Re: Heortling Mills

From: bethexton_at_...
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:07:34 -0000

.
>
> I think you're making a lot of assumptions here about mill
> technology. The vane could be horizontal, in which case no gears
are
> necessary. You can transmit the energy with leather belts instead
of
> gears. You can have wooden vanes. You can have daimones increase
the
> efficiency of the mill.
>
Dave;

A bunch of these points have been made already in this discussion, and by and large I agree that heortlings *can* make mills. The point I was trying to make, although apparently not very clearly, is that building a mill that actually works is non-trivial. It either takes inherited knowledge, magically gained knowledge, or a gifted tinkerer who can work out the details through trial and error. Further, the resouces to build it are non-trivial. It takes big grind stones, large beams, long and wide swathes of tightly woven cloth, etc. All these things can be obtained by heortlings--and certainly magic can probably both make them easier to get and make them better than their real world counterparts. However I would suggest that this is still a substantial investment for a clan.

Most clans don't have the resources and curiousity to put these sort of resources in the hands of someone who wants to build something new and hasn't worked out the fine details yet, although no doubt there could be clans so blessed.

I'm willing to believe in either hereditary knowledge or magically gained knowledge, which is why I've suggested elsewhere that different clans or tribes may have different styles of windmills. All the same, I think that a windmill only makes sense for a clan that gets a very high return on its labour. i.e. the people who could be hand-grinding grain have something else useful to do, and it is so useful that it will re-pay the cost of building and maintaining the mill (and transporting all the grain to and from a central location). This could be the case in certain clans that specialize in valuable resources, like crafts or magic. It could also be the case in a clan that is chronically short of people to do basic activities (i.e. a small clan that needs every hand tending crops and cattle if they to pay the lunar taxes every year), however short of heavy use of magic I'd expect that such a clan would have a hard time building a mill in the first place.

Two more notes:
- A toy windmill was built (or at least designed) by the brilliant Alexandrian inventor Heron long before the working mill was built in Persia. It is very possible that the early persian mills were inspired by Heron's design, although we'll never know (this is per "Ancient Inventions" a wonderful book). Along a similar vane I'm sure that the city of wonders wouldn't have neglected to create such a toy.

• water mills were in use in many, many, places long before windmills were. Anywere that there are many streams with a good current watermills are probably generally more practical (i.e. easier to build and more reliably powered) than windmills. Most of Sartar seems blessed with hilly ground and adequate precipitation, so water mills would generally make more sense there. Now, theologically windmills are more appropriate, but I'd still imagine watermills being more common for practical purposes. I'd generally imagine those that needed the labour savings to build water mills, and those that wanted the magic and prestige to build a windmill.

All just IMO, of course.

Regards;

Bryan