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Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

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Silently Watches said:
As for the Endbringers, one's dead and you're actively trying to kill the other two. Legend and RCB are both aware of that.
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Hmm. I don't think the Philly PRT are going to do anything to the Villains here.

So in Worm the ratio of Parahumans to humans is 1:8,000 in urban areas and 1:26,000 in rural areas with two thirds of those figures being Villains. That gives a ratio of 1 Villain per 12,000 humans in urban areas and 39,000 humans in rural areas. With a ratio that low rural villains can basically be ignored since they would pretty much all be lone villains or two villain partnerships at worst.

Of the 311.6 million people living in the USA in 2011 80.944% were to live in urban areas. That gives an urban population of 252.2 million. With 1 in 12,000 being Villains that means there should be approximately 21,000 Villains living in urban regions across the United States.

We don't know how large the PRT is. However the FBI operates out of 56 field offices while the PRT has 67 departments. So it seems reasonable to assume a similar size. Using that ratio gets approximately 42,000 employees. That comes to approximately 627 employees per department. Now here in Philly that is a big deal since 5% of that gives 31 Mages of which the expected distribution would be:
  • D-Rank: 14
  • C-Rank: 11
  • B-Rank: 3
  • A-Rank: 2
  • AA- or AAA-Rank: 1
That means 14 Gear Guardian Beasts, 17 Random Guardian Beasts, and 6 mages with any ability outside of supporting their Guardian Beast. For Philly that is a massive jump in combat ability. For elsewhere; not so much.

Across the whole organization 42,000 employees translates into 2,100 Mages distributed:

  • D-Rank: 945
  • C-Rank: 735
  • B-Rank: 210
  • A-Rank: 105
  • AA-Rank: 63
  • AAA-Rank: 42
Ignoring the D-Rankers since Gear familiars aren't really relevant for combat, at least in the short term. That gives the PRT 1,155 Random Guardian Beasts and 420 Mages capable of more then just supporting their Guardian Beasts.

An extra 1,575 combatants is nice, although a fair number aren't going to really be that good, but given how many Villains there are it isn't enough to tip the scale on it's own.

The trick is that these combatants can be produced fairly quickly. Quicker then the Villains can reasonably react. With the Philly test demonstrating success and some bugs being worked out a large scale rollout will be the trick.

If this can be kept fairly quietly the PRT can pull out a high speed response team of Guardian Beasts seemingly out of nowhere. That can be used to steamroll all the major villainous organizations before they can react. Especially if they can buy enough time to for their Gear Guardian Beasts, the non-random ones IIRC anyway, to put devices in all those Mage's hands.
 
UberJJK said:
If this can be kept fairly quietly the PRT can pull out a high speed response team of Guardian Beasts seemingly out of nowhere. That can be used to steamroll all the major villainous organizations before they can react. Especially if they can buy enough time to for their Gear Guardian Beasts, the non-random ones IIRC anyway, to put devices in all those Mage's hands.
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With their resources, and the gears, they can also roll out easily maintained power armor for however many of those 42K employees are PRT troopers, moving them up from peudo gang members to soldiers/pesudo-capes.
 
UberJJK said:
*shortened*.
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The first wave will be powered along the lines you mention, but it's the gear the Gears can make and maintain, based on the science of a civilization that has been interplanetary for millenia, that will make the biggest difference. Mass produced tinker grade equipment is a real game changer. Even if they can't manage to ever deal with a Jotunn or Calamity Witch tier mage, that's a mighty fine slice of the parahuman population operating on that scale. In Nanoha, they have people every bit as powerful who can and will mow down armies of b-rank down mages. The solution to dealing with these top tier enemies? Bring in the big guns on your side, the Nanohas and Taylor Heberts.

Something to consider, though, is that even though we should be taking out the Endbringers within a game year, we don't have them now, nor do we have the firepower now to make going after the villains who are the most useful/powerful a good idea in the short term. In the long term, a lot of these villains will continue to operate the same way gang, mafia, etc. leaders do out here: Make sure they never have enough evidence to arrest you.
 
