The Old World Theories

[Squidslinger Gilder]

So I'm sitting around thinkin and considering the old world. What could have happened? And then ideas came. Pieced some things together based on what tidbits of lore we've seen.

What we know about the calamity:

-A weapon caused it. I believe chemical in nature is what I remember reading (WWI era was big on chemical weapons).
-Before it, it was a WWI era world and in the process of a world war.
-There are at least half a dozen places now where they dig up or have fantastic old world technologies. Anglea, Arashi Desert, Chaladon, Paritan, etc
-The people were not all from the same places as they are now. Migration and relocation happened.

So first, lets consider the weapon since that is the thought that spawned the rest for me.

We know Anglea is an ice ball, but also is part of Firnfeld. Now for some reason northern Yesha isn't also an ice ball. We also know there are deserts all over the place. Some seem caused by the old war (craters), while others are questionable.

So lets think, how could chemical weapons have caused the current world? For the longest time I really couldn't think of a reason and I figured Muse was just off their rockers. Then I was considering, chemical reactions. There are reactions that can generate hot and cold. Now if we use our current world standards, I don't know if we could come up with something. But lets consider these airships and their "impossibilities" for existing.

These things shouldn't exist, too heavy. Unless of course we introduce another element in the air which makes them possible. I'm going to dub this the Valkyria element, or element V, since this is literally the same idea that Valkyria Chronicles used.

What if the old world was filled with an abundance of this Element V? Similar to Valkyria. It's the do everything, wonder element. Makes battleships fly/etc.

Now consider a world war happening. It's bloody, it's nasty, and it has gone on for too long. Both sides, if not more than two sides, would be looking for ways to gain the upper hand. Last ditch efforts, or superweapons.

What if...the solution was found to simply create a chain reaction in this element? If it is in everything, both air, water, and ground, then imagine a chemical bomb that could set off Element V and cause it to take another form.

That other form would be...ice. A solid. Why not heat? Well true why not heat? Maybe it was attempted but incinerating the world just wasn't the best idea. However, freezing it would preserve technology and cities. Plus maybe the weapon designer just wanted people to "cool off" due to the level of hatred at the time?

So lets say this is a massive freeze bomb that ignited and knocked out Anglea. What about the other nations under Anglea? Well....what is to say the freeze bomb stopped with Anglea? What if it really was a doomsday freeze bomb that was intended for the entire world? That means that at one time the entire world was an ice ball. But ice melts, and so lets assume it has been melting for awhile. Which would explain why the world is so small. This is just the part that has thawed.

But that's not all true is it? What about Chaladon? Chaladon was untouched by the war/etc. Now lets consider something, if the entire world was frozen and effectively reset, then why was Chaladon spared? Chaladon is home to very advanced tech too, could that have protected them? Or...Apologies Chaladon fans but there is an answer that takes this all into account as well as current isolationist standpoints. Chaladon did it.

That's right, Chaladon was the nation which created the weapon and thus would know exactly how to nullify the effects and preserve their country. And they got away with it too by continuing to keep isolationism as their policy. What villain wants nosy people snooping around their lair? So therefore, the theory is...Chaladon still has that weapon and they still have the defensive capability to nullify that weapon.

Why don't they use it again? Perhaps things haven't gotten bad enough yet. Lets also patch in another idea. This one comes from Skies of Arcadia...lol another Overworks game. Lets say Chaladon is the Silvites. They've been watching over the people rebuilding, the whole time with their finger on the button in case they decide to plunge themselves into world war once again.

But Chaladon does have contacts and helps some people? Well true. Lets think about it. The Arashi...the Guild named the desert Arashi but the people there hate the Guild. So lets consider the techs that the Arashi dig up which Chaladon, helps oversee. Remember, Chaladon doesn't like Anglea's abuse of technology. But if the Arashi are willing to accept help with it, meaning Chaladon confiscates anything really bad...why? Unless Chaladon and the people who settled in the Arashi have an old connection.

What if the Arashi desert was the result of the old war and it originally before that was lush lands with great cities? What if they were friends of Chaladon back then? Now lets consider them being apart of the war and getting wiped out. Perhaps this would have been a final straw that made Chaladon use the weapon.

Now their Fjordlander support...if we consider the Fjordlanders as the people who lived in silver moon lands (Skies of Arcadia), then there would be some past ties to Chaladon. Maybe they were Chaladonians who went to war and fought. Even in an isolationist country, there will be those who would want to get involved in the world war. America did this. We were isolationist and we still had those who secretly supported the war effort.

