major birdbrain

So, what resources do you need in the post-apocalypse?

The basic needs in any survival situation are shelter, fire (warmth), water, and food, in that order. The setting of your specific PA will determine these factors greatly. The residents of the Valley or Tolmekia are in a far better situation than a bunch of people aboard a space station. Particularly in the Valley: there's land to work, water to drink, food to grow, and wind for power. This reflects in their technology as well.

The world of Nausicaa is set in a semi-Ceramic era. In our world, ceramics began around 24,000 BC, possibly even before that. Functional pottery came more around 10,000 BCE. It's this age that the people of this PA Earth "mine." Many of the items used are made from recycled ceramics, particularly "zirconian ceramic." IRL, this is known as zirconia or ceramic steel, and it is EXTREMELY tough. In the absence of traditional metals to mine and smith, ceramic steel is probably the best you're going to get.

But there are metals in Nausicaa.

Let's have a look at a Tolmekian airship. I'm not an aeronautics engineer, my unfinished degree was in chemistry, but I'll do my best.

It's huge. It's inelegant. It's nothing like even the largest of our modern (or ancient, to them) planes. More importantly, they're bolted together with sheets of (presumably) scavenged metal. This thing is made for the sole purpose of moving a lot of things, people or otherwise, with little regard to the actual aerodynamics. They force this behemoth into the sky, and it rattles and shakes like an old city bus.

Compare that to a Pejite brig:

It's still made of metal panels, and still a Just Huge Motherfucker, but it's smoother, more intentionally built. The windows are aligned, there's smooth landing gear. This thing is holding all the Pejite refugees and it's a much nicer ride, comparatively. Even inside, it hums instead of shakes.

What do we know about Pejite and Tolmekia, and how does that affect their production?

Backstory is limited in the movie, so I will dip into the manga a little bit.

Tolmekia is a kingdom, the successor to the fallen Eftal Empire, and its influence stretches over the remaining kingdoms. In the manga, the Periphery states (including Pejite and the Valley) are referred to as autonomous fiefdoms. By ancient treaty, they are allied to Tolmekia, and required to aid them in war efforts. Because of this, it's a safe assumption that the Tolmekians have quite a few resources to throw around. I think this reflects on the construction of their ships: if you have the resources to hastily repair your ship, or simply build a new one, you don't really need to make the things last. Pejite is a smaller fiefdom, and the Periphery states do pay tribute to Tolmekia, so they may be more inclined to put more care into their designs. If it lasts longer, it's less of a drain on your supplies.

Honorable mention to the very silly Dorok Flying Jar:

I have no idea, man. The Dorok Principalities are vastly different from the Periphery and Tolmekia, in lanaguage as well as culture. They're not even in the movie! I'm fairly sure that Tolmekians are piloting this jar. But it's worth mentioning. Dorok is independent from Tolmekia, and the difference shows in their technology. How is this thing flying? I don't know! Those circles are cannons, so who truly knows.

Now let's have a look at Valley technology:

Starting with Nausicaa's glider, Mehve. It's sleek, it's polished, it's aerodynamic. No visible seams or bolts to create drag. It's also incredibly light, and has a more natural shape, like that of a bird. This is a well-maintained piece of machinery. The Valley is a small kingdom, but it has two resources the rest of the kingdoms don't: the wind, and the Toxic Jungle.

The Jungle is the undercurrent of all this technology. Tolmekia and Pejite hide from it, try to fight it, and their heavily armored ships reflect that.

But the Princess of the Valley of the Wind regularly launches solo expeditions into a poisonous environment, and she recovers some very valuable resources because of it. We first meet her as she harvests an Ohm shell for the Valley. They manufacture this natural resource into extremely durable tools and weapons, including knives so sharp they can slice through ceramic steel. This is an incredible wealth they're sitting on purely because none of the other kingdoms will go into it. The Jungle is their blood moon, and I will come back to that point later.

