The more I think on it, the more the situation seems to be a hybrid between the first world war on earth, and the cold war. It lacks similarities with the cold war because there are no neutral territories that are being fought over and there isn't that much of an ideological divide. One side allows for more national freedom than the other, but there isn't actually much of a political difference between individual nations operations.

In a similar vein, we aren't quite at a prequel to world wars, as the societies aren't industrialized enough. They're in the process of industrializing, to be sure, but if war broke out right now, it'd be closer to the Napoleonic wars. There just isn't enough machinery to actually arm enough people to really operate on a world war scale. A few dozen tanks and a few hundred artillery is enough for a few battles maybe, but they aren't replaceable enough to actually fight a long war, at least not yet. If war broke out, within a few months, tactics would revert to the older style of fighting on most fronts, since the industrial supplies would run out and wouldn't be able to be replaced fast enough.

Though the average citizens probably aren't aware of it, I suspect that their side's leadership is just as aware as we are about the potential for mass death via silver fluorite. Back when we were invaded, I used chemical warfare on the armies that invaded us. While it'd be hard to deliver, a silver fluorite weapon would be absolutely devastating to a population. I have long since informed our leadership about the potential for such a weapon, but also said that unless the other side shows intent to murder large populations, I'm reluctant to develop the weapon myself. It's arguably just a dirty bomb, full of radiation and with none of the destructive pressure and heat. Anyone unfortunate to be near it will suffer an agonizingly slow death.

So, in a sense similar to the cold war, there is probably some amount of fear from both sides that escalating conflict too far would result in mutual destruction. To some degree, the truly terrible aspect of silver fluorite weapons is the ease of building the silver fluorite crystal. After that, you could encase it in thick layers of quartz, and then send out a tank with it inside, and have the quartz removed at the destination. It's far less complicated than a normal nuclear weapon would be, and it'd be fairly easy to scale up production. The fluorite growth process is somewhat complicated, but not nearly as complex and energy dependent as refining uranium would be.

I would argue that this is perhaps the biggest divergence in military development and technology from earth, where there was no magic. Every other technology I've made so far has, for the most part, been using magic to shortcut development of devices that harnessed other fundamental forces for energy or work. It could be argued that this is just a way of shortcutting the radioactive portion of nuclear weapons, but it feels quite different in application. After a nuclear weapon goes off, it takes a few days for most of the radioactivity dissipate. Dirty bombs were tested but never deployed on earth, and they're exceptionally heinous devices. Of course, without a world war to really conceptualize the kind of horrors that these sorts of weapons actually inflict on the populace, the other side may not be as reluctant to use them as I'd hope.

Instead of developing such weapons, I'm instead going to focus on weapons that would not only win a conventional war, but also would be capable of disabling delivery devices for any potential silver fluorite weapon. The downside to any large fluorite crystal is that they're brittle, heavy, and when broken are far less effective than when they are whole. That means that you won't actually get much use out of flinging or launching it at an enemy. It has to be carefully delivered. Which makes it vulnerable to being destroyed preemptively.

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In that regard, there are three main weapon fronts that I'd like to develop on. The first one is straightforward and should actually need less input from me, developing better ships. Our current ships would be the equivalent of destroyers from just before world war one. There is a lot of potential to develop larger and stronger dedicated warships that have no shipping capabilities, and are fully dedicated to maritime combat.

The second technology would compliment the first in the form of digital computing. It doesn't need to be overly complicated to the level of a full digital revolution, but for a large warship to be able to automatically output artillery calculations from instruments on the ship could drastically improve the functionality and response times of the warship. It'd also allow for encoded radio transmissions, which could keep us a step ahead of any enemy spying.

The third technology is aircraft. There are quite a few things that worry me about the idea of developing aircraft that we'd need to overcome, which is why it's third on this list. Even though it's arguably the most powerful of the three technologies for warfare applications in the shorter term, there are so many things that would have to be developed to enable it's practical use that I can't actually give a good estimate for how long it might take to develop. The other two technologies, by comparison, are actually already largely solved.

I've hired on a few more faculty over this break, including a few people who are retired from both dwarven and human military command roles. They aren't actually going to be teaching military tactics, as a few countries already have their own version of officer or command training. Instead, their role will be in helping me direct and organize the testing of new weapons, and to be a resource for anyone doing military related research in both clubs and independently.

I'm sure the beginning of this next semester will be somewhat hectic with there being additional students, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to start the design process for a larger ship in that time. One potential idea that I have that wouldn't have been possible without all the data collection we did on our large mana crystals and the potential power plant layouts is to add a large mana crystal as a core to a capital ship, such that other smaller ships can operate nearby to it as a fleet without affecting each other's power too much. Of course, that large mana crystal would need to be heavily fortified as it would be a single point of failure for a whole fleet.

This has additional benefits beyond just increasing the power of our own fleet, however. One side effect of our large mana crystals is that an extended area beyond the ship has low mana, at least on the surface. We would need to actually take measurements deep underwater to determine how much of an effect it has deep below, but doing it this way may prevent leviathans from ever getting close enough to be a threat to our capital ships. Further, in the event of combat with an enemy, if we size things well, the maximum range of our guns could potentially fire all the way into the low mana region. This means that enemy ships trying to fight would actually be mana starved while attempting to fight our fleet.

There are some high risks involved with this though. If a leviathan does make it into the mana crystal's zone of influence, it'll likely make a beeline for the ship. All evidence I've seen points to the fact that most animals have a sense for high mana areas, and want to get as close as they can to them, occasionally endangering themselves in the process. To combat this, it'd be wise to develop both sonar and torpedoes to help combat leviathans. After all, we're actually fairly reliant on maritime control to connect our three main parts of our alliance, and the additional control would help prevent any sort of sea-based invasion for both us and the dwarves. Further, there are a lot of larger cities on the coast of the inland sea on the human continent in both our alliance and the opposing one.

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