The Guild, perhaps they were one of the allies of the Arashi long ago but during the war they allowed the Arashi cities to be destroyed. Or maybe they didn't do enough to protect them. Maybe the ancient Guild were jerks and refused to take in the survivors too? Meaning the war in the past definitely had infighting happening among allies.

So what of Yesha? Well we know migrations happened and that the Yeshan people came from elsewhere. We know they are asian too. Cities down in Guild lands have very Japanese names. So lets consider that the world map looked very different. That the Yeshan and Arashi/Guild people were once closer but their cultures split. Or perhaps that when the Arashi cities were leveled, the survivors went two ways. One group went to Guild lands, the other to Yesha. Or perhaps the Yeshan people come from off the map? Yesha really is an issue here because it is hard to fit them as well as figure out what side they were on.

As far as the sides go. With the level of cities and tech concentrated in the north and the Arashi lands in the south, then Chaladon to the east...lets say the main front line was in the central area. If we look at the trail of devastation, it leads to Arashi lands. So lets say what brought about Chaladon deploying the V-bomb was a massive blitzkrieg that ended in the destruction of the main capital of the southern alliances.

If Chaladon was in any way sympathetic to the southern factions then perhaps this was enough for them to gain support from their people in deploying it. Also if most of the population was wiped out then they could afford to take in some and then seal off the island to use the weapon. Any hesitation would have ceased. By this time they most certainly would have considered the blitz a genocide and seen the true nature of the northern factions.

Thus that puts Anglea as more of it's own empire. However, remember, not all of the map is shown. Perhaps Anglea consisted of many other nations that are still in ice and haven't thawed yet. Either way, Anglea was possibly winning the war which led Chaladon to use it's doomsday weapon to stop it.

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Anglea was a bunch of murdering dicks and Chaladon the ultimate bond villain with the doomsday device.

So the whole ancient plot of GOIO is a mix of both Valkyria Chronicles and Skies of Arcadia. If true this means, their original writer really was freaken awesome!

[Helios.]

i think we can dispense with the super weapon theory, as excited as you are about it, because we don't NEED it for the world to have undergone such radical climatic change.
the ecological devastation that would arise from the first world war being drawn out over the whole world and the for generations would have destroyed much of the forests and green places of the world. this can cause a catastrophic cascading failure to the ecosystem. without the trees, the soil gets scorched. without the transpiration or the shade, the land dries up, and no clouds drop that water back down. the plants die. the nutrients that are left blow away and are never replaced. this is what happened when the area that is now the sahara desert was deforested. look at it now.
slash and burn farming in the amazon has this effect as well as additionally exporting available organic carbon and nutrients in the form of food exported and smoke from the burning.  the ecological disruption (not to mention pollution) on a scale as large as perennial world war would cause absolutely could alter the climate and allow the ice of teh northern poles to spread south. it isnt hard to imagine raging infernos spreading across large parts of the world. the change in the biosphere leads to a change in the hydrosphere, and deserts spread from the south to the north. if you look carefully at the map, teh few forests that are there are on the western slopes of mountain ranges, with deserts to the east. this is called a rain shadow. as the prevailing winds drive the clouds up the mountains they cool and drop the rain on the windward side.
the rains we can see fall on the western slope so we know the prevailing winds therefore go from west to east, as they do in the northern hemisphere between the jet stream and the doldrums. (in the southern hemisphere it goes east to west, which is why the amazon rainforest is so wet, but on the eastern side of the Andes mountain range)
SO with what we know about how ecological destruction could have changed the  ecology well in hand, on to the point about chaledon:
chaledon was not part of the great war that destroyed the old world. they weren't even really PART of the old world, and their super sweet tech they have now is both reverse engineering tech that has arrived in recent years and genuinely new tech they made on their own before they reconnected with the rest of the world. in the chaledon topic i describe what we know about the chaledonian history from what little has been released by muse. the important features from that are these: you cant get to chaledon without an airship, the seas are too treacherous, so nobody new had arrived there since before the widespread ecological devastation. in fact when they rejoined the rest of the world and started sending out scout parties of their own to see what it was like they were APPALLED with the degredation they found. they didn't even know that it had happened, as their island stayed as green as presumably the prewar world had been. in their ecological ark, they perfected some kind of bio engineering unique to them that allowed them to create fantastic new crops and animals etc. the airship tech arrived when the first outsiders to fly to chaledon arrived. chaledoninas have a tradition of science, and they had a very smart guy who reverse engineered the flying ship designs after studying it overnight as teh ship was going through well enough to build his own, and the chaledonian airship industry was born. they are WAY far behind, but instead fo trying to figure out stuff they find, they had figured out a lot of stuff before it showed up so have a stronger base to build from, not to mention natural resources to maintain a healthy society. the chaledonians are improving their ships very quickly, and are already competing very well with cultures that have been workign on airships for decades.
this means they havnt been driving the arashi salvage businesses away from archeotech that might implicate them, for the reason that they definitely havnt been around, not till recently, and haven't been hugely involved int eh archeotech salvage and reverse engineering industry. the angleans they hate because they are predators, and the chaledonians see themselves as shepherds of humanity into a better world. the angleans destroy, that is all the chaledoninas see, that's why they hate them...

