Probably is. But even if it wasn't, it was stated that Alda was very innocent and have 0 experience with being mentally manipulated, he took things at face values and Bellwood who is stated to be a master manipulator. Alda never stood a chance. Van's way is actually plausible though. He just know the results and try to work toward that result in his own way. The way he actually substitute mechanical part with his death magic and golem is the thing though. Like you said, he know a refrigerator, he maybe able to remake a refridgerator using our world solution but that would take a tremendous amount of time and effort in research. Instead, he use parts/magic that he know will do the same thing, keep thing cool with ghostflame which is not as big of a bullshit as you stated. If he reinvent everything using our approach, it would be bullshit in the time he did. Also, knowing about a thing is actually more than half the way toward making that thing. Like if you want to make a car, if you have no idea what it is then you will have to start with the very basic concept of something to ride, which is a horse or something, then maybe a cart that can be pull, then a self-pulling cart then etc. If you do know what a car is then it is a self-pulling cart, which require an engine, something that you never even considered in the previous case. It is not an immediate solution but it does cut down the time and effort by order of magnitudes.
Don't recall if that was a concern back then but taht's why you experiemnt. To you small scale tests first and ramp up. I explaiend this already but just because Some random Earth Culture spent more than 100K in development at some point in history doesn't mean Lamda would have. Espeically since We aren't 100% clear on what level they were at immediately before the war. I mean merely putting them around th level of ancient egypt would put them well within 5K much less 100K. Remember the world of Lamda didn't start right before the war so you kind of need to stop acting like that's the absolute begining of civilization. Also just to put this out there while it would normally be likely the war would have caused civilization to regress we know the surviving gods were very invested in restoration so such issues can reasonably be expected to be minimized if not removed entirely. In any case, the existence of magic both inhibits and aids in development because it removes the need of certain inventions but makes other inventiosn easier. No need to make a steam engine when golems work just as well if not better at least in some applications. But you also don't need a cumbustion engine because fire magic is a thing ... at least in theory. The fact that it seems no one's realy tried, or at least tried and survived to create results, shows how overall effective the supression of science and development is and while Alda isn't as active in supression as Bellwood he's carrying on bellwood's will durtifully. Unfortunately the case of Van and Gun Powder is the only example we ever really get to see. But his reaction of shere panic without even checking to see what Van's gun powder could even do is telling enough. It says Alda likely hated any technology that Bellwood actively hated and anything he was more neutral on was anything Bellwood didn't tell him horror stories about. Oh Alda definitely stood a chance. But the problem is he's so arrogant and stubborn that it seems once he decides on something he becomes unmovingly resolute in it. So once Bellwood got into his head AT ALL it just snowballed from there. If at any point Alda had at least trusted in the opinions of anyone else things might have turned out differently. But he's unwilling to ever admit he was truely wrong except about minor things. As for the other point yeah I was going to say the same thing. Van's inventions aren't bullshit because he's entirely cheating using death magic. He's just mimicking modern inventions with death magic. Hell most of his inventions are litterally soul powered! The interesting thing is that now he's introduced the concept and result if others try to invent more widely useable versions of these inventions, as in not needing Van specifically to power them, then it should go by a lot faster. No real way to guess by how much. But even just a few hundred years might be enough to speed run through what took us thousands of years to work out their own solutions for.
This is not complete. Zakkart and Bellwood was in different places and Demon King attacked both at the same time. Because of Zakkart and Bellwood conflict, Zakkart was only left with creation orientated champions, no fighting force at all. Bellwood was attacked by demon who was playing Demon King and real Demon King attacked Zakkart pretended as normal demon. Vida wanted to go help Zakkart as he did not had fighting force, but Bellwood and Alda convinced/ordered her to stay, because fake Demon King was attacking them. The end result was death off all creation orientated champions. So, Vida resent Bellwood and Alda for stopping her to go help Zakkart and leaving Zakkart no fighting strength.
