-Using force walls: The two ends of a wall need to be parallel and un-moving. Depending on how thin (rectangular) you can get the force wall, you can plate two force wall seals on either end of a sword and give it a cut-through-anything blade edge. It would be fun when the opponent tries to block or grab the sword.
You'd need a few tweaks to the seal so the force wall doesn't go backwards through the hilt and cut your hands in two, but once you do that the sword should work just fine. None of
us are really suited for it, but we can probably find some ninja who could make good use of it.
-Artillery: Can force walls intersect? If not, how closely can you make a volume with one open end out of them? If not, use MEW to dig a slanted pit into the ground and fit metal cylinders into the pit to reinforce the walls. Place a Macerator loaded with coal into the pit or force-wall volume. Projectile on top. Ignite. The pressure generated by the fuel-air explosion will drive the projectile out of the cannon. Due to how larger cannons scale, you'll start with the biggest weapon design you can manage. This is ideal for bombarding fixed positions. Using single-use MEW pits, you can prepare them on the field within a few minutes, giving you an effective rate of fire. If you manage to fashion the cannons out of indestructible force walls, you can use stupid pressure-cannon designs like the Voitenko Compressor for intercontinental ballistic bombardment.
Force Walls can't intersect, and when we were in Snow we had a plan for this insulated base out of force walls and mud at the corners, where the force walls almost but not quite meet. Apart from that, though, the basic cannon seems very workable, with the proviso that I don't think we have that much coal to work with right now. Once we get back to Leaf we can ask Jiraiya to let us experiment with it and we could maybe dedicate a research project to making a Purifier variant that gives us carbon.
-Macerators: A burning log is nice. Finely powdered flammables will ignite without a fire however. Also, they create a whole domain of chemistry so far unavailable to ninja. For example, the Macerators can be used to prepare a reactive powder, like iron fillings, aluminium or magnesium or even alcohol. Very carefully mix the powder with an oxidizer such as sulfure dioxide or permanganate. Seal the products in a storage seal. Release to fix situations with proper firepower. Uniformly divided particles also allow for some very strong ceramic plates, to be used as armor.
Hazou no doubt would be interested in putting random things inside macerators and seeing what they do. Keep in mind the limits on what macerators can cut (I think some types of wood are still beyond it right now, even if some stones aren't) and that Hazou is intended to
survive these experiments, and we've got an immediate research target. Things like permanganate we
probably don't have access to, but if any old oxidizer works then we can probably make do.
-Explosively formed projectiles: Metal disk. Explosive charges. All you need to make a lethal projectile out of a dinner plate. Inverted cones will create Monroe Effects that shape the metal into a penetrating jet. Cut the disk to create a hail of shrapnel. These can be used as mines (think Claymore mine) or as improvements to Kagome's directed explosives, but use the explosive force more efficiently and are lethal at greater distances.
Great idea, let's get Hazou to try it out.
-Fertilizer: No mention of peasants carting around cow manure. They likely have a very basic concept of soil health. Enriching the ground with nitrogen and phosphorus will double or triple yields. The Haber-Bosch process can make this on a large scale out of atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. Hydrogen can come from aluminium plus sodium hydroxide in water. You can use an iron catalyst but can skip the high pressure/temperature environment by using macerators to increase reaction rate followed by rapid cooling to extract liquid ammonia. Leaf's economy can switch to exporting ammonia and become an agricultural powerhouse. Ammonia also makes decent... war... chemicals.
-Rapid cooling: Implosion seal. You'd need a one-way seal or valve. Suck the air out of a compartiment, eject it outside. The lower pressure translates into lower temperature. Depending on how tightly sealed the compartment is and how much air is available, you can go from vacuum freezing to gentle air conditioning. Rapid cooling allows us to extract liquids out of the air, from water to liquid oxygen. The condensed products do not need to be inside the compartment: cooling the inner surface of a metal plate can allow frozen air to form on the outer surface. You can freeze-dry food.
-Concrete: People use wood. Its terrible and bad at insulation or humidity, which breeds diseases. Wood rots and is weak too. Widespread availability of concrete will improve everyone's lives. Concrete is not hard to make and macerators allow for very effective firing of kilns and furnaces. Getting ninja to MEW up homes is a bad waste of their specialized skills. Get the civilians to do it for themselves, all they need is a genin to prime the air pumps and replace the seals.
-Metals: Do you even know what temperature a finely misted charcoal and liquid oxygen fire can reach? Rapid cooling valve with the implosion seal can be used in reverse to pump air into a chamber. Leaf will have access to improbably high quality steel. This allows for cheaper agricultural tools, lighter weapons and armor and a low-key industrial revolution with gears and steam engines.
All worthy goals, with the problem that Hazou doesn't have the groundwork to figure them out. Any attempt to introduce new tech to this setting must come with a 'how can we have Hazou stumble on this by sheer luck?'. For concrete, we could make Hazou very interested in experimenting with stone and try to guide him towards materials like cement and aggregate needed for concrete, but he'll spend a good deal of time randomly experimenting along the way. Things like fertilizer, though, where would we even start? It's an end goal Hazou would be very in favour of, but he'd have no idea how to get there or that it's even possible, so we'll have to carefully craft stepping stones on the tech tree, each one with their own justification for Hazou to research.
-Roads: People walk on dirt paths surrounded by murderous forests. Use MEW to build walled roads. It will help people. The Romans did it for a reason.
This one is just motivation/time. Hazou can certainly do it, especially with Noburi helping on the chakra front, all we need is Jiraiya's go-ahead. He might decide we're better spent researching, though, at which point the best we can do is teach MEW to a genin and have them do the road-building.
