Technology: How did We Get Here?

Terms
Mundane Technology - Technology that does not actively run on magic empowerment.
Magitek Technology - Technology that does actively run on magic empowerment

At some point in time, the leader of the Skalovian revolution performed an act that would gain his forces the knowledge to bring the world into a new epoch of flame. It was labeled the great blasphemy by the prelates, the high priests, of his time.

What does the Great Blasphemy mean and what did Uhlion actually do to get the tech used in the revolution?

-412 PR, Uhlion, flees from his father Hruimdr and leaves Skalovia. -223, Uhlion well aged and now having great experience of the world learns of a new world that almost no inhabitant of Central Tys know about. -204, Uhlion goes to this New World with a group of personal friends, followers, and the accumulated wealth and resources he gathered over 200 years. -178, Uhlion performs a ritual that brings forth the being Genastres from the Great Firmament. Genastres takes the form of a human woman with writing all over her body and she can change her skin. The secret histories will call this the gold expedition. -156 Uhlion and his expedition return to Velassia with a ship full of tools, weapons, tomes, and artifacts that will be used in the expedition. -158, Uhlion meets the runaway Gagrin Yagresslov and his own following, a genius prodigy but heavily scarred ex-slave assistant to the Scale Prince Malurr. Yagresslove pores through all of Uhlion's tomes and does all he can to learn about what Uhlion brought back while they continue to be on the run all over central Tys. -76 PR, Yagresslov cracks the code and learns how to advance muskets past the equivalent fusil stage of development. They still need a way to make them to his design in greater numbers. Using a makeshift workshop in Shonan, it takes five days to make one musket. This is unacceptable. Piotr Dansky, an acolyte of Yagresslov's and the designer of the musket along with being a runaway as well, almost gives up. They continue to research. In the midst of all of this, they continue to work upon Genastres' information and make multiple stunning advancements along with all the work Uhlion's group was doing since -178. In -45, they meet the young Klaus Holowitz, a human inventor from the kingdom of Klastte to the south of Skalovia. He is interested in mixing magical means and equipment with technology, going past the basic realms of enchantment and magical items such as crystal balls and making a name for himself by being the father of magitek. He supplies the expensive and rare but effective tools necessary to produce gunnery in mass numbers. Yagresslov is furious, and will one day produce the tools and means necessary to make the guns mundanely before his death in 24 PR using the resources supplied by the Republic using means he had been formulating for decades. Holowitz will live to see it and be proud of his colleague that loathed him for showing him up.


This results in the weaponry, advances, and tools that bring the world, starting with Skalovia from a technological state mirroring an anachronous state from roughly the 1100s to the 1400s in Europe with outliers. Armor, crafting tech, medicine, and the like being advanced thanks to a mixture of enchantment, magic facilitation, and clerical healing (with the latter essentially giving the world means for magical pasteurization, anaesthesia, and vaccination much earlier than the real world) to the very early 1800s with the multiple tech disciplines all in one place but not adopted immediately. The early nations to catch up are Klastte who are then defeated and absorbed into the Uhlion Republican Equitianist State, and Thrake, a nation on the other polar end of Velas whom Genastres had given the same information to including stolen tomes from Uhlion as early as -112 PR. They will catch up by 43 PR and be using designs that are modeled after earlier weaponry by -34 but in extremely small numbers due to the same issues the Golden Expedition had with the difficulty and time consuming production of such weapons along with the earlier weaponry going against bullet proof armor not by purposeful design but just by lack of penetration, hence the lack of proliferation

The Retrograde Effect

The Retrograde Effect explains why technology does not advance quite as fast as expected and why compared to the history of Earth in the 19th and 20th centuries it takes Tys around 300 years to be at the level of 1880s tech compared to their start of late 1700s and very early eighteen-oughts tech.
There are two important reasons to understand why this is the way it is. Advancement encountered roadblocks due to not having the tools or designs to innovate quickly due to not having the foundation to grow upward from what they knew. What the researches and inventors of that world had was like a hanging bridge they could leap to the middle of but then lacked the ability to go backwards and forwards without starting from the first steps of the bridge. Thus they had to discover advancements from the basics. There is still the ability to modify technology that both had already existed and came into recent existence. The second reason magic and clerical power serve as a handicap to slow down advancements since the equivalents of certain advancements technically exist but only in the hands of a few. Along with this, Magitek, which will be discussed below, allows one to skip steps and create mundane items with specialized tools but does not allow for proper advancement like training wheels do not allow the proper balance to ride a bicycle. That's not to say the religions of Tys engage in obscurantism as a purposeful process. The handicap more has to do with the issue of why invent pasteurization and vaccination when a priest or wizard could wave their hands and do it? The answer is basically that those that are not gifted as individuals or states that want that power without having to rely on certain individuals that could possibly create theocratic or magical supremacist systems. Equitianists, Harmonists, and old traditionalists all understand that.