But you do need spare resources, and I think you do not understand what it takes to perform resource extraction in a dangerous area. That is a lot harder, and a much greater logistical nightmare, then just sending in a kill team to slay some monsters. This does not actually counter what @Overlord2019 said, it does not even come anywhere close to it. Neither does it come close the other 3 times you blindly use it counter point. But since you keep coming back to that, I am assuming you have no argument other then this, so here is the thing. They did have info from the champions, but as has been said that info was garbage. To much missing info or pop-culture references missing the context of being fiction. The BMR residents did develop based on the info and tools they had, the results are just not what you are thinking they should have been. Because you fail to understand how development in a world like Lambda would work, and are applying assumption that have no basis in the story as if they were hard facts, when there are plenty of REAL WORLD examples that show they are not hard rules. There are worlds where medieval stasis makes no sense, Lambda is not one of these worlds. Al development is going to follow/be based on the job/skill system since that has a so much better cost benefit ratio it is not funny. Even the BMR would be using it because guess what, that is what the creation champions were using, and it is what their surviving records (as useless as they are) refer to. The BRM never met the champions, they only know what was passed down to them, and the champions were not even using the same methods as in our world, they were using Magic to re-create things, or make new things based on scientific knowledge. You are asking someone to go from a Bow and arrow to Rail guns, based on a description of what they do with none of the mechanics involved, and no knowledge of electricity for the electro magnets.
I actually would argue that the inside of BMR lacks the extra powerful people that we are assuming they have. They do have some powerful fighters but it seem that it was just enough to maintain the current status quo. For the longer live races like Majin and Kijin, they all went to hibernate and help maintaining the Barrier. Shorter lives races like Noble Orc while strong are still only rank 11 at best. That's should sound impressive but are still only A-A+. Hell, Bugita was able to nearly subjugate the inside of BMR with his forces and he was only rank 12.
Only Rank 12? A single Rank 12 is explicitly stated to be powerful enough to wipe a mid-sized country from the face of Lambda unless met in battle by a whole team of A-Rank Adventurers or stronger. Don't forget, Human nations have collective heart-attacks when anything Rank 6 or higher shows up in their territory, and even now, the strongest entities in the series thus far that have Ranks are around Rank 14. Rank 12 is not something to be derided as "only"; it's a big deal.
Get high rank people to go into lower rank dungeons and it becomes much easier. And again, getting spare resources is what every nation wants so this is something they would already be doing. How exactly does it not counter it. 3.) In the BMR people would want to build research laboratories because that's what the creation champions did. 4.) They have the motive to invent stuff because they worship the creation champions. 5.) They have the culture because they worship the creation champions and want to emulate them. 7.) They worship the creation champions and would build infrastructure for them to invent things. The results are that the tech level of the area that hates invention is the same as the tech area that encourages inventions. How does that make sense. It's been 100k years. As long as they were doing experiments, luck would've made it so that the BMR would overshoot the tech level of the outside world. So why can't the residents of the BMR use the same methods the champions did? Next time, actually read my comments. It was the first thing I said in the comment you're quoting. I don't want to go from bow and arrow to rail gun. I want them to go from bow and arrow and expand that into other bow designs like compound bows.
It is a big deal, but if you consider the whole BMR, it really should not be much if they had all their theoretical forces. About a dozen Purebreed, hundreds of Majins, Kijin and noble 10+ but all are hibernating. I had meant it more of a statement that they are severely lacking in their forces. Also correction, he was rank 11. and Gufadgarn incarnation was about rank 16? (I am not too sure on this). The point i am trying to make was that BMR does not currently have the force to comfortably clear out dungeons and devil nest in BMR. If we consider A rank to be the minimum for 15 evil breaking swords, Amid alone got more than 15 them. The Majin dungeon boss is also rank 11.
An overly simplified solution to a complex problem. The issue there is how do you get the high ranked people, that requires sending them into high ranked areas/dungeons to train, which would produced more valuable materials. Your solution wastes the time and development potential of the most valuable individuals who are in short supply, and requires a surplus of high ranked individuals since they still need ot cull the high ranked dungeons to prevent surges/rampages/etc from over population (only Van's dungeons do not have that issue). Because the point was OPPERTUNITY, worshiping someone does not provide opportunity. Spare/luxury time and resources do. which were limited. you took the part of the point that was a symbol of what it would eventually lead to and ignored the actual point to make a blind assertion of what you have already been told is not even close to being sufficient. The other time you uses their reverence as an I do not want to think about is justification were Motive, Culture and Infrastructure. Neither come solely form revering someone. all of them have additional requirements that were not present and you made no attempt to show are present. Requirements that being in a struggle for survival and resources would hinder, as even motive which is the easiest to justify take sa back seat to "I need yo not die" and "I need to feed my kids NOW". Show how they would have met the requirements, don't just blindly say that they would have because they revered X. Except it is not the same. You just either do not understand or refuse to accept how the Skill/Job system affects development. It needs to be accounted for, it is IDIOTIC to ignore how that system would affect how people develop. What you are arguing requires that it be ignored, and give the BMR side a better starting point knowledge wise then they actually had. They had hard info the the people using horse dewormer to cure Covid have, and you are assuming that the would take that and build from there. You have to take into account what they had as a starting place, and how the resources available at the start would have affected their growth. That includes the tools available to them. Those tools were the Skill/Job/Rank system, and some 3rd party knowledge. They woudl have started from using the system for what they could, and that would have affected their development and set it away from tech from the start. Except THERE WAS ADVANCEMENT, you are just not satisfied with the amount and the nature it took.
