View Single Post
Old 02-11-2019, 12:51 PM   #201
Icelander
 
Icelander's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Industrial Chemistry, part 2

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Varnish
You need a waterproofing varnish for primers. The usual TL6 choice was shellac, but that is not going to be available to the ASN: it comes from insects that live in India and Thailand. Indeed, the only decent varnish they have available is going to be based on pine resin, dissolved in alcohol.
Depends on how kind I (or more likely the dice, if there is no research-based reason to prefer one over the other) feel like being to them. Jötunheim has a biome entirely unfamiliar to most Antarctic Space Nazis. The places where they have most of their gates tend to be significantly warmer and more humid in climate than any Northern European area of today, but the first gates they found actually led to Arctic areas.

The evidence is that Jötunheim used to be a lot warmer and more humid than is now that the ASNs have discovered it, but that areas analogous to the poles are freezing rapidly (well, on a geological scale) and that many types of local flora and fauna are dying if they fail to adapt to changing climatic conditions.

And, oh, it's not an Earth-analogue, even if the underlying terrain where the settlement gates are could be said to be analogous to the area in Europe where the ASNs come from, if hotter. The best way to tell it's not an Earth analogue is that it's not a planet and the sun seems to be a magical energy source, not a star.

In any case, Jötunheim doesn't have very many Earth plants and, for example, a lot of grasses or grains were unknown there. And with the high level of volcanism, it's not exactly a garden world anyway. Ironically, the area where the ASNs are settling was probably not a very salubrious place in the last couple of millennia (or millions of years, even), but has become somewhat of a wildlife refuge with the climatic changes.

There's plenty of hostile flora and fauna, thus, even if there is evidence that up to 95% of the local biomass are in the process of dying out and the oceans, for example, have huge hypoxic dead zones (and some areas may have had such dead zones with unclear causes alternate with localized spurts of life that last thousands of years, for millions of years). Theories include natural shifts of mana levels, which affect the local lifeforms, as many of them are at least partly manavores.

In any case, the local insect life is pretty big and robust compared to familiar Earth insects. Let's say that it resembles fantastical versions of Jurassic and Cretaceous insects, with many strange adaptations to the local mana.

Could such giant insects yield anything useful as a shellac substitute?
__________________
Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!

Last edited by Icelander; 02-11-2019 at 01:01 PM.
Icelander is offline   Reply With Quote