which haven’t survived).
The mechanism is basically a set of gears that you move by hand, to replicate the epicyclic theory of the movement of planets and the Moon. The theories of the astronomer Hipparchus in particular seem to have been replicated in solid form. It seems to indicate the dates for the games festivals as well, which is nice.
Note that the answers it gives aren’t very accurate (Mars is out by up to 38° on occasion), but it seems to be a fantastic attempt to turn the very complicated cosmology of the time into something you could manipulate physically for a range of dates. I don’t know if there were many other devices of similar type at that time- Hipparchus is known to have used a range of astrolabes and equatorial rings, but there are no other geared devices from this era as far as I know.
Meh. Once you have force shields, making them dilatant doesn’t break my credulity threshold. If that kind of thing works for fluids in real life, it’s not that weird for sci-fi fields
I certainly wouldn’t put it past the government in the ST novel. The government makes a big deal about how it’s impossible to talk to the bugs, so this has to be total war, there’s no choice and we have to make sacrifices. But the Skinnies are allied with the bugs at first, then become allied with the Federation partway through the book, and the ‘no communication’ line never wavers. Couldn’t they just communicate with the bugs by talking to the Skinnies, and having the Skinnies relay the message to the bugs? I definitely get the impression that the Federation started the war in ST and are trying to perpetuate it for their own reasons. I never really bought the ‘oh they’re such a good and kind and just’ government line after the when they had their official spokesman say that the idea of a handicapped person wanting to vote was “silly”.
I do not think that is correct. Moore’s law was put forth on the mid '60s. My HS math teacher told me in 1975 that we would have full-fledged computers the size of calculators in a quarter of a century, and when you look at the potential capabilities of the Apple Newton, he was very close to the mark. As for Hollywood, there was a very popular movie in about 1967 where Heywood Floyd was reading a news tablet – apparently wireless – on the moon shuttle.
The biggest problem with tech is that everyone seems to be on a different page. Where will we be in 20 years? Will we have started to see some negative effects on humanity due to pervasive technology (cf., Dune, where they have mentats because computers are outlawed)? Or will there be a resources crash that stymies technical progress? Or some other unimaginable combination of factors?
It is pretty difficult to guess what to expect. Apocalypse are handy for dealing with that.
No, I remember noticing it when I read ST originally, which was something like 15 years before I read Ender’s Game. It’s not like getting something mixed up in the book is unusual, Heinlein later claimed that something like 95% of federal service was boring government jobs (not military at all), but what he wrote in the novel doesn’t support that, and in fact implies the opposite.
I just finished up reading ST myself—the most I recall on that front is that 1) Most of the really specialized support/logistical work done in the military/Mobile Infantry was done by the civil service (or civilian contractors, IIRC) when possible, and 2) the Mobile Infantry itself, by the numbers, was actually relatively small in numbers, especially considering that they recruited from at least all of Earth.
Plus, with the focus of the story primarily not taking place in “The World,” almost by definition we don’t get to see all the boring or civilian-oriented government jobs.
And, actually, as at least one planet was mentioned as being the subject of a terraforming project—Venus, at that—it’s conceivable that the labor needs of megaprojects alone might skew the proportion of services away from military roles.
(Starship Dirt-Farmer probably isn’t going to get a Verhoeven adaptation anytime soon, though.)
“So why don’t you boys go home, go to college, and then go be chemists or insurance brokers or whatever? A term of service isn’t a kiddie camp; it’s either real military service, rough and dangerous even in peacetime, or a most unreasonable facsimile thereof. Not a vacation. Not a romantic adventure.” There’s an 11 page essay on the topic that’s been floating around the net for two decades that’s filled with quotes from the book: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf
An interesting essay, just from a light browsing*, although there are still a lot of unknowns in what constitutes the “civil” form of Federal Service, and how dangerous or indeed how regimented it must be. (And as funny as how a Heinleinian Shock Labor Battalion would be. :D)
*Although even it’s author notes, “Heinlein would not have made such a statement did he not believe it. I believe that Heinlein’s intention was for Federal Service to be only five percent military, and that in the haste and fury of writing it and due to the nature of the protagonist’s service, the supporting statements were left out or inadvertently edited out[…]But if any reader chooses to
take Heinlein’s separate comment as evidence of his intent to make Federal Service ninety-five per-cent ‘civil service,’ they will get no argument from me.”
I believe that’s the “Doylist” perspective, more or less. The “Watsonian” one might be that Johnny Rico himself was uninterested in, or felt an in-universe reader would already be familiar with, the details of the Civil Service.
Except it turns out that the place where the steam engine was actually developed to a practical level, out of all the kinds of factories and smelters and other places that could use motive power, was a coal mine. And steam engines were only ever wood-fired on any significant scale in North America, home of huge existing forests of a like never seen in the civilized sections of classical Greece and Rome.
Which kind of makes me think that fuel would in fact be one of the greater of their issues. When slaves and oxen (including upkeep) are cheaper than fuel, low-quality steam engines don’t make much sense.
The issue with steam engines isn’t just the engineering, but the metallurgy.
I don’t believe any Greek or Roman metallurgists would have been able to reliably reproduce such engines over the long haul. Tolerances having already been mentioned.
Yup, no HUMAN is going to use that as an effective weapon. I’d love to see someone like Mark Henry or Braun Strowman, but even they’re not going to be able to “fight” with it, just swing and hope you connect.