Lovely example of Argumentum Ad Naseum. Just keep repeating the same statement over, and over, and over again until people get tired and then declaring yourself the victor. Using the phrase "they worshiped Zakkart, why didn't they do what he did?" Is like saying "hey, Tony Stark made a brand new element in a storage closet using random bits of junk after seeing a blueprint his father left behind. Why didn't his many corporate rivals, like Hammer, do that?!" Answer: He's freaking TONY STARK, IRONMAN, who built his first power-suit by tricking a terrorist group into thinking he was building intercontinental ballistic missiles for them. None of the races in the BMR actually KNOW what Zakkart did; it's been quite a bit of time, he was a recluse (more or less), and the Alda bunch did a pretty effective purge of all Zakkart tech after backstabbing and stealing Vida's divinity while she and her faction were trying to catch their breath after the Demon King war. So, no, they absolutely can't do what he did, and what he did was so "out of the box" that even if they did know, it's not likely they can repeat it. VAN is able to repeat it because he's got part of Zakkart's soul and is cheating by using Death Magic to mimic modern tech. And as already spelled out countless times, what bits and pieces of Zakkart's dubious wisdom survived the ages and purges is, in a word, unreliable. Recreating modern tech any other way, will, at best, be completely ineffective, at least as far as combat is concerned, and combat IS the top priority in Lambda, as a matter of survival. It's been pointed out that if someone fired a cruise missile at Miles, not only would he shrug it off, but he'd get mad and charge at and attack the source far, far faster than they could react. And he's not even the worst Van's allies, or enemies, could bring to the table. YOU try justifying spending a metric butt-ton of resources to overcome that kind of strength gap with no assurance of success, when it would take your best warriors going on a multiple day walk to the nearest dungeon, fighting monsters all the way, to even get at said resources, protect those resources on the way back, and the rest of your faction is constantly fretting that some murder-hobo, if not group of ravenous monsters, is going to find where you live and all your people are going to have to freaking run for it at any moment. Yeah, not going to happen, especially when there's this nifty little thing called Jobs/Ranks and Skills that does all the heavy lifting for you and favors bows and arrows over their "better" counterparts, like crossbows, guns, missiles, and bombs. Heck, even if Rodcorte managed to bring over an engineer with blueprints in his head to recreate gunpowder and hot weapons, the laws of physics in Lambda are just screwy enough to totally screw over whatever said engineer tries. I did make a mistake earlier when making a comparison between Base 10 numbers and Base 4. In Base 4, 100 would represent 16, not 8, but still it's a HUGE difference. Let's say this engineer comes over with the tech to make a laser rifle. His blueprint has physics that go by Base 10. He distributes the knowledge and somehow manages to avoid the notice of an army of Alda templars, or the local Bellwoods hate club. People who manage to recreate this laser rifle and use Lambda's Base 4 physics are going to read the numbers in the blueprint all wrong, reading 100 as 16, and so on. At best, it's going to be seriously under-powered, or not work at all. At worst, it could blow up in the hands of whoever tries to fire it. That's going to seriously discourage anyone who tries to repeat the process, and Mr. Engineer is going to be seen as a fool, at best, scam artist at worst. This was spelled out when Murakami demanded high-powered rifles and guns as part of his "go assassinate Van mission" that he agreed with Rod to carry out. As to your final argument "The results are that the tech level of the area that hates invention is the same as the tech area that encourages inventions. How does that make sense. It's been 100k years. As long as they were doing experiments, luck would've made it so that the BMR would overshoot the tech level of the outside world." Again, the Jobs/Rank and Skills system is the biggest game in town, anybody that wants to advance and actually has a brain, instead of just throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and even most of the ones that do the latter, are going to have to bow to that massive construct, as the people that play by that game are going to seriously stomp those that don't. See Miles vs Cruise Missile earlier. So, by your own logic, it's been almost half-a-century since Back to the Future came out. Going purely from watching the movie, we should have time-travel tech, flying Doloreans, and be selling Mr. Fusion energy packs in every corner drug store, because Marty Mc Fly knows a crazy scientist who can do it, and we've seen a movie about it. WHAT?! WE CAN'T?!! Bummer. Why are those scientists and engineers being so unrealistic?! IT MAKES NO SENSE!
