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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Doing evil erodes the soul. Even outside of a universe where evil and souls provably exist, it still changes a person in ways that are not conducive to rigorous adherence to proper standards. Evil is associated with incompetence because evil directly leads to incompetence. Proper lab procedure requires traits like humility, cooperation, mutual understanding, farsightedness. These are all virtues. These require the virtuous.
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So, I can understand that most evil people are gonna end up overly sadistic and not too meticulous about their test procedures. But I gotta ask... why does proper lab procedure need humility, cooperation, and mutual understanding? I can maybe understand the humility, in terms of needing to record one's failures accurately in order to get anywhere with progress (Though surely people can understand that multiple failures are expected before one can get any success?). But cooperation and mutual understanding? To meticulously follow lab procedures? Isn't the stereotypical scientist a cold-hearted, very rational actor who does not necessarily cooperate with other scientists that often?

I honestly think a base full of people you experiment on in cruel ways will blow up eventually, not because people aren't following proper lab procedure, but because a place like that is actually trying to change people in unexpected ways. Definitionally, your procedures for expected dangers will one day fall to an unexpected change. SCP Foundation is rather different because they are generally seeking only to contain anomalies, not to change them.
 
Godwinson said:
The sorts of steels that are just flatly better than the bronze alloys available in the Bronze Age weren't actually reproduceable until the late 19th century. Most of the steel that was produced before that point wasn't actually better, just that it was cheap enough to have a broad base of skilled armorers familiar with working it.

It's something that gets drastically oversimplified, complete with people misunderstanding what steel even means in various contexts.
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Mid-to-late medieval steels are better than bronze. 12-13th century and up you can find better steels.
 
Kai Merah said:
So, I can understand that most evil people are gonna end up overly sadistic and not too meticulous about their test procedures. But I gotta ask... why does proper lab procedure need humility, cooperation, and mutual understanding?
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Humility to counter the "I don't need to wash my hands after going to the toilet because I don't piss on my hands" mindset.
Cooperation to pull your own weight instead of taking advantage of redundant safety procedures to Prisoner's Dilemma your workload.
Mutual understanding to prevent the kind of tribalism which can and has crippled billion-dollar projects.

Kai Merah said:
Isn't the stereotypical scientist a cold-hearted, very rational actor who does not necessarily cooperate with other scientists that often?
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You'd think so, but I have never known anybody more prone to developing new types of paganism at the drop of a hat than scientists. If you look through a laboratory and don't find a single shrine to a cantankerous piece of expensive equipment, it's probably a front for something.
 
It also depends on what "better" even means. Harder and can take a finer edge? Then obsidian is better than either, but I think it's pretty obvious that there's some serious disadvantages there. Ductility also matters, though bronze isn't actually all that brittle from what 5 min of research have told.
And as mentioned, the real killer here is logistics. If you can equip 100 soldiers to their 10, then it doesn't matter much if the sword is slightly better. And with bronze, it's more like you can either equip 0 soldiers with bronze or 100 with iron, because your trade route collapsed and now you don't have any tin to make bronze, but iron is in most places.
Kai Merah said:
Isn't the stereotypical scientist a cold-hearted, very rational actor who does not necessarily cooperate with other scientists that often?
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A scientist who doesn't cooperate is because they're arrogant and can't keep it in long enough to, which is the opposite of cold hearted and rational. Like, leaving even the principles of peer review aside, there's just too much different things to do and know. That only grows more so over time.

Also, there's few things scientists love more than talking your ear off about their specific thing. And other scientists are perfect targets for that, because they'll understand how impressed they ought to be, might be useful, and are generally interested.
 
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Kai Merah said:
Isn't the stereotypical scientist a cold-hearted, very rational actor who does not necessarily cooperate with other scientists that often?
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Yeah, as the person who kind of started the "fictional amoral scientists are incompetent" thing, I have to say fictional scientists are not very good representations of scientists you may find in reality. Unfortunately, fictional stereotypes kind of spoil the rl guys reputation. I have to admit Boney's take is more realistic, because I cannot think of a rl evil scientist who wasn't an incompetent moron.

... Well, maybe Fritz Haber, but his morality is hotly debated and he thought he was doing good even when he did the more morally ambiguous stuff, which brings up the question, can a scientist who creates an evil invention but sincerely believe they are doing the right thing be competent? Weapon development of poison gases and nuclear weapons seem to point to yes.
 
storryeater said:
Yeah, as the person who kind of started the "fictional amoral scientists are incompetent" thing, I have to say fictional scientists are not very good representations of scientists you may find in reality. Unfortunately, fictional stereotypes kind of spoil the rl guys reputation. I have to admit Boney's take is more realistic, because I cannot think of a rl evil scientist who wasn't an incompetent moron.

