Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Dirigibles are also really difficult to make. You need silk for the fabric, aluminium for the frame, and hydrogen for buoyancy, each of which needs a complex infrastructure to create.

Indeed. Which is why the four Parsifal-class zeppelins* are the ASN equivalents to the Moon Landing for 1960s US.

Note, however, that probably the most efficient use of RPM to make building airships easier is using the magic to achieve a proper gas seal without having to make the gas bags from expensive goldbeater's skins. If you can just use fairly mundane materials instead of having to slaughter 200,000 cattle for each airship, that saves a lot of resources.

*Parsifal, Lohengrin, Amfortas and Titurel.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Nuclear powered dirigibles are even worse, as you need uranium mining, boron production, control rod production, and fuel rod production. It requires a population of around a minimum of 10,000 experts to even maintain the infrastructure for one nuclear power plant, though each additional plant requires much less to due to efficiencies of scaling (for example, the UK civilian nuclear energy program only employs around 15,000 people).

How much could you reduce manpower requirements if you can have 2,000 TL7 'people' who don't mind risk and can ignore both radiation and toxic effects? And as many TL3 'people' with the same traits as you want? Granted, they won't be doing any science, but they can do any necessary labour.

Basically, how many of the people need to be highly educated technicians, how many can be ordinary TL7 factory hands and how many just need to be able to follow directions and perform basic labour tasks when supervised by technicians and engineers?

And are there complicated safety protocols used in our world that would be redundant when you have expendable workers who don't mind toxicity and radiation?

[adm]

Originally Posted by Icelander

...Basically, how many of the people need to be highly educated technicians, how many can be ordinary TL7 factory hands and how many just need to be able to follow directions and perform basic labour tasks when supervised by technicians and engineers?...

Study how China became the leading producer of manufactured goods over the last 30ish years, they followed this model.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Well, if they have a population of four million, with all the men working on military, political, scientific and engineering jobs, and they haven't had a civil war due to typical Nazi factionalism, they should have SAPHE and effective mass-production of military goods.

Of course they haven't had a civil war. That would put the fun in the past. They might have a civil war in the coming era, which is a much more interesting option for PCs.

Originally Posted by johndallman

On the nuclear front, RPM has the potential to save a great deal of effort, if you're willing to have that. You're opening a Pandora's Box if you do so, but you may be happy with the idea. Simply allow Matter effects to separate U-235 from other uranium isotopes, with vastly less cost and equipment than doing it by mundane means. With highly-enriched uranium, you can build small high-powered reactors: that's what submarine reactors use.

You can also build simple nuclear weapons really easily, which is what you may want to avoid.

Magic functions fine up to TL3, but it interacts unpredictably with higher tech than that, with each effective TL of concepts, design and manufacture meaning interference with magic around it and magic causing lower Malf. numbers with it.

Magic around TL4 stuff just means slightly more maintenance is needed and the magi needs to be slightly more accomplished for the same effect. Magic around TL5 stuff is still doable, but definitely a maintenance hassle in the long term (but often worth it, as magic is very nice). Around TL6 stuff, powerful magi can still strut their stuff, but the average journeyman might become a bit unreliable, and while ordinary mechanical things generally work fine, stuff like light switches and radio gets all wonky. As for experimental nuclear technology and magic mixing...

Let's just say that no sane magician would be in the same world for the experiments.

In fact, while I still believe that our Antarctic Space Nazis ought to aggressively pursue nuclear power*, I don't see them having advanced their technology to the point that they can fit a miniaturized nuclear reactor in a scout airship. Not in Year 51, no.

Happily, I came across a technology in Pyramid #3/64 Pirates and Swashbucklers, in Christopher R. Rice's article 'Sailing the Open Skies' that I think is perfectly suited. It's the Elemental Furnace (TL4^), which is essentially a steam engine that is powered by bound elementals (air and fire). It's only about as powerful as an efficient, effective steam engine of its size (which makes it much less powerful than internal combustion engines), but it can run basically forever.

The ASNs didn't invent it, but their TL3^ allies, once they managed to achieve TL4^ by trading with the ASNs, did. And now the Nazis have adopted it, having obtained the methods of its creation from their allies in Svartálfrheim in return for some major concessions when it comes to technology transfer that got the allies up to TL5^ in some fields. Not firearms (they still buy TL5 arms from the ASNs and can't manufacture primers for the black powder 11mm cased ammunition themselves), but it's only a matter of time before Svartálfrheim is fully mature TL5^ and starts pushing the boundaries leading to TL6.

