Dragon Ball: After the End
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
If that was the case they would never go to war and we know that they do.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
But the thing is, from Kakara's IC perspective it's incredibly unlikely, and thus suspicious. If we ignore OOC concerns the only reasonable response is that this requires examination and consideration - we're asking if there's a blatantly OOC reason for it not to be a concern, much like we were willing to drop speed-of-light technique shenanigans because you said you didn't want to have to think about the physics of apparently FTL combat.
Or, put another way:
Yes, they are in fact hiring thousands of people for such tasks. I imagine it might very well be the largest job sector on Garenhuld.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Thousands in a population of billions is not that much. However they likely only need thousands if they have good communications and are willing to share.
- Location
- U.S.A.
Even then, they likely have hundred of "inventors" who want to see things change, but can only do so through the strict guidelines. I imagine this profession might have a suicide rate comparable to dentists, which then only reinforces the idea that innovation is dangerous.
--"He thought about new ideas too much and then killed himself because he couldn't handle it," When its
--"He knew what needed to change 50 years ago and he just can't take one more second of waiting"
Poor sods.
I fell out of my chair laughing at this line. Dear god.
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Thousands per firm.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
There have to be a bunch of Saiyan owned and run firms. It is the only way this can make sense. However, that comes back to the problem of how the Exiles don't run the whole economy?
Edit: Then again considering how much more Exile money is worth I suspect they at least control a sizable percentage of it.
Edit: Then again considering how much more Exile money is worth I suspect they at least control a sizable percentage of it.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I'd argue that if they came to the conclusion that Ki Users had been secretly running the world for centuries, they'd conclude that 'ki users running the world is a safe scenario' and now want it in the open (less unknowns) and with them as the ki users in question. It's clear Garenhuld has an aversion to the unknown, not an attachment to the status quo. Or else we wouldn't have nations seceding, other nations trying to conquer them, and so on.
In this example;
Poptart explicitly outlines obviously self interested parties leveraging the fear in their favor. But the common man has no investment in maintaining the status quo per se, they only do so at all because it is 'known' and if they see a 'proven' status quo that isn't their own and appeals, they jump right on it.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Saiyans likely make tones of money just from not being afraid of the unknown. They have no problem doing jobs away from the cities and collecting the extra hazard pay. There is no such thing a poor Saiyan.
Edit: Considering Goku's backstory many actually likely live in the wild just to emulate him. Garenhulds would find the idea of a camping trip crazy.
For Saiyans however "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the baddest motherfucker in the goddamn valley."
Edit: Considering Goku's backstory many actually likely live in the wild just to emulate him. Garenhulds would find the idea of a camping trip crazy.
For Saiyans however "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the baddest motherfucker in the goddamn valley."
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
...Point.
Mitsuba:
"Garenhulders are not stupid. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle Kakarot, on the other hand... I think he must have gotten a lot of the Mister Satan and Ox-King genes, and not a lot of the Briefs genes."
[facepalms]
See, the reason I keep harping on this is that while this works for technologies invented prior to, oh, some time in the early 1900s... It kind of breaks down for 20th century technology, with its complex machinery, precision design, and use of radical new materials like concrete and steel and plastics to get results you just can't get with traditional materials like wood and stone and natural fiber.
The problem is that for most 20th century technology, adaptation requires redesign. A tank is not a bulldozer and a bulldozer is not a truck and a truck is not a car, even though each item in that series is in some ways related to, or similar to, or an adaptation of another item in the series. To turn a car into a viable truck, a truck into a bulldozer, a bulldozer into a tank, nearly every detail of the machine has to be if not redesigned, at least seriously examined to see if it needs redesign.
In a world where it takes five years for a car manufacturer to react to the fact that their automotive engine (I assume it's a car engine) is falling apart often enough to be a scandal and that they need stronger bolts somewhere inside... Organizations are not going to be capable of redesigning anything quickly. This creates some problems in the context of adapting your existing technologies to cope with the introduction of new technology.
