The original sources of power

[+Oltux72 he/him]

We are told that the Threnodites arrived on space ships. And they designed flying cities. How did they power them? The first generation died from causes other than the Sun. So they spent years on Canticle without Sunhearts. How did they keep the cities flying?

And am I understanding this correctly? Did the first generation intentionally destroy and lose that technology to force their descendants to go into the Sun, lest Shades overrun Canticle?

[Lightspen of the Glass Sea she/her]

Maybe the technology simply deteriorated? If they didn't have the chorus yet, they wouldn't have been able to create new parts. Maybe they used whatever spaceship they arrived on until it fell apart, and by that point they had sunhearts?

[drunkenbotanist]

They tapped into the deep well of power always available to Threnodites: Misery and Puritan Angst

[JohnnyKaizen he/him]

On 10/2/2023 at 3:11 PM, drunkenbotanist said:

They tapped into the deep well of power always available to Threnodites: Misery and Puritan Angst

just sitting over here gasp-laughing at this

[Duxredux he/him]

On 10/2/2023 at 6:59 AM, Oltux72 said:

We are told that the Threnodites arrived on space ships. And they designed flying cities. How did they power them? The first generation died from causes other than the Sun. So they spent years on Canticle without Sunhearts. How did they keep the cities flying?

And am I understanding this correctly? Did the first generation intentionally destroy and lose that technology to force their descendants to go into the Sun, lest Shades overrun Canticle?

I think the Scadrian ship had purified Dor which was presumably enough for them to get back to wherever they would check in for an emergency. Other than that, I don't think we've seen what kind of Investiture sources are sufficient to sustain space travel let alone FTL. Based on what Nomad says while talking to Aux, the main constraints on space travel is getting a sufficiently portable power source. This can be found in portable power dense batteries (Sunhearts, purified Dor, I'll add Aether spores as their initial mass is a fraction of the end result), or anything that can indefinitely pull power from the Spiritual Realm (Bondsmith, Fused's Song of Prayer) so long as the power gain exceeds life support and propulsion demands. I don't think we've seen anything yet that could provide that kind of power on Threnody (I mean, maybe they have Shades run on a giant hamster wheel, but I don't think that's enough), so who knows if they're using a native technology or are using a non-native one like the Scadrians. Until we know how the power source actually works, if it was a renewable power source or just a really good battery (like buying a lot of purified Dor), if they had full knowledge and capacity to rebuild or run maintenance on the power source, I don't think we can say with certainty what pressures led to the transition to Sunhearts, other than at some point resource constraints led to the continued use of Sunhearts.

I will note that landing on Canticle has much lower power requirements than leaving Canticle - as any pilot who has had to glide in for a landing after running out of fuel can tell you. To leave Canticle they would need sufficient resources to sustain life and power to get to another habitable planet. Without knowing the state of the arriving Threnodites, we don't know what choices were available to them. Could it have been suppression of technology? Sure, but the full implications with that is that the Threnodites had a renewable and sustainable power source that was sufficient for them to leave Threnody, travel to Canticle, land with everything intact, avoid the sun long enough to not lose any important infrastructure, learn what the sun did to people and conclude that it was a viable method to reduce Shade production as opposed to using Silver, in addition to all of this have the necessary resources available to be able to obtain escape velocity, sustain propulsion, and life support systems to get to another habitable planet and then choose not to take that route and cripple their technological growth. Sure they can be stuck anyway and then choose to burn the old fuel cells, but that seems kinda dumb. Possible, yes, but that seems like a lot of assumptions to make with so little data when they can get stuck for simple reasons like "we didn't have enough fuel to get to different solar system" or "the important doohickey broke and we don't have the resources to repair it again so we're stuck here." I find it more likely that they had to make changes on the fly and had to repurpose space equipment by giving the parts to the Chorus and having them convert it into more efficient atmospheric equipment as opposed to someone choosing to strand them when they had the choice to get everyone off the planet.

Edited November 4, 2023 by Duxredux
Added thought