Securing test subjects and access to Waaagh energies isn't the problem. The problem is that Mathilde is not a Waaagh Shaman and therefore not capable of making enchantments made out of Waaagh energies that would be easily capable of detecting other Waaagh energies, and that there's no friendly organization of Waaagh alchemists out there that can supply her with Waaagh-reactive materials.
So what I'm hearing here is that we need a diplomatic coup with a Greenskin tribe to make permanent allies out of them.
...Or the "try it and find out" infiltration thing. I feel like Ranald would probably
like the Infiltration thing: We haven't used the Night Prowler for pure theft and spying in a while and it would be cool to take a month or two to deep dive into Greenskin society and shamanism somewhere like Black Crag/Karak Drazh.
Actually, yeah, I love the quest's take on different societies and Mathilde's In-Character Xeno-Affinity would tie into such an arc pretty well. Right now we have the Elfcation to prep for and a Mummycation as a vague idea after that, but the more I talk about it, the more Greenskin infiltration sounds like a legitimately fun idea for a miniarc if we're ever in need of a change of pace for a bit.
*Pencils down "Orcation" for a project proposal sometime eventually
TM after the Elfcation*
I assure you all, the sheer befuddlement that would come of Mathilde disappearing for a month or three and coming back with a book titled "Amongst the Waaagh! A deep dive into Greenskin society and magic" has nothing to do with the idea.
Yeah, it's a lot easier to build a Turing machine than it is to have the framework of knowledge and concepts that makes doing so significant. Mathilde's not a Connecticut Yankee so she's going to limit the applications of this to things that it makes sense for her to see the use of.
For what it's worth here, while I am
excited by the Turing machine implications, I also realize that something like a general computer or rocket-ignition-sequence-control-unit grade of control system for a spell system spell is probably outside the scope of this quest. Even if all that is really fun to play with as ideas and fanfic about.
Most of my thoughts here are more on the level of something like one to five calculations, hence the talk about the same grad of simplicity as Minecraft redstone or (the user facing side of) Factorio logic components. A lot of cool things don't often
need much calculation, just knowledge of how the underlying system works and a small handful of components that may not even talk to each other.
A lot of the ideas that come easily to mind for me are Waystone Project things but one of the other things in that vein that's been coming to mind for instance is river leyline controls. It strikes me that if you knew the possible failure states you could probably tie emergency controls into river waystones just by reading the local river conditions. Much the same way that Mathilde built up a comprehensive list of terrain obstacles so she could program the identifier for where the Rite of Way sends the Skywalks, really: A handful of controls distilling a large list of cases into a tiny list of actions that will solve most of them.
"If:
Sevir > [some % of critical mass], Then: Throttle Inputs"
"If:
Dhar > [more than the system can safely handle], Then: Start emergency purge line"
Another use case might be splitting a Leyline. If the Kislev circuit has a maximum capacity or needs to discharge something that mini-vortex can't handle on its own (Which are still "ifs") then it... seems? Like one could use the strength of the primary leyline to feed excess from the mini-vortex there to secondary networks. Be it the Karak Vlag nexus or a restored Forest of Shadows network. Mostly that one came to mind since it's occurred to me that the prophecy about a male Ice magic user "Tainting Ice magic forever" might involve
something getting into the waystone network that both powers and is intimately tied to Ice Magic.
Aiding the Karaz Ankor in general by ensuring that lines cut off from flow to Ulthuan can go there instead would also be the same kind of project, I suspect. "You have too little" is a lot more diplomatically complex than "we have too much," but it seems like something that could be useful if and where we detect breaks with our mapping actions.
All this had definitely transformed into me just... gushing here, but this kind of design is just such a fun topic to think about.