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Total Members Voted: 28

[WillowLuman]

Again, though, lots of hard work in order to get it right. Advanced technology may sound easy on paper, but in practice you really do need to put a lot of development into it. And seeing as how none of us are experts in any of the required fields, it would take even more trial-and-error. Understanding the principle =/= knowing what to do. You have a lot of experience in many fields, and a lot of good knowledge about physics and chemistry, but once again I doubt you've ever worked closely with an Active Denial System. I have no doubt that, given enough time, we could do it. No question. It's just that it would require the majority of our attention for it not to take decades. Even so, I doubt it could be done in under a year.

As for any of the native enemies of this world, them developing and deploying modern weapons within our life times is unlikely. As long as we don't give out the secrets of their production, anyway. We would have to explain the processes to nobody outside our fort, not even to share the information with the Mountainhome. No trading any of the finished hardware either.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Unless Wierd knows something that those people don't....

-snip-

I was basically right.

Again, though, lots of hard work in order to get it right. Advanced technology may sound easy on paper, but in practice you really do need to put a lot of development into it. And seeing as how none of us are experts in any of the required fields, it would take even more trial-and-error. Understanding the principle =/= knowing what to do. You have a lot of experience in many fields, and a lot of good knowledge about physics and chemistry, but once again I doubt you've ever worked closely with an Active Denial System. I have no doubt that, given enough time, we could do it. No question. It's just that it would require the majority of our attention for it not to take decades. Even so, I doubt it could be done in under a year.

As for any of the native enemies of this world, them developing and deploying modern weapons within our life times is unlikely. As long as we don't give out the secrets of their production, anyway. We would have to explain the processes to nobody outside our fort, not even to share the information with the Mountainhome. No trading any of the finished hardware either.

Don't even share how to make it with the dwarves at the fort.  Never know if one of them might be a spy for our enemies, or be on 'Cassius Ops' from our allies.

I personally am going to strip down the Slashdiver after the war if it survives and give it to wierd, since he is more... responsible with knowledge like that.  It will not have the core that allows planar travel.  There are no plans on how to build it, since I made it myself, and have seared all knowledge of its production from my mind.  The core will be reused to power the meditation plane that will be created.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Update to the war

Dragons-27
Phyrexians-17
Neutral-11
None-5

Dragons are 10 above.  Time to write the final conflict.  (10 above was a condition for me to start the final battle of the war)

[wierd]

I didn't mean we could "just make one".  But after a proper educational period to educate our fortress inhabitants, it would take at most 5 years to build such a system.

Weird would be quite busy... assisting eric in building industrial equipment, and being employed full time as an instructor in high technology, but our fortress would be a pinnacle of power and intellectualism in a dark age world.  It would be like alexandria.

Only our lighthouse would be the kind that kills people.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

...it would take at most 5 years to build such a system.

I would suggest not doing that...Cassius Ops and Black Ops from allies and enemies...don't want that sort of technology to get out to the world at large.

[wierd]

Without the education to go with it, it would be moot.

Take for instance, the advanced calculus and algebra available in 300 ad. It was beyond the understanding of most people.

Even if we wrote it down, and taught it in our schools, it would take similarly educated people to understand what a waveform equation meant. To everyone else, it would be nonsense.

Most would suffer from difficult notions of invisible light, let alone its properties.

Assuming we were tight lipped, and educated only a select few, like the masons did, we could effectively control the knowledge.

Not everyone who lived in alexandria went to the university there. You had to prove worthy of admission.

[WillowLuman]

I don't think that, as of yet, anyone else has the required background to even begin to comprehend advanced technology. No widespread use of the scientific process, none of the required infrastructure. Before a society at large can begin to produce these things for itself, it must have made the prerequisite advances necessary both to produce the components and have enough people that understand the principles. They need the infrastructure, and most importantly they need to have enough knowledge to produce their own experts.

They could of course learn from instruction, but that's the point; with their current understanding, they would need comprehensive education. We are the only ones able to provide instruction on these matters, so until their cultures have enough understanding in the matter to produce their own instructors, they cannot hope to develop the technology. Understanding of the physical principles that make the devices work is far more dangerous than the devices themselves falling into enemy hands.

