Well. You won't be wielding submarines or nuclear power plants. If the people whom know about those fields of science and engineering died in the nuclear fire.
So far, I have been the only one - whom has stated and explained how my society managed to retain Old World Knowledge. Not only in using 21st Century tech, but also improving on it. And slowly developing more themselves.
Just saying that you definitely arent the only one who explained how the society retained the old knowledge and even had a chance improving it while the rest of the world went to hell. And also being able to jump on the mining/manufacturing/creating whatever train as soon as the nation started to form.
So far, I have been the only one - whom has stated and explained how my society managed to retain Old World Knowledge. Not only in using 21st Century tech, but also improving on it. And slowly developing more themselves.
It's worth pointing out that while perhaps on some level retaining knowledge on how computers work does not equate being able to use that technology. First and foremost, the technical means we possess today is an effect of globalism and international trade, with materials like natural rubber imported from South America being a stepping stone to the production of artificial rubber from oil, to be used in any variety of sealing applications in combustion engines, tires, fuel hoses, and any application where the flexibility to take movement and varying levels of stress and heat in a given system where more rigid lines like copper or iron would run up against a certain point and not being made for those applications sheer or break.
Computer technology too is built on the backs of materials mined largely in Africa, assembled by more computers in delicate work in an manufacturing system of decreasing size and increasing efficiency.
Every modern tool and amenity - no matter how mundane it seems - is built off an interlinked architecture of equally advanced tools, or tools built in part through global trade. This architecture itself incredibly vulnerable in a nuclear event that would not only damage local energy production but also local manufacturing capabilities. The rise in sea levels also included in this RP would do an additional number to whatever means is left by drowning the large industrial ports and rendering the commercial shipping dead. Immediately after, the ability to receive new fuel oil to run international shipping to obtain those far away resources in a commercially viable way is gone and what is left is on severe short supply.
Consider also that for the most part fuel refineries - particularly at least in the United States - is coastal infrastructure so that newly refined fuel can be put directly in oil freighters for distribution into the world market. Many of the key industrial ports for that purpose is gone.
Which comes back around to the before point: you may know how to build a tank, but you can not possibly run a tank. The energy needs to run a factory to build a tank or to begin manufacturing the necessary replacement parts to operate a pre-war tank is out of the hands of every nation. Access to diesel fuel - particularly in Europe - would be difficult or even impossible since all viable fuel reserves are in the north sea and any remaining oil drilling platforms are probably too flooded or at an unsafe level given current sea levels and how this would be an effect in way of storms, never mind the industrial apparatus that would manufacture the tooled parts for these drills would also have been destroyed in the nuclear fire. The materials for computer boards in the targeting and aiming systems in these old tanks would have suffered degradation over time from the elements, never mind that without a running engine the batteries on board a tank may not be able to sustain life any longer than they would without an engine running to keep the computers functional for the first week, EMPs aside.
An event as large scale as this would be setting society way back.
Hence why 400 years was taken to get us back onto some moderate level of society.
At the cost of millions of life here and there.
I never read it as 400 years as a return to modernity. Just four-hundred after the fact. But this trivializes the matter as well, because after four-hundred years of coming back from the brink too, how would you propose returning to obtaining the raw materials needed to supply a modern society given that after a century of exploitation, much of the raw materials we can obtain it is only with engineering modern to our time?
The depths and capabilities of drilling for oil has been a process necessary to pursue supplies of oil found deeper underground. We cap entire mountains to dig out coal and iron. We have to go further and deeper, even for the primitive resources like iron and copper. The old world is economically devoid of much of the raw material for its own society from centuries of exploitation by ancient and medieval society, how do you expect to get anything new from the world? Or from where land - especially in the British isles - is at more of a premium now than it is today with much of the former arable land under water and to also keep on claiming mineral exploitation.
We humans are rather resilient creatures - and we have yet to scratch some avenues of research and technology. Due to either moral, religious, economic or political reasons.
In all honesty, conflict breeds progress - and once the initial shock is survived, mankind would usually either find new ways. If something proves costly or unable to be reached - say coal or land - then you adapt and start developing new ways or you die.
When basic survival is on the table - you either adapt or you don't survive.
We humans are rather resilient creatures - and we have yet to scratch some avenues of research and technology. Due to either moral, religious, economic or political reasons.
In all honesty, conflict breeds progress - and once the initial shock is survived, mankind would usually either find new ways. If something proves costly or unable to be reached - say coal or land - then you adapt and start developing new ways or you die.
When basic survival is on the table - you either adapt or you don't survive.
Communication also creates progress, much less conflict. We got what we have today because of large international networks of dynamic character. We all share our own progress in fields to others who find the areas to re-investigate. Not that we've been at war with one another that demands progress, that a broader field of researchers was thrown together to see this progress happen.
