Do we know that meat is necessarily generated with the vats? I could see the vats being some sort of processing or preserving system.you are right, Produced might be a better word. But it's a "vattery" so I have to assume that the vats are the primary part of the process. Living on spires it would make sense that they cant have much in the way of traditional grazing herd animals. But then were does the 'meat' come from?
you are right, Produced might be a better word. But it's a "vattery" so I have to assume that the vats are the primary part of the process. Living on spires it would make sense that they cant have much in the way of traditional grazing herd animals. But then were does the 'meat' come from?Yeah, whatever the vats are for, the vats themselves have to be a major part if only based on the name. I wouldn't assume that that role is producing the meat just yet though. Like you said, the next question is where does the meat come from. It seems inevitable that the Spires are pressed for space, so raising grazing animals doesn't seem likely. Considering they sail through the air, how about "fishing" for birds? "Whaling" for the mistmaw creature mentioned earlier might be an option as well.
Yeah, whatever the vats are for, the vats themselves have to be a major part if only based on the name. I wouldn't assume that that role is producing the meat just yet though. Like you said, the next question is where does the meat come from. It seems inevitable that the Spires are pressed for space, so raising grazing animals doesn't seem likely. Considering they sail through the air, how about "fishing" for birds? "Whaling" for the mistmaw creature mentioned earlier might be an option as well./nods. Or even gathering and rendering down some sort of Cloud-krill maybe.
/nods. Or even gathering and rendering down some sort of Cloud-krill maybe.Yeah sausage or any of the canned style meats seems like a good guess. I could even see the vats being used as baths to somehow neutralize whatever nasty goodies the meat might get from being out on the etheric currents. That way you wouldn't have to grind everything to a mush.
So ok, lets say they get some sort of raw animal material from somewhere. Im going with Soylent as the working name (you dont WANT to know where it comes from). What do you all picture as the final form coming out of the Vats? My mind first went to some equivalent of the Pink Slime that cause such a hooplah recently, but something more akin to sausage makes sense too.
Yeah sausage or any of the canned style meats seems like a good guess. I could even see the vats being used as baths to somehow neutralize whatever nasty goodies the meat might get from being out on the etheric currents. That way you wouldn't have to grind everything to a mush.Fair, though you could have to slice it after, especially if it's a tough consistency. Im picturing them cubing it off like Tofu, in that case, only with more the consistency of a canned ham.
One more thing pointing to the meat not being grown in tubs, Bridget mentions her family's knives. You shouldn't have to butcher meat from a jar.
Fair, though you could have to slice it after, especially if it's a tough consistency. Im picturing them cubing it off like Tofu, in that case, only with more the consistency of a canned ham.Also a possibility ;D
Still not the most appetizing of things. I mean...Tofu? :oIdk, I've had tofu before, but never meat grown in a vat. ::)
Here's the thing: sliced ham, chicken nuggets, imitation crab meat, those frozen pre-cooked chicken breasts with the grill marks on them... they're all what's called "restructured meat". In other words, they're chunks of meat (or sometimes not even chunks) that are glued together to form whatever shape is desired.No, I get that "printing" meat is a possible function for the vats. I'm just reluctant to say that's the most likely function. That kind of technology doesn't mesh well with the genre, even with handwaved crystal technology. The setting doesn't seem to have enough scientific background to be able to handle artificial meat.
If you ever bite into a piece of "meat" that has no fibers in it, or really soft mini-fibers (or that happens to be shaped by a rectangle), the odds are really high that the current shape does not match the shape of the muscle the meat came from.
However, people are currently working on 3D printing meat. Once that's achieved, we should be able to replicated a proper steak, with all muscle fibers properly aligned and everything (people actually want to 3D print working organs for transplant, but that's gonna take a lot longer).
I'm guessing that's how the vattery works: you have huge vats where the different type of meat component cells are grown (a muscle fiber vat, a blood vein vat, etc) before final 3D printing and assembly into primal cuts.
