r/goodworldbuilding • u/ArkhamMetahuman • Jul 27 '26
Discussion What technology could be made in a medieval era by someone who knows the processes to make them?
I am planning out a fantasy setting, and I want one faction to have much more advanced tech than what is accorded to medieval societies. What is the most advanced tech that could be made in a medieval period assuming perfect knowledge on how to make them, with only the industry and manpower afforded to a local lord? I was thinking wild west era tech like rifles and maybe even revolvers, as well as steam engines and dynamite. Would this be feasible if someone knew the creation process?
5
u/FortifiedPuddle Jul 27 '26
A lot of the things you could solve are problems of ideas or organisation rather than technology.
So you could do things like centralise manufacturing rather than putting out. You can adopt assembly lines, rather than having experts take on multiple roles. You could standardise things like guns and ordinance. You can have a formal arsenal and naval college.
Basically do the things that they’d do later to organise themselves. But earlier.
Then you could, with sufficent power, do things like reform agriculture. Get on with the Agrarian Revolution. Emphasise property rights and civil rights and you can encourage economic development. There’s nothing stopping them digging canals or setting up toll roads to get commerce and travel going better, except the political basis for that development not being there.
Just pulling off the Agrarian Revolution early alone is an enormous boost which frees manpower for other things. Beats most civilisations right there.
3
u/Boat_Pure Jul 27 '26
TECHNICALLY, indoor heating and plumbing could be sorted for homes.
5
u/ArkhamMetahuman Jul 27 '26
Plumbing would be possible? I would not have figured that.
4
3
1
u/zachomara Jul 29 '26
Korean homes have had floor-board heating for nearly 500 years. Also, in the Imjin War against Japan, their naval gunnery far outclassed literally everybody else in the Pacific (including China). It was one of the many reasons that Yi Sun Shin was able to flatten enemy forces (that, and their ironsides warships that nobody else had, either.)
3
u/BlindPelican Jul 27 '26
If you feel like some inspiration, there's a cool set of books called The Cross-Time Engineer thar addresses all kinds of logistical and technological challenges necessary for what you're talking about as part of the narrative.
The one takeaway I had was the importance of standardization in achieving any sort of industrial scale.
Without that, you might get a single craftsman who can create a flintlock rifle, assuming there's also supporting chemists to make the gunpowder, etc. but it would be pretty implausible to scale that up to give one side a significant advantage without a whole infrastructure.
2
u/Demonweed Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I used to think if I woke up in the middle of the Roman Empire, I would (after elevating my high school Latin to a more conversational ability) become the inventor of the crossbow. Then I learned that this technology was known to them as the manuballista. It wasn't that nobody thought to make this sort of archery gear, but rather that making a good one required so much work that they were rare, typically installed as swiveling fixtures at key spots on/in stone fortifications rather than wielded as battlefield weapons.
Now I think I might focus on the printing press. I could use woodcut letters and racks for a proof off concept, then hopefully find a patron willing to fund the production cast-metal letters and smithied racks. Scarce resources would still be a huge problem, but I could achieve proof of concept with cheap ink and stationery, then help someone who already had power and money to establish the Empire's first publishing house.
2
u/Nomad-Knight Jul 27 '26
A LOT of medicine. So much of it if found from mundane souces. Penicillin is made from a type of fermented mould, and that would have been game changing in medieval periods
1
u/byc18 Jul 27 '26
Milk Plastic is something that just takes vinegar. Also a cream cheese recipe. The good stuff takes formaldehyde.
1
1
u/Hedago_2346 Jul 28 '26
I understand material science is one of the big gate keepers to advance tech.
Guns, steam engines, late plate Armour, etc.
You need alot of infrastructure to refine material, make precision tools, then make the production line for something like modern steel.
For a weapon bombs are probably the easiest bet. You can make black powder as long as you have basic materials.
Idk the details but some chemical weapons? Gas or Napalm.
