The logistics of fantasy technology

One thing tgat is iften forgotten is that the industrial revolution started with water power, not steam power.

I love considering how to employ pre-industrial technologies in world building at various scales.

You guys totally forgot about wind power. Just for fun look up the 1,000+ year old Nashtifan windmills. Now imagine something like that powering blast furnaces and drop hammers like they did in ancient China, AND Ancient Greece(at least for the drop hammers). Or you can look up the old Dutch windmills that they used to pump the water out of the marshlands to make dry land out of it. Hey, you gotta do something when most of your country is below sea level right? Or look up the Roman Barbegal watermill complex from the 2nd century, and again imagine something like that powering everything from smelters, blast furnaces and drop hammers, to lumber mills and looms BEFORE going on to provide fresh water to a city and then eventually to irrigate the surrounding farmlands. Puts a whole new perspective on the Aqueducts. Now they seem more like ancient power lines... One cool thing nobody ever mentions though, is transportation. Since we`re looking at fantasy worlds, look up the Last Oasis trailer here on Youtube. Then look up the Theo Jansen Strandbeest that these are based on. Now in your fantasy setting, are ships limited to water? Why?

The bit on period lighting is incorrect. While this is arguably semantics, candles were not the standard for lighting in period; that was rushlights, which were dried reeds (often rushes) dipped in some kind of fat (usually tallow). Theh were far smaller and more flexible than candles and generally last somewhere from 2-10 minutes, depending on the size and quality. Candles (which use a far more processed wick, more like a rope) were far more expensive. Candles ran a pretty sizeable range in quality. Most candles used tallow, which is smokey and produces a moderate to strong unpleasant odor and tends to gunk up the ceilings. Beeswax was far cleaner and more pleasant, though several times the cost, and thus was largely used only by gentry/aristocracy and clergy or later on, the bourgeoisie. Torches were more expensive than either as they burned through more material faster. The reason they were sometimes used is light levels; rushlights and candles produce very little light, all things considered. The bigger and stronger the flame, generally, the bigger the light output. This gets extended to devices not often depicted in pop-culture, such as 4-5-foot, several-inch-thick cylinders of flammable material that were used for instances like nighttime feasts and balls. I would recommend a candle lantern over and oil lamp for dungeons. Oil is much easier to compromise with lots of harsh, jostling movements as it is easily spilled, thus the fuel is easily lost and the flame easily extinguished. Carrying additional candles is far more forgiving than additional oil. And you definitely want a lantern, not a lamp, as tiny flames (more fuel-efficient) are very vulnerable to air movement. Whether conventional lights would be abandoned is very setting-dependent. Conventional flame-based lighting would remain dominant anywhere mages or items are not common enough to cheaply replace them. While Light is a cantrip in modern D&D, spellcasters with access to it are a pretty small portion of the population in most settings and magical items are usually cost-prohibitive to use them at-scale for most of the population.

the problem with every atempt at magitech is it's creators tend to try to scince up the magic or magic up the science instead of just making the two work together as is. Science as hard rules and defined limits and magitech can't break that but magic can do pretty much what the writer needs it to and often does even in stricter universes. Put the two together to make some fantasy technology and you have devices that don't do the impossible instead doing the things we know are possible but can't yet achieve with tech alone. You open the device up and you can see how it works at a glance and it looks like it sould work but you can't explain how. This is the one true blend of magic and technology because the magic is still fantastical and the tech is still grounded in reality.

You guys didn’t really talk about the topic in the title of the video