Why Is the Latex from One Colony Valuable Enough to Justify Going to War?

[JBCrowson]

If you want to stay with the engineering, could the magic latex be made into self turning tyres / wheels? The energy saving from that would be enormous and avoid horses or other draft animals that need food, shelter etc. Your roads would have to be up to scratch in enough of your world to make it worthwhile.

The magic rubber could make better catapult weapons e.g. greater range / accuracy. Could you make hard (vulcanised) rubber projectiles from it that are targetable to a specific person / race / species?

 

[Patrick-Leigh]

If you want to stay with the engineering, could the magic latex be made into self turning tyres / wheels? The energy saving from that would be enormous and avoid horses or other draft animals that need food, shelter etc. Your roads would have to be up to scratch in enough of your world to make it worthwhile.

The magic rubber could make better catapult weapons e.g. greater range / accuracy. Could you make hard (vulcanised) rubber projectiles from it that are targetable to a specific person / race / species?

Actually, you don’t need to have motorized vehicles to want rubber tires. Even if they’re purely mundane, rubber tires would greatly reduce the noise a horse drawn vehicle makes and might be less prone to getting stuck in the mud than a cart with metal tire on its wheels. Magical rubber that does not get stuck in mud and retains its traction in nearly all conditions would be insanely useful to military vehicles. Mud can be positively devastating to armies, as explained in this video:

The point is that, even without engines, vehicles stand to benefit from rubber tires. If those tires can magically prevent a vehicle from sinking in deep mud, even better. They might not make the veg fly, but if they can make it levitate even a little, that’s going to make it less dangerous to move them along muddy terrain. That, in turn, can be the difference between a battle won and a battle lost.

 

[Rexenm]

Maybe a more psychological reason, like they are poisonous for birds and fish. That way the latex is a third integer, just like gem.

 

[Vaporo]

What if it's something a bit simpler. What if the latex is just really, really stretchy and really, really strong. Instead of steel cables, your civilization uses latex ropes. Instead of kevlar vests, they use fabric carefully woven from fine strands of rubber. etc. It wouldn't be a cure-all material, since it isn't rigid, but any application you can imagine where the only material requirement is "exceptionally high tensile strength and we don't care how much it stretches" they default to latex rubber.

And here's an off-beat idea: rubber bands for energy storage.
No, wait! Just hear me out.
Even most forms of (non-magical) energy storage have big caveats attached to the. Batteries have limited life and cycle counts. Flywheels are heavy and VERY dangerous if they break. Capacitors are bulky and expensive, etc. However, a storage device that simply stretches a magically strong and EXTREMELY stretchy rubber band (e.g. by winding one around some kind of spool) may be comparatively lightweight and cheap. Perhaps so much so that their technology has become completely dependent on it and it's worth going to war over.

In fact, I have now successfully nerd sniped myself with this one. If you assume a rubber band that can distend to ~50 times its original length and has a yield strength on par with steel (>= 500 MPa), you can pretty easily make a battery with an energy-per-mass density over ten times what some of our best real-world batteries (and even some chemical fuels) can manage.

Here's the math if you want to check it out:

 

[Patrick-Leigh]

What if it's something a bit simpler. What if the latex is just really, really stretchy and really, really strong. Instead of steel cables, your civilization uses latex ropes. Instead of kevlar vests, they use fabric carefully woven from fine strands of rubber. etc. It wouldn't be a cure-all material, since it isn't rigid, but any application you can imagine where the only material requirement is "exceptionally high tensile strength and we don't care how much it stretches" they default to latex rubber.

And here's an off-beat idea: rubber bands for energy storage.
No, wait! Just hear me out.
Even most forms of (non-magical) energy storage have big caveats attached to the. Batteries have limited life and cycle counts. Flywheels are heavy and VERY dangerous if they break. Capacitors are bulky and expensive, etc. However, a storage device that simply stretches a magically strong and EXTREMELY stretchy rubber band (e.g. by winding one around some kind of spool) may be comparatively lightweight and cheap. Perhaps so much so that their technology has become completely dependent on it and it's worth going to war over.

In fact, I have now successfully nerd sniped myself with this one. If you assume a rubber band that can distend to ~50 times its original length and has a yield strength on par with steel (>= 500 MPa), you can pretty easily make a battery with an energy-per-mass density over ten times what some of our best real-world batteries (and even some chemical fuels) can manage.

Here's the math if you want to check it out:

Not sure about all that, but having the stuff be used to make the belt in various types of engines is certainly plausible. Given the rise of steam and stirling engines, such belts are going to be increasingly important, so a resilient material is going to be essential.