UberJJK said:
We don't know how large the PRT is. However the FBI operates out of 56 field offices while the PRT has 67 departments. So it seems reasonable to assume a similar size. Using that ratio gets approximately 42,000 employees. That comes to approximately 627 employees per department. Now here in Philly that is a big deal since 5% of that gives 31 Mages of which the expected distribution would be:
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I'm using a slightly higher ratio of personnel to department here, and I'm also weighting it based on cape numbers. Philly has an abnormally low number of capes, so the local PRT has only 600-ish staff. The NYC branch, on the other hand, has a solid 1,500.
Solusandra said:
With their resources, and the gears, they can also roll out easily maintained power armor for however many of those 42K employees are PRT troopers, moving them up from peudo gang members to soldiers/pesudo-capes.
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This is a very important point, and I'm glad someone made it without my prompting.

Keep in mind that the only real advantage a combat-trained Tinker like Armsmaster or Kid Win or even Hero have over standard PRT agents is advanced weapons and armor. Without those things, they're just regular old squishy humans. Thanks to the Dragon Teeth armor and Gears, the PRT will now have said advanced weapons and armor.
 
Silently Watches said:
I'm using a slightly higher ratio of personnel to department here, and I'm also weighting it based on cape numbers. Philly has an abnormally low number of capes, so the local PRT has only 600-ish staff. The NYC branch, on the other hand, has a solid 1,500.

This is a very important point, and I'm glad someone made it without my prompting.

Keep in mind that the only real advantage a combat-trained Tinker like Armsmaster or Kid Win or even Hero have over standard PRT agents is advanced weapons and armor. Without those things, they're just regular old squishy humans. Thanks to the Dragon Teeth armor and Gears, the PRT will now have said advanced weapons and armor.
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Which allows your usual lower level brutes and blasters and the like to be dealt with by PRT troopers and leave the higher level villains to Guardian Beasts or stronger Protectorate capes.
 
Wonder how actual Parahuman Tinkers will react when mana based systems start to be used by the PRT. New information and knowledge for shards to collect.
 
aceraptor said:
Which allows your usual lower level brutes and blasters and the like to be dealt with by PRT troopers and leave the higher level villains to Guardian Beasts or stronger Protectorate capes.
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you can also deal with alot of the higher level(mid tier) capes by military tactics if your military isn't simply mowdownscrubs.
 
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I mean, once the technology proliferates enough, should it not be possible to actually set up a proper automated assembly line for magic-tech? Its not blackboxed like Tinker-tech is.
 
Wyrd said:
The first wave will be powered along the lines you mention, but it's the gear the Gears can make and maintain, based on the science of a civilization that has been interplanetary for millenia, that will make the biggest difference.
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The gears will absolutely make the biggest impact long term. They completely shakeup the technological foundations of civilization on Earth.

I was talking about the short term. Like the stuff I was discussing could happen in the next couple weeks. Lets say for mechanical reasons it takes a week to teach a spell.

Week 1:
Taylor scans the Philidelphia PRT and teaches them all to create Guardian Beasts. With 17 randomly generated Guardian Beasts there should be at least 1 (96%) Gear and probably around 3.

Week 2:
The Gears have access to PRT Tinker equipment so they can likely skip straight to producing Storage Devices. How many doesn't really matter at this point since just one is needed to allow PRT mages to scan for new mages.

Week 3:
PRT Philly Mage X spends the week traveling the country via teleporter to scan for mages. Once located he, and his fellow PRT Philly Mages (PRTPM) travel around the country teaching Guardian Beast to new mages. With 17 PRTPM who know the non-random Guardian Beast spell it probably takes up all their time (4 actions) to cover all the Branches but odds are they are getting serious overtime here.

