Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
I'd start with TL4 black powder + flintlock muskets for local levies, because they're a huge advantage over TL2-3 weaponry, but people armed with them can't defeat TL6 troops with bolt-action rifles without a ridiculous numerical advantage.
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I have the allegiance with
Svartálfrheim being vital enough and the magicians of the 'Aryan Secret Masters' being powerful enough so that the Antarctic Space Nazis were irrevocably committed to helping the TL3^ society of their allies to advance and industrialize. The first step would have been enabling their isolated allies to emerge from their hidden fastnesses on
Svartálfrheim (where they were deliberately isolated like medieval China or Japan before Perry) and start the conquest of that world.
Among the technologies that the ASNs would have handed over would have been TL4 black powder and firearms, because the highly skilled craftsmen of
Svartálfrheim TL3^ society could quickly learn to maintain and eventually manufacture those on their own. TL5 firearms would have been sold to
Svartálfrheim as well, but at first, there would be no question of TL3^ craftsmen duplicating them in useful numbers, largely because of the need for advanced chemistry for percussion caps or primers and metallurgy for barrels made in bulk. Still, it is amazing what highly skilled craftsmen who know something is possible can do, given a few years, and
Svartálfrheim was well launched on the magitech version of the Industrial Revolution within a comparatively short time.
The society of the 'Aghartans' was expanding fast enough on
Svartálfrheim in the first couple of generations for them to buy every firearm and all the ammunition that the ASN could sell, whether TL4 or higher, even if they were technically capable of making their own muskets and black powder. Quite simply, they needed hundreds of thousands of weapons yesterday and the ability to make thousands of their own didn't suffice. Within ten years, the Aghartans would have
required some six thousand rifles for elites and 50,000 muskets for ordinary troops, and if they could, they'd really have
wanted this by day one.
Within 20 years, they'd have started arming native levies of their own and needed a million weapons all told, with another five million firearms of all kinds required before Year 51. All of these would have needed ammunition at rates required by short sharp wars punctuated with periods of police actions in newly acquired territories. Basically, the Aghartans are going to keep the nascent ASN armament industry
very busy for the foreseeable future, though obviously the ASNs can't neglect their own armaments during this same time.
Officially, despite the 'Aghartans' looking nothing like
völkisch stereotypes of blond and blue-eyed North Europeans that Nazis tend to mean when they say 'Aryan', they were declared to be one of the two original and highest branches of the Aryans, brothers to the Nordic race, destinated to share rulership of all the worlds with the
Neue Reich. Certainly, neither party would have been able to expand and advance as they do without the trade, technology transfer and transfer of magical secrets that goes on.
Privately, any number of the more paranoid, or maybe just realistic, members of the ASN leadership realized that the 'Aghartans' were their most likely serious rival in the future. Maybe not within a century, as there were so many lands to conquer and so many things to do, that neither party would benefit from breaking the allegiance, but at some point, when one side decided they no longer needed the other, the most probable outcome would be at least a Cold War across the multiverse and perhaps a total war for supremacy.
Ironically, in that despite that threat in the future, there is no serious political resistance to giving the Aghartans firearms and black powder, arming native levies on
Germania Hyperborea becomes a hotly contested issue, with one faction, a loose collection of the most xenophobic and paranoid among the ASN leadership, arguing that on this world, the rule should be that only citizens of the
Neue Reich should ever be allowed the military secrets of gunpowder.
An allegiance of convenience between pragmatic technocrats, who realize that black powder is not going to stay secret and want the ASNs to benefit from which societies get it first, and a range of romantic
völkisch fantasists, who see various native cultures as kindred Aryan/Nordic/Germanic peoples beset by non-Aryan foes, ultimately overrules the paranoic faction of the ASNs and military assistence and trade to designated allied tribes is allowed to include TL4 firearms and black powder.
I'm leaning toward such allied tribes being vital to ASN expansion on
Germania Hyperborea, if only because the all-out effort at building up industry simultaneously demands that they settle important resource areas distant from the main gates and doesn't leave enough German-born citizens free to carry out mundane military tasks like garrison duty, convoy escorts and patrols over hundreds of kilometers between vital strategic sites.
Still, with the demand for guns and ammunition from new
Neue Reich citizens and the insatiable demand from
Svartálfrheim, there will be plenty of allied native tribesmen using their traditional melee weapons or bows to fight beside the ASNs against other natives, at least for the first decade or two. Maybe much longer, I don't know how long it would take the ASNs to build up their industry to the point they could be making thousands of rifles and hundreds of thousands of muskets per year, as well as supplying ammo for them all.
It will be interesting to know by what Year of
Neue Reich settlement the ASNs can breed horses fast enough to have a surplus for allied native tribes, as that would determine whether the eventual auxiliary tribal cavalry will be primarily mounted firearm infantry or if enough of them got bigger horses before they could be armed with firearms for a native cavalry tradition to develop among the allied Germanic tribesmen, keeping in mind that natives who were favored with citizenship would have had first call on any advanced weapons and the ammunition for them.