- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Well,
There's a character with a presumably related talent in the RP.
There's a character with a presumably related talent in the RP.
Dragon Ball: After the End
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
He's gonna need a really good chief minister.
I suspect he's likely to appoint Raditz, head of the Senzus, to the position. That's the one Vegetan Jaffur can know he can trust, because Raditz put his butt on the line during the Sealing on Jaffur's behalf, unlike literally anyone on Garenhuld except, well... Kakara.
Eheeehhh... uh. Synthetic rubber was a big deal during World War II because the plastics industry was in its infancy.
No synthetic rubber on a planet that I am pretty sure has a significant plastics industry? If only because it clearly has Internet and hypersonic cruise missiles and a vast network of highly sophisticated mass transit and other things that require at least late 20th century technology to build? Can we... maybe dial that back? A society with pre-1940 knowledge of industrial chemistry (needed to avoid synthetic rubber being a thing) would make it very hard if not impossible to build a lot of other stuff we know or have good reason to think the Garenhulders have.
Worldbuilding suggestion: The overwhelming oil monopoly is sufficient. The rubber monopoly really shouldn't matter very much, but it's a moot point because you make synthetic rubber from oil. And synthetic oil really is a horribly expensive way to do business, so the oil alone would do the job of giving Semdal the disproportionate economic clout you want. Oil is that important, and it sounds like Semdal could singlehandedly touch off an embargo that would make the '73 and '79 oil crises look petite and dainty.
Firstly, Goku was expected to go oozaru to do the job (power level 100-200). Secondly, if he failed but didn't die right away, zenkais are a thing.
Thirdly, as I recall, the whole "strand on random planet to kill inhabitants" schtick is what the saiyans of the Bad Old Days did with weak children, not strong ones. Reasoning being, in the brutal Darwinian way of the old saiyans, that either they'd adapt and come back as powerful warriors worthy of respect, or they'd get killed by the natives of the planet they were stranded on.
[X][FACE] ...your family is a traditionally influential one, and your father in particular possesses an outright leadership position over roughly half your population.
[X][ROLE] ...answer any questions directed to you. You have no address planned, but you will be prepared to field any questions they ask. Better to keep the focus on your father, but there's no reason to decline all questions.
[X][ROLE] ...answer any questions directed to you. You have no address planned, but you will be prepared to field any questions they ask. Better to keep the focus on your father, but there's no reason to decline all questions.
You're assuming that just because they have the ability to figure it out, they have done so.
Remember, anti-innovation, anti-curiosity.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, the thing is, they have technology. I mean, I get the whole "anti-innovation" schtick, but it has to be consistent on some level: the Garenhulders wouldn't be able to operate advanced technology and design applications of the technology they already have without some level of flexibility. Even if we assume that literally every major innovation in Garenhuld society was leaked to them by some Exile, someone has to be able to adapt known techniques to new situations.
Every time Garenhulders build a bridge, it's going to be slightly different from other bridges, because it's in a different location, the foundation supports have to be laid differently, the river current is different, and so on. If Garenhulders can build bridges that don't fall down under their own weight, it's because SOME Garenhulders are at least creative enough to take a well understood concept (design of a bridge) and genrealize. Likewise for every time the Garenhulders design a car, or plan a military operation, or even basic mundane things like organizing parties.
if the Garenhulders already have something like a reasonable selection of modern plastics available, they know or can readily figure out what rubber is and how to duplicate it. It's just another polymer. If they can build rockets and hypersonic jets and huge mass transit systems from their own ingenuity, this is a relatively simple challenge. Sure, their ingenuity is cramped. They don't think of speculative, radical ideas; they're too committed to minor modifications of existing ones. But that is exactly the kind of behavior profile that would greatly slow down "invent plastics in the first place" while doing little to limit the Garenhulder natives from adapting the basic concept of 'polymerize assorted petrochemical molecules').
They can be anti-innovation but if they were that anti-innovation, even in the face of overwhelming incentives like "they have our nation blockaded," they'd never have lasted four or five years, let alone twenty.
Every time Garenhulders build a bridge, it's going to be slightly different from other bridges, because it's in a different location, the foundation supports have to be laid differently, the river current is different, and so on. If Garenhulders can build bridges that don't fall down under their own weight, it's because SOME Garenhulders are at least creative enough to take a well understood concept (design of a bridge) and genrealize. Likewise for every time the Garenhulders design a car, or plan a military operation, or even basic mundane things like organizing parties.
if the Garenhulders already have something like a reasonable selection of modern plastics available, they know or can readily figure out what rubber is and how to duplicate it. It's just another polymer. If they can build rockets and hypersonic jets and huge mass transit systems from their own ingenuity, this is a relatively simple challenge. Sure, their ingenuity is cramped. They don't think of speculative, radical ideas; they're too committed to minor modifications of existing ones. But that is exactly the kind of behavior profile that would greatly slow down "invent plastics in the first place" while doing little to limit the Garenhulder natives from adapting the basic concept of 'polymerize assorted petrochemical molecules').
