They're probably not au courant with all the details of the period of history he's talking about, but they would know that it was vanishingly unlikely anybody in central Europe was performing "experiment[s] concerning magnetism and electricity" during the Hundred Years' War. Those investigations didn't really go much of anywhere before the 1600s. For that matter, even 1990s teenagers would have been likely to know that "von Fahrvergnügen" isn't a real modern German surname, let alone one from the late Middle Ages--particularly Fritz Koopman, who is German.

No, I choose now to believe that they recognize right from the off that the guy is either bullshitting them or out of his damn tree, and are just abiding because... hey, free space adventure. And for all the decades afterward, they never called him on it outright, just out of politeness. Let the man feel like he's getting away with whatever it is he's getting away with. His heart is in the right place. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

In the longer view, whatever is actually going on in his head, von Fahrvergnügen has been profoundly and consistently generous to everyone in the WDF, and his deep pockets and his shipwrights' skills are real. Complaining that it's been 400-plus years and this mysterious First Evil that he needs a space navy to fight has never materialized (unless that was Twilight, but I don't think it was?) would be churlish.