Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

For how long might a bronze helm, breastplate, spear or sword remain in use as a prized heirloom?

Those are two different questions! If its a prized heirloom, you don't use it every day. When the ASN left their Earth, there were plenty of shops in the Reich busily using renaissance-to-18th-century tools from museums which had been hastily resharpened and fitted with handles etc.

Early iron edge-tools tend to wear out more quickly in use. Bronze artefacts can last pretty much forever in the right environment. A bronze sword fitted with an umbrella handle was found on the battlefield after one of the risings in Ireland was put down. There is a castle in Italy which has the best private collection of armour in the world but almost no firearms or edged weapons because anything they did not contribute to the Andreas Hofer rising was gathered up by the French afterwards (a 15th century sword is not a great weapon in a Napoleonic context, but it is better than a scythe-on-a-pole or a club-with-nails-in-it).

Probably the oldest things in use will be cases like that: something from a barrow or a riverbed or a crowded junk-room which is discovered and put back into use after it has been undisturbed for a long time.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Those are two different questions! If its a prized heirloom, you don't use it every day.

Fair enough.

It's just that in certain locations on Germania Hyperborea, there are warlike tribes with notably poor material cultures living on lands where there are remains of previous societies which in most ways had much more complex social organization, higher population densities, stronger economies and consequently richer material culture, but were nevertheless Bronze Age.

These herdsmen, pastoralists and nomadic warrior bands don't exactly have the kind of wealth needed for anyone but the absolute elites to own prized heirlooms that aren't used for something and even warlords would probably wear an ancient panoply rather than display one, at least if they were still effective protection.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

When the ASN left their Earth, there were plenty of shops in the Reich busily using renaissance-to-18th-century tools from museums which had been hastily resharpened and fitted with handles etc.

Yeah, I can find plenty of evidence of weapons in use that were made a century or two ago. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence of 19th century tribesmen in the Sudan using swords from the Crusades and similar reports often turn out to be incorrect.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Early iron edge-tools tend to wear out more quickly in use.

Fair enough. Old iron and steel weapons aren't as inherently interesting as bronze ones, anyway. In an Iron Age world where the evidence suggest that there are centuries since most of the major societies adopted the widespread use of iron, 'modern' (well, 1940s) people expect to see tools and weapons made from iron and steel.

Bronze arms are much more shocking and romantic, and would hold much more interest for the professional Anhnenerbe archaeologists and other scholars, as well as all the amateur antiquarians among the völkisch movements in Antarctic Space Nazi society.

I'm just trying to figure out if savage warriors living on the ruins of past Bronze Age kingdoms would still have bronze arms even centuries later. I mean, sure, they would technically have had access to neighboring cultures that could sell them iron/steel tools and weapons for two or three centuries, at minimum, but it's not like any culture that actually has thriving international trade is going to remain 'savage' and 'primitive'. I'm thinking about the most isolated or xenophobic among them.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Bronze artefacts can last pretty much forever in the right environment. A bronze sword fitted with an umbrella handle was found on the battlefield after one of the risings in Ireland was put down. There is a castle in Italy which has the best private collection of armour in the world but almost no firearms or edged weapons because anything they did not contribute to the Andreas Hofer rising was gathered up by the French afterwards (a 15th century sword is not a great weapon in a Napoleonic context, but it is better than a scythe-on-a-pole or a club-with-nails-in-it).

Cool.

What about bronze artifacts that see heavy use, even if they are also viewed with superstitious awe and maintained as well as the TL1-2 'barbarians' can manage?

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Probably the oldest things in use will be cases like that: something from a barrow or a riverbed or a crowded junk-room which is discovered and put back into use after it has been undisturbed for a long time.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Of course, I'm also wondering about what are effectively AtE societies, where survivors of advanced Bronze Age societies destroyed in a past catastrophe mixed with small bands of wild 'barbarians' to rebuild some kind of societies amidst the ruins.

I'm wondering whether high-quality bronze arms made many centuries ago and reclaimed by the survivors from the runs would still be preferable to the kind of early Iron Age weapons they can make now, after having lost most of their own culture and only recently started to import an Iron Age material culture from neighbors.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Perhaps the comparatively much greater apparent authority of women in Minoan/Pelesgian influenced cultures is a point the Germanic tribes might seize on.

Sticking to the simple labels that the Nazis preferred to Greco-Latin coinages: "Mother's boys."

. . . Paleo-Balkan cultures that apparently reject this and display what almost seems to be a self-conscious exaggeration of male authority and idealized masculinity as part of religious iconography.

