Board Thread:Theories/@comment-30785465-20170716114217/@comment-1327106-20170718162949

It's not that reverse engineering is weak. It's that it only takes you so far. As I mentioned, if you don't have the original equipment molds, knowing that your ship's torpedos are 533.4mm wide and 7163 mm long functioning off of wet heater propulsion doesn't mean much. How are you going to build it in the right shape? How are you going to figure out the alloys the torpedo housing is made out of, or are you going to just use the same materials you use for sword blades or shotgun pellets and hope it works?

Yes, you can try to recreate the mold, yes you can try to recreate the composition of the materials, yes you can try to recreate the internal mechanisms. It's not impossible but it takes time and infrastructure and the Walls are unlikely to have help. We know they have a time limit of three years (because they get to the ocean a year after the manga starts) and they're not likely to rebuild the Walled country into a giant factory town in that amount of time.

You brought up the thunder spears. While I think that was less reverse engineering and more Hange figuring out how best to apply suppressed technology, it is worth pointing out that not everyone was armed with the things and they needed those badly. The thunder spears were critical equipment and they did not have enough. For Paradis, the limit isn't natural resources, it's production. And that's why reverse engineering is not the answer to everything. They can know, but they won't have the instructure to make.

The vertical maneuvering gear has been around for quite some time in the Walls so it's not really comparable. It's not new tech anymore. They already have the kinks worked out and the molds and everything they need for production. Expecting that to easily translate is like asking a car mechanic to work on your airplane. They might both have engines and run on combustion, and he might eventually figure things out, but it's going to take time, he's not going to have the parts, and there may be unexpected hazards (not realizing the suction power of the engine when it's turned on).

As for crewing the ship, I highly doubt the Marleyan soldiers are going to work for the Walls. If you capture an enemy ship, you don't put the captured soldiers back to work sailing the ship (they're liable to sail someplace you don't want and/or sabotage things). Sure, you probably could get a few of them to cooperate, but a WWI-era battleship has hundreds of soldiers. Where are you going to find a crew of 600 that you trust enough not to munity on you, especially where then are hundreds of them on board? That's bigger than the entire Survey Corps at its peak.

Yes, the Survey Corps might still win in a mutiny, even if there are only a hundred of them on board, but if that fight happens at all you have lost your crew and if you're lucky you'll still have enough left that you can turn around and go home.