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Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)

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Redium said:
The only issue I can foresee with this is that the Etruscans already have us beat. They're famous for importing raw materials and turning them into splendid artisan crafts; ivory, turtle shell, and ostridge eggs, all worked with gold and silver, are found in Etruscan tombs and among Etruscan trade goods. Most of their trade contacts are focused along their western shore, but their trade networks are very well established. They only truly become severed when the Etruscans finish having The Worst Century EverTM​ and are subjugated by Rome.

We might be able to muscle in as middle-men, taking Etruscan goods and exchanging them with the various Illyrian barbarians for silver there, but that would severely undercut our chances of growing domestic industry. The Etruscans are 'closer' to Illyria (since crossing the Adriatic is a huge barrier), they have the advantage of cheaper transport and existing expertise. Only the areas where our craftsmen wouldn't have to compete with well established Etruscans (Glass) or where Greek manufacturing are qualitatively superior (Pottery) would flourish.

There's also the risk of simply being cut out of Etruscan-Illyrian trade; it depends on how much of a barrier crossing the Adriatic actually is. If it's a bigger problem than dealing with Liburni pirates, then trade will naturally flow from the Etruscans to Illyria and bypass our Agora. We can turn Eretria into the greatest harbour and most significant center of trade in Epulia and the Adriatic, but that does not mean we are well positioned to tap into all routes of trade.

To be honest, I'd like to try and steal some of the Etruscans' techniques and artisans. I know we can't directly import barbaroi into the poleis, but it would be interesting to draw Greek artists from future Venice and Ravenna that have been inspired by the Etruscans.
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There's clearly at least some untapped potential or else the Enetoi wouldn't even consider giving Eretria a monopoly on the trade of Amber, and the Daorsi wouldn't have been so welcoming of a Greek colony as a chance to trade. The Histri and Dalmatae and even the Liburnians seem to be comparatively isolated at this point as well. The issue with the Adriatic crossing is definitely a problem, though I do wonder if perhaps hitting the Strait of Otranto can make it possible to cross over in less than a day; Wikipedia gives the sustained travel distance of a trireme as between 80-100km per day, and the strait at its narrowest point is less than 75km. I'm not sure what a merchant vessel could do in comparison though.

Anyway the Padanian Etruscans are due to be run over by the Celts soon so there's probably also a window of opportunity to displace them once that happens.
 
Regarding the Adriatic Crossing...Monoxylon (Greek for dugout canoe) are well used in Europe since the Stone Age. But has there been any indications that dugout canoes with outriggers existed in Europe other than the Irish find?
 
Now that I think about it, we hear a lot about the marriages between the gods, but nothing about any children coming from that union. Is that just not a thing in Eretria or is it because coming up with children for the gods is a bit too much?
 
kilopi505 said:
Regarding the Adriatic Crossing...Monoxylon (Greek for dugout canoe) are well used in Europe since the Stone Age. But has there been any indications that dugout canoes with outriggers existed in Europe other than the Irish find?
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I'm not sure why an outrigger would be more seaworthy in the Mediterranean than their merchant ships.

NuclearConsensus said:
Now that I think about it, we hear a lot about the marriages between the gods, but nothing about any children coming from that union. Is that just not a thing in Eretria or is it because coming up with children for the gods is a bit too much?
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Most of the pantheon is fairly set by the classical period. Some newer Gods might emerge or become more prominent, but it's not generally a thing that's done, and marriages among the Gods is not meant to replicate humanity but is to be above it, because the Gods are explicitly not humans but something beyond. So it's not really shcoking that despite all marriages in Ancient Greece being done with the intent to bear children, the Gods don't have a household that represents a human one. They are literally larger than life.

Redium said:
We might be able to muscle in as middle-men, taking Etruscan goods and exchanging them with the various Illyrian barbarians for silver there, but that would severely undercut our chances of growing domestic industry. The Etruscans are 'closer' to Illyria (since crossing the Adriatic is a huge barrier), they have the advantage of cheaper transport and existing expertise. Only the areas where our craftsmen wouldn't have to compete with well established Etruscans (Glass) or where Greek manufacturing are qualitatively superior (Pottery) would flourish.
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Etruscan trade is extremely Greece-oriented. The trade they do in the region is mostly with the Celtic tribes to the northwest, but most of their trade is oriented towards the Adriatic routes south to Greece, not Illyria. The transition of the Etruscans to an Adriatic economy is even more prominent here and has helped cities like Clevsin and Aritim (Clusium and Arretium in Latin) become even more wealthy and powerful than the southern cities, whose day in the sun is past now with the Greeks seizing control of the Tyrrhenian trade and locals cutting off their main ports of call.

