"The Enemy tore up my workshop," he says. "When you blast him with whatever weapons you've developed to do the job, if there's any occasion for nasty comments, you can slip one in about that. All right. I still think we're four years out on something that lets us develop nuclear weaponry from the information in Loki's memory, however indirectly I need that done. Loki, what are you working on, what's the timeline for it, how can we support you?"
"Next step in the teleportation. It'll take longer than the first part. I have some prioritization to do, actually -" She pulls out a page of notes, forces it from Asgardian into Quenya. "The ultimate goal is for me to be able to fetch things and information from my galaxy and the interdimensional part is as with your project the hard one. I could go straight to that, but I could also detour to adding passengers so I'd be more useful here in the interim - faster, hackier version would just let me have some of my cargo allowance be alive, I could take a few swifts with me that way; longer more elegant version would let me take large numbers of people without having to alter their size in any way first. The question is basically whether it's worth a delay of five to eight years objective time for me to be able to teleport passengers to handle intraplanetary refugee, trade, diplomatic, etcetera situations that crop up in the subsequent ten to, mm, thirty, objective, while I hammer out the dimensionality problem."
"Unless it's bigger than yea big," she gestures, "in any dimension, yes, I can do that with what I have now; if it's bigger I need to work the passenger angle."
"Customarily you'd also have aircraft, but that would be an entirely separate problem."
"Possible, I don't know. I don't see an obvious reason you couldn't do a bombing run with a zeppelin, although they're not very fast, might be easier to take down."
"So I should push the passengers angle. Why am I only just now hearing this about the moon?"
The Enemy tried knocking the Moon out of the sky almost as soon as it rose in it. There was a lot of violent turbulence and when it crashed the first night we thought it was gone for good. We got confirmation from Círdan who'd heard it from Ulmo that that's what happened."
"I suppose if your project yields Asgardian library contents anyone who's working on extracting information from them will have to be literate in it anyway."
"There might be a few things written in other languages - Allspeak is standard on Asgard - but I think even most of the imported material gets translated."
"If you wind up needing untranslated materials you might need them from a variety of different languages, and I don't actually know any languages except Asgardian and a little of the Men's language I picked up while their writing was in development so you might have to spend as long as several days deciphering miscellaneous script. I do not imagine this to be a prohibitive difficulty."
"Oh, and it's possible you'll need to build non-uranium-based weapons because the Enemy has the Silmarils and apparently they block radioactivity? That might add an extra few development steps. Pure fusion bombs are also possible and don't rely on anything radioactive as far as I recall but typically appear much later in a realm's tech tree. Antimatter even farther along. So I don't know that I'd recommend sinking any fungible resources into getting uranium yet."