What Tech Level is Your Fantasy - Part 2
Okay, so moving on to some more thoughts on tech in traditional fantasy.
I apologize for splitting this across platforms, which is entirely my misjudgement.
I’m going to start with something many fantasy books include: Overland travel.
Overland Travel – 3 Miles Per Hour or More?
Okay, so I’m going to start by killing a common misunderstanding.
If you are traveling by horse it is not faster than traveling on foot. There are exceptions, but those exceptions use multiple horses. A courier or a stage coach change horses when the horses get tired, which allows the horses to go faster.
If you’re asking one horse to carry you all day, you’re facing the same limitations as hiking: About 20 miles in good terrain, 8 to 10 in tough terrain.
I don’t know for sure about camels, mind, but I doubt they’re any faster.
Traveling with a mule string will hold you to a walk no matter what.
With that out of the way, until very recently your options for transportation were walking, riding, or a cart drawn by beasts of burden. Oxen were commonly used to pull carts over short distances, but ruminants have the disadvantage that they do need to stop and chew their cud.
Mules were often preferred for work carts for this reason. Horses have always been considered more elegant.
The stage coach network in the U.K., to give some idea, started in the 13th century, but didn’t mature until the 16th.
Stage coaches were the first, to my knowledge, long distance common carrier. There’s a direct line from the stage coach to the airliner! You bought a ticket to the stage you planned on going to and piled on with your luggage. The coach ran on a fixed route. But their average speed, until the 18th century, was still only 5 miles per hour. That said, a stage coach could do 70 miles in a very long day. In the 18th century, road improvements, doubled the speed. In other words, the slow speed was caused by mud.
The next step was the railroad, which existed long before you think it did. The oldest operational railway in the road was the Reisszug, a funicular that was installed in the Hohensalzburg Fortress in Austria…in the early 16th century. It used wooden rails and a treadwheel. There is still a funicular running on that route today.
As a side, fun note, some funiculars used gravity. Water would be pumped into a tank below the car at the top, and out of the tank at the bottom. The high car would then descend and, via a pulley, pull the low car up. The Lynton/Lynouth funicular in the U.K. still uses this system, borrowing water from a nearby stream only to return it. Zero impact!
Wagonways showed up in the 1550s in mines, and eventually in cities, with cars running on rails and pulled by horses. These eventually became streetcars, while mine wagonways were typically replaced by narrowgauge rail.
Steam drove rail, but not in the way you think. It took static steam power to produce the energy to make metal rails, in the second half of the 18th century. Points were introduced not long after. Then the reciprocating engine, used to power cotton mills, came into being.
But locomotives required high-pressure steam acting on a piston, which needed much stronger boilers. The first patent was in 1784, and the first working locomotive was built in South Wales in 1804. It functioned, but it was too heavy for the tracks they had at the time.
The first commercial locomotive, Salamanca, ran on the Middleton Railway in 1812…and this was also the first rack railway because it didn’t ahere to the tracks. That technology is still used for steep incline track. The next year, the adhesion problem was solved with Puffing Billy. Where’s the Rocket? Stephenson’s Rocket broke speed records and Stephenson’s designs solved a lot of problems.
If you have steam railroads, you’re really getting into gaslight. If you have diesel, you’re into period or even contemporary.
The first electric locomotive was built in 1837. There were electric locos and trams running in the late 19th century, with overhead power by 1891. There’s an electric railway in Brighton that opened in 1883…and is still running.
Electricity allowed subways. Yes, there were steam powered subways, but ventilation was a problem. Most street railways (streetcars/trams/light rail) were electrified by the early 1900s. Electrification is older than you think.
As for automobiles. Experiments with steam driven carriages started in the 17th and 18th centuries, including tractors. Steam proved to be too heavy for small passenger vehicles, but in the U.K. road rolling machines are still called “steamrollers” because steam did work for them, although nowadays true steamrollers exist only in the hands of enthusiasts.
Politics and fear were also involved, with laws against “road locomotives” or greatly restricting their use. Still, steam cars might have worked. By the 1930s, steam cars were looking pretty good…except that somebody had gone and invented the internal combustion engine.
(It’s easy to imagine a world with a peak of steam car use if there aren’t the political obstacles).
Steam cars vanished and were replaced by internal combustion engines. But while in our gaslight period, they were toys of the rich, that doesn’t have to be the case in your book!
Electric cars might also have developed much faster if oil was more expensive.
(And then add in magic and real fun could happen).
And…apparently I’ve used all my space just on land transportation. What can I say, I’m a transportation geek!
Also think about canals, which aren’t technically land transportation, but did temporarily compete with railroads in some places, especially the U.K.
And, of course, your fantasy city could be Venice…