Likewise, "Over-compensators."

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm wondering whether high-quality bronze arms made many centuries ago and reclaimed by the survivors from the runs would still be preferable to the kind of early Iron Age weapons they can make now, after having lost most of their own culture and only recently started to import an Iron Age material culture from neighbors.

High-quality bronze vs. early iron items made by people still learning the craft? Bronze all the way. Until they learn which iron ores work for sword edges vs cores vs wire, and all the little tricks used to turn ore into spongy iron into artefacts, their iron wares are going to be fairly low-grade.

Oh, and you can forget iron plate (aside from small pieces like helmets) until they have blast furnaces and quantity production of consistent iron/steel, so any bronze body plate will be irreplaceable and probably highly valued (also, bronze polishes up really nicely - good for your high status leaders).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Rupert

High-quality bronze vs. early iron items made by people still learning the craft? Bronze all the way. Until they learn which iron ores work for sword edges vs cores vs wire, and all the little tricks used to turn ore into spongy iron into artefacts, their iron wares are going to be fairly low-grade.

Oh, and you can forget iron plate (aside from small pieces like helmets) until they have blast furnaces and quantity production of consistent iron/steel, so any bronze body plate will be irreplaceable and probably highly valued (also, bronze polishes up really nicely - good for your high status leaders).

Indeed, this is all very true.

I was, however, wondering how long these irreplaceable bronze arms would last, among 'barbarian' warlords where no one could make any comparable material artifacts.

Assume that there was little volume of trade outside the zone of the catastrophic event in the past and that any individual tribe that made attempts at a more settled lifestyle had a high chance of being massacred by one of the warbands that focused exclusively on scavenging ruins, raiding neighbors and maintaining a subsidence level of food production.

Would bronze arms made a thousand years before still be superior to 'modern' arms made with early Iron Age technology? What about 500-600 years?

I mean, eventually, these 'barbarian' survivors of the catastrophe started to make new bronze weapons and eventually adopted iron, as I said, but even in the 'modern' day, they are not noted for their wealth, the quality of their material culture or the skill of their craftsmen.

How old can a fine quality bronze breastplate be before it is inferior to a 'modern' one made of leather or fabric?

And what about axes, knives, spears and swords? Surely, 500-1,000 years of use, even if also accompanied by the best maintenance they could manage (or fewer years of active use, but also no maintenance while it lay in ruins), would be enough to cause cumulative damage to such arms? Would they still be usable? And even if usable, more desirable than cruder bronze or iron arms made by the new societies that have arisen?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Sticking to the simple labels that the Nazis preferred to Greco-Latin coinages: "Mother's boys."

While it is somewhat unlikely that the average Germanic auxiliary or allied tribesman would notice, it might be worth noting that many of the most influential religious elites among the Minoan/Pelasgian influenced peoples do not seem to intermarry with the 'ordinary' tribesmen or even with the local noble warrior class, at least not if they are merely mostly 'secular' warriors.

The priestesses, seers, magicians, doctors, and the members of mystery cults or mystical warrior societies, and other conservators of old lore, seem to form a genuine elite religious caste, with varying degrees of purity. Not that this is always reflected in any visible phenotype differences (though there might be hair and eye colours more common among the learned religious caste), but it seems to be at the very least cultural difference in that the elites generally preserve one or more liturgical languages different from the local ones.

The Minoan/Pelasgian 'inheritors' are not always the only nobility of their tribes and usually coexist with local elites more concerned with secular matters, but tend to be by far the most influential group in their societies when it comes to religious, magical and other mysterious matters (which includes many arts, crafts and other 'mundane' fields of learning).

All of which is to say that the warriors the ASNs and their allies and auxiliaries fight are not led by their mothers, in truth, but by a caste of mysterious priestesses and other esoteric groups that inspire superstitious awe and fear. The elite caste will dress differently and wear decorations that are restricted to members of their groups, through law or taboo (much the same in most of these societies).

So if the ASNs find the family of a warrior, they'll easily spot a difference between his aged, sainted mother, speaker of the same Thraco-Dacian or Scythian (or whatever) language he speaks, and a mysterious priestess of the elite caste who might accompany a warband into battle, who'll be bilingual, at least, and speak a sacred language forbidden to those outside the caste in addition to the same language as the warriors.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Likewise, "Over-compensators."

Any such groups who speak a language even remotely related to any known Greek one will become the subject of intense scrutiny from ASN antiquarians interested in Homeric myth, the Trojan War and Graeco-Roman culture in general. There will be endless attempts to designate various ones as the 'real Achaeans' or 'true Myceaneans'.

