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@AndyD273 Nice! I got a work-from-home job in early 2019, so I had already made all the adjustments by the time COVID hit. Bought some lake property too so we had somewhere to go that didn't require interacting with other people.

@AndyD273 Sounds you got through the pandemic pretty well then. I too work from home now. It's pretty great.

Also, you're alive! How are things?

@AndyD273 Cracked block

@Shalvenay Heh. Youtube suggested that one to me too. I love that guy's videos.

IT COMPILES! IT COMPILES!

Well, spaceships have acceleration in 6 dimensions: X, y, z, pitch, roll, yaw. Sportscars just have X and yaw.

@Loong would that be different from acceleration/deceleration?

@Shalvenay I'm looking into programming how a spaceship might handle and how to make it handle like a sports car vs a freight train.

@Shalvenay have you ever considered how to quantify why a BMW is a much nicer car to drive than a Corolla?

What kind of a story are you trying to tell?

@redfrogcrab Um, I'm not sure I can make the decision for you. It would depend on what feel you want for the story.

@redfrogcrab go for it.

Today's question: Given the capability to simulate star system formation, what's a scenario you'd like to see?

@Shalvenay True, but there's going to be that one guy who has forging in his veins. He will have a really good handle on craft blacksmith but also on modern mass-production. Bridging the gap would be relatively easy for that guy.

Another thing to consider is that swords the elves are used to aren't actually the swords they need for the current conflict.

Humans over the last 5 millenia have been wildly inventive with sword geometries. Historians have spent man-millenia going over the fine details about which swords worked best in which environment.

Each elf warrior is ging to know what a good sword feels like in their hand but not a dang thing about how to actually make one.

@Shalvenay If the quartermaster has time, he would be well served to find a current domain expert on how to make great swords. If the Elves are most comfortable with Western-style swords, find an expert in Europe. Look to Japan for Eastern-style swords. That expert would be able to give you trade-offs for various alloys, costs and manufactuering requirements.

@Shalvenay Sounds like you've done some research already.

@Shalvenay If there's a metalurgy stack exchange, I'd ask around over there to see which are the commonly recommended stell alloys for modern sword making. (Given all the pretension for sword making, I'd be more surprised if that question hadn't been asked three or four different ways.) Pretty sure it's not common mild-steel.

There's a bunch of specifics I can't get you here. Lead-times, which alloy to use for which part, manufacturing process, limits of forge/stamped blades, heat treating....I know that these are question but no idea how to answer them.

Building the pipeline through the various manufacturers would take some time to setup (months?) but once that "machine" is set up, swords delivery could be churned out quite quickly.

@Shalvenay Agreed. The big problems as I see it would be: quality control on the various parts, sequencing of manufactuering, delays to final assembly.

Heat treatment can be done in batches of hundreds or thousands.

@Shalvenay I think so. With an order size of 20K, it's worth the speed increases and tooling setup to bring in CNC grinding/milling. If you can cut a blank with a CNC plasmas cutter/water jet in <1 minute then give it to a CNC grinder to rough out the final geometry in 20 minutes, you'd probably spend more time moving the metal around on the shop floor. C

We are probably looking at several different producers. One manufacturer is going to be well suited for cutting the blanks for the swords from stock. Grinding down and polishing the blade to final geometry would be someone else. Perhaps the second stage also handles all the pomels and cross-bars. Still another manufactuer assembles all the blades into a final product.

Getting the right steel together shouldn't be difficult since modern steel production is in the megaton range.

Okay. 20k swords divided by 365 days is 54 years, or 54 guys working every day for a year. Double the number of guys, it's down to 6 months. 200 ironworkers could get the whole thing done in 100 days (assuming one sword a day per guy).

I was going with a double safety margin of 2 swords per elf.

@Shalvenay So, we need 20K high quality, fit-for-fighting quality swords in as small a window as possible. Money isn't an issue because bottomless money bag. We just need them as quick as possible.

Next question! (Send me more questions!)

You could write a really interesting alt-history book on the Court cases to resolve all those old claims. So much courtroom drama!

I can't find the reference, but I saw a really fun and ineffective move by the UA parliament where they revoked a centuries old charter issued by proto-UA to found Moscow. While the claims themselves may never stick, that revocation points to extremely old histories of claims and counterclaims. Who owns Russian land after obliteration may come down to some treaty that no one but dusty history professors know about.

Looking at the map of Belarus, Russia (former) and Ukraine... UA is gonna push/claim as far as they can around the Black Sea. Georgia will also try to push further north and west to meet up with UA.

Or they just stop talking about those ambitions.

Chinese leadership has a great reason to tell their people why they are giving up their Taiwan invasion plans. "We don't want to die" is an excellent reason.

Potentially, there's enough fallout from the bombardment that it might start a mini ice age.

Germany is going to be very cold. Hope it's a mild winter.

If Russia is destroyed in the fall, Germany and Europe won't have time to shift their gas supplies from Russia to anywhere else. We can see with the 2022 invasion that with 6 to 8 months warning, Germany can shift to other sources. But no one can make that change in a month.

The surviving cities and regions may be able to still generate those resources but the infrastructure to profit from them is gone. Governmental organizations and regulation is gone.

Given the degree that NK was essentially self-contained, the effects are mostly regional and ecological. Russia, despite being unpopular, exported considerable amounts of resources: gas, oil, wheat, timber

Competition for food is going to be real high in net grain importers, mainly the Middle East. When people can't get get food, they get angry and riot. There are few things as primal as humans when they can't get bread.

And there's going to be a lot of new customers. Russia was a top grain exporter. worldstopexports.com/wheat-exports-country

Arms supply to African nations will dry up or shift to other countries. All the soviet/Russian arms suppliers don't exist anymore. Israel, China, US, UK, France and Germany (to name a few) will have plenty new customers to court (or snub).

Ukraine's situation gets really interesting. Luhansk, Donestk and Crimea are suddenly undefended. Previously, UA couldn't muster a counter attack to retake those regions. Now, those regions are defended by unsupported and unsuppliable. Retaking them should be relatively brief.

So, Russia's western cities have evaporated under the Nag's bombardment. This leaves one global superpower, the US. China wants to be a global superpower but is presently regional.

Russia, for their own reasons, have been messing around despite warnings that aggression will not be tolerated

If I remember that right.

@HDE226868 Dude, I remember when you were telling us that you had just graduated from high school and were getting ready for college. I'm delighted to hear that you're working in your chosen field. Nicely done!