ASOIAF/GOT ASOIAF Ideas, Recs, and Discussion thread

[CarlManvers2019]

Barring bad geography that doesn't show up on maps, it is actually a good idea.

Nor would (again barring geography) it actually be that hard or complicated. Smallfolk are dirt cheap, you simply have them start digging.

Granted, you wouldn't just do it across the Neck (although that route is quite useful for shipping between Bravvos & Lannisport, and more broadly for reaching the west coast of Westeros). You would also do it in a number of other places, linking rivers/dredging them to make them navigable.

Spoiler of a map that I made for something else

Spoiler

Westeros-Navigable-waters

Image Westeros-Navigable-waters hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

Connect the various bodies of water with relatively small connections and you will drastically decrease transport costs. Travel via water is still one twelfth the cost of even modern land travel; in the age of horse drawn wagons it is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper.

How would they all avoid the flies, lizard lions, diseases and unstable land?

I think this could displace a bunch of Crannogmen too

 

[Emperor Tippy]

How would they all avoid the flies, lizard lions, diseases and unstable land?

I think this could displace a bunch of Crannogmen too

You don't, you just throw more smallfolk at the problem. Again, they are cheap.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

You don't, you just throw more smallfolk at the problem. Again, they are cheap.

Can’t be that cheap, especially if workers get sick or die at an increasingly alarming rate due to starvation(how are you gonna get food that far in), disease(got a scratch, now have a horrible festering disease), falling(“ground” is unstable) and being eaten alive by lizard lions

If it’s a project, who knows how many decades till it’s finished and how much tax money is wasted on an endeavour people see as wasteful

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Can’t be that cheap, especially if workers get sick or die at an increasingly alarming rate due to starvation(how are you gonna get food that far in), disease(got a scratch, now have a horrible festering disease), falling(“ground” is unstable) and being eaten alive by lizard lions

If it’s a project, who knows how many decades till it’s finished and how much tax money is wasted on an endeavour people see as wasteful

Again, smallfolk are cheap. Thousands of them dying isn't noteworthy.

As for taking decades, you are looking at a decade max. And tax money, it is basically just the food to feed the workers.

We have done far more difficult canal projects in real life with the same tech level. It's really not anything special or difficult.

When you can order ten thousand peasants with shovels and pickaxes to start digging you get results surprisingly fast. Let's say that each peasant can move one cubic meter of dirt per day and you want a canal a hundred kilometers long, a hundred meters wide, and ten meters deep (this is pretty absurdly large). That is 100,000,000 cubic meters of dirt to move. With ten thousand peasants that is 10,000 days or roughly 28 years. Make it fifty meters wide, 8 meters deep, and have twenty thousand workers and it takes roughly five and a half years.

And this is a society that can throw around multiple forty thousand plus man armies on pretty much zero notice and keep them in the field for a decent chunk of time.

When you can simply order several thousand people to go and do something - even limited to basic hand tools and muscle power - they can produce amazing results in surprisingly short time periods.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

When you can simply order several thousand people to go and do something - even limited to basic hand tools and muscle power - they can produce amazing results in surprisingly short time periods.

And when they're finally done with their work, they come home without that much money than when they first left off due to a combination of transportation costs, taxes and having to buy their own food and tools

 

[Deleted member 88]

So another Lannister or rather Lannister related SI.

Addam Marbrand.

Its early in Winds-Aegon has taken KL, Tommen is dead, Myrcella is in Dornish custody, and Cersei fled the capital with Qyburn and Robert Strong and a small force of retainers. Though her whereabouts are unknown and it is unlikely she will be able to get to the Rock.

Worse still, the Riverlands have erupted into open rebellion and there are reports of a terrible massacre at Riverrun-with an undead woman emerging in the feast and rasping for vengeance. Daven and Genna have perished. And so have many in House Frey, Prester Forley and his men were attacked by the blackfish and Nymeria's wolves.

You as Marbrand command around three thousand men, and fading fast.

