What Can SV Teach an Evil Sorceress? (abandoned)

LoserThree · Aug 30, 2020

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                         NOTICES

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Cacophonous Interlude is NOT active
  (the QMPC does NOT hear what you write right now)
Next story update : Sometime in July would be nice
Next vote closing : TBD
Progress toward next update : 3,146 words

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Anything I post that's not in text blocks or in spoilers
may be understood to be said by the QMPC, with the
exception of the Collaboration Post
  (see Collaboration Post for details on itself)

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Players do not need to use code blocks or spoilers
outside of cacophonous interludes

If you use code blocks, please limit yourself to 32 lines
and your lines to 57 characters, so that people on mobile
can read them without scrolling within the code block

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This is not meant to be Plagiarism Quest.

You're not discouraged from using outside reference
material or quoting other sources.  When you do, please
cite your sources in spoilers or a code box.

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 I have added some players who contributed a fair amount
the last two times as thread collaborators who can update
   the collaboration post. If you'd like to update the
collaboration post too, contact me by PM and we'll talk
                        about it.

Check the Collaboration Post and read the latest story post in the Threadmarks to get a rough idea of where things are at.

If you're not already involved in the game, portions of either of these may be difficult to follow. But you can skip to the line that says "B R E A K" in the latest threadmarked story post and skim from there to get an idea of what's going on.

If there's no corresponding Closing The Vote post in the Informational threadmarks for the latest story post in (normal?) Threadmarks, then the game is in a cacophonous interlude and the QMPC will hear what you post, unless you do so with spoilers or code boxes. The NOTICES portion at the top of this post should also tell you if the game is in a cacophonous interlude.

So you can engage with other players, make suggestions, ask questions, and propose plans and you can compose a message to the QMPC all whether or not the game is in a cacophonous interlude. And once it is, you can vote and/or send a message to the QMPC by creating a post in the thread.

If you want to vote, simply do so as you would in other quests on this board. You may look at other players' votes to see how yours should be formatted. And you may check the tally to see that yours are counted as you intend them.

If you want to send a message to the QMPC, though, keep in mind that they are a creature of their time. They may not understand what you mean if you don't take the time to make it clear. This game rewards and demands work from its players. When a player wants to introduce a concept or tool or technology to the QMPC, that player will probably need to expend effort to explain it carefully, and take into consideration the limits of the QMPC's understanding of the world.

I think this is similar enough to Graeber's 'interpretive labor' that we can use the term colloquially to describe what is being asked of players. Put yourself in the mind of the QMPC and ask yourself how such a person can be made to understand what you want to tell them.

The QMPC has different values than we do. They have different assumptions about the world and objects and forces within it. Their goals may not align directly with number-go-up or color-get-big gaming agendas. But they want something, and will listen most attentively to players that tell them how to get more of or closer to what they want.

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                    Collaboration Post!

The Quest Master posts story updates that have 3 parts.
- Quest Master Player Character responses to player posts made during the last cacophonous interlude
- An update by the QMPC following a break of varying length but usually some number of years, covering what the character believes is worth mentioning
- Requests by the QMPC for direction on a number of issues, which the players will provide in the form of votes
Following each story update, players posts are audible to the QMPC until voting is closed.
This is the cacophonous interlude.
- Players may convey any information they can represent in text.
- No images, sounds, or hyperlinks will get through (this is my limitation, not a limitation of the game, so please do not try to transcend it with clever protocol tricks).
- Players may use spoilers or code blocks to communicate with each other without doing so in ways the QMPC can hear.
When votes are tallied, the QM collects player posts so that it may be known what the QMPC heard.
- Votes are tallied in the conventional fashion. So only votes in the most recent post by each player are counted. [X] marks what the player is voting. And only identical write-ins accumulate.
- Some votes are querying the players for their preference, in which case the only suboptimal answer is that which does not accurately reflect the preference of the players who nonetheless chose it (I don't think these kinds of misunderstandings can be helped).
- Other votes are intended as puzzles where there is a choice the QM believes would best meet what they believe to be the goals of the players.
  - However, in these sorts of votes the QM has in mind a choice that would provide the players with what the QM thinks they most want, but which is not listed in the available votes.
  - In this way, clever write-ins are encouraged.
QM reads player posts, researches their suggestions, checks notes for precedent, determines what the QMPC thinks they already know on the topic, what they're right or wrong about, how likely they are to engage with the topic, how likely the QMPC's followers are to follow-through in the matter, and finally what the result is going to be later on.
QM composes QMPC's responses to player posts made during the cacophonous interlude and updates their notes.
When narrative benefits from uncertainty and chance, QM devises tests for QMPC or other characters and makes those tests using die rolls on a post made just for that purpose.
- Skill or attribute tests will be made with a largely undocumented homebrew modification of the Burning Wheel system, mangled to suit the format of this game. (The Burning Wheelis a good system and I encourage you to check it out.)
  - Tests may be a contest between two characters or against a static target with tiered results.
  - The rules being used and followed will be described in each post in which tests are made by die rolls.
  - Normal mortals count 7s and better as successes.
  - Heroic characters and characters who are otherwise innately magical count 6s and better as successes.
  - Demigod characters and characters who otherwise possess some spark of divinity count 5s and better as successes.
  - New gods and characters who have otherwise stolen the power of Old Gods count 4s and better as successes.
  - Old Gods count 3s and better as successes.
  - Sorcery and other magic skills lower the threshold of success by 1 to a minimum of 3 only when they are the skill being tested, not when they provide a bonus to other skills. Players may note that Old Gods' threshold of success does not improve when they use magic.
  - Bonus dice provided by Kahl's Warhorses and any incendiary devices more complicated than a burning arrow reroll 9s & 10s and keeps successes. These same bonus dice cancels successes on 1s & 2s, rerolls those, and additional 1s & 2s cancel additional successes. More 1s, 2, 9, or 10s mean more rerolling and more successes or cancelations, but only in the manner of the original die. That is, a 1 or 2 that comes up when a 9 on a bonus die is rerolled don't cancel successes or lead to further rerolling.
- Research project results are determined by percentile dice with results falling into 5 tiers.
  - Uh oh: something has gone horribly wrong
  - Nuh uh: failure, but the boring kind
  - Huh: partial success
  - Uh huh: full success
  - Whoa: superior special case success
- When players expect a test to be coming up -- for example if they vote for an invasion or to send a diplomat to manipulate a foreign leader -- they can improve the odds of the test turning out the way they want by providing the QMPC with advice specific to that matter. If the advice is not mistaken or outright bad, there will be at least a chance it will help. That is, decent advice adds dice.
QM composes the QMPC's post-break update, player vote questions, and player vote options.
GOTO 1

The QMPC is intended to be the only character the players will interact with in this game. (It's kind of possible that the players could maneuver the QMPC to surrender control of the Astute Cacophony to another character, but unlikely.)

The QMPC is a small, evil woman who knows magic and has not died, despite looking like she probably should have at some point. She goes by the name Bianca the Undying. Her early life took place in the Paleolithic, in which she has said that she traveled around quite a bit and came to understand the malleable nature of populations of people and animals and even the land itself. At some point she was trapped underground, to her displeasure. She remained trapped for a very long time.

When Bianca got out, she found her way to a community of eight tribes living pastoral and agrarian lifestyles in the local Copper Age. She made these people hers and they relied on her for magically enriching their fields so that they did not need to slash, burn, and move around a bit, unlike their neighbors. Bianca and her followers formalized their relationships into the Eight Ways Pact. Later, another tribe joined Bianca's followers bringing small horses and the Bronze Age and their pact was updated with a ninth directive.

Bianca has an agenda that requires her to have more power than she does right now. She believes that achieving divinity will get her that power.

Ciber · Jun 28, 2021

Legion0047 said:
Yay, more - mostly - useless blue sky research.

Also, guys. Do the Boilers of the Nations use Waterpipe or Firepipe architecture?

Uncertain. It may be that they use something worse than either. Best to describe both.

Legion0047 · Jun 28, 2021

Ciber said:
Uncertain. It may be that they use something worse than either. Best to describe both.

Good point, so let's just go through all boilers just to make sure:

All of the following designs are built inside a box with only three opening, the door your shovel coal into, the exit for the fire's smoke and the pipe that leads the steam into the engine.

The most basic boiler is a round, metal cylinder you put over a fire to heat up the water inside the cylinder, which then turns into steam and moves into your engine to do work.

In the second most basic boiler, you put a pipe through the cylinder and let the heated air of the fire move through it - best architecture here is that you place the cylinder above the fire with a slight incline so that the warm air of the fire moves to the direction you want before you force it to double back through the pipe.

The next few boiler designs all consists of more and smaller pipes that go through the cylinder to increase the surface area of heated metal that gets into contact with the water.

There is a hard limit to what you can achieve with this kind of fire pipe design and will probably suffice for the next while, but before long it is time to switch to a so called water pipe boiler.

The main difference here is that you reverse what gets lead through pipes and build a lattice work of water pipes that get heated by the central fire in the middle of the boiler. This leads to even more surface area of heated metal touching water - creating steam - and allowing for higher steam pressure while means you can run your steam engine faster.

Ciber · Jun 28, 2021

LoserThree said:
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This is your 21-ish hour warning. The votes are mostly close. But they're also mostly in agreement.

Sir professor might I please have just one more day to submit my paper?
I have no excuse. Just a perennial inability to meet deadlines.
And I feel like with the number of people voting for my economic plan I aught make it a bit better.

Also I think some of the quotes in this last update might not have lined up with what Bianca was actually replying to.

liberty90 · Jun 28, 2021

I think that there exist two entirely different kinds of wealth. Useful wealth and baubles. Useful wealth are productive devices, like steel tools or reaper devices or wind-power grinders or, now, steam wheels. When crafts of people grow to be more complicated, it's very reasonable for inequality in useful wealth to exist, as there are devices that are scarce, and these should be owned by people who know how to the best use them. It's moronic to give away steel tools or glass device for looking at tiny life, the best used by a surgeon or healer. If somebody looks at tools of a healer, even if complicated and costly tools, and say "you have so much and I so little" - then such a person is not correcting bad inequality, but is a moron.

Perhaps people should form cooperatives for owning complicated and costly but useful devices, just as traders form cooperatives for trade, humph.

I know even about nations that worked entirely because of trade, families traded even with neighbours instead of giving gifts, and issues of inequality were mostly solved by authorities giving paper coins to these less fortunate. In a way authorities of the nation replaced giving, partially. There was inequality, but manageable and without great discord.

Legion0047 · Jun 28, 2021

Just as a note, yes I know this stuff of the top of my heat because my main quest on SB is a Frostpunk quest and that means Victorian Era England and all the research that implies. So I already did my work and am now just remembering it. When I do go looking stuff up, I will of course link the source.

LoserThree · Jun 28, 2021

22a

Ciber said:
Sir professor might I please have just one more day to submit my paper?
I have no excuse. Just a perennial inability to meet deadlines.
And I feel like with the number of people voting for my economic plan I aught make it a bit better.

Also I think some of the quotes in this last update might not have lined up with what Bianca was actually replying to.

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              Per request, deadline is extended 1 day to 
                       0100 GMT on Wednesday, 2021-06-30

liberty90 · Jun 29, 2021

Black Cat here again.

I want to mention interesting observation that table-rulers and others who use numbers to make decisions should probably keep in mind. Survivorship bias. There is a story of well-supplied armed host where soldiers were given hats made out of metal, to reduce number of head injuries. But afterwards greatest surgeon of the host complained to the Commander that, according to his observations and more imporantly his numbers and records, amount of injuries only increased. Can you guess what was wrong?

Well, even very wise can make similar mistakes. Surgeon was right with his numbers, but mistaken at considering only injuries. There were more injuries seen by him because more people lived long enough to need attention of healer, instead of dying fast! So the iron hats were actually working!

And a few words about different matter: how to keep body at least somewhat clean without soap. Keep in mind that use of soap is greatly superior method over the lack of soap, of course. But sad lack of soap is no reason to abstain from cleaning bodies: it's better to clean body with a piece of wet cloth than not at all. I think that this may be obvious to many, but not to all, and sometimes it's useful for the authority to remind people even something obvious. Even without cloth it's generally better to throw some water at hands and dirtiest parts of the body, like ass, daily. If there is no water, scrub body with clean sand. Of course this invalidates nothing about our previous advices and soap remains vastly superior to such desperate ways of cleaning. Perhaps very obvious to many already...But it helps to promote cleaningness as ritual expected from people, as form of virtue.

I also want to mention that mercury can be used to measure moderate heat. I think that bimetallic strips are used to roughly measure heat above the heat of boiling water and below the heat of melting copper. Device with mercury can be used to measure usual everyday heat levels in both winter and summer. Heated mercury expands. During cold of a winter, mercury would take less place in a clever glass device. It's good to invent a measure for heat. If we assume that, under usual conditions, fresh water freezes at 0 degrees of heat and boils at 100, then during cold winter there can be 20 below 0, during peak summer heat 30 above 0, usual heat of healthy human body is 37. Note, that salty seawater is different from fresh water also in this manner and freezes in temperatures below 0. And yes, mercury is still a poison, remember, if you want such measures use only closed devices with glass.

I suppose that everyday heat levels are somewhat relevant for plants.