One problem with trying to find anything recognizable as Achaean, Myceanean, let alone 'Greek', culture among any of these people is the distinct lack of any kind of national identity, political unity or even mutually intelligible languages, as the area of modern Greece and environs is home to a wide range of dialects or even a language continuum, as well as being mostly dominated by speakers of many other languages than any that can be related to Hellenic ones.

Any polity near a coast in that part of the world is much more likely to be a part of the wider Minoan/Pelasgian influenced macro-culture than anything resembling a heroic 'Achaean' or 'Greek' one. And as for those tribes and polities that reject the elite religious caste and their influence, they mostly seem to lack any indigenous tradition of philosophy, learning or advanced cultural markers that would identify them as analogous to Ancient Greece. In rebelling against the influence of the educated religious caste of their neighbors, they seem to have adopted powerful anti-intellectual memes and a culture that values few things as high as warlike qualities. In terms of material culture, they are usually about the equivalent of the northern Germanics, which in the richer lands around the Mediterranean makes them distinctly savage and primitive.

Perhaps the more interesting groups would be the Illyrian, pseudo-Celtic, Getae, Thraco-Dacian, Anatolian, pseudo-Hellenic and Scythian societies where the Minoan/Pelasgian elite caste is not part of the ruling class, but influences from it are freely adopted and the religious traditions appear to be some kind of admixture. This actually describes quite a lot of this part of the world, especially the further away you get from the close trading links of the Aegean, Cyclades islands and the Anatolian coast. Some of the wilder warlords of these societies might become formidable allies of the ASNs, if approached correctly.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Indeed, this is all very true.

I was, however, wondering how long these irreplaceable bronze arms would last, among 'barbarian' warlords where no one could make any comparable material artifacts.

Assume that there was little volume of trade outside the zone of the catastrophic event in the past and that any individual tribe that made attempts at a more settled lifestyle had a high chance of being massacred by one of the warbands that focused exclusively on scavenging ruins, raiding neighbors and maintaining a subsidence level of food production.

Ok, I was not sure why you were asking. I thought you wanted to know what were the oldest, most mystically powerful artefacts you could justify the natives using. But this is more about how old can things be common?

The main dangers to bronze tools are the effects of corrosion and polishing, edgetools which do rough work might suffer fractures and notches. So the first things to wear out would probably be 0.6-0.8 mm thick greaves and breastplates, then helmets, then fine knives/chisels/gilt sickles for harvesting mistletoe, then swords and heavy cleavers, then axes. Greaves and breastplates might be worn too thin within a century of frequent use, axes with proper hammer-hardened edges could probably last hundreds of years of weekly use.

Gilt bronze will not wear out from polishing and fingermarks as quickly, some of the ocean finds of classical helmets are gilt.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Would bronze arms made a thousand years before still be superior to 'modern' arms made with early Iron Age technology? What about 500-600 years?... How old can a fine quality bronze breastplate be before it is inferior to a 'modern' one made of leather or fabric?

Well, here you have to think like an Early Iron Age person, and to him or her the answer is "bronze makes me shine like the gods, leather makes me look like the shaggy men of the woods who don't grow oats or barley just hunt and eat truffles."

Its not at all clear that classical bronze armour was more protective than the linen and leather equivalents (and it definitely was not "almost certainly safe" armour like 14th-16th century European plate), but bronze made you shine like the gods and leather did not!

Bronze had been incredibly important to Bronze Age Europeans, so they showed their respect by putting most of it in rivers and bogs. (Not by carefully conserving it for what a survival instructor would say are the most urgent uses, offering it to the gods). That importance lasted well into classical times. Generally something continued to be made of bronze until there was an iron or brass equivalent which offered compelling advantages (so forge-welded spearheads are so much easier to make than cast bronze spearheads that they replace them immediately, but a thousand years later bronze helmets were perfectly respectable because making deep thin shapes from early iron is hard ... and those iron spearheads were not sharper or more durable than their bronze equivalents, just far easier to make).

Who knows what the cultures in your setting would do when they found an intact bronze sword in a barrow: they might melt it down, it might be taboo, or if they had the right dream they might polish it up and give it a new grip and put it to work. Fashion, taboo, religious ideas, styles of warfare are generally more important than technical properties.