 

[JBCrowson]

What if contraceptives made from the magic latex give special enhancements to the experience? Reckon some would go to war for that.

 

[Patrick-Leigh]

What if contraceptives made from the magic latex give special enhancements to the experience? Reckon some would go to war for that.

Ha! No, I don’t think they would go that far. The Hellfire Clubs and other hedonistic cults are certainly influential, but they won’t be able to convince a government to go to war just to get better condoms.

That being said, latex condoms would be something that might at least be in development at this stage. My setting has magical STIs, such as the Thunderclap, the Burning Snowcap, and Pimples of Vitriol, all of which can leave you sterile if only by damaging your ability to perform, so finding ways to reduce the spread of these diseases is a lucrative market many are hoping to monopolize. I can see this colony producing latex condoms as one of its exports, but they’d be a new and very small industry, not the main one.

Having the colony manufacturing condoms could be worth including, though, as it would be a good way to organically work in a conversation about why condoms won’t make it safe for Humans and Merfolk to copulate, which is one of the big obstacles preventing my Mermaid from being with her Human love interest. They’re not the first Human and Mermaid to fall in love, so they have plenty of examples of others trying to get past these obstacles, including with condoms, only to discover the hard way those solutions don’t work, create more problems, or simply make the experience so unsatisfying that it isn’t even worth it. (Think of two people trying to get it on while wearing thick hazmat suits. It’s not quite that extreme, but that’s the gist of it.)

Bottom line: I will have condoms be manufactured in the colony to set up organic expositional dialogue, but they won’t be the reason the Draconic Empire sends three Skyships to seize the colony.

 

[Vaporo]

Bottom line: I will have condoms be manufactured in the colony to set up organic expositional dialogue, but they won’t be the reason the Draconic Empire sends three Skyships to seize the colony.

Honestly, an empire sending three warships (even if they are new, shiny, and advanced) to conquer even a moderately productive colony seems pretty par for the course in a war-and-conquest-and-colonization society, especially if they're already at war and/or on bad terms with the original holder of the colony. Even if the latex were relatively mundane, I don't know that I'd question it too much unless "three skyships" actually amounts to a huge fraction of the empire's navy. Perhaps conquering this colony is actually more of a dry run for their new ships?

What if the latex were a powerful anaesthetic? Maybe more than just an anaesthetic. A fear stopper. Give your soldiers some gum made from this stuff and so long as they're chewing it they stop feeling pain, fear, or even inhibition about killing. It would certainly be valuable to a warmongering empire. Perhaps in nature the effect is meant to make insects and the like go off and to get eaten by predators they no longer fear.

 

[Vaporo]

Maybe it's supernaturally sterile? So much so that surgical implants and sewage pipes lined with it never need cleaned with more than a quick rinse from the nearest tap in even the most polluted environments.

Or maybe there isn't much special about it at all? Maybe it's essentially just normal rubber, but it's just so cheap in comparison to alchemy or whatever other alternatives are available that it's used for pipe fittings and belts and tires and whatever else you may think of anyways. You could even have a point where the empire has its supply of latex cut off and develops their alternative technologies to the point they don't even really need the colony and its rubber trees anymore. But they come and conquer/reconquer them anyways as a show of strength.

 

[Rexenm]

There could be a point where the latex has no magical quality, so it becomes prejudice against the sky ship. They come against the empire, knowing that their latex has no special quality, and then the market is flipped.

Then once flipped, they can see that war over such a powerful nation, was more about the latex than anything else, so they war against the prisoners.

They could see this presumption over such a latent quality, could be a reason to go to war anyway, and see that these pretenders are beheaded by the king and thrown into the gem volcano.

There could be two sky ship, one owned by the empire, and the other by pirates.

 

[Patrick-Leigh]

Maybe it's supernaturally sterile? So much so that surgical implants and sewage pipes lined with it never need cleaned with more than a quick rinse from the nearest tap in even the most polluted environments.

Now that has some serious potential. If the latex is a surface onto which pathogens, mold, fungus, and other nasty stuff cannot propagate, then it would be incredibly valuable in the medical field. If you can make it so it won’t bother people with a latex allergy, then you’re really cooking with gas, as one of my college professors put it. Covering wounds with the material would greatly reduce them from getting infected, which is something that the militaries of the world would absolutely want, and to deny their enemies from having. After all, the more soldiers you keep from dying from infected wounds, the better your odds of winning.