The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Lucas didn’t bother standing up. He dipped his quill into the dark inkwell, gave it a firm tap against the glass rim, and turned to a blank page in his heavy ledger.

"Right, lets move to next requirements on the list,my lord. Ironbreaker, Brakka and Dray," he said. "Three separate requests, three separate departments. How many columns do you want?"

"One."

Lucas looked up. "They asked for entirely different things, my lord. Ironbreaker wants tolerance. Brakka wants a bearing that doesn’t seize under load. Dray wants surveying instruments for a hull eight hundred and twenty feet long."

"They asked for different things because each of them guessed at what would fix it," Lucien said, pulling up the Exchange interface above the desk. "None of them is short of skill. Brakka is the best hand on a lathe in this territory and Dray has built ships for forty years. They’re missing knowledge — something already worked out somewhere else that nobody here has ever been told."

"You can’t know that yet. You haven’t read a single entry."

"I know it because all three of them described the same symptom and none of them could name the cause. Ironbreaker says seven in ten and doesn’t know why. Brakka says the steel is cursed. Dray says his men are careless and doesn’t believe it." Lucien opened the tab. "Men who are short of tools can tell you exactly which tool. Men who are short of knowledge can only tell you what keeps going wrong."

Lucas held the quill still for a moment, then drew one line down the page instead of three.

"Then price them together," he said. "And I’ll tell the council it was my notion, because if those three learn they’ve been sharing a budget, I’d like some credit for having survived it.Lets start."

Unified Fabrication Doctrine

Origin: Mars Forge-World Archive, Adeptus Mechanicus

Requirements: Tier IV Infrastructure, Holy Tech-Priest

Cost: 96,000 System Points

Details: A massive collection of four hundred volumes detailing every machine tool, tolerance standard, and material process known to the forge worlds. Written in holy machine chant and only readable aloud by a holy tech-priest. Questioning the purpose of any step is considered heresy against the Machine.

Summary: An exhaustive reference answering every manufacturing question your realm could face for centuries, within the volume challenging a single instruction risks conversion into a servitor.

"Ninety-six thousand," Lucien said. "Near enough a year of everything we earn."

"That’s not my objection." Lucas folded his arms. "Does it say why the artillery bore is of specific figure?"

"It would give ironbreaker the figure,not the reason."

"Then it’s no use to him. Ironbreaker asked me that question himself last winter and wouldn’t leave my office until he’d worked the answer out on my wall." He drew a line through the entry. "Hand that dwarf a book that forbids the question and he’d burn it on his own anvil to see what colour it went."

INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING SCIENCE

Origin: Kassa Fabrication, Systems Alliance

Requirement: Tier IV Infrastructure

Exchange Price: 62,000 System Points

Notes: Complete production science for precision components at fleet scale. Machine tools throughout are field-assisted — the cutting is held true by a mass-effect field rather than by the rigidity of the machine itself. Roughly two-thirds of the practice is unusable without element zero.

Remark: A masterclass in advanced manufacture, two-thirds of which explains how to hold a cut steady using a miracle element your planet does not possess and your miners will never find.

"The space rock," Lucas said flatly.

"The space rock."

"Sixty-two thousand for a manual where two pages in three need minerals we can’t dig." He crossed it off. "And the third that works?"

"Unusable, we’d pay two hundred days of revenue to buy a scrap." Lucas moved his quill down the page. "Next please."

ADVANCED PRECISION MANUFACTURING AND METROLOGY

Origin: Earth (Sol-3), Information Age

Requirement: Tier III Infrastructure, An artificial machine capable of millions of calculation per second

Exchange Price: 24,000 System Points

Notes: Machine tool design and tolerance practice at the limit of mechanical achievement. Assumes benches on foundations isolated from the building, workshops held at a constant temperature, and a machine doing calculations as it works. Roughly half the practice is unexecutable in an ordinary workshop.

Remark: Teaches your smiths to hold a tolerance the width of a red blood cell, provided the workshop sits on its own foundation and not thirty feet from a trip-hammer that shakes the teeth out of your skull every four seconds.

Lucas wrote this one down

"Twenty-four thousand. Seventy-five days." He tapped the page. "That’s a season, my lord, not a decade. Does it do what he needs?"

"It does more than he needs."

"Then what’s stopping you?"

"Isolated foundations. The floor can’t move while it is working."

