37
I believe that you may be asking slightly the wrong question. You ask:
"Will Ships still be useful on a super-continent"
To which my answer is .... Yes!
But a slightly better question is:
"Where will trade occur, and through what means"
Curiously, predicting trade is often a fairly good proxy for technical prowess and societal development ...
22
Pre-modern cities in general needed massive amount of farmers working elsewhere. The safe calculation is that urban population can be only as big as 10% of total population, which mean that your 10mln man city would need 90mln people producing food. Now to put it into perspective, ancient Rome had around 1mln people and even though essentially entire ...
14
If bog iron is available, then a single knowledgeable person would be capable of collecting it and working it into ironwares.
Additionally, smelting other varieties of iron ore can be achieved by a single knowledgeable individual, perhaps with the assistance of unskilled labor to operate the bellows.
Working smelted iron into iron and steel goods can also be ...
13
There is preindustrial transport rule of thumb:
cart transport is ~5 times less expensive (per ton*km) than pack animals
river transport is ~5 times less expensive than cart transport
ocean transport is ~5 times less expensive than river transport
So it was more expensive to move goods on pack animals ~100 km from port to farm than to move them from ...
13
Oil lamps
Just before electric lamps we used oil a lot. We even had people refilling and lighting the lamps when night set in.
An oil lamp is one of the most advanced ways to have a torch. A torch is basically a stick on fire, but can be augmented by oil in rags around it. Logically you take the burning torch to an extreme.
The oil used for the torch is put ...
13
Hollywood has long used link-type torches in movie production -- an expendable or non-expendable handle with an optional metal end, around which is wrapped tow (loose vegetable fiber, like rope that hasn't been twisted) soaked in pitch. The tow and pitch are replaceable on the reusable variety, burn fairly brightly and for a good while (roundly an hour or ...
13
5000 people per square mile on a surface of 2000 square miles makes 10 million people.
With medieval level of technology those would be 10 million corpses: transporting enough food and water to feed them and taking rid of their wastes is something beyond medieval level.
Famine or some lethal plague are granted.
For a reference, London in the middle of 1500 ...
11
A hive-mind wouldn't make sense to them. So they would fit the facts to something that did make sense to them
To be frank, it's unlikely that they could figure out that they were facing a hive-mind creature because the very concept of even just "collective intelligence" was so alien to the medieval mindset, let alone the much more developed idea ...
10
As per the above. Food is the problem. Assuming you have a system of aqueducts, sewers and/or rivers feeding fresh water into the city and removing waste from the city you can probably 'solve' the water problem.
But even then you have to assume waste disposal is solved by the application of rigorous public hygiene laws that weren't in place anywhere during ...
10
As MontyWild's Answer noted, +1, early metal working using bog iron was easily accomplished by just a few people.
I'd add some details. Thousands of Vikings created Settlements in Eastern North America (Greenland) circa 980 A.D. that survived to 1430 A.D. or so. They were active in farming, and many other things, including collecting bog iron and processing ...
7
Probably Not as Much As You'd Think
First, I'm skeptical that the stuff could be made "cheap", particularly in the medieval period. Your spider farmer would need to farm millions of spiders, protect the spiders from predation and disease, and train all the associated animals, none of which is light-labour activity, particularly in the medieval ...
7
The separation power of the average human eye, in good light, is about 1 minute of arc, or about 0.0003 radians, or about 0.29 mils. Which means that an average observer --
Can see a person (as a dot) at about 2 or 3 km or 1 or 2 miles, provided that the person wears clothing which makes a good contrast on the background.
Can distinguish the upper and ...
7
It is not realistic.
Before the end of the medieval period, every city in history that exceeded 1 million people was at the center of an empire with a total population of at least 100 million people. Rome (200 AD), Kaifeng (1100 AD), Hangzhou (1300 AD), and Jinling (1400 AD) all belonged to nations with populations commonly estimated at 100 millionish ...
5
Combo-hybrid-proselyte-tech.
One of these (a hand-pressured kerosene blow-lamp):
Alltools.blogspot Eugbug 2022 fair usage.
And this (limelight.):
Theresa Knott via Wilipedia Share-alike 2.5 2022
Made with a quicklime (calcium oxide, made by heating chalk) heating target. Usually seen with a shell-shaped (scallop or cockle-shell shaped) reflector. Gives an ...
