1

Keep in mind that in the anime, Lelei learned how to properly wear and use a MOPP suit, while she was starting to learn Japanese.  Aside from the obvious issue (Where did she get a MOPP suit in her size?!?), that requires intelligence and good observation skills, especially if you can not read the instructions to do so.

One thing that can really help with the hearts and minds mission for the JSDF is providing basic medical and sanitary treatments.  There is nothing that can win gratitude faster than being able to treating a sick and/or injured child...

2

Lelei isn't really any shorter than Kuribayashi, and the JSDF would have to stock MOPP suits in sizes to fit women the size of Kuribayashi.

What's more interesting to me is how Lelei even learned that such things exist. If I had to retcon it, I'd guess that she was talking to Kurokawa and complaining about the stink, and Kurokawa then told her about those suits. And by that point Lelei is already in enough with the JSDF to be able to get one loaned to her.

Later on, it wouldn't surprise me if she used the Collective's money to buy several of them, since they were going to be used nearly every day for months.

3

There are all kinds of things that could potentially be sold on the other side which are cheap and common here.

Sugar, for instance. If their technology is what it seems to be, the only source of natural sweetener available to them would be honey -- assuming they have the equivalent of honey bees there. (That was all the Romans had, and there wasn't very much of it. So the rich people relied on something they called "Lead Sugar", which turns out to be lead acetate. Supposedly it does taste sweet. But of course it's also is poisonous, and it's believed to be part of why Caligula went insane. He was very fond of the stuff and ate a lot of it.)

Condiments like mustard and soy sauce should go well. (We see mustard being used in one scene.)

The nice thing about that kind of goods is that it's so cheap here that the markup would be titanic (50:1? more?).

Bulk spices should be very valuable. Black pepper, in particular, but that's not all by any means. (Curry powder, anyone?)

Balsamic Vinegar? (the real stuff, not the crap they sell in my grocery store)

Chocolate!!!!

I can see an increasing trade in tea, too. Some of these kinds of things would start small; with samples being given (!) to merchants to take to their rich clients to test. And if the rich-but-stupid ask for more, then the merchants would send word back to the Collective, and it would go into the next order back to Japan.

We have better metals and alloys than anything they could ever have. I can see a case of kitchen knives selling well.

I suspect that almost any kind of top quality liquor could find a market, not just brandy. Scotch, Tequila, Bourbon... And liquers like Cointreau and Amaretto.

The possibilities are virtually endless.

4 Probably salt, too.  Pennies here, priceless there.

5

No, I suspect salt would not be worth hauling through the gate; I doubt the markup would be anything like as high as for some of the other stuff.

The Quartermaster isn't going to let the Collective take over all the capacity; they'll be rationed, and the Collective will want to prioritize extremely valuable goods over the merely expensive ones. (And I doubt salt would even rise to that level.)

6 "There are catgirls at the PX."

Truly, finer words have never been spoken.

7 Uh. Didn't the lightning trip the detonator?

8

Well, I didn't originally think so but looking at it again you might be right.

9 That said, Lelei is definitely something special - almost a shame she's in the same show as Rory, who outshines her on the moe level.

But possibly not on the dangerous level. Oh, sure, in a direct confrontation Rory mops the floor with anyone else we've seen so far. But Lelei with a physics textbook is -scary-, because her magic is actually pretty flexible... and gets stronger the more she understands about the world.

On the topic of trade. The major question is this - are more gates possible? If so, then a real bulk trade of commodities will probably come into being eventually. If not, then at some point the traffic through the Gate will be completely dominated by Japan-side traffic. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Empire is not a really big customer, and their economic system is toast in the medium term - it simply won't be permitted to continue. Either Japan will be forced to step aside for American-and-other troops to end it, or Japan will end it by themselves in order to preempt such an action. That said, the wealth difference is so great that maybe, just maybe, some kind of compensated manumission might be possible?)

10 It's a neat story touch that despite Japan's military dominance that the locals have control of much of the economic trade through the gate.  While I'm sure Japan is keeping a close eye on anything sensitive going through the gate, the Alnus collective is calling the shots.  It looks like Japan did think to import and retain control of modern medicine; I hope the people thinking of disease (whether Earth to Empire or Empire to Earth) are offscreen and very competent.

