Cowboy technology base

Romulans, phase-inverters, friendships, OH MY!

Moderators: justTripn, Elessar, dark_rain

putaro
Captain
Captain
Posts: 646
Joined: Wed May 25, 2011 6:18 am
Show On Map: No
Location: Cupertino, CA
Contact:

Cowboy technology base

Postby putaro » Sun Feb 12, 2012 12:13 pm

Alelou's new North Star AU fic led me to go back and rewatch the original episode. Travis mentioned that there were about 6000 people on the planet and we see:

Clocks
Window glass
Repeating rifles and six shooters
Nicely sawn lumber
Nice fabrics (not rough homespun)

Now, of course, most of this is because they used the standard "Western" sets at Universal and standard "Western" costumes. But, let's take it as reality. On Earth, the Wild West was really the tip end of the industrialized East. Guns, ammunition, tools, fabric, glass were all coming from the East.

So, what's the industrial backend to North Star? 6000 people is pretty small to handle all of the work and specialties needed. The Humans don't seem to be very well educated, but to make the cartridges for the guns would require precision machining and some relatively sophisticated chemistry (cartridges fire when struck by a hammer because a contact explosive, something like fulminate of mercury, is in the base - fulminate of mercury sounds a lot harder to make than the powder since you need nitric acid and mercury and some other stuff...)

I'd buy it if there were several hundred thousand Humans and they'd struggled to bring their technology back to that level. Are there some Skagaran machines hidden away that are turning out tools?
Image

User avatar
Asso
Site Donor
Posts: 6336
Joined: Tue Jan 02, 2007 11:13 am
Show On Map: No
Location: Italy
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Asso » Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:42 pm

Let me say this.

I do not know if in America, that is the country where it was born, the so-called Western Epic (Am I speaking right? - I hope so. :dunno: I mean the Epic of the Wild West.) is felt and perceived in the same way than here. Of course, I believe, it is dear to Americans, because, after all, it is precisely their Epic.

Now, every people loves to portray what is seen as its Epic and loves also to put, into this Epic, the most various things and even the most improbable. For example, the characters that, somehow, are really loved and that, therefore, it would be nice to see acting in that Epic.

That's why, I believe, it is so frequent that the Western Epic is shown on the screen, so that many personages may act in it who with it have nothing to do, such as Trip and T'Pol.

On closer inspection, it is a tribute of love for these personages: it is good for a people who feels the pride of a certain past to make sure that this past can be experienced even by characters who are far away from that past.

But, of course, from this particular perspective, plausibility will inevitably be banished. Not completely, but for the most part: what matters is the captivating mixing that can be derived from making revive this Epic by the characters who are popular today.

And that's very nice. :D
Well yes. I continue to write. And on Fanfiction.Net, for those who want, it is possible to cast a glance at my latest efforts. We arrived to
The Ears of the Elves, chapter Forty-four


And here is the beginning of the whole story.
Image

But, I must say, you could also find something else on Fanfiction.net written by me. If you want.

User avatar
Alelou
Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Posts: 7894
Joined: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:05 pm
Twitter username: @sheerhubris
Show On Map: No
Location: Upstate New York
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Alelou » Sun Feb 12, 2012 2:29 pm

Actually, Putaro, these are the very questions that have been driving me crazy as I work on this story.

I'm assuming the guns we've seen came with the original colonists, because I just don't see how they could rise to that level of metallurgy and machining.

Cloth, on the other hand, is not that hard to set up an industry for, though I'm assuming that somewhere on this planet they must have a river that can provide the kind of power required. That was the first industrial revolution, long before the 1900-or-so era of this crowd. Clothing would be much more expensive relative to other things than it is for us today, though, and it probably would have to be individually sewn.

However, I would have to agree with Asso that the show wasn't really very realistic about the conditions they were likely to be living in.

