Dragaera

Magic versus Technology

Seth Terashima rst_98 at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 1 09:42:56 PDT 2004

Even if technology would have little practical purpose in a magical world, 
Dragaraens (especially the Hawk and Athyra) obviously value knowledge. Yet 
one of the books (I forget which) implies Dragaerans haven't figured out the 
world is round. How could this be? Contrary to popular misconception, 
[Earth's] humans have had this figured out for quite some time - the 
Egyptians not only realized the earth was a sphere, but calculated its 
diameter.

I think the answer to this is the presence of the Overcast. The motivation 
for developing mathematics is linked with astronomy; for example, solar 
calenders or calculating lattitude and longitute for navigation based on the 
relative positions of stars and the horizon. Perhaps being deprived of the 
stars, Dragaens never developed advanced mathematics (and therefore never 
developed science or technology). (If this is correct, is this the purpose 
of the Overcast?!)

However, Vlad says that the Athyra (?) had a unit for magical energy (~ the 
joule). This implies that they have the means to quantitatively assess 
magic's physical effects, which would require a basic understanding of 
Newtonian kinematics. So maybe I'm wrong and just wasted some of your time.

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