Print

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

[Happerry]

Eh, whatever we get from flying, they'll probably copy us sooner or later, and the more broken it is the more sooner it'll be.

[evictedSaint]

Design: Flying Carpets [3+2-2, 3+1-1, 3+1-1]


Ancient tales talk about secret vaults of treasures, guarded by demons and djinn that protected all manner of magical and mystical mayhem that lay within.  One of these artifacts was a carpet, enchanted with the power of flight.  Though we've never seen such a thing and the tales are obviously nothing more than fantasy, we decide that it's not a terrible idea.  After all, who wouldn't enjoy flying through the air on a magic carpet ride?  It opens up a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view of the battlefield.

The carpets are woven together and embroidered with the tales, hymns, and verses from our Holy Book that mention even the slightest hint towards birds, flight, and clouds.  We also stitch in a few prayers for good measure, and then enchant the whole thing with a specially-crafted spell that borrows heavily from Cyclone Shield and Gust of Wind.  This lets us generate lift, pushing the carpet off the ground when the enchantment is active.  The most difficult aspect is control; the only way to make the carpet lift off and settle back down is from the magical influence of a wizard.  It can reach quite impressive heights, allowing the mage to survey the battlefield from the clouds.

At the moment, that is all it can do.  The carpet will drift if the wind blows, but it has no locomotion of its own.  The mage can attempt to drift the carpet one way or another but there's no self-propulsion to allow them to zip around over the battlefield.  The carpet is also rather difficult to sit on, as the edges ten to curl up and the entire thing can shift one way or another with little warning.  In many cases, it flips altogether and the mage plummets to the ground.

It does allow us to survey the battlefield and relay information back to the ground by using several carpets and teletalk wands, but since the height is from our own lines only those with the keenest of eyes can do a decent job surveying.  The enchantment is still not permanent and requires periodic maintenance.  It also burns out faster as it flies, meaning the mage can't stay airborn for too long without risking a long fall back down.  Still, it increases our battlefield awareness, which is an immensely helpful thing.

Because this was an ambitious project, we receive penalties to our effectiveness, cost, and bug likelihoods.  The fact that we have experience with enchantments helps offset this, as does the holy words woven into its fibers.  Being primarily based in wind-magic also helps.  Very Expensive.

[Detoxicated]

weave wind magic into the carpets so that it has a way of moving for itself as well as being able to carry more weight and Not flip over

[Madman198237]

Fix Carpets! (Move by itself, carry more weight, but, MOST IMPORTANTLY, not flip over anymore): (2) Detoxicated, Madman198237

[Sosoku234]

Fix Carpets! (Move by itself, carry more weight, but, MOST IMPORTANTLY, not flip over anymore): (3) Detoxicated, Madman198237, Sosoku234

[Happerry]

Fix Carpets! (Move by itself, carry more weight, but, MOST IMPORTANTLY, not flip over anymore): (4) Detoxicated, Madman198237, Sosoku234, Happerry

Perhaps we could add a wooden or wicker frame around the edge of the carpet to keep it from flipping?

[Madman198237]

Hmmmm....Perhaps: Framing the magic carpet in staves inscribed with the spells and prayers and phrases and quotes and doggerel and gibberish and verses and hymns and tales and all that jazz will stabilize the magic carpet, increasing its durability and load-carrying capacity to hold a small group of Alnnar Almuqaddasa-bearing soldiers and the mage, who now has much greater control over the whole assembly.

[Devastator]

Most important is we need a way of propelling it over the enemy lines, so we can bomb their cannons and their towers.  Lifelines and some basic precautions should be able to keep people alive.

I am also feeling bad because all the reasons why I wanted a flying creature to do flying hit us here, which makes me think that if I didn't raise objections to it we wouldn't have gotten as many penalties to the roll.

We also have an expense chit.  Price is no object this turn, we need it to work.  A 1 leading to a fixed carpet but a price increase would be way better than a 1 that gives us nothing.

At least they shouldn't hit us in the air.  You'd need to accurately judge distance to something of unknown size, and get it dead on, not to mention get the direction and angle.  And that a cannonball might just rip a hole in a carpet but not knock it out of the sky.

[S34N1C]

IMPORTANTLY, not flip over anymore): (5) Detoxicated, Madman198237, Sosoku234, Happerry, S34N1C

[evictedSaint]

Revision: Fixed Carpets: [3]
We experiment with several methods of fixing the flipping issue of our carpets.  We try chairs tied to the carpet, belts, hand-rails, safety cables, and a few other methods that all end up failing.

Then we try rolling up the carpet and riding it like a horse.

This ends up working surprisingly well; the mage can attach a saddle to the carpet, and they have a better center of gravity from this position.  It's actually pretty comfortable to ride!  Using this method the mage can then safely cast Gust of Wind to gently blow himself around the battlefield.  The "Pegasus", as our men have jokingly started calling it, can be equipped with a saddlebag filled with Firestorm Grenades and dropped from above.  This is terribly inaccurate, but great for harassing enemy troops.  The maximum height of the carpet is about 3/4 the maximum height of a longbow shot straight up, so it's not perfectly safe.  The slow and second-hand nature of navigation also means the mage is poor at dodging enemy arrows; they should be safe, so long as they don't fire en-mass (or use a highly-trained elite sniper).  We can deploy three or so per theatre, due to the expensive nature of the enchantments and manufacture of the rug.  Very Expensive.

[Devastator]

Well, that should be expense chit-worthy.  We don't need the bombs to be terribly accurate when we are dropping them on cannon and towers.  (which aren't terribly mobile, and the carpets aren't terribly fast.)  And we'll have the bonus of scouting the enemy troops.  And the power of their bows will be a lot less when shooting up, due to losing a lot of energy.

Expense Chit on the Flying Carpets.

[S34N1C]

Flying Carpet (1): Devastator
Save it (1): S34N1C

[Kashyyk]

Flying Carpet (2): Devastator, Kashyyk
Save it (1): S34N1C

[NUKE9.13]

Hey, that's not bad for 4 3s in a row. A solid effort; we shall see how useful they prove to be in battle.

I do worry about this quote, though:

they should be safe, so long as they don't fire en-mass (or use a highly-trained elite sniper)

Because, uh, they totally use highly-trained elite snipers. With arrows that explode on contact with magic. So they don't even need to hit the mage, just anywhere close to them.

So, like, before our mages do anything stupid:

ORDER: Avoid approaching enemy lines on the carpets. Use them for skirmishing (when the enemy is not expecting them and will be too slow to react) and observation (safely out of longbow range) only.

I mean, if two of our commanders's brain cells happen to bump into each other, they'd come up with this on their own, but just to be safe, you know?

Flying Carpet (3): Devastator, Kashyyk, NUKE9.13
Save it (1): S34N1C

Have carpets avoid enemy snipers (1): NUKE9.13

[Detoxicated]

Have carpets avoid enemy snipers (2): NUKE9.13, Detoxicated