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Dragon Ball: After the End

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This setting is nuts. In a good way, but still.

There's probably a whole bunch of Innovation-Illuminati groups, both Saiyan and native. Most of them at least Saiyan-inspired, as in 'Our founder, the Great Messiah, passed down the forbidden arts of innovation to us, his chosen disciples!'. When what actually happened was more than some quick witted native learned from a Saiyan how to solve problems more creatively and passed down the knowledge in secret.

They are probably a lot like Tzeentch cults in a way. Certainly public perception of such conspiracies would be akin to Chaos cultists if they ever found signs of one.
 
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065tdsa said:
This setting is nuts. In a good way, but still.

There's probably a whole bunch of Innovation-Illuminati groups, both Saiyan and native. Most of them at least Saiyan-inspired, as in 'Our founder, the Great Messiah, passed down the forbidden arts of innovation to us, his chosen disciples!'

They are probably a lot like Tzeentch cults in a way. Certainly public perception of such conspiracies would be akin to Chaos cultists if they ever found signs of one.
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Once you have one big conspiracy others will pop up in the shadow of it. In the same way that telling a lie tends to mean you have to tell more.
 
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Andres110 said:
@PoptartProdigy, are there any horror movies revolving around the concept of inventions and the people who make them?
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Of course there are, we have those in real life! :p

Gore17 said:
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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Um... okay maybe, IF the Exiles were consciously working on this massive plan not merely for a short amount of time, but for the centuries they've been on Garenhuld. Maybe.

It still wouldn't cover everything, I'd think. For every really new technology there are lots of ancillary technologies. Like my example of how you can't make trains very effective if you don't design bridges and viaducts capable of carrying trains. Or if you're not comfortable building a steel mill that makes railroad rails, because just having a steel mill isn't good enough, it has to have the specific kind of machinery that produces specific rails.

Unless the sample we've seen of Exile society is grossly unrepresentative, most Exiles aren't actually master inventors. Only some. The number of them isn't really enough to design everything. It's certainly enough to design prototypical examples, but that relies on the Garenhulders being able to turn a car into a truck, or at least turn a truck into a truck capable of going off-road, or figuring out how to adapt existing metalworking technology to make a new grade of steel that they know is better. Or figuring out something for themselves, anyway.
 
Simon_Jester said:
...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.
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Yes. That is what I was trying to display. Garenhulders are good at applying any given specific thing. Thus, they can swiftly acquire their own specialists to use the specific objects they acquire, and those specialists can swiftly pick up the use of new things within their field -- enough that, if we didn't know the context, we'd call them savants on Earth. With this, they acquire the expert and trained labor needed to operate an industrial economy, particularly with Exile-sourced user manuals available. However, saiyans remain the source of the vast majority of technological advancements along the lines of, "make a bridge strong enough to hold locomotives," or indeed, "place ham in sandwich."

Honestly, Simon, at this point we're not really disagreeing with each other; we're talking past each other. You keep insisting that Garenhulders can't possibly be responsible for the small innovations that characterize our society. And you're right. I'm not trying to say you aren't. Garenhulders learn a specific piece of tech well, but hit a mental wall when it comes to changing it in all but the smallest ways. Exiles are the patch -- they make new things or make the small leaps needed to diversify products. And, thus, "entrepreneur," is the highest-paying profession in Exile society.
Deathbybunnies said:
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.
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On reflection, I suppose it doesn't disambiguate things any to say that the answer is either, "It's an IC coincidence," (read: "I decided to be OOC lazy,") or, "Something IC caused it for reasons unknown."

There are reasons why I might not clarify that, though. Sometimes, saying that something isn't OOC laziness and refusing to articulate why or how it's IC constitutes a hint. Occasionally, it's in my best interests to provide such a hint. For instance:
Simon_Jester said:
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.
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As I hope I've mentioned before, yes, you are exactly right.

There are IC reasons for the missiles being developed absent Exile help to which you all are not privy, even given the latest infodump. It's not because I've missed that being such a glaring, obvious exception to the paradigm I've invented.
Simon_Jester said:
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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Exactly. Granted, they're comfortable with the tech they possess now, and their inability to improve it in any meaningful way (absent those two matchlock inventors trying to prevent the destruction of their nation, and similar acts of existential desperation) hasn't exactly changed since c. 700s-level tech.
fictionfan said:
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.
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Thus why Exile investors tend to be so wealthy, yes. The only reason the Exiles don't rule the planet is because, as a society, they don't want to (after all, if they did care to, economics would not be the most obvious way of doing it). Private individuals are free to wreak whatever merry hell they so please on the humans' economy. However, while any given Exile is free to run off and do whatever, the Exiles as a whole are very firmly disinterested in any conspicuous economic hegemony. If you go make your fortune in the human world, your Lady/Lord is going to come have a chat with you if you're not spending most or all of your time in Masque and in human public. That being a limiter on the number of Exiles willing to swan off and be millionaires.

