Both have great potential, the war needs all the help it could get, and it might net us new lands, it will also legitimise the daughter by virtue of martial excellence.
The Diplomacy could lead to dynasties or if we're really lucky privitisatiom and if the gods are kind heredity. But that is all dependent on how the hk can influence us, and how the Queen ligitimise after coronation.
Edit :Now that I think about it the Diplo option could have some very useful overdue benefits
I like how no one's pointed out that in terms of narrative, the Main Study Alchemy action was one of the worst things we could have done for the poor king. It was explicitly the King personally investing just as much resources he could into his old floozy of an ex's pet project as he did into the war effort. I'd be amazed if this doesn't lead to an uptick of corruption in some manner because this was naked legitimization of political patronage if ever there was one.
I don't really care for the thread's obsession with gunpowder considering properly utilizing iron is far more immediately relevant- but half the reason the girl is in this mess is because she has people gunning for her due to our our mismanagement of the situation.
Gunpowder is cool and all- but it's utterly irrelevant without the tools to properly use it. For all the morons expecting it to be some military revelation? It's not. The Mongols and the Manchus all conquered a China that knew about gunpowder and had much better tools to actually use it than we will for several centuries.
We're just developing iron scale mail, we don't need another pie-in-the-eye tech that we're not even going to have the tools to make the tools to use properly.
That's my issue- people are voting here expecting this is research on gunpowder despite inconsistencies noted in being able to develop gunpowder over say- naphtha. Moreover, people are utterly unaware of the possible utility (or lack thereof) of gunpowder right now. Not only is it just as possible it was an experiment with tar or pitch or what have you- but even if the Ymaryn jump forward thousands of years to satiate the rampant wish-fulfillment crowd, what the hell does it gain us? It's just disappointing to see how people are looking at this.
I see people looking down on the diplomatic initiative with the HK and having her become career military. And I'd be okay with this if they didn't immediately turn around and chase the moon while mumbling about hereditary aristocracy under their breaths. Say what you will, but at least we know what we're actually going to be getting with those options, and they promise to be fairly useful if somewhat loaded.
I like how no one's pointed out that in terms of narrative, the Main Study Alchemy action was one of the worst things we could have done for the poor king. It was explicitly the King personally investing just as much resources he could into his old floozy of an ex's pet project as he did into the war effort. I'd be amazed if this doesn't lead to an uptick of corruption in some manner because this was naked legitimization of political patronage if ever there was one.
I don't really care for the thread's obsession with gunpowder considering properly utilizing iron is far more immediately relevant- but half the reason the girl is in this mess is because she has people gunning for her due to our our mismanagement of the situation.
Gunpowder is cool and all- but it's utterly irrelevant without the tools to properly use it. For all the morons expecting it to be some military revelation? It's not. The Mongols and the Manchus all conquered a China that knew about gunpowder and had much better tools to actually use it than we will for several centuries.
We're just developing iron scale mail, we don't need another pie-in-the-eye tech that we're not even going to have the tools to make the tools to use properly.
That's my issue- people are voting here expecting this is research on gunpowder despite inconsistencies noted in being able to develop gunpowder over say- naphtha. Moreover, people are utterly unaware of the possible utility (or lack thereof) of gunpowder right now. Not only is it just as possible it was an experiment with tar or pitch or what have you- but even if the Ymaryn jump forward thousands of years to satiate the rampant wish-fulfillment crowd, what the hell does it gain us? It's just disappointing to see how people are looking at this.
I see people looking down on the diplomatic initiative with the HK and having her become career military. And I'd be okay with this if they didn't immediately turn around and chase the moon while mumbling about hereditary aristocracy under their breaths. Say what you will, but at least we know what we're actually going to be getting with those options, and they promise to be fairly useful if somewhat loaded.
