Supporting the gang wasn't a spur-of-the-moment idea from Perfikot, nor did she have a screw loose somewhere.

The current situation has determined that a big city like Chernobyl needs a gang force and a black market to help stabilize social order and supplement the insufficient supply of resources.

This is not difficult to understand; the resource control adopted by Perfikot can be understood as a planned economy, while the black market is the market economy.

In times of insufficient resource supply, naturally, a planned economy is needed, where all resources are centrally deployed, which can avoid waste and concentrate limited resources where they are most needed.

But at the same time, one can't completely discard the market economy; some spontaneous actions of the civilian market can supplement the official planned economy.

Moreover, a particularly important point is that gang forces are indeed beneficial for stabilizing social order in this era.

Especially as the apocalypse approaches, social emotions will increasingly become turbulent, and it's not surprising to see the emergence of gray forces in such situations.

If at this time a gang force can be fostered to occupy an ecological niche, then in the future, even if we can't completely control the situation, we would still have a first-mover advantage.

Moreover, the critical point is, if you don't do something about the black market and smuggling, others will, and instead of letting such a huge market allow others to profit, Perfikot thinks it's better to control it herself.

Of course, as the Northern Territory Lord, she only needs to convey an intention, and the specific operation can be handled by her subordinates.

After all, if a dignified Empire Count, Northern Guardian, has to personally engage in fostering a lower-level gang, it would be too demeaning, and it would also make her subordinates seem highly incompetent.

Compared to these, the problems exposed by the early snowfall in the Northern Territory are what she should pay more attention to.

Because the snowfall came too early, for the people of the Northern Territory, they hadn't even prepared for winter—insufficient firewood reserves, food shortages, lack of warm clothing, and so on...

Some of these issues Perfikot had anticipated and prepared for over the last two years, so some were resolved by Northern Territory officials once they arose.

Some were yet to be solved, but there were solutions in place; it's just that the snowfall came too quickly, leaving no time to activate them.

However, there are some issues that were not anticipated.

For example, the transportation problems caused by the snowfall, which indeed presented a challenge to the Northern Territory.

Currently, the Northern Territory has three means of transportation: trains, horse-drawn carriages, and Flying Airships.

Trains run on tracks, so even with snowfall, they can be well managed; snowplows clear the track snow quickly, allowing trains to operate again.

Even in areas where the snow is too deep, it can be manually dug out to let the trains pass.

Overall, rail transport is relatively secure and has not encountered problems.

Flying Airships are even less affected, using aerial vessels, as long as they don't recklessly fly into the clouds, they typically won't face any issues.

This is also the current primary post-disaster emergency measure for the Northern Territory, using the mobility of Flying Airships to transport scarce resources to places in urgent need.

Compared to these, traditional transportation by carriage is quite at a loss, even struggling within Chernobyl city.

For one, horses are inherently non-cold-resistant animals, adversely affected by extreme weather.

Secondly, carriages have poor passing ability, with even slightly thick snow significantly hindering their movement, sometimes even worse than humans.

Under such circumstances, the situation in many Northern Territory settlements becomes very concerning.

The settlements with built railways are doing okay since the railway guarantees stable resource supply.

However, those without railways are in a bad situation, where roads connecting towns or other settlements are snow-covered and impassable, isolating them, relying solely on fast-reacting Flying Airships for minimal resource supply.

For these settlements, food supply is manageable, as compressed biscuit machines have spread to each settlement, and even if some haven't, transportation by Flying Airships is easy.

So ensuring food supply was promptly done.

Water supply is even more reassuring; snow in the Northern Territory can be shoveled up and directly used as a water source.

With this era having light industrial pollution, snow is mainly clean, except near factories where pollution is present, elsewhere it's pretty much a primitively preserved natural ecology.

So using snow as a water source poses no issue.

The real difficulty is with fuel concerns.

With the establishment of cities and operation of industrial centers, relying solely on the small coal mine near Eagle's Beak Cliff is clearly insufficient.

In fact, in the past year alone, large coal mines in the Northern Territory have been launched by three, with seven medium mines developed with Perfikot's approval.

Small coal mines or unauthorized private mining efforts are even more abundant, but Perfikot turns a blind eye, without excessive accountability.

Though small coal mines act as private theft of her property as the Northern Territory Lord, according to Empire law, all mineral rights belong to the Lord unless dealing with strategic resources such as gold which require sharing with the King.

For Perfikot, however, citizens mining small coal pits for coal supplies isn't too big of a deal.

Even if these settlements report upwards, their requests would usually obtain Perfikot's approval.

The era's mining technology is inherently limited, lacking large-scale industrial equipment and specialized extraction techniques; whatever shallow coal mines they can excavate for daily needs is their limit.

Hoping they could extract lots of coal to sell is unrealistic.

Yet due to snowfall causing transportation disruptions, these small coal pits find themselves unable to deliver mined coal to needy settlements for the time being.

This results in settlements sufficient in food but largely suffering from cold exposure.

Considering they haven't even fully entered winter yet, who among reasonable folks is accumulating firewood now?

Even Perfikot, having experienced a Northern Territory winter, lacks such awareness.

Hence, the Northern Territory's Flying Airships are now mostly used to transport resources and coal specifically.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.