Japan gets a serious industry boost in 1930

[Zor]

In this scenario in 1929 a story happens in which some well meaning Japanese farmers near a fishing village in Myagi Prefecture find a crashed alien escape pod containing an being and help it by providing it with some electricity and some information on the earth. It is on an important scouting mission and has which could determine the fate of it's species when it's ship was destroyed near Sol System. After a few months this alien is picked up by a shuttle from a secondary, who give the local farmers something in return for their assistance: a specially made shipboard Fabricator.

The Fabricator is a cube shaped affair about 1.6 meters to a side with four small wheels on it's base for those occasions that it needs to be moved. It's top is covered of high efficiency (75%) solar panels, a thick cable with a heavy duty plug for taking on a lot of electricity and a set of high capacity power cells able to store up to 3.6 gigajoules of energy (fully charged on delivery). The entire affair weighs about 2 tonnes. It has a retractable scanning platform. It has a hopper on one end into which material can be put in and a chamber about 42 centimeters square on the other end behind a sliding panel as well as a robotic assembly arm. On the last side is a cooling system. On the side with the scanner is a touch screen which controls the Fabricator as well as presenting information about it. In general terms the Fabricator Processes raw materials (Put some iron ore into the machine and it will break it down, separate the iron from the other materials) and uses those materials to print out 3d objects with tolerances of about a fiftieth of a micron. As a default it can print out the following objects...

1. Solar cells about 5cm across with the aforementioned 75% efficiency.
2. Power cells that weigh about 4 kilograms and have an energy capacity of about 100 megajoules each.
3. Pelleted surplus raw materials.
   
4. Insulated wires.
   
5. Component parts that can be assembled into additional fabricators with identical capacities to it's parent and can be studied at leasiure. It also provides assembly instruction, which is pretty straightforward.

It can also duplicate items so long as they don't have explosive chemicals in them and they can fit within the 56x56x56cm assembly space. One simply needs to put a pair of binoculars or a pistol or something like that on the scanning platform, tell it to scan it and it will scan the imprint into it's database. It will substitute plastics and synthetics for biological materials like wood, leather or latex. It also has a rendering program for designing objects and refining designs. At peak capacity, a Fabricator consumes about 1.5 megawatts of energy and will need that much energy to keep working. If provided with a continuous supply of raw materials (iron, carbon, water, copper and silicon) and energy it can produce all the components for a new fabricator in about 14-18 days, depending on how much dross it has to expel. Working at 10% power, they can produce a Nambu Pistol from raw materials in a bit more than two minutes.

It's function is demonstrated when it scans an alarm clock and makes a perfectly functional duplicate along with some instructions. The machine is soon taken to an IJN base shortly afterwards.

The Fabricators are beyond the capacities of the modern world to reverse engineer and replicate without a Frabricator, let alone those of 1940s.

What happens?

Zor

 

[Ms. Effy]

Japan ends up tearing itself apart in a civil war between the army and navy, because for some reason you decided to specify that it ends up in navy hands. The reader throws the alt-history novel across the room.