I remember reading a study that suggested that the single most important
factor in technology advances is proximity to large groups of other people.
In TFT, magic is fairly commonplace, but hardly at an internet cafe level,
so (if you subscribe to this view), it might not throw that large a spanner
into the works of the Spanish Armada analogy.
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Mark Tapley <mtapley@swri.edu> wrote:
> At 19:02 -0400 9/27/11, Jay wrote:
>
>> The u.s. entered the Great War (WWI) in April 1917.
>> Versailles was signed in June 1918.
>>
>
> Fascinating post. I'd thought of the WWII build-up as stunning, but
> this puts even that to shame in some ways.
>
> BUT....
>
> This history relies on a technology base able to field 200,000
> soldiers plus the "work battalions" plus the industrial infrastructure
> *plus* the normal-technology ground troops, and still feed everyone. That's
> not only farming technology, but government of huge numbers of people which
> implies communications and transportation infrastructure. In a medieval
> setting, more or less none of that exists.
> I think for "period" veracity, you'd have to look farther back. The
> British Royal Navy, building up for its battle against the Spanish Armada,
> may be a good analog, but even that is after the development of gunpowder
> weapons, so it's marginally too far up the industrial development
ladder. At
> those levels of technology, change and build-up took place on a scale more
> like decades than years, even under the impetus of impending invasion.
> Magic, as always, throws a monkey wrench into the analogy (Ow! I
> broke my metaphor!) by actually enabling transportation (gates) and
> communication (proxy, Long Range Telepathy) on par with or beyond
modern-day
> technologies. So maybe the WWI buildup is actually an appropriate
> simulation; but I'd be careful about drawing too many parallels across many
> levels of technological development.