As this thread is for musing two things immediately occur to me:
There are loads of things that people have used for hundreds of years that are more simple than the kind of things we have now, and they have been surpassed because people at the time were unsatisfied with their operation and wanted something better. I know some old things have been hard to improve on such as leather, but even that is losing ground constantly as better materials, designs, and methods of manufacture are being introduced. Not like I have a beef with this kettle because it uses old methods, in fact I rather fancy one for heavy trips to the beach, but your appeal to something being desirable because it has a long history is something I find perplexing. Loads of things that are simple and have a long history are awful. I don't need to look much further back than Victorian England with something like
The Book of The Farm to see times were crap. I know it's not a popular view here because of the strong retro following but as we're doing musings in this thread - what many find comfort and romance in comes across to me like; She sits in her hovel trying to thread a needle through dim eyes by the glow of a stinking oil lamp. Across the room her husband is huddled under a damp woolly blanked on a strained horse hair mattress. He tries to speak and hocks up a whelk into his toilet rag. She doesn't know if it is TB or pneumonia that has him yet but the bronchial irritants from the burning twigs sure aint helping. She wonders if it would be better to just freeze. - Well, apart from the freezing I guess that could be some third world villages today. I guess the moral to all this is that to include a spin based on the fact that something was used a long time ago, or that it has been used for a long time, is very precarious ground.
Now to home in more specifically;
lots of pieces involved.....stove, pots, windshields..............all in an effort to boil water and boil it efficiently.....
Is it all just in an effort to boil water? If that were the case I think on shorter trips I'd use a Thermos flask and back it up with a bit of tin foil. Whilst I am vaguely interested in a Kelly Kettle for going heavy at the beach the size and weight of the brute lack versatility for anything else I do. True, I suppose you could warm something through on the top but I doubt cooking on it would be much fun at all. The little mini one weighs nearly half a kilo and the others are between about a 1kg /2lbs to a whopping 1.53kg or nearly 3lbs. That's a lot of weight for very limited functionality. Add in a single bottle of water and that's nearly 5lbs for the all up weight of my Thermos flask full which doesn't way anything like that. Clearly not great for day trips. And on a longer trip in which everything has to be man-portable I certainly wouldn't want to carry it. I can see why they are popular on a kayak forum I frequent, but not on foot.
By contrast I use stoves from the little ones Pocket Rocket size run on canisters not much bigger than an AA Mag to the lumpen Coleman 442 at around 1.5lbs, and they are much more versatile. They make it easy to cook on and to cook well. The one below is my current workhorse. Whilst it is true the Kelly kettle is versatile in the sense that you can burn all sorts of things in it, that's still only the default position I am forced to should my burner fail make a fire with something, stick pot on top. And that's in the event that my burner actually does fail. In the meantime real useful versatility comes from what I can do with the amount of size and weight allocated. That's easy, many stoves can do this but taking the example of the one below again. It has a remote bottle to it works in a good range of conditions. It has a pre-heater tube for the same. It chucks out a lot of heat and with the wide stable low profile I can stir fry with a wok on it, boil the kettle on it, do mundane reheating on it, in fact anything one can do on a domestic hob. If you can get the hang of the controls you can stick a biscuit tin on top and bake on it. All this with the convenience of location seldom being a factor Then there's that not only does it work immediately and offer me fine control I can also cook from a bivvy with little more space than a fat coffin. That's handy when you wake up in the morning or when it is raining especially. Then there's the convenient coffee stop along a route and so on.
Like I said, interesting thing for the beach and burning driftwood but I find it hard to ignore the impractical nature of it for carrying. For the amount of size and weight dedicated I can cook up a feast and that compares very favorable to Cupa-a-Soup to me. And if my preferred choice does go horribly wrong one day I'm only back to burning twigs 'till I get home anyway.
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