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Despera
I'm just making this thread now so I can look smart if it ever actually gets made.
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well: one of the reasons i was looking forward to this is that it's an era of japanese history that i hadn't seen in anime. in fact, an era of world history i don't see much. (1920s, for those who don't know)
like, in anime you got what, the future, the present (meaning 80s to 10s depending on how old the anime is), and a sort of medieval slurry. but the 20s! that's interwar! after wwi taught everybody that now politics was going to be different and probably worse, but before the fucking apocalypse.
japan wasn't even that militaristic yet. they didn't have any of their own designed tanks, just a few they'd bought from france. their last war (not counting wwi, cos who cares what japan did in wwi) was a humiliation of the tsar based partly on fancy new technology like radios. there was a whole big political reorganization coming up just a few years out. like nine coup attempts, too.
it's like, a transitional period, man.
also: the technology. the plot of despera was going to be ain being a huge nerd about computers, or something. "but tzetze," you say, "there weren't any computers". but you're wrong, see. you know why nobody ever talks about "the inventor of the computer", except it being babbage sometimes? cos we'd been using things called "computers" that did the same sort of thing for fifty years before UNIVAC.
say you're a battleship, which is partly why i mentioned war. you wanna shoot some shit. before 1800 or so that means you got to get within fucking ramming rage, practically, because your cannon is a stupid fucking tube of iron and could very well miss the broad side of a barn. hence marines. post 1800 you have some improvements in the guns that let you hit things from, like, distance, but just to fuck you up, ships are fast now and you can't eyeball it any more.
so you invent computers! they had computers in like 1912. big mechanical things. continuous. generally fixed-function. they used them through world war two. one of the big science secrets on par with RADAR and crypto (but probably not nukes) was the aerial bomb sights, which contained computers to do the work of accounting for wind speed and the plane's angling and shit.
but mechanical things aren't great for computing. they're slow, for one, since things physically move. you have a lot of inaccuracy from friction and other effects. it would be nice to do things electronically instead. and you totally can. take a multiplier, something that takes two streams of numbers (in some form) and outputs a stream of their product (in some form). a common operation for this sort of application, especially since it also lets you square numbers, and you need that for Newtonian dynamics. The obvious, actually used, and slow and terrible way to do it was to make the two signals drive mechanical servo motors to move rheostats around, thus altering the output voltage. Variable resistors, and once you get through vacuum tubes (available to Ain), you get what else but transistors.
it's an exciting time, man!! electric digital logic was invented irl less than twenty years later, in 1937, still before the war. i was all ready to nerd out. i'm pretty sure lain is why i even know who vannevar bush is, and vannevar bush was a dude who actually built these mechanical computers. and now there's a series about those! man!!