Gufadgarn's incarnation is rank 13 iirc. Godwin is rank, what, 16? Vida's nations seem to be stronger on average than the human ones but they seem to have a lot less outliers.
Hm. I could have sworn Godwin was like several ranks ahead of everyone else. You know what kind of bugs me? He's Rank 14 and has like a million Jobs and has been alive for hundreds of years but he's still probably weaker than Heinz. It irks me that Vida's races don't really seem to live up to their hype in that respect: Apart from Van's group there don't seem to be many A or S class equivalents.
Heinz got that special divine protection from Alda plus all the equipment he has, though have Godwin had any? I have this impression that he fight without equipments. Also those fancy familliar descent too. In a 1on1 fight though, i would say Godwin is stronger. Vida's race really doesn't get many divine protection and artifacts compare to the human outside, thanks to the barrier maintenance and Vida being sealed. Those come a long way to being A-S class. Also, the S class of Vida is all sleeping though, i.e. the older Majin, Kijin and Vampires.
You guys remember that Zakkart died twice before the Barrier Mountain Range became a thing, right? Like once upon a time he stopped by Talosheim to create their sunbathing mirrors, but Zombie Zakkart not Champion Zakkart. They got chased out of the areas of the continent where they had been building their homes and cornered in the center of the continent, where Zakkart died again and Vida got staked. So Zakkart isn't there anymore when the Vida kingdoms were founded there.
Gah, so many misconceptions I'm in pain, almost literally. I'll say that I used "almost impressive" because of how horrific it is, horrific things are not truly impressive. Highly unlikely, imo. There are basically 3 useful examples of states federating at scale... USA achieved it by being new and unstable, China usually achieved it via violence and intimidation from a uniting factor, and the USSR which achieved it via "peaceful" political and diplomatic ideology fell apart once the "peaceful" force and intimidation became less than the desire to get the hell out of dodge. In the real world, certain unpleasant inevitability dictates that the majority of people holding power are exactly the ones who don't give it away, leading to sovereign powers fighting against losing sovereignty and sub-units trying to gain independent sovereignty of their own. That the EU succeeded as well as it did is a miracle, but it's set against a background of the independence campaigns in Ireland, Scotland, parts of France, large sections of Spain, the Imperial colonies in Africa and Asia, spliting countries like Czechoslovakia, India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, the mess that is the former Mandate in Palestine, just to name a few. The only country "getting away" with expanding territory via merging is China (and that's depending on Hong Kong's return from the British) ... the idea we're heading towards any real federated states or One World Government is basically ignoring nearly 100 years of mostly counter examples. I simply don't buy it, not enough wants to give up portions of their rights or identity. So I was right, 100k is about the end of branching and start of serious tooling. This is a fallacy. Technology is an exponential development process, it feels fast simply because the present is normally the steepest gradient on the curve. Things like modern computers didn't pop out of nowhere, they were created using the tool of older computers, if you follow it back you get to a time where IC chips were designed using tape and transparencies. We build machines to build better machines, we use science to access more science, we individually use the collected knowledge of every predecessor to make progress. This is where the phase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes from. It's not a process that can continue indefinitely, the history of terrestrial fusion experiments provides a good demonstration, but for much of history we lacked the knowledge to advance knowledge efficiently and the tools to build tools successfully. Another fallacy. There exist modern populations with little to no tech simply because those populations have reasons for not acquiring tech. The Amish limit their tech because of belief but the communities around them didn't adopt modern tech because they actively possess a belief that drove them to do so. It's like social thermodynamics, a population property that can spread without intentional dissemination will statistically tend to spread to any group without an active barrier to adoption. However, conscious choice is only one barrier, there are lots of others that don't require the extreme forces you mentioned. It's a complicated subject. Except no, this drastically misses the causes and limits of population growth. High population grow is historically often linked to active causes for growth. A controversial example would be the connection between Catholic strictness banning birth control and the average sizes of families in that place. Mortality due to uncontrollable factors is part of what drove population growth in areas of Africa, changes in growth rate lag mortality rate. Overall, the problem here is relative numbers. The scale of force sizes a population must field for combat and hunting isn't properly linear to the population size, a country with 100 times more people won't have 100 times more soldiers because 100 times larger soldier count doesn't