Even as she got the advisors around them to begin helping and sorting out the preparations, Rulwyna's mind was racing with thoughts of what to do next. Born with a naturally keen mind and raised in an environment that had sharpened it immensely, she had the feeling that her father's days were numbered and that she should start seriously considering her options. The gods seemed displeased with her father, bringing unstable but torrential rains that had ruined fields and crops and brought strife to farms and cities, although not as terrible as ancient legends said they could become. Among the many causes for this displeasure was most certainly her father's continued sponsorship of her mother and the impropriety of it, which put her at the intersection of a number of her parent's enemies hit list. She had figured out that she needed her own power against these sorts of actors before she was ten, and knew that when her father passed she would mostly be on her own.
While it features prominently, it's not the only reason people are bitchy, though it makes her an acceptable target for the enemies of her parents.
Nobody expects gunpowder, they hope for it. I'm sure you've hoped for things before, even unrepentant pessimists hope, so you should probably drop that particular line of complaining-without-convincing.
People look at the 'diplomacy' options, and see exactly what you admitted they saw, a foot in the door for hereditary power structures. Did we not specifically deny Rul's last attempt to institute ancestral honor for exactly that reason, despite the other option being 'do nothing at all'. Doing nothing is anathema to the crowds attracted to these quests. If they would rather do absolutely nothing than kind of imply a move towards hereditary power with an attached buff, it's a good bet that even if you incentivized it more heavily they'd still refuse.
I also point out that a diplomatic attachment to the HK will drag us into the lowlands war. If vassalizing the HK costs us the ability to move in a meritocratic direction and forces us to inherit the ultimate shitstorm war, I have to say it's the worst move we could possibly make.
I would go so far as to sensationally claim I'd rather Rulwyna die than perform one of the 'diplomacy' actions successfully.
Both have great potential, the war needs all the help it could get, and it might net us new lands, it will also legitimise the daughter by virtue of martial excellence.
The Diplomacy could lead to dynasties or if we're really lucky privitisatiom and if the gods are kind heredity. But that is all dependent on
Are you trying to subvert your own vote? Because those arguments are likely to have most of the thread stay clear of both options you voted for like the plague.
Because Alchemy is the study of turning one thing to another.
What treatment was she investigating when she decided to create a big dust cloud and set fire to it.
Here I mean narratively unsatisfying as we are expecting that we are meant to predict what the potential reward is based on the description given and from that we decide if its worth doing. This is the building block of quests.
Having the answer being a dust explosion ruins expectations because rather than learning about dust explosions we could likely learn something very basic about alchemy that just happens to make a lot of dust in the process.
It means that we can't predict the likely outcome.
I can't give any reason to argue that this isn't a trap option like VoidZero proposed, but I also can't give a reason that diplomacy isn't a trap option when they capture our young hero and hold her to ransom.
The reward isn't just the outcome of our various actions, it is also having our young hero unit become more profficient in those actions. By having her study what went wrong with Lolwyna's experiment, Rynwyna'll gain a better understanding of both alchemy and mystic arts in general. That's the sort of thing we want.
And creating a big dust cloud only to light it on fire kinda makes sense as an alchemical experiment.
We know that if you apply the element of (Air/Wind/Spiritus) to a pile of dust, it gets infused with energy, causing it to lift up in the air and slowly fall as the energy dissapates. We also know that the element Fire can produce a similar lift, as seen when soot, smoke or embers rise from a pyre. It then only makes sense that you might be able to get an indefinitely flying dust cloud by keeping a source of Fire beneath it.
Now, if we assume that Lolwyna had some sense of care (likely given how old she's managed to get), she probably started out with a pretty small amount of dust. In which case she'd clearly see that the dust recieves too much energy from the Fire and gets consumed. However, if the energy instead is spread over a larger amount amount of dust it might be able to withstand it and stay adrift. I mean, we know that dust on it's own is pretty flame-resistant, so it stands to reason it is the combination of (Air/Wind/Spiritus) and Fire is the problem. Hence repeating the experiment with more dust.