This is actually much harder than writing Star Trek technobabble, because it's entirely likely that people out there with more expertise in such matters will be able to point out I've got it all wrong. :)
OMG, ANOTHER new chapter! NORTH STAR Chapter 28
Image.Image
Read opening chapters free at Amazon (US): The Awful Mess: A Love Story
Blog: Sheer Hubris Press / Twitter: @sheerhubris / Facebook: Sandra Hutchison

putaro
Captain
Captain
Posts: 646
Joined: Wed May 25, 2011 6:18 am
Show On Map: No
Location: Cupertino, CA
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby putaro » Sun Feb 12, 2012 3:14 pm

You're trying to make sense of it? Oh, you poor thing!

Clothing can be done, but I'd just expect much rougher fabrics. I think the actual difficulty is in spinning the fine thread (hence "homespun" referring to rough, homemade fabrics) as opposed to the weaving. You can make nice cloth by hand if you have the time to put into it, but most frontier societies didn't. Making a spinning mill, even one powered by a water wheel, would be a pretty big engineering undertaking, I'd think, since spinning isn't really power intensive, so the reason you go for power is to run a lot of spinning in parallel, which seems tricky to engineer mechanicals. A flour mill powered by a water wheel seems a lot simpler.

Guns, maybe just the Sheriff and his boys have the repeating guns. Muzzle loaders were possible with a pre-industrial society.

The clocks - maybe they don't work, they're just drawings. The old folks told the kids about them and the kids made some drawings and now they're just traditional.

Just be thankful they didn't show any choo choo trains!

Or, maybe there's another race that comes by to trade for something special that they mine. They'll make anything the Humans can ask for or show them a prototype of. And since these guys don't have a lot of imagination, they don't get anything better than a six-shooter. There's a small group that does the trading and most of the Humans and Skagarans don't know about this other race.

Personally, I think the reason so many shows wind up doing a Western episode is because the sets are up and you get to shoot at people. But then, I'm a cynic 8)
Image

User avatar
Asso
Site Donor
Posts: 6336
Joined: Tue Jan 02, 2007 11:13 am
Show On Map: No
Location: Italy
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Asso » Sun Feb 12, 2012 3:21 pm

putaro wrote:...Personally, I think the reason so many shows wind up doing a Western episode is because the sets are up and you get to shoot at people. But then, I'm a cynic 8)

But not too far from reality, I am afraid. :mrgreen:
Well yes. I continue to write. And on Fanfiction.Net, for those who want, it is possible to cast a glance at my latest efforts. We arrived to
The Ears of the Elves, chapter Forty-four


And here is the beginning of the whole story.
Image

But, I must say, you could also find something else on Fanfiction.net written by me. If you want.

User avatar
Alelou
Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Posts: 7894
Joined: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:05 pm
Twitter username: @sheerhubris
Show On Map: No
Location: Upstate New York
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Alelou » Sun Feb 12, 2012 3:58 pm

putaro wrote:You're trying to make sense of it? Oh, you poor thing!


Hey, the entire missing scenes series is an attempt to make sense of Enterprise and Trip and T'Pol's tortured relationship. A few historical anachronisms ought to be a piece of cake.

C'est la vie, as those who have already-amortized sets, props and costumes available to them probably say.

Those Skagarans really must have picked these people up part AND parcel if they remember how to build frontier towns in such glorious detail right down to the nicely turned scrollwork, Victorian artwork on the wall, etc. (And those guns? What'd they do, lock them in a safe somewhere?)
OMG, ANOTHER new chapter! NORTH STAR Chapter 28
Image.Image
Read opening chapters free at Amazon (US): The Awful Mess: A Love Story
Blog: Sheer Hubris Press / Twitter: @sheerhubris / Facebook: Sandra Hutchison

User avatar
Linda
Commodore
Commodore
Posts: 3025
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:38 pm
Show On Map: No
Location: South Milwaukee, a quarter mile from Lake Michigan

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Linda » Wed Aug 29, 2012 6:42 pm

I am dealing with similar technological issues in a story I am rewriting-expanding. There is a ship crash with some 200 survivers on an M class planet. Rescue is only a remote possibility. They have to back down in technology as they go through years on the planet. Of course they have supplies from the ship that they can use. My husband says that knowing things are possible to make gives them a huge advantage over people who have not invented much technology yet and don't know what is possible. So I am devoring science and technology encyclopedias and articles on the history of technological development. It is taking a long time to think this out. From warp drive down to steam power was my original thought. I'm trying to see if some electric power is possible...with supplies of copper wire from the ship. Also, could oil deposits close to the surface of the planet be useful and could they refine it to gasoline? I'm not sure if I ever will finish my story project but I am getting a better education on technology than I had before. :?
Working on a major fan fic project. Two-thirds done. Hope to put it up in the not TOO distant future.