JayTar · Jun 29, 2021

Right Jay here again, lets talk about medicine, science and research.
Before your imprisonment some voices explained the placebo effect.
Also previously various voices talked about double blind testing and how scientific theories can be confirmed or refuted. At the time you were skeptical of the need for such complicated methods.
All the ridiculous and nonsensical medical theories from the doctors are exactly why.
Let me tell of something you must know but perhaps have not thought about. We call it Confirmation Bias.
When someone believes something to be true, or wants to, their ability to judge if it is truly true or not becomes flawed.
Many factors feed into it but to mention a few:
People tend to remember things that support their view and forget things that do not.
When presented with new evidence that does not fit their view people look for reasons to ignore it.
When searching for evidence people look for evidence that supports their view and do not look for evidence that contradicts it.

So how can one know the truth? Well there are clever ways of thinking to try to reduce the bias, and there are systems that can be used to separate the testing to the theory from human bias.
To start try to re frame the issue. For every theory there is an opposite theory, that the theory in question is not correct.
Take the idea that singing a certain song under the light of the moon will cure a person of a fever.
Do not ask the question "How may I prove that singing the song under moon light will cure a fever?" Instead ask "How may I prove that singing the song under moon light will not cure a fever?"
There are then a number of tests that can be preformed. Does the song matter? What if they sing a different song instead? Does the moon matter? What if they sing under the sun? Or inside?
Then take that what is to be tested, people in the case of the singing and split it randomly into two groups.
Each group will test one of the conditions. Say one group will sing the original song, the other group will sing an entirely different song.
Then data will be recorded and compared.
If then it is shown that no matter what song is being sung the same results happen then perhaps whatever effect you observed is just the placebo effect. Or perhaps it is really the act of singing that is important not the song and further tests must be preformed.

When a scientist is presenting their theories they should not be explaining why they think they are true. Instead they should be explaining all the efforts they went in attempting to prove it not true. If despite their efforts they were unable to prove it false, then perhaps the theory may be true.

The next strategy to know the truth is double bind testing.
It is important that both the ones being tested and the ones preforming the tests and recording the data do not know which of the two groups they are in or testing. This is important because it insulates the test from bias and lets what is true show though. Between the placebo effect and confirmation bias the reasons why this is important should be obvious.

Another important detail is independent verification. If something is truly true then it is true everywhere (or if it is not true somewhere then there must be a reason why that is).
Once one researcher has proven (or failed to disprove) a result they should then present their findings and methods to their peers. Ideally findings should be written down and distributed to any and all who may be interested.
Then other researchers should repeat the tests, and possibly other tests in an attempt to disprove the theory. Once many independent researchers have attempted and failed to disprove a theory then you may have good confidence that it is true.

It is also important to display failure, not with shame but with pride. To publish negative results. If a researcher after much effort has discovered that the theory they have been pursuing is not the truth they should not hide away the results. Instead they should circulate it just as far and wide as those who have found the truth. They have not failed, instead they have succeeded at eliminating an untruth. Now others must know such so that they spend their time following other paths. This is also vital due to the nature of numbers and probability.

When looking at the tabulated results of a test a researcher should not then declare "This is true" or "This is false" but rather "This is true with odds of 95 in 100" or "I was not able to prove that the odds of this being false are less then 5 in 100". (As a note, 95 in 100 odds of being true or 5 in 100 of being false is a good benchmark for when a theory is worth strong consideration)
How is this determined? They must compare the result they are seeing with the odds that it is merely the result of random chance. If it is highly improbable that the difference in the two groups tested was the result of random chance then they can be more certain of their theory. By testing larger groups the certainty can be increased. If two people are sick and one takes a medicine and the other does not, and one dies and the other does not, well perhaps one just got lucky/unlucky. But if a thousand people are sick, and half of them take the medicine, and almost all who do survive and almost all who do not die, then you can be much more sure.

This is why it is important to publish negative results too. If by running a certain test you can be certain of an untruth with odds of 99 in 100. And if one hundred researchers run the test and all who discover it to be an untruth hide away the result in shame, then one of them may in error find it likely to be a truth and declare so.

In regards to more specific knowledge of medicine:
That the herbs you know for ending pregnancy are also poison is likely true. If the risk is too great and they should never be used is a more complicated question to which the answer can vary based on circumstances and individuals.
But yes it is quite possible that a good fraction of what herb lore you know is incorrect. Just as I have spoken about all the failing of the mind, you yourself are not exempt. That upon being confronted with evidence that contradicts with what you know you seek to resolve it instead of rejecting it indicates good things about you. Think about how many fools you must have seen insisting on what they think is true even as the real truth is obvious before them?

Tiny life is an imprecise term. All living things are in fact massive colonies of tiny life working in synchronicity. In a single drop of blood there exist millions of tiny cells whose purpose is to transport oxygen from the air in your lungs to all the parts of the body alongside cells that bunch together to form scabs when blood is exposed and cells that seek out and attack foreign invaders in the body. Nearly all types of tiny life required for the body's function are produced and maintained by the body. Blood is produced in the marrow of the bones. Skin is produced by the bottom most layer of the skin. Many other cells divide themselves into twins to fill in for losses.
Sickness can be caused by the attack of a foreign agent or by the malfunction of one of the many the systems of the body. Learning what causes a given sickness is a very important step in understanding medicine.

The subjugating structures are in fact a truth! We refer to them as a virus. They are one of the types of foreign agents that may attack a body.
You are correct that they do not do many of the things you were told they do. The symptoms and effects they cause should not be so wildly different from any other sickness. Specific alterations to behavior are extremely rare in diseases. The frothing sickness or Rabies is in fact a virus and is notable in how much it causes behavior to change due to it progressively destroying the brain of its victims. Any behavior changes more subtle are either due to indirect effects (someone who is feeling sick will of course act different from usual) or due to sicknesses of the mind.
Sicknesses of the mind are a different and highly complicated subject. They are however caused by malfunctions of the body and mind not foreign tiny life.
Otherwise any behavior changes are likely unrelated and only thought not due to errors in research as previously discussed.

For a final topic: Research ethics.
It is important for those that preform research to be trusted. If people do not trust them they will not listen to them and they will not wish to be subjects for studies. Thus it is important to take certain actions.
Patients must be informed if the treatment they are receiving and if it is well practiced or experimental and if there are other options. They must also know if they are participating in an experiment and give their agreement of such. They must also know that even if they are participating in an experiment they may in fact be receiving the normal treatment not the experimental one due to the structure of the two groups experiments. They must know the possible risks and possible benefits of what will be done to their bodies. Thus the people will know that if say they come in with a great fever they will not have their hand chopped off for no reason other then a lesson.
While death being a lesson is wise, it is vital to remember that the purpose of the lesson is to teach one how to avoid getting more of them in the future.
Risky experiments should be preformed on animals until a degree of understanding and proficiency has been achieved. The physicians should not have been attempting to chop off and reattach hands of humans until they had successfully preformed such on an animal.
Domesticated mice work reasonably well as a test animal and are quite convenient due to how quickly they breed. Pigs also work as something larger.
Animals are also easier to control for uniformity. Every human is highly distinct, but mice can be bred so that each and every one is identical.

Confirmation bias - Wikipedia
p-value - Wikipedia

Holy hell this got away from me. Why can't I write essays like this.

LoserThree · Jun 29, 2021

JayTar said:
Why can't I write essays like this.

Well, you demonstrably can.

Maybe now that you know that, you can find it easier to do so for less recreational, more instrumental purposes. Maybe not. Either way, growth?

LoserThree · Jun 29, 2021

Code:

This is your 1 hour warning.

Ciber · Jun 29, 2021

TIME IS A LIE > SO IS THE SKY > TRUST IN THE ALL KNOWING ALL SEEING I

Bianca said:
"Breeding better plants, though, is not the work of a school because it is not the work of any mortal lifetime. In the centuries of my absence, how many new traits should have been found in grains or fruit or herbs or whatever? Three? Perhaps seven? Is it not enough that the people know from song that they should look, that they should carefully guard deviant plants when they find them, and that they should be shown to their village table-ruler to decide if the plant can grown more widely? Do you expect such changes to happen so rapidly that a mortal may be meaningfully schooled in their ways? Is there some means by which changes like that can be forced into being? And should they?"

All this time you've not seen simplest truth?

The truth that is at the very core of our being.

The truth that aught be enshrined in every song.

The truth that all people are so very quick to forget.

Everything you know is wrong.

Perhaps I am biased, for we are a spirit of change, and growth, and yes: Madness.
But when you ask "can a thing be done better", has the answer ever truly been NO?

You can't expect that those who farm have effort to spare carefully checking every plant for useful deviants. Moreover, the majority of deviations cause only very small changes that could easily be overshadowed by variable soil quality or access to water. And by what measure is the table-ruler to decide what deviances are useful? You would not expect much luck constructing a great stone hall if the builders just start stacking stones hither and thither with first making some plan for how it aught look.

It doesn't have to be this way. You really can achieve significant improvements within a single generation. A dedicated school of table-rulers would indeed be a good start. Give them land and manpower enough to enumerate their fields with the same meticulous care as a banker with his gold and I can guarantee you results.

Onto actual methods. As I mentioned earlier, our greatest enemy is the environment. Plants are sensitive to soil, water, sun, disease, and pest. If you are to discern small beneficial changes then you must find ways to control these variables. The most extreme expression of this idea might be to pot each individual plant so that none is overcrowded. Giving their roots each have access to the same amount of soil. mix the soil well beforehand so that it is all of equal quality. Position them far apart so that no plant shades another from the sun. Perhaps even put them under a roof to block rain so you can give each plant the same amount of water by hand.

That is an extreme though. For faster growing plants like grain it might make more sense to have a number of small fields instead of individual plants. A simple example would be to have perhaps twenty small fields of twenty plants each. At each harvest compare the weight of grain produced by each field, and use only the grain from the most productive field to plant the next season. This is another method that helps control random environmental variables. Although it requires a clear method to measure how good each field is. Another example of this method would be breeding a shorter strain by measuring the height of each stalk in each small field at harvest time.

You will notice I have talked about strains. You want to focus on breeding multiple separate strains which each focus on a single trait. One strain that is good at growing with little water. One that has large grains. One that is short. One that is tall. One that produces the greatest weight of grain. It is much easier to breed a strain when you have a single, clear, measurable goal. And you can more easily create new useful strains for actual farming in the by cross-breeding separate strains because different places obviously need different traits. A plant that grow well without rain won't much like growing in a swamp.

But selective breeding alone would not justify anything calling itself a "School". They must also apply the rule of tables to discerning what qualities of the soil matter to which crops. Developing new mechanisms like the one Puleo built so long ago. Investigating how different types of fertilizer might correct different sorts of deficiencies in the soil. How can weather be predicted? How might Bianca make the most efficient use of her time blessing fields? For certainly villages with ample hunting and fishing aught have lesser priority, and there may be some fields where a lesser effort of Bianca might see a greater effect.

I keep deleting & re-writing & I went insane but this one at least is done.
Should have went with the last draft & focused on economy tho.

LoserThree · Jun 29, 2021

22b

Katsuragi said:
Hm. If they can make copper wire in decent quantities, they might be ready to get a prototype telegraph up and running.

Gavinfoxx said:
It's Fox again. A few things, Bianca. When I say 'mindset', I mean, the core assumptions and patterns of thought and distinct perspective which allows an expert at a particular lifestyle be especially competent at the requirements of that lifestyle. Not just the specific skills, but more... the particular wisdom of how they go about using them, especial with regards to perspective and context and some of the things they don't even have to really actively think about. And the 'mindset' of Soldiers as distinct from Warriors is important, as is the mindset of Scientists as distinct from Philosophers. It has in part to do, in both cases, of existing within a larger conceptual structure and cultural context and methods of cooperation with others and the improvements in effectiveness which can be derived from such mutualism and methods of cooperation, mostly. Pay special attention to that when interacting with these sorts of people and contrast that with their more individual-acting predecessors!

Oh, and when I say, "Guinea Pig" and "Hamster", I mean, 'two specific varieties of animals which somewhat resemble rats or mice in their anatomy which are not precisely rats or mice.' I was using the more generic term 'rodentia' to mean, 'the broader category of animals within which mice and rats are included, that are characterized by having a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws'. "Guinea Pigs" and "Hamsters" are examples, as are Porcupines, Beavers, Chimpunks, Jerboas, Degus, Cavys, Gophers, Squirrels, Pacas, Rats, Mice, Groundhogs, Nutrias, and so on. And several of these names probably didn't translate correctly, because people from my world seem to reference swine in naming some of these things because of COURSE they do, but such is the nature of language and translation. Of course, only a few creatures of this type are suitable for raising in large groups as meat animals in a large scale agriculture context. And of that list, I have no idea which of those are local to you, and which correspond to some animals which must be native to some other, ludicriously far off land! Do your people categorize animals by particular anatomical similarities? It's a useful practice to encourage, to gradually tease out which animals are (very, very) distantly related (so distantly related they can no longer crossbreed, even, and are thus two different species by that point!) to which others by the evidence shown in their anatomy. And yes, the implication I made that all forms of life on your planet are related if you go back far enough in the family tree is intentional.

Anyway. We can talk more about evolution and genes and natural selection and artificial selection and the implications of that and the practice intentionally breeding things for specific features later. And it looks like your people crossbred foreign cats with the local ones to get useful genetic traits! So these concepts aren't foreign, entirely.

As far as which the best rodents for keeping for meat are... I can only say which ones are most popular in the world I come from, which is mostly 'Guinea Pigs', 'Agoutis', and 'Capybaras'. I would say the reasoning is mostly 'something big enough to have a reasonable amount of meat on it, which breeds quickly enough, which doesn't have a lot of defensive spines on it like a porcupine, is calm enough to not be utterly unmanageable in captivity, which is social enough with others of its kind so you can keep several of them together without too many problems, which isn't an amazing jumper or climber, and also which does not, itself, burrow, and can be kept easily enough in a relatively small pen.' Find whatever rodent you can which is best at as much of that as you can find which is reasonably nearby, and set clever people to selectively breed them for every sort of feature useful in a food animal!

