Floating a Battleship on Minuma...?

[Core Room]

"Marie-san, since we're going to all the trouble of making a lake, how about we lay in some ships? A cargo ship could haul great loads of goods, and a battleship would help with defense."

"At present we labor under the restriction that we can summon only the library's own equipment, so the only thing we could summon is what one might call a 'library boat.' What's more, those are not electrically powered, so we cannot procure fuel for them."

"And building one isn't really an option either, is it."

"A ship, of all things. Sunday carpentry would only invite a drowning. A ship needs design and construction both, and that requires not one or two but a great many specialized engineers and craftsmen."

"If we summoned a university or a vocational school with a shipbuilding department, mightn't we get hold of that kind of talent?"

"The design of the ship itself we could likely manage by summoning a naval-architecture or ocean-systems-engineering specialist, an additional named-ordinary monster, a bit pricey though they'd be. But to actually build the ship, the 'industrial base' constraint rears its head, as it has so many times before. It's true the Shiso (Asura) we can summon possess twenty-first-century technical know-how, but everything obtainable in this world, materials and tools alike, is at an Edo-period level. All we can summon is the library's equipment and the supplements that come with magazines."

"So a ship is too tall an order."

"Take just the steel frames and plating that make up a hull. We would have to prospect for a mine, dig out the iron ore, reduce it with the high heat of a nuclear reactor, and then process it further, which calls for a sprawling complex of factories. Only once the 'Million-Chōbu Reclamation Plan' is complete, and we have spent decades cultivating talent and erecting factories, would it at last become possible."

"Setting aside the eternal ten years, there's no chance of having a battleship ready before the next enemy raid, I take it?"

"None. Besides, a battleship is a monstrous money-pit; even the productive power of a million chōbu could never sustain one. And to begin with, Minuma's water is too shallow, so it would run aground."

The productive power of a million chōbu amounts to 14 million koku of rice and 7.5 million koku of wheat, enough to feed about 14 million people even with no exports. Yet to keep a single battleship requires, by the reckoning, a population of 30 to 40 million even for the advanced industrial nations of Britain, America, and France. Argentina, holding two battleships on a population of 50 million, is the exception that proves the rule, being among the wealthiest countries in the world.

"Setting battleships aside, then, when it comes to ships we could actually build as things stand…"

"A small wooden boat fitted with a motor repurposed from the bookmobile, I should think. For use on Minuma, that degree of vessel would actually be the easier to handle. Still, even a wooden hull can't be cobbled together from repurposed furniture, since the components fall hopelessly short in size, so we would need to spend several decades growing the timber ourselves. Or else mount an expedition all the way to 'Tanzawa Hills.'"

"That was the dungeon in the depths of the Land of Sumō, if I recall."

"By all accounts an exceedingly unpleasant dungeon, crawling with everything from leeches and ticks to venomous snakes and giant hornets, a place even adventurers balk at entering. I myself don't mind most insects, but I cannot well leave the dungeon untended. There is supposedly a timber-producing dungeon in the depths of Mōda in Sō as well, so Echizen-ya said, but that too sounds like no place one can lay hands on easily."

Marie, being a Named monster, can at least leave the dungeon herself.

"At that rate, the tanuki's mud-boat from 'Kachi-Kachi Yama' might be easier to come by."

"…! Indeed, a dungeon structure would have the strength for it. And for the moment there are no USA G.I. beastfolk about, so it wouldn't be sunk the way it is in 'Kachi-Kachi Yama.' Though of course, the instant it left the dungeon's sphere of influence it would crumble away."

"Once we summon a shipbuilding engineer, let's have them look into things along those lines. As for a tanuki beastfolk to pole the boat… there are no end of those in the Land of Ke."