Personally, I'm ok with this idea. I've never had an issue with ham, or imitation crab meat (I'm not really a fan of chicken nuggets, but that's more the breading, really). If / when we figure out how to get the texture right, should it matter where the meat originally comes from? (Assuming, of course, that there are no poisonous ingredients involved in the printing process or whatever).
I agree. For real science fiction that something like printing meat or replicators makes sense, but not in Steampunk.Concur. Especially in light of the comment about how their competitor's vat-meat was "rubbery chum"
I dunno. Growing cultures on a framework isn't particularly advanced stuff. You can grow rock candy/sugar crystals on a string, after all. Growing bacterial cultures isn't hard-- god knows I do it all the time in my fridge-- and I could well believe that they could induce edible tissue to grow from a broth of otherwise inedible proteins/lipids/sugars without the use of computers, etc. I could also believe that there's skill in it-- inducing the fibers to grow in such a way as to give it a tender (or firm or whatever) texture. Sort of like making a rock candy rib cage, instead of just a string with lumps hanging from it.My hesitance comes less from a lack of computer analogs or their ability to physically perform the processes, and more from my own assumptions that they'd need far more advanced scientific development in Biology and organic chemistry than is present in most Steampunk settings that are generally a Victorian analog in that regard.
The whole 3D printed/culture-grown meat thing isn't particularly far along in our world because, frankly, there hasn't been a need. Ranching/livestock farming produces meat cheaper and quicker, and thus far there hasn't been a need to curtail it.
Hmm. Well, the technology itself isn't complicated-- even Dresden couldn't hex it up. As Quantus points out, it's the knowledge of biochem that's a sticking point. I could suspend my disbelief for it though: ancient peoples couldn't tell you the reactions that made grain-water into alcohol or made milk into curds, but that didn't stop them from making beer or cheese! Maybe the people who run the vatteries don't know exactly what is going on, in the biological or chemical sense, but they do know what they have to do to produce something edible? That covers a lack of scientific (rather than practical) knowledge of the process...Sure, but making meat is much harder to stumble upon than figuring out fermentation by experimentation.
Hmm. Well, the technology itself isn't complicated-- even Dresden couldn't hex it up. As Quantus points out, it's the knowledge of biochem that's a sticking point. I could suspend my disbelief for it though: ancient peoples couldn't tell you the reactions that made grain-water into alcohol or made milk into curds, but that didn't stop them from making beer or cheese! Maybe the people who run the vatteries don't know exactly what is going on, in the biological or chemical sense, but they do know what they have to do to produce something edible? That covers a lack of scientific (rather than practical) knowledge of the process...To Artish's point, Alcohol mostly comes about by letting fruit juices and such spoil, and the secret to all cheese in history is cooking the stomachs of baby mammals (requires an enzyme from before they switch to solid food) which i imagine happened pretty often when they threw all the scraps into a stew-pot and notice that the cream soup stock has gone all chunky. I could see something similar happening to make a homogeneous tofu-style protein paste, scrounging whatever scrap animal matter they could and rendering them down into Pink Slime.
PS In modern times not all cheese is actually Animal stomach enzyme (animal Rennet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet)), they have created a vegan version that is processed from a mold byproduct. Because mold poop is somehow healthier, I guess.
To Artish's point, Alcohol mostly comes about by letting fruit juices and such spoil, and the secret to all cheese in history is cooking the stomachs of baby mammals (requires an enzyme from before they switch to solid food) which i imagine happened pretty often when they threw all the scraps into a stew-pot and notice that the cream soup stock has gone all chunky. I could see something similar happening to make a homogeneous tofu-style protein paste, scrounging whatever scrap animal matter they could and rendering them down into Pink Slime.
But to go to all the effort to artificially sculpt realistic animal tissues for what would be essentially a cosmetic "texture" difference seems a stretch to me. Especially if animals are rare enough that they arent typically raised and slaughtered for meat, so the majority of the population wouldnt know the difference enough to warrant the extra effort. I see it as kind of like them developing massive advanced tech to make all their meat turn purple; it's probably possible, but I just cant see how the motivation would develop.