-Seal scribes: Okay, civilians do not have access to chakra techniques. Okay, they do not have Hazo's copying skills. They do learn calligraphy, however, and just teaching a man to write seals all day long until he gets good at it costs a fraction of the full educations and training of a seal master. Cut out the bulk work and allow seal masters to focus on less mind-numbing tasks like research. The civilians will be eating better and living in warmer, stronger homes, so this might free up a bit of labour to be educated.
Again, could work in theory, but it'd be a
hard sell. It takes more time to check a seal for mistakes than it takes to make one, so the sealmasters are putting their lives in the hands of some
civilian who doesn't know the first thing about sealwork. You need absolute trust to get a sealmaster to infuse a seal they didn't draw, so it'll be tricky to try and make civilian-drawn seals accepted. Personally, I'm in favour of inventing a new sealing style for very basic seals produced by printing press. If you can simply print thousands of explosive seals and infuse them unbelievably quickly, you free up the other sealmasters to make other things.
-Kagome: He should not be on the field. He should be teaching sealcraft, shouting at students for wonky handwriting and scaring little genins with stories of the Out, surrounded by walls, people he knows and psychological support staff. He should be removed from stressful situations because PTSD and hyper-paranoia have and will put him in bad situations. Every effort should be put into warming up Kagome to the idea of delegating the safety of team Uplift to others, so that he may accept his stay-at-home role. I believe its priority #1 before the team returns to Konoha.
He's agreed to get therapy, and hopefully that means he'll be staying in Leaf for the duration of that time. This mission is a bit of an outlier, because Jiraiya needs us out of Leaf so we can't get sucked into Leaf-politics and used against Jiraiya to question his authority and hamstring rescue efforts for Naruto. Once we get back, I expect Kagome will be given a place in Leaf where he isn't in situations where his conditions will cause problems.
-Chunin exams: The team should prepare themselves to propose and undergo formal testing. Working on reputation to convey their abilities doesn't work when no-one's heard of you. Imagine how differently the situation might have gone if Team Uplifted presented themselves at 'four chunin and a jonin' instead of 'bunch of capable missing-nin'. It would be a fun story arc too.
-Teams: It is in Jiraiya's best interests to split the team up in between major missions. A major mission would require coordination, so people who work together is fine. However, for every A-rank there's a dozen B-rank missions to be assigned. For these missions, the team's skill and experience is wasted. Assigning a genin group to Keiko, Hazo, Noburi separately if temporarily will allow up to nine Konoha ninja to gain practical survival teaching from someone who lived in the wild for hundreds of days and had to deal with life-threatening situations, per mission. So, the team must get ready to be separated for long periods of time. They must also get ready to have a jonin assigned to lead their group on major missions. Minami is a sign of things to come.
Jiraiya called us something like 'I dunno, Chuunin? We'll test you later', so we probably will get our formal evaluations once there's time for it. Currently I have no idea on what happens after that, team-wise. We're as well-oiled a team as you can get, so breaking us up reduces our overall usefulness, but I can't honestly be sure any of them will even go on field missions in the first place, since they could just focus on the skills that keep them at Leaf (Sealing, Logistics, Mednin).
-Keiko: I feel sorry for the girl. Is there only one eligible Nara bachelor? How long can she hold off a marriage? She's only like, 13.
This is ninja-land, where if you wait until 18 for marriage you're likely already dead, so it makes sense for social customs to favour younger marriages. As it is, it's only being arranged right now and both sides are being very nice about it, so I wouldn't worry too much. Especially since this gives Keiko not only an entire family of people who will be accepting and helpful with her Frozen Skein and associated troubles, but also a big ol' library to spend time in.
-Noburi: I don't recall if using ice instead of water for his abilities was properly tested.
He tried to work with snow in Snow, and said it felt like his bloodline was getting blocked or plugged up or something like that. Maybe with more levels in VD, but not right now.
-Hazo: Big mouth, causes problems when he dives into explaining plans with redundant elements or come off as ignoring others' knowledge, for example, when Noburi commented that Hazo ignored Kagome's winter survival knowledge. I propose that Hazo be inspired by scientific papers and prepare an abstract for his speech before he starts. An abstract in this case would be a résumé of his main talking points and suggestions. He's got the whole plan in his head before he speaks, so why not preface it with a statement that allows those he is talking to to quickly interject and add something before he starts. This was he won't give redundant details, assume wrongly about his interlocutors' knowledge or focus on the wrong thing.
Not sure how much of this shows in reader mode, but the chapter where Kagome almost killed Minami used to be one where Kagome
actually killed Minami (the retcon was because the QMs realized Hazou would've noticed something was up with Kagome) and the resulting panic prompted a discussion on how much control we have over Hazou (since it was us telling him to share the mist drain that caused the situation). The previous state was that Hazou did exactly what we told him to do, even if it disregards his common sense, and we collectively decided to give up some of that control so that Hazou can exercise his common sense and avoid things like this. It means we have to be a little more indirect guiding him towards research (we have to
convince him it's a worthy research topic, we can't just force him to play with rocks until he invents concrete) but that's a small price to make sure we don't apply foot to mouth at mach 3 and mess everything up every twenty chapters or so.
-Akane: She's taking the team's departure and unexpected return very well. A little too well. Might exploring her feelings more deeply, instead of what she says she's feeling, be of interest? Hazo's maybe not the best person for this. He's putting his girlfriend on a pedestal and that's not good for either of them.
Valid concerns, though I'm not quite sure what we can do about it here. Maybe we can ask Mari once we get back to Leaf?