result in an approximately 100 times change to any useful property ... it's not 100 times combat power, organizational complexity or costs. Further, the smaller your population is the larger the impact of premature death, while also being more likely due to lack of protective margins. Lambda has tons of things to kill you, growing population was hard. Worse, Lambda follows the pattern of offensive factors being far more destructive that defensive factors. Magic. Socially, the amount of slavery and human wave type ideas solidly slows growth. Oh, we don't know the real fertility rates anyway. There's so many reasons that can stretch the exponential growth curve. On what basis do you think their world is safe? Even when non-humans aren't trying to kill humans, there are plenty of humans doing the job. Worse, they are effectively empire by subjugation. Amid gained dominance of their area by conquering areas and then intentionally keeping them weak. Remember Mirg and the suicide attacks that were supposedly keeping them from declaring independence? Most of the big improvements do indeed come down to desperation, bordem, luck and/or greed. Need is good for incremental stuff, but really critical advances are of the kind that you create something without an idea of how it can be practically applied. Lasers, general purpose computers and leds weren't developed with any of the modern needs of them in mind. Electricity and combustion engines had their potential realised relatively quickly after announcement but I can't accept a claim that anyone properly saw a need before hand. Part of the challenge in progress is accurately identifying and describing a need to be solved. Otherwise though, part of the reason for some of the historic patterns in who advances knowledge is that it's hard to make a living just thinking. It's not resource and opportunity shortage but rather a leisure shortage, since science was something of a luxury. You can't eat a thesis (probably in Latin) on the equations governing the motion of stellar bodies. Well, you could but it wouldn't be tasty or nutritious. Culture is exaggerated in someways, like the Dark Ages weren't as bad as sometimes claimed, but the idea of patrons of philosophy is for the rich or religious. Yay for monks? Knowledge and infrastructure is overrated for early development, it's often done at "amateur" level in the home study with limited prior experience. See Newton. I'm sure the undead love to share. Garbage. Inventing is hard because you don't know what the solution should look like, reinventing is easier because you can work backwards from the successful example you know about. Making a modern car is hard, but I hope most people are familiar enough to describe the principle of burning fuel to move a bunch of pistons on a crank. Most people who've ridden a bike much can give some description of wheels, breaks, chains, gears, etc. Certainly enough of a description for a craftsman to recreate it with some trial and error. Discovering a new edible plant is hard, listing the content and appearance of the vegetable aisle is considerably easier. Modern hyperintegrated tech is exceptional, but there's no shortage of people who rebuild classic engines or brew their own alcohol. That you can't cook and/or bake doesn't reduce the majority that can. The problem is more fundamental that what number base you use. Literally. Our science is stacked on laws of the universe that we've extrapolated all the way back to the fundamental forces. But let's say that unlike our universe where the Standard Model is described in terms of the electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak nuclear forces, we were in a universe where magic was a fundamental force with mediating bosons, representative particle interactions, and equations describing behaviour. Maybe the nuclear forces need to be a little stronger or weaker to balance the force of the magions in an atom? Maybe chemical bonds have different energetic levels? Heck, maybe the Plank length or speed of causal propagation are different? By the time you get to things like seeing if silicon-based proteins are a thing, or if there is sufficient atmospheric differences to warrant a change in potential over pressure conditions during an explosion, science may not work exactly the way you expect. Perhaps the alternate world, due to some odd happening, ended up with an atmosphere composed of 25% oxygen, 65% nitrogen, ~9% argon, and a bunch of trace. Life should be able to handle that, but your carefully measured table for calorific output over time miiiight be a bit wrong. Maybe there's also more ozone around so surface UV is less. Maybe thunderstorms glow red. (Confession: I can't remember which noble gas produces which spectral band other than neon being sorta orange(?)) ... yes, plants in that world are strangely good at getting rid of CO2, there's not enough to mention in the breakdown.
You know, I never realized until you said it that it really must have been zombie Zakkart who made the Talosheim mirrors. That really gives him more personality than I would have expected.
A very literal interpretation of the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" ... they failed to kill Van and now they're dinner. As for the latter part... "You thought it Van but it is me, Pipe-bomb-chan! Surprise! I have gifts! You get a shard, and you get a shard... Everyone gets a stabby shard! Let me hear you all scream for my wonderful explosive delivery!" .... I wonder if this attack will inspire a new Job option