Low Tech Science Fiction Brainstorm

[O Senhor Leetz]

well, in a standard medieval Europe style setting, yes, glass would be awful. but take in to account the style of this setting - no metal armor (actually little armor in general due to the hot climate)

historically, glass (obsidian really) was used to great effect by Meso-American civilizations. The Aztecs had a particular type of weapon - I can't remember the name right now - which was basically a club that was fitted with shards of obsidian. There are accounts from the Spanish of these weapons being able to decapitate a horse. Actually, I think that obsidian is STILL used as surgical scalpel tips because it is literally sharp to the molecular level.

But you're kinda right, full glass swords would be a poor idea, but short knives, spear-tips, glass-edged weapons, or the above mentioned club would make excellent weapons against lightly or unarmored opponents. It would be used as a slicing weapon, and, at least in my opinion, would be absolutely brutal against bare skin. It would take some amount of skill to use it with the finesse required, and would be next to useless for parrying incoming attacks, but in a setting where combat is focused more on finesse than pounding against metal armor, I think glass/obsidian would make very good weapons.

[LD]

Obsidian sounds like a good idea. a club wound with barbed wire or glass shards might also work to some degree- but I think that leather armor would tend to repel the glass?

[O Senhor Leetz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_use_in_Mesoamerica

check that link out for a rough of idea of obsidian use and also the flavor of this setting to an extent.

and leather could repel glass, but I doubt that would stop people from using glass weapons. Metal armored repelled metal weapons, but still was used anyways.

oh, and the Aztecan weapon was called a macuahuitl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl)

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

With all this talk of glass let's not forget that flint and bone are perfectly serviceable weapon materials.

@Leetz: How hard are weapons and armor for common people to get?  At least some martial arts were developed by people who didn't have much access, you might consider that.

[O Senhor Leetz]

Common weapons and armor - things like basic spears, bows, wooden or hide shields, light armors like quilted or leather - would be fairly common. The setting would feature massive, well developed city-states, but the majority of the world would still be based in agriculture and farming (the specific systems would vary from feudalism, yeoman farming, etc. across the world) Many of these farmers would probably serve as conscripts within the local military and would have their own basic weaponry for things like protecting the farm, hunting, and military service.

The more advanced and higher quality weapons and armors - things like obsidian, chitsalah, tlau-weave, and the rare metal weapon - would most likely belong only to the warrior-elites, the wealthy, and the nobility and be treated as family heirlooms.

I was thinking about writing an in-game excerpt about the military of a specific city-state to further help describe the setting, which is getting to the point of needing a name.

[Ghostman]

That's kind of cool - that you could have a sword that is legendary simply because it's made from metal...

How much thought have you given to the role of missile weapons? Lack of heavy armor tends to favour ranged combat, especially in the context of well-developed military systems (where you have the logistics and command structure to have large number of soldiers organized into units). The reason is, that while agile dodging and parrying can protect you in melee, it's absolutely useless against massed ranks of missile weapons. When there's 5000 archers raining arrows on the general area you're in, it's pretty much impossible to avoid being hit except by covering yourself with a big shield. So if you don't have armor that can stop the arrows reliably, you will need a shield that does.

This is especially important if the setting doesn't have anything akin to cavalry (ie. fast moving) that could close up on ranged attackers quickly.

[O Senhor Leetz]

ok, here's a slightly more concise idea of what the setting would entail.

The heart of the setting would focus around 6 to 12 massive city-states that would share a basic culture, religion, and language. Warfare - both conventional and covert - would be common amongst the cities, with tangled webs of alliances, assassins, and plots present. But even though skirmishes would be common, no city can muster the strength to attempt to conquer another city while defending itself from the others - this will be expanded on later, think a mix of Flower Wars and an assassins war. So even though the cities are at times openly hostile, trade and culture still flourishes.

beyond these cities, other states would exist and interact on a familiar level, and beyond those would be other, more foreign places. The climate of the core cities would be tropical, with a focus on coasts, islands, jungles, and warm, shallow seas.

culturally, these cities would be an amalgam of Mesoamerican, Southeast Asian, Japanese, and Polynesian influences, but obviously with it's own definite uniqueness.

beyond that, everything is still in the air.

[O Senhor Leetz]

That's kind of cool - that you could have a sword that is legendary simply because it's made from metal...

How much thought have you given to the role of missile weapons? Lack of heavy armor tends to favour ranged combat, especially in the context of well-developed military systems (where you have the logistics and command structure to have large number of soldiers organized into units). The reason is, that while agile dodging and parrying can protect you in melee, it's absolutely useless against massed ranks of missile weapons. When there's 5000 archers raining arrows on the general area you're in, it's pretty much impossible to avoid being hit except by covering yourself with a big shield. So if you don't have armor that can stop the arrows reliably, you will need a shield that does.

This is especially important if the setting doesn't have anything akin to cavalry (ie. fast moving) that could close up on ranged attackers quickly.

I've thought about that myself, and have, what I think at least, a few solid reasons to why that doesn't occur in this setting.

-as I posted right after you did, the geography of the setting will be rugged and lush, which would lead to the abundant foliage somewhat diminishing the effectiveness of some ranged weapons, especially arrows en mass. However, other forms of ranged weapons, like javelins, atlatls, blow-guns, or shorter ranged bows, would be very prevelent.

-I was thinking that warfare in this setting would be very ritualized and rule-based, so having an entire army of archers would be seen as cowardly, weak, and taboo. Warfare would be centered on melee and short- to mid-ranged combat.