Next, the other topic you've asked about earlier! Nitrogen-Fixing plants that are useful for agriculture. Plants which return vitality to soil! Okay. It's time to talk about a family of plants. Legumes, or the Pea, or the Bean family. They are a category of flowering plants, where the fruit or seed of the plant is often a 'dry' fruit that often opens on a seam in two sides. Some varieties of this category of plant have the fruit or nut or bean or pod of peas grow underground. Several of these plants grow with a particular type of small life that grows in their root systems which produces nitrogen -- a substance which contributes to soil vitality, especially if the plant is allowed to die (and the nitrogen then gets released!) in the soil during the appropriate part of the crop rotation. Most normal crops just take this substance OUT of the soil and do not place it back, making the ground less fertile over time. Note not all legumes have this specific type of small life, but many do!

All the ones I am about to mention do the nitrogen fixing thing. Also, touching the oils on these plants or eating them, even if very diluted, may cause a very very very very small percentage of your population to stop breathing due to their throat swelling shut and die due to extreme lethal allergy to even miniscule amounts of the oils. There's no real way to prevent this. Some extremely small amount of any human population is just horribly deathly allergic to legumes and that's pretty much that. Legumes are just too absurdly useful to NOT have growing around and being eaten and used as forage and fixing the soil and all that; these unwitting, often child sacrifices should probably be collectively honored somehow when you can figure out it was a legume that did such a child in.

Anyway, here's a few ideal ones. Alfalfa, also called Lucerne, is a plant which slightly resembles clover when it is young, which grows to about one meter, has a deep root system, and produces smallish purple flowers. Fruits spiral in two to three turns and have 10-20 seeds. It's a good feed for livestock (except overfeeding can cause bloating), the sprouts are edible by humans (though they have to be regularly rinsed while growing the sprouts in water in a jar for human consumption).

Lupinus, or Lupin, Lupine, Bluebonnet. A Perennial that grows up to 1.5 meters tall, with soft green leaves coated in silvery hairs. The bluish flower has a distinct set of upper and lower flowers that remind people of certain kind of head coverings, leading to people to often call them 'bluebonnet'. The pod contains several beans, and is a useful food.

Peanut, or Groundnut, or Goober, Pindar, or Monkey Nut, is mainly grown for its edible seeds. It is an annual herb which is one of the types where the nuts are specifically in pods of usually two or three in the ground, with small round yellow flowers. The seeds have a brown papery covering. They have a large amount of a substance called 'Protein' for a plant, which is usually found in animal muscle, so are useful for people who can't or won't have lots of animal products to have healthier muscles.

Rooibos, or Redbush, or Stekelthee, is used as an herbal tea, often called 'Bush Tea', and has thin, rigid, leafs and small yellowish flowers, and the seed pods often need to be weakened to germinate (by grinding or fire). Likely this plant isn't anywhere near you.

Clover, or Trefoil, is the common small three-leaf you see in grass, and it IS a legume that DOES fix nitrogen, and often has white flowers. It's used as fodder and bees, both honeybees and bumblebees, love it. The four and five and six leaf examples are rare and often considered lucky, though this is just superstition.

Soybean or Soya Bean is maybe a 1.5 meter tall plant with 20 or so growth nodes, and up to 100 pods per plant that seed. It has three to four leaflets per leaf. It goes through many distinct looks as it grows. It develops pods that contain up to three to five seeds each or so. The pods are hairy. It has small violet flowers. The beans are edible and useful in a wide variety of food products.

Let's see, what else have you mentioned of late?

As far as managing your Singers... all I can say is get together a bunch of people that are students of history, students of the sorts of arts that influence people, propagandists, confidence artists, influential playwrights, those who study politics, students of the mind and the ways people think, those who enjoy comparing and contrasting societies and ways of living and so on, loyal types, and encourage the study of the concept and techniques of 'social engineering' and 'propaganda'; that is, in this context, the specific use of scientific techniques in managing information and beliefs that other people have about you to encourage specific types of people to tend to behave in specific ways that are beneficial to you, not as much in the individual level (ie, by bribes or threats to individuals or whatnot), but in groups. Basically, I'm trying to introduce the concept that this is a specific discrete concept that can actually be studied scientifically, like anything else.

As far as this banking system and economics and the.. mindset of these people with their hoards, someone who is better than me at the history of finance and economics is going to have to walk you through what exactly is going on, what the things they are doing are formally called within economic theory, why it is useful, and give you some more context for how all the strangeness isn't madness. Or if it is a sort of madness, it is an incredibly useful madness that is so useful it might as well not be madness at all. And also the views of why they think it's okay to behave in ways that seem so strange to you when talking about declining to give tribute or the existing of shared heritage and how those things can be useful and so on, and why actions not immediately being motivated by violence and the threat thereof but instead the gaining or loss of wealth can be massively useful to the Ten Nations. But there IS system in what they are doing and it DOES have use to the Ten Nations beyond what first seems obvious to you, I can tell that right now from your descriptions.

As far as your people losing their 'edge'... That they are no longer 'as sharp'. This is... reasonably expected, at this level of develoment. My belief is that it has to do with the increasing level of specialization that people undergo, and how at the current level of social, economic, and technological development, people are more relying on these institutions which are developing to help people do one specific thing well enough, but that your society hasn't quite gotten as amazing as it could be with regards to things like information access, education, possibility for social and economic and physical mobility, obscure education techniques, the ways of thought and unity that bind different sorts of people together as a unified, dynamic 'Nation-State' (which in this context, refers to a type of government and way of thinking about a place and collection of people that hasn't quite been invented yet, and won't really become a thing for a while yet). This isn't bad it's just... a many, many little things, of many categories, need to be improved to allow the Ten Nations to scrape and claw its way out of these doldrums.

As far as the weird tiny life stuff... it seems like it's probably just lies, likely related to the social ills which also caused people at this level of development to lose their 'edge'. It happens. Education and related things will eventually fix this sort of thing. Though, it'd certainly be fun to see if there's weird magic that works on that scale or smaller scales! If you can find a magic that provably works at the scale of the very small, especially in LOTS of amounts of very small things, you could probably do some pretty amazing things!

Also!

[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
[X] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops

@Ciber I don't think the scientists should be the economist/financial type/central banker. There should maybe be a science of Economics and Finance and such encouraged as a subset of Math, to be sure, but maybe find another group to do the banking thing?

liberty90 said:
It seems to me that current understanding of things around tiny life is partially nonsense. But I know no magic, so MAYBE magic interacts with tiny life in VERY weird ways.

But if not... I'm not even sure that I understood this probably nonsense well... Perhaps I'm not understanding, but tiny structures should NOT "respond to the movements of the sky wanderers or scalped stars".

Also, no, "singing a certain song" will NOT "drive out poison". Not according to things that I know. If this works, then this must be magic.

But I think that people want to see more than there truly is. And that this is not working, that these ideas are bad understanding or sometimes outright lies. At most very mangled partial truth.

Somebody even more mad than us said some nonsense about tears nurturing tiny life for darker hair, and people somehow believed such madness without doing many proper tests.

More rigorous investigation according to scientific method is needed for these matters in the future, I think.

In the Refuge of Grace they invented paper coins and banking, so scientists are for now in fact the most qualified to manage paper coins.

This talk about paper coins and invention reminds me about hand cannons.

There are decent time keeping devices, there are some barely working but working steam devices, so WHY there are no reliable hand cannons yet? These things need basically a decent metal pipe. A flint device for ignition is useful, but even that is much simpler than any time keeping device.

I know. Leader of the Refuge of Grace dislike gunpowder. Reasonable, I can understand her, we don't want your useful ageless inventor to die yet.

But she is leader! Well, obviously you are true Leader, but she is lesser leader under you!

This means that she has servants, and besides servants, she can use her hoard and paper coins to pay others for work. So! Let this paper coin invention be useful! Order her to pay some skilled people to try making hand cannons. It's NOT like she needs to work on dangerous bursting powder herself.

Pipes of steam device are probably no worse than these needed for a reliable and surprisingly safe hand cannon.

Gavinfoxx said:
It's not necessarily a matter of qualifications to manage fiscal policy, it's, 'is there some other group that is reasonably good at this and loyal, who can try every crazy idea we send them?', and 'If you have your best scientists on this, they aren't doing other useful science stuff like making amazing weapons and inventing new things and perfecting industrial processes!'

liberty90 said:
There are currently SERIOUS problems with finding truly loyal people outside of the Refuge of Grace and with the vast majority of territories ignoring Bianca and not paying their tribute, in fact.

And mechanically invention rolls work currently just fine with the place managing paper coins at the same time, it would work surely also with more banking.

Gavinfoxx said:
Well I guess we need someone smart and loyal with a sizable team in charge of 'the science and practice of economics, finance, banking, money supply, fiscal policy, trade policy, business management, and research into and measurement of all of the the above, as well as prudent laws and regulations and best practices and financial standards which encourage economic growth in the Ten Nations and improve both the 10N and Bianca's effective economic power, and decrease the relative economic power of her/the 10N's rivals and enemies.'

I don't think Bianca quite gets how much power wielding economics like a weapon could bring her. Money has the ability to make and break empires! Bianca, consider: manipulating markets such that your rivals are clearly best defended by paying professional mercenaries to defend their borders on an as-needed basis, and thus lose, over time the traditions and know-how in defending themselves with their own armies, and then further manipulating those same markets such that your rivals end up completely bankrupt, in debt, and unable to pay anyone to take up arms in their defense. And then you march right in and take over whatever you want. And keep in mind, this sort of thing can work on peer powers that you wouldn't otherwise be able to dominate in such a way without first using these economic levers of power... You just have to be better at this aspect of conflict than anyone else! Remember, economic power is one of the main types of power to cause individuals or groups of people to engage in -- or not engage in -- certain types of behavior without the immediate threat of violence or via social domination, and often via useful intermediaries and is thus ludicrously useful.

liberty90 said:
We cannot allow something very evil to literally eat the south (possibly?). Warlord of the West is not that great thread to lives of Bianca's servants - there should be no warfare between free people that should serve Bianca, so war is his sin, but messages are still moving and cities still exist after his conquests. Total lack of communication with the far south worries me much more! If not armed hosts, then at least send to the south many, many excellent spies. If you want that warlord "king over many cities" as "ally" or servant, send nice letter or two. If fact this was probably done but he probably refused tribute like many others. Troubling, very troubling, these tribute refusals and wars, but possible deaths of whole cities far south are more terryfing.

Katsuragi said:
Tiny life needs the good old scientific theory thrown at at. If the effects aren't nt reliably, objectively, reproducible, they're no good.

Gavinfoxx said:
This! Totally this! Some groups of people need to go about methodically testing all these 'old wives' tales', publishing the results, and then other people go about re-testing it again, and then the results needs to be methodically disseminated. A lot of these sorts of folk beliefs of various sorts are downright dangerous!

Katsuragi said:
Also, not really up in economic theories and what not, but does the current system of buy in and getting effectively cancelled if you're discovered cheating because your ledgers don't match up sound like crypto currency to anyone else?

Gavinfoxx said:
...Not particularly? Just sounds like a bunch of corporations or economic cooperatives collectively regulating their marketplace and punishing cheaters? IE, a trade guild?

Katsuragi said:
I suppose. Sounds straight up how proof of stake was described to me though.

Edit: Unless early economic stuff effective was proof of stake back in ye olden pre-computer times. XD

TheBiggerFish said:
I do not mean to say that the Ten Nations should not produce a thing they need. That is simple strategy. But in the matter of wants...
This is reasonable, if Bear's People are a hostile entity. If they are not, and there is not more demand than can be met by their workshops, it is merely good sense to assign production to the people who produce the best product.

I mean that it is a good approximation to what our scientists have found to be fundamental constants of the universe itself, if you have some given cubic measure of water, and that that can be used to benchmark one unit of mass and one unit of length. ...The difference between weight (effectively, mass times force of gravity) and mass (amount of Stuff) is likely not very meaningful at this time, but I will distinguish it nonetheless.

The unit of density is mass times length times length (width) times length (depth). I don't know if you will hear this correctly, but the density of water is, within tolerances, one gram per centimeter cubed or one kilogram per meter cubed. For any given weight and measure.
...Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what practical use this can be put to, for all that I was certain, when last I spoke, that it could do something. There's a lot of physics-related math that simplifies nicely when you're just multiplying by one? But I don't know if that even matters at present. Or something about standardization, perhaps. But I sincerely don't recall. Ugh.

Oh! Yes, the thought went something like "If you have a known mass, you can reconstruct a unit of length from it, and vice versa, and water is everywhere with which to do so." I don't, however, think that this really helps anyone in any way with what we are currently working with. A curious artifact of science, and nothing more.

Also, yes, orbits (both of planets and of moons) are not usually circles, they are ovals. A circle is described, geometrically, as "all points a set distance from point X". An oval is geometrically described as "all points a distance X from point A and a distance Y from point B equal to a set number Z".

liberty90 said:
For more reliably making steam wheels and other complicated devices with moving parts, things known as device-tools (machine tools), metal devices that help to make other metal devices, are helpful. Lathes made out of good steel that keep worked piece in place with more precision than any usual human could are one example. Holding the work and guiding the cutting or shaping tool with device instead of hands.

