- Sign: National Museum of Kirelia
- Scarlet: So many rainbow disks!
- Sign: A number of factors prevented the widespread introduction of autonomous carriages…
- Scarlet: !
A Sky Full of Stars 044
|
- Sign: National Museum of Kirelia
- Scarlet: So many rainbow disks!
- Sign: A number of factors prevented the widespread introduction of autonomous carriages…
- Scarlet: !
|
25 thoughts on “A Sky Full of Stars 044”
Cecil
No cars eh.
Crystalgate
Is “autonomous vehicles” the right words? Googling it leads to articles for self driving cars. Anyway, I do wonder what those number of factors are.
Novil
I changed the wording to “mechanical”. I think that’s the term they would have most likely used.
Vicious Sand
But what do rainbow disks do? Are they just decorative? (Don’t let Viviana have one. She’ll use hers to chop all the carrots while they’re still in the ground.) Can’t go wrong with bones. Are those dragon and unicorn skeletons? Nice statue. Is that a semi-Last Supper painting?
“Preventing” the mechanical carriage? Maybe the horse traders managed to win this time. Perhaps the unicorns helped.
Crystalgate
There has to be a lot of extinct animals in this world, unicorns included I guess.
I doubt the horse traders could have prevented cars if they were practical, the pressure for a mode of transportation that doesn’t use up precious food would be just too great. There is Bloomrabi, which seems to be what the humans mostly (almost exclusively?) eat and Firebeats, which is what the animals eats. The Firebeats do seem to be able to grow on non arable land judging by the fact that there are a few animals to hunt, but not enough to allow for pastoralism. If pastoralism was possible, the people would have eaten dairy products instead of just Bloomrabi.
With that in mind, we can conclude that the horses eats up very precious resources and are only kept around because people desperately need them to pull the cart and presumable more efficient animals for this purpose, like mules, don’t exist. If motor vehicles were practical, it would be impossible to prevent them in this setting.
Jim Baerg
“Preventing widespread use of mechanical carriages”
Much less petroleum than on Earth would do it.
Vicious Sand
If you can run a Model T on a modern car battery, then you can run it on a handful of the energy crystals that everyone seems to have. There’s readers who’ve gone on about fast particle radiation from the ray guns, but anything that can do that can power an automobile. It doesn’t have to go train distances, just car distances. Sometimes technological progress gets killed off for no reason.
Dilandu
Exactly my point. If the crystals could gave enough power to power a gun, they could also power a car, or tractor. And it would STILL be order of magnitude more efficient than using horses in the world where food sources are limited.
No one of conseqence
It really depends on how the crystals are controlled. Power output means nothing if you cannot direct it finely enough. Making something desctructive is usually easier than powering some machine. We had guns for hundreds of years before we made cars (steam powered or otherwise).
Also, making cars is not just about the power source. For all the mechanical parts you need high quality materials and even more importantly the ability to create high precision parts out of them.
Jan
It took few years to build a nuclear fission bomb, it took decades to build energetic nuclear fission reactor. It took decades to build nuclear fusion bomb. We still don’t have energetic nuclear fusion reactor.
MelkiorWiseman
Regarding atomic power, the first atomic bomb ever detonated was constructed with plutonium which is an element created artificially in a nuclear reactor, so atomic reactors definitely came before atomic bombs. In fact, according to the story which I read, there was a “race” of sorts to see if the plutonium or the enriched uranium would be ready first, and the plutonium won. Since the plutonium bomb required tighter timing of the detonation of the conventional explosives used to “assemble” the over-critical-mass sphere than the uranium bomb did, the decision was made to test the plutonium first. Since it worked, it could be presumed that the uranium would also work. The first atomic bomb used in war was the uranium bomb, “Little Boy”, dropped over Hiroshima, which was followed two days later by the plutonium bomb, “Fat Man” over Nagasaki, prompting the end of WWII. (And again according to the story which I’ve read, all of the fissionable material manufactured had been used up in those three bombs, so it would have taken many months to manufacture more, but of course that information wasn’t made public at the time).
Crystalgate
When it comes to the plasma weapon, the settings page makes it clear that it’s magic plasma, meaning we can’t make much assumption about it other than that it’s hot. The way we move vehicles are by either using magnetic fields and transfer that to mechanical motion via a magnets or to rely on expanding gasses to move pistons. It is likely that the energy crystals don’t create expanding gasses when used (though there is a way to do so that I’ll get to later) and there is a chance they can’t generate magnetic fields or are poor at it. As such, it is plausible that the magitec is bad at mechanical motions. It can not be completely unable to as Tibor did use a magictec screwdriver, but still to poor at it to effectively power a car (or launch mortars or cannon balls).
