Dragon Ball: After the End
We don't need protecting.
The Fourth Monado
S U B A R A S H I I
- Location
- Away
Naw, Salada was blown up loooooooong ago.
True but that doesn't change what I said.
Bakkasama
There is always a greater fool
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/his
Garenhuld us not Earth and is not in our universe. There can be materials that don't exist here that take the same function or they could have perfected some areas beyond us that fills into the ones they didn't develope.
That said, crack theories for missiles situation:
a) Found a piece of alien tech and figured it from there
b) Saiyan supremacist group leaked things so that humans killed each other
c) Garenhulders got their first Senbei Norimaki
d) Valentine works as a scientist in his everyday life
That said, crack theories for missiles situation:
a) Found a piece of alien tech and figured it from there
b) Saiyan supremacist group leaked things so that humans killed each other
c) Garenhulders got their first Senbei Norimaki
d) Valentine works as a scientist in his everyday life
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
e) this region was an interplanetary nuclear launch facility at one point, and they happen to live on one of the silos.
Or something equally crackpot-y.
Or something equally crackpot-y.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There's basically already an alien invasion fleet coming to Garenhuld with exactly that in mind, so yeah.
A country that didn't have the physical materials to build, say, insulated power lines until ten years ago physically could not have a nationwide power grid or a nationwide Internet with buried landline stations and so on. There just wouldn't be time to build the factories to build the tools to build the tools to create such things.
It would be like saying that a nation which only discovered that stones could be chipped and cut into shapes ten years ago had successfully, already, built the Pyramids.
The point is, the Garenhulders have these technologies now. Garenhuld has never not been presented to us as a society with fairly modern-ish technology. And it sounds like this would be having it casually pulled out of a hat that oh yeah, they were in the Gaslight Age when Kakara was born. Despite the fact that now, they have so much mass transit everyone can commute to work in farms from cities hundreds of miles away, and have hypersonic cruise missiles and global Internet now, ten years later, despite being neo-phobic and not neo-philic when it comes to new technology, just...
Not buying it. This explanation makes my brain hurt even worse.
If it works well enough to "do rubber's job" in terms of electrical equipment and so on, then to wrap all the way back to where we started... Well, it greatly undermines the value of a rubber monopoly, to the point where 'oh yeah, this country has a rubber monopoly' doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as an oil monopoly, which was kind of my point in the first place.
Okay, see, I may disagree with these explanations, but the idea that there's a secret group of aliens or time travelers or gods deliberately accelerating Garenhuld's development by handholding the technophobic Garenhulders besides us? I can work with it least not adding extra layers of self-contradictory impossibility on par with "oh yeah, they've invented baking but haven't discovered fire."
Actually, what makes you think that's a recent thing?
Do note the "inferior in one or more ways" bit. Rubber monopoly would be inferior if the alternatives have issues that rubber doesn't. Perhaps it's hideously expensive. Perhaps it produces horribly toxic waste that is hard to safely store. Perhaps they've run into massive shortage of the alternative.
What matters is if rubber is sufficiently superior, economics wise, that everyone wants it, and not getting it would negative effect the nation compared to others that do have access.
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Bakkasama
There is always a greater fool
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/his
Ok. I... am not entirely aware which technologies absolutely need rubber to work. I mean, I get why it would be used to something like tires for cars but would they be used for, say, trains when they use tracks? I can also see its use for insulating cables for power lines but you could do something similar with ceramics even if it would be more expensive and need them to go underground nd for delicate work you can use other methods like varnish and different kinds of oils. Latex for sanitation would be hard to replace but you could perfect ways to sterilize and kills germs beyond our tech. Adhesives you could conceivalby find other methods. Hoses for different machinery like engines, pneumatics and hydraulics could be replaced by pipes. Hypersonic missiles seems like a fairly recent since you mentioned. Frankly, the one I am having some trouble thinking about is that they seem to have figured oil derivatives before rubber yet have nothing similar to it that comes from that.
Edit: Or what rubber has to do with having internet when it clearly works by magic.
