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Total Members Voted: 28

[WillowLuman]

And... it allows us to make some pretty kick ass defensive systems.  Our enemies like to wear iron and steel armor..........what happens if we switch on burried high intensity magnets?

Magnets? How about uninsulated electrical wires?

Metal armor would actually make someone invulnerable to shocking, as the metal provides an easier path for the current than the flesh does, so it goes down the path of least resistance and does not flow through the body. This is the principle behind a Faraday suit.

[Reudh]

Only if the metal armor was completely earthed at all times, and no skin was in contact with it.

[wierd]

You are thinking more high intensity induction, rather than conduction.

See for example, "induction heater"

Hugo is correct. High voltages would only weld the joints of the armor together, and carry the brunt of the charge away from the body.

The induction heater, though... (say, installed inside a portcullus gate) ... that would heat their armor to melting temps, regardless of metal type. It would do so in seconds.

[WillowLuman]

Unless of course the armor was wooden. Also, that would be very difficult to set up in a large area (say gate or hallway size).

A large-scale magnet, like the ones used in scrapyard cranes, would be very useful (and probably less lethal on it's own.) It could instantly disarm entire squads or immobilize armored troops. I could imagine gobbos crapping their pants as their weapons were yanked from their hands.

[wierd]

While size of heated area is a factor, it is easily overcome by increasing the current flow of the induction coil.

an induction heater makes use of a high current, low voltage AC winding.  It could be easily installed in a descending circular stair, leading down into the fortress, for instance. 

They make induction heaters for use in manufacture of novelty steels (like titanium steel), that can produce hundreds of tons of molten metal.

Given that we had a suitably crazy-powerful hydroelectric generator complex built into the bowels of the fortress, we could easily install and operate such deadly devices.

[Eric Blank]

I don't know about SPHM or our miner friend in the clockwork body, though. Who knows about Oliolli's aging.

[Athel, since Wierd and Roead killed him, is now an immortal soul and can remain in the mortal world per those rules, and the rules of mummies since Roead used his sigil to bind his soul to the body, which means he can effectively persist indefinitely until someone destroys the clockwork body and slabs him to prevent him coming back again. However, he is no longer protected by the original enchantment I used, so he will be mentally affected by his experiences and could potentially go completely bonkers, if Roead's enchantment doesn't offer similar privelages. That is ignoring the fact that the spirits of the dead are very resistant to change anyway, but it's still a possibility.]

Spoiler: ITS TOO LONG ARGH (click to show/hide)

[I would certainly think it a good idea to permit our citizens more advanced knowledge under a geas that denies them to reveal any information about it other than it's purpose to outsiders or willingly let the devices fall into their hands. We could also make it ridiculously complex to operate, or easy to operate if you have a magical key, like an enchanted tattoo on your palm that acts as 100% of the interface with the device. This would also lead them to believe even further that the device is in fact just a hunk of enchanted whatever, that only functions magically and has only limited physical manifestation. They may then assume they'd need to infiltrate our society to learn the "ritual," but anyone that enters the society is completely unable to reveal anything and also spontaneously drops all loyalty to them.

We could also try to make them nearly impossible to dismantle for the purposes of reverse-engineering without damaging it and changing some key information, like crushing an electrical battery and causing a chemical reaction with a something in the container surrounding it that changes the battery fluid (like using lithium batteries and water ) and prevents them from finding out what it is or was until they learn something about chemistry and physics for themselves, and by that means removes the only source of electrical energy, so they would have no idea it was powered by such and would continue to be stumped by the seemingly magical device. We could use rechargable batteries and if Gizogin gets involved modify his cores to accept magical energy and convert it to electrical energy, which lets our mages operate it indefinitely but still doesn't offer potential adversaries the knowledge (or capability, if we go with the enchantment method) of it's actual operation, even if they can power it.

Of course the gods would have every clue what was going on and could do anything with that knowledge. But they could have anyway, yet they don't, so they probably won't unless they decide their favored people need the advantage again.

And ye, I want a refrigerator. We could just teach our chefs a frost spell to cool the air in a room every few hours, I guess, and install a thermometer so they can read it and decide when it is at the proper temperature for storage. Leaving all this meat, eggs, cheese, and prepared meals around was a bad idea to begin with. In the old fort I assume that the large collection of forumites, in their various fields of knowledge, could handle just about everything and it was probably a metropolis filled with modern technology, and GIH's ‼SCIENCE‼, no matter what wierd was doing or asked everyone else to neglect to do. Now with everyone dead and their souls going everywhere but back to us (The forsaken. Jerks abandoned us. Even Hugo neglected to remain dead for any extended period of time!) our small council can handle everything.]

Eric wandered back upstairs. The hallways had been jam-packed with dwarves trying to get back to their normal lives. He was practically in more danger then of being trampled for moving so slowly, than he was standing outside in front of monstrous reptiles hell-bent on killing them for the slightest infraction. Now they were abandoned, with everyone but the night shift guards and necessary personel in bed. Not a lot had been accomplished today in any field of work, but tomorrow everyone would likely be able to go back to their day jobs. Even the mining team, although they had very little to do. Some of them had gotten in a little work uncovering Roead's tomb, but instead found some old abandoned ruins. Typical. He'd sealed them off, had a little pre-fab floodgate/drawbridge installed and a little pullchain on the fortress' side to operate it, but that was it. No exploration ahd been done, not even a simple survey.

