Re: Heortling Mills

From: bethexton_at_...
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 01:47:36 -0000

I think the issue with mills for the heortlings may be more a matter of cost/benefit analysis. It is a lot of work to build a functional mill (especially getting the gears right without arithmetic or the concept of "pi"). They are also a fair bit of work to keep operating, as most will need continual adjustments, oiling, and so on. Also, for wind mills, repair and replacement of the sail cloth (and I imagine you'd need cloth from the best weavers to get any sort of efficiency anyway), and for water mills clearing of the troughs and buckets and what not. Note that maintenance is difficult and dangerous because you don't have a clutch to turn the things off. Plus the mills are noisy at the best of times.

Against that, you save a lot of effort, right? Except recall that flour doesn't keep for long, so the mill can only usefully supply one stead and maybe a few other nearby smaller steads who's inhabitants would be by ever day or two. Is it worth building and maintaining a mill to grind the flour for a couple of hundred people, especially when there are adolescents who need chores to keep them out of trouble?

My guess would be that in general, the answer would be "no."

Which in no way means that mills wouldn't get built, but I'd suggest they'd be more along the lines of monuments and bragging points, quite possibly, as someone suggested, associated with temples or holy sites. i.e. closer the Eiffel Tower than the Hoover dam in terms of practicality. A lot of them may not even be very useful as mills, being more a symbol of the power of the ever blowing wind or something like that.

Just one possibility.

--Bryan

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