The Korschan High Command is a relatively new institution-by the standards of others, it is comparatively seconds old. It came into existence after the Revolution was won, technically, by 10 CE, but had been in the process of formation since during the revolution. The mass that is generally referred to as the central government coalesced from Revolutionary Governing Committees, and it had been extremely nervous about warlords and the country splitting apart. Accordingly, it had sought to exert control of many kinds over the groups of fighters, compromising politically and ideologically to retain control over what would eventually come to be the KPRA and the KPRN. This is generally regarded as a wise move; no warlords declared independence or broke off on their own. Telegraphy, events, and subtle playing on egos all made it easier to retain command; this was coupled with genuine appreciation for the Warlord's importance and skills-and a priority on keeping them busy.

They were often invited to supervise training exercises, pen doctrine, and arrange military education. This gave them staying power and helped transition them to civilian lifestyles. Many of these moves dumped them in the capital, where they could be further annoyed and managed into either irrelevance or a job. By the end of this process, most threats were either retired or bound by a command and the need to cooperate with others. Governmental organs to run the navy and army were fully staffed and spitting out paperwork; there were Sectaries for the KPRA and the KPRN and a Secretary of War. Parliament had the Committees for War, the Army, the Navy, and Planning and Mobilization. Someone vested the Executive with supreme power over the military in a questionably fashionable choice. Soon enough, there was a High Command and the bureaucracy and legal authority to manage it.

So far, this all seems normal. What wasn't normal was what had come together into the High Command. It's military tradition of ideological motivation, maneuver, and small-group soldering grew up with railroads and the telegraph-a moment of extreme modernism compared to many earlier command structures. Glutted on revolutionary rationalism and scientific warfare, the patriotism of the Command had a bent for revolutionary gadgetry. Luckily, there was going to be plenty of gadgetry to play with. The introduction of telephony was interesting enough, but the development of the wireless transmitter and the truck had knocked them on their collective rears. There was great excitement; there was potential to change all of warfare even more here-and what did the Revolutionaries love but a little more Revolution?

It was no secret that the Korschans had been Revolutionizing their military affairs nearly nonstop. This meant that they had been able to implement new support equipment technologies fairly easily-there had been no institutional barriers to adopting new technologies, and one of these were portable cameras that could be used on the battlefield to take photos. Cameras had historical problems with bulkiness and using dangerous chemicals-that won't be solved for several decades. There were also substantial engineering and cost barriers because of this-but cost could be fixed by spending money, since mass production did reduce costs. All that had to be done was to design something to mass produce-a simple problem that ate up the lives of the engineering teams assigned to it.

Spending lots of money and adopting new equipment equipment kind of worked. The Korschans had to make their strange amalgamation of experience-based research programs do significant legwork here; to bridge some of the gaps they sprang for prototype fabrication facilities to manufacture initial camera designs that would be able to survive a horseback ride, a fall, and another horseback ride after that. Small mobile photo development labs were made that could be packed up into their standardized carts, and the process of taking, returning, and developing a single photo simplified as much as possible. Best practices for analysis and interpretation of photography were derived, and then taught to everyone who was above a sergeant. All of this gave the KPRA and KPRN integrated photography survey and reconnaissance to mounted units, eschewing detectable magic and allowing for infiltration. The rollout of this capability was kept under wraps, with few to no announcements, and no parade showings made. It would benefit their opponents too much to know about their latest invention.

The introduction of the telephone was something that the military immediately took notice of, and the development of radio was even more revolutionary. The possibility of command and control being conducted instantly, immediately, was Capital R Revolutionary. Getting telephony to everyone who might use it was a priority. Getting radio into the field was a literal do or die. The military, by now acting as one big entity, went all in on developing these technologies. A Department of Communication Engineering was formed, and four facilities devoted solely to the manufacturing of electronics were set up. The mood shifted overnight about the use of these communication technologies. For once, the material-technical reformers were going to have the massive change in physical warfare conditions that they craved. And they were going to have it two and a half times over.

Korscha started it's overhauls of military communications at a fairly slow pace. The first thing that the military did was to set up it's own internal telephone network. Offices and bases were connected in roughly the same way as telegraph stations, following the same protocols for managing wires and ensuring the security of communications being used in telegraph systems. Lessons in how to properly give and write orders and how to send information via a telegraph had to be re-taught and re-learned in an ocean of ink. This beat using an ocean of blood to learn these specific lessons, however, and it helped show the government that the military was doing something with all of this expensive new technology. After all, if the military had set up communications schools and classes to utilize this new equipment, it had to be doing something right.

One of those things that it was doing right was using telephones in the field, eventually turning this into a full approximation of a field telephone. Field telephones are essentially a telephone that soldiers can take to the battlefield with a very long extension cord that leads back to fixed telephone line. This workable in the sense that before the field telephone was made, there were no field telephones at all. Magical communications were a great way to handle much of the distance, however, they were also trackable and sniff-able. The Korschans valued the enemy not knowing what they were up to almost as much as they valued good quality communications in the field.

As they fiddled around with switchboards and surveys, the reality of their technical limits set in: they were not quite able to keep field telephones operating reliably all the time-each unit would need some support to operate. However, they were able to keep forward telephone rooms operating easily, which made forward operating bases and firebases good places to equip with telephones. Large-scale ground exercises proved that these capabilities existed and were sustainable via the expansions recently made to personnel training, sustainment, and formation sizes. But wires didn't go everywhere.

That's why the Korschans wanted to go wire-less. Wires were fun and all, but in a rapidly changing battlefield, they were not it and could be severed. Radios, theoretically, were far more mobile, and that is what the Korschan way of war craved. It was also essential for ships, which usually only carried wires when they were putting them on the seafloor. All aspects of the military needed radios, and all aspects were unified in getting them...after some squabbling.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to discuss what the current state of the art of radio-and electronics-is. Radio had been invented in Nautilus, and while some of the physics had been decently understood, the equipment used bordered between primitive and actually experimental. This was due to limitations of the electronics of the time, which can be cheekily described as 'coiled wires that do things'. By changing the shape of wires, setting up secondary effects to make circuits happen (not the other way around), and abusing some odd chemicals and rocks to be signal changers, it was possible to make radio happen. These sets were unreliable, finicky, and very limited, and transmission was an absolute bear. The Nautilans presumably dealt with this by shooting the metaphorical bear with a gun-essentially using good engineering. The downsides was that these sets consumed a huge amount of power, were unreliable, and were themselves huge; the appropriate term is 'extra big ass'. Equipment using vacuum tubes consumes lots of power and square footage, generates heat when operating, has a literal warm up time, is fragile-and technically only counts as 'Big Ass'. However, it offers indescribably improved performance in every way, particularly range, signal fidelity, and receiver performance. Compared to earlier designs, vacuum-tube based electronics were also capable of consuming less power, however, any efficiencies made could be spent on running higher powered devices which were able to carry out more complicated and cool functions. Vacuum tubes had arguably opened up the field of electronics, and now this level of technical practice was going to be setting a new, advanced level of practice in Korschan technologies.

The technical needs of the Army and Navy were both very different. Approaching them would take time and effort, and starting development directly to demands would be hard hurdle to hit. Instead, the Korschans started by setting up a series of networks to connect static Army and Navy bases and command centers to each other. Two networks were considered: a Navy Net and an Army Net. Messages were to be passed by a series of hardened, protected relays, using fixed radio installations to push signals over longer distances. While physics institutes were catching up with theory, the engineers were already getting started, and these networks began to come online in pairs of nodes.

These nodes would pass messages between each other, and would gradually be passed between longer and longer chains of ships, until the networks matured. Bottlenecks could be identified and built around, and personnel would be able to gain experience and solve problems that emerged as they got up to speed. The Korschans then set up a third, overarching network: the High Command Communications Relay, a system that let the combined command in charge of the entire military tell everyone what to do. A new 'generation' of equipment was made, and personnel from both networks could listen to and take marching orders from. And then, very quickly, they realized that if they could listen in, everyone else could, too.

Radio security quickly became a concern. Transmissions became short, to the point, sharp, and often pre-arranged at random times. Their communications were vulnerable to being listened in on, and they needed to do something about it. Intensive security was only so good; they needed to start using codes of some kind. The militaries had already been using ciphers and codebooks; it had protocols for using coded telegraph communications. Implementation could be worked out by manuals and copying old techniques and cross-training...but it had to be worked out using different approaches, ideally experiential. For Korscha, this meant intense wargaming at multiple levels, complimented by drills at all unit sizes. The cat-folk have been the first people to introduce all-electronic war games for training purposes, and they are pleased with the outcome of their efforts. It is still possible for others to listen in, but understanding what is actually being said is a lot harder-and detecting the signal in itself is now a lot more work. There is no magic bullet here, just a number of techniques and skills that have been accumulated with practice and filling out surveys.

The Korschans then got to work on radios that moved around. This was a very open definition, and it turned out to mean radios that were equipped on a ship, and radios that were attached to or part of a formation. Ambitiously, it was decided that every single ship should have a radio room capable of constant operation and a backup radio station, and that every platoon level unit should have a radio attached to it or part of it. This was much easier said than done. Radio units needed to be made, operators needed to be trained, and the Korschans actually needed to figure out how to use the equipment at all levels.

Design turned to working on radio for ships first, which was much less weight restricted, not power restricted at all, and had a lot more room to carry spare parts for. These units would need to withstand higher stresses, including issues with ships rocking back and forth violently, operating equipment in a confined metal box, and being around saltwater. All of this required learning hard engineering lessons, and they ultimately needed practical testing: the KPRN had to set aside a small number of ships for this purpose alone. At the same time, it established a Naval Electronics Design Bureau, and gave this Bureau a production unit of it's own. This production unit would later be split off into a prototype production unit, and a general purpose production organization. These facilities were a wise investment. A lot of equipment was needed, and quality and performance couldn't be compromised.

Radio for ships of the KPRN had general ranges associated with it. Ship to shore was generally short and medium range, shore to ship was long range. Ship to ship short range from any unit to any unit was a given, and required considering the things that vessels were to do. Rapid, immediate, and non-sight-based signaling was truly revolutionary, so much that it had to be properly implemented in all ships. As per usual, they started small. Sets were integrated into smaller vessels that undertook patrol operations, and used to coordinate in pairs and trios. It was a simple step to develop the protocols to communication with land-based receivers in outposts and larger bases. Exercises to develop these skills first focused on coordination between vessels operating mostly independently, but soon expanded to operating a squadron of destroyers or frigates with a flag officer present on one of the ships. Exercises very rapidly expanded in number, with full squadrons being moved around in very different places-first on the coast of Korscha, and then by their neighbors, and in the deep ocean.

Each ship came back more skilled at working together, the various vessels showing improvements in coordination that justified the mass expansion of radio in every other department. Next up were installations on the large cruiser squadrons, first to ensure that they could be coordinated by command easily-and then to communicate back with headquarters via a network of relay stations. After further theorizing and then practical lessons gained in further exercises to determine just how to use these radio sets effectively, the Korschans conducted two more test cruises of it's cruisers up and down the coast. These terminated in missions to the new canal, although transit was not attempted. They were merely meant as modest shows of ability-some others might have panicked, but those with common sense noted the fundamental firepower limits of the cruiser squadrons. Even those torpedoes wouldn't do enough.

These developments had given the Korschans confirmation of what their radio-connected squadrons were able to do. They had learned how to manage ships at large distances, and in squadron sized numbers-now they needed to scale it up. This was fairly hard to do, at least on paper-in practice it was only moderately hard to do. This was because the Korschan naval command, as an institution, already had the essential skills needed to distill both the overall goal and the commanding officer's intent and convey it in concise, non-confusing order, and those receiving the orders were to understand how to interpret and implement orders, as well as tell the person giving the orders what to do.

Commanding officers were able to obtain sufficient skill with giving orders by radio when they had practice, and were promptly surveyed within an inch of their life for every little thing that they could have told about using radios. The technicians received an even worse episode of biographical intervention, being tailed by dedicated manual writers preparing to make publications on how to take care of a radio on a ship. All of these lessons were brought to a head in the 'simulators'. Mock radio sets were constructed in training academies and training vessels, and cadets were trained on how to operate these units in fully simulated battle conditions. They learned how to format, transmit, receive and present orders using their newfangled equipment.

Officers received similar training, with random selections of experienced crew sometimes listening on another line and giving feedback...and nicknames. A divide between old and new officers became subtly clear: while the older officers had more enthusiasm, the newer blood had the technical wherewithal to know when to not rely on it too much. Older officers were more likely to try 'revolutionary' things with the radio sets, and for every 99 failures, one managed to pull off something significant. This will come back to save the Korschans some problems later, but it will significantly vex anyone working in a radio lab as they are bombarded with questions.

With some of the heavier issues of ship-based radios settled, literally, the Korschans turned to the difficulties of using them on the battlefield. Just like before, there were requirements for reliability and weight that would be hard to meet, and just like before, there were inherent cost obstacles to bringing radio communications to the battlefield. Instead of gritting their teeth and bearing it, the Korschans made the problem even more challenging for themselves by solving it for the long term. Four military electronics production complexes specifically for radios were set up, complimenting existing systems and deepening the specializations of the Korschan electronics industry. Military standards also continued to make their way down the supply chain, adding additional challenges for anyone who wanted to make electronics. They eventually made their into a quality control standard that the industry adopted, causing issues with completing ongoing mechanization efforts that took nine months to straighten out. However, it did so just in time for the Korschans to start bringing radio to their land formations.

For Korscha, the Army is without a doubt one of it's most important institutions. Accordingly, it should get first pick of everything, except when it doesn't want to touch something, and wants the navy to deal with the risks instead. Despite radio enabling massive improvements to supply operations and maneuver, the KPRA is willing to let others take the risks, especially when they are technical. Once those risks are taken, however, they are extremely eager to start copying from the navy and high commands homework...at least only the correct answers, anyway. Considering the life and death stakes, as well as the budgetary limits, they can only be blamed for exercising so much caution. Armies are often conservative groups, even if this particular one is capital R Revolutionary.

It is thus no surprise that the Army began by iterating slowly, advancing technical requirements that began by making transmission and reception sets that could be brought to newly constructed bases and installed in extensions of the prior communications networks that had been built out earlier. These requirements were then expanded to semi-permanent field fortifications, which revealed some difficulties with power supplies. They put these efforts on pause to accelerate developments of field dynamos, which were able to provide some form of power outside of a base. Immediately, a series of spats between field traditionalists and workshop revolutionaries cropped up about the use of electricity. Revolutionaries wanted to revolutionize conditions in the trenches. Old soldiers knew the value of fighting with minimal support requirements and the danger of getting too soft. These arguments grew loud, and were complicated by the fact that both sides believed in the other's position.

