Technology

Midchilda, and the TSAB in general, uses a substantial amount of electricity, mostly because it is simply a useful and easy-to-work-with form of energy. Their power storage is mana-based, not chemical like our batteries - cartridges show that you can get ridiculous energy densities with very little loss, with mana. A Midchildan cellphone won't need charging more than once every couple of months, and that's the low-end models. Higher-end ones draw in ambient mana from the environment, and never need recharging. However, for the effects it can produce and transmission of energy, electricity is used often - street-lights, for example, are an easy use of electricity, electromagnets are as ubiquitous as they are in our culture and copper wire is frankly too easy not to use.

Microelectronics are rarer. They're known about, but the TSAB tends to use solid-state computational hardware like the central processing units of Devices (though obviously considerably reduced in scope) for the stuff we'd use a much more fragile and prone to damage circuit board for, as it's both more powerful and a lot tougher. Production facilities are first-rate - nowhere near post-scarcity, but one person using Myedoan-style with a Construction Device can operate an entire factory line by themselves. That means you can get whole factories running with maybe ten-to-twenty active employees, and twice that number of maintenance and support staff. Construction Devices are, at maximum, about on par with an Armed Device like Graf Eisen in terms of intelligence, though totally non-combat oriented. They're generally only made as "smart" as needed, so given that there's a lot less variability in factories, they tend to be pretty "dumb" and rely on their operator for the thinking. But they can react far faster than a human if, for example, something bad happens, and they can multi-task and manage lots of separate operations simultaneously on the line. They're basically integrated versions of those modern car factories. The operators generally cast in Myedoan, which I'll go into in a later post on different magic styles.

Power is generated in a range of different ways, some similar to how we do it, others very different. Precia's reactor - the one that blew up and killed Alicia, and sparked all of this - was a new, theoretically clean type of generator meant to tap the currents of the Dimensional Sea for large amounts of mana. It was meant to be the magical equivalent of what we want for hot fusion - clean, almost unlimited power. Unfortunately it worked out as more like fission, and that little incident was the TSAB's Chernobyl. Interestingly, that means that the colour of the blast has become associated with overloading reactors in the same way that we link green. Fate's magic is basically the equivalent of a radioactive green; an "unhealthy" colour (and you wondered why Yuuno was wary of her).

They have no FTL, which breaks causality and introduces a host of problems concerning free will and time travel and paradox and suchlike that cause severe problems in a hard-sci-fi narrative. TSAB spaceships are better than those of Earth, but still not really cut out for realistic space travel, and certainly not anything interstellar. There exist a few uncommon colonies on other worlds, such as biospheres on the equivalent of Mars in Type 1c dimensions where the Earth never went through the oxygen crisis and it wasn't worth terraforming to the Alhazredians. Something like the Asura could reach Mars a lot quicker than Terran ships could, although you'd still probably be looking at a transit time measured in weeks or fortnights to get there from Earth.