You might wonder why exactly you'd want an indefinitely flying dust cloud, but it is the same basic principles that powers a flying baloon. Maybe Lolwyna had dreams of flight.
Are you trying to subvert your own vote? Because those arguments are likely to have most of the thread stay clear of both options you voted for like the plague.
Administration
Basic Administrative Math Horse Couriers
Memory
Early Writing (Mixed Logo-/Phonographic)
Non-Local Authority
Early Indexing
Written Laws
And we now have teenage girls on horses as messengers. Dramatically faster than chariot messengers(nearly twice as fast even), and likely quite a welcome sight to the warriors
And we have scalemail. Heavy as hell compared to later designs, but functionally impenetrable to bone and flint spears and arrows.
Ancient Saltern
Gives an initial bonus to Econ, +1 Diplomacy every turn until the invention of currency, grants access to the Salt Gift action, and the Saltern extended project action, when acceptable sites for construction or expansion can be found
Provinces got tired of waiting for us to build more roads, so they did it themselves. They don't seem to consider the dye situation critical yet, probably because the Trelli can't really REACH our markets.
Stallions are business as usual, but they went to say hi.
Western Wall is living up to the name. Wall.
Greenshore is doing Capitalism Ho.
Hatriver is unexpectedly expanding warriors instead of Double War, so hmm...oh well we reaped the benefits.
Also, now that he thought about it, he should make sure that Lolwyna was given more resources so that she would be occupied and wouldn't be tempted to follow him south. He had been enough of a fool around her as it was, no need to tempt himself further.
Not very good at dealing with Lolwyna I see. Just throw shinies at her to distract her.
The fighting in Hatriver was distinctly unpleasant, in that there were two modes: infiltrating small parties through the hills, and straight, brutal linear fighting through the valleys. The People generally exceeded the Hathatyn in skill of the first, and had superior equipment to exceed their foes in the second, but it was not a pleasant experience.
The first part...yeah, Blackbirds. Hard to match. And then the latter fighting a force with full iron equipment would be a horrible experience when it's the kind of fight that a limited Bronze supply would be worst at. No way to really leverage Bronze Elites compared to Iron Line.
In large part that was because the People had built their forces for generations around chasing nomads, on maneuver and counter-maneuver to force too fast moving forces to actually come into contact favourably. The strategic pushing contests of the Hathatyn were foreign to the people, and the leaders of the Hatriver warriors suffered for that. Had the king not shown up in force it was likely that they would have lost a considerable number of warriors in the first few clashes, but as it was superior leadership and bolstered numbers kept catastrophe at bay, and the king began to push the enemy back, even as the Highlanders ate away at their flanks.
But the tactics of our dude on hills is difficult after centuries of burst warfare. Probably been giving the Highlanders the same trouble, but our Hero King cracked the tactical issues.
Hopefully someone wrote that down.
Somewhere in the grind of it all, a new sight was seen upon the battlefields. Long hair bleached white with lime and then dyed red with ochre became a banner of oncoming death and destruction, soon accompanied by whistling and shrieking war cries and the thunder of hooves.
Oh hey where did she get lime? Because that's a really handy reagent.
Whenever the People and the Hathatyn clashed and the warriors of the People started to falter, the mad teenage girl would come with orders from the elderly but still vigorous king, to help turn the tide of battle. And she truly was mad, having somehow got in on the insane practice of horseback riding early, her size meaning that when on one of the horses that had been successfully conditioned to not go insane when a human was on its back she could actually ride for extended periods without exhausting the animal quickly. There were a number of other young, small women who had discovered that the king was extremely glad to have these sorts of people available to quickly run priority messages - a single horse was simply faster and more agile than a chariot, so while fighting remained a fantasy, the decision to allow for rodeos was already paying enormous dividends.
Gender rebalancing! Young women can go to war too now, and get their own Honorable Deaths!
...probably is going to result in a lot of pregnancies after war too, when you attach them to armies.
While it was fairly obvious that the king wasn't exactly happy with his daughter running towards active battles, but her presence both turned many individual actions from losses to some form of success, and many claimed that she was an incarnation of a primordial entity like Gwy or Bytah and to attempt to rein her in was foolish anyway. Not yet an adult and she had soaked up the lessons of her father and his advisors like a sponge, and was already able to make cogent arguments in battle, policy, and theology, even if she wasn't able to win the majority of these arguments.
And now we're hitting the front with Double Hero. The Hathatyn are going to be making the same complaints we did on the Nomads.
Father and Daughter combo.
It sounds like Rulwyna is Exceptional in Martial, Admin and Mysticism already. Gwygotha come again?
What the king did try to do was ensure that she was as well protected as possible, which given her actions as a horse courier meant that the king was constantly trying to find the biggest, strongest horses for her to ride so that they wouldn't be tired when he made her and her horses wear the strongest armour that could be made available. He was constantly annoying the smiths, asking for ever better scales of iron to drape across his wild daughter, and they sort of kept up, but ultimately the challenge was for the most part beyond them. Compromises had to be made, but many were interested in the advances being made.
Ah, we got this from the Study Metal + Expand Army combo.
It's favoritism, but it's also very effective favortism.
Heck, we even got barding for the horses, though likely not a lot of it, since they aren't big enough yet.
Honour of Elites -> Best of the Best
Whether in war or in art, the People want only the best, damn the costs
Pros: Increase Martial gain from raising elite units, bonus Art and Mysticism for certain actions
Cons: Increased potential Martial loss in fighting, increased social stratification, increased costs
To be the very best, like no one ever was.
Bolded the changes. Depends on what things get the bonuses, but I expect it to be actions which push the limits of our ability? In that case we can track what items get the bonus returns by checking what items get added costs.
Oh well, we'll see when the next main turn shows up.
Taking the scroll from her father's limp fingers, Rulwyna looked at it and found news that her mother had done something in her studies that had resulted in either the gods smiting her or demons getting loose, because the compound where she worked looked like it had been struck by lightning repeatedly. The woman herself was barely alive at the time of the messenger leaving, burned in strange and terrible ways by the magic she delved too deeply into. Whether she was still alive, or would live long enough for them to get back, was unknown but doubtful.
So an explosion of some sort. Primitive black powder can do that, but so can a lot of reactions that explode. But most of them are LESS likely than black powder, which we technically have the reagents for, even if we keep burning them away.
Rulwyna frowned at this. Her mother was something of a stranger to her, having only been encountered a few times in trips back to Valleyhome from Hatriver, the older woman barely more than a stranger most of the time. Their most intimate interaction had been a theological argument over whether or not male energy was fundamentally 'hot' or 'dry' and how in the reorientation of elements she was conceiving this would arrange masculine and feminine properties. Both agreed that fire was a male element, but beyond that it was all argumentation that only priests could keep up with. As such, Rulwyna couldn't even say that she was particularly moved by the news, other than perhaps a sense of loss at the fact that she would never have the sort of relationship with her mother that most others could claim.
So the experiment involved heat.
-Dry - Powder explosion, caused by heating dry powders in oxygen.
-Wet - Steam/oil explosion, caused by pressure beyond the strength of a vessel.
However, a steam explosion is out, because our only pressure resistant vessel is wrought iron, and THAT would soften and tear before it reached explosions.
Rulwyna nodded and said to him, "The rainy season comes soon anyway, the campaigning season will end and it will be up to the Blackbirds to do the fighting for the rest of the year anyway."
Oh and we're hitting them with Blackbirds in the off-season. In the rainy season when their levies are forced to go home, our Blackbirds continue to snipe and harass them, or disrupt leadership.
The gods seemed displeased with her father, bringing unstable but torrential rains that had ruined fields and crops and brought strife to farms and cities, although not as terrible as ancient legends said they could become. Among the many causes for this displeasure was most certainly her father's continued sponsorship of her mother and the impropriety of it, which put her at the intersection of a number of her parent's enemies hit list. She had figured out that she needed her own power against these sorts of actors before she was ten, and knew that when her father passed she would mostly be on her own.
I think that's the old weather pattern showing up again, but we're Centralized enough to shrug it off.
And there's a goddamned nest of vipers.
Unbeknownst to him, at some point she had stopped riding just for the thrill of it and to help him and the People, but also to build contacts and relationships with warriors. If needed, she could pull a few strings and turn this war to her advantage, blazing her own path forward. She obviously wouldn't start off in charge of anything, but she knew that she would make a great symbol to those she fought with.
Strike a further blow against the Patriarchy and give her a warrior based powerbase like Crywd did...but reinforces the martial power base.
Then there was the news of the youngest son of the king of the Highlanders, who had been assigned the task of holding off the Hathatyn and had managed to reverse some of their gains. A "diplomatic mission" to the Highlanders could be arranged, and new allies against her enemies could be found, especially given how much they had in common with fighting the Hathatyn.
Get foreign intervention and marry the heroic son of the Highlander Heroic King.
Worsens the gender issues, and brings in foreign intervention...which is almost never a good idea for domestic politics. It'd only unite everyone against her.
And if she got really desperate, she could also run north to the nomadic tribes who had recently made a tentative contact with the Stallions, who had decided not to attack but instead send out traders. Lucky break, considering that these tribes were a confederation of nomads founded by a survivor of the tribes scattered to the east by the northerners, who had sought revenge and achieved it, but had also forgotten who exactly the 'Salt People' were. Not exactly the preferred place to run, but she figured that if things got bad she could find a place there with her horse riding skills.
The Eastern Nomads live! And they remember us! Sort of.
They remember the shitloads of salt at least. That was a Salt Gift well used and they killed NomadSon The Second for us.
Nice guys, but it's more likely they'd assimilate her than the other way round, best case they form the Northeast March for us.
Or... thinking over the message again, Rulwyna wondered at what power her mother had discovered. Rulwyna often had trouble with keeping up with her mother's ideas, but that was from lack of experience rather than mental acuity, and she knew that most other shamans and priests could not follow along because of lack of interest in pursuing the strange ideas. If she disappeared for a time into her mother's work, could she grasp what divine wrath that had struck her down and turn that against her enemies? Plus, if she did that, she might not send her father to an early grave, or bring strife to the People if others decided she was attempting to cultivate dangerous foreign ties.
And there's always the SCIENCE route to excellence and power. This is far enough ahead of their time that the contemporary intellectuals didn't know what the fuck.
Okay so seeing our diplomacy for what it truly is rather than covered in finery wow people do not like us very much they like us slightly but man have we been neglecting that stat no wonder we do not have many foreign pilgrims the barely know of us or if they do know they dislike us.
We now have what is likely a hero and have to choose what she will do.
So we have a girl that has been on the front lines all of her life, with an increased social stratification momentum. Reminder that among the Ymaryns, beyond wealth, the main thing that differentiates people is their occupation, with War being a highly regarded occupation, but there is no hereditary occupation. And currency.
We have almost everything needed for the creation of a professional army.
Fuck everything else, a professional army is better than anything, the boom boom especially can be researched later since the notes will be in the Library. The move from a non-professional to professional army will need a hero though since we are unlikely to develop it naturally being not a society dedicated entirely to war. I want a Gaius Marius!
Nobody expects gunpowder, they hope for it. I'm sure you've hoped for things before, even unrepentant pessimists hope, so you should probably drop that particular line of complaining-without-convincing.
They hope for a pointless novelty is what I'm trying to convey here. What you or I imagine gunpowder as, what you and I know what gunpowder is capable of us just isn't on the table here. And people need to wakeup and realize that regardless of their hopes and dreams.
I also point out that a diplomatic attachment to the HK will drag us into the lowlands war. If vassalizing the HK costs us the ability to move in a meritocratic direction and forces us to inherit the ultimate shitstorm war, I have to say it's the worst move we could possibly make.
Considering the HK is the only foreign check on Xoh domination of the Lowlands, and that the Xoh are;
slavers
child killers
human sacrificers
a huge fucking threat
Honestly, the fact that we've strenuously avoided war wi
The only thing keeping the Xoh in line besides the HK, is the administrative burden. What happens when they get horse couriers hmm? What happens if they get their shit together and suddenly the HK isn't on the brink of their force projection.
Ignoring the fact we had a royal marriage with the HK before, hell ignoring the fact we had a family with deep connections with the HK rule consecutively without our world ending, I can understand the reasons why people balk at these issues. What I can understand is why they ignore them and refuse to countenance alternative solutions, they're so concerned over fucking gunpowder they haven't actually even stopped to consider how it actually helps address the issues our civ faces. Technology exists to support the civilization that develops it, civilizations do not exist to support the development of technology. And people are forgetting that, valuing a tech with minimal worth to us for the foreseeable future over addressing the issues we face in the near future.
Fuck everything else, a professional army is better than anything, the boom boom especially can be researched later since the notes will be in the Library. The move from a non-professional to professional army will need a hero though since we are unlikely to develop it naturally being not a society dedicated entirely to war. I want a Gaius Marius!
Are you trying to subvert your own vote? Because those arguments are likely to have most of the thread stay clear of both options you voted for like the plague.
In that case,
Continuing the mother study will definitely establish either caste systems or Russia style feudalism, after all if the progeny do what thier parents did that's clearly heredity, which is eeeevil. Very evil, and bad. And terrible.
Also if that is an explosive of any kind we should stay the fuck away from it, such things are the tools of evil imperialists and capitalists pig dog technocrats.
And we need to fight the evil patriarchy! We must show them that a woman is as good an iron age warrior/soldier as any man!
Or even better we could really show the nomands how proper society is run by sending them a powerfull capable woman, that should confuse the hell out of them and make them fix thier sexist culture!
And having our woman go and snag a Highland Prince should show them that wife Raiding is rape and they should stop.
OK not by best rant by far, mediocre even, but it's early and am still sleepy, so it'll do.
Might have to change later. I feel that Alchemy has very little chance for a great payout, and fairly good for no real payout. War has risks on a personal and societal level, but we need the stress to evolve further.
// Core value: "What is it? Let's find out!"
And if it happens to be a kind of explosive - that may be usable in construction, dams, roads, ...
Also - if she doesn't continue the work, chance that nobody will do so
The amount of hatred for males floating around disgusts me. Lots of delusions floating around. We don't even know what sex most involved are... and its fight the patriarch this. Punish them for being male that. The People don't even know what the hell that term means.
@Karugus You claim that we don't know that it is not immediately useful. We know and don't care.
The thing with stuff that isn't useful now is, it will be useful later on and this is something to add to our tech list. We have just to vote right.
Switching to this because as much as I would like to ally with the hk doing this is the best way to ensure she becomes chief keep in mind everyone that unless she has subtantial and noticeable accomplishments she will never become king not unless we are willing to go hereditary for her.
Switching to this because as much as I would like to ally with the hk doing this is the best way to ensure she becomes chief keep in mind everyone that unless she has subtantial and noticeable accomplishments she will never become king not unless we are willing to go hereditary for her.
They hope for a pointless novelty is what I'm trying to convey here. What you or I imagine gunpowder as, what you and I know what gunpowder is capable of us just isn't on the table here. And people need to wakeup and realize that regardless of their hopes and dreams.
Considering the HK is the only foreign check on Xoh domination of the Lowlands, and that the Xoh are;
slavers
child killers
human sacrificers
a huge fucking threat
Honestly, the fact that we've strenuously avoided war wi
The only thing keeping the Xoh in line besides the HK, is the administrative burden. What happens when they get horse couriers hmm? What happens if they get their shit together and suddenly the HK isn't on the brink of their force projection.
Ignoring the fact we had a royal marriage with the HK before, hell ignoring the fact we had a family with deep connections with the HK rule consecutively without our world ending, I can understand the reasons why people balk at these issues. What I can understand is why they ignore them and refuse to countenance alternative solutions, they're so concerned over fucking gunpowder they haven't actually even stopped to consider how it actually helps address the issues our civ faces. Technology exists to support the civilization that develops it, civilizations do not exist to support the development of technology. And people are forgetting that, valuing a tech with minimal worth to us for the foreseeable future over addressing the issues we face in the near future.
They admit that gunpowder would be pointless novelty. I believe Bungi was the first person to point out that the most we could expect to make is low concentration smoke bombs or if the holder is particularly stupid, a pottery bomb. You're not going to change any minds by telling them something they already know.
The reason we've strenuously avoided war with the Xoh is because they're a fucking nightmare. They were virtually impossible to wipe out before, and that hasn't changed in the past thousand years. They also aren't threatened from above by regular nomadic invasions. Getting our hands dirty in the lowlands would absolutely require that we win within the first handful of turns, or we'd eventually come to a point where we wouldn't have the actions to spare to maintain Military stat, prosecute war missions, and deal with the other fires that cropped up such as low stability or economy or SURPRISE THE STALLIONS ARE BEING WIPED OUT BY A HORDE, all at the same time.
For fuck's sake a main war mission against a comparatively weak faction, while TWO OTHER FACTIONS are putting up main war missions against them, only succeeded marginally despite our massive tech and stat advantage because of multiple major breakthroughs in military tech and a double hero boost (triple if you go so far as to count the Highlander's probably heroic contribution). You think that anything short of absolute maximum bullshit 'the Button' would work against an actual coherent peer like the Xoh?
The last time we had royal marriages with the HK was also during one of the generational low-points in war intensity in the lowlands, so light as to have actually basically died during the turn the marriages were at all viable (since we cheesed the marriages and made the political ties only skin-deep). It's not a good example of whether or not we'd be forced into the issue by getting Rulwyna into it now.
Of the four options presented, the diplomacy options are automatic no-nos because Nomads are a joke, and [reasons above], which leaves DO SCIENCE TO IT or HELP FIGHT GUD. We're already winning, and near-certain to pull out a win regardless of Rulwyna's focused efforts. Having her use martial accomplishment to protect herself politically is a waste, when we could just as well use her to pick up a mystically-useful technology, even explosives as a curiosity are great tools of religious oppression (there is a story about a South African tribe that was duped into believing the echo from an unusually shaped cave was their god, imagine the significance explosions could have).
But also, apparently my math basically was right. The Texas City disaster page lists a different tonnage of ammonium nitrate.
Article:
In laboratory, nitric acid can be made by thermal decomposition of copper(II) nitrate, producing nitrogen dioxide and oxygen gases, which are then passed through water to give nitric acid.
That's pretty possible since we likely have some nodules of that in the tailings.
Either way with her experiments focused on proving whether Fire is Hot or Dry in nature. Experiments then would involve trying to cause an ignition at low temperatures(nitrates, powders) or burning 'wet' substances(oils, resins, water).
So the discovery is likely one of the following:
-Incendiary substances - Certain materials burn extremely quickly.
-Dust explosions - Aerosolized powders burn extremely rapidly
-Pressure - Liquids heated in a sealed container will explode vigorously.
Either way, guns probably won't be happening, but being able to MAKE explosions happen on demand would be impressive enough that by Best of the Best she has merit for leadership.
The amount of hatred for males floating around disgusts me. Lots of delusions floating around. We don't even know what sex most involved are... and its fight the patriarch this. Punish them for being male that. The People don't even know what the hell that term means.