Eretria, however, is an open port and has not found much reason to fight the Etruscans in the region yet; it's uniquely strong enough to body the Etruscans in a fight but not so strong that it has ambitions of seizing their territory. And so it makes for a good trading partner.
 
kilopi505 said:
Regarding the Adriatic Crossing...Monoxylon (Greek for dugout canoe) are well used in Europe since the Stone Age. But has there been any indications that dugout canoes with outriggers existed in Europe other than the Irish find?
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Why would you expect them to be objectively superior?

I mean yes, the Polynesians used them, but there's a lot of context that goes into designing a ship (including an outrigger canoe). What makes you think European outrigger vessels would be superior?

Cetashwayo said:
Most of the pantheon is fairly set by the classical period. Some newer Gods might emerge or become more prominent, but it's not generally a thing that's done, and marriages among the Gods is not meant to replicate humanity but is to be above it, because the Gods are explicitly not humans but something beyond. So it's not really shcoking that despite all marriages in Ancient Greece being done with the intent to bear children, the Gods don't have a household that represents a human one. They are literally larger than life.
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A lot of the minor Greek gods, the ones that are more like personifications of some abstract concept than actual characters with recognizable personality, are attributed as offspring of various gods.

It's possible that there's some cult rituals that refer to some minor godling- a muse or one of the Graces or something- as a child of Apollo and Athena, maybe? But yeah, when I saw the question you were responding to my gut answer was "yeah it's going to be... oh the QM already answered that."
 
veekie said:
From what little I know, its neither more or less seaworthy...but a bitch harder to build to a larger size
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Simon_Jester said:
Why would you expect them to be objectively superior?

I mean yes, the Polynesians used them, but there's a lot of context that goes into designing a ship (including an outrigger canoe). What makes you think European outrigger vessels would be superior?
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Cetashwayo said:
I'm not sure why an outrigger would be more seaworthy in the Mediterranean than their merchant ships.
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Because the outrigger canoe is the earliest stage in the development of multihull boats, which are generally acknowledged to be more seaworthy than a monohull boat.

And because I remember oar/paddle driven bancas here in the Philippines (I'll use boats if I am referring to the upsized MOTOR bancas that are always in the news sinking because the idiot owners overloaded them more than twice the boat's capacity in many cases) are small affairs that can carry one or two people and say a back pack or two amount of goods, which means accidentally or purposefully inventing an outrigger canoe from an ordinary monoxylon is almost dirt cheap and easy to modify away if it doesn't work out.

And because of all the stories of banca stranded at sea because storms made them lose their bearing. Notice the word stranded as opposed to sinking? I wonder what an Adriatic storm is compared to a Pacific typhoon?

So...we can just safely ferry the Kymai seeress back and forth with a fleet of outriggers and galleys every few years because we have less worry of an outrigger canoe sinking under her because of a storm.


... @Cetashwayo , you did see my question about a possible user motion, right?
 
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kilopi505 said:
Because the outrigger canoe is the earliest stage in the development of multihull boats, which are generally acknowledged to be more seaworthy than a monohull boat.
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Kilopi, you might want to seriously consider that there are important reasons why multihull boats haven't taken over the oceans, and didn't in ancient times:

1) Smaller, more crowded individual hulls- especially problematic if you're planning to transport significant cargo.

2) Physically, a catamaran is a lot wider. This is a problem when we're talking about large merchant vessels. Remember that we have issues physically fitting all our shipping traffic into our old harbor? Catamarans take up more space.

3) Holding together a large catamaran hull requires sturdy structural members to cross-link the hulls. While our technology would in principle probably allow such a thing, in reality our shipbuilders are all far more experienced with lightly-built construction styles used on the galleys of the period. They would have a lot of problems with their catamarans breaking apart until they learned better.

And if you remember what I mentioned earlier about why ancient peoples tended to be technologically conservative, and noting that if you fuck up a ship design and it sinks dozens of people die...

Well, I hope you can understand that upgrading to catamarans is not going to be some easy thing.

Plus, I hope that you've noticed the pattern that "find an excuse to introduce an ahistorical technology that I'm totally sure will work better than anything anyone tried in real life, solving our problem with This One Weird Trick" is exactly how this quest doesn't work.

