Fantasy Weapons, Societies, Cultures, Equipment and Mounts/Vehicles

Hello everybody,

This is a post for the creation of, discussing and designing of fantasy weapons as well as equipment, vehicles and mounts for a fantasy story. You can also discuss various aspects of fantasy societies here.

The guidelines for this forum are similar to the sci-fi world building forums, to quote:

- When providing a critique of a design or concept, please ensure it is constructive criticism. Similarly, don't just say "That's cool/dumb/makes my head hurt" if you can help it - explain why it's cool/dumb/makes your head hurt. One of the goals of this thread is to create weapons, vehicles and equipment that makes sense (for the setting), after all.

- Be polite/respectful etc.

The Sci Fi forums can be found here[1] and here[2]

A general forum for all things Fantasy can be found here [3]

A general Alternate History thread can be found here for all things AH [4]. A more specific thread can be found here [5]

Now let's begin with the first post

edited 22nd Oct '14 5:13:57 AM by matti23

This setting is set on a single world covered by a large ocean. Civilizations are built on islands that are only big enough for one city, with each island pooling their resources to build a single warship. This setting is at early 1800's level technology with the warships usually being battleships. Civilizations may expand to cover more than one island and the vast distance between islands renders the concept of a front line meaningless as the faster ships can slip between the islands and attack deep in a country's territory.

My first question is: How many people does a island need in order to maintain a single battleship with early 1800's technology and still have enough left over to defend themselves from attack by another island? Some islands are bigger than others so I was also wondering what the difference between the larger and smaller varieties of battleship might be.

My second question is: How large should an island be to support this population at a reasonable level of comfort for the early 1800's?

Each farmer can support 100-138 people. According to the US Board of Statistics, farmers make up 1% of the population (the same as fatcat rich dudes, funny enough). So take your total population and figure out 1%. Assume each group of four farmers has 1 or more guns.

edited 28th Sep '14 11:42:10 AM by dvorak

Well, these would be farmers working without the benefits of chemical fertilizers. Or refrigeration to get their produce to distant markets intact. Or indeed a ton of other advances that make modern farming a lot more efficient than it was back in the 1800s.

Speaking of the tech level...define "battleship", because the earliest examples of what we might consider precursors to the battleship concept didn't show up until the mid- to late 1800s. Early 1800s was still the tail end of the Age of Sail.

On top of that, battleships are hideously inefficient for the scenario you describe. Investing in numerous smaller vessels would allow your nations to patrol their territory a lot better, and battleships have always proven themselves to be rather vulnerable to weapons mounted on far lighter, cheaper platforms (the first torpedo boats came as a nasty shock) that could be sent out several dozen at a time for the price of one big capital ship. If you really want the battleship to be the king of your world's oceans, you'll need to come up with a reason why it'd work a lot better than the real-world version.

...how did the civilizations get onto those islands in the first place? I'm recalling the situation on the Galapagos Islands.

Setting that aside, how big are the islands, and where do the seeds for crops come from? 'Big enough for one city' is too vague to give a good answer for, especially when it's by 1800s standards (does that mean London, England or Victoria, Australia?). For example, 'only has enough arable land to support one city-sized colony' and 'one city, several suburbs, a bunch of hamlets and villages, several thousand bush huts' could both fall under that description.

And on the topic of battleships - where would the gunpowder and more importantly iron come from?

Thanks for the feedback. I'm amending the story so that everybody uses a lighter, faster class of ships. The citizens of the islands used to come from large continents that were rendered uninhabitable and toxic by a variety of circumstances. Some where contaminated by dark magic (this is one of the magic goes away periods of the story, it'll come back much later) or chemical weapons (the setting used to have schizo tech but most has been lost in the great war that dispersed everybody). Workers in sealed suits are able to survive long enough to scavenge metals and other useful substances to decontamination boats (the only remaining schizo tech in the setting which are 500 ton burthen boats which are assigned one to an island). An agreement ensures that nobody arms or attacks these boats as their destruction may jeopardize the continued survival of humanity on the islands, or at least make life really difficult.

