A Rant On Demesne Tech, and Isekai Uplift

So, a minor note about the tech-levels in this story. I've come to hate how in some stories the isekai protagonist is always the ONLY person who somehow makes technology progress. Magic and technology have somehow remained stagnant for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, then this guy comes along and suddenly they're having a cultural, scientific and industrial revolution as somehow he puts together common knowledge that every wizard—heck, every STUDENT wizard—knows to make railguns, radios, computers, GPS and nuclear bombs. It really pisses me off how some wizards seem more dogmatic than the actual local religious institution about making no scientific progress about their magic and being hidebound by tradition. It boggles my mind how the local religion is often the reason for the stagnation of knowledge and the maintainer of ignorance, never mind how literally EVERY religious institution older than fifty years has ALWAYS been at the cutting edge of science. They had their ups and downs, and some centuries were better than others, but there's a reason a lot of schools had religious backgrounds. 

Hence why the tech in this story. If you had, for example, a significant, professional subset of people who could create and control lightning at will (some restrictions apply) of course they'd discover arc welding. Of course they'd have names for magnetism and it would be studied. As soon as you had someone being paid to study something, it is in their best interest to continue to find new things to study to keep justifying the existence of their job and therefore continue to be paid to study, if you want to be totally Tanya von Degurechaff about it. 

Now, there are gaps in the technology to be sure, but that's for in-world reasons. Let's take electrical batteries. In my view, there is very little motivation to create them. Need electricity? A Whisperer can provide, and you get a power controller for the bargain. Ah, I hear you say, but what about electroplating? Well, naturally that will either be a Whisperer-led industry or if for some reason you want to INSIST than anyone should be able to do it, a bound tool powered by beads would be safer. There's your battery right there. Sure, someone might have come up with a voltaic pile at some point, but in a world where they've been using controlled electricity for probably WELL before that, the idea of using poisonous acids and metal to make an electric current to do something—badly—that you can do with a bead is... well, it's inefficient tech, especially since it degrades the materials involved for pretty little gain. Given the circumstantial pressures of the setting, people are far less likely to create poisonous substances that can't be easily treated by heat and maybe lightning. You can't just dump that stuff outside of your demesne, after all, because when your demesne grows it will then be back inside your demesne... 

This setting is also unlikely to ever develop computers as we know them, because the existence of Mentalists renders that line of research functionally unnecessary. All the things we originally developed computers for—ballistic calculations, crunching huge numbers quickly, code breaking, etc—Mentalists already do, as fast as a computer, while also having human intuition, pattern recognition and being FAR easer to feed the problems to. This unfortunately potentially cuts off a huge chunk of what we use computers for, such as automation, but there's historically been precedent for self-correcting mechanical systems, so those would still exist, they just wouldn't be run by computers as we know them. 

Your standard uplift-wank isekai-kun—which Rian is not, because he is not an isekai, that would be wrong and very silly—needs way more than anarchist cookbook knowledge of gunpowder, mayonnaise, thermite, how to fold steel to make a katana, and inventing the kotatsu for them to make a dent in this setting. They need to be, say, an electronic engineer who knows how to make his own parts (transistors, semi-conductors, resistors) by hand to do something that can't be replicated by local magic, like an electronic voice recorder. 

(A record(vinyl) disc/record cylinder wouldn't be enough, as those are basically descended from the music box)

In other words, you'd need to be both a specialist in your field AND know how to make the most basic components of your profession to really do the isekai thing in Demesne. Which is not to say an isekai couldn't, say, make a shoulder-fired black-powder rocket, but once the idea is out there, the local alchemists, smiths and metallurgists would be the ones making it better. 

And hey, I never said they don't already have shoulder-fired rockets.

There are probably things i haven't considered, and you will all likely point them out so they will come to my attention and I try to work them into the setting, but broadly speaking that's how I look at the setting's tech.