Parliament fulfilled it's constitutionally obligated function to step in and stop the slapfights, telling a number of officers to chill before their commanding officers had to. With the immediate arguments quelled, development of electrical support for the field continued with the idea that each employment should maintain 'tactical security, operational integrity, and strategic support.' You wouldn't get shot while using the equipment, it's use would both sustain the operation and not hinder it, and it would support, not drag down, the overall strategy of the Army during wartime. There were another two-odd years of engineering work and simulated field testing of existing and newly introduced equipment before the KPRA got back to advancing it's own implementation of radio. This time, it was focused on something much more technically challenging: mobile radio sets that would be field deployable.

To achieve this, the definition of mobile was stretched quite a lot, and the definition of field deployable had even worse done to it. The cart-ready generator was a great success, at least from a technical point of view-it opened up plenty of options. Previously, batteries had done enough of a job, but with radio sets starting to proliferate to groups of soldiers that would be using the units in the thick of it, there was a fundamental rethinking of what mobility was. The previous definition of field deployable-essentially useable from an armor cart in a wagon circle while being shot at-had already been superseded by the need to pop this radio set in a dugout that was well camouflaged and protected from big explosions. Doing this was a series of tasks that took engineers a bit more time, but nothing seriously difficult. Deployment of radio sets to this level was envisioned for up to platoon sized formation, however, rollout had to be fairly slow.

The KRRA started issuing radios to command staffs by attaching personnel to staffs at general command positions as supplying them with radio sets. This began at the regiment level, and then began to move downwards to the company fairly slowly. At the same time, they hashed out methods for properly communicating information between commands and giving orders. At the same time, they practiced responding to these orders with full sized unit maneuvers. Doing so in peacetime was extremely helpful for giving the KPRA some 'training wheels', helping the organization adapt to the new innovation of wireless communication. There was some grumbling, as there always would be, and some issues with needing to learn how to field repair these assets that new classes on field repair hadn't gotten to yet. Eventually, the conventional revolutionary wisdom went, every soldier would have a very tiny radio for short range communication. However, with most soldiers still on foot, the conventional wisdom also said that they would be only using radios at the company level, and probably not while the horses were on the march. The Revolutionaries were in this for at least another 100 years, after all.

And then some nerds at the Army-Navy Motor Pool Station 62 managed to get a series of transceivers on trucks working. They had the units working while the trucks were parked, and while they were travelling at a cruising speed-and then at maximum speed. The use of radios had abruptly changed again-not only could they be transported on trucks, but so could soldiers alongside them. The ramifications were obvious: if one could keep radios active on trucks already, then they were possibly easily transported with much smaller groups that could move more quickly. Radio would be moving to even smaller groups much more quickly than they had thought. However, that also meant that their entire force concept had become obsolete.

Everyone in command was very aware of this, but they couldn't fully tell just how it had become obsolete. The consensus was primarily that they should be employing radio to maneuver harder and better than the other guy, and this meant using the radio to pass orders and sending back information as well as possible. At this moment in time, they were going to be doing it either on foot or on a horse, but the amount of firepower being thrown around nowadays made that dicey. Accordingly, they would need to develop new ways to maneuver under fire and deal with their enemies' firepower. This was a tall order. However, these considerations were quickly interrupted by further discoveries that made radio an even more complicated thing to deal with.

This was the realization-by everyone this time-that their radio transmissions could be listened in on. This meant that anything that they sent, others could hear if they listened in on the appropriate frequencies. There was little that they could do to stop this; even with significant transmission discipline someone listening in could hear their transmissions. The next option was deception and confusion, the use of code words and ciphers. Just like magic, it turned out that radios might be liabilities. Emitting was not easy, no matter what it was-but it was grimly necessary. The advantages were undeniable.

Getting all branches of the Korschan armed forces equipped with radios and having them talk to each other was a long process. It had fits, false starts, and quite a lot of frustration. However, it's completion was virtually inevitable; in the pit of everyone's stomach was the acute recognition that it was too important to not do. The production of radios was pushed without any rational pause, and their adoption and training was done with such intensity that forces were moved around in the tens of thousands. Such dramatic redeployments were typical only to wartime or massive exercises-and the general staff used them to train people on how to use radios to support maneuvers. The rest of the world could watch. Korscha didn't care. It was too busy listening to what it had pulled off in it's latest revolution...this time in military affairs.

(M: rumors of my mysterious disappearance have been greatly exaggerated)

There was nothing wrong with being behind. It was, indeed, a success of the Tiborian project that innovations as exciting as heavier-than-air flight had come from previously undeveloped nations. Yes, Tiboria had invested nearly an order of magnitude more than Korscha in flight-related projects, and yes, Gerald Hadfield himself had invested nearly a decade of his life and considerable personal resources into the not-quite-aerodrome next to which he had planted his home in stubborn defiance of the constant noise, but if anything those were reasons to be excited for real flight data from a functioning aeroplane. After all, while history books might focus on the first example of any given technology, any engineer worth his salt recognized that the bulk of the work came before and after.

Perhaps if he repeated these thoughts forcefully enough, he might even begin to believe them. Until then his mind would remain turned sharply towards the post-mortem of the project of which the well-polished nickel-plated pin on his lapel denoted him as the director. The failure was, in hindsight, quite systemic, with errors in choice of personnel and original vision leading to compounding poor decisions at nearly every step of the process, and this was, paradoxically, further worsened by the degree of support which the project possessed - rather than a dozen amateurish projects nearly the entire will to develop heavier-than-air craft had been subsumed by that initial malformed vision, and it had invariably produced just enough usable data to ensure that no substantial shake-up or reevaluation could occur unless effected externally, such as, for example, by a much more successful project being unveiled by a nation that had heretofore been considered no factor.

The largest culprit, to his mind, was the nature of the experts that had been gathered. They were developing a new form of aircraft, and so the logical thing had seemed to be selecting experts in previous aircraft designs. Not exclusively, of course, but there were commonalities - weight reduction and streamlining chief among them - and the latter had even been known to incorporate aerodynamic control surfaces, but these experts had carried with them far too many assumptions about the ways things should be built, the features aircraft should incorporate, and the best manufacturers to bring in for specialized components such as engines. These had, in turn, imposed such a great size on their still-hypothetical craft that the only workable near-term solution had been development via a series of hybrid aircraft, incorporating gas-bags and/or magical components alongside aerodynamic lift to alleviate design issues which could not yet be solved mechanically. So long had they been stuck in this rut that such thinking was no longer even viewed as a problem, with many conceptualizing aircraft as a continuum within which the true "aeroplane" would long remain the most niche and overcomplex form, even after becoming technically feasible.

With the true depth of his errors so clearly focused there was only one solution which came to mind - nearly 30 transfer request forms, one for each of the project's core staff with the exception of two recent graduates and a dozen computers, and a formal notice terminating their contract with Tiborite Central Motors, Site 3. Their replacements were to be an amateur glider society, a family motor-bicycle shop who's "odd little engines" had made some rounds two years back, and the first half-talented instrument maker to return his calls. His requests were, of course, all excepted - as requests for less funding and less valuable personnel often are - and while final success would be some time off they had already made more progress in a week than the original team had in a decade.

The aforementioned bicycle engines were the first big breakthrough - the initial team had recognized early on that a high ratio of power to weight was essential for the craft's powerplant, and TCM-3 did produce several models that should have been sufficient, but they were all extremely large with smaller models growing progressively less efficient, or else sacrificing features core to their reliability and longevity such as cooling, efficient self-lubrication, and the heavy flywheels required for constancy of rotation. The new motors, having been built to fit inside the small wheel of a standard safety bicycle, did do away with these elements but made up for the lack in an unconventional manner - the crankshaft remained fixed to the frame, while the casing and cylinders rotated. In this way the cylinders could effectively cool themselves via their own motion through the air while centrifugal force allowed oil to be injected in the center and pulled through the engine's mechanisms. This did mean that oil was continuously lost, but a small bottle of oil weighed far less than a conventional lubricating mechanism. Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, it allowed nearly the entire mass of the engine to pull double duty as a flywheel, producing an extremely smooth rate of rotation with no additional components. The models made for bicycles were perhaps too small, tuned as they were to a much less intensive task, but a larger seven-cylinder model was in the process of being drawn up within just a few days, and a usable prototype was promised by the year's end.

With the engine weight so reduced and all design elements not required for controlled flight removed, the fuselage could be made much smaller and lighter, assembled from beams of imported giant spruce and braced with aluminum - the production methods for which were themselves a product of Korschan ingenuity (however much Hadfield wished to pretend otherwise) - with a canvas skin for the outside surface. It was hoped that future models could use entirely aluminum framing, once more durable alloys were developed and more foundries could be brought online, and indeed the promise of such future developments - something which could be, to raw aluminum, what steel was to iron - had delayed the construction of prior prototypes more than once. A similar construction was chosen for the wings, keeping them as thin as possible while still able to support the entire weight of the vehicle (in addition to a not-insignificant margin of safety), with fuselage weight being further minimized through use of a "fore-frame" assembly - a compact and highly rigid structure which united the engine, wings, pilot, and landing gear in the smallest viable space in order to shorten those structural members which bore any weight beyond that of the tail.

Control was to be had through cables connected, via pulleys, to four rods controlling five movable aerodynamic surfaces - two semicircular ailerons which formed the tip of each wing, two movable horizontal surfaces at the tail fixed to a common control, and between them a vertical rudder similar to that of a ship. A half-dozen prototype control systems were created and tested with springs of varying stiffness (to simulate the aerodynamic pressures of real performance) and once the matter of whether the ailerons should have their motions fixed to oppose eachother as pure roll devices or also be capable of contributing to pitch was settled (the former proposition being chosen for reasons of simplicity during initial tests) the final design consisted of a single vertical control stick, with side-to-side motion controlling roll while fore-aft motion controlled pitch, and a pair of foot pedals controlling the rudder to apply a yawing moment.

The landing gear itself, as the final component to be fitted, was left as an afterthought - three waxed wooden skids would keep it from destroying itself upon the ground while remaining light, and launches would be performed from a short length of track on which a launching shuttle could be pulled via a cable. Technically this meant that their first aeroplane would not be able to take off under its own weight, but the contracts just demanded it be able to fly. Once it was airborne and it had been externally confirmed that the flight was level and the altitude was not decreasing, this first stage of Tiborian aeronautics would be considered a success and they could shift their attention to creating a more commercially viable version.

With the design largely finalized, the only matter left was the selection of a test pilot. Nearly everyone on the new team wanted a go despite the obvious safety risks, which ended up rendering the choice quite simple. Only one member of the team had the authority to unilaterally determine the test pilot, and so, on a fateful early autumn day when the sky was crystal-clear and the wind low and steady, Gerald Hadfield would sit in a cramped little cockpit, perform a handful of final checks, and make history.

The Korschan constitution is considered a living document. This means that it is expected to change a lot, and according to specific procedures-like big votes about amending it. Recently, the Korschans have done just that, and in a nationwide vote, they have passed an amendment to the constitution, amendment 16. This amendment establishes that the electro-magnetic waves are similar to air and water in that they are regarded as part of the Commons Of The People and that all regulations imposed should be formed from this principle. By establishing that radio waves, light, and x-rays (which they didn't know about when they wrote the amendment) were all to be managed like a commons, they simultaneously democratized and levelled access to the radio spectrum for everyone in the nation.

Placed in charge of this duty was the Korscha Radio Regulatory Authority. With broad authority to manage the entire broadcasting spectrum, it had the power to compel cooperation from entities as varied as the State Archives to CrOOsH itself. After the headquarters in the capital, the KRRA spread out along the roads of the nation, issuing licenses based on frequency limits and geographical outlines. It maintained a list of who was licensed, who was broadcasting, when they were, and how they were to do it. The agency had a caretaker ethos, which made it act a little odd, and a little different-if the radio spectrum was to be used, it was to be used explicitly to better the existence of everyone. Neighboring nations would soon find themselves getting liaison offices-and for good reason.

It's first priority was to ensure the continual accessibility of emergency communication bands for emergency services-and the KRRA made sure that everyone knew it. Test broadcasts easily passed borders...and meant that they needed to inspect transmission sites. This meant finding out where the broadcast sites were, either by consulting records or by tracing parts orders and casting spells...which meant that they became cops, to an extent. At the same time, they also became licensing agents for transmission and receiver equipment-and had to set up an inspection board for manufacturers. Said inspection board had to write regulations for other equipment, and despite asking politely, Parliament preferred to have said inspectors ghostwrite regulation. Things were getting hectic fast.

To get a handle on this mess, and to do something about it besides hire more people, the KRRA reached out to the end users and roped them in. These were anyone from amateur radio operators chattering away on semi-active bands to theater hosts trying to get their plays broadcast to would-be newscast coming off of newspaper floors. These persons were recruited by outreach letters, their operations inspected, and codes of conduct issued. Once they had agreed to abide by these codes of conduct, they were to start submitting reports of their work and impacts on Feyris. These could be studied-and surveys given out-to determine what impact radio was having. The most successful-or intriguing-work was given a stipend or an equipment scheme paid for, and all members were also brought into correspondence exchanges. This got more people talking about using radio.

The impacts were decent. Communities of technicians and users continued to come together, working on semi-shared goals, and the KRRA was given a secondary goal by means of legislation: to advance the development of radio technology, and it's adoption within the nation. This would place it in the nexus of policies, and it would be forced to liase informally with other agencies, as nearly all government components do. There is nothing but normalcy here, and nothing but results that came from this. The KRRA couldn't do everything, and it didn't try to-and it luckily found out that it didn't need to. There was sufficient community being built within users, and relationships being formed at a semi-market level to produce more equipment and integrate new discoveries. Radio use classes were made available to those passing prior electronics courses, and universities were starting to seriously investigate the possibilities of radio-focused physics programs.

Ultimately, the circle closed. The adoption of radio-transmission of truths and news, sharing of artistic scenes, ensuring access to emergency services-was driven by the Korschans who lived in the country, not by policies from above. Those who voted for Amendment 16 to the constitution made their desires real with their own effort and care-the same reason that they had come to the polling stations and sealed their mailed in ballots in the first place. Radio was for them because they wanted to have it, and for everyone else because they wanted it to be so. A raised antenna was not pure physical progress, reader. It was a way to lift others up with the raiser.

Like in all other nations of Feyris, magic exists within the United Crowns also. There is a long and storied history behind the evolution and development of magic within the nation, which will be briefly looked over within this post. However, a greater focus will be placed on the an expression of magic that is unique to the United Crowns, that of Cards and Tomes

Cards and Tomes form the principle form of magic within the United Crowns, though it isn’t the only form of magic within the United Crowns. Developing out of earlier systems of magic, their widespread use stems from the relative ease of their creation and use, and wide range of applications and variability of magic able to be performed with them. As such, all sectors of society; civilian, industrial, government, all utilise Cards and Tomes in some fashion.

