Kind of wierd, as I believe you could buy the stuff in the US without any kind of permit.

Funny enough, the early diesel tractors with hot bulb ignition they had back then could pretty much run on any kind of oil.

I don't think Guatemala is an island?

If I recall, the designer (a Dutch master shipwright) was bedridden from illness during the Vasa's construction and his nephew or assistant took over the project. The ship ended more top heavy than it should had been, contributing to it's instability.

I'm sure the later sister ships were built with improvements and changes, keep in mind the Vasa was at the cutting edge of ship design at the time - they were trying build not only large, but fast.

>It's not like they weren't producing plate armor in the early middle ages because it cost too much. They weren't producing it because they couldn't.

Not really, they could had taken smaller plates and forge welded them together into a larger plate by hand. At the extreme, you have smiths in 5th century India hand forging smaller pieces of iron into a 6 tonne iron pillar (see Iron Pillar of Delhi). But of course, doing it this way cost a premium in labour and fuel.

Actually, cast bronze would be pretty weak as is - some forging or hammering was usually done to strengthen and harden bronze tools and items.

Yeah, but copper and tin are much less common (hence, more expensive) metals than iron. That's why most cannons were cast iron instead of bronze, despite the latter being a safer material to make cannon tubes out of.

>The big issue with plate armor wasn't cost, so much as technology and infrastructure limitations.

Well yeah, better technology and infrastructure meant you can produce said things more cheaply - so the issue is COST.

>European ship cannons were perceived to outrange Japanese and Indian cannons because the Europeans were always a step ahead on daring to reduce windage, because of trust in their production processes.

Their guns probably did have better windage thanks to superior manufacturing (to achieve such boring precision, they literally used a lathe big enough to turn a cast cannon against a boring bar), and better gunpowder too, but being able to create a 1:50 windage to bore ratio cannon tube doesn't automatically spell out to the ability to mass produce interchangeable parts, especially when said parts called for reproducing machined dimensions to a hundredth or thousandth of an inch accuracy, which again something that wasn't worked out until the mid-1800s.

Interesting you bring up Roman coins, because I recently read that the debased "silver" coinage of the late empire (when silver supplies had depleted) were basically just copper coins washed in silver salt to give them a silver coating that was so thin that it rubbed off after moderate use. As the coins had to be stamped after the silver washed, for good reason any stamped impression made on them couldn't be too sharp or deep, lest the silver wash would be damaged and the copper base be exposed, exposing the farce.

You have to understand that they were still pretty limited in terms of large scale precision manufacturing back in the early 1800s. The skilled craftsmen of the time could certainly create very tight and precise fitting metal parts as showcased by the accurate timepieces made by 18th century clockmakers, and also Eli Whitney's stunt demonstration of interchangeable parts in a couple of muskets he had made by hand.

But to make precise parts consistently the same, and in great quantities cheaply was a whole different matter and wasn't really achieved until the mid-19th century. Until that time, complex mechanical devices and parts that required minute precision to work had to be made and fitted by hand and eye. Producing true interchangeable parts with this system was not economical. Even Eli Whitney, a pioneer in the field, failed to live up to his claim of producing 10,000 muskets in 2 years, taking 10 years instead. This rate wasn't much better than what the larger gunmaking firms in Birmingham, England (a major center of gun production at the time) were doing in the late 1700s without the aid of a interchangeable parts system.

>Every cannonball needs to fit the barrel as closely as possible to maximize the power of the cannon

Cannonballs of that period were usually casted from casted iron, with no final machining afterwards. Casting does not lend to precise final dimensions as 1. It creates a rough, imperfect finish, and 2. Most metal and alloys tend to shrink in the mold as the casting cools, leading to slight variance to the final dimensions of each casted shot if factors such casting/pouring temperature, composition, cooling rate, etc. are not exactly the same. In addition, rust and grime built up that inevitably occurs during storage/transport, especially on board a damp seagoing ship, would further change the functional dimensions of the casted shot.

So as you see, there had to be some amount of gap or windage between shot and gun bore in Napoleonic-era cannons in order to compensate for these discrepancies. Usually about a few millimeters for naval or artillery guns, or a few percent of bore diameter. In service, the windage grew significantly as each firing eroded the cast iron or bronze barrel (which were much less durable than steel or wrought iron barrels used in later guns).