[Polydamas]

For another case study: in the 19th century, well-equipped warriors in the Sudan wore rusty, jagged-riveted old mail shirts and camails. A good part of that was European mail with an average age probably around the 16th century. As arsenals sold off their collection, dealers in Europe collected what there was no market for, or was too worn and rusted, and sold it somewhere poorer with less firearms, and one of the last places it ended up in was the Sudan. After Omdurman that migrated to the junk-shops of Cairo and vanished over the course of a few decades. But most of that is not continuous use, that is things which had been laid away by cultures with plenty of stone buildings and stable institutions and ignored for most of its history, or brought out every so often for town guards.

So its not crazy to see arms 300 years old in at least occasional use.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Ok, I was not sure why you were asking. I thought you wanted to know what were the oldest, most mystically powerful artefacts you could justify the natives using. But this is more about how old can things be common?

Yes, I suppose that's a good way to put it.

Mystical artifacts can always be justified as exhibing one or more of; drawing power from their wielder to continually renew themselves, being subjected to religious rites that act to preserve them, being preternaturally strong and durable, etc. Obviously, mystical artifacts without such traits won't be among any truly ancient stuff encountered.

I fully plan to have people from a wide variety of cultures use bronze tools and arms alongside iron/steel ones. Indeed, the Germanic tribes among whom the ASNs settled seem not to have had their own blacksmiths for much longer than a few generations, though they've known of iron much longer. Other societies still prefer bronze to iron among the religious elites, though there are skilled smiths in both fields.

No, I'm asking about cultures where they are mostly too poor to trade for tin and don't have a highly developed blacksmithing tradition of their own. A part of the Germania Hyperborea experienced a catastrophic volcanic eruption which was followed by centuries of societal disruption, the end result seems to have been that several of their most advanced trading cultures tore themselves apart in civil wars or were conquered by 'barbarians'.

It seems to have been a full-blown End of the World type of thing, at least from the perspective of someone living in a prosperous Late Bronze Age city-state when a tsunami ruined the fleets and ports, the crops failed for a whole year and then starving 'barbarians' invaded and your formerly prosperous olive groves became the sites of constant battles for scarce resources between roving bands of the prehistoric equivalents of Mad Max cinematic universe Gayboy Berserkers and War Boys.

There were partial survivor states and civilization was rebuilt by survivors and settlers from less affected cultures. But for some reason, large tracts of land, some of them the sites of rich and powerful Bronze Age cities and towns, seem to have been abandoned by the peoples and polities that grew up After the End. Vast areas simply became the lands of warlike, xenophobic, savage barbarian bands that may have lost almost all of their previous material cultures and who for many generations survived as simple herdsmen, hunter-gatherers, raiders and scavangers of ruins.

When the Antarctic Space Nazis arrive, this catastrophe is so far in the past that they haven't worked out if it happened three centuries ago or more than a millennia. It seems plausible that the volcanic eruption itself happened a very long time ago, but that it may have taken decades or even centuries for the total collapse of the economic and political systems in place to shake out and then the endemic small-scale warfare that replaced it may have covered more decades or even centuries, while the material culture continued trending downward. Recovery might then have only begun some hundreds of years after the eruption, explaining the hard time they have in dating the event.

It is also worth mentioning that the ASNs have not yet sent scientific teams to land a zeppelin in the heart of enemy territory to do geological fieldwork on the proposed site of the eruption, simply in order to answer chronological questions that excite historians, but actually don't seem very relevant to the challenge of building their infrastructure up to TL7.

The Ahnenerbe is very influential among the ASNs, but until someone can point out how this particular historical mystery is more important than dozens of quests for Aryan origins and a Nordic, Germanic or Gothic Urheimat, the oddness of Aegaean history will just have to wait. At least, any proposed research has to be easier to perform than establishing a permanent zeppelin base surrounded by so many enemies, approximately the whole length of the known world away from the main ASN settlements.

Of course, this has not stopped the Ahnenerbe from making smaller, more subtler incursions of combat archaelogists with Waffen-SS Jagdverbande commando escort, designed to find the 'true Achaeans', Troy, Athens, Sparta, etc.

I'm simply wondering if they'd find barbarian warbands where the nobles wore millennia old bronze panoplies from the ancient fallen cultures or if they'd mainly wear skins, with the occasional crude TL1-2 piece of armour, and whether they'd still have some bronze weapons, or only weapons taken on raids from more prosperous neighbors and the rest using crude iron/steel spearheads, knives and axe-heads. And, you know, clubs, I guess.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The main dangers to bronze tools are the effects of corrosion and polishing, edgetools which do rough work might suffer fractures and notches. So the first things to wear out would probably be 0.6-0.8 mm thick greaves and breastplates, then helmets, then fine knives/chisels/gilt sickles for harvesting mistletoe, then swords and heavy cleavers, then axes. Greaves and breastplates might be worn too thin within a century of frequent use, axes with proper hammer-hardened edges could probably last hundreds of years of weekly use.