Or even accommodating new technology in the sense of "hey, we had bridges, we now have and Know trains, but now we need bridges strong enough to hold up locomotives, so that trains can cross rivers." Or "we have airplanes, now we need places for them to take off and land and shelters to keep them out of the weather" Or "we have some kind of hellafast ramjetturborocket engine to power missiles, now we need a way for the missiles to know where they're going."
That's not a problem if people's standard of what is acceptable/Known technology can wrap itself around ideas like "well, just make the same bridge out of stronger stuff or thicker beams." Or "we know how to pave a big flat piece of land for a road or a city square, so let's pave a runway and build some giant hollow warehouses as hangars" Or "we have radar, so we just need to make it smaller."
When you initially said "Garenhulders are good at adapting known technologies but absolutely terrible at discovering new ones," I imagined something like that. In that scenario, you only have to show them how an internal combustion engine works once, powering a car. Then they will build bigger internal combustion engines to power trucks and armored cars for fighting. You may have to show them the idea of caterpillar treads before they'll build a tank on their own, but if you hand them all the pieces they'll figure it out eventually. Because, well, if you give them ham and the idea of a sandwich, they will eventually realize that ham+sandwich equals a ham sandwich. That if all the pieces of the system are non-terrifying Knowns, they won't be hopelessly allergic to putting the Known pieces together in a new yet foreseeable way.
...
But that doesn't work if the Garenhulder's attitude towards mechanical design is such that changing one bolt and leaving the rest of the engine the same is "hm, five years of feasibility studies is only enough because it looks like if we don't make the engine more reliable now, we go out of business." Because if changing one lousy bolt is that hard, modifying a car with armor plating so that it can fight, or turning a car into a truck so it can carry more cargo, has got to be borderline unthinkable.
Faced with the problems I mentioned earlier, they'd be freezing up and going "Wait, make the bridge STRONGER? Who knows what might happen! We can't do that!" Or "no one ever put an airplane under a roof before, what if something goes wrong?" Or "Radar is something a mysterious wizard showed us that barely fits in a building! You can't make a missile that uses that!"
...
Which leaves me imagining the saiyans laboriously having to hand-lead the Garenhulders through every single tiny step of the Industrial Revolution, because they can't do any of it themselves. Not even the parts like designing a viable railroad bridge after you show them trains, or a viable airport after you teach them to build planes.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Personally, give how many of your key objections are military related, and how much the military in the real world tends to innovate, I have to wonder if the answer isn't 'military careers tend to attract the Mayas of the world, and their superiors and comrades tend to overlook a certain degree of laxness in field improvisation if it pans out'.
Because they gave it to them wholesale:
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I'm sure there are some curious garenhulders who managed to hop on the "massive tech improvement" train when the Saiyans started it moving. So the Saiyans wouldn't be entirely alone.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Do we know of any "curious" garenhilders besides the confirmed mutant?
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
The very behavior of ostracizing the curious for being curious heavily implies it's a thing that happens enough to have a response other than 'stare at them like they grew five heads'.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, I could work with that... but that would in turn require that the people running the organizations be aware of the need to make dysfunctional or inadequate things work better, and acknowledge it rather than opposing it.
it would also put a lot of pressure on employers to streamline the process, if only because a company that needs only five thousand man-years of exhaustive consideration by its research team to build a better car engine will tend to outcompete one that needs ten thousand man-years. You'd see a trend towards that.
Yes. See, the Race at least makes sense with their technological hyper-conservatism. In that if you point them at a very specific problem and demand a solution, they will start working on the solution, not just not try unless they see a solution that
The only answer I can think of is "They DO, but they go to a vast amount of trouble to avoid creating the appearance that they do. Virtually every saiyan with the slightest inclination to run a business that works with technology is a secret mastermind frantically trying to uplift Garenhuld technologically, while trivially outcompeting every native corporate leader who goes up against them just by doing different things and using magic neuralyzers to convince everyone they're time-tested."
Except, if she keeps this up for another few years, Maya.