The trade balance across the gate is going to depend a lot on what the Empire and the surrounding kingdoms have, and there are a lot of options that may not have occurred on screen that I'm sure people in universe would be thinking of.  Oil might not be worth the price to extract unless Japan gets embargoed, but keep in mind that there may be some which is easy to extract.  Likewise, rare earth metals, if easily extracted, could be valuable enough on Earth to ship. 

Then there's the fantasy stuff.  We've seen what dragon scales can do, and super light / tough material has a lot of applications; if they can't be synthesized on Earth, it might definitely be worth it to farm them, even with the obvious danger.  Are there fantasy metals like mithril, and if so, what properties do they have? 

Then there's magic.  Combat magic may be obsolete in the Empire, but what else can magic do?  A while back, I was chatting with a couple of veteran RPG players and the subject of the utility of magic in the real world, and a lot of the non-combat D&D stuff is potentially incredibly valuable even with modern technology.  To use simple examples, you could give farms double the yield and protect them from pests without fertilizer or pesticide or instantly cure someone of any disease. 

11 I'm sure Lelei is marking up [luxury goods] scandalously, because the market will bear it.

As smart and savvy as she is, she's probably realized the potential economic dislocations inherent to the situation. A way to ameliorate that for a while is to mark up luxury goods to around normal prices, a bit above normal for things superior like Earth cloth and sufficiently novel like spirits, a bit below for various spices that are identical but a lot cheaper from Earth.

While that'll be a sink for local currency, the collective and the JSDF can put some of it to good use back into the local economy. Someone from Japan who knows his fairly recent history might mention it to her, or she ought to be reading it in due course (is it safe to assume she's working on her written Japanese?), see e.g. Sakoku(鎖国, "locked country") and Tokugawa coinage.

12 We already know that Lelei has no love for the empire. She said as much to the Princess one time. I think Lelei doesn't care about economic dislocation. Rather, she cares about the Collective and wants it to do well. So that means hiking prices as much as she can get away with.

13 What I find interesting is her attempt to unify the science/technology aspects she's been learning from the JSDF with what she knows of the local magic. God forbid she ever catch wind of nuclear physics.

14

What I find interesting is her attempt to unify the science/technology aspects she's been learning from the JSDF with what she knows of the local magic. God forbid she ever catch wind of nuclear physics.

You can have plenty of knowledge and skill, but unless you also have the infrastructure to utilize it, you are not going to do much.  Right now, nuclear physics would be answer Lelei's quest for knowledge, but it would hardly be practical or even usable for most things she is doing.  Unless the JSDF want to kickstart the industrial revolution in the fantasy world, there will be limits to how much Lelei or anyone from the fantasy world can use with the knowledge they learned.

15 What if Lelei can transmute elements, such as lead to gold, but only for a couple seconds before it reverts back?  Now transmute a few pounds of lead to plutonium...

16 The plutonium would probably explosively disassemble itself before it could produce a true nuclear explosion.  Since Lelei has not shown an ability for alchemy (And neither has anyone else in the series.), that would be pure speculation.

17 The point is that the magic can render the infrastructure unnecessary, if used right.

Centrifuge to laboriously separate U-235 from U-238? Nah, just cast a spell so the 235 goes to the top of the can and the 238 to the bottom. Done!

Granted that actually setting off a nuke via magic would be a completely different issue (also, er, Lelei hasn't demonstrated the kind of range that would make that even remotely a good idea...)

18 You all are thinking small.

I'm going to work in D&D terms, because that's the complete fantasy magic system I have on hand (Well, Pathfinder, aka D&D 3.75).  Start with a 5th level cleric, who can cast Contagion, which inflicts a disease on the target individual.  Give the cleric (an evil cleric, obviously) knowledge of some Earth diseases to inflict, say, Ebola.  Way more destructive than a nuke, even if it takes a while longer.  The cleric, even being in contact with patient zero, can likely keep themselves disease free (and likely knows how to do so, since they've read the Earth epidemiology textbook).

Alternatively, if you want chemical warfare, there's the villain in Order of the Stick that's able to summon Chlorine elementals...