In this SI, the Lannister house of cards has toppled-and you are a loyal bannermen to House Lannister. Bend the knee to Aegon? Keep on fighting till the end? Contact Tyrion and offer to install him as Lord of the Rock?

The SI would basically be fighting for survival from the start.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

We don’t know if he will be immortal or mortal. I suspect he will not live forever. Or end up like Bloodraven.

Bran being king is...just so obvious in hindsight.

It’s honestly something I really have come around on.

Okay

That said, in all honesty, Bran as King makes me think he would be a frankly inhuman thing in mind

Pretty much zero attachment to anything, even himself

Lost in being near-omniscient and seeing both past/present/future as if he’s there, no wait he IS there

The show’s writing maybe very bad at the end, but I managed to get that feeling of eerie inhumanity caused by Bran’s increase in awareness

Everybody & Everything is just something to be seen on the books of a page, he can read backwards and forwards and maybe insert new text or alter it, who knows

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Honestly, I would be more interested in how/why he would die

I mean the Children of The Forest probably had their own space-time Greenseer or “Three Eyed Raven” and yet they got killed en masse by bronze age First Men

 

[Abhorsen]

Again, smallfolk are cheap. Thousands of them dying isn't noteworthy.

Smallfolk aren't cheap at all, they are your industrial capital. And killing them off by the thousands is basically burning factories of food, ones that take decades to replace. In addition, they form a good amount of your army. So it's really unlikely to be built for that reason, as the small feudal lords can't afford to waste that much capital.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Smallfolk aren't cheap at all, they are your industrial capital. And killing them off by the thousands is basically burning factories of food, ones that take decades to replace. In addition, they form a good amount of your army. So it's really unlikely to be built for that reason, as the small feudal lords can't afford to waste that much capital.

How much of the average Feudal Lord’s armies really are just random barely trained & barely equipped peasants?



Like Septon Meribald once was

 

[Abhorsen]

How much of the average Feudal Lord’s armies really are just random barely trained & barely equipped peasants?

By percentage of men? A lot. By value in fighting? Not nearly as much. Also, the lower down the Feudal totem pole you are, the bigger percentage of your army is peasant levies.

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Smallfolk aren't cheap at all, they are your industrial capital. And killing them off by the thousands is basically burning factories of food, ones that take decades to replace. In addition, they form a good amount of your army. So it's really unlikely to be built for that reason, as the small feudal lords can't afford to waste that much capital.

It wouldn't be done by small feudal lords. It would be done by at least one Lord Paramount if not with the active assistance of the King.

For the Lords Paramount? A few thousand smallfolk ending up dead isn't any great matter.

Hell, go to Flea Bottom and just offer anyone who wants it free food and a dragon at the completion of the project and you could get all the willing recruits that you need while simultaneously reducing the problems in King's Landing.

 

[Abhorsen]

It wouldn't be done by small feudal lords. It would be done by at least one Lord Paramount if not with the active assistance of the King.

For the Lords Paramount? A few thousand smallfolk ending up dead isn't any great matter.

Hell, go to Flea Bottom and just offer anyone who wants it free food and a dragon at the completion of the project and you could get all the willing recruits that you need while simultaneously reducing the problems in King's Landing.

I really don't think it's viable though. Crucially, most smallfolk make enough food to eat and not enough to survive for a winter. This means that there wouldn't be enough food to pay them with. Fleebottom might work though.

 

[The Immortal Watch Dog]

And when they're finally done with their work, they come home without that much money than when they first left off due to a combination of transportation costs, taxes and having to buy their own food and tools

And then proceed to become far more comfortable over the next decade as the land prospers and a new merchant class arises and more people migrate North (and South as Wildlings would begin to assimilate when faced with rapid response times via canals and better prospects playing nice) that likely results in said peons kids becoming land owners in their own time?

Like you think because Martin doesnt understand medieval politics and economics as well as he pretends too that this wouldn't be a huge boon to the North?

 

[Emperor Tippy]

And then proceed to become far more comfortable over the next decade as the land prospers and a new merchant class arises and more people migrate North (and South as Wildlings would begin to assimilate when faced with rapid response times via canals and better prospects playing nice) that likely results in said peons kids becoming land owners in their own time?

