Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NUKE9.13]

ACs suggestions are all good and should be implemented.

Our Alsamma get shot down by cannons,  so you want to fill it with flammable liquid and have it sit on top of their canons. Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees the issue here.

I'm not sure, but I believe their cannons can't shoot straight up. But I see your point.

Okay, so. People aren't willing to join me in designing SE(ST). Fine. In that case, we should design something to make use of our unrivalled air power. The Phoenix would do this. I thought better explosives would, but then I remembered that their crystal regenerates (because of course it does), meaning our explosives would need to utterly destroy things to have any meaningful impact- and I'm not willing to bank on us getting the six we'd need to do that.
That being said, I'm also not 100% sold on the Phoenix. So far, there haven't been any suggestions that really stand out as being exactly what we need. If someone can make an argument for why some other idea is better (and not just why the Phoenix is bad), I might be willing to switch.

[Taricus]

How fast does their crystal regenerate though? That's probably important. Either way the concussive force would almost certainly kill anything in the blast range if we go for explosives; the armour doesn't matter if your internals are utterly wrecked.

[Kashyyk]

I feel like I remember a description about crystalclads being able to survive minor cracks, but large ones would flood before the regeneration took effect.

Either way, we don't need explosives that will obliterate their crystal, we just need an explosive that'll kill the man inside. Doesn't matter how much armour you're wearing if you get thrown across the battlefield by the force of an explosion.

[Taricus]

And an explosive that can make a big enough hole in theirs ships that they sink before they can regenerate is always a good thing.

[Kashyyk]

Bane - Magical Explosive : (2) Taricus, Kashyyk
Lightning Rifle :
Lightning Cannon :
Angel Wings :
Storm Elementals : (1) SMMI
Hariq al-Siyni (Chinese Fire) :
al-Tawrbinat's Wind Machine: (0)
Phoenix (Airship with flamethrowers): (3) NUKE9.13, detoxicated, Madman198237
Adamantine Plate Armor: (0)
Storm Elementals (Soul Transposal) :

Please can we not build a giant, floating, bullseye death-trap.

[NUKE9.13]

Hmm :/

Alright, maybe explosives will work _{^{(I'm not indecisive! Your face is indecisive!)}}
However. Is Bane, as it stands, the optimal way of doing explosives? It doesn't use our previous experience in the field, since we're just summoning it out of whole cloth- our al-Chemists are not involved. I'd rather create mundane gunpowder. That being said, this is Wands Race, so perhaps using magic in some capacity would be wise. Would it be possible to combine the efforts of our al-Chemists with summoning materials? Like, we summon the raw materials, and then the al-Chemists work their non-magic on the stuff to create explosives?

[Kashyyk]

I would prefer the Chinese Fire to Bane, but I'd prefer literally any of the proposed designs to the Pheonix, so I just chose the one I felt I was most likely to get additional support for.

Seeing as we've presumably got some mundane experience with Al-chemistry now, I imagine we'd actually have less of a bonus if we went magical than stayed mundane.

[Taricus]

Bane is an alchemical component and is designed so that our alchemists can slap it into stuff like our holy fire to make it both more stable and more explosive. Besides, we have a research credit and some experience in knowing how things blow up, so that will likely be counted in the creation of bane.

[Madman198237]

Alright, I absolutely should've done everything suggested by you guys concerning the Phoenix.

I'm going to go re-write it.


The idea behind the Phoenix (Besides being a flamethrower in the sky) is that people on fire don't reload cannons well. By deploying a lot of these, we can destroy their army entirely. Especially if their guns go silent due to Skyskiff antimagic. We just put a few of these monsters over the heads of every single enemy artillery nest (Remember, they come in relatively small "nests" of multiple guns), and suddenly we have complete artillery domination. Not to mention, giant flamethrowers. Also, as to getting killed: Going fast defeats their cannons. We know this, because carpets (A very small target) get shot down, while Skyskiffs (Probably a larger target than a rolled-up carpet) do not.

EDIT: Oh, and no, I won't specify mostly sideways-pointing ones, the intent is to burn down pretty much anybody beneath the thing. However, having two or so that point forwards won't hurt, so I'll add them.


Also, do NOT use magic in the creation process of our explosives. It might consume wizards to make, or it might go up in expense because we have no experience with magic and explosives mixed together. It's a far better idea just to make our present stuff even more deadly, and I don't think it's necessary to do that. If we just combine our present flammables and a brand-new deployment method, we don't need to explode them, just burn them.

[Taricus]

The entire design is flawed due to the short range inherent to flamethrowers though madman, that's the thing. And if it's going fast it's not leaving the targets on fire long enough to actually kill.

[Madman198237]

Their cannons (Except for the light antiaircraft cannon that can't even kill a Skyskiff) can't shoot upwards, not that you really want to shoot at targets directly above you, seeing as how such projectiles tend to fall back down on your own head, but that's their prerogative, I guess.

So all we do is fly there, pump flammable liquid out of six or more different nozzles and burn everything. It doesn't have to spray some sort of super-thick layer of this stuff, Alnnar is basically a hellish mixture of napalm, Greek fire, and white phosphorus. You set it on fire, and it doesn't stop burning, and it burns terribly long. We just need a thin covering over everything and we'll kill off every single Arstotzkan out there.

Then we just do the same thing with our infantry!

[Taricus]

And then what happens if they manage to make their armour fumeproof or temperature resistant? I mean sure you've convinced me a flying flamethrower isn't the worst idea, but we do need the fuel for it stabilised before we can start carting around significant quantities.

[Kashyyk]

If their cannons can't shoot up, then I wonder both how they've got the range they do and why our alsammas stay at maximum range and snipe rather than moving closer.

I trust you understand the basics of ballistics and thus see that if they can shoot at beyond LoS range, they can hit something in the air at long, medium and short range, as the Pheonix is going to have to move through those ranges to end up hovering over them.

[Madman198237]

It IS stable. It does not randomly burst into flames, at least not unpredictably.

I don't know what you're thinking of when you say stable, but I don't think you'd want it if you understood what a truely stable explosive (A la C4) requires to be detonated.



Yes, Kashyyk, but projectile travel time is increased, and as you certainly understand the basics of angles, you can realize that long range can either be good elevation, good propellant, or both. They've got a bit of elevation, but they can't physically traverse their largest cannons high or fast enough to hit out faster Skyskiffs. Upgrading the Alsamma with the armor required to absorb some of these hits will prevent them from getting shot as they run in. Or, you know, we can just sorta fly above their range. They might be able to send shells on a relatively flat trajectory against almost-stationary targets in a mass bombardment, but they can't shoot down fast-moving ships, even at ranges and elevations they can hit, because it's too hard to accurately predict shell flight versus target motion plus travel time.


Well, Taricus, when they do that we'll be in a bit of trouble anyway, since we can't physically explode enough stuff to kill them all, we're reliant on the temperature and crap. THEN we go all-out on a new, MUNDANE (Easier to produce, more readily available, usable without wizards) raw explosive... Or even better, use wind magic. A single burst isn't the most difficult thing to do. If you hyper-magically-pressurize a specialized adamantine vessel with simple air, and then used a spell to super-harden and then fracture the adamantine, we could probably put some shards through a lot of Arstotzkans.

[NUKE9.13]

The reason the Alsamma Safina is getting shot down is because it moves so incredibly slowly that they have time to target it.

I think Alnnar (not the new stuff) is relatively stable.

Taricus, if Bane is an alchemical compound, what exactly do you imagine it to be, chemically? Or is it a miracle material? How does it both stabilise things and make them more explosive at the same time?