Ever since the naval battle at Southshore ended, nothing had gone right.
All these troubles seemed to have converged, putting enormous, invisible pressure on Rowan.
Rowan truly had not expected House Stormsong to develop a new reinforced inscription at this critical juncture, raising the defenses of traditional sailing warships to a level comparable to iron warships.
House Stormsong's new product was undoubtedly a resounding slap in the face to all of Morris Industries.
An iron battleship, after all, required several times the resources, labor, materials, and supporting infrastructure needed to build a traditional sailing warship.
Granted, the Norwington Family's new warships boasted impressive performance and formidable power. But those capabilities came at an enormous cost.
House Stormsong's warship reinforcement inscriptions took the opposite approach. By combining the new inscriptions with the power of the Ironboat Adepts, they could raise an ordinary wooden warship's defenses to the level of an iron battleship.
What did that outcome mean? It meant rejecting the entire Morris military industry, and rejecting the direction in which the Kul Tiras Navy was developing its warships.
If such a simple, convenient method could improve a warship's performance, why would the other fleets and families sign technology transfer agreements with the Norwington Family and hand control of their military foundries over to Rowan?
Rowan did not pursue that line of thought any further. In terms of cost-effectiveness, iron battleships had already been utterly trounced.
The families of Kul Tiras were founded on merchants' guilds and capital-in other words, money. Merchants' guilds existed to make money, and to some extent, each family's fleet also served its commercial trade.
If returns on military investment failed to justify the expense, who would willingly waste that money?
"Is it really that absurd? However tough a wooden warship is, can it outmatch a battleship