Imagine metal lathe with a tool holder into which the cutting tool would be clamped, and which would slide on accurately planed surfaces to allow the cutting tool to move in either direction. The slide rest is positioned by a leadscrew to which power is transmitted through a pair of changeable gears so that it travels in proportion to the turning of the work. This allows screw threads to be precisely cut. Changing the gears give various pitches.

Developing such device-tools is very complicated at first, but when you have a few such complicated device-tools, these could be used to much more easily create new ones. It builds on itself, just as mining ore and smelting metals is easier for people that already have metal tools.

The basic rule is: in the Refuge of Grace they should try to make metal device that helps to replicate itself and more easily create other metal devices. It may be tricky, but I know that such things are possible and greatly replace precision of human hands.

Henry Maudslay - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

When perfected, the concept of metal device-tools can allow even for wonder known as interchangeable parts, parts that are so similar, that they can be exchanged in between two metal devices. You need jigs for guiding the device tools, fixtures for holding the workpiece in the proper position, and blocks and gauges to check the accuracy of the finished parts.

Interchangeable parts - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The range a dimension of a part that can vary and still work in a device is called tolerance band. A helpful concept. The larger the allowed difference between the upper and lower limits, the looser the tolerance band. The smaller the difference is, the tighter the tolerance band. If a part is manufactured with dimensions that are out of tolerance, it is considered unusable for its desired purpose. Tolerance band of a particular design should be known.

What are Machining Tolerances?

CNC machining is a field that requires precision. Wondering what machining tolerances are? See why they're so important by reading more here.

www.uti.edu

Legion0047 said:
Legion reporting in, so let's dissect this statement:

So, the entire point of Steam Engines is to disconnect yourself from being reliant on physical labor - mules, people, horses, etc - or natural power - wind and water - because the former requires food, which requires land, which requires labor, which requires food, which requires land, which requires labor etc... and the later isn't always available. A Steam Engine will always provide the same amount of power, for the same length of time and without complaints as long as it is properly cared for and you have the water and coal to stoke it. Basically, it allows you to completely detach your economy from food and the land required to grow it.

However, just steam engines will not solve your woes as for us, the so-called Industrial Revolution was also accompanied by a vast array of other technological breakthrough that compounded together into a greater whole.

There are vast regions of sea in which the wind doesn't blow along the coast, or at least not powerful enough, in which you have to fall back on rowed galleys which require massive amounts of food and water in comparison to ships with sails and rigging. However, you are right that sailed ships are superior and will be for quite a while except for one thing: Combat.

Having a ship driven by a wheel or screw powered by a steam engine, means you can maneuver completely independent of the wind which when fighting against an enemy who doesn't have this advantage allows you to completely control the battlefield. This is more useful when your ships have guns as otherwise naval warfare generally devolves into "RAMMING SPEED". You also don't have to take either or as carrying the fuel for the engines is a lot of weight even for relatively short trips and so warships equipped with early steam engines generally had fully rigged sails alongside their wheels for general use.

Precision Engineering? Also known as the ability to construct things within very small margins. As an example, one of the greatest problems early cannons have is that the shot you use is smaller than the bore of the cannon and so when you light the powder a lot of the gas escapes around the shot without doing much of anything. If you could make a shot that fits almost perfectly into the bore of your cannons, which are also always the same size, you could massively increase the range and power of your cannons without changing anything else.

A society at war, mirrors itself at peace. People will follow their peacetime leaders in times of war, and hold their loyalties to what they hold to during times of peace. The entire point of having a professional army is to take those attachments and to beat it out of your to-be soldiers with corporeal punishment and a rigid, formalized structure of command. Despite what people have been going on about for by this point literal millennia, It's not actually all that important as revolts against you never seem to progress beyond a small scale thanks to your regular, and decisive removal of them and having a professional army that is loyal to you first and not their hometown, clan or anything else is most important for intimidating internal opposition into playing nice. Yes, professional armies can do things that armies formed out of nested-retinues, Nation-at-Arms, Part-time soldiers or other "non-professional" types of armies simply can't such as long time and large scale garrison duty, but the difference isn't as large as people make it out to be, and there are solutions other than making a professional army to each of those things save one, namely to channel a vast amount of wealth into a small number of soldiers.

Let's make a bit of a thought experiment.

Let's say you have a hundred followers that each produce ten units of wealth and they give you a tenth of tribute, coming to a full hundred units of wealth for you. After all other expenses, they have a single unit of wealth left and spend it to equip themselves and maintain their equipment. For their one unit of wealth, they might equip themselves with an armor of padded cloth, a spear, a shield and a sword.

You however, might use your hundred unit of wealth to equip ten men with chariots and everything that entails.

This is a vast oversimplification that bears no connection to reality but it might bring the point across without getting lost in translation.

There is and it is the result of redewing stone coal. The result should be a liquid that burns long, hot and most importantly sticks to things. Perfect for setting people on fire.

The actual process differs from distilling things by enough that it may take a bit of work, but it is the same process. It also produces a flammable gas that escapes upwards, so best do it in the open and away from flames other than the one you use to heat up the distillery.

Well, that is both supremely easy and supremely hard at the same time. Very simply, instead of hammering a heated bar of iron or steel into the shape you want, you feed it in between two massive steel rollers - called a rolling mill - powered by Steam Engines which - assuming you use bars of the same general quality - will produce a plate of metal of the same thickness, strength and other properties every single time. Taking for example a handgun, you roll the metal required for your barrel, cut it off at regular intervals - also done by a steam powered machine - then take those uniform pieces of metal and shape them around a rod, forge weld them into the barrel and add the backstop. You now produce uniform handguns as fast as you can feed metal into the rolling mill.

Yes, the cannons - called bombards to differentiate them from other types of weapons - have problems in that direction and as mentioned, they are almost certainly worse than cast cannons, however Iron is cheap, bronze isn't and even if only one in ten comes out properly, when you can make a dozen of them for every bronze cannon you still come out ahead. Still, Forge Welding should remove the seams or at least make them strong enough that the bands of iron keep the cannon together.

As already mentioned above, because it "eats" coal instead of food. There becomes a point of distance at which you literally can't move food from one point to the other as your mule will eat it all. If, however, your mode of transportation required coal that is then provided regularly alongside its route, the only limit is the time it takes to move the food and if it doesn't rot along the way.

This is important because steam powered machinery is difficult to make and maintain, so it generally gets build in one centralized location and then other people do so as well because the infrastructure required to support steam powered machinery is already there. However, you then need all the people required to actually work that machinery and those required food. A lot of food. Which you then import as explained above. As an example, one of the biggest cities we know of in pre-industrial times numbered roughly a million people that were fed by an oceans worth of near-shore fields. A century after the industrial revolution, the city at its origin point numbered 10 million people and outproduced most of the other industrial nations on its own and would have been literally impossible to feed without making fields further inland viable for transport.

Basically make enclosures for fish in lakes or near the shore of an ocean. The enclosure is large enough to contain the fish, has walls with small enough holes that no predatory fish comes into the enclosure, and that's it. Put a breeding population of the fish you want into the enclosure and then watch as they fatten up. It's a bit more complicated than that, buts it's the jist of it.

Place pearl shards in the mouth of oysters, this process is called pearl seeding and will cause the oyster to turn the shard into a full scale pearl after some time.

Yes, they have to be feed anyway. However, for one, moving the grain from one place to the next is work which means that they will have to eat to regain that energy and so as you move the grain, part of it gets "wasted". Furthermore, the person who moved the grain spend time and effort to do so and wants to be compensated for their time. This, together with the wasted grain causes the price of it to explode rapidly. Using rivers, you can move more grain, quicker over longer distances as the flowing river does the work for you - so less wasted grain - and as you can move more grain in less time, there was less time and effort spend in doing so. Furthermore, buying in bulk drops the price further, especially as grain barges like that will generally not trade with random people, but with whoever owns the granaries of their destination who in turn is probably a person of import and price gouging someone like that is not the best ideas. Ships sailing along the coast have the same thing, with the wind doing the work for them instead of the flowing river, just even more noticable as they can carry even more food over even longer distance even faster.

A 1st Rate Battleship of the line -1st rate in this case describes how many decks and guns the ship has, of the line means its not an escort and battleship means its a 1st or 2nd rate- with over a hundred full scale cannons for example. The rigging for the sails on its own requires close to a hundred people and each of those guns required roughly three or more people to load, aim and fire. Add on top that ships of that size will carry a complement of marines and all the spares a warship has to replace casualties and for boarding actions you can end up with something like the HMS Victory with its over 800 men of crew.

By fitting them into the grooves of the cannons rifling. Also, the fletching is metal.

Let's just assume this for the sake of the argument that everyone gives you a tenth of whatever they do in tribute. Let's also say that you border another nation that really hates your guts and would love to do nothing more than slaughter your nation to the last man, women and child. You now go and talk with whoever is in charge of the part of your nation that borders that nation and say "I will reduce your tribute to me to one twentieth as long as you use the second twentieth to keep people under arms with good training and good equipment and fortifiying your region." You have now created a border march. It is not that the rest of your nation doesn't have warriors or soldiers, it is that you have explicitly singled out this area to have more warriors, more soldiers and more fortifications to protect your heartlands, exchanging said protection for the lesser amount of tribute you receive.

As an example for having a professional military with a functioning logistic system, you would simply take part of your army and station it on that border instead. Both achieve the same goal - bolstering your defenses in that area - but they do so with vastly different tools and over vastly different ways.

You also don't have to choose between the two. If you'd like to I could explain the Themata System that is pretty much the perfect melding of "Professional" and "non-professional" army into a great whole. It has its own problems instead and its a bit too involved for me to explain on a whim but its quite the interresting system.

liberty90 said:
We should think about ways of forcing all free people to pay you tribute.

You could use this meagre tribute that the Biancvint reliably provides to create and pay armed host. Then threaten these that do not pay tribute with your armed servants and their violence and cannonfire. Violence that can be done by paid soldiers without personal use of your time, but according to your orders.

But it would be too destructive and wasteful, I think, to march armed host from Biancvint to Tennerland elders. But it could be used to threaten these cities that are even worse than Tennerland elders or Wreol, these places that not even once resumed payment of tribute.

Wreol or Tennerlands paid at least something even if less than they should. So you should be the most furious with these who paid nothing at all.

What else... If your servants invent something new, like steam wheels or possibly hand cannons in the future... Maybe allow use of new inventions only to these people that pay full tribute and show you respect?

If your servants manage to make hand cannons, then maybe declare that only cities and armed hosts that pay you tribute can use hand cannons. And if somebody among free people use a hand cannon without paying tribute to you, then such a person or family or whole city should be killed like followers of Erweh.

Earth-Destroyer said:
Hello again Bianca once again Earth here

Today I will talk about the work of brick making and the development of machines to vastly improve their speed of making

First you will need to develop a Pugmill, a machine for the mixing of clay, the design is simple and comes with three major parts, take a circular chamber metal pipes work fine, and put a rod of metal thou it length wise, and setup one end to be used to turn the rod ideally by steam power, but a horse can also serve. then attach rods extending out of the central rod with paddles these are for mixing the clay, and need to be arranged to slowly push the clay in one direction, best for it to be away from the side that is used to turn the central rod. While fresh clay and water can be introduced from a entry point on the top near parts for spinning the mill. Lastly you need an nozzle which revives the clay and compresses it down in the manner of circle shrinking as the clay is pushed thou it, a screw to help the clay move may be needed here it can be attached to the rod. ideal the end result should be complected clay with both the correct height and width, no mold needed, thou that would be a major feet for your current tech level. But if you can simply take a length of the new clay and simply slide it thou metal wires, or bow string spaced to cut the clay into the correct length. You can also use this to cut clay as it leaves the machine if needed for the width, and height and just send the excess back into the machine. A proper pugmill and crew of eight to ten feeding it should be able to easily make over 10,000 bricks a day.

Brick should need about one to two weeks to dry out depending on weather, and be ready for firing.

Next you need a kiln to fire the bricks in. Already fired bricks of roughly three to four layers alternating long and short thick make the wall of the kiln. The kiln can be sized to hold around seven thousand bricks at a time depending on brick size. Roughly enough bricks to build a small cottage. layer the bricks with a . The entire kiln should be taller then two meters in height. The area for the bricks needs to be elevated above the fire holes around a meter in height, and the kin will need roughly eight fire holes that need tending around the clock for the firing, which take about three to five days. You can seal brick inside the kiln easily with raw clay to contain the heat for the firing.

You can also use a clamp, layer coal of even quality in an even layer. place bricks on top and and across seal with raw clay and light. This is a simple method with the advantage of you can make huge clamps up to 10 meters in height and 3 across and 300 long, once you figure out the amount of coal needed for a given size it allows for massive production of bricks. A key disadvantage of a clamp is it puts out an enormous amount smoke, and you have no control over the fire after lighting

After all this you should be able to make huge amounts of nice red bricks, and be able to train and equip teams of brick makers to send out across the lands.

And use them thusly. After working out mass production of Bricks design a large very secure building easily made using bricks possibly adding Magical defenses by way of stamping symbols onto specific bricks if possible. Then have your brick makers erect the building across all the lands these will serve as a new points of center of you reach, And they will also take in the local tribute you are do. This bring your authority closer to the people while at the same time, being a new symbol of your power. And since the tribute does not have to travel as far it will be much easier to convince the rulers to pay it.

[x][Banking] Disband the current hoard network and absorbs its wealth, replacing it with a new one, with your new buildings serving as a local point of storage.