19 Pfft, still thinking small.  I had a group of players demand that we allow modern science into a D&D campaign.  It ended poorly, as follows:
Given: a bag of holding, defined as a device that creates a tiny pocket universe for each item placed into it.  Add a magic user with the ability to summon up to a few kilograms of any material he sufficiently understands and a good physics text.
Result: a bag of holding containing a few kilograms of anti hydrogen delivered as tribute to the big bad.

20 Bah, you're doing it all wrong.

The best D&D campaign I've ever been in lasted for five years, and we never got above 4th level.  First edition, no less.  None of this triple-class, half-elf half-leprechaun half-beholder crap... four humans and one dwarf.  At one point, we helped a small town fight off a raid by goblins being led by a handful of hobgoblins.  It was glorious.  It was thrilling.  It was a slaughter.  The town burned, and while the party all survived, it was a near thing.

None of this "10 pounds of antimatter in a bag of holding" stuff!  Fighting a God?  Hell, we had problems fighting Doug, the town drunk.

21 Okay. That went rather far afield. What I was talking about is the way she began to study and apply mechanist JSDF knowledge and technology from a world without gods and magic to her spell casting. The first time she tries to skewer the dragon with a sword, it just bounces off and breaks. Then she remembers the earlier experiments she was doing with magical propulsion from studying the JSDF. She puts a magic propulsive ring at the hilt of the remaining swords and turns them all in to rocket powered sabot rounds.

If she gets her hands on a physics or chemistry book and starts understanding matter and the universe at an advanced level, with the ability to manipulate it all directly with magic, she'll be really dangerous.

22

She's already really dangerous. Lindonite mages have a reputation like that, which is why Pina was freaked to see Lelei step out of the car at Italica. Then Tuka, which was even more freaky, and then Rory, which was the icing on the cake.

But Lelei herself is recognizable as a Lindonite mage because of the staff she carries (according to Pina) and the Lindonite school is about using magic in combat.

23 She's plenty dangerous on a tactical level - certainly she's the only individual we've seen in the Gate-world who has access to what a modern army would call firepower. Rory is supremely dangerous on that kind of level.

But she has the potential to become dangerous on a strategic level. Battle magic's not used much because of inherent limitations on the power - it's just not that effective to try to will phlogiston into existence and set it on fire. By using magic that's more congruent with reality, as it were, she can get a bigger result out of a smaller change. Forget nukes for a second - using magic to change refraction a little bit, couldn't you make a burning lens of pretty magnificent size? That sort of thing.

Another comment on trade. It's true that "charging whatever the market will bear" is a good idea. At the same time, it also opens up opportunities for arbitrage. If you're charging a 100x markup for your spices, couldn't you ask a soldier to run a sack through on his next trip for only a 30x markup? Even if you've got to give him a big bribe on top of that, you're still making out like a bandit compared to PX Industries. So when it comes to pricing, it's best to keep levels from getting sufficiently high up that merchants are better off going outside your semi-official channel and onto the black market, as it were.

In the long run (and ignoring what happens when the Empire folds up), they'll do much better if they keep prices high enough for a tasty profit, but low enough that it's not worth it to try to deal with individual JSDF members. Once that channel gets opened, closing it would take a lot of work...

24 Given the spoilage in this thread, I hope that this doesn't need hiding...

Don't forget some of the tertiary effects of the trade.  Every aspect seems to help out Japan in some way.  Note the chapter (going from memory here) where Pina throws the party for the senators, and shows off a sample of Japan's goods, only for the Zorzal in the china shop to show up.  Everyone was shocked by the quality of the goods and the taste of the foods, even Zorzal. The subsequent opening of the PX in the capitol made an equal impression on the Empire's other classes.

Now I'm wondering what the numismatic value of Imperial coinage is vs. the commodity value of the base metals on Earth--of course, Imperial coins would have tremendous collector value on Earth if Japan just auctioned them off, but if there's a melt-value arbitrage play, *that* could be done without anyone ever noticing, as long as there are no trace impurities/background mana radiation/etc. that could give the "new" gold away...

