03-16-2016, 01:48 AM
That's an interesting perspective re: frozen liquids, but what frozen liquids conduct electricity? Water ice doesn't--the freezing process gets rid of the free ions that allow conduction through water (which is, by itself, a poor conductor).
Also, I don't know if you could substitute frozen liquids or gases for metals as a building material--metals are cool and useful because they're hard, but they can also bend, and they can be deformed by partially melting them. You can combine different metals to create substances with specific combinations of conductivity/malleability/hardness, but as far as I know this isn't something you can do with, say, dry ice.
As for metals with a low melting point, that still leaves the question of how you melt it. Fire is out of the question because there's no oxygen in the atmosphere, so the only way I can think of would be to use volcanically active regions, which I assume are very rare on Avalon.
The bulletproof cloth is made from carbon nanofibers--a high-level technology we're still trying to master, and not something stone-age nomads could come up with.
Oral recall of your entire knowledge base is a problem--you can't sing someone a sophisticated and precise diagram or code it into strings. It would be possible to work around these shortcomings, but it makes practically everything much harder. A braille-like language would be more efficient, though still not as compact and portable as graphical symbols. I actually like that idea, so maybe I'll throw out the record harps and use a tactile language instead (even though I think the "musical books" are canon).
The lack of farming is a huge, huge problem. To do things like run a centralized government or invent an internal combustion engine (another thing the low temperature and atmospheric composition of Avalon would render problematic), you need people who have time to devote to such things instead of going out hunting. If everybody's putting all their energy into getting food (and they would be if all their food comes from hunting), no-one will have time to sit down and tinker until they invent algebra. No farming probably means no civilization.
Also, I don't know if you could substitute frozen liquids or gases for metals as a building material--metals are cool and useful because they're hard, but they can also bend, and they can be deformed by partially melting them. You can combine different metals to create substances with specific combinations of conductivity/malleability/hardness, but as far as I know this isn't something you can do with, say, dry ice.
As for metals with a low melting point, that still leaves the question of how you melt it. Fire is out of the question because there's no oxygen in the atmosphere, so the only way I can think of would be to use volcanically active regions, which I assume are very rare on Avalon.
The bulletproof cloth is made from carbon nanofibers--a high-level technology we're still trying to master, and not something stone-age nomads could come up with.
Oral recall of your entire knowledge base is a problem--you can't sing someone a sophisticated and precise diagram or code it into strings. It would be possible to work around these shortcomings, but it makes practically everything much harder. A braille-like language would be more efficient, though still not as compact and portable as graphical symbols. I actually like that idea, so maybe I'll throw out the record harps and use a tactile language instead (even though I think the "musical books" are canon).
The lack of farming is a huge, huge problem. To do things like run a centralized government or invent an internal combustion engine (another thing the low temperature and atmospheric composition of Avalon would render problematic), you need people who have time to devote to such things instead of going out hunting. If everybody's putting all their energy into getting food (and they would be if all their food comes from hunting), no-one will have time to sit down and tinker until they invent algebra. No farming probably means no civilization.