Department of Overlooked Technologies, Unusual Effects, and Forgotten Weapons

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That's a diagram of a motorjet. The piston engine drives a compressor which compresses air into an expansion chamber where jet fuel is injected and ignited. From what I understand this is very wasteful of fuel and not as powerful as the turbojet. It was basically one step above a rocket boosted propeller fighter, where the prop is used 95% of the time and the rocket/motorjet used when needed. Both types were experimented with by the Soviets.

Another Soviet design was a prop fighter with two pulsejets at the wingtips. Pulsejets don't give a lot of power and they're noisy so you needed to keep them as far away from the pilot as possible, hence the wingtip layout.

Pulsejets were so simple that it could have been made long before the Wrights. Can you imagine a biplane with four pulsejets at the wingtips? It would look like a X-wing. :D
 
Before the Pill, however, HOW do you do this? The one thing you can't do is stop people from having sex. Should we promote war and/or disease?

So this is mainly going back to developing the Pill earlier.

World population growth spur was really a 20th century phenomenon. Over the last several thousand years we had only a few hundred million people and this population was pretty stable. By 1930 we had 2 billion people, by 1960 we had 3 billion, and now more than 6 billion.

There are some sensible things we could have done to limit population growth. First we could raise the age of conscent and marriage to 18. This would delay and reduce birth by stretching out the generations.

Lots of birthcontrol technology like condoms and the pill could have been more widely distributed. I think we'll have to get Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the Catholic Church to accept the Malthusian catastrophe concept.
 

Neroon

Banned
The Optical Telegraph could have been invented much earlier. It could have been particulary useful if invented in China, given they were usually much more centralized.
 
The Optical Telegraph could have been invented much earlier. It could have been particulary useful if invented in China, given they were usually much more centralized.

I agree. However, the invention of the telegraph in China faces an obvious problem.
 

Neroon

Banned
I agree. However, the invention of the telegraph in China faces an obvious problem.
I'm guessing you mean the use of characters instead of letters?
I think some sort of code could have been worked out. Napoleons optical telegraph didn't work like electrical telegraphs either, but with certain code phrases.
 
Which is what, exactly?

The Greeks used a form of optical telegraph, for goodness sake... (Which is where the Romans pinched the idea from) ;)

Neroon's got it. Optical signalling that relies on codes for concepts is limited by nature. The system is extremely useful for lmimited applications, and IIRC such systems were used along the various incarnations of the Great Wall, just as they were in Greece and Rome. But what turned the telegraph into a revolutionary technology was the ability to transmit language, and that was made possible only after it was made alphanumeric (not MOrse's idea, BTW - an alphanumeric optical signalling system had been around for decades in various navies). Try that with Chinese characters.

Note the problem isn't that the concept isn't going to work for the Chionese but that it isn't intuitive enough IMO to make an invention likely. I cound see it being adapted successfully from the Koreans or from Central Asia.
 
Neroon's got it. Optical signalling that relies on codes for concepts is limited by nature. The system is extremely useful for lmimited applications, and IIRC such systems were used along the various incarnations of the Great Wall, just as they were in Greece and Rome. But what turned the telegraph into a revolutionary technology was the ability to transmit language, and that was made possible only after it was made alphanumeric (not MOrse's idea, BTW - an alphanumeric optical signalling system had been around for decades in various navies). Try that with Chinese characters.

Note the problem isn't that the concept isn't going to work for the Chionese but that it isn't intuitive enough IMO to make an invention likely. I cound see it being adapted successfully from the Koreans or from Central Asia.

The Greeks and Romans used a system like this:
  • Person A wants to sent message to Person B
  • A signals B with torch to indicate that A wants to send a message
  • A and B reach for a vessel of the same size, full of water, with a float and a stick with numbers/symbols on it on it which relate to sendable message.
  • A lowers torch, and A and B let out the water.
  • Float reaches desired message.
  • A raises torch again, B plugs up hole.
  • B reads message.
The solution to the Chinese language problem is simple: use semaphore to transmit phrases rather than "letters"... ;)

Slightly more limited than the European meathod, granted, but it would work quite well...
 

Thande

Donor
Very interesting thread,

Some of the missed opportunities for technological and scientific advances have/will make appearances in my TL, though not too many - it's not supposed to be a techwank. I may make some OTL 'got' opportunities missed ones to balance it, too.







