Assuming there was an cheap& easy way to build & supply them in number, how useful would bicycles have been in the mediaeval era?
Assuming there was an cheap& easy way to build & supply them in number, how useful would bicycles have been in the mediaeval era?
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unironically would have accelerated the development of national republics by a couple hundred years
Extremely.
Now your army can move at cavalry speed at all times. Invaluable for long marches and supply trains.
You'd have to make serious adjustments to strategies and tactics though. Riding a bike with a pole weapon and gambeson would be really shit.
As for horse powered baggage trains...The Germans still used them a lot in WW1 and even WW2 despite and overabundance of bikes. I doubt they can function as a standin.
>flow of information, goods and manpower would exponentially increase, would probably accelerate the formation of nation-states and nationalism.
Bikes confirmed problematic.
>if you can make steel you can make a steam engine and if you can make a steam engine you can make a train. bicycles are a novelty and of no significant importance.
Am I overlooking something or is this post really as stupid as it sounds? People had steel since antiquity it's obviously not a path dependent spiral into steam engines.
>Riding a bike with a pole weapon and gambeson would be really shit.
That's what the baggage train is for
Everyone would have one
flow of information, goods and manpower would exponentially increase, would probably accelerate the formation of nation-states and nationalism.
After we bombed them back to the stone age, the North Vietnamese organized logistical support down the Ho Chi Minh Trail on bicycles.
You can put a lot of weight on them and still get it down a badly damaged road. And all it takes is some rice and water for the slave.
iirc the bicycle has the highest efficiency of motive force transfer of all vehicles and also has the greatest cargo to overall weight ration
I understand that you have no read on how you sound to normies, but it's really, really obvious when you make shit up and try hard to sound smart.
>mechanical efficiency:
https://pages.jh.edu/gazette/1999/aug3099/30pedal.html
apologies, i'm pretty trashed right now & couldn't remember the "correct" terminology
can't find a source for cargo-to-weight so i might have heard that a long time ago or i might have made it up, equally likely
>apologies, i'm pretty trashed right now & couldn't remember the "correct" terminology
So, to expand on my former point, pretending that you're a badass who drinks the beer drink is also a really transparent and obvious goofy pretense and it just stinks to high heaven to a neurotypical person.
You need to recognize that the normal human beings in your life can see right through this shit and it's part of why they can't respect you.
I mean it's really tone-deaf and a little insulting.
Do you need an engineer to build a bridge across that chip on your shoulder?
Are the neurotypicals in the room with us right now?
>hello fellow neurotypical persons, what is going on in our personality disorder and mental illness free lives?
you just sound like a fag ngl
Why are you apologizing to that retard?
Just because anon can't use the English language beyond the middle school level doesn't mean that you have an obligation to memify everything for him.
Let that vira-lata-retard seethe in impotence.
>fights to liberate themselves from invaders trying to colonize their country
>"you are le slave"
american projection is the most powerful force
Seeing as how wheelbarrows greatly increased the mobility of Chinese commoners and armies in the late 2nd Century AD, a bike would be a godsend. However it all depends on how well you could build and maintain roads because bikes are shit on dirt tracks. They really only took off when paved asphalt roads became a thing.
The Vietnamese used bikes to great effect in muddy mountains
Yeah but they were desperate guerrillas following trails, not everyday people about their business. Its ok for them to get flat tires since the point was to move from A to Be in whatever they can.
You need good roads for wheeled transportation to be effective and commonplace.
>bikes are shit on dirt tracks
Git gud you absolute homosexual. Though this does bring up the point that medieval metallurgy would've been utterly incapable of producing a bicycle with things required for basic bike functionality like a stiff wheel and derailleur transmission
I was thinkng that Anon was imagining basic bitch bikes (i.e. 2 wheels, a frame, gears and pedals) and not thousand dollar mountain bikes for ironman challenges.
if you can make steel you can make a steam engine and if you can make a steam engine you can make a train. bicycles are a novelty and of no significant importance.
cool, now get off the track.
That's not the point you autist
That's just wrong though. A train is limited to where the track can take it (which itself is no small feat to build) and to what the owner of both it and the tracks decides to do with it (usually a state or maybe some rich private owner). It's also big and easily trackable.
Meanwhile a bicycle can be owned by anyone, even a peasant, and it immensely increases a person's mobility. They can now travel wherever they want and whenever they want needing nothing other than the strength of their legs. A decently fit person should be able to get across any European nation in no more than +/- a week. It gives unprecedented freedom to an individual person, but as pointed out earlier, it would also be a blessing to smaller scale industry/agriculture and even possibly to the army
Extremely useful militarily, since mounted infantry was quite common.