But also what is important is the social environment progress takes place in. The reason Europe wasn't a hotbed of scientific or even philosophical advancement for the centuries in the middle ages wasn't that they weren't actively competing with one another; they will killing themselves for centuries. But that there was no solid grounds under which anyone could carry out progress-minded policy and development. And that on top of that, the social conditions of medieval society meant that very few people had the means to pursue education, the church didn't actually have that big of an effect.
The same conditions can likewise be reflected on Africa, where with much longer human habitation than the rest of the world and some of the wealthiest land in terms of agriculture and raw material has been at conflict with itself for thousands of years, which surely has not lent itself to great leaps in technological progress. And while areas of the continent did experience sudden lurches "forward" it was never a permanent experience and either stayed put or withdrew.
The following shock too of a great crisis would also do little in way of being another means of advancing humanity either. After being sacked and invaded, and subject to its own natural disasters Rome and Italy became - and in a way, still to this day - are a shell of Italy's former glory. Since the dissolution of the German Kingdom of Lombardy in 774 and clear into the mid 19th century Italy has only ever been a conglomerate of petty princedoms and Republics without any regional cohesion, this with the legacy of one of the most advanced societies of the classical period: of Rome.
The Maya too, which built a society whose complexity has only recently been revealed to be far larger than we anticipated fell quietly out of its greatness into the soft night of unrealized calamity before the Spanish even arrived and the Maya community has not yet re-asserted its former greatness and scale, human improvisation and adaptability aside.
Charlemagne's Empire has never been realized again since the fall of the Karling dynasty and Western Europe is still now a handful of independent nations despite short-term successes at matching that scale (Napoleon).
Great Empires have rarely ever been realized after their fall at the hands of even human calamity, let alone natural. What you're really saying trivializes the matter to suit specific ends to power on your side of the equation and still overlooks the immense complexity of the global trade networks and industrial complex in any field that allows the present world to exist. None of which came about with the Second World War as the sole reason, but of the birth of and the development of international partnerships of scientists, engineers, and economic groundwork over an area far larger than a single country. And that over this past hundred years the economic development of these countries has progressed beyond the rigors of an agricultural economy into a middle-class industrial or service economy.
One of the particular stunning characteristics of Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods was the closing of the gaps between the wealthy feudal nobility and the former serf population to expand the bourgeoisie middle class, newly minted wealthy farmers or merchants able to gobble up the wealth lost by a dying upper-class at the end of the middle ages. If conflict breeds innovation than the middle ages should have seen leaps to the scale of rocket science across all areas of society. But when the old warrior elite began losing its relevance in European society and the material needs were met for broader literacy, so to did Europe's development towards modernity and its own investigations into the natural science, its charting of the world, and its expansion of markets to bring in more materials for its burgeoning and exploitative middle class to utilize. And this done in the 12,000 years since the collapse of the classical equivalent of the modern world: the Roman Empire.
To expand too, mass-production has been an inestimable boon on modern society by organizing human labor in such a way more can be made with less. The advent of the industrial revolution evolved the before-stated re-orientation of European class structure from a economic society less dependent on agricultural produce and workshop labor to the large manufactury where the world's tools, instruments, and commodities can be produced cheaply and quickly. While early on it had more of an impact on the professional tradesmen by relegating the work they did professionally into a series of route tasks that could be done unprofessionally with as much quality - or at least more quantity than before with the added bonus of parts being more readily replaceable before following standardization - the ground work for industrialism's following triumphs would begin to play its greater role across all of society.
As soon as mechanization was perfected the large part of human society could then be taken from the poor rural community and added to the... poor urban one as more unskilled labor. Or at the least old farming families could produce more food with less work, creating an economy of time never before seen which could be saved on putting themselves through college or the next generation in college contributing to an expansion of the intelligentsia, a second boom so-to-say after post Black-Plague Europe and the changing social dynamic during the 16th and 18th centuries; this time in the 19th and early 20th century. The growth of the college and university going class, and thus contribution to the degree-holding class as a means to advance society continued on with societal shifts like the sharp raise of industrial wage growth prompted by Union activity or even Henry Ford's five-dollar an hour salary creating the blue-collar middle-class. And even today with automation taking over more of the factory space there's a fifty or sixty-year of human development where in the west it is more economical to get a professional college degree to get into the high-skilled workforce which is really driving technical progress ahead.
By laying out this present model the point is clear: that a population with more people free and open creates the opportunity that those idle will advance a field of human society.
Anthropologically this is asserted as what made humanity go from simple village life to complex city-state life and eventually more and more complex political models resulting in the end the nation state, as created from a group of the population who can be idle for much of the year or all of the year because they are supported in whole or in part by the surplus of society's own production.