Once back in his room, he put his helm and pick on the dresser and sat down on the bed. Then, promptly stood back up, gathered the helm and pick again, wrote a note, and walked down the hal to Cog's room, slipping it under the doorframe. He nabbed a couple hunks of turtle roast and went down to the caverns and collected his two adult centipedes, making sure all two hundred or so of the little ones had a special geas on them to keep them in the enclosure.

"Come-on, Bugly and Betty, we've got something fun to do," he said, inflicting a little geas to keep them following him and set them on defensive guard duty, but keep them quiet and their strobe lights on non-brain-searing setting. With that, he began wandering back to the entrance to the ruins.

[Oliolli]

Hugo is correct. High voltages would only weld the joints of the armor together, and carry the brunt of the charge away from the body.

Isn't that potentially better than immobilizing the enemy with magnets? Even after the power is cut, the enemy is still incapacitated.

[wierd]

Not really.

The high voltage wire will also weld to their armor as well, and is not free to produce.

The electromagnet doesn't require constant replacement of parts.

[WillowLuman]

Most enemies wouldn't have a full suit of plate armor, as those are expensive and labor-intensive to produce. Faraday suits range from essentially ringmail to a simple wire mesh, and refuse to melt under very high ampere currents. The width of plates and rings would decrease the resistance significantly, so there wouldn't be as much heat. Also, the current would only flow through part of the armor (the parts that formed the quickest path to the ground), so at best it would weld the joints of one leg and one arm.

Like the deities of many classical polytheist religions, the ones in DF are not omnipotent, omnipresent, or even omniscient. Each culture has their own pantheon, so there are several gods of death for instance, and each god usually encompasses only a certain few spheres. Someone can speak out against a god as much as they wish, but the god can only curse them if they actually go and desecrate the temple. As long as there aren't any high priests or temples in our fort I don't think that gods will acquire our technological know-how. Given how game worlds unfold, the gods are more likely like the Norse gods; they are gods simply because they are stronger than everyone else. They can be challenged and even defeated. In older worlds, they may not even have had a physical existance at all, existing only as firmly established ideas within cultures. It is only in the most recent releases that they are able to directly affect the world, and even then only in small ways.

This is not to say that gods are not a threat, however. Though we may be far from the civilization that worships a deity, that deity can still affect us by proxy through his/her followers. As an atheist/agnostic, I still believe that real world gods affected the world greatly; they still exist in an abstract way, as memetic patterns that propagate through a culture. Though they might be ideas, they are powerful ideas, driving people to build temples and fight holy wars against the servants of other ideas. In this DF world we live in, the gods can do physical things and occasionally throw thunderbolts and whatnot. They are just limited to doing this to their adherents. To affect non-adherents, they command their followers through their priests and prophets. You sack the temple? They don't need to curse you with lycanthropy or whatever. The followers, without even being asked, will know to torture you horribly for threatening their way of life.

[Eric Blank]

In this DF world we live in, the gods can do physical things and occasionally throw thunderbolts and whatnot.

Or piss eels all over the region.

That's a pretty good concept of how gods affect the real world, though.

[Oliolli]

[ELECTRICITY]

Alright, I give up. I'll also admit it straight: I had no idea what I was talking about. I've barely taken any classes in physics, and none in anything electrical.

You win.

But I think I learned a thing or two. Win/win?
Wierd, you going to continue your walk around the fort anytime soon? I'd like to know where we are going.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Well, I will not be able to post until Monday, due to a vacation.  I will be able to read your posts, though.

[WillowLuman]

He may still have been tired as hell, but HugoLuman wasn't about to go to sleep again now. No convenient night lights, no decent books, no hands, so no late night reading to help get back to sleep. He wasn't going to just sit and stare at the ceiling, though. Time to take a walk. Maybe there were some dwarves working night shifts he could hang out with.

Coming out the door, he heard the pounding of metal footsteps down the hallway. Vemini, looking quite terrifying in the dim light, came to see who what large shape was moving in the darkness. They both seemed startled to see each other, but HugoLuman broke the ice. "Couldn't sleep?"

"I never sleep."

[wierd]

[sorry everyone.. Like usual, my boss made me pull rabbits out of my ass again; This time I had to correct the isoparametrics of about 30 surfaces on a NURBS solid model of a wing stringer rib, that forms the intersection of the wingtip vortex control surface and the main wing superstructure on some damned Hawker Beech aircraft. I dont care to know which one.  All I know is that the surfaces on the model they sent us resembled a patchwork quilt, which I had to make into whole cloth. Like always, the deadline was "yesterday." 60 curve smooth operations, over 100 surfacing operations, and a lot of head scratching later, the model is a thing a beauty, and is mathematically perfect. I end up getting these little joys because I can get it done faster than anyone else in the engineering services dept, which frees up NC programmer time. For reasons I wont elaborate on, the patchwork model they sent us is very difficult to create NC toolpaths for; Curvature-continuous single patch surfaces with uniform isoparametrics are *easy* to NC program.  That's why I get the supreme delight of fixing our customer's engineering data, when they cant be bothered to do it right. (because they are too goddamned lazy, and/or, incompetent.) Tomorrow I *HAVE* to mow, because the city sent me the nastygram. I wont be on until Sunday.]

[Eric Blank]

[That certainly sounds fun... You make it sound like it would save you time to redesign the part from scratch! ]