They can be anti-innovation but if they were that anti-innovation, even in the face of overwhelming incentives like "they have our nation blockaded," they'd never have lasted four or five years, let alone twenty.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
No one expects the kid to go native and become the most powerful Saiyan of all.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Ah, the benefits of a well-timed concussion. 
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You're overestimating the Garenhulders. While they can do small improvements and adapt principles to reality, they don't make leaps from, "these two substances are a bit alike," to, "oil to rubber." They have not even had the concept of synthetic rubber. They extract everything. If you suggested synthetic rubber to your average person — your average chemist, even — they'd blink and ask if Semdal had burned down at some point. Then they'd call you nuts because alchemy was discredited a century ago, didn't you hear the news?
Why don't they take the step anyway? For greater independence, if nothing else? Somebody must have thought of it at some point. Because Garenhulders have a flinch response to new ideas, even within the same field. Apply engineering principles to this plot rather than that one? Not new; same principle. Figure out how to turn oil into rubber? Old materials, but new concept. One is refining and respecting the old. The other...to them, that feels dangerous. If somebody needed it badly enough — "the entire world is blockading us and we have run down every solution all the way down to declaring war, a war we are most certainly now losing" — then they'd risk it. But not before.
This does make Semdal incredibly powerful economically; thus why I mentioned that. It's also why Aramaia sees such advantage in making them a protectorate.
Also I made Garenhuld via random generation and Semdal came up as both tiny and sitting on vast wealth when I did.
My understanding though was that while we do have synthetic rubber, it's still inferior to natural rubber, and you need natural rubber for things that need really high quality hard wearing stuff. Like aircraft, and laboratories. Hence natural rubber is hugely important to our society as well.
Cadis
Proud Capoeria Angola Quintal Capoerista
- Location
- United States
The earth had nuclear weapons (or at least knowledge of how to build them ((dr briefs mentioned nukes when he was observing Android 16's bomb)) as well as some pretty powerful conventional weapons. There's no way Goku could've succeeded with a power level of twenty.
Daecl
CURSED BY THE DICE
Presumably, if Goku has gotten strong enough to require nukes, he's had a few battles and zenkais because of it. So he could feasibly be way stronger than 20 at that point. And that's assuming they don't underestimate Goku and he didn't end up decapitating the world government before they could bring them into play.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, again, the point is that the saiyans as a whole didn't really care if Goku lived or died, or they wouldn't have sent him off to Earth that way anyhow. They may not have even known what the strongest power levels on Earth were.
It's important, but it's not on the same level as oil.
Eheh... Alchemy. Discredited. yes.
Um... they do know how chemistry works, right? They don't just have these random recipes that somehow work by magic and no one knows why? Because that would make it basically impossible for them to, say, design rocket motors for ballistic missiles, or construct new oil refineries.
And just to be clear, Garenhuld has plastics, right? Like, PVC, polystyrene, polyesters, polyurethanes, and so on?
See, natural rubber is basically polyisoprene, it is just another polymer. Do the Garenhulders not know this and just think of rubber as this magical substance that needs no analysis or comprehension? If so, it's kind of surprising that they ever learned to vulcanize rubber in the first place, without which it's pretty well useless for most of the things rubber is useful for.
As far as I can tell, the possible explanations for "no synthetic rubber on Garenhuld, it's just not a thing they would think of" are:
1) Garenhulders have scientific chemistry at all, in which case they shouldn't be able to design oil refineries or rocket engines.
2) Garenhulders are so incurious that even with an understanding of scientific chemistry, they don't even bother to learn the chemical makeup of well-known substances. In which case they probably wouldn't have developed scientific chemistry in the first place, and even if they did their material science would be extremly poor, which again would interfere with their ability to build rocket engines.
3) Garenhulders have scientific chemistry and know the chemical formula for ubber, but are utterly lacking in plastics. This raises many of the same problems because plastics are used for a lot of things and are one of the main reasons oil is so important anyway...
4) Garenhulders have scientific chemistry, know the chemical formula for rubber, and have successfully made a variety of plastics... But are inflexible that they are incapable of the leap "well, we've polymerized several dozen OTHER chemicals, why not polymerize this one too?"
...
My problem is, I'm losing my ability to comprehend how Garenhulder technology works, especially in the context of going medieval to Information Age in 300 years. Except in the context of, say, large numbers of Garenhulder decision-makers being meat-puppeted by some mind control entity that causes them to make character-breaking innovative decisions. Just having saiyans introduce the relevant technologies so everyone else can see how beneficial and profitable they are wouldn't be enough, because the Garenhulders as described would be functionally incapable of engineering. In the same sense that a person cognitively incapable of understanding the concept of "turning" would be unable to drive a car.
I don't mean to be rude by saying this, I really don't. I just think that you may have played up the Garenhulders' anti-innovation to a point where it conflicts with their ability to maintain a technological civilization.
To a chemist, figuring out how to turn oil into rubber isn't going to feel different from figuring out how to turn oil into any other plastic. And that process isn't going to feel different from, say, learning that you can extract rare earth elements and make high-capacity electrical batteries out of them. Or that you can make paper out of wood pulp, given that paper is utterly unlike wood.