You want to do this as it both increases your effective reach by way of controlling the economic flow, and at the same times safeguards your own wealth by disturbing it across the Ten nations. And allows people much easier access to the hoard wealth if they have a worthwhile invention to fund the development of. For a nation a large as this one a mere 5 houses for money are not enough.

Code:

[MEDIA=youtube]IzHRANWKvuU[/MEDIA] [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.gobrick.com/docs/default-source/read-research-documents/technicalnotes/9-manufacturing-of-brick.pdf?sfvrsn=0[/URL] [URL unfurl="true"]http://brickcollecting.com/history.htm[/URL] [MEDIA=youtube]GEvoXuFKSA0[/MEDIA] [MEDIA=youtube]UVtRtY7BfQw[/MEDIA] Quoted Media Limit

Katsuragi said:
Since they're into mining these days, should probably mention canaries in the coal mine.

So, when you're digging tunnels to mine, toxic gasses can accumulate and kill your miners. So the low tech trick we worked out back in the day was to have a small, fast breathing / fast metabolism animal like a Canary (type of bird) in a cage with them. Toxic gasses would disable / kill the bird before it affected the humans, so it was used as a warning to let the human miners know they needed to leave.

JayTar said:
New voice here, call me Jay.
I see you have not yet been convinced that a trade can be beneficial to both parties. This is a tragedy that must be rectified immediately!
To do so I will explain the wonder of Comparative advantage.
Imagine if you will, two lands. Call them land A and land B.
Land A is rich in metal but has poor farmland.
Land B had excellent farmland but is poor in metal.
The people of both land A and land B both have a choice: How much time and effort do they dedicate to producing food and how much to producing metal in a given year.
In land B if they were to commit all their time to making food they would produce an immense amount of food, enough for them to all eat excellently and have much to spare.
Say they create 100 units of spare food as an abstraction.
In land B if they commit as much of their time to making metal as they can, only making the bare minimum of food then they instead produce 5 units of metal and 0 units of spare food.

In land A if they make only food, they will only make 20 units of spare food.
And in land A if they focus on metal they can produce 20 units of metal.

These numbers are not an either or too but rather a continuum.
For each 20 less units of food land B produces, they can 1 unit of metal. For each 1 less units of metal land B produces, they can produce 20 units of food.
For each 1 less unit of food land A produces, they can produce 1 unit of metal. For each 1 less unit of metal land A produces, they can produce 1 unit of food.

Now both lands would like to have as much metal and food as they can. They can both increase these amounts by trading with each other and both be better off.
To give an example:
Land A produces 20 units of metal, and 0 of spare food. Land B produces 100 units of spare food and 0 of metal.
Land A trades to land B: 5 units of metal for 40 of food.
Land A ends with 15 units of metal and 40 of food. Land B ends with 5 units of metal and 60 of food.

Land A now has more food then it could have ever produced on its own, and still much metal. Land B has as much metal as it could have produced on its own, and also much food. Both Land A and Land B are better off then they would have been on their own.
But this is not yet comparative advantage, This is absolute advantage. One group is better at doing one thing and the other at another thing. Thus it is obvious why one should do one thing and the other another, and then trade their products. Just as a carpenter can work more wood then a blacksmith, and a blacksmith can work more metal then a carpenter.
What if one group is simply better then the other in every way? Such a trade can only be exploitative right? Wrong! This is when comparative advantage comes in.

Say for example:
Land A is poor in metal and food. They may produce 5 units of metal or 5 units of food.
Land B is poor in metal, but rich in food. They may produce 10 units of metal, or 100 units of food.
Land B can produce much more then land A, they are richer in every way. But! Land A has a comparative advantage in producing metal, and both lands can be made better off by trade.

Land B produces 5 units of metal and 50 of food, Land A produces 5 units of metal.
Land A trades the 5 units of metal to land B for 20 units of food.
Land B ends with 10 units of metal and 30 of food. More then they could have produced on their own in total.
Land A ends with 20 units of food. Much more food then they could have produced on their own. And so both are better off.

This is of course a vast simplification. Much pulling back and forth on exactly what ratio the trade happens at, and how much of the benefit one party can claim for themselves. Nonetheless it is one the most important insights in trade and economics.
The only way trade cannot possibly benefit both of two groups, is if both groups want exactly the same in exactly the same ratios, and have exactly the same ability to produce.

Oh, and as an aside: Has anyone mentioned the printing press now that paper is plentiful?

liberty90 said:
I think that the printing press in fact exists. More devices that use steam power, for example to produce cloth, could be described by someone.

Legion0047 said:
So, while my earlier words were a bit snippy in that regard, here is a simple rolling mill to create nails in large quantities. This design also works with waterwheels as you don't need that much power:

Step 1: Use -hopefully powered- shears to cut your bar of iron into the desired length and heat it to a suitable temperature.

Step 2: Feed your heated piece of metal through a flat roller to make a plate of the desired thickness. The flat roller in this case is two rolls of metal of the highest quality you can make placed above each other and connected to the waterwheel or steam engine in such a way that they turn the rolls. Between the two is a space of the same height as you want the resulting plate to be. The roller turn in such a way that the side that is close to each other turn "away" from the direction your are feeding the metal. This means that one turns in the other direction than the other if that was a bit confusing.

Step 3: Feed the resulting plate through a second roller, but this one is not flat. Instead, each one has teethed grooves of the same width and depth as the iron plates produced just a step earlier that are placed in such a way that when placed in the prior holding for the flat rollers, they would fit perfectly into each other. However, instead of doing that, you place the two slightly more distant from each other so that instead of the roller touching each other, the edges of their grooves will do.

The result should be a bunch of perfectly fine metal rods that you can then very quickly hammer into the shape of a nail.

If you are asking "How to force the metal through the rollers" generally it is enough to just hold the bar/plate into the roller and once it has a grip let physics do their thing, but if it doesn't work at all you could technically make an extra roller before each step with a gap size of the metal you are feeding it. As such, your to be rolled piece of metal will fit in the gap with ease and be pressed into the rollers that actually do something with all of the force required.

You could also technically have a powered shear cut the plate or bars into your desired length after either the first or the second roller, however that requires you to heat the entire bar to an even temperature and for the shears to cut with very precise time spans which may be problematic for your current skill at crafts like these.

Slitting mill - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Also, what kind of arms and armor do the warriors and soldiers use and do some of them ride horses into battle.

liberty90 said:
I think that three greatest things that we should consider in advice about techniques this time are: food, weapons and uses for the steam wheels.

I think that they use steam turbines instead of Our-Time-Line early steam engines, that's interesting.

Legion0047 said:
So, first things first, let me weight in on the discussion at hand.

[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
- [X] Also use these hired soldiers to bully more territories into paying you tribute, and use parts of the gains to hire even more soldiers and weapons
- [X] But send also the best spies to the far south
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
- [X] Encourage also younger and well-suited for warfare free people to serve you as paid soldiers, and to travel as armed hosts to enforce Peace and to bully more territories into paying tribute
[X] [Relic] Write-in: Send a message to Azule apologizing for incompetence of your servants during 500 years of your absence, but demanding peace now that you are back. If he refuses peace, war with Azule until the shit stops
[X] [Banking] Write in: Master Of Coin
- [X] Trust Peyuvo and her servants to manage paper coins and coins in the manner described by Ciber

Secondly, let me think about something else to talk about.

Let's talk walls.

If I remember correctly, your current style of walls consists of piling up stone or bricks to the desired height and width and then calling it a day, yes? Well, there is a fairly easy way to make them more resistant against cannons without going into the more complicated Star Forts.

You make a pair of walls, thicker is still better of course but it's not the point, spaced apart so far enough from each other how you desire your final wall to be wide. As you then construct these two walls, you start piling up earth in between them before stamping it flat and solid. You then pile up more earth and then stamp that flat and solid. Repeat until you have made a wall of the desired height, and then just add a top layer of bricks or stone. In the end, you can very easily get very wide walls that are significantly better at resisting cannon fire than before as the earth absorbs the shockwave of the impacting ammunition better than simple stone or brick. If the fortifications aren't supposed to be permanent, you can use wood facings and skip most of the stamping down, but suffer reduced effectiveness in exchange.

liberty90 said:
In regards to mines, underground corridors can reach much deeper than simple pits. But often walls of such mining corridor need to be reinforced with wooden pillars and supports.

They certainly know gears, and I think that it's obvious that clever gears can be used with steam wheel power. But I can certainly say that it's possible to make much more reliable steam wheels than currently exist, there is still much to improve.

Perhaps edible insects could be kept deep underground for winter? Without icehall conditions underground should be neither cold nor warm year-round, but rather chilly.

Ciber said:
Actually, the reason for mine tunnels is to follow thin "veins" of a valuable mineral.

Gavinfoxx said:
Hey, is their steel and ironmaking good enough that we can describe a simple manual Cinva Ram or Compressed Earth Block machine? And I guess I need to describe all those simple machines that can be powered by rotation? Like the Trip Hammer and the later steam powered Drop hammer? IE, different sorts of mechanical things, like wire-drawing mills, slitting mills, etc.? Can anyone go through a general history of machines powered by rotation, basic descriptions of them, anything like that? I can't find a good description of this stuff...

Other than, 'once you have a source of rotating energy, try to come up with every single useful machine for pounding, squeezing, pulling, pushing, drawing through, bending, drilling, etc. that you can come up with that's useful to make things, to put all in one place and have this one rotation based engine running everything in the shop at the same time'.

Ciber said:
Not everything has to be tech. If you don't want to write an essay about the Spinning Jenny, then you don't have to. You could talk about social issues or organization or why brutally killing everyone who wrongs you might be a less than perfect plan. You could talk about economics or string theory or tell the story of Twilight Sparkle's ascent to godhood.
The only real rules are:

Write it in your own words

Cite your sources

Which might be why we have limited participants XD. This quest it basically everyone's worst nightmare from highschool.

Speaking of brutally killing...

O nai fesili mo Bianca,

Now that Table Rulers have been a thing for as long as anyone can remember, are there any special things their spirits can do?
*Dreams of a computer made from souls of the damned*

Would you be able to enter the Underworld whilst trapped underground as you were all those years ago?

If not, then do you think it possible that you might develop the skill to do so while completely immobile?

How quickly can you now enter and exit the underworld?

Could it be used as a method to avoid attack or move from place to place unseen?

Could you devise a countermeasure to prevent your escape into the underworld, and if so, can you devise some sort of counter-countermeasure in preparation for when an enemy inevitably does so?

Legion0047 said:
I get by, by running a quest that requires me to research this stuff anyway. So I just remember it from there.

Ciber said:
Hah. Perhaps Bianca is right. We are all quite mad here, even among our own kind. For by our peers measure, to speak with Bianca is an interminably slow chore. They prefer their madness to have a far more immediate reward.

Perhaps something new?

In deep archives I have chanced across this song which might serve Bianca's interests. For one, is meant to be sung by actual human voices instead of our usual bag of yowling cat spirits, and with some minor tweaks I think it could reinforce the tenets of the Pact.

A lot of it depends on the details of your language, but I think you could work in a "You have so much and I have so little" line somewhere. Maybe remind people what that phrase is actually supposed to mean in the context of the original Pact.

Code:

A single thread in a tapestry Though its color brightly shines Can never see its purpose In the pattern of the grand design And the stone that sits on the very top Of the mountains mighty face Does it think it's more important Than the stones that form the base? So how can you see what your life is worth Or where your value lies? You can never see through the eyes of man You must look at your life Look at your life through heaven's eyes Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai A lake of gold in the desert sand Is less than a cool fresh spring And to one lost sheep, a shepherd boy Is greater than the richest king If a man loses everything he owns Has he truly lost his worth? Or is it the beginning Of a new and brighter birth? So how do you measure the worth of a man In wealth or strength or size? In how much he gained or how much he gave? The answer will come The answer will come to him who tries To look at his life through heaven's eyes And that's why we share all we have with you Though there's little to be found When all you've got is nothing There's a lot to go around No life can escape being blown about By the winds of change and chance And though you never know all the steps You must learn to join the dance You must learn to join the dance Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai Lai-le-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai La-lai-lai-lai-lai-lee-lai-lai Lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai So how do you judge what a man is worth By what he builds or buys? You can never see with your eyes on earth Look through heaven's eyes Look at your life Look at your life Look at your life through heaven's eyes

Now in the original, "heaven" is meant as a sort of underworld in the sky kind of thing, but I think it mostly works just as well if you just use it to mean "very high in the sky" or and even more general "outside perspective".

As I recall your singers mostly sing at people, whereas this song includes many repetitive elements to encourage people who do not know the song to sing along. This helps people form a more emotional connection / memory with the themes of the song.

Artist: Brian Stokes Mitchell Movie: The Prince of Egypt Released: 1998

liberty90 said:
In regards to hand cannons, it's helpful for all to have similar sizes of pipes, lead balls and standard measures for amount of dust needed for each shot. Yes, it's harder for craftsmen, as all craftsmen that supply a host would need to create similar weapons according to the same measures, but then army in the field is enormously easier to supply and when design is well tested - greatly limits number of accidents.

The same principle can be also applied to usual cannons, to have only a few kinds of cannons with only a few shot sizes.

Somebody mentioned Spinning Jenny, but without explaining. It's a weird name of device, not human or Voice name. Spinning Jenny had many spindles on a iron frame, powered with water power or steam wheel power, whatever was the most convenient. Spinning Jenny allowed one worker to work eight or more spools at once. This grew to 120 as technique of making devices advanced.