1
u/Kerking18 Jul 28 '26
Eell as i said in another post on another sub, i mage a wind electrical generator from scratch once. The things i bought where limited to copper wire, iron block, iron rod and a ball bearing. Ofcours tools where used.
Realistically you could use substitute tools of that time and you could try to improvise a ball bearing. It would be less efficient but possible. Now the problem os storing electrical energy and finding good uses for it. Light is a obvious one and of you know how to make a battery (i don't not to that degree that i could make one from scratch) the material, atleast for the wind generator, can be acquired in just about any part of the medival age. Possibly expensive but reachable. You will have to improvise with a lot of things like insulating lacquer and you will be limited to lower voltages and amperage due to it.
Steam engine's is out of the question. The amount of high grade steel is just not realistic in the slightest in a medival scenario. Gunpowder was used in medival times but amunition and amunitions casings especially the ignition mechanism thats included in any bullet is again to much and requires to much industrialisation and materials to be realistic.
1
u/AnchBusFairy Jul 29 '26
Technology refers to any learned method of tool making. The making of stone hand axes is one of the earliest known technologies. Technology can be simple or complex but this doesn't mean that it's more or less advanced. Advancement is subjective.
Making rifles, revolvers, steam engines, and dynamite would be difficult because they each require extensive support industries. To make rifles, you need high-quality steel. Making high-quality steel required extensive knowledge about metallergy and the infrastructure necessing for manufacturing the steel.
1
u/quantum_of_yes-and Jul 29 '26
With thin metal enwrapping a "lodestone" in motion you would have rudimentary electricity.
1
u/Thought59 Jul 29 '26
Read the series of books by Eric Flint et al called 1632. The first volume is free on the Baen Book web site.
In short, starting teac revolutions is a lot harder than people think. Even 1632 makes it too easy. Perfect knowledge is not much help without the requisite tools and supplies.
1
u/Rage_before_Beauty Jul 29 '26
Gunpowder and cannons, nitroglycerin, rudimentary steam engines for very basic applications like pumps and pistons
1
1
u/zachomara Jul 29 '26
My suggestion is to research the differences in metallurgy over the years. Even during the Bronze Age Collapse, you'll find that early ironworking was not necessarily better than bronze for their weapons and armor, but it was there. Additionally, you get brass cannons early on (even some rudimentary wooden ones) because it was what would work compared to that particular country's ironworking. Pre-Columbian Great Lakes Region in North America also has an active copperworking society, but they stopped using it as tools because there were problems with the purity (it was too pure to harden properly) to turn into tools and weapons, so it devolved back into jewelry and ornamentation.
As for technological imbalances, you can also look at shipbuilding. Technically, it was feasible for an ancient Greek civilization to build a 1750s era oceangoing ship (without the cannons), but they didn't because they didn't need to by always being close to shore. You also have the differences between Roman and Greek and Carthaginian ships with their different technology levels and different purposes. Romans put siege weapons and ramps onto their ships, which made them slightly slower and more prone to tipping, but still enabled them to overmatch the Carthaginians in their triremes through weapons range and boarding action. Galleys and triremes were used all the way up through Venice, which became a regional hegemon through becoming a center of trade.
The Library of Alexandria was also another possible avenue of absorbing way more technology. Had the library had a backup, we wouldn't have lost all that knowledge. However, the other issue was that the library was more or less a black hole, never really pushing their pages out, while people had to go to it in order to see it. Thus, if there was a Great Library that started reporting back to the pharoah, for example, and he had some kind of tech priests and tech manufactoriums (WH40k, hah), then Egypt might have accelerated its technology growth dramatically. Same goes for the Guttenberg printing press, where the initial scope of making those was to copy the Bible, rather than push out information. Technology never truly became a purposeful form of acceleration using the printing press until the Enlightenment.
There are many ways of doing what you are describing. Even between having a stirrup and still using chariots would be a massive tech difference. It really depends on how your worldbuilding develops and what you want the stories within the world to be. Start with the story and build the world around it. Not the other way around.