Like you think because Martin doesnt understand medieval politics and economics as well as he pretends too that this wouldn't be a huge boon to the North?

Connecting Ironman's Bay to the Green Fork (and improving that to ensure navigability from that point south) at Seagard would likely be an even bigger boon economically as it lets you ship from Lannisport to the east coast (and Bravvos & Pentos) both more rapidly and safer. If you also connect the Green Fork to the God's Eye that you can run straight to King's Landing.

Connect the Mander and Blackwater Rush as well and you can barge food all the way from the Reach to King's Landing.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Why is everyone obsessed with canals?

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Why is everyone obsessed with canals?

Because they are easy, have a huge impact, could have been built at pretty much any time since the Conquest, and most people writing SI's really don't understand technology at all.

I mean it really isn't hard to make electricity, and with that comes electromagnets. That allows mass production of compasses. It also allows production of chlorine and thus bleach.

An effective semaphore system can be made using, literally, stone age technology. And yet they took forever to create in real life. All you need is to build towers in line of sight of one another on a chain between locations, have at least two distinct object states that can be easily determined by the next tower in the chain, and morse code (or anything similar). With that you can send a message a thousand plus miles in a day.

Copper sheathing the hulls of ships is huge and so long as you know not to mix dissimilar metals you are golden. Essentially, use make sure that the copper and iron don't touch and you are good.

If you have a hotspring (or any other source of sulfur), horses, and wood then you can make gunpowder pretty easily. And with steel you can make a functional breech loading rifle pretty easily. The hardest part is rifling the barrel, but you can use an iron barrel with a steel button for that; or if you are in ASOIAF and can get reforged Valyrian steel then have a button forged out of that and it will rifle steel barrels with ease. If you have access to nitric acid then going all the way to smokeless powder is pretty trivial; you also get dynamite.

You can make a functional steam engine using nothing but clay & wood. Not high enough pressure to use for mobile applications, but able to power mills and the like where waterwheels don't function.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Can we stop talking about uplifting?

I find it overdone and pointless.

 

[The Immortal Watch Dog]

Can we stop talking about uplifting?

I find it overdone and pointless.

The Mongols invented a long range semi real time comm system because Subutai got too fat to direct campaigns personally and the Roman's had industrial scale mining a thousand years before them.

Tippy isn't talking about uplifting. He is talking about applying tech that's actually doable in westeros and the North should have been masters at by necessity.

Like given its sheer size. The fact that they didnt have the Mongol style instant messaging or canals is nuts.

Hell them being sparsely populated is Specifically why mongols invented rapid maneuver warfare in the first.place.

Comanche as well.

Hell the mere existence of House Reed precludes an absence of long range communication independent of the "Raven Network"

And glass? Why the the Myrrish the only glass masters when green houses should be a thing all over the North?

Because they are easy, have a huge impact, could have been built at pretty much any time since the Conquest, and most people writing SI's really don't understand technology at all.

This is one of the many reasons why I ignore the existence of self insert fanfiction entirely.

Because you arent even talking about creating laptops out of rocks but applying shit iron and bronze age societies did that Westeros doesnt do for weird reasons.

Connecting Ironman's Bay to the Green Fork (and improving that to ensure navigability from that point south) at Seagard would likely be an even bigger boon economically as it lets you ship from Lannisport to the east coast (and Bravvos & Pentos) both more rapidly and safer. If you also connect the Green Fork to the God's Eye that you can run straight to King's Landing.

Connect the Mander and Blackwater Rush as well and you can barge food all the way from the Reach to King's Landing.

And then force projection in Westeros renders the Iron Islands more like real world pirates and as tou note.

Winter becomes a lot less of a problem

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Idea: The Planetos’ population is cursed to constantly be singing at weird times



People in-universe can’t help but notice that they all somehow sing great and maybe choreographing

Stannis is already an equivalent of Inspector Javert, he needs his Jean Valjean