Comment on xkcd #3129: Archaeology Research

milk@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This kind of happens accidentally sometimes. Like it turns out you can use pond scum as a very basic medium for some very shitty but functioning solar pannels, we could have invented solar power as soon as we could work copper and tin if it werent for the whole needing to know all the reasons why you would even want to do that.

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• squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The concept, while interesting, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Prior to the industrial revolution (and also all throught the beginning of it), most inventions weren’t all that difficult to make. With just a handful of techniques, you could go quite far when starting out with stone-age technology.

  If you take the information from a handful of Wikipedia pages to the stone ages it would take maybe a few years or decades to go from stone-age technology to steam engines.

  Up until the early industrial revolution the limiting factor for technological innovation was mostly information.

  So when going back with the knowledge of all the innovation that happened since the stone ages it’s quite easy to make basically anything happen from there.

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• Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There are some great patterns for electric looms available specifically to make really old weaves. That’s basically a super modern way to do something medieval.

  I’m sure there’s similar things available for a knitting machine

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• mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sounds like what Gorge Spräve (the slingshot guy on Youtube) did. He developed a mechanism that could be attached to any bow, with multiple arrows stored for rapid fire, draw assist, holds the string back at full draw, and has a trigger mechanism. Everything was theoretically producable during the middle ages, it just was never invented

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  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This sounds suspiciously like a crossbow.

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    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Repeating crossbows are abaolutely a thing though. There’s examples from ancient China. That being said, they tend to suck because they’re really low powered to make them easy to shoot rapid-fire

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    • BussyGyatt@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      more like it attaches the quiver to the side of the longbow as a magazine to make the bow repeating. he did make one for the crossbow that is a more weildy though

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  • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    • that we know of

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    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The invention in question is called the “Instant Legolas” for reference

      It’s possible for someone to have made one as an experiment and it not being found, but it’s also not very practical for war. Warbows needed to have 100-200lb draw weight to be particularly effective in battle. Trying to rapid-fire 5 shots from those bows would have been exhausting, and reloading the Instant Legolas was slow and would likely have reduced the total number of arrows you could fire throughout a battle. And having an extended period of time where you’re unable to fire back when attacked is a major drawback. In modern firearm training, reloads are taught to minimize the amount of time the gun is incapable of firing, as a modern example.

      Another big drawback to the Instant Legolas is that the ammunition needs to be shorter, reducing its overall weight thus further limiting its effectiveness against armor. While this does have the benefit of limiting your opponent’s ability to collect your ammunition and fire it back against you, your side is then similarly limited unless your archers take the time to remove the Instant Legos from their bows in the middle of battle

      The Instant Legolas would also have doubled or tripled the cost of bows and would have made them more difficult to store, which were significant problems with even extant equipment. There’s plenty of example of soldiers abandoning or selling armor in favor of something less protective aimply because said equipment made marching too hard.

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