Here is an analogy for how the retrograde effect doesn't just allow perfect continuous advancement:
Imagine if two individuals were asked to build a bridge, person 1 and person 2. Person 1 uses his specialized knowledge and the tools of the day to take what they have to build a bridge and then use their own expertise to essentially juryrig a great bridge into existence using guideline methods and non-guideline methods with extremely expensive and rare materials. They can repeat this feat in other places.  However, if you were to ask them how to make the bridge lighter and as tough as it is now using what they had as materials by guidelines, they would tell you they can't but they can try to slap another million-dollar piece on there that could make it lighter but only to a limited range of degree that the original materials allow. Person 2, on the other hand, takes much longer to build a bridge and figures out the foundational forces necessary to make the engineer's bridge with guideline materials. They are then free to expand the bridge's capabilities to where they can not only make the original bridge, but a lighter and tougher bridge without the expensive materials. That also requires more time and the changing of tools, however. Person 1's can create new tools to allow Person 2's bridge to improve, but only to a certain degree and once again he is limited to the foundations that he is adding on to. Person 1's tools also do not help person 2 understand why they can be used to make a better bridge, only that they do for many times the price. However, the Person 1's special materials also allow the bridge to do something outside of the realm of acting purely as a bridge, like shooting gusts of wind beneath it to allow sailboats under it to go faster.

The Magitek Effect

The Magitek Effect contributes to the Retrograde Effect by substituting an advancement for magically empowered or modified equipment. However, it also works the opposite way by making models that mundane technology can build up to. It also allows the skipping of certain steps just like magic and clerical power does. The locomotive will be built in 142 PR, but with extremely expensive tools and parts. A train will not be powered solely by mundane tech until 212 PR. Magitek also uses rarer parts of its whole, is much more expensive, and harder to maintain. Versus mundane tech which uses more common parts, is cheaper, and more reliable.

Combining Magitek and Mundane Tech

The largest example of their compatibility is the aeroship which mixed magitek enhancements by lightening and stabilizing the structure of aeroships and the mundane tech contribution of hydrogen balloons, steel cladding, and their aeronautical design. It is similarly more expensive than just using mundane tech. However, the compromise is cheaper than going with full magitek. Over time, magitek parts will be changed out for mundane parts in any piece of combination technology with those keeping to a constant mixture seeking to have wilder, massive, and much more expensive effects.

The Great Flight

 The Fall of Civilization and its Effects on Technology

The Aelthi Empire of old caused a new dark age when their empire fled for the unknown in millennia past. This was an Empire whose designs were based upon pure magic and enchantment without the physical restrictions of the Duerthi's runes or the magitek that would come later. They invented crystal balls that could peer into vast distances and speak to others remotely, great magic power fields that supplied energy to the empire's denizens, and some have said they knew of ways to fully integrate themselves into the force of magick to ascend. They held mastery over sorcery and incantation. Their armies are said to have potential to match the warmachines of the third epoch of Flame. However, when their empire fled all that knowledge was lost or obscured in tomes neglected or simply impossible to read. The relatively primitive civilizations that developed into the modern nations of the world had to learn how to rise into what Central Tys is now today. Over the course of ten thousand years, the Kinds went through the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and the age of steel that was cut short by the age of flame. They had help in advancing in new ways and relearning the ways of the old masters of the known world and ironically they were either related to the same ways that causes the Retrograde Effect. Certain tech had the basis for it formed in old Aelthi forges. Those Duerthi that survived the conquest of their mountainholds sold or shared freely what their civilization knew, although the Duerthi kingdoms and republics had always lagged extremely behind the Aelthi due to the suppression of any attempts to advance that could be seen as trying to usurp the true master Kind of the planet. Magic also helped in this regard, as it was used not as a skipping stone but rather a facilitator. Those fields it would attempt to innovate on when related to technological advancement were more horizontal branches and modulating improvements than quick skips forward. That is when those fields that are purely magical in nature weren't focused upon, but those often only advance magicians and what abilities they personally possess. Since the fall, very little of the old has been regained and much of the lost gives way to new ideas and tools. The Kinds instead march forward in their way, but those that are enterprising or wish to find great advantages for themselves may peer upon the works of the old masters of the world.