Transportations

Future Game Industrial Stage
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The use-cases of personal flight and mechanical flight are very different, I’d imagine. Flying species will already be severely hampered from using their flight for much, unless Thrive fudges the numbers for the sake of more interesting gameplay (going to post about this) - birds on Earth have had to aggressively reduce their weight due to the metabolic demands of flying, and if you add on the metabolic demands of sapience, well, I think it’s pretty likely the flier might not be able to carry anything at all. Even if they can, a proper plane will be much quicker, and it’ll also have much more durability and carrying capacity. There’d also be limitations on maximum altitude for fleshy fliers due to oxygen, pressure, and temperature.

That being said, according to Randall Munroe, you could theoretically get a plane on Titan into the air with pedal power due to Titan’s low gravity and very dense atmosphere. Under certain circumstances, flight might be effective enough to delay the development of planes - but I don’t think that would require special coding. Ideally, technology development will be fluid enough that the game would take into account this itself (presumably scientific advancements will be modified by all sorts of things, from the amount of motivation to make the advancement to how easy it is to actually do it, and if your species can already fly that would just file under ‘motivation’).

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To be fair most fliers can’t carry much beyond their own bodyweight even if they’re not nearing nigh sapient-level intelligence.

Also, speaking of transportation, would transportation animals (like horses) always be available for domestication for sapient species, or could there be cases where the domestication of such critters is hampered?

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That would depend on whether or not such domesticable animals actually exist, no?

There’s a video from CGP Grey (this one, I believe, although I’m not sure) which describes the factors that determine whether or not humans could domesticate a species. You should probably watch it, but if you won’t, a paraphrasing:

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  • You’ll probably focus on domesticating herbivores, for reasons of thermodynamics - especially if you, yourself, are an omnivore or carnivore. One of the key traits of many domesticated animals on Earth is that they turn stuff humans can’t eat (grass, generally, although pigs are also famed for eating random slop and other food waste you feed them) into stuff humans can. Domesticating carnivores is pretty inefficient. More generally, you want to domesticate animals that eat stuff that’s plentiful that you do not yourself eat. Megafauna are going to be too costly to maintain unless you’re already advanced.
  • Before you can domesticate something, you have to be able to tame it. This is due to the general maxim of ‘evolution doesn’t plan ahead’, which also applies to primitive tribes who don’t know what domestication is (and don’t want to take on large costs now for the benefit of nebulous descendants that they may not have due to being outcompeted in the present). Domesticating any sort of aggressive animal will be difficult and costly. This is another reason not to domesticate carnivores, although herbivores and omnivores can also be pretty violent - just look at hippoes and buffalo! And a lot of animals that aren’t dangerous happen to be pretty skittish. Catching a deer or a gazelle is hard enough when you need to chase it down for an entire day - but then it might escape, or mortally injure itself trying to.
  • You need R-selected animals. High fecundity means that you have much more ability to achieve useful modifications, and a short lifespan compounds this, since it means that new individuals will grow up quicker, thus enabling you to start using them for domestication as well. Elephants have life cycles too slow for domestication to be reasonable; pandas don’t really breed in captivity at all, which is a big problem, both for an ancient domesticator and a modern zookeeper. This isn’t a problem if you’re taming an existing member of a species - otherwise there wouldn’t be any war elephants - but domestication is much more long-term. With a pig, chicken, or cow, you can make visible progress with domestication in your lifetime.
  • Being very social is a help. If there’s some structure you can hijack, it’s much easier to domesticate. Horse herds have hierarchies, and head horse rules them. If you are on head horse, you rule the herd. Chickens have a literal pecking order, wolves have familial packs, etc. Remove a zebra from the herd and the family won’t follow. Not very helpful.

This doesn’t apply as much in a modern-day civilisation. The Soviets domesticated foxes as a scientific experiment to understand the relationship of various phenotypic traits and the ‘tameness’ of an animal. With complex societies, you can do a lot more; even using basic methods of domestication will be much more effective when you can summon resources from continents away, never mind possible-but-undeveloped stuff like directly screwing with something’s DNA.

Basically, to return to the point, whether or not you could domesticate a transportation animal depends on whether or not a transportation animal actually exists. If you don’t have something that’s fast, eats grass, and grows up in a flash, you might not find any transportation animals exist. And given the example of the native civilisations of America, your civ might never domesticate a transportation animal if there are no good candidates. The Americas domesticated all sorts of crops, but they didn’t have much in the way of animals.* In fact, they didn’t even invent transportation wheels, nevermind transportation animals - they had wheeled toys, but they never scaled them up, probably due to things like “too many mountains” and “no animals to hitch a cart to”.

*They had guinea pigs and llamas, and I recall that very meaty half-domesticated slugs were once discovered, but the CGP Grey video was about large animals specifically. Small animals are easier to domesticate, because smol, but also less useful, because smol. Foxes were domesticated in one person’s lifespan, but it’s pretty hard to get a project like that started without advanced tech (they be quick).