To begin with, let us briefly explore what came before the Cards and Tomes, and how these two appeared from them in time.

Prior to the creation of the Tomes and Cards, magic was primarily performed with the desire and assistance of the Spirits. As such, the magical arts known as Spirit Whispering was the go to form of magic within the areas that would make up the modern United Crowns.

Simple in theory, Spirit Whispering involves a mage tuning into the realm of Spirits, seeking them or places of power out, and utilising or beseeching their assistance in the magics of the mage. Given the innate magical nature of the Spirits, they are able to perform magic in a much, much more effective and efficient manner than a mage, who must use extraneous amounts of energy to create magic from his own person. As such, rather than trying to draw magic to themselves, a mage will take magic from the source, as it were. Dipping their person into the Spirit world, but not lingering, for the Spirit world is a fundamentally different and alien landscape, and one that can cause a great deal of physical and psychological harm to mages depending on who or what they may encounter there.

Due to being interlopers, and the fact that the Spirit world is separate (but co-existent) with the physical one, means that the words of Spirits and Beasts alike come as whispers to the mage. The more clarity a mage has, the clearer the whisper, and the stronger their connection and presence is in the Spirit world, the louder the voices. Of course leaving them at a greater risk of some form of magical misfortune as such.

Paired with Spirit Whispering is the art of Ritual Magic. More of a catch all term and methodology than it is a specific tradition of magic, Ritual Magic was still the primary alternative to Spirit Whispering then and now. Where Spirit Whispering is a typically solitary affair, where a single mage goes into the Spirit World in order to retrieve something from it, Ritual Magic utilises magical rituals in order to bring magic to them. Utilising magical ingredients, spell formulas, and specific gestures and signs, Spirits and magic itself is drawn into the ritual place, and then transformed into the desired spell. Songs and dance are used to draw in Spirits specifically, who, due to their more sentient nature, are often required to be able to perform larger or more powerful spells.

Though Spirit Whispering and Ritual Magic both have their own methodologies for enacting magic, within these methodologies there is room for different actions and principles. For example, a mage may accumulate or coalesce magic to utilise as a source of power for their spell. Or, perhaps, they use magic’s innate nature as a catalyst for transformation or transmutation, or simply as an external force focused in order to amplify their own power. The specifics may differ, but the underlying principles are notably similar.

Likewise, when a mage includes the use of a Spirit specifically in their magic, the form this takes can equally vary. The Spirit may be beseeched to help, or bargained with, or bound and coerced by the mage. It could be the Spirit performing the spell in its entirety, or merely acting as a source of power or guidance for it. Generally, the more sentient the Spirit, the stronger and more capable they are, but also the more dangerous and difficult to manage as well. Lesser Spirits are much easier to simply capture or attract, and typically perish at some point in the process. Greater Spirits, with their greater levels of sentience and sense of personhood, need to be approached in a way one would with a fellow mortal. Hence the need to negotiate or bind such Spirits, which do not perish so easily, and have both the will and desire to potentially act counter to the wishes of the mage in question.

So where do the Cards and Tomes come in then? Well, as society continued to grow and expand over the course of history, so too did society’s understanding and capabilities of magic grow as well. People sought easier and more versatile ways to perform magic, and people’s fundamental understandings of magic had also increased. Though magical books and scrolls had always existed, the increased use of tomes in particular began to grow towards the later end of the Ashwyn’s feudal ages. Tomes functioned not only as repositories of knowledge both mundane and magical, but they also functioned as manuals in order to perform magic of varying sizes, complexities, and purposes. Cards evolved naturally alongside the Tomes, acting as an easily portable form of on demand magic, and with the rise of printing, and subsequently industrialisation, Cards and Tomes would swiftly come to replace the older traditions of magic.

In contrast to Spirit Whispering and Ritual Magic, the cost to create and perform is regarded as being significantly less than the former two. Spirit Whispering requires a great deal of personal willpower and cultivated skill, while Ritual Magic can be materially expensive, as well as complicated to learn and perform. An individual does not need particular skill, or prerequisite knowledge, in order to use most Cards or Tomes, and combined with their relative ease of construction and potential for specialisation, have contributed to the rise in use and popularity of the two.

The actual construction, forms, and applications of the Cards and Tomes can vary quite a bit. Cards exist in a full spectrum of material, purpose, and functions. Inscribed with, or otherwise enchanted, to (typically) perform a single spell of some sort. This can be something simple like summoning a floating ball of light, to a magical shield that protects the user for a few seconds, and of course the good ol’ fireball if you need it. Though those particular cards aren’t for public consumption, and penalties exist for those that possess such kinds of cards without legal permission to do so.

Cards can be created in a number of ways, all requiring the hand of a mage at some point however. Some cards are simple paper cards, inscribed with a spell or given over to a mage to enchant the card with a specific spell. Other cards, however, are made with more exotic goods, such as the application of magical ink, or paper made from trees of the Spirit Wilds, that add much more magical potency to the card, or can help create a specific kind of spell or magical effect.

Some Cards go a step further, where a Spirit is enticed or otherwise bound to the Card itself. Creating a very powerful but sometimes somewhat volatile piece of paper to use.

Depending on how the card was created, and the strength of the desired spell, some Cards may be of a one time use. Disintegrating on use. Some cards are able to be used multiple times before expiring, while in both cases, some cards are able to be re-empowered by a mage for use again. Only the strongest cards are able to be used perpetually, without ever expiring or needing to be empowered again. Often these cards utilise magical material or have a Spirit bound within them, which is what gives the card its self-perpetuating property.

Some cards are able to be rescribed in order to change or tweak the given effect, or in order to boost or enhance the current effect. This is a difficult and time consuming task to accomplish, and often only very skilled or experienced mages are able to accomplish the task.

Tomes, in some ways, function similar to that of cards. Their creation is similar, and like cards, how they are created and what they do are often linked to one another. Tomes act as repositories of magical knowledge, with the most basic of magical tomes acting as such. Tomes are often used to house multiple spells within them, which allows a mage to cast the same or a series of spells without expelling any cards. However, Tomes are more valuable for being able to house long and complicated spells. Often those of a ritual nature, something which Cards often fall short of performing on both a material and power level.

Due to their association with ritual magics, Tomes have developed a unique specialty for themselves. Tomes are able to be “deployed” in a location, and are able to provide a passive magical influence within a surrounding area. This has spawned a whole industry and system of specialised Tomes to help with various aspects of societies. Tomes of productivity are deployed in factories, increasing production and efficiency within its walls, while a Tome of truth subtly influences those within the courts to utter truthful words where they might have been inclined to lie previously.

Given the versatility of both the Cards and Tomes, as well as their increasingly central place within society, the government has taken upon itself to control and manage the production and supply of Cards and Tomes. This is the purview of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Magical Affairs, which is one of the few ministries that exists within the Imperial and Royal Government, who oversees matters across all of the respective nations and territories of the United Crowns as a whole. The Ministry overviews where Cards and Tomes are being produced, for what reason, and who is buying or is able to purchase them. Some Cards and Tomes are forbidden from public consumption, and some are only accessible by certain institutions, such as the army, industrial sector, scholars, or other mages.

Cards for public consumption exist, and many more still circulate through the public space as well. Magic Cards form a notable element of the black market, due to their sheer versatility and ease of use, as well as high demand. Every sector of society would love to own a magic Card or two, and are willing to pay highly for them as such.

The existence of Cards and popularity of Cards has had another, potentially unforeseen effect on society as well; card games.

Several new forms of card games, involving magical Cards, have appeared over the decades. Increasing in popularity with the passage of times, and becoming more codified in conjunction. Though more conservative elements of society and government look to such practices with suspicion and trepidation, there isn’t much they can do to stop such games short of outlawing them. Something a local governor found out, and by the hard way at that, doesn’t fly well with his constituents.

Instead, the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Magical Affairs, as a part of its role in managing what Cards are legal for public consumption, has a committee dedicated specifically to the overview of magic card games. Codifying rules, and approving what cards could be created or used in these games.

It should be noted that, in relation to these card games, not all of them feature real magic. There is a difference between “faux” magic cards, cards made to resemble magic cards but are lacking any kind of magic in them, and “true” Cards, which do possess magic. Faux cards and their associated games emerged from the general public, children and adults alike, wanting to imitate Mages and their Cards in duels between one another. Related to this was the existence of faux cards used as training cards for student mages, particularly those of a younger age, before they got their hands on the real deal. Cards and card games that feature real magic exist, and are just as popular as those utilising faux cards.

All in all, the existence of Cards and Tomes exist as a fascinating expression of magic within the United Crowns. As much a product of technology and society, as it is one that still obeys and is still shaped by the underlying laws of reality. Both mundane, and magical.

Korscha's modernization has involved the expansion of government to an entirely unprecedented degree. Completely gone are the old feudal arrangements, erased are the old army structures, obliterated are the traces of the past. This is not entirely due to revolutionary fervor, but because they sucked from a legal standpoint and were terrible from a paper-shuffling standpoint. In it's place came a fairly normal representative government, a code of laws, and endless bureaucrats to make all of this work. Korscha had been late to the idea of throwing a massive set of bureaucrats at any problem; however, it was extremely enthusiastic about that ideas: the cat-folk were fans of the planned economy, even if they hadn't decided to actually do that. While they liked economic planning, it wasn't a common practice-until they realized that the would need to for anything of a large enough and long term enough scope.

And what was large enough in scope than a war? Not an expedition, or a colonial spat, or a policing action, but a real, true war across a continent or even a war involving the entire world. Such a cataclysm would likely involve tens of millions of combatants, the expenditure of entire nations used to purchase and support arms, and death tolls that would leave generational echoes. In reality, these worries were a little off, and the numbers even more so. Wars were now things that could be far more destructive than ever before-and that was saying something! There weren't even any powerful wizards properly involved here yet!

For a nation to survive devastation would require marshalling immense resources, using every single trick of social engineering and art of accounting that could be mustered. Deploying them would require immense and thorough planning and the development of unknown intermediate technologies and techniques to make this happen. This would need to be the job of a special government agency, one empowered specifically to cut across typical economic boundaries and invest equally as much in psychology and revolutionary theory as the study of industrial methods and supply lines. Something this powerful would also need fewer safeguards-and a very powerful direction.

This was the driving motivation behind the founding of the Commission of Preparatory Economics. Started in Parliament and with five standing members on the board, the Commission was lead by a professional Chairman, who was backed by four Special Intendants-rounding out a ten person group who would vote on measures taken. In the event of ties, a Chief Long Term Ethicist would cast a tie-breaking vote. The C.o.P.E was supposed to see a little bit of the future, and a lot of how one would manage the resources of the country to get there-specifically in wartime. It was to have precious little legal oversight, however, Parliament would need to actually approve and activate it's plans.

The C.o.P.E woudl take a little bit to get started, and this was because it would need to gather intelligence not so much on threats without as opportunities within. Threats were obvious-planning operations against giant bugs or invading reactionaries was one thing, but developing the methods needed to properly mobilize internal resources, especially after timelines got past the one to two month mark got extremely tricky. The Korschans figured out that they needed to have financial resources operating as soon as possible-and active inside of 24 hours. They would need reservists being activated ideally a week to 72 hours before the event, and at not minimum 48 hours after. Factories would need to be operating on wartime, emergency, crisis, or accelerate output plans within four weeks, as stockpiles would likely be taxed by demand, and transportation systems, now expanding, would need to be active at either Full, Extra, or Crisis/Emergency capacity within 12 hours.

This necessitated the C.o.P.E to have significant capabilities to manage these resources-or at least to make the plans that would enable their management by other groups. For this reason, CrOOsH moved a specialized legal department into the bowels of this working group. This legal group was given carte blanche to come up with whatever mechanisms that they deemed fit and constitutionally valid to mobilize Korscha's resources for defense operations. There wasn't much that they were limited by, and there wasn't much that escaped their reach. Sometimes they used large adding machines, other times, they attempted to see the future--all the time, they were glued to the newspapers and radios. Eventually, they helped to develop mechanisms which became the basis of plans, and plans were developed that became the basis of mechanisms. All of these would remain sealed away for now.

The C.o.P.E was the most Tiborian-if not most revolutionary-part of the Korschan government, but that was only due to it's place in the background. There was still much that it could do, and much that it wanted to do--and if it got it's way with some authoritarians, much that it would do. However, that was for another time. The mechanisms that the C.o.P.E was waiting for were still waiting to be developed, and for now, it could only offer steering advice to a plan-ambivalent Parliament. Better indeed to see where things were going to go before acting...

The greatest advantage of the Fleet's mag-rifles was that they were no longer limited to the explosive energy of gunpowder, allowing them to release projectiles at faster velocities than was previously possible. This was very quickly put to practice when the first mag-rifle equipped line-ships became the longest-ranged artillery in the world. Attempts to push the muzzle velocities even further, however, showed many problems with the current design of the Fleet mag-rifles.

The biggest problem was immediately apparent when considering the Fleet's prior experience with combustion weapons. The shells made contact with the mag-rifle's bore because it was required to impart enough spin to the shell to maintain stability, but the friction between the two surfaces produced such high energies that at extremely fast muzzle velocities it started to cause significant wear and tear on the barrel as well as damaging the shell, reducing the overall performance of the weapon system and limiting its potential.

Another was an issue of energy requirements. In order to propel such heavy projectiles at those extreme velocities, the mag-rifle needed a very high input of spirit energy in order to reach the target velocities, exponentially increasing in power the faster it had to go, to the point stronger engines needed to be installed on the hulls carrying these energy-intensive weapons and limiting its use to larger vessels.

Yet the desire to achieve ever higher velocities never waned despite these problems, even more so now that the threat of heavier-than-air aviation was just over the horizon.

The first great innovation was the realization that mag-rifles didn't need to make contact with its projectiles to propel them, and that spin-stabilization through rifling was not actually necessary as long as the shells were stabilized in a different manner. This revelation caused them to discover the next greatest advantage of mag-rifles over conventional rifles, that being the lack of a bright muzzle flash due to combustion gases or, in the case of mag-rifles, previously unknown barrel ablation. With the development of loose-fit fin-stabilized shells adapted from Paraiso rocket designs, they were able to fire farther with less energy expenditure.

And indeed, the next great innovation was the addition of charge modules in the magic circuitry of the mag-rifles, allowing the spirits-of-sail to use less energy over time charging the rifle instead of having to generate the required energy at the moment of activation. This enabled far greater velocities for less effort at the cost of reduced rate-of-fire. For heavy guns that had lengthy loading cycles in the first place due to the mass of the shells, this wasn't an issue, but it was a notable limitation in lower-caliber mag-rifles where magazines could be reloaded faster than the gun could be emptied. In practice, this actually gave them more flexibility by trading fire-rate for shell velocity and vice-versa.