...

The idea of experimenting with catamaran hulls is actually better than the other similar ideas I've heard you come up with, but realistically even if some Greek shipwright thought of it, there'd be a very lengthy experimental period during which time things might go very wrong and kill people.

I will note that there DOES seem to have been some indication that multihull 'ships' (basically giant floating slow platforms) were constructed as fleet flagships for some of the navies of the Hellenic period... but that's 150-200 years in the future from our current point of view.
 
Godwinson said:
In fact, I believe that the Lands vote went that way primarily as a counterbalance to the Oath vote. I know that's why I voted for that combination.

"Yes, we're making you swear oaths on gods you don't know, but we're also being very generous elsewhere to make up for it."
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Yeah that was always the plan and why I was convinced to vote that way myself.

Simon_Jester said:
1) Smaller, more crowded individual hulls- especially problematic if you're planning to transport significant cargo.

2) Physically, a catamaran is a lot wider. This is a problem when we're talking about large merchant vessels. Remember that we have issues physically fitting all our shipping traffic into our old harbor? Catamarans take up more space.

3) Holding together a large catamaran hull requires sturdy structural members to cross-link the hulls. While our technology would in principle probably allow such a thing, in reality our shipbuilders are all far more experienced with lightly-built construction styles used on the galleys of the period. They would have a lot of problems with their catamarans breaking apart until they learned better.
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This. Catamarans are handy at moving a handful of people over long distances and dangerous seas. They're completely irrelevant to sea transportation. Mostly because they're a massive pain to scale. Keeping two canoes together is easy. Keeping two large trade ships together? Not so much.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I will note that there DOES seem to have been some indication that multihull 'ships' (basically giant floating slow platforms) were constructed as fleet flagships for some of the navies of the Hellenic period... but that's 150-200 years in the future from our current point of view.
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Are they actually multihulls? I've read about Hellenistic period galleys with outriggers - but "outrigger" in that context means a sort of extended platform for the rower's benches above the waterline, rather than "outrigger" in the catamaran sense. That is to say, the "outriggers" are completely different.

The various super-size galleys of the Hellenistic period weren't too slow, since they could really pack on lots of rowers. There's absolutely no point in them at the point the quest is at though, since the quinqueremes and larger vessels were most valuable as siege engine platforms - and as has been noted before in this thread, Greek siege engine technology is somewhat lacking currently.

And though merchant ships are smaller than warships at this time, they're still larger than any practical catamaran. Slower cargoes went by single masted sailing ship and cargoes that needed speed used one of several kinds of bireme (indeed, due to Eretria taking so many Liburnian biremes in the first quest, Eretria may already be using the dominant bireme design favoured by the Romans - which they called the Liburnian, after the originators of the design - but it may also be that the Liburnian hasn't been invented yet).

fasquardon
 
...I wanted the outrigger canoes (not a catamaran, not any other multi-hull because I wanted an allohistorical first step for LATER generations of this quest's Europe to experiment with) for both fishermen (more stable fishing platforms,ability to remain on the open seas longer) and speedy, hard to sink VIP and messenger transport boat.

Could even turn into a waterborne taxi service if the roll goes that well.


"For X money, I can row you to Taras or Kerkyra! Ride now!"

*Rider must also help paddle. See city law x sec. s*

 
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Random Member said:
Ugh, not another Boat Debate.
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PoC's great boat debate was about making catamarans do EVERYTHING. This is about outrigger canoes for fishermen and speedy, hard to sink VIP and messenger transport, and MAYYBEE one passenger taxi transport.

Or a personal scooter analogue for the single professional bachelors of Eretria.
 
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kilopi505 said:
PoC's great boat debate was about making catamarans do EVERYTHING. This is about outrigger canoes for fishermen and speedy, hard to sink VIP and messenger transport, and MAYYBEE one passenger taxi transport.

Or a personal scooter analogue for the single professional bachelors of Eretria.
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Hey, I was not arguing about bloody catamarans, I was arguing in favor of longships in a society that was primarily riverine (and broken rivers at that), while others were arguing in favor of pentekontor/bireme/trireme style construction. I'll thank you not to slander the now-memetic saltstorm I helped create. :mad:

( :p )
 
Fellow questers, allow me to present to you an image of a philosopher who is most worthy of Eretria.
Take careful note of how readily he hefts the stone in service of his argument!
 
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