The thing is, a lot of the improvisation isn't field improvisation. Somebody had to design those hypersonic missiles. Somebody had to sign off on the missiles. Somebody had to figure out how to manufacture the missiles. Somebody had to build the assembly line machinery to build the missiles. Someone had to design those machines. Someone had to build the tools to make the tools to make the tools, and so on.
There is a huge military-industrial complex, much of it not all that "military" in nature, that goes into the production of an advanced weapon. Nobody involved in that process can realistically have been the kind of obstructionist stick-in-the-mud who would insist on five years of studies to change one bolt in a car engine, while leaving the rest of the engine unchanged.
They could be super-conservative technologically compared to us, and desperately afraid of anything they hadn't seen tried repeatedly. But they couldn't be balking every single time anyone proposed changing any single feature of a complex design with thousands of interrelated parts.
Plus, I could equally well give examples that use civilian technology. If cities these days are hundreds of miles apart, the railroads and other infrastructure that enable commuting to and from the cities are on the level of maglev trains or at least what we call high speed rail (like the Japanese bullet trains or the TGV). A high speed train is another one of those things you have to put a lot of precise design work into. Have to make a great many specific choices, without overthinking each one and taking five years to mull it over. It is probably harder to design correctly than a World War Two tank... and yet a World War Two tank is itself a masterpiece of intentional little design modifications to technologies that were well known before the war, but now put to different uses.
A civilian jet airliner? Same story. A server farm? Same story.
One thousand people, working with superhuman speed, strength, and total privacy could produce examples of all kinds of amazing things. Airplanes, computers, et cetera. No problem.
The problem is then that the Garenhulders, as described, can't adapt those technologies, they can't do anything more than ape them. Because there are thousands of individual parts in each design, and they're too conservative to do more than slightly tweak a few parts per design in a generation.
It works just fine if the Garenhulders only have their freakouts about things that are genuinely new (e.g. the sandwich, or the ham) but can combine them comfortably once they're done freaking out over the novelties (and make a ham sandwich).
It doesn't work without that. They'd be comfortable with a lot of technology up to... oh, some time in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and then just stall out and be unable to improve it perceptibly in any meaningful way unless a saiyan is specifically holding their hand and overriding their freakout moments.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
It does not even have to be a business working with technology. A Saiyan running any business will be able to out compete everyone else. Just by being willing to do things like refining their paperwork or taking advantage of new opportunities.
@PoptartProdigy : How do trade secrets work in this world? Is it possible for Saiyan companies to not share how they are doing things and just sell the results? For example Saiyans selling artificial rubber and pretending they have some secret supplier. Or that they are using an old family recipe and not sharing it.
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Honestly, I feel like an eventual result of the saiyan population, if there hadn't had to semi-reveal themselves, is that they would have out-populated the actual Garenhulders and replaced them with a populace of disguised saiyans vaaaaguely acting out garenhulder culture (but not really).
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I love the double pun it is so brilliant and subtle.
- Location
- Australia
@PoptartProdigy, are there any horror movies revolving around the concept of inventions and the people who make them?
Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere
I see your point. However, I wonder if that's actually already happening in story, I.e the whole abandonment of their innovation phobia due to reaching 20th century level technology.
I mean it was never going to be a quick thing, and quite possibly the only reason we don't know about it is because we the character never looked into this, plus the Exiles having a sort of racial stereotype of the garenhulders as unimaginative idiots.
The nuclear ICBMs had to have come from somewhere, and it makes sense for the military to be the first to develop something like this. This would make us not knowing even more likely, since the innovation-phobia would make the military extremely cautious about who knows about it and make them have stringent screening processes.
I think you missed the point: they are aping them. They haven't perceptively improved, unless you count wider implementation of things.
The project likely involved creating dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of slightly different designs for anything and everything. The Garenhulders grabbed that, implemented it, and then kinda stayed there. Most of the progress made in the last 20+ years would have been further distributing the discovered technology as they get around to it.
The amount of improvement their technology would undergo in a thousand years would probably equal 1 of ours.