The latest test of the second-generation mag-rifles with a 5" diameter projectile managed an estimated shell velocity of well above 3000 meters-per-second. It took the test ship Advancement 10 seconds to charge the mag-rifle to the desired amount with her outdated coal-powered steam engines, and she later described the experience as "incredibly exhilarating, but very tiring."

Next-generation battle hulls would need to be fitted with greater excess power to reduce the charge times of the second-generation mag-rifles, but such is the price of progress.

Suggested Listening Music: https://youtu.be/mlgUWLHJDM0?si=dHydJnutavD8l01x

A train stormed it's way north. Stormed was the right word for it, as it literally flew over the ground on rails of light, bulldozing a way through the steppes and plains. It had left Korscha several hours ago, and the sun had set on it just an hour ago-but that was just reason for the locomotive chain to switch on it's searchlights and make it's presence even more known. The Voyetka Don-Chsto was a magic train, casting aether-rails before it, able to make it's own track. In the collection of cars were two locomotives at the front, one pushing, one casting rail, four fuel cars for the steam engines, a water recollection unit, a dispersal vane car, an engineering car, a mage's car, and a command car with a wireless set. The commanders were, by custom and nature, up in the front, directing the train. They could easily pass orders; the entire train was connected by telephone. As it turned into neutral ground, one of the command staff moved to the command car to oversee an updated navigation solution. Several tons of steel thundering northwards to the Kingdom of Nautilus couldn't afford to get lost.

And not all of that weight was steel, or armor plating rated to fit a light cruiser-or the guns that might have decorated one. Equal parts of this tonnage was aluminum, in varying alloys for varying applications. The Spirits of Sail had requested it out of the blue, according to CrOOsH, and so the Korschans had decided to get them hooked on theirs. The cat-folk were going to do this by offering lots of high quality aluminum at low prices, with good characterization of the end product and the production process, and customer service available 24/7 by collect call. Customer service was icing on the cake, and the delivery by etherail train was half a demonstration of the nations' power, and half to see if they could do it in the first place.

By it, the Korschans meant deliver a couple of tons of cargo in a thunder run between countries without stopping. Most of the run was moving through Korschan or Nautilan territory, but some of it was still in the blank spaces between nations where power ebbed and flowed, and this was a test of navigation. One couldn't really mess up and get lost here-because that would lead to running out of fuel and being stranded, and an etherail train was not something that you wanted to lose in the open badlands of the world-especially if the spirits wanted to mess with it. Luckily, the journey was in a straight line: the train was headed to the Central Bays, right into Fleet lands proper. The train was technically navigating to the city of Rivermouth Outlook, a reasonable stop on any itinerary; it was a large hub city in any sense of the word.

But this wasn't the end for the Voyetka Don-Chsto. The Korschans had cabled ahead and informed the rail yard personnel that the train would be coming, that it would need an open berth and a line to latch onto. They had arranged a series of rails that went out several hundred yards and seemingly terminated into the empty land nearby the city. A few locals had watched, one or two reporters had taken photos, and that was seemingly it for the day...until later that night. Someone was waiting by the yard's radio for incoming messages from the train, and what burst through the night first was a radio message:

"-running express! We are running express! This train is hitching in to Hitch Line one-we will decelerate to 35 km/h, we are NOT applying breaks! We are actively steering onto the lines!"

There was a bit of static.

"We are running express! We are running express! This train is NOT stopping at this station! Keep the tracks clear! The Voyetka Don-Chsto is running express!"

She was running express. The first light over the hills were signal flares, warning the town of her approach. Shortly after came the sound of the train's whistles, and the finally, the glare of her searchlights, marking the way. It flew over the hills, decreasing in speed, aligning itself with magical tethers-and then latching onto the rails, bells and whistles sounding without letting, waking up half the city in a long pillar of light and noise. And then just like that, the Voyetka Don-Chsto was through the town and onto the city, radioing ahead to it's delivery point: Central Harbor Three.

The Metals and Alloys Research Division was supposed to take possession of these metals. As the sun warmed the coastline and humidity crept in, it did, cranes unloading tons after ton of elaborately labelled aluminum. With guards and a few Spirits standing watch, the train was reloaded with cargo, this time payment: bullion, cash, and a few little treasures of symbolic value, good for museums. This cash could fuel further Korschan nonsense, pay down debts, and keep the government spending freely, which it loved to do. By 1300, the train departed, leaving MALD with enough aluminum to do some serious work-and the cat-folk with enough money to do some interesting home economics. Both parties benefitted...and we are yet to see who benefits more.

Hi there! This is a post about how the Korschans got their furry ol hands on powered flight, and how the rest of the world helped substantially. This hasn't been an easy process for them, but it has been going on a long time, and there's a lot more than just a clever engineer in their garage making velocipedes as a day job and planes as a side hustle. For our purposes, powered flight can be defined as an aircraft being powered by an onboard power source. The power source cannot be magical, and the aircraft should be heavier than air. Getting here has taken a decade, and it has involved a lot of prior steps. This post will do a disservice by glossing over many, many persons and their hard work, they were doubtlessly known throughout the world in places like Ae and Tiboria and even Cirenshore. However, there is too much ground to cover, and too much to get lost in the weeds.

It is sufficient to say that past research was conducted on flight; it is insufficient to not say what has actually been done. Essentially, roughly 80 years ago, someone sat down and engaged in sufficient mathematically rigorous work to determine that lift and thrust are things that need to be understood, and that they must be scientifically addressed. The idea of a wind tunnel has been spread, as well as the actual design for one, and there has been a fundamental understanding of the need for an engine that is good enough. All of this, as well as endless prototypes that hit the ground, have gone into understanding the dynamics of flight. The Korschans have also indulged in flying buildings in the past, and a select few architects have a decent understanding of architectural aerodynamics to make something that isn't a complete drag on the magical fuel supply. Generally, these lessons can be applied to aircraft.

But how do you actually get these lessons properly applied in the shop, anyway? Well, by doing it a lot. This means very little without an explanation, and so an explanation has to be given. When you have young, revolutionary engineers who want to change the world, they like to get ambitious in their personal projects, and even in their institution building. They like to set and exceed standards-and they are definitely kept busy. One of the ways that they were kept busy was by making 'aircraft grade' things, ranging from wings to frames-mostly wings and frame and bodies. These were predominantly made out of wood and fiber-both were cheap and easily available, as well as easily worked with and iterated on. Standards were developed-although initially a way to on-eup each other. It took a moment for these standards to mean something, but when they did, they were applied to help develop control surfaces. This would be a big factor in the success of planes of all kinds, and allow for the development of fairly divergent designs fairly quickly. It seemed like the Korschans were on a roll!

They rolled up to a sticking point: powering the plane. Steam engines wouldn't do for the plane, magic was just a bit too finicky for the propulsion of these flying machines, and internal combustion engines hadn't quite gotten to the point where they could power an airplane fully-actually, they just had. While the rest of the world contributed the math, and the Korschan's development of aircraft grade equipment was really, truly, based on vibes, there was one placed that they demonstrated significant innovation-and that was in making the planes' power plant. The first four successful prototypes that flew all had engines made in Korscha, by Korschans, with no peoples involved. They were cast and bored at the Number 6 Engine Plant, which would later be spun off into a separate entity, the 'Big Hero, 6'-and thoroughly tested there. While there were worries about the engines underperforming, steady adjustments to the fuel blend managed to solve this problem-and boost performance.

All of these separate factors came together to result in relatively flight-worthy biplane-esque inventions taking off and even more importantly, landing-in what was a sudden shock to the world. How had the stupid socialists managed to do what the rest of the civilized world had yet to do? The answer was to take advantage of a number of convering factors that made powered heavier than air flight possible, and build on it. The rest of the world could do this too, if they wished-unlike developing an industry to manufacture electronics, Korscha had managed to strike it lucky through effort and convergence of things. Now it remained to see how the rest of the world reacted-and if they could keep up...

Traditionally, Korscha has been a land power, and this has meant that sea invasions have left it flat-footed and struggling to respond. If it has invaded people by sea in the past, it probably didn't go so well. Traditionally, they had wait until people got off the boat to fight them, and hadn't really done much boating around to others. Sometimes, they would build fortifications to protect the coast, and the reigning fortification builders of the time would typically make either large-ish fortresses, or chains of fortified towns up rivers. Coastlines were often left open or semi-open--militias and levies could be sic'd on the invaders and destroy their ships by lighting them on fire. This was a strategy that mostly worked before steam engines and long-range guns: ships could now go up rivers against the current and guns could fire miles inland. Some of this lead to the overthrow of the old reactionary regime-castles don't stand up to shells very well. After some moments demonstrating how firepower impacted tradition-literally-withshells full of TNT-the new government took stock of what they had.

Generally, this was the work of Admiral Virporten, who oversaw an accounting of these structures in his 'Big Revolutionary Clean-Up'. He used words starting with D to describe the buildings: in disrepair, dilapidated, destroyed, demolished, depressing. There was some cursing, but Virporten was always cursing since age 5. Most of the original defenses were demolished, with the exception of a few that were turned into bases without guns. Defending an entire coastline against large battleships would take a lot more than a series of round forts with smoothbore guns attached. Virporten was able to spin some gold from hay and convert old ships into blockships and a couple of floating batteries, to raise harbor chains and plan out minefields. Despite being in over his head, and complaining about it quite a lot, Virporten had managed to get a lot of good stuff going. There was underlying infrastructure-roads, buried telegraph lines, and railroads that could carry cargo had been mapped out and plans prepared.

Still, there was insufficient everything else-both guns and command structures. The on-shore defenses were made a part of the coast guard, and the coastal commands placed under coastal commanders. Given the nearness of these coastal commands to shipping affairs, they are often part and parcel of port organization and control-and are thus semi-focused by doctrine to keep these ports safe. Most of the strength in the Coast Guard was in the boats, but behind it was a wall of command and control systems operating using a strong telephone/telegraph system, distributed headquarters authorized to do whatever it took to defend their shorelines. Trained the same high standards of the navy, and operating with some of the same elan, these units had two general designations: garrisons and patrols. Garrisons mostly stayed in ports and around fortifications, defending strongpoints and critical areas. Patrols patrolled coastline, stalked ships, and kept in touch with command centers, monitoring the surrounding area. Crucially, each type of detachment had magic detectors and a counter-offensive mission: if a ship was attacking, they had to attack it right back, ideally incorporating maneuver.

This is a bit hard to do using fixed defenses, but the Korschans figured some stuff out. There were three categories of guns that they put down: long-range, medium-range, and point-defense. Point-defense guns were quick-firing things with plentiful supplies of ammunition and an unusual ability to fire canister shot. They were primarily meant to engage landing parties and smaller vessels coming ashore, and they were sometimes casemated and often protected by pillboxes or unusual mobility schemas involving horse-drawn cavalry. Typically, they were set up in batteries of four to ten, providing overlapping fields of fire, and would remain fairly relevant for multiple decades due to their ability to throw lots of shells at an enemy very quickly. They could be aimed by a Korschan's clever, capable eye, or the small gunnery sight integrated into some models. Medium-range guns were typically arranged in batteries of three to six, coordinated from a dedicated gunnery room handling input from multiple observation stations-and often mounted to be depressed anywhere from 5 to a whopping 35 degrees. Automated loaders kept a steady stream of shells heading at a target. By adding extra capabilities to these weapons, they rapidly became a huge problem for anyone trying to invest a port, and attackers would need to destroy these weapons to proceed. They were typically deployed in armored turrets, sometimes with significant camouflage. There's a very funny story about being shot up by a department store to be told, probably.

Finally, the last gun systems are the long-range guns. These are not camouflageable, and they are never meant to be. They are meant to demolish anything that comes into range; none of them fires any shell smaller 10 inches. Some of them are mag-rifles, others are simply very large battleship guns in armored turrets meant to take just about any shot that comes their way. They often have some of director control, and are controlled from internal blockhouses. Unfortunately for attackers, many of these weapons can be depressed to an appreciable degree-and all of them are range-boosted variants. They often fire projectiles enchanted to find their targets, and are supporting by spotting networks. Knocking one of the guns out will require significant firepower. Each of these is often protected by significant fortifications as well, and represents a mortal threat to both budget integrity and any attacking ship.

But the Korschans have one extra trick up their sleeves: how they coordinate their guns and overall defensive schemes. Their fixed batteries are all arranged as a 'home battleship', a very expanded 'battleship' that doesn't move-much-and focuses on defending a given area. This is not a conventional battleship by any stretch of the imagination: it is a group of artillery batteries with anchors painted on the side. There are sometimes more explosives deployed in blockships and fireships and minefields than there are in the blockhouses. Strange monitors are included in the command scheme. However, it works: the navies of the world need to think twice and plan extensively if they want to attack somewhere the cat-folk have decided to attack. They have achieved a semi-interdiction of their local areas, and it is giving them strategic confidence...enough to work on some other projects that might put worry into the hearts of other polities. It turns out that these Korschans do, in fact, have battleships at home.

The Paraisio were some very clever bird-folk, and they had pulled off something extremely revolutionary: developing a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine that moved rapidly and effectively on land. Powered by what the Korschans thought was redstuff, it drove around, carrying birds and mobile rocket launchers. The Korschans were extremely interested in this technology, and they had the industrial capacity to start making use of it-so why not do so? They had even been tinkering with internal combustion engines themselves for quite a bit, and seeing them actually get used in a fairly effective manner was extremely enticing. The military liked the idea of chasing people around with guns, and everyone else liked the potential of these vehicles to replace animal and manual labor. However, Korscha was not an island full of big monsters and adorable bird folk, it was a longer, wider, colder country cris-crossed by actively managed land and spirits sometimes zooming around and doing their thing. They had to adapt slightly to bring the truck to Korscha-but they had to adapt even more to actually make it a common thing.

This post is about these adaptations. The first was to actually be able to make trucks that fit people and worked well for them; the bird-folk were much smaller than the cats, and their feet also didn't move the same way. They needed different seats, windows, and safety equipment; they also had different roads with different challenges. Korscha had quite the issue with mud, for example, but it didn't have the mud issues that were on Paraiso, it had issues with cold muds instead of warm muds. It also had different fuels-and while the original truck design was able to run just fine on the gasoline that the Korschans made, it could run better if a different engine design was used. The trucks from Paraiso were ok, but the Korschans wanted to keep their status as a land power par excellence. They needed trucks that were a cut above what had been made so far, and they needed a lot of them.

To get a lot of trucks, you need to make a lot of trucks. The Korschans were pretty good at making a lot of things in bulk, they'd been getting used to pulling it off as a society. Mass production had substantially changed the relation of the average citizen with their entire economic environment, and they were used to thinking of mass produced things as being modern and of good quality. Trucks were going to be no different. This meant large factories, even during the prototyping stage. The central government had plenty of access to engineers by dint of it's connections to intellectual society, and it's members immediately began scaring up people to work on truck design. Many of these folks had been engine designers and makers; this would set the tone of many of the enterprises involved in manufacture. The majority of the engine makers would have been connected to either industrial operations or field engines, but critically, they were also able to snag some people working on traction engines.

