Kajika looked even more skeptical, sleeves fluttering as she crossed her arms. “The Kongokaku have bushi, too.”
“It also helps if you’ve almost died a few times,” Daniel admitted. And let’s not mention how sometimes it was more than just ‘almost’. “You have to live through combat more than once before that stops messing with your head just by itself. And from what everyone’s said about Kongokaku, they… didn’t.”
“Kibito said something about that,” Ikoma muttered, half to himself. “That they’re having to go back and think about how they teach people all over again, because steamsmiths don’t grow up knowing about combat. And what happens after a fight.”
Need to get Kibito and Jack to talk about that, Daniel made a mental note. I bet Jack has all kinds of hints on how to teach geeks not to get killed. “Anyway, if I’m not bothering you… I have a few questions. About Shitori.”
Kajika brightened. “It’s a nice place! Not as big as Aragane was, but there’s plenty of water, we can take hot baths… I hope they let us stay a few more days, this time.”
Oh, a bath. Soaking in hot water sounded like pure heaven.
Brown brows drew down. “They’d better let us stay a little longer. With Kongokaku gone – Yukina says we’re going to have to redraw all the routes, if we want to keep supplying the living stations. Lady Ayame’s going to get a meeting with Minister Yamazaki so they can talk about that.”
That did sound like a good idea. If Kongokaku had been the capital all kinds of trade would have routed through there; changing the hayajiro routes to avoid that central point would take a lot of work- Wait. “The minister?” Daniel asked, curious. “Not the station lord?” Because that seemed like a very odd blip in formal protocol, though if Ayame had lost status by losing the station she was heir to that might be understandable….
Or not, because he’d just gotten a pair of very confused looks. “What did I say?”
Ikoma blinked, then winced. “Uryuu did tell you about Lord Hirozuka?”
“Ex-quartermaster of the shogun’s army, yes-” Daniel cut himself off, as ominous pieces fell into place. “Oh no.” I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know…. “You mean we’re heading back to the station where the Hunters decapitated the local government.” Oh boy. Had anyone told Jack this? Couldn’t have, the colonel would have been brainstorming with the whole team about, what do we do when someone tries to shoot our thoroughly guilty allies.
A/N: What can I say, everybody’s been kind of busy, and they did name names. It just may not have clicked with everyone that SG-1 didn’t know X name belongs to Y station….
Side note: The first Kabaneri compilation movie has Mumei give us the distance between the lord’s manor in Aragane and the railyard: 2 ri (ri = about 2.44 miles), 8 cho (cho = 357 ft, 11 inches). Aragane seems to be modeled on a yamajirō (山城, ‘mountain castle‘), where the manor’s at the top of the hill and the town spreads out below, so that might be more-or-less the whole diameter of the station. That’s still 2.97 miles in diameter. Or about 7 square miles in area. As in, a third the size of Manhattan.
The only bigger station we’ve seen in canon was Kongokaku.
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
It kinda makes sense that Aragane was bigger, doesn’t it? Weren’t they one of the stations that made hayajiro? If they were making hayajiro before the world went crash, I imagine that brought in a lot of money.
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Actually, even bigger. If the station is 2+ Ri across, then that’s more like 5.4 miles in diameter, not just 3.
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*Points at A/N above.* If you get a good look at Aragane Station in the first ep, the manor is off to one side.
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Yes. My point was that you converted Ri to Miles, but forgot that there were _2 Ri_, not just 1 Ri (you did calculate the 8 Cho correctly). Nielin shows the math for the answer I got (even if taking that as radius instead of diameter), tho I’ll concede your point about it being imperfect because of being the angled distance instead of flat. Still, the angles involved aren’t enough to drop it under 5 miles flat.
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Um, you’re both wrong actually.
If it’s two RI and eight CHO from manor to station, that’s (2 * 2.44 miles) + (8 * 357’11”) which calcs out to a distance of nearly 5.42 miles from manor to station.
If the manor is the center of a circle then that’s also the radius (putting diameter at twice that of just shy 11 miles), and area of a circle is PI * radius squared…
That gives Aragane an area of 92.37 square miles.
