Chapter 16-412: The Tooling-Down (1/2)

I looked back at the other logistical situations back home.

The re-tooling in preparation for devolving to steam power and lack of electricity was ramping up faster and faster. Those who didn’t want to shoot and hack things were contributing and Leveling up in their own slower way, grabbing their basic Racial Class Levels and improving quickly enough that way.

The petroleum industry was basically slowly shutting down at this point. Wells were being capped and sealed, magically if at all possible, only needing to be tapped in the future for alchemical purposes, which would be a minute fraction of the current oil demand. Natural gas was a possibility to use, but got extremely volatile with fire Elementals running around gleefully, and so gaslight was never going to be a thing, while gas stoves were also going to be needed to be phased out unless you wanted random fires breaking out everywhere all the time.

So, steam power it would be. The production of Everheating Stones for heat sources was basically the name of the game at this point, and Eternal Flames and the like to heat houses, now readily available as more and more Casters hit Seven, were proliferating every day. Indeed, even the armed forces overseas were Casting them on stones and iron bars, to be shipped or Teleported back home.

Going back to cooking with more traditional ovens and stoves and fires was going to be a big change for people. The food processing plants were going into a tizzy, as suddenly heating a thousand gallons of soup at a time was going to be unfeasible to do...

In many ways, the world was slowing down. While there was still some frantic traffic, especially moving materials around, the main thing was that now people were planning where to live for the rest of their lives, as getting around wouldn’t be near as easy, and the living would be harder. It was going to take more labor to run farms again, too...

As a result, there was a gradual movement of people heading back into the countryside, if for no other reason than to be closer to food sources, and back closer to the family and friends they had grown up with.

That meant that cities were going to be falling in size and population, except for key metropolis who would be at the hub of their own network of smaller cities, towns, and villages feeding things into them and getting them back.

It was indeed going to be an era of city-states, and the City Spirits were already agitated as they felt the changes happening, the shift and ebb and flow of population, materials, and the energy of civilized life as real as breathing to them.

Coal mines that had been falling out of favor got a delighted shot in the arm, but they were also dourly disapproved of by Druids for their environmental abuse, and if and when the Mother Land woke up, they had to be prepared to pay the toll for that. Mowing down forests for bonfires was also a pretty bad idea, hence the need for Eternal Flames. Lots and lots of Eternal Flames...

One of the interesting things being put into place were salvage yards on the East and West Coasts of America. The massive fleets and steel ships of the Navy were going to be nigh useless in the world to come, as such massive vessels couldn’t run on steam power, and alchemical fuel was far too dangerous and expensive, especially on a warship.

That also applied to the tank corps, which meant thousands of beloved death-dealing mobile armored boxes and cannons were going to be scrapped, too.

All that metal and steel was going to be recycled, and a brand-new, lighter fleet of steam-powered vehicles was already being designed and getting its keels and axles laid. New designs of steam cannons and the like also had to be designed and made for all this, as the whole world needed to be re-armed.

More importantly, all the technology that we had discovered and that would no longer work, and the processes to make that technology, had to be archived safely. That in itself required companies to open up about many processes, designs, and the like, which ran into trust issues and similar things. Nobody wanted to believe they were going to be outdated by less advanced tech, after all...

Applying advanced material science and Weird Science to less sophisticated technology was basically what Artificers and Alchemists were born to do. The blizzard of shared ideas and designs going up in the Markroom devoted to such stuff was sizzling with wild ideas being tempered down by speed, pragmatism, and time constraints. Designing the most practical and useful designs and the processes to make them could be every bit as much the challenge as a new Gearbot War-Walker to supplement or replace the tanks that would have to be melted down.

I had given dire, dire warnings about Axiomatic Events if armies decided to go Construct-heavy, and even the slavery-level obedience of Golems was something that could be turned against us by sufficiently powerful forces. Ideas about Gear-Tanks and Clankers rampaging across battlefields shooting down our enemies didn’t look so hot when those things turned around and started shooting our own people after reducing their own crews to bloody smears inside of them...

On the flip side of things, there was also a LOT of ammunition that needed to be used up. Word had already gone out that actual gunpowder was going to explode when the Shroud went down, so use up and get rid of the stuff. Arsenals and armories of the stuff were emptying out... and you know, infusing Vivic Spell into a cannon or a Shell meant any undead killed by it were Truly Dead, too.

If you gotta use the ammo up anyways...

That was going to be important for the final fight, because the enemy had undead mechanized units, too, and Possessed Tanks and Necroic Cannons were definitely not things we wanted to see... but we were definitely going to.

Parts of my head were continually involved in this game, and I finally understood why the Shroud had given me all the Construct-making Feats. It was so I could advise everyone else who was going to use them, not me.

A-duh. Me smart team thinker at times, me is.

Windgraf Mochtal wasn’t in to Constructs or Gearsmithing, preferring to focus on magical items rather exclusively. The djinn weren’t a race that liked such things, Constructs and war machines of metal being more tools of the efreet and the shaitan.

That being said, he was totally into airship designs and contributing to that field of endeavor. Dirigibles were horrendously vulnerable in a magical world, so we actually needed airships, and the promise of higher Caster Levels, Spellcraft, and Valences meant we could actually potentially make such things... once we got the basic needs of day to day life taken care of. C’mon with them Eternal Flames, people...

Heck, even I was putting out several hundred a day now. For some reason, the silver-tinted black flames I Cast were in considerable demand...