The solution to the Chinese language problem is simple: use semaphore to transmit phrases rather than "letters"... ;)
OK then, let's see you work out 7,000 unique semaphore positions. :rolleyes:
 
The Chinese of antiquity were smart cookies.
They would have figured it out.

For example a list with the 63 most common words, with a special code to indicate secondary lists.
 
OK then, let's see you work out 7,000 unique semaphore positions. :rolleyes:

Gah! :mad:

I ment "phrases" as in whole sentences rather than individual characters...

So one could have one signal to mean "attack", another to mean "the enemy" and a third to mean "at dawn" etc...

So, you'd only need three signals to say "attack the enemy at dawn"...

You don't need an entire dictionary to give a short message, Thande... :p
 

Thande

Donor
Gah! :mad:

I ment "phrases" as in whole sentences rather than individual characters...

So one could have one signal to mean "attack", another to mean "the enemy" and a third to mean "at dawn" etc...

So, you'd only need three signals to say "attack the enemy at dawn"...
True, but that's still seriously limited compared to a Western system.

The Chinese could probably figure out a more alphanumeric code given time, perhaps nicking it off one of their neighbours (katakana?). Which might lead to parallel Chinese writing systems, of course.
 

Hendryk

Banned
The Optical Telegraph could have been invented much earlier. It could have been particulary useful if invented in China, given they were usually much more centralized.
Seconded.

Try that with Chinese characters.
I can think of a straightforward method that would allow each character to be identified by two numbers: the first is that of its key (Xu Shen, who lived during the Eastern Han dynasty, listed 540 of them, but by the Qing dynasty their number had been reduced to 214), and the second depending on where the key is located in the character and how many strokes it has. Thus a given character could be identified as 137-9 for example.
 
Gah! :mad:

I ment "phrases" as in whole sentences rather than individual characters...

So one could have one signal to mean "attack", another to mean "the enemy" and a third to mean "at dawn" etc...

So, you'd only need three signals to say "attack the enemy at dawn"...

You don't need an entire dictionary to give a short message, Thande... :p

That works, and there is every likelihood that it was actually done. The problem is that this not a revolutionary technology, it's just a clever solution. Telegraphs operasting on this principle communicate the standardised needs of a military (or civilian) power structure and that is it. Now, undoubtedly there are ways of adapting Chinese to an alphanumeric telegraph, but they all seem dependent on the telegraph already being there. In other words, adaptations of an extant technology. Long-distance communication in China would likely take a different route of development. Maybe indeed one of increasingly complex 'phrase codes'. After all, that was how Europeans started out their telegraphs.
 
Put it another way, modern 3rd World armies love the AK even though they are short on longer range weapons. They would under no circumstances switch to bolt action Mausers for its longer range advantage or more econmical with ammunition useage. Having firepower superiority, even if briefly, can change the outcome of engagements.
Analogies between 3rd world armies and regular military forces are very dangerous. Typical 3rd world battle is a set of skirmishes between untrained gangs of various size and whatever side gains limited amount of proper training and proper mixture of equipment acquires huge advantage immediately. Witness perennial wunderwaffe of Africa - technical. It takes on gangs armed with AK-47 with incredible success. Logistics problems are rather different too. 1st, even most backward 3rd world country today has more trucks per 1000 soldiers than any European army of WWI. 2nd, civil wars don't eat an awful lot of ammunition. Whatever Czarist Russia prepared for one summer of WWI (1917) before Revolution had been enough to sustain bloody Russian Civial war and couple of lesser regional fights for 3 years, with plenty to spare for training ranges of the Red Army waaay into 1930s.

A common rocket propellent used today is Ballistite, which is similiar to cordite and available since late 19th century. Rocket technology stagnated because rifled artillery was far more accurate. This remained true in WWII. However by WWII artillery production could no longer meet the demands of war and rockets were used as a cheaper substitute. The only performance advantage rockets had was being able to be fired off small ships in coastal or riverine bombardment.
Propellant could be the Ballistite, but the challenge was to create evenly-burning blocks of propellant and that took Soviets, Germans and Americans good 10 years to master. Britons never really got it pre-WWII. And advent of the rockets during WWII, by the way, was not solely owning to rocket's ability to be fired from a small boat, far from it.
 
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