*Because their 'benevolent Patrons', the Lords of the Last Waste, require ever greater supplies of energy.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by johndallman

So I think the pragmatic answer is not to make HE ammunition until the population and industry have been built up significantly. Take the designs and samples with you, but you're going to have to re-create the manufacturing processes because people will have forgotten the details by the time you're ready.

An interesting question is what else will they forget because they can't do it right away or at least find less of a priority until no one who remembers how has died. Or possibly didn't think about at all until too late. Given NAZI ways of thinking and military priorities I'd assume lots.

I can see them not having any pediatricians or ob-gyns. Yes doctors and medical texts but no practicing specialists. So the next generation of doctors is having to make stuff as they go because they didn't learn from an experienced practitioner in the speciality.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Happily, I came across a technology … the Elemental Furnace (TL4^), which is essentially a steam engine that is powered by bound elementals (air and fire).

That makes sense. They will need a steam condenser on airships, since venting the steam causes the airship to lose weight, which you really don't want, but that should be practical.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by dcarson

An interesting question is what else will they forget because they can't do it right away or at least find less of a priority until no one who remembers how has died. Or possibly didn't think about at all until too late. Given NAZI ways of thinking and military priorities I'd assume lots.

'Lots' is very right, but it's important to recognise Nazi priorities. Luxuries, consumer goods and several fields of research that will surprisingly result in our TL8, where personal electronics and digital technology has revolutinized our world, are not Nazi priorities. Birth rates and population growth, however, are viewed as crucial strategic factors and anything that allows for more healthy Aryan children, who become well-indoctrinated and educated Nazis, is a vital military technology.

Originally Posted by dcarson

I can see them not having any pediatricians or ob-gyns. Yes doctors and medical texts but no practicing specialists. So the next generation of doctors is having to make stuff as they go because they didn't learn from an experienced practitioner in the speciality.

In actual Nazi Germany and even the conquered territories, maternity homes and the welfare of 'racially pure' children was an important military priority, because the birth rate of 'Aryan' society is vital to the future plans of the Nazis. See the Lebensborn association.

As the leaders of the Lebensborn association were among the leaders of my SS coterie who established the Antarctic Space Nazis, I imagine that the association is still going strong in the Neue Reich. Granted, as childcare and midwife duties, along with education, nursing and secretarial work, are among the few professions the ASN actively encourage women to pursue, I'd expect that the bulk of the workforce in the Lebensborn programs to consist of women who for some reason want to be more than just Hausfrauen, but considering that Nazi Germany had female doctors, I don't see why ASN society can't.

She's not an OB/GYN, but Frau Doktor Herta Oberheuser is one of the inner circle of the leadership of the original ASN. I imagine that she pushed for medical educations for intelligent and capable women, arguing that in order for those women whose destiny it was to be Hausfrauen to best serve the Reich by having many healthy Aryan children, they would need the assistence of those women whose talents and interest enabled them to serve the Reich in other ways.

The Nazis are cooky and more or less universally acknowledged to be vile, which makes it all the more jarring when it is brought home how many of their leadership had, along with wildly racist and totalitarian views, various eccentric views that are surprisingly progressive from a modern perspective. Many Nazis were sincere environmentalists, the Nazi party supported unmarried German mothers while 1930s society in many other places still ostracised 'fallen' women and SS-Helferinnen were valued female professionals in a time when British and American society was, if anything, at least as chauvinistic toward women as Germany.

[johndallman]

Steel is the most important, but several things are needed to bootstrap steel production.

First you need iron ore, and fuel. The fuel is coal, but you can't use coal directly: you need to convert it into coke. The easy way to do that is in beehive ovens, which have to be built out of firebricks, and once you build your first couple of ovens with transported bricks, you need to start building a lot more, for which you need large supplies of fireclay and coke.

Do the various worlds the ASN have access to have geology duplicating that of their original world? If so, that makes finding these resources a lot easier.

Then there's the problem of transporting these heavy, bulky goods. A canal system may well be the easiest thing to build for that, since it can be dug by manual labour with simple tools. But you'll also need lock gates, for which you need to cut timber, and bring through the requisite large iron hinges, bolts, sluice gates, and other metal parts. You also need paint and oil for them, or they'll corrode away really quickly. And you also need barges for your canal network, and something to draw the barges. The beast-men will have plenty of work there.

The product we were after for all of this is coke, and once we have that, and iron ore, we can start to build blast furnaces to smelt iron. That gets us pig-iron, of quality dependent on the quality of the iron ore, the coal used to make the coke, and the skill applied to all the various processes we've been through so far. Since that skill tends to be somewhat specific to the site and the materials, your early products will not be all that could be demanded, but will improve with practice.

You've had to bring through a fair amount of auxiliary equipment for the blast furnaces and your elemental engines intended for airships will be needed for blowing the first furnace, until you can start to build steam engines to do that job.