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- Location
- USA
I'm just chalking up the technology situation to Poptart having a liberal arts degree (or whatever English majors and the like get). Try not to think too hard about it, since things stop making sense when you look at it too closely.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, I'm okay with that, I'm not here to sneer. The thing is, I'd kind of like it if technology inconsistencies in the backstory could be resolved in a way that points towards "consistent backstory," not towards "add new technological inconsistency to patch old inconsistency." If I don't actually know how a thing works, making firm declarations about how it works differently is likely to open more plot holes than it closes.
I want to help do the worldbuilding, not hurt it, but worldbuilding goes better when everything is intended as part of a consistent whole, instead of being a mass of patches sewn into place to paper over existing plot holes. As we've seen by counterexample in the works of Toriyama.
I don't. It would involve so many huge infrastructure projects that this would inevitably be something that isn't that recent, it must have gradually emerged over time as the necessary roads, rails, and other commuter infrastructure was built.
But you physically couldn't do that without 20th century technology. In the horse-and-buggy era, even with steam locomotives, you'd end up with a lot of much smaller cities and towns spread out more widely across the world, because people just plain couldn't commute fifty miles to work each day on a large scale.
Based on Poptart's description of population patters on Garenhuld, what I imagine happening is that large numbers of medieval farming villages instinctively huddled together as transportation and road infrastructure grew. People were never comfortable living in small towns and walking out to fields no more than a few miles from town to work, but they didn't have a choice back then. Once a choice arose, people spontaneously moved into larger and larger towns, and all the land between towns except the productive agricultural areas was allowed to revert to wilderness.
But the process of having everyone wind up super-concentrated into megacities would require 20th century train, automobile, and aircraft technology, which means it definitely postdates the Exiles' arrival and probably dates to at least 100-200 years after their arrival, after the Garenhulders had enough time to build up the needed transportation infrastructure (commuter rails and roads that make anything on Earth look like a pathetic joke).
I mean, I GUESS you could deliberately construct such a situation? But it'd be really contrived and artificial.
Rubber just... what it comes down to is, rubber just isn't nearly as valuable a strategic resource as, say, oil. It's not worthless, it's just not that important. If you have an oil monopoly you have all the political power you need from resource dominance. So doubling down and trying to distort the rest of Garenhuld's backtory to retcon in a justification for rubber being a super-valuable strategic resource controlled by a single country that already has an oil monopoly just strikes me as a losing proposition.
Part of the problem here is that the expense and sheer impracticality starts to call into question whether you could do the basic things at all. If we just happened to live on a planet where everything else was the same but there was no such thing as rubber, I'm sure we COULD find workarounds for all the places that we see rubber used for insulation, shock absorption, and so on. But the cumulative expense would be a huge drag on all sorts of other projects and things, that we might otherwise take for granted.
Yeah, but they've clearly had hypersonic missiles and high-speed fighter jets long enough that their national militaries are planned around them. Long enough that the missiles work fairly reliably; when ten missiles launched, we had to physically stop all ten, none of them broke up on their own. Long enough that both sides seemed knowledgeable and prepared for the other side to deploy such weapons. And long enough that everyone was uniformly equipped with weapons on that general tier of capability.
In other words, these are weapons that were developed, oh... at least a few years ago, even if everyone were operating under WWII levels of military mobilization. At peacetime mobilization rates, the missiles and other super-modern military impedimenta we've seen would pretty much have to have existed for ten years or more, and other advanced weapons that themselves required industrial tech to build would have to have existed for at least a generation or two previously.
Well, you could totally make up for the need to insulate cables and high-voltage power lines and things using artificial, oil-derived substances.
But at that point there would by definition be a whole bunch of plastics that do basically the same things as rubber. Synthetic rubber, in other words.
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You oughtn't infer that in the first place, actually -- the point I've been trying to communicate is that this society is utterly alien from ours and I'd need to dredge out the novel's worth of notes I have to explain in detail.See, you've said that and I get that. Almost the entire discussion can be shoehorned into the definition of "smallest possible distance." And how small a distance a group of Garenhulders can be willing to go and still be able to get anything done on a complex project without an Exile or other outside creative thinker supervising them and holding their hands. Because there are only so many of those to go around.
...
[infers that electrical power and internal-combustion vehicles have been a part of Garenhulder civilization for more than a generation]
[Pauses to process implications of that for trying to run a technological society and build an electrical power grid, with, presumably, no rubber-like substitute product...]