See, if you told me "Garenhulders have a flinch response to new ideas, but are comfortable with applications of old ideas," I would predict that they would have, say, all the plastics or no plastics, great aircraft or no aircraft, and so on. Because once someone introduces the idea of the airplane, they keep poking and refining it, but they'd never have invented it. They might have, say, very sophisticated turboprop planes but not a single hot-air balloon, depending on who suggested what. Then someone proves that jet engines work and they start refining those, until they have hypersonic ramjet fighters or whatever... but haven't picked up comparatively easy, low-hanging fruit projects like weather satellites because orbital rocketry is "new."
The thing is, we've already established that they have an industrial civilization, which kind of places some constraints on which ideas they already have in their mental lexicon.
See, I am completely fine with this. My point isn't that Semdal shouldn't be tiny, spectacularly wealthy, and sitting on precious natural resources.
My point is that a natural rubber monopoly in a world where chemical engineers know how to make plastics and routinely produce them en masse just isn't that valuable... While the oil monopoly you also gave Semdal is ample to explain their geopolitical power, without even bothering to reference the problematic rubber monopoly.
The Fourth Monado
S U B A R A S H I I
- Location
- Away
tbh the Saiyans being the only thing that keeps Garenhuld from going directly back to medieval-levels of tech might fit with how Poptart's portraying the overall planetary culture
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well yeah, but there's only a few hundred thousand saiyans on the planet, and there weren't even that many 100 years ago when their industrial civilization was presumably at least around to some extent given that they've had time to go from subsistence farming to this 100%-commuter economy. And it's not like all those saiyans are concentrated in science and engineering and high politics and so on, given how many of them have relatively mundane jobs like schoolteachers, auto mechanics, and martial arts instructors.
The Garenhulders themselves might not have been able to build their industrial civilization alone, due to being too uncreative to invent it. But they must be able to sustain that civilization, there can't be a saiyan secretly behind every single thing the Garenhulders do that involves design, planning, tinkering with and improving on existing technology, or investigating the nature of the things they routinely use for the sake of understanding and controlling them better.
Or if there were, it would conflict with something Poptart noted earlier, because it would give the Exiles waaay too much exposure within Garenhulder society.
The Garenhulders themselves might not have been able to build their industrial civilization alone, due to being too uncreative to invent it. But they must be able to sustain that civilization, there can't be a saiyan secretly behind every single thing the Garenhulders do that involves design, planning, tinkering with and improving on existing technology, or investigating the nature of the things they routinely use for the sake of understanding and controlling them better.
Or if there were, it would conflict with something Poptart noted earlier, because it would give the Exiles waaay too much exposure within Garenhulder society.
I believe this is the explanation Poptart was trying to explain. Though 3 is also quite likely.
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Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
[X][FACE] Write In: ...you and your father fall somewhere between hereditary nobility and papacy. Chosen via Seer, you are the borderline worshiped leaders of your people.
[X][ROLE] ...answer any questions directed to you. You have no address planned, but you will be prepared to field any questions they ask. Better to keep the focus on your father, but there's no reason to decline all questions.
[X][ROLE] ...answer any questions directed to you. You have no address planned, but you will be prepared to field any questions they ask. Better to keep the focus on your father, but there's no reason to decline all questions.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
The point is exposure. However Dad is already giving an address so unless you have a specific things you want Kakara to say there is no point in Kakara giving on.Is there any reason not to make an address? Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of coming here?
Do you have something specific that you want Kakara to say?
If the point is exposure, then not doing the address is suboptimal. And that's not the only point of doing this. Remember the option description?
This is a chance to get experience addressing them, a job that we'll have in the future, a chance to show our skills, to make a name for ourselves, and to help determine how Garenhuld handles Ki. Our blog has helped draw attention to Ki, made it relatable, and here we can argue about it.
[X][FACE] ...your family is a traditionally influential one, and your father in particular possesses an outright leadership position over roughly half your population.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
When in doubt, split the difference. On the other hand, the thread picked the humey-loving diplomancer build, so we might as well use it when it counts the most.
Lampreys.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
When in doubt, split the difference. On the other hand, the thread picked the humey-loving diplomancer build, so we might as well use it when it counts the most.
Link? I don't remember this...
Lampreys.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
[X][FACE] ...your family is a traditionally influential one, and your father in particular possesses an outright leadership position over roughly half your population.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
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[X][FACE] ...your family is a traditionally influential one, and your father in particular possesses an outright leadership position over roughly half your population.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
Face vote broken.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
... Grumble mumble stupid browser errors. Thanks.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I guess we could give a TED talks style speech about ki. That would fit. We give a speech as an expert not a politician.
[X][FACE] ...your family is a traditionally influential one, and your father in particular possesses an outright leadership position over roughly half your population.
[X][ROLE] ...actively address the Congress. Your blog posts over the course of the year so far have achieved widespread recognition, your continued attendance at school has done a lot to normalize you in the public view, and you have a decent amount of capital. Plus, you're a thirteen-year-old girl; even by virtue of not being able to take you seriously, people won't think, "threat," when they look at you.
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