Labrat wrote:
Oh, I am sure they will still have massive conventionally fueled furnaces being manned by a dozen underpaid and overworked bastards. This is the confederacy and unskilled labor is cheap so they will be using it wherever practical. Just as a lightbulb wouldn't be invented if you had an ample supply of glowing stones, you aren't likely to invent the tractor as long as you have your legions of humble slave laborers to hoe your fields for you.
Actually, you are likely to invent the tractor under precisely those conditions, because you don't have to feed it. Legions of humble slave laborers can't hoe the fields for you if you've starved them to death, and the more of them you have, the more food is diverted to feeding the laborers, not the overlord. There comes a time when an alternative is sought, and that's when the balance between the effort of feeding the slaves and the effort of inventing (and feeding) the tractor turns in the latter's favor. Whether this has ever happened in real-world societies (as opposed to someone pre-empting and inventing the tractor for grins, then the invention being found useful) is one of those things that economists and anthropologists argue over, but left to its own devices, a society eventually will figure this out.
Kiam wrote:
Couple of points. Hemispheres (half three-dimensional circles) aren't too complex structures. Arches have been in construction since ancient ages, and you can look at igloos to notice that they could be built where a square house with a straight roof would be impossible.
One little thing in the latest strip: notice the domed skylights in the long building in the first panel? Making a hemispherical piece of glass requires a lot more technical savvy than making a hemispherical stone arch.