25 I don't recall which chapter it was, but the JSDF very shrewdly wrote themselves exclusive mineral rights to 100% of anything other than basic gold, silver, iron, copper and... (damn, I'm sure there was something else) into their treaty with Elbe. The king knows there must be something of value in thise mines beyond the basics, but he hasn't a clue what. He's going to regret those terms in time.

26 Lead, tin and zinc are off the top of my head the other 3 major metals of antiquity, especially the latter two alloyed with copper to make bronze and brass.  Ah, I see that pewter is an alloy of 85-99% tin plus other stuff like copper or lead.

I wonder if these "Romans" are using lead acetate as a sweetener like ours did....

27

It was chapter 40, and we have to remember the extreme bottleneck for shipping anything back to Japan. Another thing missing from your list is diamonds, which are used as currency.

Most of this prospecting is speculative, trying to identify useful ores in case, someday, the Japanese decide to try to build an industrial complex on the other side. In that case oil (or coal) will be essential and ores for things like tin, zinc, aluminum, iron and so on will be of interest. But in the short term, about the only thing they could find that would be worth exploiting immediately would be Rare Earths, and even that only if they could be partially refined on the other side before being sent back through the gate.

I don't think the king will regret this. For one thing, an alliance built on mutual self-interest is the strongest kind of alliance, and now he has that with the JSDF. Which helps his situation with the empire, and that's all to the good. If the Japanese find something immediately to exploit, then it means there will be nonstop traffic between Arnus and Elbe, plus detachments of the JSDF in Elbe, and that's also a fine thing. Even if they're extracting things and taking them away and not paying taxes on it, it's still going to benefit his economy (see Italica).

Plus most of what the Japanese are looking for he wouldn't know what to do with even if he found them.

I can believe that oil would get exploited immediately, as soon as the Japanese could build a small refinery. Having a local source for fuel would drastically reduce the demands on trucking through the gate, which would be very helpful. (Your tankers go to-and-from Elbe instead of to-and-from Japan through the gate.)

Ironically, that might result in more trade goods. A lot of what would be produced by a refinery is not of local use to the Japanese. After you extract gasoline, diesel, and kerosene (jet fuel) what's left is a waste produce, so you might as well try to sell it to the locals (for instance, lubricants).

28

After you extract gasoline, diesel, and kerosene (jet fuel) what's left is a waste produce, so you might as well try to sell it to the locals (for instance, lubricants).

A lot of what remains after you refine crude oil would be very useful to an industrial society, but not nearly as much to a pre-industrial one.  You would be better off raising the technology and industrial levels of the Empire and then sell the byproducts.

The complexities of sending through the components of an oil refinery and what you need to assemble on site will probably cause headaches for traffic management through the gate.  Add to the type of oil you find (Light sweet or heavy sour.) and what you want the refinery to be able to produce and the list of items to be shipped through the gate will get long in a hurry.

29 As I understand it, "rare earths" really aren't that rare, what's rare in the 1st World is a willingness to boil them in acid 1,000 times to extract them.

Oil, well, ideally like over here you'd find some light sweet crude and mostly fractionally distill it, you might need to do more for jet fuel for jets (I gather jet fuel is becoming a near universal military fuel in the West).  Send remaining fractions to diesel electric generators, later boilers for steam turbines, for in material terms electricity is probably the true key to modern civilization.

30

for in material terms electricity is probably the true key to modern civilization.

One thing that Twilight: 2000 emphasized was that a modern economy and society needed electricity, and a working power distribution network, to function, if not more than as much as oil.  If either the means of production or worse, the distribution network ever suffered massive damage (EMP courtesy of ICBMs conducting fractional orbital bombardment, to name one.), society would come to a screeching halt, assuming it did not collapse in short order.

Assuming the crude oil was of good quality, which is not guaranteed, refining diesel fuel would be relatively easy.  Gasoline would require more processing, especially since all gasoline do not come from the distillation column in equal qualities.  Jet fuel would require even more processing, depending on the feedstock used.  You also have to take into account the expected usage rates - a single F-4 will require just under 48 barrels of jet fuel to fill its' internal fuel storage.

One byproduct of oil refining that can be a very useful trade item to the empire would be petroleum coke, which would be a better fuel for heating or manufacturing than wood or charcoal (The expected fuel sources for a medieval society.).  The downside is that a refinery capable of producing coke will probably be considerably more complex than if it simply produced diesel fuel.