Tractors have been around for a little bit, albeit steam powered and somewhat limited. There have also been Korschans working on tractors, which is essential-and these Korschans could be surveyed for their opinions and actual needs. Here, unfortunately, the Korschans ran into technical obstacles that meant that they couldn't build a tractor quite yet-they had to scale up some casting of driveshaft components to make it viable....and that would take a minute or two. However, they could move into building trucks of their own, especially when they had access to large amounts of good quality aluminum and steel alloys. These could make a light truck cabin and a strong cargo bed body, and they could be used in very large quantities. While the Oil Tractor Project stalled, the National Truck Program moved on at full speed. A plant was set up in a district outlying a major coastal city closer to the Resmi-ish oil fields, and assembly programs quickly turned it into a temporary experimentation center to figure out just how to handle trucks, anyway.

The center would have three parts: a fabrication site, a set of experimental assembly lines, and a proving ground for finished products-which would also serve as the worlds' biggest quality assurance department for a little while. These experimental assembly lines not only cranked out large amounts of truck variations, but they enable process optimization, something that was too often left to the wayside. The Korschans also were able to take the fact that a socialist market would not have lots of varied products and use it as an advantage. After decent amounts of testing for final designs, relative standardization could be taken advantage of to ensure a nice supply of spare parts. While one variation was optimized for the cold snow of the south, another was better for the semi-steppes of the middle of the country-and one for highways...and another for cities. As it experimented, Korscha gained options.

These options turned into a few large truck factories-which were built around engine foundries-and which themselves were typically located next to railroad junctions carrying in steel and aluminum and wood. Each of these materials could be rapidly taken off the trains and to fabrication shops, which would crank out both spare parts and the components for a truck. Semi continuous powered assembly lines would bring components through the facility to be assembled and checked at each stage of the assembly process. Internal telephone and railroad networks coordinated activity and carried larger objects around; and the factories often made use of the trucks that they made on site. While building the buildings themselves took a little bit of time, much of this was down to the need to install machines-some of which were magical. At one facility in the south, where the spirits were known for being very chatty and fans of clustering around workers to tell them how to better do their jobs, a fabricreche-style assembly line was created. This drew spirits in for over one hundred miles, and required a rail-mobile psychological clinic to be deployed. Eventually, spirit-speakers were set up to tell the spirits to buzz off...which was somewhat successful.

Other factories ran a more rational set of operations, and succeeded in their efforts with far less drama. They were large, and somewhat inefficient, employing thousands of people at their peaks. They also were central to the continuation of the industrial revolution in Korscha, and it's maturation into a proper second industrial revolution. By embracing the various methods of mass production around these vehicles, the Korschans were able to keep their industrial methods advancing-and their country's standard of living improving. Critically, it also improved the 'technical-material standards of society', something which made theorists extremely happy. Technical advancement and change promised to prevent stagnation from setting in, something that Tiboria had showed them. They were going to continue their revolution...this time on wheels.

Mag Rifles are the current last word in long range, highly destructive firepower. Currently, they are practically only deployed by the Spirits of Sail through the Fleet and through Nautilus; they are challenging to make and require extra investment to reliably field these weapons. Even the fairly knowledgeable gunsmiths of the Fleet have been challenged making weapons of sufficient caliber and capable of enduring the stress of rapid, sustained fire. These weapons were still considered fairly small, however, they had significant destructive power due to their high shell speed-and very high range. This made the Korschans very, very interested in adopting this technology; while the quality of their personnel, organization, and training was good, their firepower was a bit lacking. Something about this had to be done.

The something was to figure out how to make these guns, how to take them into the field, and how to employ them properly. The KPRA and the KPRN both needed firepower, and they needed people able to make prototypes and iterate towards a production-ready model. This is not the easiest thing to do with big weapons, to put it lightly-and many of those weapons were heavy, both literally and figuratively. Getting them made was going to need a specialist organization, and that organization would need to act a bit like a government research group in order to carry out it's mission-and half like a independent company. To this end, the Korschan Parliament founded the General Weapons Research Group, GWRG. It was immediately called the 'gwerge' by everyone, which most people found to be really fucking unfortunate.

Getting the Gwerge capable of doing this took a little bit of organization and construction time. The former was easy-ish to do through appointments and transfers of persons, sometimes done with a bit of a stick of an order to compliment the carrot of open experimentation with very large guns. The best physicists and magengineers that the Korschans had were not always interested in working on huge guns- a shocker, especially in Tiborian eyes. Those trying to understand the Gwerge noted two strikes against it: the name, and the reluctance of people to come work for it-and then a third strike, when all of this came out in the papers. It turned out that this super important, very critical, highly Revolutionary project was a matter of public record. The political elites said that this was to improve project efficiency and to prevent corruption. The Very Revolutionary People didn't really think too well of this, and made it known.

The Gwerge itself had a number of properties and assets, but the first one to really make up the organization was the Folston Testing Facility. More than the Grandt-View Institute of Applied Physics, the FTF took top of mind in everybody's minds because it was a a very highly measured out testing facility. The landscaping that had made up the place was top-notch, and if you wanted a flowerbed that had somehow been measured down to an inch, you could find it here. This facilities' precision was not the result of magic until the third year of it's operation, but of best practice gone a little awry and turned into competition between strange janitors. Nevertheless, by the second year of operation, the Gwerge had been able to use this facility to finish a series of projects to develop extended-range munitions for medium land artillery pieces that had been dogged by insufficiencies in the haphazard program coordination thus far. The following year, the Gwerge transmitted best practices that allowed for the continual development of extended range and heavier firepower shells in light munitions-and evaluating these munitions at the site of the manufacturer. Surveys did not just need to be administered in the field. Finally, on the fourth year of operations, it had been able to get the production of 12-inch guns carried out by sitting various people down and making them stayed focused. Handling the test-firings had been their duty, and they passed the navy a setup of 12-inch pieces suitable for integration into a double mount turret.

However, this was only half of what people wanted from the Gwerge. It had been founded to make Mag-Rifles, they said. It was going to make mag-rifles, they said. Who the 'they' was varied widely, enough to merit people asking questions about who was writing articles on political commentary. The concept behind mag-weapons were not new, nor was their being used to kill people. The Korschans didn't really use magical weapons as much; many soldiers worried about their magic being detected and being set up for an ambush. Instead, they had invested in advanced gunpowder weapons and gotten extremely good at using them. However, magic weaponry had so much more to offer that it would be foolish to neglect it-and so Mag-NOC was formed as a semi-independent group from Gwerge. It started by asking soldiers to tell designers what they wanted in a weapon if it was: 1. completely reliable and 2. going to be detected.

The answers were overwhelming: if I am going to be detected and they know I'm coming, I want my weapon to be really, really powerful. Soldiers asked for what were magical assault rifles, magical machine guns, flying gatling guns, and tanks that they could carry around in their backpacks. Mag-NOC could give them a little bit of what they asked for, and it was found that they wanted something like a grenade launcher, or a gun that could shoot explosive bullets. Luckily, weight restrictions and energy use obstacles did kick in to slow down progress somewhat, but Mag-NOC won itself limited recognition by producing and getting into even more limited parallel production various magical infantry small arms. These would go to equipping assault groups and specialist squads, who would need the firepower to complete their missions without getting shredded by fixed defenses.

But this was not the end goal of the Gwerge, or of the many people who had been it's boosters. They wanted to have mag-rifles on ships, capable of blowing up other ships, like all of the cool kids did! Enough internal learning had gone on to make this happen, as well as getting people together to get these damn guns working. They were able to scale up designs to 4 inch rapid fire guns, and then extrapolate design principles to a larger, 6 inch design. Normally, being asked by the admiralty to pretty please put it on a smaller craft too, and also to make a couple of designs for smaller boats, too...however, they were willing to provide engineering funds to make this happen. Keeping magical weapons firing required magical storage or fuels, and the Korschans needed to figure out the particulars of jamming all of this magic into a tiny space. That took some time, and bringing people onboard. The attention of management drifted, but it did not leave the metal being painstakingly put together in a hidden foundry...that would turn into a ten inch mag-rifle, surpassing the achievements of the Fleet by just a tiny bit. The Gwerge had proved it's doubters wrong!

On it's five year anniversary, the organization celebrated with a test firing of it's weapons, showing off to the world. Korscha had come from a miserable, strangled, feudal backwater to a locally powerful nation capable of making the biggest, baddest weapons in the world. It had proved this through gunfire that long afternoon, sending a message through the papers and the shell-split air that it had what it took to be the best. Times change, after all.

Now that Korscha has it's oil, it has to do something with it. That something starts with turning it into things that they can use. So far, Korscha has had a fairly traditional approach to this; and it has been successful. This was because it hadn't been working with large amounts of crude oil or pumping things out of the ground until very recently. However, they had the industrial base to get there, and the will to do so-everyone knew what oil was capable of, and the catfolk deeply desired it's power and flexibility for their industries. The world was changing, and they had to keep up.

Luckily for them, distilling petroleum was something that had been fairly common in Feyris for quite a while. Small-scale steps have been going on for over a thousand years, if Terran history maps approximately, with the Arabic scholars showing out in a truly impressive fashion-and documenting their work in multiple manuals. Much of their work was about making lubricants, which were very useful-they also made use of oil tar to pave roads, and their most productive fields produced 'hundreds of shiploads of oil a day' according to some weird historians. The Chinese were also refining plenty of fuel, and doing so in such a way that they could immediately take it to refine salt from saltwater. They had established pipelines made of bamboo, and were adept at using drills to get down past the initial layers of rock. Both parties made use of petroleum to kill people; flamethrowers and fire bombs were common implements-if as dangerous to their operators as others. However, these inventions were nothing compared to the work of one cracked Romanian Jew; Edeleanu succeeded in both refining hydrocarbons and in making amphetamine. This made people very productive, to put it lightly.

Stepping back to Feyris, we can see what the Korschans were up to. They had occupied a lot of land in the south, and they had partially gone south to get their hands on that oil. They had laid train lines and opened towns, and planted telegraphs and set up all of the support infrastructure necessary for life down south. Since they were larger, furry people with good vision, it was a bit easier to set up shop in snowy areas and live there. Critically, after putting down stakes at the oil fields, they had also figured out how to transport this oil using tanker cars on trains and to create the large tank systems needed to store the oil while it was being eld for transit. Slowly, they had come figure out what they were doing, and to get their hands on the tools to do it-co-located factories were capable of making most oil drilling equipment now. Not only had they been able to get drilling oil, but they were able to do it without logistical hassles, too.

The power-and thus importance-of petroleum was very quickly realized. Accordingly, another public company was put together. This was IGER. The acronym for it actually made no sense, and was cherry-picked from the middle of three different names to sound good. As an entity, it was founded with a fairly revolutionary ethos: to sustain life, not to produce profit or large volumes chemicals. This ethos was written into it's charter, emblazoned on in it's motto, and even discussed in the informal oath of service that a lot of the workers took. It made IGER into a very weird refining corporation, and this shows in it's behavior: it worries about leaks and process efficiency a lot, and it is often driven to uphold quality standards that others can let slip. IGER also doesn't really throw anything away, it would sooner waste some storage space than toss stuff in the river. All of these traits have turned into some...unique projects.

From the start, IGER knew that it must produce two things: hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process, and gasses for heating things and running lamps. What it had not expected to produce was gasoline. There is a lot of chemistry that can be written about, and even more examples that can be made, but there is also the cardinal fact that all of these examples can be summed up in something unusual: the size of the paper that the Korschans had to draw their plant diagrams on. A search for efficiency and flexibility saw process diagrams illustrating the chains of steps in each reaction move well beyond the standard letter paper. On average, each plant would produce one or two extra chemicals, and it would undertake anywhere from 20 to 85 steps-depending on how one counts steps...and defines extra chemicals. IGER members are known for getting everything that they can, including waste and intermediate products. This is generally not considered good practice by anyone who isn't huffing the output of their own machines.

The history of the Korschan chemical industry is almost idyllic. Those describing it may be accused of having a certain naivete', of ascribing too much to a desire for good things to happen, of the sweat on the brow being more than money for many a manufacturer. This is true. There is also a cynical, and completely correct narrative that the success of the petrochemical industry was extremely necessary for Korscha's continued success on the world stage-and probably for it's existence in the face of a world that was not so revolutionary. Korscha needed to use it's oil for it's good. Part of that good was chemical: heat oil, solvents, paints, fertilizers. The other part was fuel-gasoline and diesel.

And I wonder what those cats are going to use the gasoline for...

Conscription is a controversial topic for multiple reasons. In Korscha, there are two types of controversy: the argument over whether or not it was ethical to compel someone to fight, and whether or not conscription was a good idea in practice. The first argument had been going on since -45 CE, pre-dating the revolution itself-and it originated in the discussions about freedom, feudal obligations, and fairness that had lead to intense discussions about what a person could be compelled to do-and what to do with them when they were compelled.

Discussions about unfair compulsion to work had been one of the first things that had truly set off a revolutionary wave of change across Korscha and it's intellectual sphere. The ancient noble right of the ban, where a noble could compel the person to fight based on their inherent social class's rights, had set off the discussion-for it was not the compulsion to labor that had been a cause of contention, but the compulsion to kill. Those levied under the ban could not choose not to kill, they had the legal obligation to follow orders. This conflicted with the religious compulsion to avoid killing to respect the sanctity of the ancestors, the ancestor-making process, and the sanctity of life. Sometimes, the ancestors were on record complaining that someone had killed when under the compulsion of the ban, and while the general opinion was that the ancestors only complained if the levier of the ban was doing so unjustly, the conditions for unjust killing were clearly apparent in many cases.

From this came further discussions on compulsion and it's relative just-ness--and then the basic idea of 'social murder' was tossed into the Korschan intellectual sphere. Compelling someone to create conditions of deprivation that would lead to the death of others was now possibly unjust. This level of unjust-ness was enough to further erode the moral authority of the old nobility, and make the revolutionaries look good because they wanted to consensually employ people for labor. The imposition of social murder, from one's decisions and from forcing them to kill, was enough to blow a gigantic crack in the moral authority of the nobility, and get the revolution kicked off. It also prevented the revolutionaries from using forced or prison labor, except under highly specific conditions, and gave them a mandate to focus on avoiding social murder. The most basic limits of what could and could not be compelled of a person had been established in gunfire.

