Questions for skyslider assuming we're successful:
1) How long it would take for villages to reverse engineer upon sight of skyslider.
2) How long it would take for villages to reverse engineer upon acquiring a copy of skyslider.
3) How likely it is for villages to screw up the process of reverse engineering or engineering their own version of skyslider, and how many weeks of delay we might be talking about?
Well, Hazou's basically having to fund an entire exploration into aerodynamics, so I doubt that any Village without sufficient experience in that will pick it up as quickly as they did the skywalkers. Skywalkers just took fuuinjutsu knoweledge and some creativity, but skygliders take a
little bit more. Personally, I think that Cloud might be the Village quickest to recreate them --high altitudes allow for a certain familiarity with air and ample enough room to work --but I wonder if they'd have the wood to spare. They might be hampered by their lack of natural resources enough that another village reverse engineers it first. Not to mention who knows what their R&D is like.
1) If it's just by sight, and not backed by information gathered by spies, I'd say at least 2-4 months of constant, dedicated research. Provided nothing goes wrong. A more realistic timetable would be 3-6, I think. It depends on how long it takes us to create a working skyglider the hard way and the quality of our research team in comparison to other, foreign research teams. By sight, enemy villages get the advantage of a rough idea of what a skyglider should look like. But they also have to go through all the experimentation that we had to, as well. At which point it becomes a matter of how good that village's R&D department is and how good our clan's is relative to theirs. If it's actually the enemy village even takes up the project instead of just an enemy clan with resources roughly similar to the Goketsu --as opposed to a whole village's.
1.5) For example: the Leaf's Tower would have more resources than we would to throw towards this project.
2) If it's not backed by stolen research, courtesy of spies, then I'd say, if everything goes right the first time, 1-3 months. Depending on how good their R&D department is and how complex/delicate Skygliders are. They might ruin their stolen one in the process of taking it apart, requiring another one. And again, this is assuming that it's the village government itself that sponsors it, and not just a clan in an enemy village. And how good their knowledge of aerodynamics is. They might try to remove critical parts just because they don't understand how necessary they are for flight --thus causing delays or outright ruining their stolen copy.
3) I'd say that delays and screw ups would be pretty frequent, providing that they don't have any of the research that we've acquired via testing. I'd say at least 3-9 total weeks of delays, spread across in varying amounts at each stage of development. Think about how long "materials" is delaying us. Maybe even longer if they get stuck at a particularly rough stage. We might want to lock down any physical information we've acquired on this (blueprints, musings about "the nature of air spirits" and whatnot).
@eaglejarl, will the bit of aerodynamics that Hazou's discovered (or will discover) in the process of making Skygliders be applicable to wind-chakra techniques?
EDIT: Haru is making a serious effort to "work the system" and maintain some plausible deniability, is what I'm saying. I for one appreciate the effort.
Upon rereading the chapter, I think my lingering wariness is just from where I didn't realize that Haru was twisting the rules to figure out a way to help the civilians. During my first read, I thought it was exactly what Haru was saying --that he needed a place to train. I even made a post about it
(just a few up, I think. I'm not an observant human being) but was quickly helped out.
Given time to think about it, I'm a little more at ease with Haru's character than I was a few chapters ago. Yeah, Haru's has some anger issues and should probably treat his stepfamily with a little more kindness, but he's also a teenager --going through
Thor knows how many chakra-amped hormonal changes --and he's faced an assload of civilian/clanless discrimination all of his life. Remember the hospital visit where he comforted the child
(think it was his stepsister)? I don't think Haru had anyone to do that for him, when he was a child. So Haru had to grow a thick skin and learn how to deal with it, but he also doesn't want anyone else to "learn to deal with it." He's a little rough around the edges, but he seems to have a kind heart.
Hopefully he'll relax around our clan
(and his new stepfamily) and we can provide a space where he feels safe revealing his kind heart more often. I mean, if we can help Kagome enough that he
voluntarily teaches Honoka,
a Leaf ninja-to-be, I think we can help a superpowered teenager with a chip on his shoulder show off his big heart a bit more.
Edit: Random Thought
Just thought of an in-character reason for Hazou to want to test lead --and other metals --for healthiness in regards to sanitation. He was taught fuuinjutsu by Kagome, who specializes in explosions. Kagome is...
vigilant, so he likely knows the dangers of leaving shrapnel/debris in wounds --hell, Kagome's probably learned it firsthand. And Kagome, who genuinely loves Hazou and only wishes the best for his little socially-stunted student, would more than likely pass along the dangers of leaving explosion-related debris in wounds
(and who knows, maybe seal-related shrapnel has lingering chakra in it that can cause esoteric effects on wounds?). So Hazou is aware of this. And he also knows that the sanitation is going to be around the human body a lot.
Open parts of the human body. And Kagome's stressed the dangers that can happen when metal gets in the body. Or maybe Hazou just worries about the worst-case scenario --which, given his history, he has cause to do.
So, out of his naturally high paranoia in regards to safety
(engendered due to Kagome and Missing Nin days), Hazou's going to set up trials and experiments on what these metals do to living things. Maybe something like feeding nonvital animals from food/water buckets that also have a bar of metal welded into them
(with each group of animals having a different metal and then a control group to compare)? Or maybe feeding/watering animals chosen for this specific purpose from buckets of feed/water that have metal shavings in them? No clue how the actual experimentation would work, but I think I've logic-ed around Hazou's personality enough to provide sufficient reasoning for why he'd set up safety trials for the metals. I mean, he was taught by
Kagome, lived as a missing nin, and holds the health/wellness of human beings in a startlingly high,
I'll-change-the-world levels of regard. So if he thinks that the metal could be a potential danger, then Hazou's going to poke at it until he finds a workaround.