Copyright is a thing. Saiyans pushed for it, and Garenhulders were actually all for it without too much prompting. The Exiles love it for its ability to let them maintain monopolies on select technologies, and the Garenhulders love it due to its natural effects of restricting the spread of new inventions and ideas, and the slowdown on mass adoption.
Andres110 said:
@PoptartProdigy, are there any horror movies revolving around the concept of inventions and the people who make them?
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Single most popular horror sub-genre in the world. Widely renowned to be absolutely horrifying.

Exiles consider it comedy, because it has no bloody idea how real innovation works (last year's charts-topper: the man who put after-market tweaks into his car and turned it into a werewolf).
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Of course there are, we have those in real life! :p

Um... okay maybe, IF the Exiles were consciously working on this massive plan not merely for a short amount of time, but for the centuries they've been on Garenhuld. Maybe.

It still wouldn't cover everything, I'd think. For every really new technology there are lots of ancillary technologies. Like my example of how you can't make trains very effective if you don't design bridges and viaducts capable of carrying trains. Or if you're not comfortable building a steel mill that makes railroad rails, because just having a steel mill isn't good enough, it has to have the specific kind of machinery that produces specific rails.

Unless the sample we've seen of Exile society is grossly unrepresentative, most Exiles aren't actually master inventors. Only some. The number of them isn't really enough to design everything. It's certainly enough to design prototypical examples, but that relies on the Garenhulders being able to turn a car into a truck, or at least turn a truck into a truck capable of going off-road, or figuring out how to adapt existing metalworking technology to make a new grade of steel that they know is better. Or figuring out something for themselves, anyway.
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I'm replying to this, just give me a moment, it popped while I was writing my above post.

EDIT:

While Exiles in general are not organized, bear in mind that the saiyan cartel behind the latest leap is at least organized within itself. They all share data, they control the upper levels of almost every Garenhulder corporation, and they all have access to all the information they need to make the, "innovation," process trivial.

Exiles are actually a bit more technically inclined than you think; Kakara hasn't seen it (*once again mourns the neglected Tinker path*), but there's a low hum of technological work going on behind the scenes. Exiles owe their lives to Briefs inventions, and they all descend from Eighteen; they have a lot of respect for the power of technology, and the skill and intelligence it takes to work with it. They aren't all master inventors, but a lot of them are part-time mechanics, and in this context it's all they really need; Exile technology is way behind what they had when they left Earth, but it's crazy advanced compared to IRL, or Garenhuld at the moment. Them hand-creating every new advance is not as remarkable as you think; it's like a bunch of mechanics travelling back in time with the industrial base of China, the ability to claim whatever resources they wanted or needed, the intact contents of the entire internet, and making a fortune by looking up old blueprints of successful inventions and reproducing them whole cloth.

Exiles are only innovative from a Garenhulder viewpoint. From an Exile viewpoint, they're just 3D-printing (this is a metaphor). The most labor-intensive part of the process is market analysis to see what they should print next, and the Exiles can make Garenhulders do that.

The real innovators are the ones Berra has trying to reverse-engineer their dwindling supply of capsules.
 
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PoptartProdigy said:
On reflection, I suppose it doesn't disambiguate things any to say that the answer is either, "It's an IC coincidence," (read: "I decided to be OOC lazy,") or, "Something IC caused it for reasons unknown.

There are reasons why I might not clarify that, though. Sometimes, saying that something isn't OOC laziness and refusing to articulate why or how it's IC constitutes a hint. Occasionally, it's in my best interests to provide such a hint.
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Yeah that's fair - it's just so IC unlikely that unless there's an explicit OOC reason for it, it pretty much has to be treated as something to examine, and it would be irritating to go diving down a rabbit hole when the apparent hints that are there in-universe aren't actually intended to be there.
 
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Lailoken said:
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.
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See, I could buy that, but it seems kind of a crazy thing for the QM to just quietly not mention and keep off our radar.

Plus the part where the influx of technology from hypertech ruins would tend to slow to a trickle and then a halt as everyone fled to the (current) Garenhulder cities.

