1: A crystal is a single molecule with a very precise (and generally three dimensional) structure. It is very nearly impossible to find something more brittle. Metal is basically a single molecule with a very fluid structure, it is very difficultto find a basically rigid solid that is more flexible. Our crystal is very strong, it doesn't break easily, but when it breaks, it shatters, that is what brittle means. This makes it very nearly impossible to repair. Reproducing the initial construction forces is about the only way, and with magic and magically created crystals, that should be very easy.
2: It is better than steal because it is lighter. It is as effective as steel of the same thickness as protection, but logically has different properties. Both crystal and steel break under the same force, but around the breakage level of force the crystal will tend to have a localised shattering event resulting in lost thinckness and fractures while the metal will have a broads denting effect resulting of a broad hardening effect inducing a mild increase in brittleness. The crystal basically doesn't ever change its shape, it doesn't tend to dent and when it would it doesn't spread that bending, making it wonderful for a thing like a spyglass which requires precise alignment. Metal also spreads force more effectively, so a really big hit is more likely to bend in the side of a ship and punch a small hole through a crystal. Regenerating metal would be almost useless, regenerating crystal is wonderful, and the crystal is already generated, we just need to renew the process that we already know.
3: What I want is to fix the crystal's main weakness, and this does exactly that. A regenerating crystal armour will plug up the hole that a penetrating shot did, it will restore the dent that a non-peneterating shot left, and it will restore the cracks that come from use with heavy machinery and the associated shocks. So long as they don't keep hitting the same point on the crystal the regeneration should be pretty effective, considering that it doesn't spread its damage around much unlike metal.
1.) Do we know it's actually crystal? We're just
calling it Crystal. That doesn't mean it has to match the scientific definition of a crystal. It is magical, after all.
2.) It's also lighter. I'm not saying regenerative crystal is useless. I just think it's better done as a design instead of just kind of putting some of it into a revision where it doesn't reach its full potential and where we could use that revision for better things.
3.) Crystal will still be brittle. Giving it very minor regenerative abilities isn't going to change that. This will just fix the microfractures from machinery, which is an extremely minor problem. All it does is "oh an apprentice has to maintain a very small part of the ship every couple of days"
Yes, but there are sanity issues here. Making our ships fly would be a small tweak to their locomotion. It doesn't touch on their armament, armour, crew and cargo capacity, velocity, turning rate, mass... It is just one little tweak to a single dimension of their mobility. But it is completely impractical because we don't have a grounding in that technology. If we had experience in blimps then we could try to turn them into blimps, but we don't so we can't. On the other hand, we have hawks that can fly, and fireballs that can fly, and wasps that can fly, and cannon-shells that may as well fly, and ships already almost fly considering that they hover on a liquid. So Flying is clearly totally our thing, almost all of our stuff flies, so why not our ships?!?!? Because making a ship fly is very different to anything that we have done with ships, and our flight magic operates on things very different to ships, there is simply no mechanism there. We would be more likely to pull off aquatic fire wasps or hawks on floats... There needs to be an actual justification for the effect to happen, otherwise the proposal is ludicrously ambitious and likely to to get a small associated technology on a 6...
This is hyperbole.
Making our spell that physically modies brains to also grow the Falcon beyond natural sizes using experience from our spell that makes plants grow isn't
anywhere near making our ships fly. You're just ignoring the logic here. It's kind of insulting, actually. You're just making random irrelevant comparisons to try and weaken my point. We know how to artificially grow living things. We know how to properly modify animals. This is
nowhere near your frankly stupid example.
Mental passiveness to physical massiveness is a huge leap. There is nothing minor here in the change to the magic involved and no mechanisms from the hawk aspect. You are basically saying that a mind control spell should be able to spontaneously augment universal size with a revision. It is like saying that their mind-reading spell should be able to turn their soldiers into giants... That wouldn't fly on a design, far less a revision, at best you might be able to get a bonus from knowing magic that targets humans directly.
More assumptions. We're not making the Falcons "mentally passive". We're literally taming them with a spell. We're using magic to make them recognize our troops as friendly, Moskurgers as enemies,
and to obey commands. How is this just "mental passiveness"?