In comparison, the British Brown Bess musket in that same period fires a .71 cal ball in a .75 cal bore barrel - a windage of about 5% - and it'll still develop a peak internal pressure of around 10,000 psi with the standard military powder loads at the time despite such a "loose" fit. So no, you don't need tenth of a millimeter precision for a Napoleonic cannon, and trying to make one so would had been prohibitedly expensive.

>Presumably, there is some minimal population that is a necessary condition for industrialization.

On the Italian peninsula alone, the Roman population was at least 14 million by 200 CE - compare to Great Britain in 1800 CE at around 10 million.

> Where did you learn all of this?

Just stuff I've read over the years from various sources, I have a particular interest in industrial technology and history.

Cannons in your specified period were cast as one piece - there's not much machine parts to be fitted or interchanged.

I recall a source stating that after rent, wood fuel was one of the biggest reoccurring expenses for a late medieval/early modern English household in the cities. I'll have to look it up again.

It should be noted that the coal mines in England were also conveniently located at the coast, so they could be shipped to the urban settlements of the country in bulk through sea transport.

EDIT: Found something in one of the volumes of History of Agriculture and Prices in England - there's a chapter on Fuel that states that a hundred faggots (a tied bundle of wood sticks, about 3 feet long and 2 feet wide) was sold wholesale at Cambridge for 6 shillings 8 pences in 1512. Compare this to an average of 2 shillings and 8 pences between 1260-1400 for a hundred faggots. So there was definitely a steady increase during and after the 15th century for wood.

The price of "sea" coal varied in price, depending how close of an access a market had to the coastal coal mines. At York in 1402-1404, a chaldron of coal (36 bushels by volume, equivalent to 1.5 tonnes of coal) could be bought wholesale at 5 shillings, dropping to 4 shillings by 1419. At the coastal Sunderland area, the price of coal was about half as much.

It's not just about population - China by the 1800s had a population approaching half a billion, but they had almost no industrialization compare to the Europeans at the time.

>Were they really there? I thought they made it to the point of being equivalent to the 15th century but never got any further technologically.

In terms of metallurgical technology, they were closer to 13th century Europe-level. Just looking at iron production, the Romans of the late Empire were still running dinky bloomery furnaces to smelt iron- not much different from the ones their forefathers were operating when their city was found.

Historic and archeological evidence suggest the Romans never produced more than a hundred pounds of iron from their furnaces, while European smelters by the time of the 1200s were already producing nearly a ton of iron per run from their larger furnaces (which were more efficient in terms of manpower and fuel consumption). By the 1300s, they were able to produce a few tons of iron from each furnace operation, which spelled out to a greater and cheap iron supply that helped pushed the adoption of plate armour, and then gun artillery.

As I understand it, we didn't really have truly interchangeable machine parts until the 1850s. Before that, everything had to be fitted manually.

Or just to create decent tight fitting pipes and piston heads in the first place. The early steam engines built by Newcomen and Watt had the benefit of three centuries worth of gunmaking technology to rely on, namely expertise in being able to drill long straight and accurate holes in gun barrels and cannon tubes - which conveniently carried over for boring out steam engine cylinders.

At that time, cannon founders were able to create cannons with a windage tolerance between the barrel and cannonball at a 1:50 gap ratio. So a cannon barrel made to fire a 10 cm diameter cannonball would only have a gap space of 2 mm - which was pretty good at the time.

In addition, 17th/18th century Europe was producing a lot more iron and steel than the Roman Empire ever did - Great Britain alone in the early 1700s was producing the same amount of iron as the entire Roman Empire during it's heyday (50,000 tonnes) with just 1/5th the population. Cheap iron was vital in allowing steam engines to proliferate for industrial and commercial use.

India was one of the largest manufacturer in the world up until the late 1700s, I will think they were on par with the Romans in terms of craftsmanship know-how during the relevant time. The 5th century Iron Pillar of Delhi is a testament to this, a 6-tonne monument of forged iron that even the Romans would had been hard pressed to create.