Now, steel. Steel is complicated. It's an alloy of iron and carbon, with various admixtures of other elements. Those other elements are an issue, because you can't make up steel alloys as if you were doing chemical synthesis in a laboratory: industrial quantities of materials aren't consistent enough for that, unless you engage in complicated industrial-scale chemical processing. This is why WWII Germany really needed Swedish iron ore; it has a useful mix of other elements in it, once you can get the phosphorus out of it. So the steels you can make depend on the iron ores you have available.

Steelmaking also needs a lot of equipment, much of which is large and heavy. The ASN will want to use the Gilchrist-Thomas variant of the Bessemer process, which needs large steel Bessemer converters, lined with the correct materials (depending on the type of iron ore you started with) and powerful air pumps. So you'll need small-scale equipment to be specially designed and built in Germany, so that it can be dismantled into 400lb chunks, and then you'll need a foundry and steel mill so that you can build bigger ones. The foundry can come in a later posting.

So as well as iron ore, coal, and fireclay, you need dolomite or magnesite, limestone, sandstone, and maybe some other minerals. A professional steel metallurgist back in Germany can tell you what's needed after analysing samples of your iron ore, but you need these minerals in enough quantity that you can't stockpile them across the World Tree.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Do the various worlds the ASN have access to have geology duplicating that of their original world? If so, that makes finding these resources a lot easier.

Note that finding abundant reserves of any natural resource is much easier with access to dowsing and divination magic, even if you plan to exploit them with mostly mundane technology.

The geology of Germania Hyperborea is Earth-like, in that the same rules apply and there are even rough analogues to various geographical locations on Earth, but the world is not an identical mirror of Earth at any point in time, so resources cannot be simply assumed to be in some location because it's the exact same distance in some direction from the Exernsteine as a place where that resource is found on Earth. However, in general, areas with similar topography as rough analogues on Earth will have similar geological makeup and thus likely the same natural resources and a geologist can use his skills unchanged to analyse terrain on Germania Hyperborea, just as he could do with a region on Earth that hadn't yet be surveyed.

Jötunheim and most other places they have access to are much more alien worlds, but Jötunheim, for example, has vast reserves of untapped fossil fuels and mineral resources that are easily accessible. Indeed, the first major gate there leads to coal fields every bit as rich as the Ruhr and numerous sources of iron ore, except that no one has ever worked them and vast reserves of goethite and bituminous coal are on the surface or near it. Under some of the coal seams, there is plenty of seatearth, which may or may not be the best source of fireclay for them, but I imagine it is harder to mine than coal on or near the surface. Limestone and sandstone are present and accessible at the first industrial site in Jötunheim. There is dolomite there as well, but I have no idea how hard or easy it is to mine.

There are rivers, streams and various wetlands located fairly near the first gate to Jötunheim, with possibilities for navigable rivers and canals. The terrain around the first settlement in Germania Hyperborea is similar to prehistoric Northern Europe, complete with about the same density of rivers as our Rhineland and Westphalia. There is no reason to believe that there won't be substantially similar natural resources located in the settlement area of the ASNs on Germania Hyperborea as there are on Earth in that area.

Better iron ore than the goethite is also available relatively near the first gate to Jötunheim in decent amounts, although not quite as easily accessible as the bog iron, which can be 'mined' easily with TL2 methods. As for sources of iron ore as good as the best mined at TL7, the sort you need for the best modern steel alloys, well, these exist in both Jötunheim and Germania Hyperborea, and the ASNs know where when they settle, but there is no convenient gate next to an ideal source of unending 'Swedish iron ore'.

The best they can do is around 500 km from a gate to some very good iron ore sources (pretty ideal for sword steel, at least, which should be of some use for gun barrels and simple AP projectiles of hardened steel), with the best potential replacement for 'Swedish iron ore' they've found bring located more than 1,000 km from any early ASN settlement or gate leading to one, which makes it impractical to work until they have better mundane transport infrastructure. Of course, the reason exploring the World Tree and the new worlds it gives access to is such a high priority is that if they find a valuable natural resource near a gate on a new world that has convenient access to one of their settlements through the World Tree (where distance is very abstract and things can change in weird ways), it may allows extremely cheap exploitation and transport of that resource to where they need it.

There are petrochemicals and natural gas in Jötunheim as well, but not within easy walking distance of the first gate there. Well, there might be sources of natural gas there, but the closest easily accessible major field that would provide fuel for generations is at least 150 km away. There are TL7 methods of fracking that would allow tapping closer sources of shale gas, but with the amount of coal gas produced as a byproduct of coking, I can't imagine much need for it.

