Passive Antichronic Reverbramancy [...]
There's a lot of room for improvement with this spell. Lets not leave it half finished and waste a design.
Thing is, AR provides defence, but to defeat their cannons we also require offence. It is unfortunately probably true that if they continue to hammer us with the quantity of shells they have been in the past, AR will not be enough to save our troops. But if we can reliably take out large numbers of their cannons, the remaining sporadic bombardments will be avoidable.
(Or revise it to give several minutes warning. And even that might not be enough)
NUKE, the Hammer can be cast if Storm Strike can be cast. So, we revamp Storm Strike to be always useful.
An accurate Wand of Thunderbolts will NOT give us that kind of advantage. It doesn't have the number of strikes that Storm Strike brings. And their cannons are METAL!!!!! They're basically a bunch of lightning rods, waiting to be hit by our Hammer.
WoT already takes out some of their cannons. Making it more accurate is guaranteed to let it take out even more.
As it stands, we can't get our airships close enough to cast HoA.
Nuke, it's a lot more reasonable to call down death from the skies than it is to charge that into wand form. Plus if we spend just one extra revision we'll have targeted lightning again. We just have to fix Storm Strike. This allows UNLIMITED lightning strikes---otherwise we have to charge wands.
This would allow us to use our deadliest weapon again. The storm could be cast by a crack squad of mages who, sneaking along on War Pegasi, make it behind the enemy camps and call down the storm on their heads...every night.
Well, you say that, but WoT is cheap. Each mage can carry many wands. Yes, it isn't unlimited, but it lack of lightning has not been stated to be a problem.
If you could guarantee me that crack squad of stealth mages, I would vote for all-weather Storm Strike. But that's the thing, it isn't guaranteed. Whereas the effectiveness of WoT is.
Here's my thinking: barring anything more pressing, next turn we use a design to create propellers for the Alsamma Safina.
Then we use our revision for all-weather Storm Strike, once we have a reliable way of getting mages into casting range. If we revise it this turn, we'd probably have to wait for the airship improvements before it becomes useful anyway (crack mage squads don't just happen automagically, they'd probably require an Order. A risky Order).