PoptartProdigy said:
Yes. That is what I was trying to display. Garenhulders are good at applying any given specific thing. Thus, they can swiftly acquire their own specialists to use the specific objects they acquire, and those specialists can swiftly pick up the use of new things within their field -- enough that, if we didn't know the context, we'd call them savants on Earth. With this, they acquire the expert and trained labor needed to operate an industrial economy, particularly with Exile-sourced user manuals available. However, saiyans remain the source of the vast majority of technological advancements along the lines of, "make a bridge strong enough to hold locomotives," or indeed, "place ham in sandwich."
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Okay, see, what I'm saying (because I know how real engineering projects work) is that this is at the barest ragged edge of remote plausibility given the number of Exiles available. And it requires a considerable majority of the Exile community to be actively working on this project, to supply the requisite number of people capable of actually designing anything for an entire planet.

In effect, the Exiles are stuck playing the role of the entire scientific, engineering, high-stakes decision-making, and general "brain caste" of their society.

If true, this is something Kakara would very definitely be aware of, because she would of course be aware of the occupation that consumes most of the time and mental energy of a plurality if not a majority of her civilization.

Honestly, Simon, at this point we're not really disagreeing with each other; we're talking past each other. You keep insisting that Garenhulders can't possibly be responsible for the small innovations that characterize our society. And you're right. I'm not trying to say you aren't...
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Yes, it's the implications of that observation that are the problem.

You've got them so paralyzed by their anti-adaptability that the number of "brain caste" outsiders required to make all the obvious and necessary decisions for them is significantly larger than the slice of the Exile population available to do the thinking.

Garenhulders learn a specific piece of tech well, but hit a mental wall when it comes to changing it in all but the smallest ways. Exiles are the patch -- they make new things or make the small leaps needed to diversify products. And, thus, "entrepreneur," is the highest-paying profession in Exile society.
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If the Garenhulders are relying on Exiles to make "ham+sandwich=ham sandwich" level modifications and adaptations it is also overwhelmingly the most common profession, based on even rough order of magnitude estimates of the manpower required to make all this happen.

Especially if most of this industrial technological boom has happened in the last 50-100 years.

As I hope I've mentioned before, yes, you are exactly right.

There are IC reasons for the missiles being developed absent Exile help to which you all are not privy, even given the latest infodump. It's not because I've missed that being such a glaring, obvious exception to the paradigm I've invented.
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It's not the ballistic missiles that are bugging me, because I can tell those are a weird outside-context thing that surprised everyone except the people who are using them.

it's the other stuff Berra was utterly unsurprised to know the Aramaians had, and presumably expected. Like fighter jets and paratroopers and hypersonic long range cruise missiles and surface to air missiles and nuclear weapons.

Because all of that stuff implies so stupidly much "tools to make the tools to make the tools" infrastructure, as does the entire rest of Garenhulder civilization including its Internet, its mass transportation and commuter networks, and so on.

Keeping the machines running and the lights on and expanding all that infrastructure at the pace it's been expanding at would trip up in so many, many little places and unforeseen ways if almost nobody can bring themselves to change minor details or bulk up a bridge girder. Or at least have some concept that nature and design and so on have underlying principles that can generalize safely.


Thus why Exile investors tend to be so wealthy, yes. The only reason the Exiles don't rule the planet is because, as a society, they don't want to (after all, if they did care to, economics would not be the most obvious way of doing it). Private individuals are free to wreak whatever merry hell they so please on the humans' economy. However, while any given Exile is free to run off and do whatever, the Exiles as a whole are very firmly disinterested in any conspicuous economic hegemony. If you go make your fortune in the human world, your Lady/Lord is going to come have a chat with you if you're not spending most or all of your time in Masque and in human public. That being a limiter on the number of Exiles willing to swan off and be millionaires.
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The thing is... basically every member of the equivalent of the Fortune 500, or for that matter the Fortune 5000, or as far as I can tell any organization larger than a mom and pop outfit would need either a saiyan, or one of those exotic mutant Garenhulders who is inexplicably not super-afraid of change, making all the meaningful decisions.

Because at some point in the history of every corporation (or other large organization) comes the moment at which the corporation must go "well shit, we're going to have to change how we operate." At which point Garenhulder corporations invariably burst into flames and die screaming, as far as I can tell- because the people involved aren't going to balk at mere bankruptcy as a threat sufficient to motivate any perceptible change, however slight, in how they do things.


Single most popular horror sub-genre in the world. Widely renowned to be absolutely horrifying.

