Dragaera

while cursing amazon re the non-release of _TLoCB_

Wed Aug 6 16:44:24 PDT 2003

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote:

> >of technology, and in fact isn't present by the Paarfiad, so I doubt
> >one Dragaeran minute equals one Terran minute.
>
> Well, exactly.  With that, I entirely agree.

Ok, well, this disputes an element of Alexx's Timeline (no pun intended),
which is perhaps more reliable than the Texts themselves - I forget what
position Cracks and Shards takes here.


> >> Metronomes are 19th-century inventions.
> >
> >I suspect the Vladiad is meant to occur post-19th century.
> >Pre-Jenoine texts survived, why not simple metronomes?
>
> You seemed to be implying that the tribal Dragaerans had metronomes,
> which is unlikely given their tech level.

Terran texts were unearthed, though possibly just Lyorn copies of them.
So maybe some simple tech survived.  I've never built a metronome,
but they seem like hardy objects to me.

Ok, I once again step away from the tech/Dragaera discussion, which too
instantly gets ridiculous, after one comment below:


> >  Dragaerans can measure and in fact care about fine gradations of
> >time - the greymist bomb can be maintained for 8 seconds, and
> >presumably other spells have tight parameters.
> >
>
> Modern Dragaerans care; I was referring to preindustrial cultures
> (those lacking fine engineering) in general (although starting to care
> about finer gradations of time helps propel such engineering research
> that then develops it).  And of course, the Orb is a digital computer
> as far as timekeeping is concerned, and so could track such variation,
> if that is in fact how they wished to go about things (not that I have
> any certainty about whether they do or not).


My assertion was that while the Empire is preindustrial, it's technical,
and as such might (I'd think must) have for millennia cared about say
how long to subject a dagger to Lady X's ensorcelling rays.