BXBX NOVEL Chapter 235 - Primitive Cars
For any civilisation, the car, short for carriage, has to be the Industrial Revolution mark. Rino did not think that the gods wanted him to push the timeline for technological progress so quickly when he saw the newest daily quest.
Ping!
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Daily Quest #32
Objective: Build a Carriage
Time Limit: 10 Days
Tutorial here.
Reward: Mass Grave Locations
Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.
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Thankfully, he was thinking about making glowstone powered minecarts before the gods tasked him with building a carriage. The initial efforts paid off when the mine carts could be operated even by non-magic wielders. Rino allowed more people into the mines to experience driving carts, and eventually, that design was used as a reference for the new cars meant to be driven on the streets.
Owning a car meant a great deal in the upper society of the upper class in his previous world. Carriages were designed extravagantly with house crest symbols painted on them. The cars were also bigger as the noble ranking increased, with the royal carriage taking up an entire double street\'s space. The lower-ranked nobles like himself could only make carriages that fitted only two people.
At the same time, he recalled the colours that a carriage could be painted with. There were so many rules about them that Rino decided to build one using magic that did not stay on the ground. Why take the congested streets when he could monopolise the air space instead?
Of course, there were many objections about a mere baron acting arrogant and using a carriage that not even the royal family owned. The ban on Rino\'s baron status and flying carriages simply made Rino change the carriage\'s colour and crest to the magicians\' tower. Unsurprisingly, the objections snuffed out almost immediately as nobles quickly found ways to make their cars appear fancier to step up on the competition.
Rino didn\'t really care. Why would he compete with them at useless games when the king tasked him to create cars that could fly to transport tributes. His memory was a little hazier now, and Rino could not remember what happened to that assignment. He might not have completed it before the world exploded, but there was a chance he also completed it with the help of dwarves.
Whatever. None of those was important.
Pulling out his design sheet for the mine cart powered by glowstone, Rino realised several limitations for creating mana powered cars. The mine carts were easier to control because there was no need to determine the levels of output from the glowstone. The moment it connects to the mechanisms inside the cart, it turns the axle that turns the wheels.
The minecart was simple in design because the rails held it in place. There were only two directions that the wheels could spin to take the cart forward or backwards. Also, there was a disengage from the power function to slow the cart and a brake system that helps to avoid accidents. Rino did not set any speed limits to the carts because the mine drivers knew what they were doing.
Things would be very different on the streets. Regulations must be introduced to make the streets a safe place for cars and people. Rino wondered if the streets he planned were wide enough to accommodate them. In the end, the lich decided that it was better to do a trial run with other forms of carriages.
Not all carriages on land were made to carry passengers. Those who could walk should use their feet. The carriages were used to help transport objects from one place to another. A good route to plan for would include the farms and the windmill. It was a fairly travelled path, and Rino knew that the windmill could help transport sacks of ground powder over to the cookhouse.
Hence, he started observing what his townsfolks did daily. The paths that they took depended greatly on their jobs. Most of the people in his domain worked as farmers in the field, and the labourers only moved according to their assigned project. This made for a very unreliable data collection.
Sulking, Rino wondered what path would be the safest for testing if he could not predict what kind of routes his people needed. If that was the case, perhaps he should do just the opposite and pick the path that was least travelled on so that if anything went wrong, only Rino would know.
That wasn\'t very difficult, and Rino soon found out that the path to the barn was actually the least travelled and the ones going to the tannery. Both paths were least travelled simply because nobody liked the atmosphere there. Simply put, the smell was too strong.
Sometimes Rino wondered why his people were okay with drinking milk and eating dairy products or animal products from the same location that produces biological compost. Quasimodo was a meticulous person who heaped the dung and urine vats far from the milking station and butter churn. However, there should still be that mental image of eating what was produced in a place full of biological waste to deter some.
Deciding that the tannery was less travelled than the path to the barn, Rino passed the message to the construction team to finish that least travelled path first so that he could test the effects of glowstone cars on stone paths.
The glowstone powered carriage design should be fairly simple. Rino knew that Spudville knew how to produce wagons. Even without the initial buff of speed, the weak skeleton farmers there learned how to attach wheels to the bottom of a simple plank after seeing Rino\'s example. The wagon was greatly improved to carry more potatoes and use less manpower to move it.
Wheels had to be the breakthrough for transportation developments. The Spudville villagers used stone for the wheels because they were sturdier than wooden wheels and easier to reshape when they were flattened on one side. However, it was also rather heavy that made them less ideal for travelling in the swamp. Thankfully, cargo boats were a thing in Cypress County, and wheels didn\'t matter there.
Taking the latest wagon\'s example from Spudville as a reference, Rino compared the schematic of the glowstone mine cart and started drafting.
The first thing he wanted to change about the carriage was the material of the wheels. With stone paths in Town Zera making travelling a smoother experience, Rino could remove the weight of stone wheels for the carriage. At the same time, there was no need to add a pulling handle on the wagon because it would be powered by the glowstone.
However, there was a need for a glowstone compartment and a driver\'s seat with various controls. The controls had to be kept simple for the speed, and Rino wondered how he would create the braking system on the pavements.
Unlike the wheels on a minecart that could be jammed with a brake pedal because the rails held the path of the minecart consistent, the carriage on the stone path could not do the same without skidding or toppling. Braking so suddenly was only going to cause everything inside the car to fall as well, and Rino really did not want to listen to reports of accidents involving vats of spilt urine from the barn to the tannery.
There were several ways to slow the speed of an object. Rino knew that gravity and friction were some ways an object would stop in its motion. Friction was used in the minecart example to slow the cart into a stop. However, Rino did not want a sudden stop in a car on the road that could throw everything inside it off. He needed it to be gradual but fast stopping. In the case of a sudden stop, Rino might need to implement levitation as a braking mechanism.
Flying cars were his invention in the previous world. Similarly, Rino wondered if he could borrow that idea for this world. If cars could fly, the streets should be fairly accident-free. The only thing he had to take note of was the air traffic regulations and carriage weight limits. Both of these requirements could be easily taken care of with proper planning.
Starting from scratch, Rino drew a cuboid with dimensions specifications for his intended car. It might be slightly primitive in design, but functionality was more important than aesthetics. It did not need a roof because Rino was fairly certain that rain wasn\'t common in his territory, especially with that barrier around his town. Not designing a roof made transporting bulky items easier if Rino could stack them up. However, the carriage sides were raised with foldable fences that could be locked into place to secure the goods when travelling. They could be unhinged and lowered to act as a ramp for loading and unloading purposes.
The more Rino added details to his design, the more convinced he was that the first car in his empire would be used as a replacement for the spectre powered sky palanquin.
Didn\'t his ridiculous speed buff work in the Nightless Underpass too? Maybe he should start from there.