one thing you explored which i hadnt considered is the gas in the balloons possible ecological effects. here's what we know: there is in fact a special gas that is in the balloons of the ships we are flying around.  its simply called 'the gas' when it is mentioned in the lore and is definitely special somehow. we know that its fabrication (as we do for hydrogen from water) or isolation (like we do to get helium out of natural gas deposits) is not a technology that has always been around, and that the flight of the Icarus marked its first use in that way for flight.  also we anyone who has fought a blenderfish can attest: sometimes the gas gets out!
as we dont know what it is, we get to make up the stories of how it affects the atmosphere. maybe the process of it's creation or its ultimate escape affect the climate somehow.
if i had to, id guess that it was teh process of isolating or creating the gas that affects the climate for the colder. its kind of a stretch (ok its a HUGE stretch, but at least not based on nothing) but teh reason isay this is because fo teh corsair. the corsair, for those of you who havnt played on the prototype dev app servers, is teh first ship from teh anglean republic that we have seen. its a pretty big ship, adn has a large balloon. when that balloon goes down it falls faster than than a ton of bricks, indicating at least to me that it is a very dense ship, and the lift from the balloon must therefore be HUGE to keep such a behemoth flying.  the Angleasn might therefore be making a LOT more of this gas per ship than most anyone else. if this process has the affect of turning away the suns rays (a la snowpeircer) then the frozen ice fields might indeed be the result of the process.

[Richard LeMoon]

My current working hypothesis is that there was a weapon/device that was used, and is currently still in use, which is what creates the odd weather, strange trade winds, and allows the ships to fly with minimal lift. It ties in with this proposition that the hull and balloon 'devices' keep the ship mostly neutrally buoyant, not the balloon itself. The balloon is merely a swim bladder of sorts.

The weapon that was/is being used is a massive electrical generator of some sort that warps the Earth's electrical magnetic field, compressing it closer to the ground and causes it to do all sorts of strange things, such as diverting sunlight away from certain areas to other areas. This creates cold and hot areas in seemingly impossible places. The hull and balloon devices allow ships to harness these warped fields, thus requiring minimal lift. It is also why you can only fly so high and can't pass certain areas. The field does not go as high in some areas, and creates bubble vortexes that trap ships from time to time. These bubbles are where our battles take place.

Doomday weapon or just global power grid experiment gone wrong? Who knows.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

So kinda like Avenger's movie weather weapon? Hadn't considered that possibility.

Runaway carbon cycle is not so terrible. Even if trees are burned up, we get most of our O2 from the ocean. Plankton. But you'd still need devastation on a global scale to trigger anything major and in the time frame needed. Now volcanic eruptions on a large scale could do some severe damage to an already weakened ecosystem. Especially super volcanoes. There are some theories that some of these blowing up triggered mini extinction events at times. Mix in that with a global war event and you got something that could cause some big problems, however it isn't as world shaking as the apocalypse description that Muse mentions.

Can't say its a runaway water cycle because if a world gets into that kind of state, it's literally Venus in a short time.

Just based on what I remember and what Muse has said indicates more to me that it was a kind of chemical warfare that brought the world to the state it is in. Yeah I thought it was silly but it's what was either said or recorded. Think on a fireside awhile back. I remember more because I questioned it.

Chaladon I'm pretty sure was listed as unaffected by what happened but that there was people there and they did seem aware of what was going on. Had to have known, at least those in charge did. If they were more simple society and cut off then what? A bunch of bushmen running around? Early docs list Chaladon as similar to British India. So two cultures. It could be that there was a native people there and others came later with technology. That would make sense if they were refugees escaping the world war and then conquered the native Chaladonians.

Richard you make a good point about the height limit. Didn't consider that. If any part of my theory is true then it could be perhaps the V Element isn't in high concentrations at higher elevations yet. But then, planes exist...so how do we account for airplanes which would surely fly higher than airships? Maybe we just need to assume that planes can fly higher and not to worry about it.

Also, V-Element makes skywhales possible. Perhaps I need to look back at the sky whale fart theory I thought up awhile back. Maybe the ocean does have high concentrations of V-Element in it. Perhaps if the world was frozen over, this is where the V-Element didn't solidified.

