what do the engines driving these look like? how have they not degraded over hundreds or thousands of years? if the ancients had this technology why didn't they use it for anything else?
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in reply to @nex3's post:
cue every single male comedian ever making a joke about generations of people maintaining those traps.
Like the steam engine being invented by ancient Greece and only being used as a toy
If I've learned nothing from pseudoarcheology it's that the ancients had plasma generators and UFOs and stuff and absolutely nothing about the infrastructure or what they were doing with it has survived.
the main advantage is that self-destructing stone engine only has to work once!
To its credit, the Myst novels address this detail almost immediately in the first volume by proposing that D'ni machines were made not from metal but from nara, a kind of quasi-metallic stone that is ultra-dense, unreactive, and displays blessedly little friction when cast into mechanism components. How did they come upon such a plot-and-setting-convenient super-material? They simply wrote it into existence using The Art and went to go collect it with a Linking Book.
I'll admit, the "diegetic authorial indulgence" conceit of the Myst franchise is a bit on the nose at times.
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