Hearts of Iron 4 Player's Guide to Save the Isekai World

Phantasy

Revised October 2024

***

Morning, Next Day

War is hell. But for once, it made things simpler. Erich got cozy on the vanity, snatched two of his notebooks and a fountain pen, and kept his hand moving on the doodle book as fast as the thoughts could stray on a page.

And for the love of whatever ancient sorcerous empire that got him and many magicked into the world, he re-doodled a recoilless rifle as best as he could from the illustration of a monstrosity in an 1844 French patent and stapled the exposition.

There's something about a tube that lobs shells without all the manufacturing difficulties of adding a recoil system around it that captured the mind of Alfred Krupp and his canon double sans recul. There's no escaping the jokes about wunderwaffe when the man proposed a goddamn 305mm recoilless gun in the mid XIX century.

But the principles were there, and Erich revised the exterior akin to the American recoilless rifle. Now, it was up to the engineers and mathematicians to solve it. There's still the query where steel represented the alloy itself or the conglomeration of leather, wool, cotton, et cetera.

But first, Erich wracked his head for those fragments of memory of his grandfather's hunting jacket. Cold War surplus was cheap—got him in his element, as he used to say. Nothing could go wrong with the Prussian Blues, and he was as sleep-deprived as the senior who went into a room full of up-and-coming sophomores by mistake, but he's getting ahead of himself. Any uniform could enlist raw goods to train as disposable goods with enough choreography in Brandenburg Gate.

Give a lazy person something easy to follow, and the least the rational ones could do was put up with their irrationality until the frontline needed more fillers. One eventually learns that a sheepdog is a wasteful expenditure over a flock that'd bah for the chance to get the Iron Dog Collar 1st Class for the pride rather than the resume.

People are that simple.

Scarcity, he wrote and encircled, gave a decorated piece of sheet metal recycled from a belt buckle factory more worth than money itself. It drives up the competition and ambition for something cheaper than a sack of wheat.

Pressing and rubbing his warm temples as the hours and days ticked by in his head, Erich turned the ideas legible in his cleaner notebook and clicked his tongue. He pulled the fountain pen away from the puddle of a period and slid it away for the reading material the spymaster called a 'report.'

Maybe if he bored himself in another dull review, the passive backlash of speeding up time may as well be white pain. If One-Speed gave him a migraine, Erich shuddered what Five-Speed would do. A stroke or aneurysm would be better than what it'd do to him, preferably if he acclimated himself to swallowing the finer details under the pressure.

And that will take years, and the prior sentences began slipping his mind. Then he caught another lightbulb moment.

He reached for his pen and notebook, jotted 'odd jobs = commodity/service voucher?', and continued reviewing the report. It was an improvement, but he'd probably whipped it out during a brainstorming session. There's also the printing press needing a techroll, and there's the bankroll for the wages, transport, and reach before they could gain the confidence of industry leaders for ad revenue, the hero's number one newspaper be damned.

Erich squeezed his face. "My kingdom for manpower."

He's one labor crisis if he's ever seen one. No matter how much red tape he cut, there were still different shades of red. Marrying someone or two important was almost tempting. Then someone knocked.