Compare that with the Valley's gunship. Being a combat machine, it's more heavily armored than a glider, but even so, it's SO smooth, even compared to the Valley barge behind it. Valley ships take the wind into account in every part of their design. Fairings to cover the mechanics and improve drag. Static wicks on the much heavier barge. An aerodynamic craft reduces drag and improves fuel efficiency. In a resource scarcity, efficiency is the name of the whole game.

With all of that said, it's time to talk about the Consolidation of Iron.

I'm gonna go ahead and shout out @ctrl-shift-alt-9 for their massive, detailed, lovingly maintained Iron Lung reference doc. I have their timeline up as I'm writing, and I'll be pulling some shots and promo materials from their database. Show them some love!

Before we dive into the fictional station, I think it would be good to have a frame of reference: the International Space Station.

[Image courtesy of NASA]

This bad boy hovers in Low Earth Orbit (about 250 miles/400 km, specifically) and only a crew of 7 people live on board. Sometimes more during handover. It is big, 356 ft (108.5 m) end to end. All of this:

[NASA]

is for seven people. That isn't even including the massive coordinated effort on Earth to resupply the damn thing. We make a trip to the ISS every 40-45 days to bring food, water, breathable air, equipment, and parts.

At the start of Iron Lung, the population is estimated at about 721, with Eden and the COI combined. According to the in-game terminal, the COI has a population of 257 at time-of-entry. That's 39x the ISS capacity. Even assuming that the population is distributed evenly among the three remaining stations in the COI's possession, that's around 86 people, or 12x the ISS capacity. (I'm rounding these numbers to avoid cutting anyone in half.) The sheer size of the station needed to house that many people would be IMMENSE, and I highly doubt everyone in the COI is getting their own bedroom. We also need to account for fuel storage, reactors, galley(s), med bay(s), labs, prison cells, and a morgue.

The astronauts on the ISS only spend a few months to a year on the station. In Iron Lung, the station is all there is. There's no planet sending resupply ships, making new materials. You can mine astroids for resources, but it's labor-intensive and the problem of zero-G makes traditional mining difficult. It's not possible with our current technology, but if we had the ability to start a thriving Mars colony in 1992, it's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine that we would come up with a way to mine asteroids.

All habitable planets and asteroids vanished in the Quiet Rapture. This is a fact, but also pretty vague. A habitable planet is generally understood to be one that we could live on, given the ability to get to it and settle it. The asteroid mention is interesting, since asteroids don't have atmospheres, and that's usually a pretty big requirement for habitability. What asteroids do have, however, is water. They have water (or ice), minerals, and metals.

So all that said, what does the COI actually have?

257 people, 3 stations, 2 moons, and 2 spacecrafts. Presuming that 1. we figured out how to mine asteroids, 2. we retained or refined that technology in the years leading up to the film, and 3. there are still asteroids left to be mined, there are at least some natural resources available to the COI. Making metal, however, is a little more complicated than just digging it up. Melting and casting metal plates could be feasible on a space station, provided it has a source of artificial gravity.

The COI is running on EXTREME scarcity, and when you have no new materials coming in (or a very small amount,) you need to get recycling. Minimizing waste is already a priority on space stations, even the ISS with its frequent resupplies. With the destruction of Filiment Station, it's not unreasonable to assume that the COI would reclaim the materials it's made out of. There's no telling how much of it is left after the explosion, but I'd argue anything is worth salvaging. Hull repairs, extra parts, even luxuries like textiles. We don't get a look at any of the COI stations, but we can look at something else they've built:

The SM-13.

[SM-13 texture image]

Look at this thing. It's a disaster. But this is what we saw with the Tolmekian ships above: a craft hastily put together, haphazard repairs with sheets of metal and big, heavy bolts. The game states that the Lung was never designed for the pressure, and it sure does look like it. Pressure is relative to a planet's gravity, and we don't have a way of knowing what AT-5 gravity is compared to Earth's. For the sake of comparison, I'm going to use something we do have here on Earth: the Mariana Trench.