PS In modern times not all cheese is actually Animal stomach enzyme (animal Rennet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet)), they have created a vegan version that is processed from a mold byproduct. Because mold poop is somehow healthier, I guess.
And yet people (and chefs) do all sorts of crazy things to alter the texture/color/smell of food products. I guess all I'm saying is that it would not break my suspension of disbelief if over the however many years people have been living in the spires they developed variations on basic food production that allowed for vastly different-seeming products. I'm not arguing for growing whole animals in a vat, just that whatever form the products of the vatteries ultimately take, there is likely quite a bit of development behind the method used to make them.Fair enough :)
i think the meat is grown. it is not from a creature at all.good catch with that quote. I dont think Ive reached it yet.
"part of growing the great sides of meat in the vattery was harvesting the leather casing that grew around them as they matured." sounds like an artificial meat source to me. if the Spires were created to get away from the earth because of some contamination or something eating from the surface creature was bad as they could be contaminated. so they have no room on the Spires for herd animal so they create an artificial way to create meat.
i think the meat is grown. it is not from a creature at all.Yeah, from what I picked up I'm assuming it's a big (like 150lb) piece of flesh that they grow in a nutrient bath and then harvest when it's big enough. It has skin on it, but I'm not sure if there are any bones inside. If there were it would help get the meat to the correct texture because they could stimulate it to flex against a core bone or something
"part of growing the great sides of meat in the vattery was harvesting the leather casing that grew around them as they matured." sounds like an artificial meat source to me. if the Spires were created to get away from the earth because of some contamination or something. eating from the surface creatures was bad as they could be contaminated. so they have no room on the Spires for herd animal so they create an artificial way to create meat.
good catch with that quote. I dont think Ive reached it yet.Yeah, based on that I'm starting to lean more towards grown meat.
The various levels of the spires are called "habbles" (sp?). It seems that you have huge spires built to allow people to live off the surface of this planet. I would conjecture that the habbles are the habitat tiers of the spires.
The warrior caste are genetically modified. Possible the cats were too. (If someone wanted to give cat enhancements to humans, why not give cats human like intelligence too? For proof of concept, or because they could, or because the mad geneticist in question was a crazy cat-person who wanted their conversations to be more meaningful...)
Polydactyl cats with opposable "thumbs" on their front paws are not uncommon in the real world. The polydactyal gene is considered dominant, but its expression is variable such that the number of extra toes produced and whether or not they're opposable can vary. There are likely other still to be identified genes that effect its expression.
The hypothesis that this series takes place in a human colony world where technology has regressed, perhaps due to the "iron rot", at least in part, sounds like a good one to me. I must also admit to being curious how "the enemy" factors into this world's history and development.
'Habble' seems to obviously be an amalgam of 'Habitat' and 'Level'.
OK, New question on the Spires, specifically their dimensions.
Spire Albion is "ten thousand feet high, two miles across. There are two-hundred and fifty habbles, of which two-hundred and thirty-six are occupied." -Ch 20
Ill save you the conversion factors and say that it's 10,000 ft tall by 10,560 ft wide. The word "spire" was evocative of, you know, pointy things; something tall and narrow and shrinking down to a point. But Ablion is actually slightly wider than it is tall, making it as squat as any Egyptian pyramid, which in turn makes me wonder if it comes to a point at all, or if it's a more uniform cylinder. Otherwise the differences of available space per habble will be fairly extreme.
Thoughts on this?
If habble means habitat level (which sounds logical) I am upset by the extra b.
Probably, My Spanish speaker is slightly annoyed not only by English being the TAW world language (except for a Latin reference) but for the use of not-metric units.I think the base language for the book is "Albion". Every habble has their own language.
Yes, I think Auroran and Olympian have their own languages. You are right in that.Given that Albion means Britain, it does make sense that they speak the English language and use Imperial units. And if you think it's bad reading about a place that uses a lot of Imperial units, imagine living here.
