Dilandu wrote:The main thing that i found especially hard to believe in Charisian industrialisation, is that they just "skipped" all this stages; only a few years ago they still used water wheels and have no metric system or arabi numbers, and after only a few years, they suddenly have a industry, that Earth nations took years to build!
Simply speaking - they could not do this so quickly. Even with all specs provided, they could not just decide "oh, let's build a large steam hammer for steel battleships construction!" They need to build an industry chain, that was capable to provide materials, tools and equipment to build this steam hammer. And this chain also need sub-chains to work.
You forgot that the industry was guided by people who know what's going on, have access to Owl, and while they do let their inventors experiment and learn for a while, they are under heavy pressure (from COGA and from what might awake from under the Temple) to do it fast, so
any time they really need it, they can get Owl to make them correct blueprints and thus skip a lot of intermediate phases.
In fact, they knew (starting from Merlin, then others as they were added to the inner circle) about the need for the entire chain of industry, and Howsmyn experimented with that even before he knew. Merlin was pushing and prodding to get them to accept new ideas, and thus compressed several centuries into several years.
The whole thing has a government on top that knows what it's doing and that government is at the same time efficient and benevolent. How many corrupted politicians are there in Charis government? None since the Duke of Tirian.
That, I think, is the greatest advantage they have, and the reason Merlin chose Charis (in addition to them being an island nation, so COGA could not start land war from day 0, which gave Charis time to prepare).
Even that was not accidental; there is a whole order of monks/priests who knew most of the story, who advised kings of Charis for generations and a number of those kings were introduced to the full story too (or as much as the order itself knew). No wonder that those kings kept their government clean.
Compare that to any government in the real world - US or any other country. You'll find it very hard to find even a single honest and competent politician. In fact, if there ever was one such, he would have found it very hard to get into any significant position.
So, we have a competent and honest government, that knows what it's doing, has access to Owl's database, with info equal to a major TF university, Owl is by now a real AI capable of independent scientific research, including researching a top-end PICA from scratch, without even reverse-engineering Merlin, so producing blueprints for 18th/19th century machines is a piece of cake for him/her/it.
Blueprints that can skip 100% of the problems humans found in the real world, and in practice, if they don't skip some of that, it's just to let Charisians get some practice.
And the government will provide all the money that's needed, and they all are under the pressure of a serious war.
Under such circumstances, yes, I believe you can do it all in several years.