Week 4:
With just the non D-Rank PRT Mages there should be 1,155 randomly generated Guardian Beasts. Of which ~192 should be Gears. If those plus the 3 from Philly for ~195 get to work it should only take 5 Build Slots each to outfit all the D-Rankers with Devices. If we assume each has two Build Slots due to PRT gear that gives +390 D-Rank Mages and +65 Gears

Week 5:
The 195 Gears from Week 4 + the 65 new Gears produce 520 more Devices. At this point 96% of D-Rankers have Devices so there isn't much to gain by waiting for next week.


So in just five weeks it isn't unreasonable for the PRT to go from just 31 Guardian Beasts (only 17 Randoms) to 2,096 Guardian Beasts of which basically all (2,065) are randomly generated.


Now at this point the 358 Gears could, IIRC on a suit of quality Power Armor taking up two slots, go on to produce an extra 358 'capes' each week via Power Armor. However they'd probably be better off producing Devices for the 1,155 Mages C-rank and higher mages without one since those can be covered in just two more weeks.


So while the PRT could bring about Guardian Beast swarms all on their lonesome in about 5 weeks it would probably take 7 weeks before they are ready to switch over to Power Armor production and probably another 6 weeks before they match the number of Guardian Beasts and another 3 on top of that (9 weeks) until they match the number of Mages as well.

Keeping everything on the down low for just three weeks (all non D-Rankers) should be pretty feasible given the incentives, the fact information would be limited to a need to know basis, and the fact there is practical zero trail involved here. The extra two weeks to get D-rankers Devices are probably more questionable given the paperwork and supplies requirements involved. However in the wake of a mass Guardian Beast blitzkrieg it would be a lot more subtle and be a good way to keep up the momentum.

Mass production of power armor however is never going to be subtle.
 
UberJJK said:
Week 3:
PRT Philly Mage X spends the week traveling the country via teleporter to scan for mages. Once located he, and his fellow PRT Philly Mages (PRTPM) travel around the country teaching Guardian Beast to new mages. With 17 PRTPM who know the non-random Guardian Beast spell it probably takes up all their time (4 actions) to cover all the Branches but odds are they are getting serious overtime here.
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And this is where I get leery. Giving the PRT the ability to choose who becomes mages could go smoothly or very questionably depending on how stringent/loose their selection criteria are.
 
A final thought before bed; having run the numbers those few D-Rankers in Philly may benefit from waiting to learn the Guardian Beast spell. I mean they want a Gear with 100% certainty that is fine but I'd expect most would prefer the more powerful random choice. A couple weeks, at the far end, isn't really that much of a wait all things told.
 
UberJJK said:
Week 2:
The Gears have access to PRT Tinker equipment so they can likely skip straight to producing Storage Devices. How many doesn't really matter at this point since just one is needed to allow PRT mages to scan for new mages.
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Nope, only we can scan for mages. They can use telepathy to find candidates, but they'll need us to show them how strong they are, which makes a huge difference in what spells they should be getting. Without access to a Transcendent Gadgeteer, they are also locked out of better quality devices unless they hire Shipwright/Dragon to produce some. Then again, I'd be a lot more worried about the PRT abusing armed and intelligent devices than storage devices. It'll take years to teach these new magic-tech engineers enough for them to be able to build those, for the same reason as it takes years for a more traditional engineering student to master their field.

landcollector said:
And this is where I get leery. Giving the PRT the ability to choose who becomes mages could go smoothly or very questionably depending on how stringent/loose their selection criteria are.
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From canon, Piggot was a bigot who seriously abused her own power because of how much she hated parahumans, while staying just barely on the side of the line that would have gotten her investigated and possibly arrested. I'm less wary of this than I would be if implementing this change out here because we have enough people with enough power that we can bring down the hammer and make an example of the inevitable fraction of officers who'll try to abuse their new power.

We also need to make sure familiars/guardian beasts get protections under the law. Too many people would be cruel to their GBs just because they could. They need civil rights, though I don't support letting them vote, as that'd just be giving the creator two votes.


We know that magic tech requires different materials than we're used to for electricity based tech, so we should really invest heavily in currently useless materials that are about to be massively in demand. Dragon, this sounds like a job for you. Knowing Dragon as well as we can, I'm not even worried she'll misuse the massive profits she's about to be making.
 