That's just an American thing though. One day they will realize that some traditions are not worth keeping. :DWe keep trying to get rid of it every generation or so. Turns out it's ridiculously expensive to switch 320 million people and especially 4.3 million kilometres worth of road-signs to a knew system. Not to mention we hate and fear change, and are often more than willing to share that opinion in a loud and belligerent manner. In the early 90's they tried teaching us youngsters only metric in school, hoping if they got the newer generation exposed to metric first, it would force the nation to shift as they aged. But it didnt get wide enough support to accomplish anything. At this point Im hoping the internet and the internationalzation of culture (combined with the US losing their throne as the science/tech leaders) will finally push it out of usage.
I will admit that Imperial can be nice in small measurements for quick math (feet and inches being in base 12 makes for nice fractions). After that though, it just falls apart.
In that case, we would need to create two more numerical characters. Part of the awkwardness of imperial is using a base 12 math system with a base 10 numerical system
I am not a very skilled pure mathematician, so I cannot say if switching from base 10 to base 12 would truly complicate our constants and established measurements.
Actually I don't think pure mathematician would care as much, since the stuff they deal with is almost entirely number system independent. This is more about the fact that your average person will need to divide things into 3 more often than into 5.
Actually I don't think pure mathematician would care as much, since the stuff they deal with is almost entirely number system independent. This is more about the fact that your average person will need to divide things into 3 more often than into 5.
Really? I don't think soUsing a particular base usually only changes how numbers are expressed. I don't know of any important results that depend on which base you use.
I just skip the parts with units I don't get, that's too technical for me and I don't want to bother. I am more or less familiar with feet because of RPG manuals and I've got an idea of pounds. Miles and inches, I just ignore them.
I agree with that, I disagree with the divide into 3 more than into 5.You are right and wrong. Many scientists and mathematicians have argued to move to a base 12 system because it is evenly divisible by twice as many numbers. Also in base12, only divinding by 7 will result in an ugly repeating decimal value. In base10, you get that ugly result with 3, 6, 7, and 9. That makes the simple mathematics much easier for non-mathematicians. Your everyday life would be easier.
Let's see, I concede the 24 hours of a day, or the 9 muses. But 60 minutes or second divide by 3 or 5 with no problem. 30 days for a month, again divide 3-5. Many things are seven. We also have 4 directions. Many things come in pairs. There are flowers with 5 based corolles and with 3 based one, so it's a tie here. I agree insects have 6 legs, so divide by 3. But other animals have numbers not based in 3 or 5.
So, sometimes base 10 (1000 thou = 1 in), sometimes 12 (12 in=1 ft), the rest sounds mosly random. Best thing about metric system is that you know how the units are (always difference of ten with the following, as decimeter, centimeter, milimeter and it's easy to divide by ten. So, a person who is 174 cm height is 1.74 m. A person who is 68 inches...how much is in ft? or thou?
Anyway, my idea was not discuss the advantages or disadvantages of metric system, only to say that as it is not used in all the world is depressing that in TAW is still used. And yes, I know Victorian Era really used those units, but as I think it is set in our future I would expect another thing.
That is what I meant, Quantus.Right. I was just also saying that, in addition to how it makes conversions easier when up and down a given unit, as you describe, there was also a lot of benefit when converting between completely different values, as when going from Length to Volume and even to Thermal energy. I was referring to the whole thing where SI is based on 7 Fundamental/Base units and how their definitions interact on a base10 as well: Length, Mass, Time, Electric Current, Temperature, Luminous Intensity, and Chemical Amount/Amount of substance (moles).
Actually the gram is not defined by the amount of pure water, but as 1/1000 the weight of The Kilogram and the mass of the International Kilogram Prototype possibly being off is a matter of some concern. It is the only Metric measurement still constrained by being derived from a physical artifact.It was historically based on Water, that's how they originally defined it, even though now it's defined by a specific block of platinum alloy. (http://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/mass/ipk/) All of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit)are like that. The meter used to be based on the earth's size but is now a derivative of the speed of light in a vacuum and a calculated fractional second, and even the Second is now defined by the decay of a caesium 133 atom instead of anything to do with the earth's rotation.