This sounds like 500-1,000 years after the collapse, the barbarians living on the ruins will not retain many usable bronze artifacts, unless they are enchanted or at least preserved with mystical means.

Would that strike you as the most plausible answer?

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Gilt bronze will not wear out from polishing and fingermarks as quickly, some of the ocean finds of classical helmets are gilt.

We may assume that bronze items made before the collapse would mostly be the products of fabulously wealthy Bronze Age societies often with great traditions of art and craftsmanship and generally a very high level of skill. Some city-states are likely to have been TL1^, TL1+1^ and perhaps even TL1+2^. The ASNs are probably not aware of that, but judging by the existence of 'modern' TL2+1^ polities, it seems plausible.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Well, here you have to think like an Early Iron Age person, and to him or her the answer is "bronze makes me shine like the gods, leather makes me look like the shaggy men of the woods who don't grow oats or barley just hunt and eat truffles."

That's a very good point and, indeed, the reason why many of the neighboring cultures often favor bronze over iron/steel even in the 'modern' era, at least for the elites who can pay the high cost of tin these days.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Its not at all clear that classical bronze armour was more protective than the linen and leather equivalents (and it definitely was not "almost certainly safe" armour like 14th-16th century European plate), but bronze made you shine like the gods and leather did not!

Yes, I have no problem imagining savage warchiefs wearing DR 2 bronze helms and breastplates, brittle with antiquity, in preference to heavier and less shiny, but nevertheless more protective, DR 3 hardened or layered leather.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Bronze had been incredibly important to Bronze Age Europeans, so they showed their respect by putting most of it in rivers and bogs. (Not by carefully conserving it for what a survival instructor would say are the most urgent uses, offering it to the gods). That importance lasted well into classical times. Generally something continued to be made of bronze until there was an iron or brass equivalent which offered compelling advantages (so forge-welded spearheads are so much easier to make than cast bronze spearheads that they replace them immediately, but a thousand years later bronze helmets were perfectly respectable because making deep thin shapes from early iron is hard ... and those iron spearheads were not sharper or more durable than their bronze equivalents, just far easier to make).

Those are good points, especiallly for cultures where the Bronze Age didn't end with a AtE style collapse and long Dark Ages. In many places, there was a reasonable continuity of material culture through the gradual replacement of bronze with iron/steel.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Who knows what the cultures in your setting would do when they found an intact bronze sword in a barrow: they might melt it down, it might be taboo, or if they had the right dream they might polish it up and give it a new grip and put it to work. Fashion, taboo, religious ideas, styles of warfare are generally more important than technical properties.

For quite a lot of the cultures I've established, they would assume that the older it was and still intact, the more likely it was to be sacred to some god, the great weapon of some forgotten hero or otherwise important and supernaturally significant.

And they'd be right, in that material artifacts that are miraculously preserved for much longer than such objects generally are do sometimes turn out to be magical. This fact considerably enhances the reputation of other archaic arms, jewelry and other mystic-looking artifacts. Even the stuff that survived for entirely mundane reasons and which is nothing more than an old tool, no better or worse than a modern one, will often be perceived as being of tremendous mystical significance, simply because it came from the great ones who came before.

Of course, native cultures vary enormously in their views toward any hypothetical ancestors of vast wisdom and artistry. Most hold them in mingled fear and awe, which is not unreasonable, as the 'modern' world has shamans, priests, witch doctors and other magicians with real power and you really don't need to offend people who might curse you with impotence, kidney stones or your cow giving sour milk. If there were really more powerful magicians and priests among the ancestors, even gods who walked the earth, it's pretty rational to want their spirits dealt with by experts and kept from becoming angry.

But in an individual tribe, disturbing the grave might be a powerful taboo and even touching arms that might have belonged to the gods is considered in the same light as we might regard playing with radioactive waste. In other tribes, seizing an ancestral bronze sword and strapping on an antique panoply before going out to slaughter any enemies you might have (or make some enemies and then slaughter them, if you had previously lived a largely blameless life) might be recognized as a viable beginning to a political career and an announcement of one's candidacy for kingship.

Some Iron Age cultures on Germania Hyperborea still prefer bronze to steel, for reasons ranging from pragmatic to religious ones. In others, however, bronze might be taboo, the forbidden metal of the corrupt and decadent foes of antiquity, even associated with demons and various unfriendly powers of mystical nature, against whom iron was a sure and sovereign security.