-considering how military tactics would differ without heavily armored infantry or cavalry charges, I think a battle would go from ranged skirmishes to a very fluid melee that would focus on one-on-one combat as opposed to shield-wall pushes and phalanx style attacks.

does that make a bit more sense?

[Ghostman]

Yes. Lack of armor and cavalry wouldn't necessarily lead to loose melee, but prolific dense vegetation certainly would. But moreover:

a focus on coasts, islands, jungles, and warm, shallow seas.

This is something that emphasises the importance of NAVAL combat. That aspect should certainly be well developed, and the cities should be able to match each other's strength on the seas at least as well as they do on land. Allowing any one of them to rule the waves would shatter the balance of power you've described.

[O Senhor Leetz]

I was thinking about that myself as well, and it's becoming apparent that everything nautical is going to be very important in the setting.

with the focus on shallow, calm seas as opposed to open ocean, I think the majority of vessels would be man powered (rowed), due to the probably lack of reliable winds. plus, the development of ship building and sailing technologies would be severely stagnated by the lack of metals - compasses would be rare beyond words, no complex rigging, no nails, etc.

also, as a way to explain how the balance of power within the city-states is maintained, I was thinking that around the time of the cities foundings, some great pact was signed that set a myriad of rules for warfare - both land and sea, trading, rules for assassins, etc. with the enforcement of these rules coming from the threat of being ganged up on if a city breaks them.

[O Senhor Leetz]

I thought that maybe writing down a list of possible and achieved advances in this setting versus impossible or unachievable advanced may help flesh it out more. keep in mind the settings foci are on little metal, advanced societies, and a non-Western viewpoint.

YES- advanced agriculture sans metal tools, massive metropolises, advanced sciences (maths, physics, etc.), alchemy/chemistry, road systems, humanities, sewer/water systems, colleges/universities, gunpowder, genetics, and evolution theories to name a few.

NO- anything that has to do with abundant metallurgy like steel, metal weaponry, firearms, machines in general, locomotion/automobiles, and a million little things that depend on metal but are taken for granted like cooking pans, locks, clocks, bells, or buckles.

[Ghostman]

YES- advanced agriculture sans metal tools

What kind of alternatives are in use? Metal tools (particularly the plough) have had tremendeous influence on our agriculture, increasing it's productivity and thus requiring less people to work the fields, allowing more of them to move into urban centers and take up different professions.

The species of domestic animals available to the people is another very important factor that should be carefully considered. Jared Diamond (the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) concluded that people in Europe and Asia had agricultural advantage over the rest of the world because they had access to the most useful domestic animals.

Creating your own fictional species could open a lot of interesting possibilities regarding agriculture.

YES- [...] gunpowder

Might want to call it "blackpowder" or come up with a brand new name, since it won't be used for guns.

NO- [...] locks

You don't need metal to make locks. Not that that means you'll have to have them in your setting, just that you could if you wanted to.

[O Senhor Leetz]

What kind of alternatives are in use? Metal tools (particularly the plough) have had tremendeous influence on our agriculture, increasing it's productivity and thus requiring less people to work the fields, allowing more of them to move into urban centers and take up different professions.

The species of domestic animals available to the people is another very important factor that should be carefully considered. Jared Diamond (the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) concluded that people in Europe and Asia had agricultural advantage over the rest of the world because they had access to the most useful domestic animals.

Creating your own fictional species could open a lot of interesting possibilities regarding agriculture.

well, considering the climate and geography of this setting, as well as the feel, I think that rice - or some imaginary cereal that would be cultivated like rice - would be the best choice as the cornerstone food. because of rice being grown in paddys and not dry fields, I don't think it would be as severely hampered by a lack of metal tools like plows or other harvest tools. this would explain why on one hand the setting had a lower level of technologies we often think of as modern, but still be able to support massive urban populations (cities of a tens or hundreds of thousands with the super-cities being one, two, or even three million, this all being in addition to a massive rural population as well.)

In addition to large, developed agricultural systems and infrastructures, the high populations would also be maintained by well developed medicine, sanitary, and social systems. At its height, Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs, was one of the most well developed and largest cities in the world, all without the aid of Eurocentric technologies, beasts of burden, or mechanization.

one of the points or themes of this setting is to answer the "what if..." questions of what would have happened to Mesoamerica (just as an example - as a myriad of cultures could fit right in) if Europeans never came? The other is the question of how humans would have advanced differently without the benefits of metal, which is the keystone to human technological advancement as we know it.

[Tangential]

What keeps the rulers of each city in their vaunted place? It seems to me that a city of millions real control would be hard to ply.

Back to the subject of weapons. Glass knives were used in cooking up through the 1940s in America. Tempering glass isn't really all that challenging and I imagine a civilization that was forced to 'focus' on it would have made significant advancements toward mass production.  

[Drizztrocks]

I just had an idea. Since you are going with an alien planet theme, and since the planet has gone some sort of terraforming after the humans crashed/landed, perhaps there could be some sort of conflict between the natural plants and animals versus alien plants and animals. Does this make any sense?

  Picture a valley full of strange, giant lilly-pad like plants, and blue moss carpeting the forest floor, with a small stream running through. A few hundred yards away, another forest, tall pines and ferns, compete with the alien forest in a slow battle for nutrition and sunlight. This is just an idea. I could expand if you would like.