Okay, if we were going to have the Transcend provide people with a kit to whatever world they’re showing up in or performing an intervention…would they customize the received kit based on the world that they were arriving at?
Example-a more “swords and sorcery” world, they’d make sure you at least had a sword as well as everything else. A more post-apoc cyberpunk world they’d make sure you at least had a gun and maybe something you could immediately trade for resources, that kind of thing.
Honestly, combat armor (which even if you don’t go for the full infantry loadout almost certainly comes with a sidearm and a stabby), a cornucopia, a synapticon, and a copy of the Panpraxis should cover virtually all situations. And the latter two even fit nicely inside the combat armor.
(Hell, the cornucopia’s probably cheating. It just saves the readers a few hundred chapters of “All Right, You Primitive Screwheads, Listen Up! This Is How We Turn This Stick Into An Industrial Base”.)
It also lets them skip some of the rather dangerous ramp up period, where the growing industrial base is vulnerable to people who realise how it may change the status quo in ways not in their favour. The novel is probably more entertaining when there are only a few encounters with petty thugs before getting to the cutting politics, instead of a dozen chapters of defending your waterwheel.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind this part, as long as the story didn’t linger there (i.e. maybe a couple of paragraphs per chapter as we see things improve, one creation at a time).
On which note, have you head of Ascendance of a Bookworm ?
The basic premise is that an extremely bibliophiliac assistant librarian (as if there’s another kind, let’s be honest) winds up Truck-Kun’d into an eight-year-old body in a society that - to her great dismay - is roughly at the pre-printing press western Europe level of civilization and development.
After she finishes freaking out, she concludes that the only way she’s going to see any books again is if she makes them herself, so that’s what she decides to do.
The writers seem to be doing their best to at least make an attempt at realistically modelling the societal changes this causes even if Myne herself is mostly oblivious/indifferent to everything that doesn’t involve books…
I have not, but I really feel that I should have.
Linky?
If you’ve got Crunchyroll, https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G6793XKZY/ascendance-of-a-bookworm; not sure if it’s on any other platforms at the moment. There’s also a manga; I’m currently unaware of any places where it can be read online.
Manga and Light Novels on Amazon.
Just finished watching what there is of the anime. (It only covers the first seven volumes (out of thirty-three!) of the light novel series.) Highly recommended!