Chapter 1218 - 1146: Identifying the Problem
"Is no one going to speak?" Horn’s gaze swept over the cardinals and the relevant senior engineers present as he lightly tapped the table with his knuckles. "I’ve even made an exception to allow you to smoke in the meeting room."
The Stag Chamber at the Holy Seat Mansion was filled with a choking mix of scents.
The burnt smell of tobacco, the rust of the brass heating pipes, and the damp autumn air wafting in through the window.
The September rain carried a faint chill, slanting against the transparent glass and flowing like a spider’s web.
The pale gray sky hung low, pressing down on the spire of the Holy Seat Mansion, making it hard to breathe.
Chief Cardinal Madlan held an extinguished pipe between his fingers, his gaze fixed intently on the motorcycle design sprawled open on the table.
Sitting on both sides of the long table were rows of high monks from the Holy Alliance, from the Saint Vault Master to the Exorcist Leader, they had all come.
Apart from those sitting, there were also those standing, all leaders of various projects and institutes.
Including many elite engineers and scholars, all here because of the motorcycle explosion incident.
Madlan spoke slowly: "I have an idea, call Edwin over, have her recite the plans Kapen took, would that work?"
Horn shook his head: "Edwin can’t memorize everything; memory input takes time, at most she can restore the first generation for you."
"What about Novia? Can’t she manipulate metal? Just call her over since it’s a prototype," asked Tilara, the Agricultural Department head.
"Novia can manipulate metal, but she can only handle large parts.
If she could craft those high-precision parts by hand, she would have been called already.
Unless she had Lady Hilov’s microscopic vision divine art, which she clearly does not," a senior engineer said, spreading his hands helplessly.
"What about divination then?"
"Divination was already included, besides, we’ve already used the dreamless divination earlier, and the continuous use will only increase errors."
In fact, continuous iterative divination on the same issue is very likely to cause overfitting.
If divination were all-powerful, Black Snake Bay would have taken off long ago.
This world, though flawed everywhere, is still somehow reasonable, existing with an impossible triangle where you can’t have it all.
With Madlan and Tilara leading, everyone finally began to speak one by one.
But each proposal was quickly refuted by another.
The problem snowballed, growing larger and larger.
The Stag Chamber seemed to carry a curse of discord, the meeting room noise growing denser like the rain outside.
"Then we can only draw manpower from elsewhere, right? Can the Agricultural Department support a bit?"
"Why should craftsmen be taken from our Agricultural Department? Our manpower is very tight too."
"Your Agricultural Department’s machines are insignificant, aren’t they? Are they more important than our spring machine vehicles?"
"I don’t like hearing that. What do you mean by that? Are you saying our Agricultural Department isn’t as important as your Industrial Department?"
"Uh huh."
"Uh huh your mom! Wasn’t it your Industrial Department that caused this mess? Why should our Agricultural Department bear the responsibility?"
"Wasn’t it Cheka that caused the mess? What does this have to do with our Industrial Department?"
"When did Cheka cause a mess? Do we Cheka have enough manpower? Earlier, when we were preparing to expand manpower, wasn’t it your Holy Court that disagreed?"
"Manpower is secondary; with such a large flow of people now, materials are blocked, how can we transport them over..."
"Earlier, when transporting minerals from Cold Spring Castle, they kept pushing and refusing, now it’s probably even harder. Are those remnants of the Steel Guild going to die or not?"
"Boom!"
With a loud bang on the table, the dense sound of argument suddenly halted, and it was Chief Cardinal Madlan who had slammed the table.
"Mind your behavior, don’t you see His Grace is still here?" Having been the chief cardinal for so many years, Madlan was still quite authoritative.
With Horn’s sharp gaze adding to it, under the watchful eyes of the stag, the people who were about to start fighting reluctantly returned to their original seats.
Only then did Madlan finally place his pipe on the table, his voice hoarse as if grated by sandpaper: "Let’s list the current problems one by one first, see which ones can be solved, which ones are deadlocks.
We can’t just dash around like headless flies, hitting a wall every time we think of a solution."
"I’ll start with the matter of parts production." Hilov picked up a charcoal pencil, "The Holy Alliance has the Gray Furnace Town workshop area, manufacturing ordinary parts isn’t much of a problem, but the largest issue is precision."
Currently, the precision of spring machine vehicles relies entirely on Dwarf craftsmanship, quite like the early eighth-grade fitters from Horn’s hometown.
Although the Holy Alliance is gradually promoting lathes and attempting to replace artisans with lathes, they still can’t phase them out.
Because the Holy Alliance’s technology is still far from reaching Earth’s modern level, not even Earth’s modern age was able to phase out the group of fitters.
Assembly, scraping, grinding, marking... These fitter tasks, the Holy Alliance has not yet found ways for lathes to completely replace them.
Like the templates, molds, and gauges that perished in the sea of flames, they rely on Dwarf craftsmanship for precise processing.
Only then can template molds gauges be placed on machine tools for mass production.
Now those things are all gone, you can’t just recreate them at will, Horn’s level of industrialization hasn’t reached that point yet.
"Can these things be crafted out in ten days?"
No one spoke, Horn waited three minutes before finally speaking in disappointment: "Then onto the next issue."
René stepped forward, pulling a folded paper from his pocket and tossing it onto the table: "This morning, outside the military zone of Gray Furnace Town at Joan of Arc Castle, we captured two passengers suspected of being Flanlaya spies.