Another possibility is that since the magitec is only understood at a surface level, maybe it can be used to generate mechanical motions, but the people just don’t know how to. To make a car, they would have to dismantle already existing artifacts that generate mechanical motions and repurpose them to power a car as they don’t have the understanding to reverse engineer the process.
Now, there is one way to use the energy crystals to generate mechanical motions that I can’t explain away though, steam power. If they can create a lot of heat, this world should have steam trains and boats, though not cars as steam power is hard to scale down that much. Maybe this setting does have steam engines and we just haven’t seen one? If not, I can not think of an explanation though.
Old Brit
Steam cars were a thing in the early 20th century, along with electric cars. Working steam engines can be made small (a few centimetres in size), but I don’t know how efficient they are.
However on our world, steam engines evolved from Newcomen’s atmospheric engines, enormous stationary machines used to pump water out of coal mines. They were so big that precision engineering was not needed, and so inefficient that they were only practical because they were powered by some of the huge quantities of free coal that they helped to mine. Without that combination of circumstance, steam engines may never have been thought of, and so never evolved to the point of powering vehicles.
Crystalgate
Interesting. In Lavarel, if great quantity of coal was available, people would be interested in mining it. Mines also may have the ground water frozen, so there is no need to pump it out like done in our world. On the other hand, the demand for a mechanical transportation would be much higher in Lavarel than in our world due to horses being expensive to feed. Still, the non existence of steam trains may be plausible after all. Well see when we get more information about this world.
Dilandu
Well, they were shown to have power drills as fairly standard equipment. Not something rare, just standard working tool. So they HAVE the technology to store energy and transform it into rotary motion (and power drills require quite a lot of power, you know).
Lokitsu
Any problems with production could shelve the idea. I’m also wondering if popular support wasn’t behind the invention. There were several times during the early days of the automobile where different groups opposed the widespread use.
Dilandu
One big difference – automobiles came to the world already controlled by railroads, steam ships and cheap horses. Neither of which seems to be true for Lavarel. There aren’t any railroads shown, the oceans are nonexistent, and horse would be ridiculously costly to feed. Any kind of mechanical transportation in such situation would be a great breakthrough.
Crystalgate
I will also add to what Dilandu said that the lack of an ocean is a problem by itself. Prior to railroads, food could only be transported large distances via ship. If you transport food overland with animals, the food will get eaten by said animals during the transport and over a long enough distance, all of the food will be eaten. We know that boats are a thing in this setting, but they are limited to lakes and sufficiently large rivers. The lack of both oceans and mechanical transport would be a logistical nightmare.
That said, most fantasy settings seem to ignore this sort of logistic anyway.
Clevershitter
I really love this aesthetics!
LurkerAbove
I wonder what Scarlet spotted in the last panel – maybe a picture of another ancient machine ?
Werwolfe
The unicorns kept headbutting the mechanical carriages. That was a factor.
MelkiorWiseman
It occurs to me that, if the world in the comics is as old as it appears to be, it may be that previous generations had already used up most of the mineral oil buried underground, leaving very little to none to operate internal combustion vehicles from. While it’s possible to get something similar such as ethanol from plant life, it’s a more expensive process in general, and requires a fairly high level of technology already in place.
My guess would be that insufficient access to oil resources, whether mineral or plant-based, and possibly caused by a lack of technological resources, could be the reason why “mechanical carriages” never became popular in-universe.
Crystalgate
There is also the chance that the world was a lifeless world colonized and seeded, at which point there may not have been enough time for fossilized fuel to form. Come to think of it, this is a thing to look out for, does the world have coal and oil?
MelkiorWiseman
It probably has some kind of oil, from animal life. Before the refining of mineral oil became commonplace, lamps generally used whale oil. But without oceans, oil from animal life would be very limited too. Candle-making requires wax, but you can get that from bees, not only from mineral oil.
It’s fun, thinking up potential explanations for things in fictional worlds. 🙂
Jude
I love the attention to detail that Elli Puukangas (the artist/illustrator) gives. I love her own webcomic Tistow and through it, I discovered this one.
Characters
Ariana Carolus Athamas Baako Bolin Cyril Elwin Flammt Evelina Ferrus Gale Nenawa Gavin Carolus Iona Jehona Shardyk Julius Mirkning Kala Silverspring Kenan Orege King Protos Lauro Levon Goldwood Leyton Wayt Ludis Graybold Luitpold Marik Marton Princess Elodie Raymond Reto Mirkning Reva Rodar Rosetta Greenleaf Scarlet Carolus Severin Silvana Mirkning Tibor Frey Vidal Viola Vreni Xaver Yerim Zach Ilkin