Talk:Kunoichi/@comment-25405125-20150127131442/@comment-26097222-20150216224311

One of my hobbies is military history, focusing on the technology that enables war. Technology is interconnected. Advancement is iterative. Advancement also accelerates over time and brings on indirect effects and unintended consequences. Explaining WHY I think of American Civil War tech for MGE would take quite a bit of explaining, but the short version is that if they had better we'd see it. For example, take that AK-47. I saw a video once of a guy in Afghanistan who turns out an AK a day using nothing but a gas fired portable forge and hand tools. No power tools, no machine tools. He can make ammunition too, including the primers. The hurdle to making an AK isn't having a factory, it's knowing it can be made and how to make one. Once someone builds up the tech to make an AK-47 and figures out how to make one, it can be reproduced. Getting there is the problem. Most of the tech that went into inventing the first AK-47 has other uses. People are creative and while the styling of things they invent differs from culture to culture, the basic function is driven by physics. MGE has some different physics, but most of it is the same as our world. If the MGE world has AK-47s, they'll also have cannons that render castles not just obsolete but actively a form of suicide. The same goes for town walls. Japanese sword bias aside, NO ONE brings a sword to an artillery battle. Well, not more than once anyway.