Wyrd said:
Nope, only we can scan for mages. They can use telepathy to find candidates,
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For the most part...that's all that;s needed.
Wyrd said:
but they'll need us to show them how strong they are, which makes a huge difference in what spells they should be getting.
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as it makes THIS significantly easier. D and C gears would keenly feel their guardian beasts draw, so it wouldn't be hard to ID the higher ranks for us to scan and sort.
Wyrd said:
Without access to a Transcendent Gadgeteer, they are also locked out of better quality devices unless they hire Shipwright/Dragon to produce some.
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Wouldn't their being assigned to the pair of them teach them? Also, the beasts, especially rando gears, are supposed to come with a rather wide assortment of knowledge.
Wyrd said:
Then again, I'd be a lot more worried about the PRT abusing armed and intelligent devices than storage devices. It'll take years to teach these new magic-tech engineers enough for them to be able to build those, for the same reason as it takes years for a more traditional engineering student to master their field.
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Agreed.
 
Solusandra said:
Wouldn't their being assigned to the pair of them teach them? Also, the beasts, especially rando gears, are supposed to come with a rather wide assortment of knowledge.
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How fast do you think you could learn engineering from a dedicated tutor who only has a bachelor of science in engineering? Also, how long would it take you to get your doctorate with only self study and that same tutor to teach you?

Eventually, the details present in their devices and the books on theory we're giving them would allow them to build very advanced stuff, but it will take a lot of time and effort to get there.

Unless you're referring to Dragon/Shipwright as the pair. I'm not sure how that idea would work, but I can see it as a possible interpretation. If that's who you meant, please clarify, as I'm not seeing what you're trying to say.
 
Wyrd said:
How fast do you think you could learn engineering from a dedicated tutor who only has a bachelor of science in engineering? Also, how long would it take you to get your doctorate with only self study and that same tutor to teach you?
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FOr the GB's? Very fast. That's what they're designed for.
For the Mages with devices? A month or two for simple reproduction, 5 years for anything derivative.
For normies, anywhere from 3 months for a experienced engineer(or natural talent), to three years for new trainees. A year and 5-10 years respectively for anything derivative.
For a Transcendant gear? Days for simple reproduction, a week to a few months for anything derivative because buying talents.
 
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Its not just PRT, if you think about it, if they can draw up a list of vetted groups the US and Canadian governments can draw from a large pool of reliable personnel. Canadian Mounties for example, or FBI's field agents (up to and including the Hostage Rescue Teams). If we propagate the telepathy detection method then the US and Canadian governments can find a lot of people with magic that's already vetted.
 
aceraptor said:
Its not just PRT, if you think about it, if they can draw up a list of vetted groups the US and Canadian governments can draw from a large pool of reliable personnel. Canadian Mounties for example, or FBI's field agents (up to and including the Hostage Rescue Teams). If we propagate the telepathy detection method then the US and Canadian governments can find a lot of people with magic that's already vetted.
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So long as it goes public before Gesselschaf and Yangban get ahold of their own. Emergency services and hospitals are also a decent recruiting ground. You can never have too many healers on a hellworld.
 
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Solusandra said:
FOr the GB's? Very fast. That's what they're designed for.
For the Mages with devices? A month or two for simple reproduction, 5 years for anything derivative.
For normies, anywhere from 3 months for a experienced engineer(or natural talent), to three years for new trainees. A year and 5-10 years respectively for anything derivative.
For a Transcendant gear? Days for simple reproduction, a week to a few months for anything derivative because buying talents.
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That was my point. Gears don't come with knowledge of how to make armed, intelligent, and boost devices. That means that they will be, as I put it, that dedicated tutor with a bachelor's degree. Given how advanced devices appear to be, even the most gifted of mundane magi-engineers aren't going to be producing the higher tier devices for at least a year. And Unison Devices? Not happening at all in the next decade without some TGs working together to teach how to make one. No matter how fast Tim has advanced as an engineer, that does not mean he would be a good or even passable teacher. With how the information is downloaded into their heads, I'd expect TGs to actually be worse at teaching thanks to not learning it in a traditional manner. Geniuses often make the worst teachers for this reason.

