thedukeofnuke wrote:The high standard of archery was maintained by legal measures, such as banning all other sports on Sundays
That's pretty amazing. Their military advantage was based on sport? Maybe we should try that. Let's ban all sports on sundays except... Halo? That'll be useful in case aliens attack. We'd be fat, tho.
Xonen wrote:it's rather unlikely people would start complicated experiments on harnessing a force they don't even know to exist.
I don't know, somehow it seems to happen repeatedly in history. There are all sorts of things that I have no idea how they first came up with. Such as the aforementioned gunpowder.
"Hey, let's try mixing sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate! Oh look, it burns rapidly - let's put it in a cylindrical container and use it to propel various objects at people we don't like!"
I sure wouldn't have thought of that.
Salmoneus wrote:Or would it have held us back
That is an interesting thought. Case in point:
In this famous picture (which funnily enough is apparently from 1492) we see Pythagoras demonstrating how to get musical notes in various ways, using the same number sequence - strings with different tension, pipes of different length, and so on. The wavelength is proportional to these numbers, said Pythagoras, and people believed it, and many still do. But as it turns out, all except one of the demonstrations are wrong - the numbers should increase quadratically, not linearly, to produce the right wavelength.
But now I'm sort of derailing myself again.
Ships. What about those? In my specific scenario, ships would play an important part. What sort of ships could the fictional slightly-more-advanced people have invented?
Steam ships, I guess, but that's boring. Ironclads? I'm not sure what's so great about them - does the metal stop a cannonball?