For what it's worth, they have moved away from The Big K and are now defining the kilogram using Avogadro's number and Si-28. - (http://www.nist.gov/pml/si-redef/kg_new_silicon.cfm)Oh, sure, that's one of a bunch of new/revised definitions that have various levels of support. In the case of the Kilogram, it's the only one left that is still standardized to a specific artifact rather than a physical constant of some kind (though other are defined by the kg, so it's hidden in them too), and the two most popular methods are to base it off either the Planck constant or the Avogadro constant.
From what I am finding, they are currently refining equipment for precision to go ahead with this transfer of the definition of the Kg. Which is good, because after that happens, we will no longer define one of our Seven Fundamental Units for Understanding Life, the Universe, and Everything on an over sized, multi-million dollar paper weight. :DYup, if they succeed at solving the manufacturing problems they hope to offer it up as a viable Atom-counting alternative to the Planck constant (energy based) approach, which it turns out was accepted back in 2011 as the path forward, though at the same time they (the International Committee for Weights and Measures) postponed their next conference to 2015, so the change-over hasnt happened yet. Well, what they did was: "Accept a resolution to 'Take note of an intention' that the kilogram be defined in terms of the Planck constant, h (which has dimensions of energy times time) together with other fundamental units." That contains far too much parliamentary gibberish for me to pull any definitive meaning :P
Probably this planet was colonised. Genetically modified plants and modifying your live stock to not actually need to graze, or poop or move sounds good for a colony ship, and later on this world where the ground is not very hospitable. For some reason, they've back slid, maybe they're not quite neo-barbs, but they're a shadow of what the original colonists were...
No, I get that "printing" meat is a possible function for the vats. I'm just reluctant to say that's the most likely function. That kind of technology doesn't mesh well with the genre, even with handwaved crystal technology. The setting doesn't seem to have enough scientific background to be able to handle artificial meat.
I always imagined it like when they do limb replacement and such in sci-fi space movies. The character that is hurt is usually submerged in a tank, and machines (or lazers or whatever) grow the artificial replacement back. Some examples are Starship Troopers, with Rico. Age of Ultron, with Hawkeye. Matrix, with everyone pre-pill.That sounds about right. Especially given the part where they have to repeatedly peal of a leather 'rind' to allow it to continue growing, it makes me imagine something that layers up. I expect it would have what by our definition would be a distinctly odd texture.
A vat doesn't necessarily mean the product is a liquid, or even semi-solid. I imagine the process is like this.
1 ) fill a big ass vat full of enzymes.
2) load in a crystal somewhere (maybe a crystal rod inside the vat, maybe two opposite polarity crystals on either end)
3) energize crystal
4) wait for the enzymes to gather in groups due to the crystal's etheric charge (the way static gathers lint)
5) pull out the completed piece of meat product
6) chop it up
Precedent is there, just not for food.
I wonder if the builders created the original version of the vatteries?I think Core crystals are life-forms. If weapons crystals and lift crystals are equivalent to Vat meat, Core crystals are actual animals that are growing and maturing.
I wonder why power crystals are the only one that gain in strength over time and use. Imagine if the other crystal can be grown so they mimic power crystals in this form. It would allow large scale implementation of high level crystal engineering. So not just used for the military or the nobility.
That sounds about right. Especially given the part where they have to repeatedly peal of a leather 'rind' to allow it to continue growing,
The have wool (or at least something called "wool"), so it may be more than just a rind.INteresting point, I never considered where their textile fiber comes from. they have hydroponic Gardens, so fibers from common sources (Cotton, hemp, etc) are simple enough. But animal fibers are a different matter, and being another byproduct of Vattery meat along with Leather makes as much sense as anything.
But animal fibers are a different matter, and being another byproduct of Vattery meat along with Leather makes as much sense as anything.
Either that or they use cat fur.... ;)like the cats would stand for that... :P