5
There cannot be a single answer, it depends on the location of the departure and arrival places.
It's all a trade off between the cost of the two alternatives:
going from A to B directly on land
going from A to the closest port, then travel by sea to the closest port to B, then go to B.
Within the cost you should include:
how long does it take to go from ...
4
They can collect metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1157678/view/cape-york-meteorite
The precontact Inuit knew where there was a big meteorite and they would collect iron from it and work it cold into iron tools. Other groups of Inuit found telluric iron - metallic iron from the Earths core and ...
4
It depends on accessible resources.
As others have noted, a single person could do it.
But, in medieval times they mass produced steel with a society. You didn't just find iron lying around. You had to make mines, deal with flooding, transport the ores, use water wheels to power bellows and pumps and such.
They also had superior creations, like plate mail. A ...
4
It depends on where the rivers and mountain ranges are, and on whether there are any rival states that make trade difficult in certain regions.
4
Consider this completely fictional planet with a super-continent:
Remember that Europe+Asia+Africa is the equivalent of a super-continent, and for a long time, nearly all trade was within that super-continent (and to a large extent, within small parts of that super-continent).
Even nowadays, a vast majority of long-distance trade is still sent by ship ...
3
It's not going to be possible without hand-waving. The numbers you give puts each person having a plot of land 75' on a side. With that land, there must be shelter, livestock, a share of roads, markets, administrative buildings, etc. So on average, each person would have a tiny amount of arable land.
The wall is possible, however - the Great Wall of China ...
3
Yes, definitely, just like it happened in real life.
Traveling between the opposite sides of your supercontinent would be much easier by sailing around, than going over land. My proof is that in real life, much bigger detours were made to avoid land journeys.
In the USA, the biggest cities were on the two coasts, and people traveled between them mostly by ...
3
TL;DR: best method below, but it has ways to pretend it's not a hivemind regardless of what you do
You capture a bunch of the "workers" or "soldiers", including a "core" if that's what they're based around. You take away all their communications equipment and any technological means they have of communicating over long distances ...
2
From what you've described about the world, it seems like the large Western/central region is difficult to pass through on land. Those in the Southern countries would want to sail to the Northwestern countries instead, for example. Another thing to consider is with so many countries on the East coast, passing through each civilization might be a logistical ...
2
A ravine in the mountain is not exactly the most productive place on Earth for farming: most of the people will be farmers, part or full timers. Wood will be easily gathered from the surrounding forests, and if you keep the production low, you might have iron/copper produced for the internal need, provided that the mountains have easily accessible ores.
...
2
Part of being involved in farming is needing to have metal, provided you have at least medieval tech levels. There are a lot of things you can use other materials for, but for them to last a reasonable amount of time (and thus not require regular excursions to collect more materials) you kind of need metal for a lot of things.
Because of this, it was rather ...
2
72x would be a real challenge, for the little ones !
So the giant would stand 131 meters tall, if we were the little ones.. That is big, a building 40 stories high, just below halfway the Eiffel Tower.. I wonder if medieval weapons would have any effect. His feet would be the size of a house, that is 13 meters long, say 4-5 meters high. Humans with swords ...
2
Yes
You've solved the one problem that matters - you don't need to care about the resources, man-power, or time needed to build the wall. With that convenience, the only issue is encompassing enough area and resources to have the number of people you want and the ability to supply their needs.
The question really is, how much of those needs must also be ...
1
If this is a phantasy world, you have options, besides saying "Its just magic look no further!".
OP doesn't specify. but in D&D there are methods, resources and opportunities to expand living conditions for city dwellers.
The natural world offers many resources to combat some of the obstacles that get in the way of city growth.
Sewer and ...
1
According to this site Ancient Rome did pass 1 000 000 inhabitants, just as Baghdad or Beijing (or other Chinese cities) had reached 1 000 000 inhabitants and beyond during Medieval era.
Dutch mentioned that your city would have about 10 000 000 inhabitants. It may be doable if the focus of an entire empire is to provide for that city (and if we stretch ...
1
I agree with the other sources here, oil lamps are probably your best bet. Something I'll point out though, is that if you have oil lamps you will probably have basic technology for electricity. Nothing like incandescent bulbs yet, but for very niche applications, like floodlights, early electric options are available.
Most notable among these are arc lamps. ...
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