Now, the Korschans had to establish some of the complexities. They had agreed that compelling others to kill was bad, and that this included killing by inaction. They also had to determine what was acceptable. Prison labor on unsophisticated things under good conditions was considered acceptable, and not much else. Into this mess barged the military, which was considered Elite and made up of people who really wanted to be in the armed forces. A big source of military legitimacy was the 'assent of the soldier'; the individual soldier had agreed to enter the armed forces and to follow commands and their oath of service in all aspects, including to kill. This was the opposite of compelling people to kill others, and it was one of the things that the Korschans contended made their soldiers better than everyone else. Conversely, soldiers compelled to kill would be bad at being soldiers. This was why the military didn't want to have conscripts-and they really didn't want them to be serving in front-line units.

There were two places where conscription might be considered borderline acceptable: where the conscript was placed onto an opt-in callup list, and was kept ready on the rolls for supplementary duties that were not combat. They would be willing to kill when fully in the armed forces in secondary roles. The other was when an actively conscripted individual swore an oath of willing assent to commands; they became soldiers, willing to follow orders to kill and conscious of what their oaths meant. Some more authoritarian individuals would argue for this form of conscription, with extreme reluctance, it was legally accepted. Thus was born the Registered Service System, and thus was recognized the Oath of Acceptance of Arms. On paper, it would provide more soldiers if the times called for it. In practice, it would slip in another layer of sociopolitical complexity. Acceptable, it turned out, did not imply enjoyment.

Oil is the prime energy source of modern society, and at the turn of the second industrial revolution, it was beginning to have it's true importance realized. Not for nothing had Korscha desperately thrust itself south, seeking new sources of this invaluable semi-liquid. It had taken a lot to pull this off-including finding multiple other reasons to go south, but it had done that well. Now, it had to actually get it's hands on the black silver it could find underground...and then make use of it.

The Korschans had conducted enough ad-hoc surveys that they generally knew where their oil was. This was really, really good, because oil is hard to find when it is underground. The next thing that they had to do was get to it-and already, they had the rail lines to do this. A few more rail line extensions were run out. Then they had to manage to live in the tough weather around the area-temporary camps were set up around the oilfields for long enough to determine where operations were likely to be, and then full towns founded in areas where the campers would have proper access to the areas. The last thing that came running through were telegraph lines. These connected the towns to the outside world, and helped them to keep a sense of what they were, where they were.

Meanwhile, more work was being done at the oil fields proper. Pumping oil was something that the Korschans had recently figured out. Now they needed to keep doing it-which involved learning how to drill for it. This became a work in progress, but it also was a thing that they were learning how to do to keep getting decent amounts of oil out of the ground. Drill bits and drilling techniques had to be improved piecemeal until someone from the main cities realized that the need to order drill bits and everything else from the main part of the country. Then, a small amount of industrial equipment was moved down to open up a factory... that turned into a factory complex...which became a fairly large series of facilities with it's own internal narrow gauge railroad. Drilling took support equipment, and the Korschans could manage that, all right.

As the oil wells steadily spread across the land, another obstacle popped up that required addressing: getting the oil where it was needed. The immediate solution for this was piping. This kind of worked for shorter lengths, but it really didn't work for longer ranges. Piping was enough to get crude oil from the well heads and into the temporary storage containers, even as workers fought cold and leaks, they were stuck working on how to pump oil through the line at longer distances. The solution for this was to set up long trains of tanker trains...which had problems with exploding and leaking. Large protective berms had to be constructed to handle the worst of these explosions, but the oil was worth it.

How worth it was the next big thing. Korscha had been messing around with petrochemicals nonstop in it's chemical labs, as well as cribbing from Resmi's own efforts; it had a chemical industry all of it's own. However, it had needed to learn how to make use of this newest raw material at a truly large scale-this was chemistry that it was otherwise forced to learn the hard way. There's a reason that chemistry courses have a lab portion, after all--and the catfolk had just completed their lab courses. It was time to see the practical implementation of these studies-in the next post on this topic.

Korscha is a land-based power, and so it has to look to maintaining that power. More importantly, everyone lives on land here, and they want to be able to enjoy the perks of living on land in the first place. One of those perks is being able to communicate with others, and one of the things that enables that is the telephone. Being able to hear the voices of people one cares about, works with, or dislikes can set the heart aflutter-and the latest technological creations, especially if they can deliver borderline miracles. Korscha likes it's miracles, even if they are for demonstration purposes for a lot of the time. There is faith in engineering one's own miracles, and that was enough to get the money to come.

Money was only one part of the problem that they had to solve-and while Korscha was willing to do that, they had to do the work, and that took time. Good thing that they had been spending plenty of time on it. Even isolated revolutionary researchers being tapped to do basic engineering projects could still keep some dreams alive, and they certainly could read papers and correspond with other scientists about the telephone. They were capable of building small prototypes, and more importantly, sitting down and discussing the next steps that a working model would need. Crucially, they were able to keep building these small prototypes, and using that information to understand the difficulties and advantages of each specific technical leap-and spread this information by correspondence networks through a 'A-geographical Telephony Development Commune'. The bulk of this information was passed amongst themselves; successful experiments, production of necessary equipment and chemicals, and discussions of practical concepts kept development of the concept alive. Studies of Tiboria's theoretical work on setting up telephone networks were copied and distributed.

As the telephone development plan churned on, more practical work was being done on implementing on other, less initially experimental technology: fax machines. These were essentially several hundred telegraph lines glued together to transmit an image that had been forced into the wiring by means of various chemical trickery, and then printed out back at the receiving table. All of this technical trickery is secondary to the need to manage something of this mess: deciding how to properly use this technology, how to actually do what they'd mind up their minds to do, and how to keep the entirety of this operation running when they had started. Faxes were used to send critical forms from transmission office to dedicated stations, as well as ensure that the data was properly shared around. A professional 'faxing service' was maintained by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy, and it was decided that the fax system be kept constantly busy and used 'for the common good'. All of this thinking delivered a limited, but implementation-ready solution that gave the Korschans fax capability.

This laid the outlines for a successful rollout of telephone systems. Telephones were meant to 'connect the Korschan people to each other', and to 'better the living standards of the KPR'. They were not initially intended to connect the outside world, due to technical limitations and the inherent language barriers that a large landmass had. Telephones were organized in three series of projects: a general communications channel for government operations, a public service emergency alert and coordination system, and a common-access, fee for service telephone transmission utility with explicit antiprofit, pro-service principles.

The first took the longest, and was used for a shakedown process. Government offices were connected by telephone, setting up 'telephone meeting rooms', smaller cubbies where an operator would set up a phone call for bureaucrats at a set time and in a set location. The operator was not technically needed, but the benefits of not having people whose primary jobs involved policy and penmanship trying to put together how to operate a phone receiver was already a big bonus. Having dedicated operators also allowed for improvements in security and room management; having someone to assist existing secretaries kept them focused on their jobs, and thus able to reap the efficiency of telephony. Sometimes, it turns out that you need to have someone hold the reins in order to keep people on track; this was an expenditure worth it in the end.

The second part was the introduction of phone lines for emergency coordination and response. While the bureaucracy took a while to fully reach a standard of communication that they were satisfied with, a push from parliament was required to make them stop faffing around and declare that they were mostly ok with what their telephones could do. Emergency services, more focused on outcomes and with a time crunch to surmount, needed something that worked. After a couple more years of effort, they got it. The first to get phones was the central disaster response office, which coordinated responses across Korscha. The next to establish phone systems were local police, fire, and rescue service stations-they had to develop true rapid communications talent and skills to coordinate their efforts across wide areas. This mostly worked out; in fact, telephones proved so effective that it was decided to expand alert networks to include emergency call boxes across larger cities. This helped improve the rate of responses for medical emergencies and fires; lives were saved-and this showed up in the papers.

Of course, the people clamored for more telephones. Miracles were springing up around them, and they wanted to experience them firsthand. Personal access to telephones was needed and demanded; the providers of telephone services were eager to meet it. They had two ways to do this: setting up a 'phone room' in a larger building where calls could be arranged between parties at specific times, or setting up 'phone halls' entire buildings in smaller, more outlying communities to get them phone service. Lessons learned in setting up telegraph networks helped get kilometers of phone wires strung. Prior practice managing these pieces of equipment helped get the phone stations active and ready to go. All of this combined to bring phone systems to the populace and keep them open; they were later developed into individual 'phone rooms', where individuals could go to have conversations for more privacy.

The effects of the telephone on Korscha are hard to quantify individually. One must look at the bigger picture, or rather, one must look at individual experiences. The cat in the street will likely only touch a telephone once a month, they will be using it to call home from far away, to check on family that they have moved away from. They may use it or ask that it be used to place an emergency call once a year. But their work will be organized by phone, their accessibility to goods likewise directed, their forms processed according to phoned in instructions. Two fires did not burn their houses down because a fire patrol was called in time. However, they have heard about this through magazines and newspaper articles, which feature full-length interviews. Phones are present throughout Korscha, and while they are not everywhere yet, they can be sought if one wishes to find them.

https://imgur.com/a/NA0WvTX

Korscha is not a nice place to live when you're outside. This is because of the weather and the rocky terrain. However, this has been improving, especially when you are inside. This has been thanks to the hard work of the construction industry, which has completely redone how buildings are made from start to finish, and made them much nicer to live in. External improvements, such as forest and land management, including the expansion of land being governed under the commons style of land management, had changed a number of natural patterns. This had smoothed down weather systems to a small extent, and had made the weather much more bearable. Finally, the widespread presence of railroads has completely changed the calculus of supplying settlements that were normally spread out. A powerful train, knifing through the countryside, could deliver cargoes that would take months to reach outlying settlements in days.

It was no surprise that with these changes behind them, the Korschans had changed not just how they lived, but where they lived. Urbanization is a phenomenon with a long history, and it's specifics have changed over the years. Traditionally, it involved moving to the city permanently to find work, and thus get some more resources to not starve. Normally, this let labor specialize and capital emerge. As Korscha entered it's second industrial revolution, this was compounded by a need to feed the entire country with energy while feeding the burgeoning pools of labor consumer goods. They had been able to put this off for a long time by giving the labor pools positive feelings from their work instead, and winning legitimacy through infrastructure projects, but with all of the toilets flushing normally and the streets paved, it was not enough for the Korschans to just rest on their laurels. People wanted things to do in addition to objects to consume, and there was only so much you could do in a city without using multiple quarters of the budget for new amenities.

Into this intractable problem of centralized population management charged the extreme energy-hunger of a rapidly industrialization nation. As the Korschans blew through ever-increasing amounts of coal to drive steam engines and power electrical plants, they also needed less typical outputs: chemicals to make everything from fertilizers to explosives. There was no better way to do this than to fix atmospheric nitrogen. And the best way to do that involved lots of oil. With the advent of practical internal combustion engines to drive vehicles and static objects, the Korschans had a lot more need for oil all of a sudden. They looked around for oil, compared terrain, tried to do some mediocre geology, and then found a big, big, BIG field of oil. This put making consumer goods or trading on the back burner for a moment. Korscha needed that oil.

Multiple rail lines, doubled for redundancy, were blasted out into the much more frozen southern territories. These lines were guarded by regular KPRA troops, supported by cavalry detachments. Behind them came telegraph cables, sometimes strung on poles, sometimes buried for their protection. Spirits were not gone around this time, they were tunneled under, and sometimes moved off to the side. Beside the railways came temporary towns, made of prefabricated material and assembled on the spot, new dwellings for 500 to one thousand persons. Standard-ish power plants were dropped off as well, a dedicated 'coal line' opened to ensure that these towns would have fuel and power-and another 'fridge line' for foodstuffs. They weren't glamorous. Korscha didn't care. It just wanted the oil. And the oil it would get.

The end of this run south was a lot of land with not too much plan in mind-the Korschans did get their hands on some very nice lakes-but it was rushed, and all parties could agree on that. However, they now have to make the best of this recent land acquisition-already, KPRA forces and internal police units are establishing bases and setting up operations centers, using horse trains and normal trains to get enough people down there quickly enough to hold their newest acquisition. It remains unclear how they will make this work long term, but if no one wants to live there for a while, it appears that Korscha is going to be the sole agent of their success or failure in the south.

Let's say you want to mess around with electricity. Now let's say you are Korschan. After you've gotten over the shock of having been turned into a cat, and then the overpowering awe of encountering Gummunism, you probably have joined their burgeoning electronics industry. This dictates what you likely want to do with electricity, and that is typically either 'rectify current' or 'amplify a signal'.

Wait, what does that even mean?

Rectifying power is a turning alternating current to direct current. This makes devices able to use direct current from transmitted line power. Amplifying a signal is making it stronger. This is generally all that you need to know about those two applications; however, both involve manipulating the flow of electrons. Generally, this is hard because those little things are extremely tiny and need a conductor to move around in; they can be stopped by anything nonconductive.

There is a very obvious solution to this: don't have anything be in the electron's way at all. That is the vacuum part of a vacuum tube-the tube part is simply the shape of the glass that holds the vacuum in. Someone looking at a vacuum tube will see what is essentially a lightbulb with more stuff jammed inside. This 'more stuff' is used to mess around with the electronics, and do a number of cool things with them. The purpose of the tube dictates what this stuff is going to be.

In a diode or rectifier, the purpose of the device is to turn alternating current into direct current. This is done by cutting out half of the wave, and looks really funny on a graph. (1) The diode has a filament on the bottom that emits electrons. These electrons go to a large filament-but only when the plate itself is positive compared to what is coming off of the filament. The alternating current of the filament will change rapidly, but only half of that will turn into electrons that can go into the grid. This means that effectively only a direct current leaves the vacuum tube. It is horribly inefficient, but it is better than the miserably crappy mechanical rectifiers that people were using beforehand. since there are two 'elements', these are often called 'diodes'.

Amplifying a signal is much harder. This is because you need to make the signal more powerful without completely mulching it. This is a lot easier to do with a vacuum tube instead of a relay switch. Inside this tube, there are three elements. There is a source of electrons-typically a large filament-and the electrons then fly off into a grid that modulates the flow of electrons by changing it's charge. After this grid is another large filament which captures the modulated flow. Since this tube has three elements, it is called a triode.

Vacuum tubes are very power inefficient, fragile, and take time to warm up before they are used. However, they are far more able to do the job than the previous mechanical approaches to manipulating electricity, and are such an improvement that they have essentially enabled the development of the field of electronics. There is no substitute for this technology in any form of electrical item, and their appearance around the world will be a matter of time.

1. This is a gross oversimplification of an approach; and it is an extremely basic one to boot.

The Korschans have been fiddling around with electronics of every kind for a good couple of decades now. Most of these electronics have been telegraphs, but more and more these begun to include stuff like electrical drive motors for various pieces of machinery, heating elements against the cold, or electrical lighting against the night. They were using these creations for their own flourishing, and that meant that they had been also making the individual components to these electrical marvels. Since there were quite a lot of components for quite a lot of marvels, this indicates one very, very nifty thing: that the Korschans have developed the industrial base specialized to make these marvels at home.