Exiles consider it comedy, because it has no bloody idea how real innovation works (last year's charts-topper: the man who put after-market tweaks into his car and turned it into a werewolf).
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Who came up with the special effects?
 
Simon_Jester said:
The thing is... basically every member of the equivalent of the Fortune 500, or for that matter the Fortune 5000, or as far as I can tell any organization larger than a mom and pop outfit would need either a saiyan, or one of those exotic mutant Garenhulders who is inexplicably not super-afraid of change, making all the meaningful decisions.

Because at some point in the history of every corporation (or other large organization) comes the moment at which the corporation must go "well shit, we're going to have to change how we operate." At which point Garenhulder corporations invariably burst into flames and die screaming, as far as I can tell- because the people involved aren't going to balk at mere bankruptcy as a threat sufficient to motivate any perceptible change, however slight, in how they do things.
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Poptart has already clarified that they're far less concerned about societal/political/economic changes.
 
KnightDisciple said:
I'm fine with Kakara "just" being an amazingly good child-prodigy of social interactions and the foundational understanding of Ki's manipulation and the like, while also being a Seer.
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You show a lack of ambition!
Carrnage said:
with multiple bodies karkara would have to be exceptionally lazy to not pick or improve dozens of skills over her life.
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Or really, really busy.

Also, our mother is a generalist, she'd be really happy if we were as well.
 
Gore17 said:
Poptart has already clarified that they're far less concerned about societal/political/economic changes.
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The problem is that a lot of changes straddle the line. Are they changes to technology, to procedure? To what? Like "switch over to a computerized database so we're not hiring fifty clerks to do the work of five." Or "create a new form to standardize handling this type of information so that we don't have shoddy record-keeping." Or, say, double-entry bookkeeping.

Can Garenhulders program computers at all? I mean, even a little bit? It sounds like it's way too big a jump in the direction of goal-oriented reasoning: "I need this to happen, how can I make this happen?" The kind of reasoning that might lead to someone making a ham sandwich.

Are they capable of constructing mathematical models to describe a system so that they can figure out what things will do by means other than brute force trial and error? Do they have a concept of abstract mathematics beyond the level of arithmetic?

All this was a lot easier for me to imagine working in a self-consistent fashion without putting the saiyans conspicuously in the role of "have to do everything ourselves" a while ago. Back when I thought the problem was specifically that Garenhulders can't invent new things but can at least adapt established things, as opposed to being so super-inflexible that they really, really can't do that either.

Carrnage said:
with multiple bodies karkara would have to be exceptionally lazy to not pick or improve dozens of skills over her life.
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Based on how things went during the tournament, Kakara can't sustain multiform for more than, oh, a few hours a day, tops. It adds time but not that much time.
 
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VicSage said:
All work and no play.
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Who said learning new things is work?
Simon_Jester said:
The problem is that a lot of changes straddle the line. Are they changes to technology, to procedure? To what? Like "switch over to a computerized database so we're not hiring fifty clerks to do the work of five." Or "create a new form to standardize handling this type of information so that we don't have shoddy record-keeping." Or, say, double-entry bookkeeping.
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"Oh, there's a new thing that has been confirmed not Unknown safe and useful, let's switch over." Then they do so.
Simon_Jester said:
Can Garenhulders program computers at all? I mean, even a little bit? It sounds like it's way too big a jump in the direction of goal-oriented reasoning: "I need this to happen, how can I make this happen?" The kind of reasoning that might lead to someone making a ham sandwich.
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Could go either way honestly.
Simon_Jester said:
Are they capable of constructing mathematical models to describe a system so that they can figure out what things will do by means other than brute force trial and error? Do they have a concept of abstract mathematics beyond the level of arithmetic?
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Yes.

Also, before this goes further, have you seen/read the edit Poptart made above?
PoptartProdigy said:
While Exiles in general are not organized, bear in mind that the saiyan cartel behind the latest leap is at least organized within itself. They all share data, they control the upper levels of almost every Garenhulder corporation, and they all have access to all the information they need to make the, "innovation," process trivial.

Exiles are actually a bit more technically inclined than you think; Kakara hasn't seen it (*once again mourns the neglected Tinker path*), but there's a low hum of technological work going on behind the scenes. Exiles owe their lives to Briefs inventions, and they all descend from Eighteen; they have a lot of respect for the power of technology, and the skill and intelligence it takes to work with it. They aren't all master inventors, but a lot of them are part-time mechanics, and in this context it's all they really need; Exile technology is way behind what they had when they left Earth, but it's crazy advanced compared to IRL, or Garenhuld at the moment. Them hand-creating every new advance is not as remarkable as you think; it's like a bunch of mechanics travelling back in time with the industrial base of China, the ability to claim whatever resources they wanted or needed, the intact contents of the entire internet, and making a fortune by looking up old blueprints of successful inventions and reproducing them whole cloth.

