What are the chances of cars, planes etc being invented?

KaiserCorax

Banned
What are the chances of vehicles as we have them being invented, with PODs set significant amounts of times before their invention (50 years+)?

For example, if you have an ATL where say, Byzantium survives, or where Russia never unifies, will you still get cars in the modern day? Will you still get trams, trains and airplanes?
 
other than planes, none of them were really giant leaps of advancement ... and planes were something that had been theorized about since times unknown so it would probably be a question of time after the technology was there before that would happen one way or another
 
What are the chances of vehicles as we have them being invented, with PODs set significant amounts of times before their invention (50 years+)?

Of course. Barring magically earlier nuclear war or some pandemic disease, you’ll get cars and airplanes, in some form, because said forms are almost obvious and obvious, respectively.

They can't make a steam engine smaller than a locomotive and have it be useful for anything.

That sounds totally wrong. Why not one on top of a lawn mower?
 
They can't make a steam engine smaller than a locomotive and have it be useful for anything.

Says who?

1891_Serpollet_steamer_vl_-_Verkehrszentrum_M%C3%BCnchen.JPG
 
During WWI, someone actually made a steam powered airplane. It was intended to be used for observation, as it did not make any noise.
 
You may get the inventions as prototypes or just workable concepts. It is a completely different thing to go from there to presume that a historical trajectory beginning in, say AD100, would lead to widespread use and introduction of these concepts as actual technologies. Civilizations have to be predisposed to want or need these things. After all the wheel principle was independently "invented" in pre-Columbian Mexico, but nobody ever saw fit to use this principle in engineering, transportation, manufacture, just in pull-toys. With a PoD prior to the industrial revolution, I believe that the chances of the world remaining at a pre-scientific and pre-industrial level is just as likely as the world becoming dominated by technological/scientific civilizations
 
Personally, I think industrialization is close to inevitable. It's possible to postpone technological advancement indefinitely through disaster, but in the end industrialization is based upon not cultural constructs but science, which exists no matter what, even if it's largely unknown. So while you can have a pre-industrial world in the year 2000, I think that civilization still leads to industrialization. And industrialization leads to space, hopefully.

That said, industrialized society doesn't need to look like modern Westernized society at all. While some trends would be the same (urbanization leads to social pressures that promote shifts away from traditional governmental structures), and there is a place for cars and airplanes, since they definitely fulfill a purpose, you still have a lot of leeway in alternate history.

For instance, airplanes don't have to be invented in the early 20th Century, which changes war, transportation, and naval technology. And automobiles could be owned only by the very rich while most civilians get around on electric streetcars. Canals could be more useful than roads when transporting large quantities of goods through early modern cities. The designs of machines, too, may reflect the cultures of those who build them and their values, so that a 'car' looks little like our cars.
 

Sior

Banned
Bill Frost was born in Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast on 28 May 1848. The son of John and Rebecca Frost, he became a carpenter on the Heyn Castle Estate in Saundersfoot.
Although a relatively poor man, he became obsessed with the concept of flying. According to legend, in the winter of 1876 he was carrying a long plank of wood while a gale was blowing and the wind - always strong and powerful on that stretch of coast - simply picked him up and carried him several yards through the air. Frost's obsession was born.
Frost was a religious man, and became deacon of his local chapel. He was also an accomplished musician and founded the Saundersfoot Male Voice Choir. But his real interest lay in flight.
Locals, it was said, had seen him running about the fields holding a piece of zinc above his head, perhaps hoping that the wind would once more lift him into the air. The people of the town put this bizarre behaviour down to the grief he was experiencing since his wife and daughter had recently died. It was more likely to be Bill Frost testing out the concept of aerodynamics.
In 1894 Frost applied for a patent for a flying machine; the design was registered on 25 October that year. The machine was something of a cross between a glider and an airship, and was equipped with two reversible fans designed to lift the machine into the air.
When aloft the wings would be spread by means of a lever and the machine would move forward and down. When the lever was pushed the other way the machine would rise once more.
Bill Frost built his aircraft in the workshop of his house on St Bride's Hill in Saundersfoot. It was over 30 feet in length and was apparently made of bamboo, canvas and wire. The gas bags or pouches that helped keep the craft aloft were filled with hydrogen.
Unfortunately there are no photographs or written testimonials but Frost - and many people from Saundersfoot - claimed that he flew in his glider/airship on or around 24 September 1896. He travelled, it was claimed, for about 500 yards, a distance that, if true, was considerably longer than the Wright Brothers managed seven years later in 1903.
The flight was not without incident, however. The undercarriage of the machine caught in a tree and he crashed in a field. Although Frost managed to repair the flying machine, disaster was waiting to happen.
Despite being tethered to a tree the machine was totally destroyed in a storm, with pieces spread over a wide distance. Frost had neither the money nor the time to start again and his patent lapsed after four years.
The story of Bill Frost and his flying machine is a fascinating one. Unlike the Wright Brothers he did not have any independent witnesses to the event or, most important of all, any photographic evidence that he had taken to the air.
Bill Frost died in March 1935. By then he was nearly 90 years old and was both blind and poor. He was not bitter but bemoaned the fact that the government, following his first flight and the disaster that befell his machine, had turned down his request for funding.
The government stated that they had no intention of using aircraft either for navigation or for warfare. In the light of the later development of aircraft during World War One, it seemed to Frost and everyone else to be a strange and rather short-sighted statement.
Everyone who knew him was clear that Bill Frost was the most truthful of men. If he said that he had flown then he most certainly had done so. At this distance, however, and without written or photographic proof, it is hard to come down, one way or another. The story remains one more fascinating episode in the history of flight - and of Wales.
 
What are the chances of vehicles as we have them being invented, with PODs set significant amounts of times before their invention (50 years+)?

For example, if you have an ATL where say, Byzantium survives, or where Russia never unifies, will you still get cars in the modern day? Will you still get trams, trains and airplanes?
There is a huge difference between "50 years+" and "Byzantium survives". Let's say the invention of the automobile is in 1885, and we interpret "50 years+" as "seventy years", then we get 1815. By that date, printing, universities and systematic science, the industrial revolution and steam engines all exist and make the invention of the car very, very likely, perhaps one can say inevitable to occur at some time during the nineteenth or twentieth century.

If you have a POD that allows Byzantium to survive, the very last year you can choose is 1453, where of all the things mentioned above, only printing with moveable type has already been invented. I think the fact that printing exists already makes systematic science quite likely, and this in turn makes the car with an internal combustion engine also quite likely, although it might be invented either much later or earlier.

If you have a POD substantially earlier than the 1450s, when Gutenberg invented moveable type, it might be possible that printing is butterflied away, or is invented much later. Consequently, the development of systematic science might be hampered very much, and there is no guarantee at all that we have anything like the Industrial Revolution or cars by the 21st century.
 
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