I had initially thought of the average city in this world as being the size of London but this is just an early preliminary and I was wondering if I should scale it up or down. I seem to have missed quite a bit of detail from my first post, if there anything else you need to know just ask. Also feel free to post some of your own stuff below.

edited 28th Sep '14 7:54:02 PM by matti23

The entire London metropolitan area, or less than that?

Entire Metropolitan area for the city with the whole island being 5 times bigger. Each city island is supported by a large number of less developed islands. These other islands have cities about 1/10th the size and devote much of their land to agriculture.

edited 28th Sep '14 10:16:55 PM by matti23

Okay London Metropolitan Area is a rather vague concept, so perhaps Greater London (1569 km^2)? That's an area per island of about 7800-7900 km^2 (or 7000-9000 if you want a bit of variation), which isn't too bad, half as big again as Brunei.

edited 28th Sep '14 11:33:28 PM by MattII

Battleships are kind of an interesting designation. The term itself is a contraction of line-of-battle ship first known use of the word is 1794.

So with that mind a "battle ship" pre-ironclad era would be a wooden sailing ship namely being "A Ship Of The Line". They were not cheap vessels and required a substantial amount of lumber and other supplies just to build one. Never mind arming it, crewing it, and supplying it. The big ships have always been a bit on the expensive side.

Like has already been mentioned smaller vessels would be preferable as they are cheaper to build and easier to field by comparison.

Other methods of protecting a shore line against such ships would be Coastal Forts armed with large cannon and other weapons.

If you are using alternative history periods and schizo tech you could have Iron Clads where steam powered ships. Even a small one while expensive was a fairly tough ship.

edited 29th Sep '14 2:13:28 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Of course that leaves the question of what to use for fuel.

Coal, which most warships used until the WWI era, would be pretty rare in an island setting. Getting anything out of offshore oil deposits requires a lot of high technology. That leaves the occasional island lucky enough to have oil within easy reach...or alternate options.

If the setting previously had higher technology, producing fuel from biomass is an option...once you know it is possible it's fairly simple, really. Marine biomass (kelp farms) could conceivably keep a few warships going for quite some time.

He mentioned a caste of Disaster Scavengers; presumably they can find an old powerplant and use that.

Since this is a fantasy setting, is tidal-generated power converted into some form of solid battery an option?

Putting that aside, that simply isn't enough space for agriculture. It would naturally be supplemented by fishing, but still. Quite a bit of that land is too close to the ocean for sustainable agriculture without some work, so they probably had to clearcut the inland land for farming.

I read somewhere that it takes 1 to 1.5 acres (4 to 6000 meters squared) to sustain one person for a year, depending on the diet and crops; as this is an island, we'll assume 8000 square meters just to be safe. Going off of what MattII said, this caps the island's farmable land at (8000 km^2 total land - 1670 km^2 for the city) = 6330 km^2. Assuming you could actually farm all of that and not have to deal with unfarmable geography, the population cap is (6,330,000,000 m^2 / 8,000 m^2) = 791,250; again, based solely on total land, not actual arable land or whatever it's called. (Could someone check my numbers - my math-fu isn't that great.) It might do to study island geography.

And if you have to wear a sealed suit to salvage something, it's going to be too dangerous to handle without one and also very expensive to clean and sterilize for other uses.

Please clarify what you mean by 'city', if it just refers to the total inhabited area-squared on an island or is a measure of population or what. It's really hard to picture enough materials remaining after... whatever happened, to see modern London sticking up from a smallish island with a bunch of farms around it.

Oh, and where does the fresh water to sustain these inhabitants come from? Keep in mind also that agriculture eats up a tremendous amount of water, something like 2000 liters per person per day (730,000 liters per year), which may cap the population even further. You can handwave this with 'magical desalination' if you like, but the total output of potable water should probably be something like 4000 liters per person per day - 4 cubic meters - and that is probably going to be the ultimate cap on population. (The largest current-day plant produces 640,000 m^3 a day - 32 km x 20 km at 1 meter deep, and I'm sure someone could out-math me here - which would limit the population to 160,000 under the above conditions and requirements. By comparison, Greater London is some 52 times more populous, at 8.2 million.)