The most promising major oil field is around 300 km from the second gate discovered to Jötunheim (the gate was found in early 1945, though the first industrial settlement was almost entirely around the first gate and remained so for many years). There are some smaller sources of oil closer and there are extremely rich natural gas fields in several locations between 300-500 km from the second Jötunheim gate. I imagine that the ASNs are not, by Year 51, inclined to lay railway tracks that far for anything they do not desperately need and most likely their petroleum industry is still fairly small in scale, given their much easier access to coal and coal gas.

I imagine that diesel and any refined petroleum fuels are still extremely scarce and expensive, limited mostly to military airship projects. Anything that can use coal or coal gas is much easier to do, as they can literally walk those over from Neue Ruhr on Jötunheim to end users in the magical demiplane around Wahr Wewelsburg (though Himmler passed some pretty stringent legislation about environmental protection there and would prefer only clean energy be used there).

Moving anything produced in Jötunheim to Germania Hyperborea through magic requires a fairly circuitous climbing route over the World Tree that takes about an hour for a healthy adult with Light Encumbrance. Defacing the World Tree by cutting brances and laying track or building roads is not an option (for one thing, such changes would mean the route no longer led to the same place), but using airships to carry cargo while hovering 'over' the route on the World Tree does work.

And in a direct line by airship, the distance along the World Tree is only about 1 km, although it is obviously necessary to have enormous control over the airship in order to avoid collissions with huge branches (that can't be removed or altered without risking the route being changed as well). That means RPM casters have to be involved on some level and a lot of workers need to acccompany each airship per trip, as the trip is essentially one long landing approach.

Granted, at first, the gates would be fairly small, but I'm thinking that for these particular ones, increasing their size at a steady rate over the history of the ASNs makes sense. Tiny balloons and blimps at first, but huge, specialized cargo zeppelins by the time their industry can support that.

I'm not sure whether the supply of coal and gas that could be man- (or beast-) handled over the World Tree was enough for the initial settlers in Germania Hyperborea, even with the aid of early balloon or blimp contraptions. Likely enough they developed some smaller coaling operations of their own, given that there were probably some minor sources close enough to the first settlements for that to be practical within a few years. Or maybe they just burned wood, having emerged in a massive primeval forest like the ones that used to cover much of Europe.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Granted, at first, the gates would be fairly small, but I'm thinking that for these particular ones, increasing their size at a steady rate over the history of the ASNs makes sense. Tiny balloons and blimps at first, but huge, specialized cargo zeppelins by the time their industry can support that.

I have a weirder idea. If the gates are permanently open, a cable car line suspended from balloons is possible. You have to take firm measures to keep the weight on the line constant, but the easy way to do that is water ballast tanks on the cars.

[johndallman]

Further materials that will be needed, and ways of getting them:

Copper has all sorts of important uses, but is fairly easy to mine and smelt.

Zinc is more of a problem. You can make brass without extracting metallic zinc, by including its ore in the melt along with fluxes, but you need metallic zinc for hot-dip corrosion-proofing and extracting that needs industrial electrochemistry.

Aluminium also needs electrochemistry, and lots of pure carbon and Fluorite.

So let's look at how to bootstrap electric power generation. A decision to take right at the start is the AC frequency you're going to use, followed by the standard voltages you want. There seems no reason not to stay with the German standard of 220V 50Hz, and that greatly simplifies taking electrical equipment across.

For the Last Redoubt, you clearly want hydro-electric power for cleanness, and some kits of small-scale turbines and generators can be produced in Germany that will break down into 400lb loads. There may well be an annoying amount of cable splicing required by the need to carry cable in fairly small reels, and the required copper will have to be diverted from SS industrial plant in Poland, since its use was strictly controlled by the Ministry of War Production.

For your industrial areas, an initial hydro plant is still a good idea because it's relatively easy to get working to provide some power on site. But you're going to need to build coal-fired power stations quite soon. That needs lots of steel fabrication, lots of copper, lots of bricks and cement (Oh, cement! That's a problem), and building large turbines and generators.

You want those large turbines designed for robustness and ease of manufacture above efficiency, and you may want to get the high-pressure blades made in Germany and carried through, since they're individually reasonably small.

You take the instruments, gauges, governors, connectors, and so on for the first few stations with you, but there's a predictable equipment crunch a few years down the line where you have to start making lots of different bits of kit. You just have to get your population adequately grown and educated in time. The need for the young to spend a lot of effort fixing creaking infrastructure may cause a lack of reverence for the Old Reich in the new generation, but that was bound to happen someday.

Given electric power and magical prospecting, the other minerals you need should be able to be found and refined. Other materials, and processing, may be more of a problem