For the real world, take Imperial Japan for example. They were able to reverse-engineer and mass-manufacture their own modern infrastructure and hardware. They even made improvements on some designs. However, for this to be possible, Japanese people had to go to the universities of other cultures that had the understanding of the physical principles needed for such development. Only after thus acquiring this background knowledge could they build the modern military they needed to stake out an empire.

[Corai]

-Oh, Weird. You have started more derailments on this thread then anyone else. -

[WillowLuman]

However, if we did let people make off with any of our hardware or our students, in several decades the clever people of their societies would probably have extracted and figured out how to apply the knowledge. The key words being several decades, though.

In general I think that controlling knowledge is wrong. The idea of keeping other cultures stunted so as to easily overpower them repulses me. However, this world is clearly not yet ready for the knowledge of modern warfare. Modern war technology + outdated tactics = unfathomable casualties for little advantage. We should allow other cultures to develop more tolerant attitudes and build up their own scientific knowledge before offering to share our knowledge. We shall allow ourselves merely to be seen as great wizards, freaks to be avoided but not of enough consequence to seem a threat (and thus provoke attack), rather than gods among mortals.

Left to their own, ah, devices, I estimate that it would take another few thousand years for any of the native goblins, humans, dwarves, or elves to reach the levels of the last century in our world. The fact of magic reinforcing superstitions that discourage scientific examination, as well as the interference of supernatural beings, would likely delay advancement considerably.

[Corai]

However, if we did let people make off with any of our hardware or our students, in several decades the clever people of their societies would probably have extracted and figured out how to apply the knowledge. The key words being several decades, though.

In general I think that controlling knowledge is wrong. The idea of keeping other cultures stunted so as to easily overpower them repulses me. However, this world is clearly not yet ready for the knowledge of modern warfare. Modern war technology + outdated tactics = unfathomable casualties for little advantage. We should allow other cultures to develop more tolerant attitudes and build up their own scientific knowledge before offering to share our knowledge. We shall allow ourselves merely to be seen as great wizards, freaks to be avoided but not of enough consequence to seem a threat (and thus provoke attack), rather than gods among mortals.

-If you do that, then necromancers will attack. I mean, wizard zombies? They would rule the world.


...Are there any necromancer towers in the Bay Fortress area?-

[wierd]

Agreed. 

First, we would design industrial equipment to jumpstart our defenses. Like the ostwald reactor, and a bessmer steel reactor.

The dwarves only need know how to operate these devices at first. (Much like the millions of people who use computers, but could never build one.)

Once the infrastructure to sustain the fortress is in place, people like weird will have free time.

This is when "apprentice testing" gets underway, and the next generation of scientists and technologists get chosen and trained.

By instilling a "culture" with the education, (again, like with the masons), you can effectively control the information. Really advanced and dangerous shit, like nuclear physics, would be witheld until suitable profiling of the aspiring student could be done. 

Our culture would prohibit the release of knowledge outside of the university. This is much like the less known side of the oath of hippocrates: don't teach any medicine to a non-doctor.

Violators would be punished. Severely.


We would train anyone willing to agree to our terms, and who passed our intelligence tests... but they would have to become members of our order, and renounce loyalties to outside politics.

Uncontrolled release of our knowledge would without question, destroy their world.

Part of the culture we would instill, would be one of nonaggression, due to the extreme nature of the knowledge. Creation of WMDs would be a capital offense.  The knowledge of advanced tech should be employed to benefit sentient life, not to subjugate ad enslave it.

Defensive weapons are fine. Deadly super weapons would be told about and explained, but only as a cautionary tale to inform that we have been there, and it was bad. We refuse to do it, and we refuse to tell you how to do it, if we even suspect that you be tempted to do it.

The culture wouldn't be about dominance or political control, it would be about proper and ethical use of knowledge.




Also... some of us are functionally immortal as long as we don't get offed.  Myself, eric, and hugo, for example. 2 necros, and a dragon.  No set expiration date.  We could ensure that the school never deviates from its moral obligations for political non-involvement.