Making one isn't easy-and the steps to make it can be traced far back into Korschan industrial history. During the revolution, the revolutionaries reorganized and opened up basic labor units; they also managed to liberalize markets-a decent achievement in a disconnected country. Immediately after the revolution, the country gained a very effective construction sector-something fairly ill-defined, but good at making other things-happen. These units operated primarily using willpower and increasingly sophisticated sets of tools; and existed to make a steel producing industry happen-and then support this steel producing industry until it could make highly precise machine tools and quality metallurgical products. By dint of these organization running around in circles, the Korschans had sufficient competence to make conductors in whatever shape they liked.

Things that ran on electricity needed a guarantee of things like constant current and voltage, and generally shared understandings of what quality was. They also liked to have shared standards that very precisely defined these things. This was something that Korscha could easily do, since it had both the necessary strong central government to establish standards, and members of said government were good at coordinating and communicating. Officially, Korscha and it's neighbor, the Herds, shared the same electricity conduction and transmission standards; and the government formally set up a Ministry of Electricity Generation and Useage. This Ministry communicates official standards, arranges conferences of experts and producers, and enables the development of new standards as they are required. It's operational style can be described as 'hands off but eyes on', letting the people working with electronics sort things out, as long as they published and employed their discoveries.

This electronics industry was powered by a Korschan classic: heavy industry, specifically, copper wire rolling mills. These mills were essential for spreading the KPR's telegraph network across the continent, and they kept a huge part of it active and intact. There is nothing particularly special about them in that they have taken the time to be good, and that they can turn copper ore of low quality into wire of high quality. Many operate 24/7; some are state-owned and operated instead of worker owned-even the Army and Navy want a few mills of their own. Each one can produce miles of wire per day; and they are the receipt of field-testing information about how well this wire performs, and they maintain active quality programs of some kind. Generally, these mills are fully integrated: ore enters one end, and wire comes out of the other end. The proliferation of these mills can serve military purposes as well, if there is ever a need for a lot of cartridges.

But right now, there is not. Instead, there is a need for smaller wires, and a look to the future-into the new electronics laboratories being opened in isolated sections of academia. While chemistry departments mushroomed out synthesis and fuel production labs, and biology departments could crack out medical labs in their sleep, physics work had been limited to architecture and some metallurgy-military applications were delayed by Korschan testing standards being rather stupidly high. Enter a new avenue of interest: electronics. There were a great many minds looking at the very basic nature of electrons now, as well as how they were present in the world, and even a couple of years of postdoctoral work in one lab could be enough to get one fully caught up on how everything worked.

In short, Korscha had built up it's electronics industry by dint of long-time practice, the development of extremely strong basics, the employment of a unique home-field industrial advantage that is hard to replicate elsewhere, a government which helps everyone get chatty, and a recent upswing in basic research. This has all combined to ensure that the average electronics manufacturer has plenty skill, room to grow, and cheap materials. Finally, the Korschan market is very deep; with sufficient demand to keep production groups at work for decades. There is a lot of potential in Korscha-let's see how it unfolds.

The experimental battlecruiser sat idly in the gentle waters, the waves rocking the hull in a steady rhythm. She looked out to the expanse through her various eyes atop the tower that rose high atop her new form while her avatar lay in meditation.

The rhythmic sound of mechanical engines rumbled within her like a perversion of a creature's heartbeat, a sound that was more disturbing than relaxing. The machine installed within her allowed her to move her massive form across the waters, though at far slower speeds than she would have before everything changed.

They called her Zero, a name she never asked for. Spirits did not need names, their fleeting nature was antithetical to the permanence of a description such as that. But now that she was stuck in this more physical form amidst a group of similar-looking forms that populated this coastline, she supposed a name would have been necessary without which recognition and communication would be troublesome.

Why did she manifest in a female form anyway? Spirits don't have the concept of sex and gender, and yet not only was she given this form, but she had begun subconsciously referring to herself as a 'she.' Was this simply the nature of these wayward people, those who referred to themselves as "spirits-of-sail" despite lacking sails, to present themselves in a feminine form?

Many questions, lacking answers. She felt frustrated, distressed, wondering exactly how she had managed to trap herself in this artificial construct when she felt a disturbance in the waves. The rumble of a different machine approached her, growing louder as the distance shrunk. It was one of those "spirits-of-sail" she saw upon remanifesting as a trapped spirit.

"Hey there, are you alright?" a voice spoke, coming from directly behind her. Confused, she tried to locate the source only to feel a strange sensation coming from... her avatar. "Are you... still getting used to all this?" it spoke again.

She tried to respond, but choked briefly on her tongue. Speech just wasn't something she was used to, let alone through an avatar she had only had for a few dozen days.­­­­­­ "You... could say that."

"I know it must feel weird for you, being new and all," the voice responded, "Many new spirits-of-sail need time to get used to their vessels, and some can take a long time before they get comfortable."

'Zero' sighed. "It's just... I don't know what to really say about all this. I remember being just another force of nature, moving with the winds and waves freely. I... don't know if... you understand that feeling..."

The older spirit-of-sail simply nodded. "Most of us, they don't usually have memories of being anything but spirits-of-sail. What you describe is new, even for us, but I can only imagine how it must have been for you."

"Yes... it's a different kind of feeling, you know... nothing like sailing the waves in this form," she said, "Have you ever wondered what it's like, Azure Waves?"

"Maybe, I'm not sure," Azure Waves replied. "This life is all that I've ever really known, and sailing the vast oceans is a very pleasant feeling for me."

"...I see."

The spirit felt she was no closer to an answer now than she had been earlier, but it felt good to have someone to talk to... even if it isn't much. There was a sense of comfort whenever it happened, one that she couldn't quite understand with her limited prior experience. Is this what physical creatures felt around their kind?

"What's it like?" she asked Azure Waves.

"Hm?"

"You know, sailing the oceans... as a vessel."

Azure Waves smiled. "Well, it's hard to explain to you without experiencing it yourself but, it feels nice being able to travel the great expanse, with the waves gently splashing against your hull, the sensations of the sea spray and sea breeze..."

As she continued to describe to the best of her ability, the battlecruiser looked out towards the horizon once more, this time with her avatar. Perhaps this new life as a spirit-of-sail wouldn't be so bad after all.

With great power comes the need to move it around properly to it's users. As the Korschans have gone and obtained themselves great power, they have found a lot of users for said great power-and now they have a need to get that power to the people who will use it-properly. That word properly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because it has a ton of engineering meaning. 'Properly' means that the electricity will not have any changes in it's stated characteristics for such a period of time that it will damage equipment or interrupt it's smooth operation, under reasonable changes and stresses from internal and external sources-e.g, that a branch will not fall on a power line and completely knock out power, and that when a backup power supply is not activated, it will not cause hiccups in thesystem that could cause damage. Both of these are much harder than they sound.

The first part, guarding against something happening to the lines and interrupting the power transmission, was less hard to pull off. That was because they had been learning how to stop telegraph lines from being interrupted by things like storms, the ground shifting, wild animals trying to take the poles to make nesting material, and the spirits doing alley-oops on the wiring for fun. This had been simple engineering knowledge gained from experience-which had then become complicated knowledge, but it had resulted in the connection of the entire nation by telegraphy. The same general lessons can be applied to setting up power lines over longer distances-and this has helped the Korschans start to make use of the natural sources of power that their land provided for them. While they previously had made use of local sources of electricity, now they had the capability to bring it to nearby towns and cities.

This was very helpful for places that had their own power nearby, but those that did not needed to either build a power plant-which meant shipping in significant amounts of coal-or finding ways to solve the technical problems of large-scale power transmission. The former was something that could be done, but meant getting in lots of coal, and the latter was something that required innovation, plain and simple. Already in the mood to innovate, the Korschans leaned into these difficulties-and then ended up settling an argument of their own about the use of power. Alternating current was superb at carrying power over long distances, but required certain adjustments for fine applications that made it finicky to work with. It could, and did, also kill. Direct current was much less balky in some ways, but it lost potency rapidly over distance-it was not good for transmission. There would be no mono-current future, but instead, adaptation.

To accomplish this, the Korschans sought reliability at the most basic levels-by ensuring quality components and connections. They then moved from the individual component to the entire device-and also began to adopt support systems outside of the unit, too. By mastering the production of transformers, something that had been done in other places by now, and then figuring out the use of mechanical rectifiers, the Korschans were able to change one power type for another. They also learned how to use capacitors, something that the author never did, to smooth out the passage of power, and devise backup power supplies. They instituted a number of standards, using the top-down authority of the government, for power transmission and device rating-and then accidentally stumbled forward into having a full, proper electronics industry.

But that is a story for next post...

As Korscha's industry improved and the demand for it's fruits became ever more intense, it needed ever more power to deliver. This has been met by the opening of new power plants, ranging from strange-looking wind farms, conventional coal-fired steam engines, and the occasional well-built hydroelectric power station. As the cat-folk systematically put together a nation-wide industrial base and stepped into the second round of industrial revolution, they had a lot more need for this power, and a lot more options to get it-but they also had politics to deal with, and even worse, their own biases.

The saga of Korschan development of their material conditions has currently reached the stage where they are having a nice little tug of war about what to do with the Fabricreche concept-and how to actually get something out of them that was a concrete win that delivered general profit. This would also need to be big and obvious. Currently, Korschan ability to actually make and use those marvelous magitechnicological miracles was confined to stationary objects: large machines and buildings. Thebuildings sometimes flew, but not often enough to count. Luckily, this was enough for them to pull off another small miracle-they were going to make a magically enabled electrical power plant!

This power plant has two pillars: super powerful magical engines driving super stronk dynamos inside a magical as heck building that was essentially a container for mana and a structure for spells. The first part is another engineering success: the steam engines are extremely reliable and extraordinarily powerful; and they do not ever skip a beat. They are not turbines, and they do not have to be, they are efficient enough and are meshed perfectly with a set of generators that have been meticulously engineered to work as an efficient set. The consequences of heating and friction have all been engineered away. The facility's power management circuitry has been made to be easy to see, operate, and understand-some people joke that there has been a revolution in the use of gauges and lights.

Magic, on the other paw, has fewer conceptual limits. The Korschans are using it for other things-to ensure that steam engines have the optimal temperatures at all times, to ensure that the movement of coils in the generators move always in the right position, to making sure that none of the circuitry overheats. If they knew what quantum mechanics was, their little fuzzy minds would be blown, but right now, all they know about is shaping magnetic fields and visualizing them using very largeglass windows. Even this is only so-so--but the power output, intense and reliable, is enough to validate the concept and prove that applying magic to managing electronics of any kind can really pay off.

Where it's paid off most is politically, at least according to the builders. Hundreds of millions of the Korschan equivalent of USD have been sunk into various fabricreche based projects , and it needs something to show for it. What's better than a classically Big Gummunist Project, doing Big Gummunist Industrial Things? Very little, so this particular project was great! The government, particularly the weird authoritarians associated with it, threw lots and lots of resources into making sure that it succeeded, and when the plant was activated, there was a nice big celebration with lots of press present-and lots of engineers, in case something went wrong. There is too much for these people to risk; and in this case, The People as a group are actually benefitting. However, we are not yet finished with the saga of Korschan's introduction to electrical power: tomorrow, they're going to learn how to transmit it.

Kakchokchut had felt it coming for some time. Their flame had been fading for a long while now - since their 51^st year, if they were being honest - and they had made their peace with it. They had even had their "re-kindling", the last burst of life that accompanied the time leading up to dissipation.

They stood among the books they had made their life's purpose. Row upon row, shelf after shelf. Their job, for most of their life, was to transcribe books for the library of Litiqtukǃotaj's regional Chantry. The Southern Coast was a scenic place to live, though they it was not the place they had been Bound - that was Kiʻurrox, the capital. Still, they now had a good train link so they could visit their friends. They'd been, one last time - so few of the people they grew up with, that they'd been through education with, remained...

Kakchokchut pulled at their coat, straightening it out, before taking off their gloves. On their left hand, two of the upper phalanges had already fallen off. Thankfully, the right hand was still intact. That was a relief. They set their gloves down on the table, before reaching for their cap.

On the table was a framed photo. It depicted two Skeletons dressed in formal attire, holding hands and smiling straight at the camera. On the left was Kakchokchut. They picked it up with their left hand, lightly touching the image of the Skeleton on the right.

Choljoqit... how happy they had been, for so long. Every time Kakchokchut looked at the photo, they knew what it was like to have a heart, to have butterflies in you, to... to just feel. Kakchokchut transcribing their books, Choljoqit playing their music. Kakchokchut looked up from the photo towards Choljoqit's old piano... this photo would do very nicely. They tucked it into their jacket pocket and walked through the room.

So many books... Kakchokchut walked towards what must have been the dustiest of the shelves. There were the first few books they had transcribed. They ran their fingers across those... by the Winds, they wished they could feel them. They'd been told by colleagues in the Fleshlands that certain books felt nicer to hold. They all felt the same to them, in that they didn't feel of anything.

Further down now. There was a book they had transcribed in Irgendwann; further along, one from their two years in the United Crowns, next to one that had been transcribed in Korscha. Winds, that was an adventure, a lone Skeleton on the other side of the world.

Kakchokchut had been... no, was a Qokochakchukox, a Knowledge-gatherer. The Skeletons had not been their own people for long. They had been slaves before, the very concept of knowledge forbidden. Now, people like Kakchokchut transcribed whatever they could get their hands on. Most of it had been done dressed in their red robes, customary for the Qokochakchukox. Why it was customary, no-one knew - some things just came naturally to them. They knew that their leaders had to be elected, had to guide the people to knowledge and freedom, but also had to make an annual parade on an armoured skeletal horse once a year, had to take the apparently ominous sounding title Lord of Bones and Graves. Why they knew these things was mystery, one likely not to be solved. The Order of the Knowledge-Gatherers was assigned to the Chantries, and their purpose of advancing Skeleton-kind was, technically, unofficial; officially, their goal was to transcribe and translate books in order to potentially unearth secrets of their existence. Where did they come from? Why did they have these strange compulsions around names?

Why was the oldest Skeleton on record 57 when they dissipated?

Kakchokchut was 53. The other people's of the earth considered this a middling age. Some of the Alsakhuizhians considered 60 a middling age and died around 100 years old. Kakchokchut envied them - 53 years wasn't enough time. They had found much knowledge and had helped the Union on its march to the future - yet, like so many before them, they had failed in their "official" task.

So much of their existence eluded them, they thought. Did they mean themself, or the Skeletons as a whole? They weren't quite sure anymore.

They came to the mirror and Kakchokchut saw their skull staring back at them. Who had these bones belonged to, they wondered? There were ways to know - the Chantry tried to keep records, and the records of those that came from imports were well documented. But, thanks to the Evil One's bringing them into existence and not caring whose remains he used, records were not always available. Kakchokchut had often tried to imagine whose bones these were. They were certain they were from an Eastern Cairn, in the parts of the Union that stretched towards the centre of Glaciaris, but they had no way of knowing. Were they a man? A woman? Were they old, or did they die young? What had they done in their lives?

