Seroster said:
The one part of the book that made me really scratch my head is the chapter on putting together artificer's contraptions. Is this really intended to be used to figure out how long it takes someone to make steam-powered doors for a temple? Seems complicated for something like that. Did the author(s) have in mind weird steampunk-like giant automatons powered by people in the body and legs peddling like mad? Shades of Jack of All Trades...
An example would really, really, REALLY have helped. I find the use of "Construction Points" and "Construction Target" to be kind of confusing; couldn't one simply say that an artifact has a Construction Cost of X, and it can be reduced by adding various bulky bits?
Hero of Alexandria designed temple doors which operated something like this (more or less): priest (or supplicant) makes burnt offering on altar; air in altar is heated and rises, creating partial vacuum further down pneumatic pipes; water is sucked up pipe to fill vacuum; buoy on watertank lowers with water level, pulling rope which is wrapped around pulley system to amplify force; rope pulls open door, causing yokels to think that deity is pleased at having received burnt offering. It was more elegant than that, but that gives you some idea of what he did.
That was simple, though, compared to his
stage shows. He had hydraulic and pneumatic and gravity-fed systems which were capable of putting on an entire play as a silhouette/puppet show, complete with sound effects, and for amphitheatres he designed completely mechanical stage sets. He was just one of
several brilliant inventors of the Hellenistic Era. The most tantalizing thought is that the Alexandrians and Archimedes came very, very close to steampunk computing. There were several very sophisticated astronomical calculators and clocks built on the basis of gear systems, including a public clock/ephemeris in Athens, and it required just one or two more steps before someone could have made one powered by steam. The steam powered calculating engine would have been created a full two millennia before Mr. Babbage graced us with his powered Analytical Engine #3.
