Unveiling the Tractor and the Seed Drill

[Outside the West Gate, Across the Minuma, the Farming District]

Yoshida, the retainer in charge of agriculture, and Kobayashi, the one in charge of machinery, were giving a demonstration of a power seed drill, that is, a sowing machine to be hauled behind a tractor.

"By using this power seed drill, even an unskilled hand can sow seed evenly. We will be deploying these to each formally established village in turn, in time for the wheat-sowing season at the end of autumn, so please learn how to operate it."

A small library utility vehicle had been converted, fitted not with rubber tires but with wheels that looked like sections sliced off a clay drainpipe, and behind this ungainly machine some strange contraption was being dragged along. The body carried a frame made of dungeon structure, so that even if it tipped over, it would not end in catastrophe.

"Regrettably, a single unit is not enough, so we will be using it together with hand seed drills and hand sowing. However, going forward, we plan to establish a system whereby villages, or individual farmers, can borrow the agricultural machinery they need from the dungeon, or purchase it outright."

[Core Room]

"Marie-san, so we've finally got to the agricultural tractor."

"This year's goal is, with the cooperation of the immigrant craftsmen, to finish the first hundred or two hundred units and place one in each completed village. That's about the size of it. Even with the difference that our power is mainly electric, our situation isn't much different from the Taishō or early Shōwa eras, when mass production was difficult, so we can't manage any truly large-scale production."

"If only there were a machine-tool factory dungeon somewhere."

"As we've already begun doing, we'll have no choice but to build up our machine tools one by one with the desktop NC lathe and 3D printer from the partwork encyclopedia. For parts that are simple in shape and composition and can tolerate some dimensional error, we can use dungeon structure, but such parts are limited."

"Dungeon structure is sturdy, though."

"It has a large margin of dimensional error, it can't be machined, and we can only make things that are simply hard. Also, an iron pipe we can make if we have scrap iron, but timber, for instance, is a mass of cells, so we can't deform it with the dungeon's functions."

"Can't we join up summoned furniture lumber into larger pieces of timber?"

"That's impossible. Not as dungeon structure, no, but if it's glued laminated timber, processed and fixed with adhesive, we could make it. Naturally, that would require a proper sawmill."

"So, will this tractor of ours actually be of use?"

"As it stands, the constraints of a converted vehicle mean its performance is inferior to a genuine farm machine, but even so, it should save more labor than doing things by hand. Going forward, over the winter we'll summon and overhaul a small truck, in spring deploy a combine harvester and then a rice transplanter, and eventually run them on autonomous driving with positioning done by communication keyed to the dungeon. That said, the state of fields and paddies differs completely by region and by era, so even if we build something based on otherworld books, it won't necessarily be of use. If anything, so long as we properly establish a patent system so that inventors earn an income, the farmers themselves will develop things to suit their own circumstances and spread them around."

"So you're just leaving it all to the people on the ground."

"Worker-Peasant Russia drew up five-year plans and seven-year plans and look at the state they ended up in. Tens of thousands of capitalists and self-employed proprietors develop an economy better than one genius economist. Besides, this dungeon has no economist with a doctorate, and given the specifications of dungeon monsters, summoning one would be difficult at present."

"And what about a license for the truck? There's no driving school and no instructor."

"Not just trucks, but tractors or anything else, you need a driver's license to travel on a road, and in this dungeon you can't obtain a license. So I intend to treat them not as roads but as passageways, and thereby sidestep the legal problem. As for safety, we'll secure it with the dungeon's own classes and tests."

"That somehow looks like sophistry to me."

"There are checkpoints at the three entrances to the dungeon's sphere of influence, and they aren't connected to the outside, so legally they aren't roads. If the police say no, we'll comply, but the Saitama Prefectural Police aren't going to come here from another world. And even supposing a police officer were reincarnated here, that would be a baby who is a 'former' police officer, not a police officer."

Tremendous sophistry.