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I guess finding such animals would be more useful if your species has problems with carrying heavier items or items on larger distances…

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Horses are originally from North America. They migrated over the Bering Strait to Europe. It is still debated whether or not they went extinct or just became rare during the ice age, after which the settlers reintroduced them. There is even strong evidence that they were in fact domesticated by native Americans at one point (before the ice age, when there numbers dropped so much it wasn’t feasible to domesticate them any more).

https://ictnews.org/news/yes-world-there-were-horses-in-native-culture-before-the-settlers-came
https://great-american-adventures.com/did-indigenous-people-have-horses-before-colonization/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3927037-native-americans-used-horses-far-earlier-than-historians-had-believed/
https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/horses-part-indigenous-cultures-longer-western
https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/abstract/S0168-9525(23)00156-7

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The populace of a species would then also factor into the likelyhood of your domestication efforts succeeding…

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Well, a significant environmental upheaval/mass extinction is going to interfere with domestication efforts regardless of the previous population density. Horses are large, and therefore require large grazing area; an ice age is probably going to kill off your domestication project even if you previously had a lot of horses.

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unless you know where to redirect or how to adapt your domestications-in-process…

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I highly doubt that a bunch of random early domesticators, who likely aren’t even conceiving of what they are doing as ‘domestication’, are going to have the knowledge and resources to sustain domestication during an ice age, or ‘redirect’ it (what does this even mean?), or whatever it is you’re suggesting hunter-gatherers might do when they are abruptly thrust into a very hostile and low-resource environment. It’d already be difficult enough to sustain your horse herd in a normal winter; what are you going to do when the winter lasts seven months? How do you ‘adapt your domestications’? Make the horses smaller?

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Well then you cannot help your domestication if it’s not “finished” yet.

By the way, wasn’t this discussion supposed to be about the industrial stage? Well then, would trains be expected to develop in some form in all industrial civs?

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If the creature can acquire and shape enough metal for tracks, and the terrain isn’t to incompatible with laying them, it seems highly likely the species would attempt to develop a train-like transportation system.

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34

If you’re in industrial stage, the only prerequisite is having invented tracked carts, which in turn depends on the wheel.

Wagonways, a track carved in stone for wagons, were invented as early as 600 BC in Greece, and by the 16th century minecarts were already invented (As told by Agricola in De Re Metallica, they had probably existed for some time before then but I don’t know if there are any examples earlier than the that century), those would run on either grooves cut by the miners to run in, or on a built wooden scaffold if you couldn’t dig groove.

Being in the industrial stage inherently means you’ve found a source of power behinds civilians, beasts of burden, or natural forces [1]; and I find it pretty unlikely that you wouldn’t have discovered wheels if you’ve discovered a new power source (Maybe outright impossible, barring some electricity before the windmill shenanigans).

Since I imagine most players would want minecarts for productivity in society, the vast majority of players should be able to get trains pretty easily, or if they skipped the tech starting on trains would be only 1 technology (Cart tracks) removed from them once they enter industrial.

I think the tech would be nearly always available by the time you enter industrial and it’s only a matter of not investing in it, which is entirely on the player for never bothering to build a railroad (Or on the culture/species simply not wanting to entertain industrial production for whatever reason, good on them).

Maybe attaching a power source to a minecart is a bit of a leap to trains, but considering you need men or beasts to move a minecart I don’t think it’s a stretch to say putting a moving component on a cart to lighten the load, even a heavy power source because carts already exist to move heavy weight.

Once you have the basic locomotive invented, from there it’s a matter of improving the system, upgrading carved or wooden tracks to steel, fine tuning (Train wheels are conical, strangely enough), and making the kinds of gradual improvements we see throughout modern history.

  1. Windmills, waterwheels, and sailboats are pre-industrial ↩︎

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35

Right, now we have covered planes and trains.
Are there any more methods of strategy locomotion which may not be universal to all species? I guess balloons (the ones designed to carry specimens) might not be a requirement since they’re rather niche themselves.

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Balloons are a lot easier to make (and harder to steer) than airplanes. There are suggestions that they may have been used to make the Nazca Lines over 2000 years ago. Actually, while there are not records of them being used back then, the materials needed to make them were widely available in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, Viking culture, and a lot of other old civilizations.

Edit: Floating lanterns made in ancient China are considered unmanned hot air balloons.

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I meant more like the manned balloons. I guess airborne species (like birds) wouldn’t need such things as much as humans for example.

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Everything before the edit referred to manned balloons.

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39

Yes I know, but balloons in general seem like a rather optional tech.
Also would zeppelins count as a balloon type or their own thing?

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I would call it a type of balloon.

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So would it require you to have researched less advanced types of balloons to develop zeppelins?

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I would think so. They are basically balloons with a metal frame and an engine.

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