Talk:Undersea Kingdoms
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Here we go, some where to discuss the fate and nature of the merman and their "lands", if that is the right word.
First a note on the mermen themselves. I was thinking of making them very bimorphous, with the males about three times heavier than the females. In other words, I was thinking of giving them a bit of walrus character. Andy 11:47, 25 May 2008 (BST)
Just a thought on the idea of metal rich mermen. this probably would not be the only tradable resource that they have. haw about Under water oil deposits the mermen may or may not use but the drilling rights to them would be very lucrative. also oil also means plastics something the merpeople would have some use for as it does not rust in salt water (although floating away might be a problem). renewable tidal power sources for electrics ( although this energy sorse would be quiet dangerous to the mermen eclectics and water ooww!)geothermal springs on the sea bed may also be useful to the merfolk for energy.--Geoff 14:44, 25 May 2008 (BST)
It's a good point about the about selling mining rights. Some types of plastic are heavier than water - bakelite, for example. Being one of the earliest types of plastic, it probably would have been around during or just after the alliance war. In our own world its not used much anymore, but if a ready market exists then the surfacers might still produce it for export. Bakelite is hard but a bit brittle, so most products made out of it would be a bit chunky. I suspect that most of the underkingdom will be lacking electrical power, seeing as all that water makes distributing it a little difficult and dangerous. They may well have a few off world locations with a bit of crude wiring. Andy 16:10, 26 May 2008 (BST)
My view of the mermen is that they would have originally been a society based on clans, each clan tending to run around following a school of large prey (whales and the like), like the tribes that still live out in Lapland and northern Siberia, following great herds of caribou, just aquatic. As time progressed some clans would have given up the nomadic life, either finding reefs or coastlines where there was a consistent batch of animals they could protect and nurture, or finding aquatic plants, like in the sargasso sea, which they could tend; in essence both groups would become farmers. There would be a cultural split between the hunter nomads and the sedantry farmers.
Then when they begin trading for technology the splits would become more apparent. Farmers would be interested in technology that improves an area like nutrients and breeding programs, while nomads would be more interested in transports and communications. Both groups would go for weaponry. And all the surface power blocs would try and court both types of clan, since the farmer types would have good control and knowledge of the resources in one area, while the hunters would have a sketchier knowledge of the resources over a wider area. The farmers are likely to have become the better educated of the two groups, while the hunters are more likely to have retained more talent in the art of dimensional travelling (which would probably have been developed originally to keep up with/lay ambushes for the whales).
Does this contradict wildly with other people's ideas?--Alex 16:45, 28 May 2008 (BST)
Not wildly. The nomadic/pastorial groups makes sense. I suspect that the pastorials would alreday have had selective breeding before the recent interactions with the surface. It doesn't require any greate technology to do, just the realisation that it is possible. Small point though.
I'm not sure which would have the most dimensional expertise. The coral gates I was thinking of would be pretty immobile, and my first though was that they would take years (10-15 was my original figure) to grow, which makes the pastorials the most likely to produce and use them. Perhaps they originally used them to pass from one village to another, via some of the safer dimensions. Of course not all the villages would trust each other, so there would be different safe dimensions used by each. Andy 11:25, 29 May 2008 (BST)
This is also the place to discuse what level of technology the merman have. Seeing as we've pretty much agreed that the mermen have access to some sort of modern weapons, whether the built them personally or just aquired them by trade, let start there. Specifically, lets talk about submarines, seeing as they have been mentioned in the past.
What would mermen require from submarines? In the real world, their main advantage is stealth. There isn't much to recommend one in terms of armour, weapon/troop carring abilities or speed compared to a standard ship. Stealth though, isn't likely to be the mermens interest. If they wanted to be stealthy, they would just get out and swim - they'd be a lot harder to detect that way then 19,000 tonnes of steel. Besides, stealth is only really of limited interest when the coral gates allow them to drop off anywhere they like. Why bother sneaking when you can effectively teleport anywhere you like and surprise people that way?
What the mermen need is a something to counter depth charges and underwater sonic attacks, and also something that can sink steel hulled ships. In other words, they need submarines to provide heavy weapons and protective armour. Mermen subs are more like the surfacers tanks. This means they would probably come out looking rather different.
They'd want a design that could carry large numbers of torpideos and fire them quickly, and could out manuver other subs in a "Dogfish fight". Perhaps rather than a susage shape seen in the real world, mermen subs would look more like mantarays. The wings would allow for faster turning, and could have more weapons mounted along them.
The existence of such subs (Built or traded) would effect surfacer subs, causing them to adopt similar designs to deal with them. Any thoughts Andy 13:56, 30 May 2008 (BST)
