Weapon Age

[FlyingSquirrel]

So, we established in Clovis' thread that photography is the age it was in 1850's. I also remember Beltharean and Grakor discussing if there were flintlock pistols in WoW. This would also set is about 1850's. However, what's the overall weapons age? There are tanks, planes and sniper rifles, as well as Grenades, motorcycles and just regular rifles.

So what age would we say WoW is based off of, weapon wise? I'm personally inclined to say mid-way through WW2, but with more of a steampunkish approach, but with a mixture of cowboys as well. What do you all think?

[Karunzo]

I think that you shouldn't try to compare WoW to the real world to much. It's fiction. We have flying machines and people are still running around on horses. There's tanks and wars are still fought with plate and steel.

What you see in-game is what you get, in my opinion.

[kindle135]

If you do want to compare WoW technology to the real world, go with Leonardo Da Vinci tech, he automated suits of armor, created tanks, machine guns, and a lot of other things. Another thing to note about Leonardo's inventions that most of them were so faulty they were useless.

And to explain, he automated one suit of armor to wave it's hand at people.

[CappnRob]

WoW is all over the place. It has NO real world historical counterpart. The tanks are completely absurd, then you have weird things like glaive throwers too. The "normal" plated armor looks to be something VAGUELY high renaissance, but then guys like the Humans peasants are clearly low middle ages. The orcs have some sort of bizzare Conan the Barbarian thing going on, where the trolls and tauren still fight with rocks and sharp sticks. WoW is just crazy. That's all it'll ever be. It is Schizotech.

[CharAznable]

Essentially what Rob and a few others said.

WoW is too high fantasy to really have a historical counter part like say... A Song of Ice and Fire or other fantasy settings. I think its safe to say that WoW's weapon age is completely ridiculous, as in an era of guns, tanks, mobile armor suits and golems, we still have dudes swinging melee weapons and others using bows.

Any pretense of logic or realism is nonexistent here.

[Hawk]

Not to mention the creation of mechanical steeds and robots and all. WoW's technology is... really confusing.

[Beltharean]

It's not that it's confusing, it's that anything you think of can be made with technology because of the magic that goes along with it. Most of the 'Wait, what..?' inventions you see in game are that way because of Chaos Generator within. Most people thought it was a way to harness the arcane without learning to cast, tweaking what spell it creates by putting in different inputs to create another output. Instead however, it was revealed that Chaos Energy is simply a mimic of the arcane. Much less stable, more prone to explode in your face, and MUCH more interesting to the average tinker (unless you're a technomage). The difference between WoW tech and Real Life tech is that there are almost NO limitations as to what you can do in WoW aside from the fact you need to use steampunk-esque parts to run it. Your robot is likely run with a Chaos Generator simply to give sentience to the lifeless parts.

Your tank on the other hand just goes along with the, "I thought of it, I got the parts, I made it." WoW Engineers are gifted with Gnomish and Goblin ingenuity. You'll have seen schematics for outrageous things and thus you'll be able to get ideas from it. An interesting thing with that is, according to Grakor we have pepperboxes and gatling guns... But no revolvers. An engineer may have thought of the revolver and then realized he could one-up himself by making it fully automatic. Thus the only man in the world with the idea for a revolver just eliminated the need for it, until he realizes his fully automatic weapon jams too often, and he goes back a step. Just because we don't have on in lore doesn't mean Grazgil the Goblin Engineer (to use a completely made up character, off the top of my head) won't make one ICly.

That being said, the tl;dr version of this is that the sky is the limit. When you have flying robots that can soar higher than high, and steamsuits that can dive lower than low, your character can invent most anything. Trying to compare what technological era engineers are in, is like trying to compare how imaginative the human race has been at any point in history, because imagination is really the only thing an engineer needs. That, and a whole lot of textbooks.

EDIT: Going through Engineering schematics it seems like a lot of times an engineer will take a more magical approach outside the typical Chaos Generator. They can bind small amounts of an elemental into their devices and then control them somehow. This can be seen with the 'Heart of Fire' in the Pet Bombling, and the 'Core of Earth' in Lil' Smokey. Thought you aughta know.