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Old 01-26-2019, 08:31 AM   #22
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Stories like that since Mark Twain show a pattern: the more the author knows about engineering, and the more experts he talks to, and the more research they put into the problem, the more people he or she decides are needed to achieve a lower final technology. So the Connecticut Yankee builds 1880s technologies in Migration Era Europe, but 20,000 Grantvillers just about build mid-19th-century technology in 17th-century Germany after hooking into the global trade network.

This would be a great excuse to postulate strange gaps in their knowledge: even if the Nazis had not hated actual experts (the boss preferred learned-sounding cranks), a few hundred or thousand refugees just can't bring and sustain the knowledge of the 1930s with them. So yeah, probably OK field medicine and machining, but they may be flat earthers or believe that Untermenschen cause the spontaneous generation of bacteria.
Well, yeah.

On the other hand, the world that the PCs might meet these guys on is flat. So it's not as if their pseudoscience is necessarily always wrong.

And if I manage to justify nuclear technology* as a new power source for their zeppelins, these couple of generations after the founding of their new society, I fully plan for their understanding of radiation to be abysmal and them to have a variety of pseudo-scientific theories that purport to explain the poor health of those few zeppelin crewmen who retain their full humanity.

*Because, seriously, the compact they've made with their scary Thing patrons means they'll face enormous pressure to a) Generate power out of all proportion to their population and mundane needs and b) Bring back a steady supply of conquered slaves, entirely aside from their labour needs. So, essentially, positing that the entire surplus production of the New Reich since its foundation was focused on generating power and the military exploration of other worlds would be pretty reasonable.
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