But the first Spinning Jenny was metal frame with eight wooden spindles at one end. A set of eight rovings was attached to a beam on that frame. The rovings when extended passed through two horizontal bars of wood that could be clasped together. These bars could be drawn along the top of the frame by the spinner's left hand thus extending the thread. The spinner used his right hand to rapidly turn a wheel which caused all the spindles to revolve, and the thread to be spun. When the bars were returned, the thread wound onto the spindle. A pressing wire (faller) was used to guide the threads onto the right place on the spindle.

Spinning jenny - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Legion0047 said:
It is important to note that the results don't have to be identical, but rather just close enough. Until machinery on our world advanced far enough to make identical weaponry for all intents and purposes, black powder weaponry was either made in singular foundries - for cannons - that could offer weapons with small enough margins or in patterns - for handguns - where the product had to be able to meet several criteria or otherwise the craftsman would not be paid.

liberty90 said:
Yes, as far as I know something like the Brown Bess "musket" - musket is a weird name that some among Voices use for well-developed hand cannons, but anyway - it had parts that were not yet really interchangeable, such precision developed only later and only with advanced device-tools. But sizes of lead balls needed and amount of bursting dust needed were mostly consistent and even this helps. These things were not yet identical, but had similar "pattern".

Brown Bess - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

And now my thoughts return to metal devices designed to help with precision-making of other metal devices, to device-tools. Yes. These will be essential to create devices as complicated as these of the Bear's People, while not needing their skills. Yes!

Earth-Destroyer said:
Here is some stuff I found I someone want to write it up

Code:

[MEDIA=youtube]e60CAAAhshI[/MEDIA] [URL unfurl="true"]https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/03/article-1158800-03BC53FF000005DC-220_468x373.jpg[/URL] Quoted Media Limit

liberty90 said:
I think that lengths that many among Voices use, millimeters, were once mentioned. In discussion about bees I believe, but that's unimportant.

Anyway, the Brown Bess "musket", a very perfected hand cannon design used by enormous Empire for a long time, had pipe with around 19 millimeters of width inside. So a pretty small lead bullets were used. The thing was possible to be carried and used by one person.

But it was a pretty long, 1100 mm pipe. The whole weapon had 1490 mm, because at the rear there was a wooden part that allowed to rest the weapon on the shooter's arm before shooting, to aim and to remain standing despite recoil force of shooting.

Flintlock device in between a wooden rear and end of the metal tube was responsible for easy ignition. I believe that such devices were explained a long time ago? Not especially complicated.

At the front, below the pipe, a knife could be attached, to allow use of the weapon as spear after shooting at the enemy.

The method of use was mostly to shot and then use as spear later in fight, and it was durable enough to remain usable.

That was Black Cat speaking.

Legion0047 said:
Actually, thats a good question. Are the handguns used by bear's people a cannon on the end of a stick you just cradle in your arm or are they something you rest against your shoulder.

liberty90 said:
Excellent question. Designs that you rest on your shoulder are greatly superior. Bear's People are unbelievably excellent at precision manufacturing with only hands and skills and without device-tools that help. But they not always have ideas what exactly try to manufacture.

Ciber said:
How vulnerable is Bianca to explosives compared to a God? We could put that undyingness to the test by having her use herself as bait for a massive explosive trap!

For that matter, we know that under carefully controlled circumstances well trained men have been launched out of cannon and lived. Can anyvoice think of a good reason to shoot Bianca out of a cannon?

We could setup a network of high powered cannon around the countryside that Bianca could use as speedy transportation!
Ballistic Ordinance Organization Meant to Transport User Bianca Expeditiously

Earth-Destroyer said:
Earth here again and I have a method to better make cannons

Start by making a mock cannon, usually made up of wood, rope, and clay. Place in a bed of sand, which should be built in two parts, one half for the bottom and one half the top, make sure it tightly contained, and fire it to harden the sand. Separate and remove mock cannon. Now you have a mold which you can put molten metal into. Now you have a pure shaped bit of iron. Next you need to drill the center. For most cannons simply using a waterwheel and attaching a drill bit to it and very slowly guiding the cannon forward onto the drill will work. But for true precision and ultimately accuracy you need to mount the cannon to the waterwheel, which allows more exacting control over the drill bit

Here is some stuff I found I someone want to write it up

Code:

[MEDIA=youtube]e60CAAAhshI[/MEDIA] [URL unfurl="true"]https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/03/article-1158800-03BC53FF000005DC-220_468x373.jpg[/URL] Quoted Media Limit

It took a long time to find a decent video about making cannons.

liberty90 said:
Casting big cannons as a single piece of metal and then drilling the bore on a great drilling device is indeed better development for durable and reliable cannons than previous method of casting around a core.

The great drilling device could be powered also by the power of steam. Isn't that nice in winter, when water may become ice? Anyway...

Not only is single drilled piece more reliable, but great drilling device allows more precision. Again and again, matters of precision are more and more important in our advice... Anyway. What is nice with more precision, "less windage - the gap between the cannonball and the bore - which meant less gas pressure escaped, so that smaller bursting dust charges could hurl the projectile farther and more accurately. When less gunpowder could be used to achieve the same power and range, the cannon experts found that cannon barrels could be made thinner, shorter, and lighter."

Gribeauval system - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I heard that it helps to have metal drill well lubricated: it reduces friction and heat buildup.

But small hand cannons were created with hammer welding a pipe, or at least it was done in this manner in the history of the weird world that I know. Of course your servants could also experiment with drills - testing is important and I admit that my wisdom is imperfect.

It's very possible that with introduction of greater and more complicated device-tools, like these great drills made out of the best steel... It's possible that with such great things increasingly needed for production of more refined and reliable kinds of cannons and devices - it may become impossible to make the best weapons in all villages, and only a few cities or great buildings may be able to do so. But it would be well worth the effort, bursting dust weapons would become enormously better. And there are benefits of such concentration and of great costly devices needed for production. Because it may be easier for you to control a few leaders, and kill or replace these that may displease you, instead of controlling production of weapons in 1000 villages.

And why you may want to have some "control" over places producing the best weapons? Well! It would be nice had only these who properly respect you and pay you tribute could use the best weapons. There are so many issues with disrespect and lack of tribute currently, so many that you cannot kill all offenders without causing too much damage and more importantly wasting too much of your time. Your enemies, or even these among the free people who refuse you proper tribute, should lack the best weaponry.

liberty90 said:
Wait, wait. They are in a place that is very similar to a place on our weird world, to a place that on our world is called Europe, probably Lithuania. Lands of their world are maybe not identical, but very curiously similar. So. Shouldn't they have turnips? Oh my god, I'm displeased with myself if for over 600 years I missed something as obvious as turnips.

Turnip is a plant with edible root that returns nitrogen to the soil. Turnip root is mostly white-skinned apart from the upper part, which protrude above the ground and are purple or red or greenish where the sun has hit. The interior flesh is entirely white. The root is roughly globular. The leaves grow directly from the above-ground shoulder of the root.

Turnips are a biennial plant, taking two years from germination to reproduction. The root spends the first year growing and storing nutrients, and the second year flowers, produces seeds, and dies. The flowers of the turnip are tall and yellow, with the seeds forming in pea-like pods. In areas with less than seven-month growing seasons, temperatures are too cold for the roots to survive the winter. To produce seeds, pulling the turnips and storing them over winter is necessary, taking care not to damage the leaves. During the spring, they may be set back in the ground to complete their lifecycle.

Turnip - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Legion0047 said:
I just had a thought. Did anyone mention that firing a cannon slowly but surely work hardens it until it becomes brittle and bursts? It's one of the advantages of bronze cannons that you can just recast them then.

Gavinfoxx said:
Neither the source you mentioned nor any other source I could find says Turnips return nitrogen to soil!! I think, at most, Turnips and Radishes do nitrogen scavenging, which as near as I can tell isn't as useful.

liberty90 said:
...I was sure that turnips helps with nitrogen, perhaps because of turnips role in a system with four years crop rotation. But... Honestly, it's very possible that I was mistaken. Still, it's good to know turnips and to eat some turnips.

Ew.

Sorry?

Anyway, it's still good and healthy to know and eat turnips. Yes.

JayTar said:
Wait whats with the part of the vote about using mercenaries to bully territories into paying tribute?
That sounds like a really bad idea. Wasn't there something about how the tenner successors didn't fight each other? Using military might to force them under rule seems like a really bad idea and downright unnecessary.
That Bianca is Bianca will be obviously evident in time. Even discounting whatever deeds she preforms or technologies she provides, the fact that her detractors will age and die while she shall not makes her victory inevitable. No need to rush it.
Additionally if people are paying tax/tribute to Bianca and that is then being worked into a bank it may be worth talking a bit about monetary policy and like.

liberty90 said:
Tenner successors in fact fight each other, even if with some rules. And this fighting is, I think, undesirable. We in fact have exactly such situation to the West, with that "Second Kuwutz".

I really don't know how we would want to act imperial and Enforce Peace, with armed intervention in the far West and East, but without tribute from protected territories. We protect them... Excuse me, by "We" I of course mean you oh Great Bianca, please do not be offended by our weird manner of speaking... So, Bianca protects them, or armed hosts paid by Bianca protects them, so they should pay.

In fact it's not only payment of tribute for nothing. There is in fact some protection in exchange, as hosts of Bianca would protect these territories from "Second Kuwutz" or Azule. Dangers of the world should probably be explained better to people under Bianca.

The war-lord ruler of the West, the "Second Kuwutz", enforce more and more tribute from conquered lands. Perhaps he cleverly calls this tribute "payments for protection", as the Free People hate tribute that is called tribute, but the effect is the same, his power grows. He can pay soldiers from more and more conquered territories. This is danger, armed hosts under a mortal who never paid tribute shouldn't be as powerful, remember about traitor Gazark.

Of course it's not like this self-proclaimed Second Kuwutz for sure needs to be killed. Maybe not, if he improves his ways and starts to pay Bianca great tributes himself and cease further wars. But he sounds like someone very ambitious, and I know such people, they want to rule whole worlds - foolish for mortals, limited in their lifetime, of course.

Earth-Destroyer said:
Earth here again

First let us discuss the concept Friction. Friction is the a force that cause two objects to stick together. With friction being determined by the surfaces of the objects in question and the pressure between them. For example if you had a dagger that was enchanted be unaffected by gravity and you throw it forward it would eventually stop in mid air as the air would slow it down thou friction over time. Now imagine throwing a normal dagger in a place without any air or matter at all, that is the nothingness of space, the dagger would just keep going onward forever. That is what space it the absence of stuff. Things do not slow down in the nothingness between planets and stars because their is nothing to make them.

Now let us discuses the three principles of motion.

Number one, is that an object a at rest will stay motionless unless it is acted upon by an outside force. And an object in motion will stay in motion if not acted upon by an outside force.

Number two, Acceleration is determined by the mass of the object. With the more mass an object has the more force is needed to cause acceleration. Or force equals mass times acceleration

Number three is that whenever a force is applied to an object an equal and opposite force is also applied to the object applying the force. Like in my dagger example form earlier you hand receives an equal amount of force from the dagger as you put dagger put into it as you put into throwing it. The ground beneath you applies equal force to keeping you up as gravity does in pulling on you

Next I have 2 critical things that are available to you, one of which is dependent on the clocks. Methods to find how far north and south in the world a person is this is Longitude, and how to find how far east and west a person is. Together this allows for accurate mapping of the world both on land and sea. The advantages of this for sea trade and map the routes are immense and should be keep a secret if possible.

The north south location is easy is you have pole star. That is a star that remains stationary thou out the year. In which case simply find the angle of the star with regards to the horizon, and the angle out of 360 is how far north south your are. So if the angle is 30 degrees then a person is at 30 degrees north south. This can be achieved with other stars that move provided accurate star maps are available.

The east west is harder and this requires clocks to be viable. This is derived by comparing the local time found using the sun of where in the world a person is, and using a clock to compare to the time to the set location times. Then the time difference is how far east west of a location are. This is possible by understanding that the planet completes a full 360 degree rotation in a full day. Then simply divide that out into each hour and minute. You then just need to know when the sun is highest at ones current location and the predetermined location. With the difference being how far east west of the set location you are. If your world day is 24 hours long then a single hour difference is 15 degrees difference.

What is friction? (article) | Khan Academy

Until now in physics, you've probably been ignoring friction to make things simpler. Now, it's time to include this very real force and see what happens.

www.khanacademy.org

https://www.dkfindout.com/us/science/forces-and-motion/friction/

All About Newton's First, Second and Third Laws of Motion

Newton's Laws of Motion explain how objects behave at rest and in motion. Get a description of Newton's three Laws of Motion and what each one means.

www.thoughtco.com

Newton’s Laws of Motion | Glenn Research Center | NASA

Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion explain the relationship between a physical object and the forces acting upon it. Understanding this information provides us with the basis of modern physics. What are Newton’s Laws of Motion? An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in...

www1.grc.nasa.gov

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[MEDIA=youtube]X4W0D5FkN64[/MEDIA] [MEDIA=youtube]00ZEIZsl5xk[/MEDIA] Quoted Media Limit

Ciber said:
Uncertain. It may be that they use something worse than either. Best to describe both.

liberty90 said:
I think that there exist two entirely different kinds of wealth. Useful wealth and baubles. Useful wealth are productive devices, like steel tools or reaper devices or wind-power grinders or, now, steam wheels. When crafts of people grow to be more complicated, it's very reasonable for inequality in useful wealth to exist, as there are devices that are scarce, and these should be owned by people who know how to the best use them. It's moronic to give away steel tools or glass device for looking at tiny life, the best used by a surgeon or healer. If somebody looks at tools of a healer, even if complicated and costly tools, and say "you have so much and I so little" - then such a person is not correcting bad inequality, but is a moron.

