Nemo wrote:You're confusing the issue here, which is that I was talking about how the author's politics drives a narrative that supports his own views at the expense of the story.
You said they were talking about expelling foreigners and cutting off contact. I pointed out thats not what was referred to in the work, certainly not in the manga at least (chapter 7), but that its something you read into it. Unless the manga itself is the odd man out and the anime scene was in line with the original work which included additional details you are familiar with? While I doubt this I can not verify myself, can't read them. Im told the novels are rather difficult to translate properly.
You've conflated two of my sentences. The first one was "the fact that Japan is seriously considering using the resources from the Gate as an excuse to go full isolationist again" whilst the second was "No, the isolationism they're advocating for isn't the kind where a country minds its own business and keeps out of international affairs as America used to be at certain times and on certain issues, they're advocating completely cutting themselves off from the rest off the world, North Korea style, expelling all foreigners, etc. etc.". The former is what the manga had in it, but was seriously toned down from prior adaptations of the same material.
The latter is referring to what the author advocates through the narrative he weaves, in the same manner that Tolkien advocated pastoralism over industrialism through The Lord of the Rings. You won't find a direct reference where Tolkien wrote "Industrialisation is bad", but the work illustrates his point through peaceful idyll of the hobbits as contrasted by Mordor.
Likewise, the author's views are present in the demonisation of foreigners and rosy coloured portrayal of Japan. While discord did mention that this was Nippon Strong and that it's more or less a variant of America Fuck Yeah and HFY, there is a difference. Most American works that have AFY present in them aren't nearly quite as bad. Independence Day, for instance, has foreigners sitting around waiting for the Americans to save the day. Bad, but not
that bad. Stargate had a lot of AFY, with foreigners shown to have their own agenda's and were frequently fed into the meatgrinder in place of Americans. They were however never portrayed as evil or utterly stupid, not as badly as Gate does it.
The narrative portrayal of foreigners and foreign governments being meddlesome, stupid and evil in the Earthside chapters, contrasted with the relatively 'smooth' operation happening on the Gateside chapters sends the message that Japan would be better off without foreign entanglements. If you ignore the Earth chapters and don't think about the lack of foreign involvement for the Gateside chapters though, the work is fairly enjoyable, but I think any work where thinking is the enemy doesn't deserve to be defended.
I refer to the manga while you are refer to the anime. Unlike discord I thought the anime was a terrible adaptation. It weakened all the female characters, especially poor Tuuka but the Princess Pina as well. It dropped large sections of characterizations and internal dialogue in favor of fan service bath scenes etc. And it changed a number of things, like the scenario we are discussing here, making the scenes needlessly weaker as a result. If you're basing your reactions off the anime then I can see where our disconnect is coming from but I have to lay the blame for that at the feet of A1. I spent most of my time watching it groaning in pain, waiting for a pay off that never came.
I've read the manga, but my freshest memories are of the Anime, so that may be clouding matters. In either case, they're already quite a few steps removed from the author's original webnovel, which I understand did contain a lot of his rather jingoistic views.
Pipelines and trains are only going to be able to bring in minuscule amounts of resources in comparison to modern shipping
Modern shipping is fed by pipelines and trains, both of which are more efficient and faster in general. Can the volume of material necessary to support the economy of Japan pass through the gate? Haven't seen numbers. Oil likely so, pipelines are very efficient. TAPS, the trans Alaskan pipeline, runs 340,000 cubic meters of oil day. Japan consumes about 690,000 cubic meters a day. The TAPS system is all of 48 inches in diameter. So 120 inches or less to fully accommodate current and future oil needs. Thatd be a yes
and given the shorter distance required to transport the oil its likely you could use a higher temperature/pressure system to get a higher flow rate for the space given. I don't have numbers on their current raw ore imports, but whatever they are you could reduce them greatly if Japan really was going full Isolationist as much of their industry is focused around exporting products to the world. The Aussie iron trains regularly run 35,000 tons of ore with a record 99,000 tons of ore in a train 7 km long. At speed it took all of 6 minutes for the record setting train to go past.
Is it a good idea to go full Isolationist? Likely not. Is it something that must be explored as an option for the extreme case? Yes, absolutely. Access to the Gate may threaten the stability of world powers to the point of provoking conflict, with a worst case of nuclear strike on Japan. Not exploring possibilities would be dereliction.
The problem is that the gate is incredibly narrow. The area where the gate is implied to appear, Ginza 6-Chome in the anime is roughly
here, at least according to the street sign.
At most, the Gate is 4 lanes wide plus the pavement. In the anime, tanks were shown rolling in two at a time with a bit of leeway. The manga also depicts the gate being at a rough count 20 men wide marching in phalanx formation, though that last one is a bit rough.
Lane width is 3.25 - 3.5 meters in Japan, giving a minima of 13 meters and a maxima of 14 meters.
Assuming an upper bound, and using some of your figures:
The pipeline eats up 304.8 centimeters. Allowing for clearance and various other linkages, that's one lane gone, so we're down to 10.5 meters.
A Japanese freight train is likely to have a gauge of 1067 mm, but the width of the track is not the width of the car. Checking
this diagram, we can see that freight and passenger trains come in a whole mess of widths and heights. I'll go for something middle of the road and say that the width of the train will be around Plate C or 3251.2 cm in width, eating up another lane.
