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Forum Name: Our Witches at War/Gallian Gothic
Topic ID: 34
Message ID: 13
#13, RE: New Tricks
Posted by mouse_rr on Jan-05-15 at 01:09 AM
In response to message #12

>In the Chief's defense, he was not exactly at the very top of his game
>right then. :)

a fair point and all things considered completely valid ... besides BAR or not Shirley is rather distracting flying pants or not.

>Well... not really. There are three factors that argue against that
>conclusion.
>
>The first is that it isn't obvious that they're as advanced as they
>are to anyone who isn't wearing them. It's not as if she turned up
>with, say, a Vindicator (wo)man-portable multibarrel rotary particle
>beam cannon. They would be significantly easier to keep on the QT
>than any overtly unearthly object.

this is the primary reason i dont think it would happen 'instantly' outside of Minna, who she would tell for reasons of full disclosure and security, few would be in a position to see them in use but with the profusion of technicians and service men, loyal to the witches and otherwise, someone outside the group would notice and questions would go up/down the command chain.

>The second is that, by that point in her career, Mio has lived through
>the Warlock incident and is soon to experience a modified version of
>the I Know, Let's Neuroi Up the Yamato incident. She knows all
>too well that a) the brass hungers for new toys and b) they never,
>ever use them right. If it absolutely came down to it, she'd dispose
>of them before she let those morons play with the underlying
>technology.
>
>And the third is that, even if she didn't, they wouldn't get anywhere
>with it anyway, because the technology embodied in those goggles is
>both extremely subtle and, if you took it apart and started screwing
>around with it, quite delicate. They're ruggedized for field use and
>basically maintenance-free, but there are bits inside them that would
>be ruined very easily if they were removed, so all a 1940s military
>R&D laboratory could conceivably accomplish would be to break them.
>They wouldn't learn anything in the process. It'd be like
>giving Civil War-era gunsmiths a microchip. Even if they somehow
>figured out what it did, they'd destroy it in the process.

the warlock/yamato cases are a bit counter to the argument they are used for considering the relatively fragile* and inherently hard to decipher nature of Neuroi Core Crystal but even without that constraint other issues crop up. 1 thing retroengineers do very well, in my limited experience with the field, is figure out how broken, damaged or otherwise nonfunctional hardware works and document _every_ aspect before they do anything that could further complicate the decon/recon effort. being given access to fully functional hardware a group who specialize in that would approach it very differently than the comparison you offer suggests. it is a valid comparison and the potential to screw up Important Fiddly Bits because they only had a hammer and not a Sonic Screwdriver is non-zero but in light of the next part of your response i would stipulate they would take such things into account and apply Other Resources to the task ... Ursula and her type of witch would conceivably be capable of deconstructing the entire system and blueprinting it in the process. after that its merely a matter of figuring out how to actually produce the micro/nano-electronics that would be involved.

>However, it's interesting that you should bring this problem up,
>because on a different scale, Gryphon and the 501st already had to
>deal with a similar problem during his first visit to their reality.
>There are a couple of allusions to it in New Tricks, but it
>wasn't really the place or time to go into it in detail. Suffice to
>say that there were certain elements in the Allied military structure
>who were very interested in the rumors they were hearing about some
>kind of "rocket man" who had informally joined the 501st. A
>significant percentage of G's spare time during his stay in 1943 was
>spent keeping those clowns from acquiring any solid evidence that he
>and his jetpack actually existed, and when that ultimately failed,
>preventing them from keeping said evidence long enough to act
>on it. (Hence Mio's remark about "what you and Sanya did to Allied
>G-2," that is to say, Military Intelligence.)

this part here lays the foundation for the whole Big Problem. anyone familiar with how a militarized government, especially a wartime established one, works knows that unless you destroy the _entire_ thing some subsection will return and they _will_ Make Plans and given the undeniable proof(wrecked M.I. facilities/research depts and anything related to a subject of particular interest and confirmed to be Fact by said destruct of...) that such tech exists anything that even hints at connections to said tech will inevitably draw the undivided attention of those groups who remember and covet what they were denied previously. they might even have partners among some of the support traditionally only given to witches ... namely witches in the chain of command who can be swayed by 'think of what this could mean for future witches and please ignore the dagger i have behind my back'

>This is a topic that will come up again when he returns to 332/S,
>which - because I am the UF universe's King Canute, helpless before
>the tides - I'm already designing...
>
>--G.

all that said i do get the angle you come at it from, i just dont happen to agree based on my understanding of their particularly skewed universe and the exceptional feats of engineering they accomplished using the limited understanding of O.T of course i do concede that it wouldnt be instant and the women of the 501st would not simply 'let it happen' if they could avoid it, given what you said bout Mio i could see her destroying the goggle set before willfully handing it over and outright theft would require something so far unprecedented in their universe thanks to her New Tricks, but the disruptive potential will remain as long as they exist. in the event that a Neuroi actually takes the sudden/startling advance in tech as an excuse to break out the next generation things could get very fugly very quickly.

*core crystals cant be _that_ durable if an embarrassed unpowered-butt-clench is all that is required to smash a tiny 1