A collapse of automation and the mechanical farm would mean that far more brain-trustees would be forced to work in the fields or the workshops using their labor time less to advance the current state and more to simply maintain the status quo. Or, you know: making sure their family and community doesn't starve. This is assuming that these people don't already starve in their intellectual idleness.
This comes down as the root ultimately of my argument. That the collapse of modern technical manufacture and harvest destroys the opportunities of labor savings in fully mechanical farms, and fully or largely automated factories, that forces more and more of what'd be today's "professional" workforce to take up the plow and hammer. They're not there anymore to re-invent the tank, or the battleship, or the power plant, or nuclear fission. Materially, as determined by their immediate circumstances, they got to keep themselves alive.
Let's do it. I'd imagine you'd have contact with Seme mostly, as it's basically right on the border. I do agriculture there. Feasting sounds tasty, trading sounds useful, and I'd even propose an alliance.
Im all for an alliance, the North Africans west of the Suez are agreeable people. The city states East of the Suez may be difficult, not hostile but just annoying.
Im all for an alliance, the North Africans west of the Suez are agreeable people. The city states East of the Suez may be difficult, not hostile but just annoying.
You're talking about your people here? One of my settlements is on the east of the Suez, around the far north Saudi Arabia area. Maybe there'd be significant cultural crossover?
Although my people are Anarchists at heart, they're still logical enough to see that alliances should not be squandered. Especially with a neighbour so close.
Okay, my idea so far. Very rough, and heavily WIP. Honestly just posting this so it's still here tomorrow and not deleted as a draft.
Nation Name: The Free United Nations (TFUN)
Flag/Banner(s): None, yet.
Political Environment and Government Type: I'm going to put this in hider dot point things to organise my thoughts a little more.
Warlords act as rulers over their individual cities. They are bound by The Free Uniting Pact (TFUP) to enforce very few laws in their city. By custom, if a Warlord is killed, their killer takes rule. This is unlikely if the Warlord is well liked, which they'd better be for fear of assassination. If a Warlord is not killed and dies of sickness or age, the first person to assume the mark of power for that city becomes the new Warlord (this can be a throne, a staff, a crown, shit like that). This usually has a ritual before it, involving competition with other candidates, but there's nothing apart from stigma to stop someone forgoing this ritual.
So basically justice is fit to be served by any five people not involved in the perceived wrongdoing. If these five people disagree they will have to make the vote unanimous in any way they see fit (debate, murder, threat) Justice is complicated. The large majority of the people follow a loose moral code, generally something along the lines of "Everything is appropriate at different times.". Apart from this strange cultural habit, there is no formal justice system.
This is the only city protected from the inside by TFUP. If anyone within TFUN attacks Jajeme, they will face the wrath of all the other cities. The Warlord of Jajeme doesn't follow normal rules either. The Warlord has several students he has chosen, usually about 5. These students take it in turns to run certain aspects of the city so the Warlord can evaluate them. When the Warlord dies any way the students appeal to the Warlords of the other capitals, who must make a unanimous vote on a student (again, by any means.). The Warlord of Jajeme ensures the safety of TFUN as a whole, and enforces the rules put in place by TFUP.
The rules enforced by TFUP are as follows:
It is our responsibility to punish any Warlord who neglects his responsibilities.
It is our responsibility to defend Jajeme.
It is our responsibility to forget conflict if Jajeme asks, until Jajeme sees fit to resume the conflict.
It is our responsibility to defend cities of TFUN from outside forces.
It is a Warlord's responsibility to only control one capital at once.
It is a citizen's responsibility to dethrone an unworthy Warlord.
Location On Map:
Demographics (Religious and Racial): TFUN is a melting pot of different ethnicities. This is a breakdown only of the most common:
East African (28%)
Arabic (22%)
Eastern European (15%)
Central African (12%)
West Asian (14%)
Other (9%)
TFUN follow a strange religion where all gods are accepted as true and real. No god is able to contradict another god because its teachings only apply to the followers of that god. Demographics (Other)
Culture:
Important States and Cities:
The capital of TFUN, and founded as the free uniting pact was formed. A city large enough to be a state itself. Centerpoint of all other TFUN cities
The most inland and out of touch city of TFUN. Fairly undiverse, but they became wealthy with the discovery of large amounts of metals in the craters surrounding what was The Great Rift Valley.
The gateway to the east, Eljawhera is a very diverse city. The center of trade with the east, if trade is occurring. Anything that wants to get to TFUN's core by sea has to get past Eljawhera and Jajanhart.
A formidable military force with a decent navy. Jajanhart is a chaotic city that erupts quickly, and with force. Usually trades salt and seafood, as it is perched between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
(Pronounced SH-ehm) Is a largely agricultural city due to the minerals found in the soil. However, as the main defense against the Mare Nostrum it still holds an army comparable in size to Jajanhart. Center of trade for eastern and southern Europe.
History:
It's 1:00 here. I will edit this with a finish tomorrow.