It's 6.8 miles (10.94 km/10,935 m/35,876 ft) below sea level. The pressure is over 1000x the pressure at the surface. (I think it was birdbyrne's Aperture fic that stated the blood ocean is about 7 miles deep, but I may be misremembering. Either way I'm working with the Trench numbers.)

The craft that made the journey was the Deepsea Challenger.

[Deepsea Challenger, NatGeo]

This guy is made for pressure. Smaller, with a vertical orientation. The Lung, however, reminds me more of a WWII sub: tube-shaped, horizontal, with space to move around. More for distance and combat than depth. Most modern subs aren't going below 1500 ft (450 m.) So the implication here is that the SM-13 (and others, like the SM-08) were repurposed, or built off of very old diagrams. That's pure speculation on my part, but why would a space station have a submarine otherwise? Were they using it for something else? An escape pod, repurposed into a sub?

There's another ship it resembles:

The invulnerable ship from the Valley of the Wind, the most decayed vehicle we see in the movie. A ship that was said to have traveled everywhere, "even the stars." But they've left it at the edge of the Acid Lakes, instead of salvaging it. They don't need to. They get enough resources from the Jungle to leave an ancient ship untouched.

Take a look at the Lung being lowered. It's already in rough shape, with a giant metal sheet welded over the hatch. We also get a glimpse of its escort, the tow ship, and it's sporting the same bulky, patchy metal plating as the Tolmekian airships. These are not state-of-the-art crafts with top-shelf materials. This is the last-ditch effort of a dying people, using whatever they could spare. It's part of the approach to scarcity: make something last, or make something new out of something old.

Let's compare with another favorite (derogatory) ship of mine:

[Event Horizon]

The Event Horizon. It's not a PA situation, it's a rescue (or salvage) mission. But the ship just looks so gross. If we saw the COI's stations, this is pretty close to what I'd imagine. Could you fit 60+ people on that thing? No idea. But that's the sort of thing I'm imagining: this massive, hulking beast, cobbled together with the corpses of her sister stations, the last dredges of humanity trying to keep it going for just one more day.

There is one more resource the COI has, and that is the blood moons. I'm going to set aside the Eel and any supernatural properties the blood may have, because what I really wanna talk about is the blood and bone itself.

Bones are calcium and collagen, and marrow is protein, fat, fat-soluable vitamins. All pretty hard to find in the vacuum of space. And the blood itself could also be a source of food. We've eaten blood for hundreds, thousands of years. But even more interesting than that is the potential source of iron.

It is possible to derive solid iron from blood, but it takes so MUCH of it to get any usable quantity. The average human has 3.5-4g of iron in their whole body. Taking an average of 5L of blood per person, that's 0.8g per liter. As the famous blood sword post theorized, you'd need somewhere like 2500 people's entire blood supply to make one longsword.

Unless you happened to have 2 moons covered in blood at your disposal. The Pacific Ocean itself is 710 sextillion liters, a number so big I physically cannot fit it in my head. It's not an ideal method of making iron, but I don't think it can be entirely discounted. I also don't think the COI necessarily knows what the blood can actually do. Much of that is speculation, but I would argue that it's corrosive at the very least.

The blood moons (and AT-5 specifically) are the COI's Toxic Jungle. A tremendous potential source of resources, extremely dangerous to actually access. They see enough potential in it to risk expeditions, to quickly weld on a grabber to sample the skeleton Simon finds. The fact that they had to attach an arm to make the sub able to take samples shows how woefully unprepared the Lung was for this dive. Even after multiple trips, it isn't worth the energy expenditure to weld on a grabber until they get proof that something worth sampling is down there.

We see the same sort of haphazard manufacturing as the Tolmekians, but for a very different reason. Having excess vs having nothing to work with.