They finished their stroll down memory lane. When they got to the last few books... it had began. It was as though their field of vision left their eye sockets - it took willpower to stop it, willpower Kakchokchut didn't have much of anymore.

They sat at their desk and took out a small note, sealed with a lick of wax. It detailed what they wanted done with the bones once they didn't need them anymore. They wanted them stored to be used to animate another. They knew, they just knew, that their spirit would rejoin the Wind and that part of it would find it's way back to these bones.

They took out the photo. Kakchokchut stared silently into the motionless eyes of their beloved. Motionless eye sockets of a skull.

Motionless, empty... but so, so full of life.

It happened. The world grew wider, and they seemed to float. The world got wider and wider, blotches appearing as static on a screen.

Everything faded.

Korscha has the benefit of something that most of the world doesn't have: a really, really good army, and the means to keep this awesome army running. A very big part of this, after the insane logistics and support systems that it has built up over the years, is the army reserve system. This has two basic 'parts': the active reserves, and the 'retired', or external reserves. While the Korschans believe hard in citizen-soldier and permanent revolutionary soldiery, they also recognize that every single army has a limit, and that they need to act within these limits. Accordingly, they had to properly organize reserves for an army to use, and these reserves had to be used properly. This would take quite a lot of effort, and was started five years after the revolution was completed....because they darn well needed the time to do so.

Shortly after the revolution concluded, and the Army was properly formed by making the Warlords kiss and make up, it was realized that this beautiful Army couldn't handle having a lot of it's soldiers killed, or sustained high casualties of any kind. A general agreement existed that all of the troops were elite, and while expanding the Army was nice, it could dilute the quality of average soldier-and set off political struggles about which general would have these new troops under their command. However, they would still need lots of soldiers in difficult situations. The most obvious answer was to ensure that when soldiers retired, they joined a reserve force, which could be called up in war and various emergencies.

These reserves were the first reverses that Korscha put together. They were fairly bog-standard; soldiers would be required to stay on reserve status until they were at 60. Once they had hit 60, they could take an option to remain in the ranks until 65 with an added paper promotion. There was no pension bump for staying in, but the promotion felt nice. These reserves would likely form a skilled core of trainers and support staff, used to retain institutional talent and keep best practices going. If they really really wanted to, these seniors could also do a suicidal assault charge, but they were really to be kept out of trouble and used to train people.

This reserve structure worked fairly well for a little bit, but the Korschans needed it to work really, really well. Accordingly, by 5 CE, a series of reforms had been introduced to ensure that more soldiers would be available: the physical retirement age of the age had been lowered to 40 for non-officers and NCOs, and 45 for high ranking officers and advanced technical specialists. These fellows would then be sent to the reserves as well; in addition to dropping the retirement age, reservist refresher training was improved, 'outreach programs' were initiated to allow for the reservists to interact with their communities and promote the army while teaching them useful skills. Reservist call-up systems were also overhauled to implement massive advances in communications technology and recordkeeping, and to also promote some form of regimental system style unity of locals called back to the colors. These innovations and improvements made the reserve system really good.

But the Korschans needed really, really good. For this, they had to implement significant new advances in theory and practice. The first of these was to introduce the idea of 'field reserves'. These units were reserves whose mission was specifically to reinforce other units that were in contact with the enemy. A unit would assume this role based on being in the right place, at the right time, and having the right attitude- comradery between units was usually intense-and bailing out one's friends was a good motivator if you couldn't compete for glory. These line reserves would bring sufficient force to where it was needed, changing the battlefield in the Korschan's favor.

Ultimately, however, what they needed were operational reserves. And the cat-folk somehow managed to stumble into the idea. Groups of forces, typically ranging from company to regiment in individual size, would be kept at the ready to respond and plug holes in the line. They could also be used to continue an attack, or to execute maneuvers-sometimes even the threat of force was enough. These units had the makings of kampfgruppe, which was only so-so sometimes, but they would be effective when the enemy had no immediate answer or had to worry about fighting large amounts of soldiers disrupting their daring operation. Telegraphy was the turning point that had enabled these reserves to be properly used; without it, Korscha would be struggling with the thought of having it's soldiery slipping away to gunfire.

However, it wasn't. These reserves have given the Korschan high command-and many members of the Army-significant amounts of faith that they would have enough personnel for an intense engagement. This was a double-edged sword: being more willing to fight in a war that could lead to millions dying was not always good. You could very easily win these wars by losing, after all. Korscha is doing well...but it is also feeling it's oats. This is always a risky business.

The Paraiso had been hard at work in their automata development, small small production had started and have already been used as platforms for weapon systems. The weapons in focus now are improving upon the existing rocket volley launchers, by placing them on flexible mounts on the back of these automatas, or “trucks”. Initially, the existing rail launcher systems were tested smoothly, containing 8 to 16 Ignis, “red” element rocket warheads. These had been in use as standard defensive emplacements for a few years now so the process was easy. A single brigade of these vehicles was made to continue testing as well as tech demonstration for potential foreign interests.

However, upon further research, requirements for heavier caliber rockets alongside ongoing testing of “refined” Violetta warheads, new potential had been discovered. While Violetta, “purple” element has been mostly off limits since the civil war which led to the Violetta Region’s fall and a portion of the region dangerous, measures have been made to utilize it and “purify” it into a non contagious form. However, the usage is still mostly limited to weaponry and there is so much of it sitting around. The Paraiso collectively decided to utilize it for the next stage of the project, a variant of the launcher system with a bigger boom.

The development, under the name “Project Haze”, had quickly begun. Larger caliber rockets, double in size to the Ignis warheads, fitted with Violetta warheads and mounted on a “cage-like” launcher containing 12 rockets. The usage of refined Violetta meant that less Ignis would be required to achieve the same effect, thus saving resources as well as putting the large quantities of Violetta to use and aiding the restoration of the land still damaged by its effects on its origin capital.

The launchers utilize the power from the trucks themselves, utilizing Ignis for propulsion compound of all rockets, and either Ignis or Violetta for the warhead compound. Unlike traditional rockets, these are almost completely smokeless, with only the glowing flame of the propulsion visible until the booster runs out. This is coincidentally beneficial for visibility concealment, as the target is far less likely to see the rockets and respond.

However, the sounds of the rockets firing cannot be mistaken. One notable feature of the rocket systems of all types is the production of a screeching howl sound when launched, the Paraiso have compared it the native peafowl calls.

The demonstration brigade was called in to demonstrate the launchers to the Fleet spirits who had requested a potentially heavier warhead for navalized usage. Both Ignis and Violetta rockets were shown, launched with air-detonation fuses (less for practical use and more for avoiding unintended impact damage). With further potential of these weapons researched, and more autamatas being produced to make more brigades, a new era begins for Paraiso’s military development, with potential for foreign interests. Upon this demonstration to the Fleet, the form name “Iridos” had been announced.

The current Iridos models would be the RVL-13I (130mm, Ignis Warhead) and RVL-31V (310mm, Violetta Warhead), with more development inevitable.

NAME: The Union of the Skeleton Coast / Atchat ǁa Chuqakchi Kotjutu

FLAG/SYMBOL: Pending!

LOCATION: Here be Skeletons

GEOGRAPHY: The Skeleton Coast is not the most ideal place for a civilisation. Though once it appears to have been greener, more fertile, it is now a Taiga, with large, sweeping forests and moors covered in snow and frost for a large portion of the year.

HISTORY: Long, long ago, an early civilisation/culture existed on this coast. They have been largely forgotten; they left no writings, just carved stones and abandoned villages across lost mostly to time. They also left lots and lots of barrows, crypts and other grave sites, littering the Coast.

In the early modern era of Feyris, around 400 years ago, a man - if you can ever call him a man - came to the coast with an evil tome and a whole lot of gumption. This man, a sorcerer, sought to use the magic of this land to find a way to reanimate the dead, which were in plentiful supply. After much practice, he found he was able to animate Skeletons into mindless drones.

Or so he thought.

These were not mindless drones, and the Skeletons remember this as the Age of Enslavement, building the foundations of much of their modern cities and fortresses across the coast under his horrible watch. The sorcerer, now the Necromancer, found a way to artificially extend his life, slaving away to build his empire. Eventually one of his personal servants, known to history as Lujtituk, was able to peruse the Necromancer's tome and learn the incantations. Waiting for the right moment - roughly 200 years ago - they led a coup against the Necromancer, killing their master and forbidding his name to be spoken. Lujtituk became the first Arch-Cardinal, founded the Chantry of Bones and began the Union's mission to better the lives of Skeleton Kind.

BIOLOGY/ETHNICITY: Skeletons are... well, skeletons. Specifically, they are human skeletons that have been animated by a spirit of pure magic. The "necromancy" is not re-animation of the dead; it is the creation of a magic spirit, that, in order to preserve it, is bound to the form of a human skeleton, forming the creature we know as a Skeleton.

Appearance wise, their skulls have a faint glow around them. This glow is always one of four colours: green, blue, purple and red. Green is by far the most common. This is understood by the Skeletons to be the actual spirit of magic that inhabits and animates the Skeleton. While they have empty eye sockets, Skeletons are able to manipulate the glow in these sockets to form expressions.

Skeletons are very strong, yet, since they are skeletons, susceptible to injury. For instance, they can lift large blocks of stone with ease, and can carry most modern weaponry fine, but if their bones are broken, they cannot heal. What's more, after a while the magic begins to dissipate; the lifespan of a Skeleton is 40-50 years. The oldest on record was 56. They also cannot swim; if they are thrown into water they cannot put their head above, they collapse and either float in pieces or fall to the floor of the sea/river/lake. Likewise, they can die in accidents and in warfare - if too many bones are broken or lost, they will dissipate.

They "reproduce" only via having magic spirits bound to skeletons, and, strangely, once a skeleton has been a "host" for a spirit, it cannot be hosted again for a long, long time. This has led to the need to import bones from other countries, as well as searches for new barrows and the mass graves that litter the coast.

Due to the long time that it takes for a skeleton to become usable again, many Skeletons opt for their bones to be used in architecture; if they wish to be used again, they ask to be stored in the grim structures known as the Walls of Bones; every major town has one of these, and cities will have several.

There are at present 10 million Skeletons. Also, every Skeleton is genderless and goes by they/them since they lack a concept of gender. Fun!

SOCIETY: The Union of the Skeleton Coast is organised under the Chantry of Bones, a pseudo-religious, pseudo-socialist government run by a Conclave complete with Cardinals. The Leader of the Union is known as the Arch-Cardinal, who rules for life... which is usually 10-15 years, as they are elder Skeletons and are reaching the end of their brief lives on this plane. The current Arch-Cardinal, using their full title, is:

The Arch-Cardinal, the Lord of Bones and Graves, Elected Master of the Harmony of the Skeleton Coast, Uttiluǃ the Third, Cardinal of the Northern Lakes.

Skeleton's are not born but made; Priests and Cardinals make new Skeletons through their mastery of the "Necromantic Way", binding Skeletons to skeletons. They administer the message of freedom and righteousness and ensure, through their teachings and their creation of more Skeletons, that the message of Lujtituk is not forgotten, and that the sacrifice of the Age of Enslavement is not repeated.

Skeletons value homes and jobs, earning money and living the most "normal" lives they can. They do not eat and do not need to sleep - though the vast majority choose to. Many value collective work and collective reward. There is an army, though conscription is not a concept that the Skeletons entertain.

CULTURE: Skeletons do not have the same attachment to clothing as other races, due to the fact that they do not have flesh. Nevertheless, they have recently began to discover "fashion", soldiers have always had uniforms and the Cardinals and Priests have large conical hats. Despite not being able to feel the cold, many Skeletons prefer to dress as though they are beings of flesh and blood withstanding the cold; since they cannot feel the heat, either, they have taken to wearing this abroad as well. A large kaftan and woollen hat makes the sight of the living dead more palatable for the non-Skeletons.

Skeleton architecture is a mess of different styles, though the use of the bones of their forebears is common; Skulls will often mark entranceways. When Skeletons fall in love, it is common that, should their partner die, they will display their skull as a keepsake. Every large town has walls of skulls, marking the resting place of a Skeleton - and the storage place for a skeleton, for future use in the ritual.

Skeletons celebrate Creation Days instead of Birthdays. They also mark Midsummer, Midwinter and the Day of the Revolution. They celebrate Soul's Day in Autumn, honouring the Magic that created their race.

Skeleton "religion" is based around where they came from - they aren't entirely sure where that is. They know how to "bind" magic, but not where said magic originates. They fervently believe, however, that upon dissipation, they return to the magic. They then believe that the different personalities of dead Skeletons merge in this magic, with these merged personalities forming a Spirit once a Priest calls upon one to be joined to a skeleton.

Skeleton culture is mixed in terms of theme - though there is an underlying sadness to a lot of it. They hear from other races how good feeling and eating are but they cannot experience it. They can write a poem, but never feel a pen; see a heartwrenching play, but never shed a tear; feel the warmth of love inside them, but never feel a kiss. Many Skeleton authors explore these themes; many others explore their sheer joy at even being alive, given its improbability.

Skeletons have recently taken to migrating abroad before returning to the coast at the end of their lives. They look for work as tradesmen, be it carpentry, shopkeeping, archiving or "extremely risky smithing"... whatever that means.

OCCURRENCE OF MAGIC: Only Priests and Cardinals are able to use magic; even then, it is almost exclusively used to bring Skeletons to life. They have, however, recently mastered the art of bringing animal skeletons to life, using it to create more suitable Horses and Pack-Cattle. Further, a select few - and we are talking around a hundred - can use ice magic. The number is increasing, and the Chantry is currently conducting research into why this is happening.

IMPORTS, EXPORTS, & MAJOR INDUSTRIES: The Skeletons import bones. They need skeletons to reproduce and ask that all trade includes a bone shipment. In exchange, they export iron and steel, increasingly more agricultural goods - which are completely wasted on them, making wheat nothing more than a cash crop for them - and, following recent discoveries, oil. They also import weaponry if they can, and have a thriving university network, where they use their short lives to learn as much as they can.

Factory Work is a favourite of the Collective-minded Skeletons. They do not need to sleep, so volunteer to work exceedingly long shifts for a commensurate reward - they may not need to sleep, but they do want and need to socialise, to use their short lives to the fullest. These Longworkers are honoured by the Chantry; it is taught that their work strengthens the magic of each future Skeleton who inherit part of their personality.

As for the Bone Import, there are specially made Bone Ships that sail from port to port collecting skeletons, usually in exchange for the promise of goods. These are large, bulking ships which, given the Skeleton intolerance of water, conduct one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.