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See, I could work with that... but that would in turn require that the people running the organizations be aware of the need to make dysfunctional or inadequate things work better, and acknowledge it rather than opposing it.
it would also put a lot of pressure on employers to streamline the process, if only because a company that needs only five thousand man-years of exhaustive consideration by its research team to build a better car engine will tend to outcompete one that needs ten thousand man-years. You'd see a trend towards that.
Yes. See, the Race at least makes sense with their technological hyper-conservatism. In that if you point them at a very specific problem and demand a solution, they will start working on the solution, not just not try unless they see a solution that
The only answer I can think of is "They DO, but they go to a vast amount of trouble to avoid creating the appearance that they do. Virtually every saiyan with the slightest inclination to run a business that works with technology is a secret mastermind frantically trying to uplift Garenhuld technologically, while trivially outcompeting every native corporate leader who goes up against them just by doing different things and using magic neuralyzers to convince everyone they're time-tested."
Except, if she keeps this up for another few years, Maya.
The thing is, a lot of the improvisation isn't field improvisation. Somebody had to design those hypersonic missiles. Somebody had to sign off on the missiles. Somebody had to figure out how to manufacture the missiles. Somebody had to build the assembly line machinery to build the missiles. Someone had to design those machines. Someone had to build the tools to make the tools to make the tools, and so on.
There is a huge military-industrial complex, much of it not all that "military" in nature, that goes into the production of an advanced weapon. Nobody involved in that process can realistically have been the kind of obstructionist stick-in-the-mud who would insist on five years of studies to change one bolt in a car engine, while leaving the rest of the engine unchanged.
They could be super-conservative technologically compared to us, and desperately afraid of anything they hadn't seen tried repeatedly. But they couldn't be balking every single time anyone proposed changing any single feature of a complex design with thousands of interrelated parts.
Plus, I could equally well give examples that use civilian technology. If cities these days are hundreds of miles apart, the railroads and other infrastructure that enable commuting to and from the cities are on the level of maglev trains or at least what we call high speed rail (like the Japanese bullet trains or the TGV). A high speed train is another one of those things you have to put a lot of precise design work into. Have to make a great many specific choices, without overthinking each one and taking five years to mull it over. It is probably harder to design correctly than a World War Two tank... and yet a World War Two tank is itself a masterpiece of intentional little design modifications to technologies that were well known before the war, but now put to different uses.
A civilian jet airliner? Same story. A server farm? Same story.
One thousand people, working with superhuman speed, strength, and total privacy could produce examples of all kinds of amazing things. Airplanes, computers, et cetera. No problem.
The problem is then that the Garenhulders, as described, can't adapt those technologies, they can't do anything more than ape them. Because there are thousands of individual parts in each design, and they're too conservative to do more than slightly tweak a few parts per design in a generation.
It works just fine if the Garenhulders only have their freakouts about things that are genuinely new (e.g. the sandwich, or the ham) but can combine them comfortably once they're done freaking out over the novelties (and make a ham sandwich).
It doesn't work without that. They'd be comfortable with a lot of technology up to... oh, some time in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and then just stall out and be unable to improve it perceptibly in any meaningful way unless a saiyan is specifically holding their hand and overriding their freakout moments.
Consider: if the common explanation explanation for the tens of thousands of disguised, disunited Saiyan inventors introducing technology is, "I found it", would any of them notice if a lot of those designs actually were relics of ancient civilizations? Heck, perhaps everybody already does know that Garenhuld is dotted with forgotten hypertech ruins and the GM just hasn't mentioned it because the character doesn't think it's noteworthy. There may be a steady influx of new designs each year from things people find while draining a swamp and huge piles of accumulated hardware which only get rolled out as the locals advance enough to recognize what the various pieces are. A medieval civilization wouldn't learn a whole lot from picking through modem microelectronics, but they might gradually develop rules of thumb about how to pound sheet steel into something they recognize, then cling to them because the ones who don't routinely end up cracking open a pressurized car battery or medical x-ray source with a rock.