So now you get to think about population density. 160,000 in 1569 km^2 is 102 people per km^2 - which frankly sounds more like an Old West ghost town - or 9806 meters^2 per person (if my conversion from km^2 to m^2 is accurate) without bothering to factor in public/federal property. Even slashing that area in half per person still means a four person family gets a 140 x 140 meter plot to build on. ...So everyone has enormous front and back yards, under these really exacting conditions that I've imposed (with far less knowledge of the math and necessary physical limits than I'm betting anyone here is happy with ), and this does not include farmland.

Times like this, I wish I knew how to visualize data properly!

On the issue of fuel, it may be that the area was once above water and forested, similar to how Hashima Island was once a coal mine despite being only 6.3 acres.

Thank god. I've been meaning to ask about the logic of my fantasy-mounts for AGES, but I never figured out where to actually put it.

So my fantasy-Mayan-ish archipelago uses the native elk species as transport/mounts, due to the heavy forestation in the north and the hilly/mountainous terrain in the south. (Long story short: Didn't want them to have horses, but didn't want them to be a complete copy of actual Mayan society either. I got the deer/elk idea from the Sami of Finland.) In general they use a range of travois, litters, and similar sled-type vehicles in addition to being ridden.

My main concern is that my domestication process (enough to tweak the elk to be more suitable as mounts/pack-bearers, plus managing several different coat colors) might not be accurate, since I'm not a biologist or a farmer.

Off the top of my head:

• Wild elk have longer backs and shorter legs than domesticated elk, as the domestic elk were bred for stronger/less-breakable backs and taller stature. Is this a sound idea biologically?
• Wild elk antlers are longer with less prongs than domesticated elk. The shorter length and greater amount of prongs make domestic elk more mobile in forests and increase the number of cheap spear/arrow-tips whenever they shed them.
• Speaking of "elk," they aren't biologically elk—the natives' name for the animal translates to "great/king-deer," which is quite literal but was misunderstood as a poetic name for elk by foreigners. Is this logical? The islands are about a month or two away by ship and only recently started mingling with other cultures, if that's any help.

edited 29th Sep '14 5:49:04 PM by Sharysa

Selective breeding should allow for the first two, Cross Cultural Kerfuffle for the third. All-in-all, very well thought out.

In my current worldbuild, dragon-men keep Pelludas (a medieval French dragon with a passing resemblance to a cross between a porcupine and a stegosaurus) as war-mounts. Rather than having a Breath Weapon, they launch the quills on their backs.

edited 29th Sep '14 9:53:39 PM by dvorak

That sounds awesome. Never heard of dragon-quills before, but it actually makes as much if not more sense than scales.

i have heard dragon quills before; they're pretty awesome imo. how to train your dragon convinced me of that.

Interesting idea about the fantasy mounts, look forward to hearing where that may go. Sharysa, It looks like a plausible idea (I guess the variation already exists in the species and you can try using selective breeding). What other applications of this breeding methods does the society have?

About the island setting, thanks for the feedback, you all have very interesting ideas and I'm thinking of adding much more schizo and magitech into the setting.

I'm going to go with the Greater London for the definition of London Metropolitan Area. When I said city I meant the total inhabited area. I've changed it so steam punk torpedo boats and faster classes of warship now dominate the setting. That idea about the coastal forts and armed with a large cannon is a good idea, mind if I use it?

There is a dense marine ecosystem underneath the oceans in this world and I've added in special forgotten tech ships that can harvest biomass from the undersea ecosystem. There's some plants that reach quite far up from the ocean floor. In the shallower places they reach up far enough to make it easier to be harvested but in most cases they don't reach far up enough to endanger ships. Think of them like undersea forests.

Floating forgotten tech farms are scattered around the world to provide even more biomass. Old power plants do exist on several of the islands (and some are on sea platforms) and provide some power to the world's nations. These power plants use a range of methods to produce power including tidal, wind and solar. Power is drawn from the power plants to fuel desalination plants.

A city island is usually supported by a number of sparsely populated island mostly used for agriculture. I'm playing with the idea that there are salt resistant crops growing on the islands.

edited 4th Oct '14 4:59:58 AM by matti23

Basically, they just do selective breeding. They're a pre-industrial society and also very insular due to the long distance between the islands and the continents, so they've had lots of time to get elk breeding right.

