ZOMBIE FORUMS

I'm thinking (and what fired this thought) of the barracks-like buildings in the last comic (the first one in the N.C. storyline), it all seems somewhat like Soviet-era concrete blocks-style to me.

What do you think? How technologically superior are they?
The rifle the dame is holding (wish I'd posted this yesterday) looks like a decent equivalent American Civil/Independance War Rifle to me.

Also, their cultural attitudes seem to be somewhat southern, wild-west and industrial at large, probably partially colored by the emergence and integration of new technologies into existing society.

It also seems like the geography of the N.C. matters a lot to it's culture. Seems like a vast northern frontier with population hubs scattered about. A powerful nation still in slumber they'll wake up in a few generations and start marching south and sending ships abroad to other continents, I think. Or perhaps not.

What do you think?

The wiki is very sparse, so yes, let's improve it. The N.C. seems very much like some nation in one of my campaign-worlds... basically a vast expanse like Russia but with more population (decent, if intermittent population centres as well as large sprawling rural communities), industry and diversity.

Hehe, I like the bit about 'odd rumours in Tsuiraku' though. ;^_=

Considering the quality of their firearms, they're likely pretty far into the industrial revolution. Consider the infrastructure needed to build a firearm: You need someone to mill or forge the receiver, the barrel is general forged by hand or machine, you need a lathe to rifle the barrel, you need high-quality steel for the chamber/barrel/cylinder or else it would blow up from the pressure, you need a brass puller to make cartridges, black powder for propellant (or smokeless powder, cordite, or some other modern propellant, which all use refined petroleum, an entirely seperate industry), phosphorous for the primers, and obviously some schmuck who doesn't mind getting lead poisoning for minimum wage to cast bullets.

They won't have automobiles or electricity yet, but they've likely grasped the concept of steam engines and other simple machinery. We didn't have firearms of the quality they have until around the late 1860's, early 1870's. Now, since it'sa confederacy, probably different states have different economies and technological development levels, but who knows.

Remember that a good chunk of their technology is not their own, being instead gleaned from randomly pillaged dwarven bullshit. They are probably hitting advances out of order.

It that isn't enough, magical fuckery is probably partially or totally replacing whole chunks of technology. Why bother inventing a lightbulb if you can have a first year magic student from an arcane community college make a rock shine brightly whenever it is turned upside down. Magic is probably really handy, and a hell of a lot cheaper than some of the more finicky metallurgical bullshit we normally have to go through, in the manufacturing process. Get the chemical proportions right and separate out impurities with the proper chant and then get the crystals in the metal to form in a pattern that just doesn't happen naturally. You could get some really cool stuff going.

Magicians are going to be expensive, but not any moreso than the hoards of master blacksmiths and metallurgists and craftsmen you are going to have to have anyways. And they can save you one hell of a lot of time and effort all the while doing things that can not otherwise be replicated. You only need one per facility plus a couple novices to do the brute work.

An excellent point, Labrat. Why invent the steam engine if you have magic for long-range transportation? Then again, teleportation likely isn't as commonplace as, say, trains for transporting massive amounts of cargo and/or passengers for long distances, but we have seen an excellent example of just such transportation when Meji and Ellis first set out on their journey.

Airships, though. Until air travel became commonplace, the easiest way to transport large amounts of cargo long distances was by water. We know they have airships to some degree (mentioned by Meji and Ellis as alternate transportation) but we haven't seen an example of one thus far. Considering that this is ES, they're likely heavier than air craft that are kept aloft by magic, as opposed to something like a dirigible.

Still, magic just isn't as available as massive amounts of labor available from the peasantry, and you can train some schmuck to handle bellows and a hammer and tongs much more quickly and easily than you can train a magically-inclined individual to use magic. Magic can't be that widespread, except in limited cases, such as Tsuraiku and the elven city. So likely they've figured quite a few things out the old-fashioned way; magic has just altered the natural process.

Something interesting to watch would be how the development of firearms would change if cartridges had become commonplace soon after the development of percussion firearms. The first cartridge pistol was a revolver, which came about directly because percussion revolvers were already available. And those evolved out of the need for a rapid-fire repeating handgun, and the revolver was the most efficient method for achieving that with such technology. But the revolver is much more complicated than a simple semi-automatic pistol. A lot more. If cartridges were invented early on, would the revolver ever have come into being?

Oh, I am sure they will still have massive conventionally fueled furnaces being manned by a dozen underpaid and overworked bastards. This is the confederacy and unskilled labor is cheap so they will be using it wherever practical. Just as a lightbulb wouldn't be invented if you had an ample supply of glowing stones, you aren't likely to invent the tractor as long as you have your legions of humble slave laborers to hoe your fields for you.