OW OW OW.
I... um... I have to disengage from this conversation, I think. I can't explain. Because I feel like there is no way for me to explain the problems I'm perceiving, in the context of my knowledge of how technologies work, without coming across as condescending or arrogant. I don't WANT to be condescending or arrogant, I just... don't have the Communications bonuses to explain why I think there is a problem anymore.
Regardless, if you care to disengage, I'm fine with it as well. I am not in fact terribly invested in explaining how I derived this society. I have in fact done that derivation, but am more concerned with suspension of disbelief than describing the array of priors one has to unlearn for this society to make sense. Consider it dropped.
The Fourth Monado
S U B A R A S H I I
- Location
- Away
So basically take everything we know about how Earth developed and discard it as 'not being how Garenhuld formed'?
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I haven't been trying to conceal the fact that that was my process, no. To be clear, though, everybody, Monado's entirely right. I have here a society envisioned as, "pathologically incapable of innovating on any scale but the trivial." I did not enter into this under the impression that the conditions required to produce such a result would seem familiar to us, nor that the process to arrive at that point would look sensible or sane.
Regardless. Further votes?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The derivation of the social order, I'm fine with. The only parts that have been giving me headaches are the parts where I know the physical technology creates obstacles.
It's like, if I wanted to say "these nations have no concept of human rights because they never had an Enlightenment as such, they just went straight from medieval times to modern technology," I'm okay with that. Because having alien minds and cultures can explain how that would work. Rights as we know them are a social construct, so a society with different culture would construct them differently.
...
But if I wanted to say "these nations are masters of baking, and have long held baking competitions that are famous the world over, but they only discovered fire last week..." Well, understandably you might start going "wait what the hell" at that point. There's an obvious contradiction between saying that a group of people only discovered fire last week, and yet are master bakers whose baking is world-famous. Being as how you kiiind of need to have some understanding of fire, and therefore ovens, in order to bake.
And if in the process of explaining why these nations of master bakers only discovered fire last week, you speculate that maybe they did all their baking in electric ovens, and I reply "oh yeah, they don't have alternating current and only discovered direct current electricity five years ago," you're going to be all like "WAIT THAT ONLY RAISES MORE QUESTIONS aaagh."
Having an alien culture would not explain how people with no fire or electricity (or any other known means of cooking food) could become a nation of master bakers with a generations-deep, world famous tradition of baking. Because that's a physical limitation, not a socially constructed one. The technology in question does not care what people think about it, you have to do certain specific, tangible things to make it work.
It's like, if I wanted to say "these nations have no concept of human rights because they never had an Enlightenment as such, they just went straight from medieval times to modern technology," I'm okay with that. Because having alien minds and cultures can explain how that would work. Rights as we know them are a social construct, so a society with different culture would construct them differently.
...
But if I wanted to say "these nations are masters of baking, and have long held baking competitions that are famous the world over, but they only discovered fire last week..." Well, understandably you might start going "wait what the hell" at that point. There's an obvious contradiction between saying that a group of people only discovered fire last week, and yet are master bakers whose baking is world-famous. Being as how you kiiind of need to have some understanding of fire, and therefore ovens, in order to bake.
And if in the process of explaining why these nations of master bakers only discovered fire last week, you speculate that maybe they did all their baking in electric ovens, and I reply "oh yeah, they don't have alternating current and only discovered direct current electricity five years ago," you're going to be all like "WAIT THAT ONLY RAISES MORE QUESTIONS aaagh."
Having an alien culture would not explain how people with no fire or electricity (or any other known means of cooking food) could become a nation of master bakers with a generations-deep, world famous tradition of baking. Because that's a physical limitation, not a socially constructed one. The technology in question does not care what people think about it, you have to do certain specific, tangible things to make it work.
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- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Mate, I need you to decide if you want me to explain this or not. You're zig-zagging on me at the moment.
The Fourth Monado
S U B A R A S H I I
- Location
- Away
I mean
I'd personally be interested in an explanation on how their tech tree and culture developed, so
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
It's probably like a scab, you wanna pick at it but picking at it just makes it worse.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Taking such 'scabs' and ensuring that they heal cleanly and smoothly is, like, one of my favorite hobbies. I've done it before several times and would be very happy to do it again.