User avatar
Alelou
Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Posts: 7894
Joined: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:05 pm
Twitter username: @sheerhubris
Show On Map: No
Location: Upstate New York
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Alelou » Thu Aug 30, 2012 9:52 am

Sounds interesting.

On North Star I'm thinking that with their current supplies and those particle weapons on the ship they could easily bore into the planet for some geothermal heating/cooling. And anytime you have a good temperature differential or wind or sun it should be possible to create electricity, though they would need some supplies. The ability to obtain new refined metal and plastics and other materials or the energy needed to replicate them from other materials is probably their biggest hurdle.
OMG, ANOTHER new chapter! NORTH STAR Chapter 28
Image.Image
Read opening chapters free at Amazon (US): The Awful Mess: A Love Story
Blog: Sheer Hubris Press / Twitter: @sheerhubris / Facebook: Sandra Hutchison

User avatar
Linda
Commodore
Commodore
Posts: 3025
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:38 pm
Show On Map: No
Location: South Milwaukee, a quarter mile from Lake Michigan

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Linda » Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:07 pm

Thanks! I had not considered geo-thermal heating yet. Metal work is possible to an extend as blacksmith shops have been working metals for centuries. You can easily get a wood fire hot enough. Blast furnaces and rolling mills would probably be out, but I am looking into this. Whatever I have them bring on the ship (it was ferrying supplies to a colony world before the unexpected crash) would eventually wear out and have to be replaced, if possible. But I could 'cheat' a little and have mining or drilling equipment onboard.

Since this is a series of 3 novellas, (novel lengths sound too intimidating right now) I have a character bio list, a timeline, an outline/chapter summary list, and am making a map of the settlement. I even have been toying with the idea of having an artist friend draw sketches of the characters. If I don't keep this organized, the scope of this project will overwhelm me. It took long enough to kick start myself into being excited enough to work regularly on it, so being overwhelmed and frustrated is the last thing I want to happen, LOL.
Working on a major fan fic project. Two-thirds done. Hope to put it up in the not TOO distant future.

Cogito
Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
Posts: 1886
Joined: Fri Dec 03, 2010 8:46 pm
Show On Map: No
Location: England

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Cogito » Fri Aug 31, 2012 1:29 am

I guess that getting an adequate supply of food would be the most important factor - it's hard to have an industrial revolution when everyone is busy being a hunter/gatherer.

If it is the sort of ship that had a cultural archive then they may well have a record of the techniques needed to grow crops, detect and mine ore, refine it, and get a basic manufacturing base. But reading it is one thing, making it work is another, and I think they would find it difficult to apply them successfully without practical experience. If they don't already have access to a database where they can discover the old techniques, I think it would be a much much harder task and very difficult to kickstart a technology base before their existing equipment wore out. In any case, getting past the steam age would be difficult without a big enough population to support all the infrastructure.

User avatar
Linda
Commodore
Commodore
Posts: 3025
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:38 pm
Show On Map: No
Location: South Milwaukee, a quarter mile from Lake Michigan

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Linda » Fri Aug 31, 2012 2:33 am

I was thinking they had the knowledge base but not the experience. And batteries don't last forever, so I was going to have them struggle with deciding what knowledge they needed to save. The small population might be a problem. I am trying to find out what the smallest viable breeding population needs to be in case they were not rediscovered for centuries. The colonists the ship was transporting are farmers, mostly. They would have to discover if some of the seed they had with them could grow on the new world. There are sheep, a few horses, a few dogs on board. There is one woman who does spining and weaving as a hobby. Among the ship's crew are medical people with a limted amount of medical equipment and lab facilities. They would have to discover which of the native plants had the right nutrition. And warp drive people would have to learn steam technology skills from the knowledge base. The planet, if we use earth hours, has a different length of day, different length of year, and different length of month as determined by the orbital period of three moons. There is a long winter. So I have a lot to play with, in addition to the character traits of the people and trying to make an exciting plot. I may have bitten off more than I can chew, but it is a terrific writing project to work on.
Working on a major fan fic project. Two-thirds done. Hope to put it up in the not TOO distant future.