Perhaps people should form cooperatives for owning complicated and costly but useful devices, just as traders form cooperatives for trade, humph.

I know even about nations that worked entirely because of trade, families traded even with neighbours instead of giving gifts, and issues of inequality were mostly solved by authorities giving paper coins to these less fortunate. In a way authorities of the nation replaced giving, partially. There was inequality, but manageable and without great discord.

liberty90 said:
Black Cat here again.

I want to mention interesting observation that table-rulers and others who use numbers to make decisions should probably keep in mind. Survivorship bias. There is a story of well-supplied armed host where soldiers were given hats made out of metal, to reduce number of head injuries. But afterwards greatest surgeon of the host complained to the Commander that, according to his observations and more imporantly his numbers and records, amount of injuries only increased. Can you guess what was wrong?

Well, even very wise can make similar mistakes. Surgeon was right with his numbers, but mistaken at considering only injuries. There were more injuries seen by him because more people lived long enough to need attention of healer, instead of dying fast! So the iron hats were actually working!

And a few words about different matter: how to keep body at least somewhat clean without soap. Keep in mind that use of soap is greatly superior method over the lack of soap, of course. But sad lack of soap is no reason to abstain from cleaning bodies: it's better to clean body with a piece of wet cloth than not at all. I think that this may be obvious to many, but not to all, and sometimes it's useful for the authority to remind people even something obvious. Even without cloth it's generally better to throw some water at hands and dirtiest parts of the body, like ass, daily. If there is no water, scrub body with clean sand. Of course this invalidates nothing about our previous advices and soap remains vastly superior to such desperate ways of cleaning. Perhaps very obvious to many already...But it helps to promote cleaningness as ritual expected from people, as form of virtue.

I also want to mention that mercury can be used to measure moderate heat. I think that bimetallic strips are used to roughly measure heat above the heat of boiling water and below the heat of melting copper. Device with mercury can be used to measure usual everyday heat levels in both winter and summer. Heated mercury expands. During cold of a winter, mercury would take less place in a clever glass device. It's good to invent a measure for heat. If we assume that, under usual conditions, fresh water freezes at 0 degrees of heat and boils at 100, then during cold winter there can be 20 below 0, during peak summer heat 30 above 0, usual heat of healthy human body is 37. Note, that salty seawater is different from fresh water also in this manner and freezes in temperatures below 0. And yes, mercury is still a poison, remember, if you want such measures use only closed devices with glass.

I suppose that everyday heat levels are somewhat relevant for plants.

JayTar said:
Right Jay here again, lets talk about medicine, science and research.
Before your imprisonment some voices explained the placebo effect.
Also previously various voices talked about double blind testing and how scientific theories can be confirmed or refuted. At the time you were skeptical of the need for such complicated methods.
All the ridiculous and nonsensical medical theories from the doctors are exactly why.
Let me tell of something you must know but perhaps have not thought about. We call it Confirmation Bias.
When someone believes something to be true, or wants to, their ability to judge if it is truly true or not becomes flawed.
Many factors feed into it but to mention a few:
People tend to remember things that support their view and forget things that do not.
When presented with new evidence that does not fit their view people look for reasons to ignore it.
When searching for evidence people look for evidence that supports their view and do not look for evidence that contradicts it.

So how can one know the truth? Well there are clever ways of thinking to try to reduce the bias, and there are systems that can be used to separate the testing to the theory from human bias.
To start try to re frame the issue. For every theory there is an opposite theory, that the theory in question is not correct.
Take the idea that singing a certain song under the light of the moon will cure a person of a fever.
Do not ask the question "How may I prove that singing the song under moon light will cure a fever?" Instead ask "How may I prove that singing the song under moon light will not cure a fever?"
There are then a number of tests that can be preformed. Does the song matter? What if they sing a different song instead? Does the moon matter? What if they sing under the sun? Or inside?
Then take that what is to be tested, people in the case of the singing and split it randomly into two groups.
Each group will test one of the conditions. Say one group will sing the original song, the other group will sing an entirely different song.
Then data will be recorded and compared.
If then it is shown that no matter what song is being sung the same results happen then perhaps whatever effect you observed is just the placebo effect. Or perhaps it is really the act of singing that is important not the song and further tests must be preformed.

When a scientist is presenting their theories they should not be explaining why they think they are true. Instead they should be explaining all the efforts they went in attempting to prove it not true. If despite their efforts they were unable to prove it false, then perhaps the theory may be true.

The next strategy to know the truth is double bind testing.
It is important that both the ones being tested and the ones preforming the tests and recording the data do not know which of the two groups they are in or testing. This is important because it insulates the test from bias and lets what is true show though. Between the placebo effect and confirmation bias the reasons why this is important should be obvious.

Another important detail is independent verification. If something is truly true then it is true everywhere (or if it is not true somewhere then there must be a reason why that is).
Once one researcher has proven (or failed to disprove) a result they should then present their findings and methods to their peers. Ideally findings should be written down and distributed to any and all who may be interested.
Then other researchers should repeat the tests, and possibly other tests in an attempt to disprove the theory. Once many independent researchers have attempted and failed to disprove a theory then you may have good confidence that it is true.

It is also important to display failure, not with shame but with pride. To publish negative results. If a researcher after much effort has discovered that the theory they have been pursuing is not the truth they should not hide away the results. Instead they should circulate it just as far and wide as those who have found the truth. They have not failed, instead they have succeeded at eliminating an untruth. Now others must know such so that they spend their time following other paths. This is also vital due to the nature of numbers and probability.

When looking at the tabulated results of a test a researcher should not then declare "This is true" or "This is false" but rather "This is true with odds of 95 in 100" or "I was not able to prove that the odds of this being false are less then 5 in 100". (As a note, 95 in 100 odds of being true or 5 in 100 of being false is a good benchmark for when a theory is worth strong consideration)
How is this determined? They must compare the result they are seeing with the odds that it is merely the result of random chance. If it is highly improbable that the difference in the two groups tested was the result of random chance then they can be more certain of their theory. By testing larger groups the certainty can be increased. If two people are sick and one takes a medicine and the other does not, and one dies and the other does not, well perhaps one just got lucky/unlucky. But if a thousand people are sick, and half of them take the medicine, and almost all who do survive and almost all who do not die, then you can be much more sure.

This is why it is important to publish negative results too. If by running a certain test you can be certain of an untruth with odds of 99 in 100. And if one hundred researchers run the test and all who discover it to be an untruth hide away the result in shame, then one of them may in error find it likely to be a truth and declare so.

In regards to more specific knowledge of medicine:
That the herbs you know for ending pregnancy are also poison is likely true. If the risk is too great and they should never be used is a more complicated question to which the answer can vary based on circumstances and individuals.
But yes it is quite possible that a good fraction of what herb lore you know is incorrect. Just as I have spoken about all the failing of the mind, you yourself are not exempt. That upon being confronted with evidence that contradicts with what you know you seek to resolve it instead of rejecting it indicates good things about you. Think about how many fools you must have seen insisting on what they think is true even as the real truth is obvious before them?

Tiny life is an imprecise term. All living things are in fact massive colonies of tiny life working in synchronicity. In a single drop of blood there exist millions of tiny cells whose purpose is to transport oxygen from the air in your lungs to all the parts of the body alongside cells that bunch together to form scabs when blood is exposed and cells that seek out and attack foreign invaders in the body. Nearly all types of tiny life required for the body's function are produced and maintained by the body. Blood is produced in the marrow of the bones. Skin is produced by the bottom most layer of the skin. Many other cells divide themselves into twins to fill in for losses.
Sickness can be caused by the attack of a foreign agent or by the malfunction of one of the many the systems of the body. Learning what causes a given sickness is a very important step in understanding medicine.

The subjugating structures are in fact a truth! We refer to them as a virus. They are one of the types of foreign agents that may attack a body.
You are correct that they do not do many of the things you were told they do. The symptoms and effects they cause should not be so wildly different from any other sickness. Specific alterations to behavior are extremely rare in diseases. The frothing sickness or Rabies is in fact a virus and is notable in how much it causes behavior to change due to it progressively destroying the brain of its victims. Any behavior changes more subtle are either due to indirect effects (someone who is feeling sick will of course act different from usual) or due to sicknesses of the mind.
Sicknesses of the mind are a different and highly complicated subject. They are however caused by malfunctions of the body and mind not foreign tiny life.
Otherwise any behavior changes are likely unrelated and only thought not due to errors in research as previously discussed.

For a final topic: Research ethics.
It is important for those that preform research to be trusted. If people do not trust them they will not listen to them and they will not wish to be subjects for studies. Thus it is important to take certain actions.
Patients must be informed if the treatment they are receiving and if it is well practiced or experimental and if there are other options. They must also know if they are participating in an experiment and give their agreement of such. They must also know that even if they are participating in an experiment they may in fact be receiving the normal treatment not the experimental one due to the structure of the two groups experiments. They must know the possible risks and possible benefits of what will be done to their bodies. Thus the people will know that if say they come in with a great fever they will not have their hand chopped off for no reason other then a lesson.
While death being a lesson is wise, it is vital to remember that the purpose of the lesson is to teach one how to avoid getting more of them in the future.
Risky experiments should be preformed on animals until a degree of understanding and proficiency has been achieved. The physicians should not have been attempting to chop off and reattach hands of humans until they had successfully preformed such on an animal.
Domesticated mice work reasonably well as a test animal and are quite convenient due to how quickly they breed. Pigs also work as something larger.
Animals are also easier to control for uniformity. Every human is highly distinct, but mice can be bred so that each and every one is identical.

Confirmation bias - Wikipedia
p-value - Wikipedia

Holy hell this got away from me. Why can't I write essays like this.

Ciber said:
TIME IS A LIE > SO IS THE SKY > TRUST IN THE ALL KNOWING ALL SEEING I

All this time you've not seen simplest truth?
The truth that is at the very core of our being.
The truth that aught be enshrined in every song.
The truth that all people are so very quick to forget.
Everything you know is wrong.

Perhaps I am biased, for we are a spirit of change, and growth, and yes: Madness.
But when you ask "can a thing be done better", has the answer ever truly been NO?

You can't expect that those who farm have effort to spare carefully checking every plant for useful deviants. Moreover, the majority of deviations cause only very small changes that could easily be overshadowed by variable soil quality or access to water. And by what measure is the table-ruler to decide what deviances are useful? You would not expect much luck constructing a great stone hall if the builders just start stacking stones hither and thither with first making some plan for how it aught look.

It doesn't have to be this way. You really can achieve significant improvements within a single generation. A dedicated school of table-rulers would indeed be a good start. Give them land and manpower enough to enumerate their fields with the same meticulous care as a banker with his gold and I can guarantee you results.

Onto actual methods. As I mentioned earlier, our greatest enemy is the environment. Plants are sensitive to soil, water, sun, disease, and pest. If you are to discern small beneficial changes then you must find ways to control these variables. The most extreme expression of this idea might be to pot each individual plant so that none is overcrowded. Giving their roots each have access to the same amount of soil. mix the soil well beforehand so that it is all of equal quality. Position them far apart so that no plant shades another from the sun. Perhaps even put them under a roof to block rain so you can give each plant the same amount of water by hand.

That is an extreme though. For faster growing plants like grain it might make more sense to have a number of small fields instead of individual plants. A simple example would be to have perhaps twenty small fields of twenty plants each. At each harvest compare the weight of grain produced by each field, and use only the grain from the most productive field to plant the next season. This is another method that helps control random environmental variables. Although it requires a clear method to measure how good each field is. Another example of this method would be breeding a shorter strain by measuring the height of each stalk in each small field at harvest time.

You will notice I have talked about strains. You want to focus on breeding multiple separate strains which each focus on a single trait. One strain that is good at growing with little water. One that has large grains. One that is short. One that is tall. One that produces the greatest weight of grain. It is much easier to breed a strain when you have a single, clear, measurable goal. And you can more easily create new useful strains for actual farming in the by cross-breeding separate strains because different places obviously need different traits. A plant that grow well without rain won't much like growing in a swamp.

But selective breeding alone would not justify anything calling itself a "School". They must also apply the rule of tables to discerning what qualities of the soil matter to which crops. Developing new mechanisms like the one Puleo built so long ago. Investigating how different types of fertilizer might correct different sorts of deficiencies in the soil. How can weather be predicted? How might Bianca make the most efficient use of her time blessing fields? For certainly villages with ample hunting and fishing aught have lesser priority, and there may be some fields where a lesser effort of Bianca might see a greater effect.

I keep deleting & re-writing & I am going insane.

Adhoc vote count started by LoserThree on Jun 29, 2021 at 9:00 PM, finished with 64 posts and 6 votes.