However, you can't really expect to run trains without clearance on either side for both safety and maintenance, so that's more room eaten up again. Clearance width seems to vary from 1524 cm to 2515 cm, adding either 3048 cm or 5030 cm. Assuming you need to be able to run wide loads through the Gate, we'll go with the upper bound.
Adding all this up, running a train through the gate needs:
3251.2 cm (Train) + 5030 cm (Clearance) = 8.281 meters of clearance. Subtracting that from what we had left above, we get 2.219 meters of space left. While you could fit a car through it, it'd be a tight fit and a one way lane, most likely used in case of emergencies.
While you can certainly get a lot of freight through the gate, the narrowness and location limits your options. Ginza is a major city and space is at a premium in Japan. You can either have a secure location or a massive freight hub, you can't really have both. You'd need to demolish a significant amount of expensive real estate in order to turn it into a freight yard large enough to service the entire nation. You also need to be able to ferry through everything you need to extract those raw materials such as mining trucks which are, last time I checked, not small. You'd need to cut the entire thing into pieces and reassemble it on the other side to get even one through the Gate, which would slow everything down.
You also need to get the infrastructure into place. Building a pipeline in America is very different from building a pipeline through untamed, unexplored, and insecure territories. Primitive as the inhabitants may be, a long pipeline is unlikely to be protected at all points along its length from errant dragon attacks. You need to import all your workers and materials until you can source them locally which is yet more infrastructure projects, requiring raw materials and personnel, that also requires infrastructure and yet more personnel.
But even supposing these difficulties are overcome and you have material on the other side of the gate waiting to be delivered, new issues arise.
Space, for instance, is severely limited, moreso in Japan, and even moreso in Ginza. Once you've delivered your materials, you need a place to put them to be delivered elsewhere, to park trains, and you'd want to send the trains back through the gate to pick up more. The trouble with this though is that there's space for only one track, meaning you would have 50% downtime while the trains head back to the Gateverse to load up again.
Using
Iron Ore importation as an example and rounding up to a years worth of ore by average, Japan imports ~136.284 million tons of iron ore per year. Using your train as an example, 99,000 / 6 = 16500 tons of ore per minute. 136,284,000 / 16500 = 8259.6363 minutes to freight all that ore through, or 137.66 hours. Double that for a return journey loaded with freight required by the Gate side, so 275.32 hours, or almost 11.5 days round trip for iron ore importation and exportation of needed material for the other side.
This is just one material being imported by Japan. It also imports all of its natural gas, meaning 12,176,244 cubic meters, and 204 million tons of coal.
If we take the 16,500 tons of ore per minute to also apply to coal importation, 12363.63 minutes, 8.58 days of continuous coal train rolling in, 8.58 days rolling back out loaded with supplies. Iron + Coal = ~two weeks of non-stop importation to meet the nations needs for the year, assuming you can distribute and store it properly and fast enough.
Add Gas onto that. It's unlikely that you could pipe gas through the oil pipeline while there's oil in it, so that needs to be trained too. Using your iron ore figure again, we can convert that volume of gas into mass and roughly factor how long it would take to train in.
Density of gas = 0.5kg/l
1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters
12176244000 liters of gas / 2 = 6,088,122,000 kg = 6,088,122 tons / 16500 = 368.97 minutes, 6.15 hours to train in. Which would be nice, if we lived in a world where natural gas were as dense as iron. We can refactor this by taking density into account.
Iron is 7,870 kilograms per cubic meter, whilst LNG is 500 kilograms per cubic meter. 7870 / 500 = 15.74, which should be our conversion factor.
6.15 * 15.74 = 96.801 hours, 4 days to import, 8 days round trip.
I could go on and try to cover Japan's total imports and calculate a reasonable buffer to allow for a setup that doesn't have a 100% efficient throughput so that there's some spacing and realism to deliveries, but the jist of this is that you can only ram so much material through the gate so quickly even with the necessary infrastructure. You have to allow time for it to get through, get delivered and get distributed before allowing time for a return trip to do another delivery. I am reasonably certain that amount of materials required to be materially independent from the world would exceed the amount you can push through the gate in a year. This still does not allow for technical expertise that Japan may not have, the lack of which would result in a decrease in the standard of living. It also doesn't account the enormous cost of all that infrastructural development and redevelopment necessary. Between the benefits of being completely independent of the world versus simply trading for resources as they always have, any sane person would realise that it's far more beneficial, short and long term, to engage in trade and take resources from the new world as being supplemental at best, except where such resources are unique, IE, Dragon Scales.
It's one thing to consider your options, but considering the possibility of an impossible scenario can and should always result in "Avoid this happening at all costs". If the other powers need the Gate so badly, they'll be willing to trade for it before war and isolationism ever become even a blip on the radar.
As for the science bit, Id be more interested in the stability of the gate first of all. Hard to plan a military beach head when you don't know when or how it might shut down on you. Figure out how it works later. I was surprised that hasn't been brought up at all so far, not in the manga at least.
From what I've heard about the light novel and novel adaptations, that becomes a plot point later on, though not from a scientific standpoint.