"Sera’s machinists read their calipers between hammer strikes."

"I know."

"They wait for the blow, take the reading in the gap, write it down before the next one. It’s in the training. Every apprentice learns it in their first week." He set the pen down. "So this would have us pour separate footings under every bench in Titanworks and hold the building at one temperature through the year."

"We’ll do that eventually."

"Eventually. Not for seventy-five days with Dray waiting and Skyforge waiting and Cedric waiting." He left it uncrossed. "Keep it on file. Lets move to next"

PRECISION MACHINE TOOLS AND TOLERANCE PRACTICE

Origin: Earth (Sol-3), Mid-Industrial Age

Requirement: Tier II Infrastructure

Exchange Price: 7,300 System Points

Notes: Complete drawings and construction practice for toolroom machinery — precision lathe, jig borer, cylindrical grinder, honing machine. Heat treatment and dimensional stabilization. Order of operations for hardened work. Limits, fits and gauge design. Selective assembly and matched-lot grading. Long-baseline alignment and control of error accumulation across successive stations. Executable with machinery built from within the package itself.

Remark: Every method here was worked out by men in grease-stained aprons who ruined a mountain of good steel finding it, so that the buyer would not have to.

Lucien read it through twice, then a third time.

Lucas’s quill stopped short of the page. "All of it? On one book?"

"On the only book tonight written for men who have to build the machine before they can use it. Everything above it assumed the machine was already in the room."

"Then this is it my lord." Lucas wrote the figure in and underlined it.

"Yes this is it, who is next on the list" Lucien asked

"Cedric," Lucas said, turning the page. "And I’ll warn you now, my lord, his column is the longest one I wrote at that council."

"Well read it might as well listen up."

"Paired communication equipment for the agents working outside our borders. A cipher machine to replace the codebooks. Something for seeing in the night if the System has it. Listening apparatus and counter-infiltration method." He looked up. "Five requests. He asked for the most of anyone."

"Well lets see, how much we can afford" Lucien said opening the tab.

COUNTER-INFILTRATION AND INTERNAL SECURITY DOCTRINE

Origin: Imperium of Man, Ordo Hereticus pattern

Requirement: Tier IV Infrastructure, sanctioned authority

Exchange Price: 71,000 System Points

Details: Complete doctrine for detecting, tracking and eliminating hostile agents within a population. Includes informant network construction, interrogation practice, and standing procedures for population-scale screening.

Remark: Identifies every enemy agent in your territory with remarkable accuracy, alongside a substantial number of people who are simply unpopular with their neighbours.

"Seventy-one thousand," Lucien said. "And the last line is the whole of it. It works by suspecting everyone and then sorting afterwards."

"We have three hundred thousand people in this territory and a labour shortage." Lucas crossed it. "I’d rather keep the ones we have,Let’s move to next my lord."

FIELD RESONANCE COMMUNICATION SET

Origin: Kassa Fabrication, Systems Alliance

Requirement: Tier III Infrastructure

Exchange Price: 9,800 System Points

Details: Paired transmission units, encrypted at source. Range is planetary. Cannot be intercepted by any method below equivalent technology.

Remark: Perfectly secure communication spanning the entire globe with trusted for 3 centuries by the alliance.

"Nine thousand eight hundred," Lucas said. "We hold eight hundred and fifteen."

"It’s not close."

"It’s not close, and it’s the cheapest thing in his column that does what he asked." He wrote nothing down. "Next."

CIPHER ENGINE, ROTOR PATTERN

Origin: Earth (Sol-3), early Information Age

Requirement: Tier II Infrastructure

Exchange Price: 2,400 System Points

Details: Mechanical cipher. Rotors step with each character, so no letter enciphers the same way twice within a message. Drawings and operating practice included. Buildable in an ordinary workshop.

Summary: Makes your messages impossible to read without the right machine and daily setting, a big step up from a codebook that could be stolen and secretly copied.

Lucas stopped.

"That one’s buildable," he said. "Two thousand four hundred. Seven and a half days worth of points."

"And we have eight hundred and fifteen left."

Lucas wrote down the total, boxed it, and stared at it for a moment. "Finally, something affordable—or Cedric would have been pestering us."

"Not tonight. Seven and a half days."

"Seven and a half days,but i have an answer now. well good night my lord" Lucas said, capping the inkwell, and tucked the ledger under his arm on his way out.

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