aceraptor said:
Its not just PRT, if you think about it, if they can draw up a list of vetted groups the US and Canadian governments can draw from a large pool of reliable personnel. Canadian Mounties for example, or FBI's field agents (up to and including the Hostage Rescue Teams). If we propagate the telepathy detection method then the US and Canadian governments can find a lot of people with magic that's already vetted.
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Solusandra said:
So long as it goes public before Gesselschaf and Yangban get ahold of their own. Emergency services and hospitals are also a decent recruiting ground. You can never have too many healers on a hellworld.
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The main reason I put the PRT first is that they are essentially SWAT teams, a group trained to a higher level and put under stricter guidelines because they'll adjust best to the tech infusion. All police, firefighters, emergency response people of all stripes, including doctors, should definitely be high on the priority list. It's in this stage that I expect the Yangban et. al to get enough information to start their own programs. Without template gadgeteers, they'll be lagging behind hard enough that hopefully they won't make a stupid move too soon.

Stupidity is pretty much guaranteed with them, since they're the ones who refused to help with Zion at all, and who invaded a world opened up to a different country after refusing a portal of their own to a world of their own.
 
Wyrd said:
That was my point. Gears don't come with knowledge of how to make armed, intelligent, and boost devices. That means that they will be, as I put it, that dedicated tutor with a bachelor's degree. Given how advanced devices appear to be, even the most gifted of mundane magi-engineers aren't going to be producing the higher tier devices for at least a year. And Unison Devices? Not happening at all in the next decade without some TGs working together to teach how to make one. No matter how fast Tim has advanced as an engineer, that does not mean he would be a good or even passable teacher. With how the information is downloaded into their heads, I'd expect TGs to actually be worse at teaching thanks to not learning it in a traditional manner. Geniuses often make the worst teachers for this reason.
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And we need these devices out quickly...why? I guess, eventually, but that's not what we really need or want gears for, for the most part.A storage device with Force Teleport will work just fine for skylaunching EB's.
Wyrd said:
The main reason I put the PRT first is that they are essentially SWAT teams, a group trained to a higher level and put under stricter guidelines because they'll adjust best to the tech infusion. All police, firefighters, emergency response people of all stripes, including doctors, should definitely be high on the priority list. It's in this stage that I expect the Yangban et. al to get enough information to start their own programs. Without template gadgeteers, they'll be lagging behind hard enough that hopefully they won't make a stupid move too soon.
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Yes, but if the public 1 in 20 has them, then it doesn't matter what the Yangban and Gesselscaht do. Proliferation is typically the key to getting the better stuff (you find more talented creators that way) and letting the pleebs have magic is something china and germany will NEVER allow if they have the chance.
 
Solusandra said:
Yes, but if the public 1 in 20 has them, then it doesn't matter what the Yangban and Gesselscaht do. Proliferation is typically the key to getting the better stuff (you find more talented creators that way) and letting the pleebs have magic is something china and germany will NEVER allow if they have the chance.
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Weren't you saying earlier that you consider most people to be boring (which means not very talented/desirable people for mage recruiting)? In that case your idea of proliferation doesn't have any pros that careful examination/headhunting of prospects don't also have, while also causing lots of collateral effects and potential unwanted scenarios.
 
landcollector said:
Weren't you saying earlier that you consider most people to be boring (which means not very talented/desirable people for mage recruiting)? In that case your idea of proliferation doesn't have any pros that careful examination/headhunting of prospects don't also have, while also causing lots of collateral effects and potential unwanted scenarios.
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You're looking at two different dimensions. Boring as in unlikely to turn to crime. And proliferation is highly beneficial to headhunting as otherwise you'd need to do truly inordinate amounts of legwork to find those candidates.
Silently Watches said:
Force Teleport is an advanced bit of magic that does require a Boost Device.
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My mistake. @Wyrd sorry for my last reply then.
 
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