[rumors] [infertility] [relic] [banking]

Total voters in this category

5
3 people have voted
[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
- [X] Also use these hired soldiers to bully more territories into paying you tribute, and use parts of the gains to hire even more soldiers and weapons
- [X] But send also the best spies to the far south
2 people have voted
[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
- Ciber
- Gavinfoxx
Total voters in this category

5
3 people have voted
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
- [X] Encourage also younger and well-suited for warfare free people to serve you as paid soldiers, and to travel as armed hosts to enforce Peace and to bully more territories into paying tribute
2 people have voted
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
- Ciber
- Gavinfoxx
Total voters in this category

5
3 people have voted
[X] [Relic] Write-in: Send a message to Azule apologizing for incompetence of your servants during 500 years of your absence, but demanding peace now that you are back. If he refuses peace, war with Azule until the shit stops
2 people have voted
[X] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops
- Ciber
- Gavinfoxx
Total voters in this category

5
3 people have voted
[X] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin
- [X] Trust Peyuvo and her servants to manage paper coins and coins in the manner described by Ciber
1 people have voted
[X] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin
- Ciber
1 people have voted
[x][Banking] Disband the current hoard network and absorbs its wealth, replacing it with a new one, with your new buildings serving as a local point of storage.
- Earth-Destroyer
1 people have voted
[X] [Banking] Have Peyuvo send table-rulers to set Bianca's hoard up on the network in the same way others are (but not the cursed items)
- liberty90

Ciber said:
[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west

I feel like poking things to the south will trigger something bad prematurely.
Azule has waited 500 years. They can wait a bit longer.
But the guy in the West might actually be turned to an ally...

[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration

Nothing we do will get me my Skull throne. So I guess this...

[X] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops

I don't think Azule is dumb enough to fall for any tricks, and 500 years of war means they have likely already claimed the heads of a hundred descendants of Kartz anyway.

[X] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin

It's a simple fact. Bianca is not an Economist, and has neither the time nor inclination to learn.
Meanwhile Peyuvo has a 500 year record of competence, loyalty, and limited ambition.
The perfect combination to take the reigns of this budding economic system.
Thus I think this is an excellent opportunity to organize a sort of central banking system, one which Peyuvo should head.
General goals should include:

Standardize coin weights & measures

Prevent counterfeiting of metal and paper coins

Prevent paper coins from loosing their value when a bank fails

Make paper coins from one bank be usable in another

Control how many paper coins a bank can issue

Bianca will of course give all the fungible (easily converted to coin via sale) parts of her hoard over to Peyuvo. Bianca will still be able to pull from Peyuvo's hoard for her projects, but it will be put to good use in the meantime facilitating trade. And Peyuvo will be able to use her greater control over lesser banks to ensure that dangerous magic makes its way back to Bianca.

One point I want to make clear is that the narrative should be that all hordes belong to Bianca, but the fact should be that any horde keepers who cooperate will still retain nominal control over their horde. I think that the Horde keepers will largely go along with this after the first couple who resist are messily killed by Bianca. Obviously try to coordinate some armed bands beforehand so that horde-keepers don't have a chance to flee with their hoard before they can be talked around...

There are actually some real benefits for the hoard keepers that aught be brought up during said diplomacy. The hoard they watch for Bianca would be made safer of course because who would be stupid enough to steal from Bianca's hoard! And since they are just an extension of Bianca's hoard, there would of course be a streamlined process to request temporary transfers from the central portions of Bianca's hoard overseen by Peyuvo.

If hoards do attempt to remain separate from Bianca, then we have some other tricks up our sleeve as well. The traders who would normally do business with independent hoards would of course preferentially do business with Bianca's hoards because their paper coins can be exchanged freely across the ten nations and have extra bloody protections against counterfitting.

There is of course lots of important detail left out in this plan, but the most important part is make Peyuvo deal with it.

Ciber · Jun 29, 2021

On account of the fact that time is an illusion, I can definitely state that I finished clarifying the details of "[] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin." Long before said non-existent time ran out.
Quoted here in case peeps don't want to have to hunt back a few pages.

Ciber said:
[X] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin

It's a simple fact. Bianca is not an Economist, and has neither the time nor inclination to learn.
Meanwhile Peyuvo has a 500 year record of competence, loyalty, and limited ambition.
The perfect combination to take the reigns of this budding economic system.
Thus I think this is an excellent opportunity to organize a sort of central banking system, one which Peyuvo should head.
General goals should include:

Standardize coin weights & measures

Prevent counterfeiting of metal and paper coins

Prevent paper coins from loosing their value when a bank fails

Make paper coins from one bank be usable in another

Control how many paper coins a bank can issue

Bianca will of course give all the fungible (easily converted to coin via sale) parts of her hoard over to Peyuvo. Bianca will still be able to pull from Peyuvo's hoard for her projects, but it will be put to good use in the meantime facilitating trade. And Peyuvo will be able to use her greater control over lesser banks to ensure that dangerous magic makes its way back to Bianca.

One point I want to make clear is that the narrative should be that all hordes belong to Bianca, but the fact should be that any horde keepers who cooperate will still retain nominal control over their horde. I think that the Horde keepers will largely go along with this after the first couple who resist are messily killed by Bianca. Obviously try to coordinate some armed bands beforehand so that horde-keepers don't have a chance to flee with their hoard before they can be talked around...

There are actually some real benefits for the hoard keepers that aught be brought up during said diplomacy. The hoard they watch for Bianca would be made safer of course because who would be stupid enough to steal from Bianca's hoard! And since they are just an extension of Bianca's hoard, there would of course be a streamlined process to request temporary transfers from the central portions of Bianca's hoard overseen by Peyuvo.

If hoards do attempt to remain separate from Bianca, then we have some other tricks up our sleeve as well. The traders who would normally do business with independent hoards would of course preferentially do business with Bianca's hoards because their paper coins can be exchanged freely across the ten nations and have extra bloody protections against counterfitting.

There is of course lots of important detail left out in this plan, but the most important part is make Peyuvo deal with it.

liberty90 · Jun 30, 2021

I feel potential for a great mess next update.

Well, I mean, it depends on random rolls of course.

I'm not complaining, there would be a potential for mess regardless of options selected and I voted for winning ones, to be clear.

Earth-Destroyer · Jun 30, 2021

The outcome depends highly on how much progress is made removing the demons and their corruption. And I don't think we really had something that will help with the food shortages. But by that same token the farmland had expanded to beyond what was needed under Bianca, and now she is back. So their should be more farmland then needed and the progress in repairing the lands from last turn frees up more farmland, with every year that passes things swing more in Bianca favor.

Honestly would want to purify the burned forest that is slowly growing in size next.

liberty90 · Jun 30, 2021

We don't know current population, but 500 years is enough to double population five times (or six, depends, and that's a very big difference between 16 million and 32 million - beauty of exponential growth). Of course 95% of this overflow outside of the homelands, but I can be sure that there is less farmland per person, not more.

Katsuragi · Jun 30, 2021

I gotta find time and energy to write out the details of a basic telegraph for practical purposes for next open chat, as I think at the least they could make a local scale model to have as a basis to scale up if they don't quite have the ability to make enough copper wire for wide scale deployment yet.

I've also got to write up something on the four fundamental forces for funsies. Completely useless to their society, probably, but Bianca might be able to find something fun to do with magic via it.

Earth-Destroyer · Jun 30, 2021

Yeah if we can't get trains up soon, or at least the telegraph going it will be hard for Bianca, historically no nation could expand beyond the distance of half a years journey and even that is pushing it. That is half a year for a message to arrive and half a year to respond on the national scale.

liberty90 · Jun 30, 2021

Roman Empire? Chinese Empire? Spanish Empire? Continental empire is entirely doable.

Besides, they use pigeons. Widely.
My pigeons ^.^

Legion0047 · Jun 30, 2021

liberty90 said:
Roman Empire? Chinese Empire? Spanish Empire? Continental empire is entirely doable.

Beaides, they use pigeons. Widely.
My pigeons ^.^

The chinese had a civil war every other year and the Roman Empire split for exactly the reason that they are too large. I am not familiar enough with the Spanish empire to say anything.

liberty90 · Jun 30, 2021

Legion0047 said:
The chinese had a civil war every other year and the Roman Empire split for exactly the reason that they are too large. I am not familiar enough with the Spanish empire to say anything.

I'm not completely sure that you understand time well. Human institutions are often limited in their times of existence to a few hundreds of years, with of course some exeptions (the Catholic Church, some Universities). Almost no current modern institution, including the Unites States, is in existence for longer than imperial Rome. For historical judgement as to what is more stable: brutal low-tech continental Empire or modern democracy - for such a comparision we need to wait a few hundreds of years more.

Legion0047 · Jun 30, 2021

liberty90 said:
I'm not completely sure that you understand time well. Human institutions are often limited in their times of existence to a few hundreds of years, with of course some exeptions (the Catholic Church, some Universities). Almost no current modern institution, including the Unites States, is in existence for longer than imperial Rome. For historical judgement as to what is more stable: brutal low-tech continental Empire or modern democracy - for such a comparision we need to wait a few hundreds of years more.

Yes, and all those modern democracies have telegraphs. Also, the Roman Empire spend at least half of its existence as a city state with tributary states, and it wasn't until after the social wars that that really changed and it wasn't until the fall of the republic that Rome actually cared all that much for its provinces.

E: there is also no need to immediately jump to insults

liberty90 · Jun 30, 2021

"I'm not completely sure that you understand time well" was not an insult, as I think that the vast majority of people, limited as we are to a few decades of life, is unable to understand time well. The realisation - the true emotional feeling, not the trivial math - that from Caesar to Marcus Aurelius there was over 200 years is, in a way, shocking. And english is not my native language.

But shortly speaking, I apologize if you felt insulted in any way.

Earth-Destroyer · Jul 4, 2021

Well here is something I have been working on, if anybody has suggestion to help Bianca understand I would appreciate it.

On the topic of glass making I expect your people are using soda ash made from white pebbles and vegetation. For making clear glass potash may be better for the flux. flux is important as it lower the temperature that the glass melts at and lower that is the more contaminates are burned away. You can make Potash by saturating wood ashes in water, then straining it into a clay pot and heating the mix until the water is gone. Recommend for best results is hardwood trees with broad leaves as the best source oaks generally. For best result use the white ashes of super hot fires, Also Potash is a very good fertilizer, and you can make soaps from it.

Potash gets it properties primarily from its potassium content element nineteen. If you have a way to magically search for it, potassium can also be mined, it is generally found in areas that where underwater a few million years ago.

You can also try using Lead oxide to the molten glass as a flux. Lead oxide is easy to make just heat lead to about 70 percent to 80 percent the melting point of iron, it should somewhat resemble an orange powder. Look like you can go up to 40 percent lead oxide to the glass mix. Lead oxide make very sparkly glass, which while containing lead which will leach into stuff stored especially liquids, it is still very good for other applications.

If your still not getting clear glass the purity of the sand is likely the problem. Silica Sand also known as white sand is the best for glass making. Some things to note if the glass is coming out with a green tint that is because of Iron, you can try using magnets to remove iron from the sand. Panning the sand for elements heavier then the sand etc. If needed

How Potash Is Produced and Used

Potash is used in fertilizers for disease resistance, to support plant growth, and to increase crop yield.

www.investopedia.com

Potash: Meaning, Trading, Reserves and Production

Potash is the common name for any of several compounds which are used in manufacturing fertilizer.

www.investopedia.com

Lead(II) oxide - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Glass - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Potash - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

How to Make Glass (with Pictures) - wikiHow

Making glass is a very ancient process, with archaeological evidence of glass making dating back to before 2500 BC. Once a rare and prized art, manufacturing glass has become a common industry. Glass products are used commercially and in...

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How To Make Potash - Survival Manual

Potash (potassium carbonate) is a useful substance. It has historically been used for making soap, glass. It is used as a drying agent in food, used as an

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What Is Silica Sand & How Is It Different From Regular Sand?

Silica sand, also known as quartz, white, or industrial sand, is made up of two main elements: silica and oxygen, specifically, silicon dioxide (SiO2).

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Now on to farming specifically the use of herd animals, cows, pigs, sheep, others. Called Holistic Planned Grazing this is the practice of charting grazing moment to consider the time that an plant is exposed to a grazing livestock so that the recovery of plant is planned. In nature herd animals would move around in tightly packed groups and be constantly be moving to avoid predators. As this was the norm prior to humans grass and trees are evolved to take advantaged of large amounts of the waste of herd animals generally a wild herd could reach well into the thousands to tens of thousands. So I recommend combining local herds into a single massive herd driving grazing animals thou the land to revitalize it, just make sure they don't over graze an area, this is about making sure the plants are not exposed to the animal to long. All plants can endure only so much exposure to the livestock before major damage, and their recovery period is largely determined by their growing speed. You will have to do a lot of testing and research for your areas, this is to dependent on your native plants to. So plan out livestock grazing patterns over the months to mimic nature. This will be easiest with fields that are being left fallow for the year, but with good timing before planting and after harvest is also good. Also it is good to corral the livestock into a fairly tight nightly pen for the days they are grazing an area where you want to plant later on.

Holistic Planned Grazing is going to take a lot of work to figure out but will help the productivity of the land form the forests to the farms. Some other advice it is better to have animals graze an area instead of burning it. if a field is going to be feed for cows, use sheep's to graze it, separation of food and animal helps prevent germs from developing new diseases.

Oh pig bodies are a great for testing your hand cannons as the pig bodies react closest to humans body. Does the armor available stop the bullets, eventually bullets will be powerful enough to punch thou any wearable armor, but if they have not yet reached that point it is good to keep in mind.

https://savory.global/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/about-holistic-planned-grazing.pdf

Holistic Planned Grazing is not rotational or mob grazing - Jefferson Center

holistic planned grazing and the key insight of timing

jeffersonhub.com

liberty90 · Jul 4, 2021

Ym, the stuff about animal grazing sounds rather controversial and confusing. Is that a well-estabilished theory?

What Can SV Teach an Evil Sorceress? (abandoned)

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Evil Neoliberal Cat

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Evil Neoliberal Cat

Idea briefcase

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The 1%

Evil Neoliberal Cat

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Evil Neoliberal Cat

Retired Shadowrunner.

Evil Neoliberal Cat

Evil Neoliberal Cat