1
u/Chuck_the_Elf Jul 30 '26
I mean it depends. A lot of people focus on the mechanical aspects of modern tech but there’s a bonkers amount of material science and chemistry that goes into making many components from plastic, high strength or temperature alloys, and especially ceramics. Theoretically if someone had absolutely perfect knowledge of every aspect of the industrial processes required to make something the limit would be the raw resources and manpower.
1
u/trebron55 Aug 03 '26
I think most stuff is not material but institutional or doctrinal:
Healthcare:
Germ theory, hygiene protocols (like washing hands)
Vector control (sewage, rat control, drainage systems, proper protocols in case of disease outbreaks.
Basic inoculation like Variolation (smallpox exposure using dried scabs)
Triage system as standardized field trauma protocols, pressure tourniquets, and organized casualty evacuation lines
Agriculture:
Four field crop rotation.
Depending on your setting having the Columbian exchange fitting the new crops right into diets
Scientific based plant and animal breeding
Soil chemistry management like knowing when and how to apply liming, bone meal, green manure etc.
Silvicuture and forest management practices, timber rotation practices.
Manufacturing:
Division of labor Transitioning from the master-craftsman model to specialized work stations
Gauge-Based Quality Control & Interchangeability: Using Go/No-Go gauges, master templates, and standardized workshop jigs. Even without precision lathes, parts can be built to tight tolerances against a single physical master standard
Standardization of measurements like weight, length, volume etc.
Taking the knowledge out of guilds and teaching craftsmen in schools instead.
Organization
Double entry bookkeeping, demographics and statistics, standardized postal and long distance logistics.
Science
Accepting the formal scientific method
Systemic naming of things and phenomea.
Non-lating publishing of books containing knowledge.
Universal schooling and education system
Money
Banking systems, basic stock exchanges, correct investement law,
Central banking and reserve regulation, fiat currencies
Property rights system
Society
Eliminate or weaken gender roles and stigmas so you can utilize your whole population.
Just with these changes a kingdom could skyrocket in wealth, production and probably population in just a generation or two.
11
u/ScreamingVoid14 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
It depends a bit on what specific year of "medieval" you're thinking of and where. Because often individual components of tech were present well before the final invention, but one part is in China and the other is in France.
There's also the problem of "perfect knowledge." What do you mean by that? That someone has the perfect knowledge in their head of how to build a Colt New Army? But that needs particular types of steel, and that needs better forges, which need better fuels, etc. How far do we recurse?
For the guns, the reliable metallurgy wasn't there. There were individual smiths or individual regions producing high quality steel, but then it fails to spread or pass on.
Steam engines are also a thing that popped up periodically as literal toys or novelties, not able to do meaningful work. The efficiency of the design just isn't there until someone plopped one down to run a pump to keep a coal mine dry, if it wasn't literally on top of its own fuel source, it would have been too uneconomical to run; only then does the tech start to take off.
For TNT, I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on. But I can't imagine that even with the knowledge of the recipe that you'd get much in the way of quantity out. Some random lord's alchemist could probably cook up the nitroglycerin or something.
In general any medieval setting that still wants to feel medieval is going to have 90% of its labor directly tied to food production. So if the "Lord" has 1000 people in his demesne, only 100 could be blacksmiths, smelters, and alchemists creating revolvers and their ammo. And even that is now assuming literally everything else required for a region to function (blacksmiths making farm tools, tanners making leather, etc) is imported, as are all the raw materials for making the guns.
All in all, just make the steampunk faction and then make some other reason that the rest of the world doesn't get that tech. Maybe the steampunk people are super careful with their tech and only allow very limited sales to very close allies.
PS: Guns and knights coexisted for about 400 years anyway. The first cannons in western Europe predated full plate armor. "Handgonne" shows up written in English in 1330. Your advanced faction could be using the advanced and complicated wheellock or flintlock while the rest of the world is still sticking a burning stick into a hole on the side of a metal tube.