31

Local oil refining doesn't have to supply the entire needs of the base. If it even provides part, that helps relieve the supply flow from Japan, and gives them capacity for other, more long range things to be shipped in. (Like more drilling equipment.)

This whole endeavor is subject to considerable budgetary limitations, though the "budget" isn't money, it's shipping capacity. Someone is spending a lot of time figuring out how to divide up the existing capacity through the gate so as to optimize the mission. For the time being, trucking going back to Japan is mostly going empty, so if they can come up with goods from the far side worth returning to Japan, they'll do it. But that capacity is also really limited so there are a lot of things that just aren't worth shipping, particularly later.

The reason the Collective is being granted shipping slots from Japan is mainly because they're a source of local currency plus a substantial asset for information gathering. But they can't have much, because so many other things need to come through.

It reminds me of the Red Ball Express in France in 1944.

32 We're really a bunch of geeks, you know that?

33

It's 0522, I'm in an IV clean room in mask, covers, etc., towards the end of my shift, taking my break, reading about Lelei.

That'd be a "yes!," Steven.  God bless us; there's none like us!

34 Considering we actually care about the logistics of a fantasy anime, yes, yes we are a bunch of geeks.  But that's part of what makes being fans so fun.  Plus, you rarely get to think about open questions like this.

35 Petroleum coke comes from cracking long chain hydrocarbons, which you need for heavier crudes and more favorable mixes of light outputs.  Technically more complex as well, and often requiring prior removal of sulfur (kills catalysts).  I'm assuming that the demand for light outputs isn't huge compared to the total throughput of a basic refinary, and a demand for the heavy fractions for electricity (also used here on Earth to power ships, and oil heating).

For local heating, as well as stuff like iron and steel production, I'd assume at some point they'd be looking for coal.

Hmmm, things in general are a bit unsettled for these sorts of industrial plants and transport networks, imagine a fire dragon vs. a refinery.... 

36

Local oil refining doesn't have to supply the entire needs of the base. If it even provides part, that helps relieve the supply flow from Japan, and gives them capacity for other, more long range things to be shipped in. (Like more drilling equipment.)

There are fairly small refineries whose main purpose is to provide refined fuel of whichever kind to either alleviate shipping requirements for fuel or eliminate them - like mining companies or air force bases in out of the way locations, or even to support oil drilling operations in remote regions (All the refineries in Alaska, including one at Prudhoe Bay, for example.).  One of three (Yes, three.) refineries built in the US since 1998 started with a capacity for 3000 barrels per calendar day.  So building a small refinery is definitely possible - but shipping all the equipment for it and all the equipment to build and maintain it would be a major burden on traffic management through the gate...And all the more so, since the refinery will be producing fuel that will require more processing than a simple distillation column will accomplish.

Petroleum coke comes from cracking long chain hydrocarbons, which you need for heavier crudes and more favorable mixes of light outputs.  Technically more complex as well, and often requiring prior removal of sulfur (kills catalysts).  I'm assuming that the demand for light outputs isn't huge compared to the total throughput of a basic refinary, and a demand for the heavy fractions for electricity (also used here on Earth to power ships, and oil heating).

Since even power generation by the JSDF will probably be dependent on diesel fuel, any refinery in the fantasy world will have the overwhelming majority of its' output in the form of light distillates, not heavier bunker fuel.  And being able to produce petroleum coke would demand the refinery be more complex, and require more sophisticated equipment, all of which will up the what needs to be shipped to the building site.

Still, until coal mining in the empire produces sufficient quantities of coal, petroleum coke would be a considerable better fuel source than any non-magical fuel.

37 Guilty as charged.  World-building is my favorite hobby, even over reading; if I haven't torn apart the world and put it back together 6 different ways by lunch just to see how it would work, my day just isn't complete.

That's why I latched onto the manga when I first came across it.  Soo many opportunities to think things through.  I've had similar ideas in the past, but they tended to involve "unit gets tossed into fantasy (often Clarke's 3rd Law fantasy) world with no way home".  Gate is a refreshing new concept, with lots of technical details to puzzle through; it and Log Horizon have kept me occupied this year.