[WillowLuman]

ninja'd by Weird's edit

I don't think that we'd instantly become a target for necromancers. After all, necromancers don't usually go raid each other in hopes of having necromancer zombies. Unless they launch assaults on settlements or attempt other forms of conquest, necromancers are also usually never bothered by the armies of any kingdom. As long as they are content to sit in their little domains, doing nothing more than preying on the occasional traveler who wanders too close, they are often seen as too scary for an individual to challenge, but not enough of a threat for a nation to challenge. This would be the ideal perception for our little enclave, minus the preying on travelers. Besides, should a necromancer attack we have 2.5 of our own to counter them, and this is if one attacks before we set up nifty modern defenses.

Here's thinking in the long term. For the forumites, we all would probably eventually succumb to age, necessitating the teaching of our knowledge. Weird and Eric are immortal due to their necromantic pact, and I probably am as well due to being a dragon. Presumably clockwork Gizogin could outlast a flesh body. I don't know if Corai's respawning preserves him from the ravages of time. Everyone else would probably have to rely on cybernetics. For the aging of non-forumites, Roead is a mummy, Jerry and Vemini are elves, and Captain Ironblood is a demigod. I don't know about SPHM or our miner friend in the clockwork body, though. Who knows about Oliolli's aging.

It's near certain that aging will be the absolute least of our worries, though. This story would have to go on for some time indeed for us to worry about anything more than 5 decades in the future, if that.

[wierd]

The problem we would have, is that things change, and time waits for noone, even immortals.

We would argue amongst ourselves.  We would have internal strife.  Outside agencies would seek to destroy our unity, and make off with the spoils, coveting our knowledge and latent power.

We would have to future proof against that.  We would probably have to make use of eric's geas ability to forcibly prevent our students from abusing their knowledge. Nothing egregious, just something along the lines of magically enforcing their oaths.

Internally, no single one of us should have unilateral power of any sort. We should form a leaderless council, made of immortal old fuddie duddies. We should limit each other's internal political power to avoid abuses, and if possible, even geas ourselves for the same reasons we do it to our students.

We would enter this arrangement of our own free will, and do so with the full knowledge of why we do so.

Our order *should* be seen as one held down by imovable inertia; no outside force would tip our hand. We only swat at armies on our doors, and that's it.  More neutral than the swiss.

Essentially, little more than a modern university in an ancient world, and a smal nation blooming around it with the benefit of technology and science. We don't threaten, and we don't send advisers.

[WillowLuman]

My original aim when I came to this place was to build a TARDIS and escape back to our homeworld. Now I want to find out what caused us to be here in the first place, and make sure that no one else gets trapped here. Of course, it might be fruitless, but it's what then again it might not be.

As for now, though...
HugoLuman dreamed himself staring into harsh white light. His four feet were nailed to a metal table, though he could feel only a numb false-pain from them; a plastic tube of some blue substance was stuck in a vein on his neck. Anesthetic, though it left him still awake, just paralyzed. Five men walked around him, all of them Gizogin. He found he could still move his eyes, though he wished he hadn't looked. The abdominal cavity was wide open, a bloody saw sitting next to him, Gizogins prodding at his organs and removing some of them.
Just as one of them said "Now what saw to use on the skull?" he was no longer on the large operating table. He found he was his original self, though his hands were tied. Standing in a line next to him were all the other forumites. And they all had ropes around their necks. He looked down. He could feel tightness on his own neck, and he could see he was standing on a floor hatch. All the forumites were standing on hatches. Looking to left he saw a hooded dwarf holding a lever. An audience of dwarves, goblins, and elves stood watching. The dwarf pulled the lever. One unified *clank* of many hatches opening.

HugoLuman awoke, and then after a few seconds of blurry vision opened his eyes. The thought having of see-through eyelids was suddenly very unnerving to him, though now he was glad to realize there was nothing to close his eyes to at the moment. It was only a dream. He raised his head and looked around. Everyone in the hospital was still asleep. The torches and lamps were still extinguished, except for the dim light from Gizogin's office that his powerful eyes could see the whole room with.

[Oliolli]

And... it allows us to make some pretty kick ass defensive systems.  Our enemies like to wear iron and steel armor..........what happens if we switch on burried high intensity magnets?

Magnets? How about uninsulated electrical wires?