Kotik

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Kotik » Mon Sep 03, 2012 7:56 pm

It's been a few hundred years since the Skagarans took the humans. I would guess they took a few more than 6.000 to begin with. All the people they took had the fresh knowledge of their time. They knew how to make weapons and they knew how to make cloth etc. Both the bloody uprising and the rather drakonian laws (they hang people at the drop of a hat) severely cut into their numbers. What follows is a severe degeneration of the gene pool as inbreeding becomes more likely. What happened to them is basically an accelerated variant of what happens to humankind now on Earth. The genetic peak of humanity is believed to have been in the late sixties - since then we're on a downward slide. And it shows. Between the 70s and the mid eighties humanity managed to shrink computers from something that filled entire rooms to something that fit the size of a shoe-box while 10-folding processing power in the process. smart kids in the 70s and 80s invented things, smart kids today know how to pirate ring tones of the crazy frog, the drunken elk or the masturbating otter, while the slightly less smart kids don't even know that it is rather impolite to stab fellow students with a knife.
I tend to think of the North Star colony of a remnant population that had severely degenerated from the originally settled gene pool. If Bennings is anything to go by, 'survival of the fittest' didn't quite apply there.

Distracted
Site Donor
Posts: 5036
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 1:19 am
Show On Map: No
Location: Lafayette, LA

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Distracted » Mon Sep 03, 2012 8:00 pm

The genetic peak of humanity was in the 60's? Lord save us! I hope not. :shock:
Image sig by chrisis1033

Cogito
Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
Posts: 1886
Joined: Fri Dec 03, 2010 8:46 pm
Show On Map: No
Location: England

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Cogito » Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:03 pm

No, I don't think you could claim that anything peaked in the sixties except, perhaps, recreational drug use. As far as technological achievements go we're on an accelerating curve as the cost of designing and building things plummets.

Thinking about Linda's comments a thought occurred to me. In our time, there seems to be a general fondness for simpler times and I know various people in high tech high stress industries who have talked about chucking it all in and taking up a low tech job - and I know a couple who have actually gone and done it. I can imagine that this attitude will be even more prevalent in future, and by the time it's possible to form a colony the people who do it might, paradoxically, be the ones who are most familiar with living off the land and least keen to build another high tech civilization.

Faced with dwindling technology and a huge amount of work to rebuild enough of an industrial base to maintain what they have, I could easily imagine a proportion of them will decide they actually don't want to. It's not too much of a stretch (in my imagination) for this to polarize the settlement leaving a dispersed community living a simple agrarian life much like today's Amish, and a core high tech settlement jealously hoarding their dwindling knowledge and resources. Is there going to be one culture there, or two?

User avatar
Alelou
Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Posts: 7894
Joined: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:05 pm
Twitter username: @sheerhubris
Show On Map: No
Location: Upstate New York
Contact:

Re: Cowboy technology base

Postby Alelou » Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:13 am

That's an interesting idea, Cogito.

I would expect the increasing genetic diversity as Earth's populations interbreed to improve our genetic situation, although I suppose advanced medicine across the planet might also cause some weakening as people survive and breed who wouldn't have in past centuries.

Of course, the way new resistant bugs are being created lately (and new antibiotics are not) we may start culling the herd sooner or later.
OMG, ANOTHER new chapter! NORTH STAR Chapter 28
Image.Image
Read opening chapters free at Amazon (US): The Awful Mess: A Love Story
Blog: Sheer Hubris Press / Twitter: @sheerhubris / Facebook: Sandra Hutchison


Return to “Non-Ship Fanfiction”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests