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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Simon_Jester said:
1) Because learning how to fly a gyrocopter probably takes more than 1 AP in one turn. It's a pretty specialized trade even if you're not planning to fly combat operations.
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I don't know about that. Mathilde's got her massive Learning score, and she's not planing on doing combat flights with it. Just simple travel. A quick search shows that non-professional pilot licenses only take 30 or 35 hours of flight time training. An IRL commercial pilot's license takes years, sure, but that's with modern computer control systems and for flying hundreds of people around in a massive vehicle. A three-month training course for Mathilde's flying taxi is more than plausible, I'd think. (And she even contemplates taking the training with Max and/or Egrimm. That wouldn't exactly jive with multiple AP long training course.)

Though even if it does cost 2 AP, it'll still be a far cheaper way to fly than a griffon. :V
 
Doesn't Mathilde already have her personal gyrocopter? Well, close enough to be equivalent.
 
Shard said:
Doesn't Mathilde already have her personal gyrocopter? Well, close enough to be equivalent.
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Boney said:
You next return to Laurelorn via Zhufbar, as they've completed the Gyrocarriage they've been working on in gratitude for your contribution to the Karag Dum Expedition and the safe return of most of its Steam-Wagons. This one has been built from the ground up for that purpose instead of being adapted from a Gyrobomber so it's merely loud and uncomfortable instead of deafening and painful. But it's not as freeing as it otherwise would be because of the question of piloting - though the pilots of Karak Eight Peaks are happy to donate their services to accumulate experience in the air, they'd not be willing to spend weeks or months in Laurelorn or Middenheim to be on hand at a whim. Scheduling your trips in advance isn't a problem - it's what you've been doing already - but it does mean you're not fully taking advantage of your new acquisition, and you toy with the idea of learning to pilot it yourself, possibly alongside one of your WEB-MAT colleagues. Johann is out for obvious reasons, but Max or Egrimm should be willing to learn.
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Emphasis mine. Mathilde needs to either learn to pilot herself or hire a full-time pilot to gain the maximum benefits from the Gyrocarriage. Namely, being able to travel wherever and whenever she wants, within range of refueling of course. (Though possibly that problem could be solved too.)
 
Shard said:
Doesn't Mathilde already have her personal gyrocopter? Well, close enough to be equivalent.
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We have a personal gyrocopter, which means we can go wherever we want within its range... if we schedule ahead of time to get a pilot for it.
Getting training to pilot it means we can use it to travel whenever we require to.

Simon_Jester said:
Because Mathilde will probably want to have her hands and mind free to do other things while riding in the gyrocopter.
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We can still have a dwarf pilot for our K8P-laurlorn commute, and other pre-schedulable trips.


Noting that I wouldn't consider the training the most pressing of actions, there's a lot I would prioritize above it, but it would be useful.
 
Rafin said:
How do you sign a treaty with "Norsca"?
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Norsca is largely divided into seven major "Kingdoms". They're each ruled by a King, with several Jarls (high ranking nobles) below them controlling territory and holding land. The Jarls then have warriors, clan members (anyone who doesn't fight is considered a "peasant") and Thralls (slaves) below them in that order. The seven kingdoms are the Graelings, Skaelings, Bjornlings, Vargs, Sarls, Baersonlings and Aeslings. Norsca can then be divided into the Northern Kingdoms and the Southern Kingdoms.

The Northern Kingdoms are the Vargs, Aeslings and Graelings. The Southern Kingdoms are the Baersonlings, Bjornlings, Skaelings and Sarls. The Northern Kingdoms are closer to the Wastes and therefore deal with the Kurgan more often, and are significantly more Chaotic as a result of their proximity to the Wastes. They are more devout, more war mongering and violent, and more dedicated to the gods and their ideals so they raid a lot, which includes raiding the Southern Norscans. The Southern Norscans trade about as often as they raid, and are generally less violent and devout than their Northern Cousins. Page 140 of Tome of Corruption says this about them: "They raid when necessary for survival, but are more interested in acts of heroism and adventure over the carnal slaughter embraced by their kin." Unfortunately they still join the hordes of Chaos when they go south because they'll be annhilated if they don't.

Here is a map of the territories:
I say Kingdoms, but that's mostly because they're ruled by kings. They are actually called "Tribes" by Tome of Corruption, although I'm not sure about the terminology because as far as I know if a Tribe has a King it's a Kingdom not a Tribe. The settlements they have are not always permanent, they're generally semi-nomadic and move wherever there is land to cultivate. The Southern Kingdoms are willing to sign treaties and trade with Marienburg and Kislev, because they always have someone else to fight. Norscans are not united, and they fight each other very frequently, so they're never out of targets.
 
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Boney said:
think you're looking at this from a viewpoint that is far more used to both Wizards and flying than pretty much anyone in-universe. They won't be thinking 'hmm, lucrative piloting career for a respected figure, this seems like a solid career path'. They'll be thinking 'flying beyond the safety of the Empire in a bizarre Dwarven contraption that shoots through the air in service to a particularly intimidating Wizard where any momentary lapse in concentration on my part would kill everyone involved'. Sheer desperation would be the least bad of the possible motivations for getting involved in this. And you'd be lucky to find someone willing with any kind of education, let alone the sort of education that would serve as a suitable foundation for learning the extremely unintuitive mechanics of aeronautics and air navigation.
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Look, I'm sure we can find some young brighteyed boy/girl willing to dedicate their life to learning from Dwarfs somewhere in the Empire in exchange for the chance to fly. Bonus points if they're from Mathilde's old town. Eager young hayseeds are a genre convention for a reason after all! Hell, even once Mathilde is gone, we can bequeath her personal gyrocopter to the Grey College or something, there's a steady career right there.
 
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Shane_357 said:
Look, I'm sure we can find some young brighteyed boy/girl willing to dedicate their life to learning from Dwarfs somewhere in the Empire in exchange for the chance to fly. Bonus points if they're from Mathilde's old town. Eager young hayseeds are a genre convention for a reason after all! Hell, even once Mathilde is gone, we can bequeath her personal gyrocopter to the Grey College or something, there's a steady career right there.
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I'm sure they exist, I am also sure they would be hard to find and harder to vet. It's not like you can put an add in the paper.
 
Shane_357 said:
Look, I'm sure we can find some young brighteyed boy/girl willing to dedicate their life to learning from Dwarfs somewhere in the Empire in exchange for the chance to fly. Bonus points if they're from Mathilde's old town. Eager young hayseeds are a genre convention for a reason after all! Hell, even once Mathilde is gone, we can bequeath her personal gyrocopter to the Grey College or something, there's a steady career right there.
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If genre conventions open an academy to start educating enthusiastic peasants in things like trigonometry and fluid mechanics, then you can start hiring them to fly Mathilde about the place. Until then you're going to have to yield to grim reality.
 
Boney said:
If genre conventions open an academy to start educating enthusiastic peasants in things like trigonometry and fluid mechanics, then you can start hiring them to fly Mathilde about the place. Until then you're going to have to yield to grim reality.
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Trigonometry should be on the list for the Gunnery School in 8-Peaks?

What about hiring some human engineer-student from there, they should have at least part of the foundational knowledge.
 
Boney said:
If genre conventions open an academy to start educating enthusiastic peasants in things like trigonometry and fluid mechanics, then you can start hiring them to fly Mathilde about the place. Until then you're going to have to yield to grim reality.
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I mean, that's a gold-problem though, at least in the logic I'm working with; it's definitely a complicated field, but not one beyond some years in focused tutoring. I'm not envisioning grabbing some kid and shoving them into a pilot's seat, I'm thinking of finding someone young and bright and just at the age kids start apprenticeships, finding a tutor to cram the required knowledge base into them, which will cost a manageable amount of gold, then when they finish that using our Dwarf influence to get him trained to pilot the specific gyrocarriage that would belong to Mathilde. A process of at least a decade in total, but will yield a dedicated pilot answerable directly to Mathilde.
 
Shane_357 said:
I mean, that's a gold-problem though, at least in the logic I'm working with; it's definitely a complicated field, but not one beyond some years in focused tutoring. I'm not envisioning grabbing some kid and shoving them into a pilot's seat, I'm thinking of finding someone young and bright and just at the age kids start apprenticeships, finding a tutor to cram the required knowledge base into them, which will cost a manageable amount of gold, then when they finish that using our Dwarf influence to get him trained to pilot the specific gyrocarriage that would belong to Mathilde. A process of at least a decade in total, but will yield a dedicated pilot answerable directly to Mathilde.
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Your timeframe is longer than half of the quests length to date. Hopefully by ten years we will have made substantial progress on the waystones/finished it, and thus will have already needed a dedicated pilot.
 
Shane_357 said:
I mean, that's a gold-problem though, at least in the logic I'm working with; it's definitely a complicated field, but not one beyond some years in focused tutoring. I'm not envisioning grabbing some kid and shoving them into a pilot's seat, I'm thinking of finding someone young and bright and just at the age kids start apprenticeships, finding a tutor to cram the required knowledge base into them, which will cost a manageable amount of gold, then when they finish that using our Dwarf influence to get him trained to pilot the specific gyrocarriage that would belong to Mathilde. A process of at least a decade in total, but will yield a dedicated pilot answerable directly to Mathilde.
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By the time that pilot is ready we would have already found a set of accomodations that we've been using for a decade. We're looking for a quick solution, not a solution that we'll get in ten years time. A reminder that the entirety of this quest has taken place over the course of around 17 years.
 
A gyrocopter pilot is a single point of failure that could permanently kill Mathilde and end the quest if corrupted or suborned. If your idea's only line of defence against that is the willpower of a random peasant or engineering apprentice, perhaps you should take it back to the drawing board. And for the record, 'Boney wouldn't end his quest that way' is not a great lynchpin.

Artemis1992 said:
Trigonometry should be on the list for the Gunnery School in 8-Peaks?

What about hiring some human engineer-student from there, they should have at least part of the foundational knowledge.
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This would be viable, but introduces the problem of them probably being more loyal to the Gunnery School than to Mathilde and being given access to a whole bunch of Dwarven engineering secrets.

Shane_357 said:
I mean, that's a gold-problem though, at least in the logic I'm working with; it's definitely a complicated field, but not one beyond some years in focused tutoring. I'm not envisioning grabbing some kid and shoving them into a pilot's seat, I'm thinking of finding someone young and bright and just at the age kids start apprenticeships, finding a tutor to cram the required knowledge base into them, which will cost a manageable amount of gold, then when they finish that using our Dwarf influence to get him trained to pilot the specific gyrocarriage that would belong to Mathilde. A process of at least a decade in total, but will yield a dedicated pilot answerable directly to Mathilde.
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Investing that much time into producing a candidate could let you solve any number of problems, but as has already been pointed out, ten years is a pretty long time.
 
VoiceOfTheRiders said:
Your timeframe is longer than half of the quests length to date. Hopefully by ten years we will have made substantial progress on the waystones/finished it, and thus will have already needed a dedicated pilot.
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Codex said:
By the time that pilot is ready we would have already found a set of accomodations that we've been using for a decade. We're looking for a quick solution, not a solution that we'll get in ten years time. A reminder that the entirety of this quest has taken place over the course of around 17 years.
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Oh. Well in that case that's impossible. Engineering student or bust, and even then it's iffy cos you don't have the time to inculcate spiritual, ideological and emotional loyalty.
 
It would probably take less time to enchant the gyrocarriage to fly itself than it would to learn to fly it ourselves.

(A dwarf apprentice probably spends a decade studying the plans before he even sits behind an experienced pilot, let alone touches the control himself)
 
Ultrackius said:
yeah but any like, edible crops, is the question
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Based on everything shown about Sylvania, no. Dhar blights the land and anything edible that grows is in spite of it, not because of Dhar. It's pretty much radiation poisoning turned up a notch and instead of normal cancer, it can cause Chaos Spawn and other worse mutations. And even if it doesn't mutate someone physically, just being around it mentally wears away at one's empathy and ability to not be a self centered megalomaniac.

Shard said:
Don't dwarven gyrocopter pilots already exist? What is the problem to be solved here?
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Dwarf pilots are a miltary asset. So Mathilde needs to make plans around their schedules. She doesn't have one that answers to her specifically.
 
Shard said:
Don't dwarven gyrocopter pilots already exist? What is the problem to be solved here?
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The previous system is that the K8P's Gyrocarriage would fly to where Mathilde is on a schedule organized in advance to get her to where she needs to go. She just received one of her own from Zhufbar which could let her fly around wherever she needs to go at a moment's notice, but still being reliant on K8P's pilots means that it would have to work on the old system, as the pilots are military assets that can be lent for a day here or there but can't be permanently seconded to Mathilde without weakening the defence of the Karak.
 
Boney said:
This would be possible.
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Boney said:
If she's being recruited solely as a pilot then she wouldn't require managing, only if you also want to do other things like enchanting or research or whatnot with her.
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I'm actually surprised that Adela would be available for recruitment purely for piloting. Is she that desperate for knowledge that she's willing to spend so much time in Laurelorn acting as a personal pilot just for a chance at piloting? I thought she was busy with the Gunnery School branch.
 
Codex said:
I'm actually surprised that Adela would be available for recruitment purely for piloting. Is she that desperate for knowledge that she's willing to spend so much time in Laurelorn acting as a personal pilot just for a chance at piloting? I thought she was busy with the Gunnery School branch.
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Spending time in Laurelorn seems like a pretty nice perk tbh.
 
Codex said:
I'm actually surprised that Adela would be available for recruitment purely for piloting. Is she that desperate for knowledge that she's willing to spend so much time in Laurelorn acting as a personal pilot just for a chance at piloting? I thought she was busy with the Gunnery School branch.
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For a curious and adventurous young Wizard, having to loiter for extended periods in the general vicinity of wherever Mathilde will be Mathilding is a perk.
 
It also means having access to a gyrocopter. Don't always get that every day. Sure, she can't exactly tear it apart, but it's still quite the opportunity to study a product of Dwarf engineering firsthand.
 
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