Coat-colors are basically selected variants of the natural coat colors: Red and gold/tan coats come from the original wild-type brown, white/black/blue coats are variants of gray, and mottled/spotted coats are a result of adults retaining their baby-coats into adulthood. Gray/blue or "moon" eyes are often considered "wild-looking" since it's a sign of heavy magic exposure, and most people prefer that their giant antlered pack animal can't use too much magic.

Domestic elk also have longer manes than wild elk because it's more impressive and it's good lining/stuffing for blankets and cloaks.

edited 5th Oct '14 5:52:47 PM by Sharysa

The setting I'm working on has shades of space exploration 4X fused with a Dungeon Punk fantasy RPG. There's a weapon class based on Magitek, and one on weaponizing a vessel's FTL engine, in addition to conventional guns, [whatever radiation to be amplified].a.s.e.r.s and rockets. The weaponized FTL engines (exotic) use the ship's Engine Rating to determine damage mitigation, rather than the Galactic Civilizations-style trifecta of Deflector Shields, armor, and antimissiles. There is also a strong component of cyberwarfare.

Yes, this is still in the same setting as pelluda-cavalry and Half-Human Hybrid dragons.

edited 10th Oct '14 1:04:31 AM by dvorak

Antima Sarana, a circular city 5000 km in diameter, 4km tall and made out of magitech. Food grown in hydroponic gardens. Population 100 trillion.

Wouldn't work, if the hydroponics are in the cylinder too.

Here's my terrible math showing why (and a story illustrating the various points of it all):

Cylinder area is Pi by r^2 by h, so 3.14... X 6,250,000 X 4 = 78,539,816.34 km^3. (You bought a fast car without thinking about how easy a mark it makes you, and take it for a test-ride.)

Divide that by 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000), and you get .000000785398163 km^3 per person. (A cop pulls you over, and after you try ranting, he explains exactly how little of of your taxes actually goes towards his salary.)

Multiply that by 1 billion to find the easier to picture square meters, which is 785.3981634 m^3 per person. (Not only did the cop not buy your 'I pay your salary' rant, he has decided that you were 'resisting arrest' and/or 'driving under the influence' as well.)

That's 10m x 10m x 7.85m per person - about the size of a two story house in the suburbs, I think. This isn't the problem specifically (as your lawyer tells you in the clink).

No, the problem is, the old rule of thumb is that it takes an acre (4046.9 m^2) of farmland to feed a single person for a year. Combine this with a minimum height for the crops - call it a meter at least - but you'll actually need more space than that for heat and irrigation purposes, so it will probably take at least 4046.9 x 2 meters = 8093.8 m^3 per person. (Your lawyer basically laughs and goes out for lunch while you represent yourself.)

The primary problem is either keeping the agriculture inside Antima Sarana, or the population. A separate Farm-Cylinder or a population quite a bit under 10 trillion would circumvent all of this. (...However, the lawyer's an old friend of the judge, and is willing to represent you properly if you actually pay his fee rather than depend on pro bono.)

Deus Deno interesting point about the agriculture. I was planning to have a fantasy bioengineered plant used as the food source. It's fast growing (about 1 meter of growth daily, comparable to some bamboo plants) and ready to harvest every 2 days, so the people don't have to wait a year to harvest. Soil is kept nutritious for the plants by vast converter stations that add the energy used by the plant back into the soil. Even with this 182 time increase in harvesting there's definitely not enough to feed everyone. Thanks for the help, I might cut a few zeroes off and have 100 billion people in the city. What do you think about this setup and the changes?

Power for the magitech generators is provided by the Sarana Dhala, which lead massive expeditions into the demon overrun surroundings to secure a power source that can be mined by robots they have brought with them. The power source contains 0.01% the energy content of Antimatter.

Dvorak, I'm curious to hear more about your setting and what kind of weapons may use the system you describe.

edited 12th Oct '14 5:29:30 AM by matti23

With these kind of figures you might as well explain things as "Because I said so"