... Well, maybe Fritz Haber, but his morality is hotly debated and he thought he was doing good even when he did the more morally ambiguous stuff, which brings up the question, can a scientist who creates an evil invention but sincerely believe they are doing the right thing be competent? Weapon development of poison gases and nuclear weapons seem to point to yes.
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I think there's a distinction between 'science to create evil things', which history is full of examples of (Nuclear weapons and poison gasses as you point out, every variety of weapon ultimately) and 'science through evil means' (Mengele, Unit 731, etc), which basically always dropped the 'science' in pursuit of the 'evil'.
 
storryeater said:
Yeah, as the person who kind of started the "fictional amoral scientists are incompetent" thing, I have to say fictional scientists are not very good representations of scientists you may find in reality. Unfortunately, fictional stereotypes kind of spoil the rl guys reputation. I have to admit Boney's take is more realistic, because I cannot think of a rl evil scientist who wasn't an incompetent moron.

... Well, maybe Fritz Haber, but his morality is hotly debated and he thought he was doing good even when he did the more morally ambiguous stuff, which brings up the question, can a scientist who creates an evil invention but sincerely believe they are doing the right thing be competent? Weapon development of poison gases and nuclear weapons seem to point to yes.
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Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun.

Dishonourable mention to Thomas Midgley Jr, who put lead in petrol and the hole in the ozone layer. And the 1950s BuWeps guy that was trying to make a rocket propelled by dimethylmercury a thing.
 
Tobtorp said:
That one actually makes sense, the big hurdle with cannons is that you need good enough metallurgy to get material strong enough to withstand the pressure, yet light enough to be practical.
Metallurgy is something of a solved problem for the dwarfs.
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I've heard that the manufacture of church bells is the source of a lot of early ability to make cannons in Europe.
 
Godwinson said:
The sorts of steels that are just flatly better than the bronze alloys available in the Bronze Age weren't actually reproduceable until the late 19th century. Most of the steel that was produced before that point wasn't actually better, just that it was cheap enough to have a broad base of skilled armorers familiar with working it.

It's something that gets drastically oversimplified, complete with people misunderstanding what steel even means in various contexts.

Oh, and, if you're assuming Dwarven skill with metallurgy for steel, then it should also be presumed for bronze too, in which case there are, in fact, bronze alloys that are superior for personal armor than steel alloys, but they're drastically more expensive and difficult to work.
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My current understanding is that the difference between iron and steel within the context of historical weaponsmithing has to do with the amount of carbon in the alloy. Not enough and you won't be able to heat treat it properly. Too much and it ends up too brittle to be useful. Just enough and you end up with a material that both hard and ductile and can be heat treated to become a spring, capable of recovering after being bent.
Replication is a problem, but my understanding is that the rate of sucess grew over centuries with the build up of practical knowledge in smithing and forging techniques. In othercwords, early iron weapons were,well, iron(see above) and no better then bronze, but over time due to both increased chances to make proper steel and techniques making better use of less then perfect material (pattern welding, differential hardening etc) the new iron or in some cases mixed iron and steel blades ended up being better then bronze blades could be.

Now, I fully admit to not being a specialist, so if this is wrong I would very much appreciate corrextions and extra reading.
 
Mopman43 said:
I've heard that the manufacture of church bells is the source of a lot of early ability to make cannons in Europe.
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That would be because the foundries large enough for the purpose and immediately available in Europe, once it was discovered that bronze was strong enough as a metal to be used for cannons light enough to be moved, were those that had been casting bronze to make church bells.

The Reformation might also have played a role, since suddenly a lot of monarchs who'd become Protestant could seize the centuries of accumulated wealth in previously Catholic churches at their discretion, up to and including their church bells, meaning that vast stocks of still relatively expensive bronze was suddenly available for use.

EDIT: That said, there some decidedly innovative attempts to make cannons with even cheaper methods; the Swedish Empire experimented with making cannons out of rope.
 
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Boney said:
You'd think so, but I have never known anybody more prone to developing new types of paganism at the drop of a hat than scientists. If you look through a laboratory and don't find a single shrine to a cantankerous piece of expensive equipment, it's probably a front for something.
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I wonder if part of this is that science is as much a ritual of abandoning your preconceptions in exactly the right way to gain new insights as it is a body of knowledge. The whole point of a hypothesis is to be disproven and take the theory with it, after all.

If clapping three times after entering the room seems to keep the instrumentation working then who is the scientist to judge the rationality of it? That, too, is a theory the instrument is putting under strain.
 
