industialized nomads

mailinutile2

industrialized nomads

could a nomadic culture develop industry while at the same time remaining nomadic?

let's start simple: could a forge be put on a yurt?
now let's scale it up: what about a furnace?

cultural aspect: would chain work mechanisms function in a less irregimented society such a nomadic one?

supply problem: you cannot travel loading coal and iron mines on your cart. how to work around that? (please do not answer "by settling").
 
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Flocculencio

Donor
Well, off the top of my head, perhaps slave-worked mines which the nomads sweep through on a yearly basis? The slaves are to stockpile resources during the summer and when the nomads sweep in for the winter the factories are opened, certain essential pieces of machinery which the nomads keep with them are installed and the slaves work through the winter. In Spring, the factories are shut down, the nomads head off, bearing with them essential pieces of machinery so that the slaves can't make the equipment work on their own.

Perhaps they would leave behind a garrison force- maybe every young warrior of the tribe would have to serve his year on garrison before being allowed on his first real war-raid. These would keep the slaves in line while the bulk of the tribe are away for the summer. Implausible but as a thought experiment it might work.
 

Hendryk

Banned
mailinutile2 said:
let's start simple: could a forge be put on a yurt?
now let's scale it up: what about a furnace?
Click to expand...
Old World nomadic cultures made their own metal weapons and other implements in OTL, so the answer to the first one is yes: small-scale ironsmithing is compatible with a nomadic lifestyle.

However, industrialization is only possible when fairly stringent conditions are met, among them the generation of a large agricultural surplus and some form of artificial power generation, neither of which is possible for nomads. At most one could have a two-tier society in which the ruling class engages in nomadism while the rest actually get the industrial process going. But that doesn't sound like a very stable arrangement.

Besides, what need would nomads have of industry?
 

Saepe Fidelis

Well I had an idea for a TL where Rome industrialises and the barbarian tribes are redced to migratory labourers who work in their fortified industrial complexes. Pretty ASB but it was a fun idea. Flocculencio's idea reminds me of Stargate, for some reason.

Althoug hthat really is the most realistic way of doing it- the nomads themselves only overseeing the process which is stationary, and they spend their time moving from one place to another.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
mailinutile2 said:
Not to be crushed by industrialized neighbours
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Not good enough- industrialisation isn't even the factor. Once you get military tech that needs more of a manufacturing and supply chain (i.e. gunpowder armies) nomads lose any edge they ever had, except in guerilla warfare. The central Asian horse nomads were the most feared force in Eurasia right up 'til gunpowder came along. Then you had weapons any peasant could be trained to use in a month or two which meant that the nomads were simply outnumbered and driven off.
 

mailinutile2

Flocculencio said:
Then you had weapons any peasant could be trained to use in a month or two which meant that the nomads were simply outnumbered and driven off.
Click to expand...

And that meant they had to evolve as well.
first step would be having a self-supporting weapon manufacturing.
to do that you need iron forgeries (the barrels), chemistry (the powder).
could you have a forge able to fit in a cart and able to produce at least a lightweight cannon? (horse artillery!)
I remember some attempt of leather cannons in the 1600
 

Flocculencio

Donor
mailinutile2 said:
And that meant they had to evolve as well.
first step would be having a self-supporting weapon manufacturing.
to do that you need iron forgeries (the barrels), chemistry (the powder).
could you have a forge able to fit in a cart and able to produce at least a lightweight cannon? (horse artillery!)
I remember some attempt of leather cannons in the 1600
Click to expand...

That still doesn't give the nomads the numbers they need, unfortunately. It's the same problem hunter gatherers had- nomads can produce skilled, magnificent warriors. Settled societies can produce sick, mewling hordes of cannon fodder. Once firearms take a lot of skill out of the equation ("This end points at your shoulder, that end points at the enemy. Pull the trigger.") nomads cannot handle the sheer mass settled societies could throw at them if necessary.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
Processing animal fat into fuel for engines could work; using the buffalo that roam all of America before the Europeans fuck them up for good, you can probably get some good amount of fuel from them, plus other materials. Plentiful food, and all you need is the engine that runs on Buffalo Burgers.

I mean these guys were nearly EVERYWHERE. Hard to be a nomad when you can't see the herd for the cows. But, using their industrial know-how I'm sure they could slaughter the Buffalo fairly quickly.
 

mailinutile2

I have this haunted vision of a caravan of track-wheeled mobile-factory veichles powered by animal fat (also maybe solar cells?) following a buffalo herd.
Something like a whaleship, only on land
 

Jester

And you're venturing into fantasy.

For one thing, meat and bonemeal has a higher energy output than fat, buffalo were quite lean in meat for another, and finally, you'd still have less energy output than coal or even peat.

There are sorts of other plausibility issues but then, that seems to be this thread.
 

mailinutile2

dried cattle dung.
I was forgetting it.
it burn easily somewhere is nicknamed "steppe coal" (or it was camel dung being nicknamed "desert coal"?).
 

Jester

It burns fine, but that doesn't make it a fuel.

Any contraptions you can make to work off of low quality fuels like that would not beat riding steers.

There's a reason that it wasn't used for that purpose IOTL.

And I wouldn't recommend eating horse apples either.
 

mailinutile2

AngleAngel said:
Any contraptions you can make to work off of low quality fuels like that would not beat riding steers.

And I wouldn't recommend eating horse apples either.
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I agree, but my point was to find some sort of power source for the manufactury yurt.
trading for coal could be a neater solution, but you need something you can rely on too.

could you distill alchol out of grass?

does "horse apples" stand for something? :confused:
 

Jester

A slang term for horse shit.

A manufactory yurt simply isn't going to work my friend. You can have the low-intensity, low-tech industry of say smithing, but anything that can be called "industrial" simply isn't going to be able to move with a tribe of nomads- nor is there a reason they would carry such a thing along.
 

mailinutile2

AngleAngel said:
A slang term for horse shit.

A manufactory yurt simply isn't going to work my friend. You can have the low-intensity, low-tech industry of say smithing, but anything that can be called "industrial" simply isn't going to be able to move with a tribe of nomads- nor is there a reason they would carry such a thing along.
Click to expand...

I'd say a lot of chemical and textile could be done.
probably glasswork, too.
iron forgery would be a lot more difficult, I'm sure.
following herds, we would probably see the developing of some sort of "butchery industry" meant to extract everyting from cattle, alike to whaleship otl.
bone replacing iron? difficult but intriguing.
Could you get saltpeter from cattle dung? if you can, you are much nearer to achieving your oun gunpowder.
And, shimmering in the distance, I see methan production :D
 

David S Poepoe

Banned
RMcD94 said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines_quartet

Mobile cities!

What about nomads after industrialisation?

Like, with cars. That'd be cool. Thousands of jeeps racing across a desert towards a city. Have to be solar powered though, or they'd run out of oil.

If someone gave the nomads machine guns they could deal with the mass of settled civilizations.
Click to expand...

Actually these series isn't that bad of a read. It was fairly imaginative, a sort of dieselpunk story. There was an earlier graphic novel series about a giant mobile city ruled by a intelligent alligator or something, can't remember the title tho.
 

David S Poepoe

Banned
Saepe Fidelis said:
Well I had an idea for a TL where Rome industrialises and the barbarian tribes are redced to migratory labourers who work in their fortified industrial complexes. Pretty ASB but it was a fun idea. Flocculencio's idea reminds me of Stargate, for some reason.

Althoug hthat really is the most realistic way of doing it- the nomads themselves only overseeing the process which is stationary, and they spend their time moving from one place to another.
Click to expand...

I was immediately reminded of William Forstchen's Lost Regiment series.
 
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