Actually considering that, there would be a flood first if a freeze bomb device happened. Unless it froze fast enough to bypass the liquid phase.

[Helios.]

the parts fo teh world that dont ahve any growing things could easily be contaminated from a chemical eapons attack, or a war that used chemical weapons regularly  more generally that might keep large swaths of desert from becoming arable again.

as for the venus comment, i can only say that the desertification of the Sahara didn't destroy the world, there's no reason that the arashi desert and the wastes must therefore have another explanation when a very well understood and easy explanation will suffice. run away greenhouse effect will  indeed cause a venus like planet, but it needs only be change slightly to cause devastation to the ecology. the ocean we know is still relatively healthy, because we know the fishing industry in the fjord baronies is present (although currently suffering from over-fishing, or if their accusations are correct, a chaledonian created sea creature that is eating the fish. whichever you want, pick one)

i like the swim bladder idea, the balloon component indeed even looks like a blower of some kind, compressing the gas in the balloon, increasing the overall density bringing you down, and easing off the flow of air to let the gas decompress and decrease the density, bringing you up. this would also help explain why having a damaged balloon component would make you less capable of changing your height quickly.

the height ceiling and 'trade winds' phenomenon i would count as game mechanics rather than plot points, there's no reason square formations of wind holding ships from escaping should be a cannon climatic feature. just let it be a game...

im not sure if there is any evidence of a massive power source, theres not even that much electricity that we see in the world. the pictures of the cities have lanterns, for example.

the escaping to chaledon and creating a dual culture thing that reflects the british/indian duality of the architecture and clothing is interesting, and indeed such a duality would need to be explained somehow. we do know it wasnt refugees from a ecologically devestated old world arriving though. we know a few things for certain: the chaledoninas were suprised that the old world was so devestated, appalled really. and that traveling across the straight separating the island from the mainland is impossible by boat.

[Helios.]

im not sure either if an electric generator of ANY power level could disrupt the magnetic field of a planet. if you could i don't think it coudl look like 'cold poles and hot deserts' ii think it would be more like 'gamma radiation killed every living thing on land'

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Yeah magnetic field disruption for the level of tech is a bit extreme. Granted there are times in history when our own magnetic field has flipped and it is a known phenomenon that does happen. But a device to control that and potentially manipulate it would have to be able to manipulate the core of the GOIO world. Unless GOIO takes place on maybe a small moon or a tiny rocky planet, I don't see that happening with the level of tech. Besides that, small worlds that are not tidally locked to a large world as a moon would not remain geologically active enough to maintain an atmosphere. Basically become a dead world like Mercury or Ceres. There would be no magnetic field to protect it from solar winds which would blast away the atmosphere.

The only potential way it could be done would maybe be with a Plutoian system. Where you have two planets orbiting around a barycenter. As we saw with Pluto, it is probably the most interesting planetary body we have in this solar system. Imagine that happening in closer to a star...makes me wonder.

[Helios.]

absolutely, the magnetic field has to have been the same the whole time or else everything would be dead as hell...

im trying to suggest how the changes could be wrought with the least amount of additional information added, fitting int eh specifics of the world we are given and the history we have. the less we have to add, in my view, the better. occams razor steers us away from drawn out views with a million moving parts, i suggest

[Clockeye]

I actually tought of that for a long time, and I think the answer could be much, much easier.
You saw how battlefields looked like during WWI? The miles of no-man's land?
What if they fought so long the NML spread for tousands of miles and even further?
Lacks of food, lacks of clean water.... half the population rotting in the mud.
And the endless dust being blewn up by constant explosions.
Don't you think that this could cause a global-wide disaster?
Imagine the sides of conflict slowly dying, whole countries with no food or clean water. Entire portions of fields
turned into desert by years of exploation and drought.

As for the plague, I think the trenches and war itself is the best place to start a new disease. Soldiers would often
leave their positions and bring diseases o their homes, infecting others.

And so as the time passed, towns were dying and everyone was too busy with war to take care of their
envoirmental problem.

So what I'm saying, there was no big weapon that would turn the world post-apo within hours.
Just long, long process that started a chai reaction which results we see for these day.

Basically, I'm supporting Helios opinion on how the world fell.

BUT... as for the gas thing...
What if the process of getting the gas involved using the fresh water in excessive ammount? What if thy were producing too many blimps, and started destroying
world's supplies of water? That would further destroy the climate and cause more problems.
Now, let's say humanity fell... and the technology of gas making has been lost...
Maybe Gabriel did not invent the gas? Maybe he was just smart enough to repair one-more junk machine he found
buried somewhere? He found a relic from the past and that's why noone could create baloons before his appearance?