Murks74 said:
It's more than that. It's pretty much the same process, skill set and facilities. Many foundries could produce both depending on demand.
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Makes me wonder is they ever ended up mixing their deliveries up. Some quartermaster ends up with enough bells for a carillon and has to track down which church now has a battery of twelve pounders hanging in their belfry.
 
Altom said:
My current understanding is that the difference between iron and steel within the context of historical weaponsmithing has to do with the amount of carbon in the alloy. Not enough and you won't be able to heat treat it properly. Too much and it ends up too brittle to be useful. Just enough and you end up with a material that both hard and ductile and can be heat treated to become a spring, capable of recovering after being bent.
Replication is a problem, but my understanding is that the rate of sucess grew over centuries with the build up of practical knowledge in smithing and forging techniques. In othercwords, early iron weapons were,well, iron(see above) and no better then bronze, but over time due to both increased chances to make proper steel and techniques making better use of less then perfect material (pattern welding, differential hardening etc) the new iron or in some cases mixed iron and steel blades ended up being better then bronze blades could be.

Now, I fully admit to not being a specialist, so if this is wrong I would very much appreciate corrextions and extra reading.
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It's worth remembering that steelmaking traditions had a substantial degree of variance throughout the world, based on the quality of the local iron and especially the knowledge of the local steelmakers (such knowledge typically being closely guarded by those steelmakers for obvious reasons). A village smith working with bog iron wouldn't be able to outdo a smith trained at Toledo in Spain, which kept up its expertise and resultant competitive advantage for two millennia.

India is probably the ultimate example of this, inventing high-carbon crucible steel before anyone else and then exporting 'Wootz steel' cakes and weapons across Eurasia (Damascus, being a major trade hub, got its share of this, hence 'Damascus steel'). (I feel the need to mention the neighbouring tradition in Sri Lanka, too, which developed a high-carbon steel smelted in furnaces powered by the monsoon winds.) Indian steel was famed as far back as Alexander the Great's day, when he received 100 talents of the stuff as part of a peace deal with the Indian king Porus, and continued to be so right up until the Industrial Revolution and British rule conspired to crush traditional steelmaking in India. Over the few centuries before they'd even started making bows out of steel, first as novelties for elites and then because it's far easier to keep and maintain an armoury of large numbers of steel bows than composite bows.

(The above tradition, by the way, may be part of the inspiration behind Lokhir Fellheart's 'Red Blades of Ind', made of 'Indan bloodsteel' melted down from a statue. Either that or the writers just wanted something exotic.)
 
AlexScribler said:
That's not why we do it, but yes. A healthy society raises healthy citizens who can become healthy soldiers who, because they are healthy, average stronger.
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It may not be the best of reasons to do it but, funnily enough, it is how it started in some places. At least in the United States, history has it that the National School Lunch Program was originally sold to Congress by the military, who claimed that malnutrition had significantly limited the number of possible recruits during WWII.
 
You know I can just imagine a Grey Wizard instructor at the College, after the students have properly acclimatized to their Wind, taking students into the streets of Altdorf and basically going batman on criminals. Dealing with minor crimes and using it as a teaching opportunity for the students to allow them to practice some techniques in the field.

To the point where the City watch are completely used to hearing that a criminal gang has been decimated/arrested by a gaggle of young Grey Wizards.
 
The Phoenixian said:
It may not be the best of reasons to do it but, funnily enough, it is how it started in some places. At least in the United States, history has it that the National School Lunch Program was originally sold to Congress by the military, who claimed that malnutrition had significantly limited the number of possible recruits during WWII.
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The NHS had a similar origin in the UK. During the First World War, nearly a third of working class men were rejected from the army due to medical issues.

As the war dragged on, the higher ups began freaking out about running out of soldiers. Bare in mind that this was the British Empire we're talking about. Covers a third of the globe? And they were worried about running out of people. They were starting to talk about sending women to the front lines (as tank operators, mainly).

And then some guy comes up with the idea of a "National Health Service", to run alongside the "National Armed Service". Mandatory medical care, so that the Empire would always have enough soldiers for all of its wars, and that no one would be found unfit for service.

Of course, the NHS wouldn't actually come into existence until after the Second World War, but the idea of it was born in the First.
 
Sinsystems said:
You know I can just imagine a Grey Wizard instructor at the College, after the students have properly acclimatized to their Wind, taking students into the streets of Altdorf and basically going batman on criminals. Dealing with minor crimes and using it as a teaching opportunity for the students to allow them to practice some techniques in the field.

To the point where the City watch are completely used to hearing that a criminal gang has been decimated/arrested by a gaggle of young Grey Wizards.
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Issue is, I'd imagine a decent number of those gangs are informants and weirdly patriotic.
 
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