Exiles are only innovative from a Garenhulder viewpoint. From an Exile viewpoint, they're just 3D-printing (this is a metaphor). The most labor-intensive part of the process is market analysis to see what they should print next, and the Exiles can make Garenhulders do that.

The real innovators are the ones Berra has trying to reverse-engineer their dwindling supply of capsules.
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Simon_Jester said:
Based on how things went during the tournament, Kakara can't sustain multiform for more than, oh, a few hours a day, tops. It adds time but not that much time.
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Also true, and very annoying. I'm severely desiring to figure out to make them longer lasting, possibly as an Elite or Legendary Talent.

Failing that, I hope to someday get Tinkering and Medicine so Kakara can upgrade her brain and have remote-controlled bodies.
 
Simon_Jester said:
it's the other stuff Berra was utterly unsurprised to know the Aramaians had, and presumably expected. Like fighter jets and paratroopers and hypersonic long range cruise missiles and surface to air missiles and nuclear weapons.

Because all of that stuff implies so stupidly much "tools to make the tools to make the tools" infrastructure, as does the entire rest of Garenhulder civilization including its Internet, its mass transportation and commuter networks, and so on.

Keeping the machines running and the lights on and expanding all that infrastructure at the pace it's been expanding at would trip up in so many, many little places and unforeseen ways if almost nobody can bring themselves to change minor details or bulk up a bridge girder. Or at least have some concept that nature and design and so on have underlying principles that can generalize safely.
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Because the Exiles gave them all the tools, and the designs. And they do, in fact, make alterations:
PoptartProdigy said:
313 GE

Garenhuld

You're an engineer.

Your job is, broadly, to apply existing technology. Sometimes you're hired by manufacturing plants, in which case your job is to plan the workspace and determine how everything should work together. Sometimes you're hired by people who want to build a bridge, and you are responsible for the (insanely dangerous) work of making the small tweaks to the standard bridge design that make it fit with its new location.

You do not design things. You do not change the fundamental design of things. Yes, you alter standard designs to suit circumstances, but standards are standards for a reason (what that reason is, you couldn't rightly say -- but then, nobody thinks too hard on things related to the Unknown). You wouldn't dare change a thing.
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Simon_Jester said:
The problem is that a lot of changes straddle the line. Are they changes to technology, to procedure? To what? Like "switch over to a computerized database so we're not hiring fifty clerks to do the work of five." Or "create a new form to standardize handling this type of information so that we don't have shoddy record-keeping." Or, say, double-entry bookkeeping.

Can Garenhulders program computers at all? I mean, even a little bit? It sounds like it's way too big a jump in the direction of goal-oriented reasoning: "I need this to happen, how can I make this happen?" The kind of reasoning that might lead to someone making a ham sandwich.

Are they capable of constructing mathematical models to describe a system so that they can figure out what things will do by means other than brute force trial and error? Do they have a concept of abstract mathematics beyond the level of arithmetic?

All this was a lot easier for me to imagine working in a self-consistent fashion without putting the saiyans conspicuously in the role of "have to do everything ourselves" a while ago. Back when I thought the problem was specifically that Garenhulders can't invent new things but can at least adapt established things, as opposed to being so super-inflexible that they really, really can't do that either.

Based on how things went during the tournament, Kakara can't sustain multiform for more than, oh, a few hours a day, tops. It adds time but not that much time.
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It sounds as if individual Garenhulders can make "ham sandwich" level modifications within their extremely narrow fields of expertise, but barring compelling reason the population outside of their narrow field don't like them to do so by more than the bare and thoroughly tested minimum. See the court engineer who could design a new house and the auto engineer who could make multiple improvements at once. They're given just enough leeway to keep a modern techbase running, and in extreme circumstances enough for cross-disciplinary groups to come close to matching ordinary human innovation rates. They're not Maya-style innovators because they stick to their very narrow fields and distrust people in other fields just as much as the rest of the population, but they are available when the time comes.

It's the ordinary best-practice and standards-based iterative design process taken only as close to the autistic extreme as they can afford to and held back by society at large rather than a lack of ingenuity on the part of the people doing the actual drawing board work.
 
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