I'd be delighted by an explanation of how all the social and cultural aspects evolved. Of how the Garenhulders moved from medievals who had no means of transportation faster than their own feet into a civliization of super-commuters living in widely spaced megapolitan cities. Of how this Aramaian super-state emerged and how it overcame the various barriers of communication and trade that normally discourage the creation of loose confederations over such a huge area- either by inventing its way past those barriers, or by some other means. And so on.
I would also be delighted to help resolve any inconsistencies created by places where a "master bakers discovered fire last week" slip-up crept into the timeline. If I can think of a way to excuse the master bakers' ignorance of fire, or to otherwise tweak the setting to preserve their master-bakerness, I like to do it. I do that a lot- I take stories with accidental plot holes, and think of ways to fix them. I like to take things, and leave them a bit better off, hanging together a bit more firmly, than they would be otherwise. It's fun; I'm an anti-deconstructor by preference.
...
But if when I notice "master bakers just discovered fire" and react to it as a confusing inconsistency, that is not an attack on the overall timeline/setting. If I get a reaction as if I were engaged in an attack, that creates a problem for me. Likewise, I have a problem if the author tries to patiently explain to me that the master bakers live in a very rainy country where fire was hard to invent, which kind of misses the point that you need fire to bake regardless of how rainy the country is.
So I suppose the answer is:
If we can talk openly about accidentally created technological plot holes in the backstory, with an eye to hopefully fixing said holes, as I often used to do with dear friends of mine in years past... I'd be delighted to discuss the backstory of Garenhuld.
If we can't do that, I'd rather not bring it up and just stop thinking about Garenhuld at all because it'll make my head hurt.
I would also be delighted to help resolve any inconsistencies created by places where a "master bakers discovered fire last week" slip-up crept into the timeline. If I can think of a way to excuse the master bakers' ignorance of fire, or to otherwise tweak the setting to preserve their master-bakerness, I like to do it. I do that a lot- I take stories with accidental plot holes, and think of ways to fix them. I like to take things, and leave them a bit better off, hanging together a bit more firmly, than they would be otherwise. It's fun; I'm an anti-deconstructor by preference.
...
But if when I notice "master bakers just discovered fire" and react to it as a confusing inconsistency, that is not an attack on the overall timeline/setting. If I get a reaction as if I were engaged in an attack, that creates a problem for me. Likewise, I have a problem if the author tries to patiently explain to me that the master bakers live in a very rainy country where fire was hard to invent, which kind of misses the point that you need fire to bake regardless of how rainy the country is.
So I suppose the answer is:
If we can talk openly about accidentally created technological plot holes in the backstory, with an eye to hopefully fixing said holes, as I often used to do with dear friends of mine in years past... I'd be delighted to discuss the backstory of Garenhuld.
If we can't do that, I'd rather not bring it up and just stop thinking about Garenhuld at all because it'll make my head hurt.
They usually carefully constructed building that use sunlight to heat themselves up, and then concentrate that heat. Or utilise magma to heat things up. Or they possess some sort of plant which allows them do so.
Honestly, this reminds me of interesting fact about the Ben 10 universe years and years ago. As it turns out, in that universe, Earths technological development is distinctly non-standard, where Universal Translators are usually invented concurrent with the steam engine, and radio is discovered and implemented after nuclear technology and anti-gravity has become widespread.
More generally, Tv Tropes calls this Aliens Never Invented the Wheel and Schizo Tech.
Based on my own experienced, the feeling that you need to properly explain yourself, whether out of fear you've been misunderstood, or that you need to explain why something was a problem, is very strong.
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- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Alright, that's enough folks on board. I'll post a more detailed explanation -- not the full one including how the aversion first arose, it's spoilery as all hell and novel-length -- regarding Garenhulders tomorrow, when I'm less tired. It'll mostly focus on the priors I have shifted in comparison to our real life societies in service to the end goal.
Nah, like I said, I'm not invested enough to be annoyed. It's just that it's a long chat and I feel there are lots of miscommunications flying around, so I wanted to ensure that they stopped before I proceeded further -- because that leads to irritated everybody.
The Fourth Monado
S U B A R A S H I I
- Location
- Away
probably for the best
everyone would shit their pants if you spilled that
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
And there it is...