Which makes sense, rice fields take up a lot of space, and the farms have to be entirely within the walls, as if I’m recalling right Aragane also had rice fields butted right up against those huge walls of theirs.
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and V proves her chops and my fail… 😉
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*Rueful* I’m using a very conservative estimate ’cause given the slope we see Ikoma run down to get to the railyard, and the slope up to the manor, a significant chunk of Aragane is near-vertical! Which makes the running length longer even if the area is less.
But thanks for bringing that up, I went back and edited the A/N in chapter 12 to clarify what I was calculating. 🙂
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That might be as the Kabaneri travels, rather than as the crow flies, but I’d expect a major industrial hub to be one of the bigger stations, yeah. Makes sense that Biba would want to sound them out on taking a stand against his dad. (Although I do wonder if the hayajiro that rammed Aragane wasn’t on his orders.)
-Albert
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How could Biba have arranged for a signalling Wazatori? Is it something that could have been timed to go off after taking out the capital?
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I honestly don’t think he did – he had Mumei and Shimon there to gain Aragane’s support. The Wazatori-Fusujou attack seems much more like Very Bad Luck.
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I don’t think he did either, but it was well towards the end of ‘he got weird starting about a year ago’.
He also had all those scientists. If one of them worked out a way to hack Kabane to any degree, I could see something like ‘if the radio signal isn’t given, the hayajiro rams the station’, with Hozumi’s handler deciding whether or not to send the signal based on how the negotiations with Ayame’s father went.
I mean, it’s more likely to have just been a wazatori who figured out station whistles, but one wonders. And if I was planning to destroy the capitol, I can see the value of clearing a major industrial node of enemy humans so that my humans could then take over and have our own industrial base to work with. Black-blood a kabaneri to make a Fused Colony, direct it into a kill box, and you’ve cleared the station.
-Albert
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Except as far as we see in canon, the only radios that existed at all were in Kongokaku and its ring stations like Iwato. There’s no evidence that Biba ever had one. And from what we saw, negotiations with Lord Yomogawa were actually going well, until Boom. *Shrug*
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thanks
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The next question is how densely populated Aragane (and other stations) are. Manhatten’s got a massive population, but it’s a freaking postage stamp. They just build up and don’t devote significant surface space to extraneous things like food production or railyards.
I wonder how space efficient Aragane’s apartment buildings were.
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That’s a good question. I honestly have no idea how to answer it. All the flat areas seem devoted to paddies and the railyard, while the hills are cheek-to-jowl… mostly. Ikoma’s shack seems to be at some distance from any other buildings. I suspect due to the risk of experimental explosions.
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Part of the problem is that it’s not really drawn to scale very well. The houses out in the fields look like the traditional little one-room-plus shacks… yet are larger than some of the obviously multi-story buildings (and number/size of windows matches). So the images of Aragane as a whole aren’t very good for estimating those numbers, and you have to look at the individual scenes of close-in stuff (like the fight and chase scenes) to try making an estimate there.
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Looking at the pics again, things are even farther off-scale than I remembered. The size of the Hayajiros can be calculated from the size of people on them (which puts them about 6-12m tall, and 4-6m wide, depending on which scene you measure from), which also gives an idea of the size of the track.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t match up with the listed sizes for the stations. There’s a good “close up” of the track that circles Aragane, the wall around the station, some major pipes inside the station, and some buildings and fields… The wall is only about 5-8 times as high as the track is wide (so, even assuming the larger track, that’s ~30-45m tall), with some of the pipes at its base being as wide as the track (6m+ diameter steam pipes… and I’ve no idea who is going to turn that valve, considering its’ hand wheel is larger than some of the houses).
Also, looking at the same image, most of the houses are smaller than the steam pipes at the base of the wall, and even the smaller steam pipes that head inwards towards the center of the station are larger than many of the houses.
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“You mean we’re heading back to the station where the Hunters decapitated the local government.” Oh boy. Had anyone told Jack this? Couldn’t have, the colonel would have been brainstorming with the whole team about, what do we do when someone tries to shoot our thoroughly guilty allies.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I think so Danny, but where are going to get 10 pairs of Groucho Marx Glasses way out here?”
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Ayame has a plan.
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