But sometimes, just sometimes, an innovation is too good to pass up even if you have another method of getting the job done that works just as well. Your dirt-cheap laborers need to be fed and tended to a bit when they are injured, they get drunk and start fights or rebel, they need to be ordered around all day by somebody with a gun so they don't just run off. Sometimes its just less of a headache to have one halfway well paid bastard on a tractor than a dozen guys in a chaingang with farm implements. Even when you have a million slaves piled into storage.

In this case though, there isn't too big a difficulty. Normally (presuming that you are attempting a primitive version of an assembly line here) you will have a dozen or so brute laborers working at any given time, a well trained gunsmith, a metallurgist (probably splitting his time between forges) to keep the metal right, and possibly a separate blacksmith to help handle and manage the working of bulk quantities of hot metal. There will probably be some basic support staff around treating the inevitable wounds (laborers are cheap, but ones acclimated to the job are a commodity) and keeping everyone constantly fed and watered. Throw a single competent magic user into the mix (also splitting his time between forges) and you will probably both increase the total production, quality of goods (possibly to a miraculous degree), and damn near eliminate the need to recast flawed materials. If he can invest implements with the ability to manage metal temperature or consistency or induce a certain type of crystal growth, he doesn't even need to be in that particular facility on a daily basis. It might be best to just have the magician and the metallurgist be the same person, if they are trained right.

I'm going to have to reread the comic from the start to see where you guys are getting a lot of this stuff, because I've been reading it from day one and a lot of what gets tossed about around here as if it's fact hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever actually appeared in the comic.

Welcome to the Home of Unfounded Speculation. It's the Mainstay, Pastime & Currency of the Forums.

This thread needs more Arcanum.

Notice how the rifle gleams? ... late 70's then or maybe even 80's? Looks like she has some sort of pump-option.

Also, some of their buildings were half a three-dimenions circle, those shapes are hard to build.
I think Poe is writing the N.C. as very high-tech, and it'd be a good magic-technological trinity between Tsuiraku as Wizard, Veracia as Cleric and the N.C. as technology.

Tsuiraku: Arcane Magic /Trinity
Veracia: Divine Magic /Trinity
Elves: Perfected Arcane and Divine Magic
Dwarves: Technology and Magic
Northern Confederacy: Technology /Trinity

While Tsuiraku and Veracia (and the Ensigerum) are the children of the elves the Northern Confederacy hails the past of the Dwarves.


All in all, studying their infrastructure, I'm going to put a bet on a modified 1890's, but the next technological revolutions won't be as fast in the coming as in our world.

Not exactly unfounded. Some of it is logical derivation, given some basic starting points. Granted, some of the conclusions hang on some very thin limbs.

And half of our raw materials are not from the comic itself, but from things that Poe or Impy has let slip at one time or another. You will have to reread a whole lot of threads to pick up all of that stuff.

Except that stuff we have to migrate into the wiki

The Pedago-s tell us Dwarves couldn't do magic.

I'm actually a member of the Brotherhood of Unfounded Speculation.

It's my JOB to come up with crackpot theories.

Couple of points. Hemispheres (half three-dimensional circles) aren't too complex structures. Arches have been in construction since ancient ages, and you can look at igloos to notice that they could be built where a square house with a straight roof would be impossible.

Also, there's no divine magic, other than that made by the gods themselves (and maybe the moths, depending on whether the gods gave them enough). And then it's really mostly a matter of complexity, rather than fundamental source. Veracia's god is a joke to every magically advanced society (yeah, both of them). The Church approved magicusers are regular magicians that have been neutered, pretty much.

Finally, high-tech is a relative term, and misleading. I'd say technological society rather than high-tech.

Right... thanks for putting me on track. And I was going to retract the bit on the 'splatter' though it does remind me of a shotgun.. nice rifle tho'.

Hmmmmm, right about the architecture, but their technological society's outward appearance still gives me a Soviet-era barracks-like concrete frontier feel.

What do you others feel, intuit, know about the N.C.?

Actually, you are likely to invent the tractor under precisely those conditions, because you don't have to feed it. Legions of humble slave laborers can't hoe the fields for you if you've starved them to death, and the more of them you have, the more food is diverted to feeding the laborers, not the overlord. There comes a time when an alternative is sought, and that's when the balance between the effort of feeding the slaves and the effort of inventing (and feeding) the tractor turns in the latter's favor. Whether this has ever happened in real-world societies (as opposed to someone pre-empting and inventing the tractor for grins, then the invention being found useful) is one of those things that economists and anthropologists argue over, but left to its own devices, a society eventually will figure this out.


One little thing in the latest strip: notice the domed skylights in the long building in the first panel? Making a hemispherical piece of glass requires a lot more technical savvy than making a hemispherical stone arch.