You want to know the easiest generator to produce?
All it requires is copper wire, a large enough magnet, and a water
wheel. Yeah, generators are actually that easy, if you ignore voltage
regulation systems.
If a waterwheel isn't feasible, a Stirling Engine can be created
(albeit an inefficient one from fluid leakage) using TL 1 materials
and techniques.

On 2/20/18, shadow at shadowgard.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
> TL is a kind of slippery idea anyway.
>
> Because *historical* TLs aren't that good of a guide to what would
> happen in the real world.
>
> As an example "Roman" level tech *plus knowledge from higher TL
> cultures* gives you a *very* different set of doable projects without
> requiring much of a change in available tools.
>
> For example, semaphore telegraphs are quite doable (the lenses for
> telescopes/binoculars) are the hardest part). That alone is a major
> change.
>
> Heliographs are quite doable as well.
>
> Limelights may be doable and that gives really long ranges for night
> time messages (also nasty surprises for barbarians trying to sneek up
> on the defenses of a fortified city at night :-)
>
> Electrical telegraph is harder both because of the cost of the wires
> and because keeping people from stealing the wire will be hard :-)
>
> Crude radio (say spark gap transmitters and crystal receivers)  is
> doable.
>
> And that's just communications.
>
> Pick just about any field and without changing that tools and
> resources of X TL, you can get a lot of stuff that wasn't aviale
> until Y or Z, just because nobody thought of it, or they didn't have
> the theory to tell them it was possible.
>
> Just importing "books" (or some sort of media and readers for same)
> will result in TLs that don't much resemble history.
>
> And yes, things like a commsat/weathersat network are really cheap to
> buy and useful enough for folks to pay for willingly.
>
> So that native guide may have a sat phone with GPS, and check the
> satellite network for the weather that's approaching over the next
> few days.
>
> So without huge changes in culture (though you would get them
> eventually) you can have some major surprises for characters from
> higher TL worlds who don't stop to think things thru (ie a large
> percentage of PCs).
>
> So basicaly you can take a "historical" (or fictional) TL X culture
> and throw in various higher TL items. Some are luxuries the rich &
> powerful importeed. Others are cpommodities that are fairly cheap to
> support and useful enough to put up with the limits of having to
> import them and difficulty of getting them repaired locally.
>
> Check out any third world nation, especially in the back country, to
> see how this is playing out on earth.
>
> This means you can have a lot of local culture/flavor, as well as
> surprises.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
> shadow at shadowgard dot com
>
>
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