Okay, the obvious way to do exploding shells would be to invest in time metamagic, which would not be a terrible discipline to have, but we should probably fix our plant magic first. The other way would be to have a circuit which breaks another circuit which can cast. Time-metamagic would mean a circuit to place a horde of just-cast fireballs in stasis, to be releases when the time circuit breaks. The other way is to load it up with storage crystals and have somethign that can cast a massive fireball, again, when the external circuit breaks, either due to impact or we could do timed shells by placing circuits onto crystal shell-casings that expire when the crystals times-out. This latter approach would be vulnerable to antimagic... Or we could try to do something funky with antimagic charms... If we could get them to cycle the absorbed magic through a circuit, by which they would have a 'pressure-release', and if the circuit breaks then the antimagic charm can no longer release its pressure so it instantly absorbs the whole circuit and explodes...
We did exactly that with our anti-magic arrows. The result was dissapointing, and instantly negated by their anti magic.
The result was disappointing because the projectiles were too small to do a lot of damage, to my memory, and the focus was on negating magic than doing damage. As for being negated, can you recall why they were being negated? How can anti-magic be itself negated by anti-magic?
Because we didn't want it to go off in our own antimagic fields. I kind of dispute this, because the reasoning was that because it operated on our own antimagic theories, and the individual components were weaker than a full charm, the charm would absorb the magic before the bomb could get at it. But the reason that they don't detobnate is because 'they don't work in antimagic'... I feel that they should detonate in 'positive' antimagic, such as jamming fields and disruption forces. They should also detonate in 'neutral' antimagic, such as a binding effect on atmospheric magic, just at a slower rate, they will still absorb whatever they touch and still suck on their surroundings, it will just be that there is a force opposing them. Where they will not detonate is in 'negative' antimagic, which takes the magic away. Well, they can't absorb anything if there is nothing there to absorb... They were specifically designed to be weak to our own antimagic, but our charms are completely ineffective(Actually total non-interaction, it didn't even fluctuate or bend towards our charms or something...) against theoir antimagic too, so it is not a matter of force. Their antimagic also works over a range, and somehow can be magically manipulated into a magical dead-zone... Honestly, I think we should revise deicide as a means of countering their antimagic...
I was going to write this whole thing breaking down RAM's Spell-forged Steamworks proposal and how it was extremely over-ambitious (definitely more-so than the HA1 - just look at the post yourself) and how its benefits were vague and kitchen sink-y
Please reconsider, I would like to know the specific points that are concerning so that I can address them specificall. So far all I have is "over-ambitious" which sounds sort of liek a good thing to me. We may have trouble getting it to work but it seems worth it. But if there are specific points of concern then I can try to refine the design...
river powers steam engines
I do not know how a river could power our steam-engines. They work because of magical heating. It could serve as a source of water but they are already very water-efficient. I think that mechanical heating would be a massive invetment in research.
Instead of wasting wizards to make exact shapes of crystal, we let machinery do it for us. ...
the crystal starts as raw "blobs" but its hardness, weight, shape, and more is refined and manipulated ...
The result is much cheaper crystal items and products.
I don't understand how this works. We can currently make crystals to specifiic shapes, the circuits used to summon the crystals should be able to do the same. Also, being crystals, they are somewhat reliabnt upon their internal structure. It is not entirely impossible that some form of compression would enhance their qualities of hardness or weight, and it is possible that the substance that they are composed of could be modified, but the question again arises, if we find that this is possible, why not change the summoning spells to create this new material. I have failed to understand how an assembly line helps when you can conjure a fully-formed object from thin-air.
We've found that crystals are, in a way, "bound" to the summoning wizard. Being dispelled is likely breaking the connection to the wizard. So what if we made the crystals connected to themselves? Then the crystal is a solid object, now completely free of magic and immune to dispelling. The nature of the circuits used in the Crystalworks works great for this - the circuits can easily make "isolated" Crystal because the circuits are "isolated" themselves. No wizard is making this crystal.
The result is permanent crystals no longer tied to magic and therefore no longer dispelable.
This is very similar to what we have already done in binding the crystal objects to gems. I believe that the gem-bund axes that our thanes used were also dispelled, so binding them to the world didn't help. I can see that recursively binding them to themselves could give reality enough of a headache to just ignore them, but antimagic immunity? This makes them more magical, not less, unless I misunderstand. Is there some sort of magical quarantine effect that I missed that keeps their antimagic from reaching the circuits? Making them self-contained whould help if we had such a quarantine effect, but I would expect that we would prefer to extend it over our entire force if possible...
But mostly I have my own pet theory that hey are inherently opposed by reality because they came into being without replacing anything(like a house would replace a pile of bricks and lumber and nails and what-have you...) that would be invalidated by your theory. So imma fight ye!
As a very minor feature in addition to the selling points of the Crystalworks, it's created in a very modular configuration. It has multiple crystal lines and more can be added easily. These lines can be configured without difficulty to produce different products as we come up with new crystal-based designs.
I like to think that we have enough crystal expertise to make new crystal formation spells without much effort.
mundane aspects such as these conveyors
Ireally don't know the history of conveyors, but it sounds like something that may increase the difficulty. When not augmented by magic our mundane stuff is still middle-ages.
Author
Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 393479 times)