elemental power

From: ian (i.) gorlick <"ian>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 17:48:00 -0400


A while back I was worrying about the implications of people, specifically the waertagi, relying too much on elemental power sources.

Sandy 'pshaw'ed my concerns. Undaunted, I have done a few calculations and a little reading and I would like to try to raise my concerns again.

As Sandy correctly indicated, the Romans had access to considerable mechanical power in the form of waterwheels and this did not change their society very much. At the height of roman engineering, a waterwheel had a power output of 2.5 to 3 horsepower. Harnessed to a flourmill such a waterwheel could match the output of 40 workers using hand mills.

The epitome of roman waterpower was probably the installation at Barbegal in southern France, where 16 waterwheels were installed in a large industrial complex that could grind enough grain to feed the entire nearby city of Arelate
(Arles). This complex had a total power output of 40 hp.

Barbegal appears to have been a unique construction in the Roman Empire, though perhaps a few equally impressive sites exist but are still unidentified. It was made possible by the fortuitous replacement of an existing aqueduct. The old aqueduct was redundant but it still delivered water to a convenient height of land where the mill complex was then built to take advantage of this now available head of water. Note that this uniquely large complex was only made possible by a peculiar and very unlikely set of circumstances.

This is always a problem with water power. There are limited good sites for installing it that combine a good head of water with adequate flow and a nearby market for the product of the power. It requires a fairly hefty capital investment to exploit it, especially if you have to build dams. There are definite limits to how many mills you can put on one site before they conflict with one another with their needs for water.

Now, my calculations based on the rules indicate that a large undine or sylph
(10 cubic meters) can do work at the rate of hundreds of horsepower, while
medium ones (3 cubic meters) can put out tens of horsepower.

Maybe a few of you would like to take out your rules and try to work out some of these values. The rules are not designed for this kind of calculation so I may have made some poor assumptions. I did try to err on the low side. I'd be pleased to compare calculations with you, but I won't put mine down here. ( Calculations are boring, this is not the Rules Digest, and I wouldn't want to influence your approach to the problem.)

Thus elemental power systems can do one or two orders of magnitude more work than waterwheels. A large elemental could do the work of several thousand labourers. No such power source was available to real world cultures until the development of the steam engine and the industrial revolution.

As Peter Metcalfe indicated, they can be bound for a relatively small expenditure in power points. The bindings are made with a much lower expenditure than the complex machinings and fittings needed for steam power. There is a limit to the amount of POW available at any one time for making bindings. However POW is a renewable resource, there is a steady flow of it available and once made the elemental binding will last forever unless it is deliberately destroyed. So elemental engines are going to become very plentiful.

Elemental engines are cheap and plentiful. They are easily portable so they can be taken to wherever the market is. There is no effective limit to the density of them that can be on a site. They supply power on a scale that was unavailable until the industrial revolution. Unlike steam engines they require no fuel, once the initial small capital outlay is made to build one it will supply power for free, forever.

Now, does anyone really believe that such power systems could exist on Glorantha without irrevocably changing it from the bronze-age/medieval culture and technology that we all believe is there?

Cultures evolve in response to their technologies, and the limit to technology for most of human history has been limits to the power available. Elementals blow the lid off the limits.

The existence of such power sources is inconsistent with Gloranthan culture as we know it, IMO. So we either have to rewrite all the peoples of Glorantha or we have to rewrite elementals.

My preference would be that we change elementals.

How do the rest of you feel?

(For anyone interested in waterwheels and the work they can do please see 'The
Medieval Machine' by Jean Gimpel from Penguin Books and from Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, and also 'A Roman Factory' by A. Trevor Hodge in Scientific American, November 1990. )


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