1: Mind is not physical, that would be like saying that fire is a combustion reaction. Fire is the visible emenations from a combustion reaction. When people say "look fire" they do not point at the fuel, they point at the brightly coloured flames. Now, most peopel are more interested in the combustion reaction because they either want to start or end a fire, and that happens at the combustion reaction, but the visible fire is just exhaust fumes and heat distortions. The mind is the toughts, and we have magic that can affect thoughts directly. Occams razor says that if it effects a mind alteration then that is all that it does.
2: The only unnatural thing about the plant growth is it pace. The hawk growth would exceed its normal size. Taking the spell from plant to hawk is one step, from pace to maximum is another, maybe another two, and that assumes that it references growth at all and is not just time acceleration and fuel facilitation. Quite frankly I would much rather work on the angle that it is the latter because that is waaaaay more powerful and would totally explain why we had so much difficulty getting it to work. If we lock it down as being some pathetic size alteration magic then we lose a massive potential resource.
3: unnatural and growth, two things, already a big ask from a revision, definite negatives, much unlikely to work.
1: The mind is in fact physical. Every single thing you do, you think, you remember, is all physical. It's all reflected in and based on your brain. In order to change anything about the Falcons' minds, we have to physically change their mind. This is a fact. We are permanently altering their brains. Mind == Brain.
2: But we're still making it unnatural growth. "Time acceleration and fuel facilitation" is just such an unnecessary assumption of how it works that only serves to "disprove" my Revision. Why would we be doing that? If we were doing that,
we'd know it. Evicted isn't the kind of person to tell us that a tiny aspect that we never knew about made something useless. If that kind of thing was relevant, then we'd know it.
3: Okay, you're doing that thing where you unecssarily make something complex. For example, I can say "I walk down the stairs" or "I move my leg down, then I have to make check the next location where I shall step and coordinate it with the position of my leg. Using my muscle memory, I have to place my foot down on the step and shift weight so I don't fall down. ..." Adding more steps or parts doesn't make something more complex.
In fact, watch. Let me give Regenerative Crystal
just a bit of the same treatment that you've been giving Hunter Falcons (and
many of my other,
working designs). I don't believe this, but it's to serve a point. I can do this exact same thing to practically every single working and effective design we have, too.
Crystal regeneration: A minor improvement to crystal, this aims to give crystal a minor regenerative factor, to the point where microfractures and small chips repair themselves. Additionally, it allows manual repairs to be done more easily and quickly.
What? We're just going to make crystal
grow now? Machine crystal is inherently unmagical - that's the point. How the hell would we make an unmagical material grow without external forces? It's like just asking someone today to make regular steel just regenerate by itself. Crystal is just a physical structure, and nothing can make it grow. It's made of molecules and molecules can't just replicate themselves!
We don't even have any experience in making crystals regenerate themselves. Why would we be able to do it in a revision?
"But we have life magic!" You might say, but how's that even relevant? All life magic does is increase pace of growth, and crystal doesn't have any pace of growth because it
doesn't regenerate or grow. "But we can summon crystal!" Then how are we going to do that? What? We don't know how to make materials summon more of themselves! It wouldn't even be machine crystal, and the regenerated material would dissipate and would be dispellable from anti-magic just like our old summoned crystal. And how's our experience from having mages summon crystal going to translate to making crystal regenerate itself? Those are two different things! Just because someone knows how to smelt steel doesn't mean they can imbue all steel with the ability to smelt more of itself when damaged.
Then how are we going to make the crystal even know when to regenerate? How's it not going to just become a tumor? We'd have to make crystal intelligent for that, and we have no experience in that. We'd have to do it in multiple designs to even try to get it to work. If we just give crystal the ability to regenerate all our designs will
obviously just start growing out of control and become useless. We don't even know how to make anything intelligent - all we know is how to modify minds and that doesn't apply here at all.
I could go on, but I think that proves my point.
I never said that it was lying.
Yeah?
Oh, and I am not interested in basically lying to the G.M. to make our rolls easier.
I don't get it.
I don't get it. You always make up these strange reasons based on your own assumption-based perception of how magic
should work, instead of how it works in Wands Race. And you keep on trying to pick apart things based on
your own personal rules of magic when they don't apply. What I'm making are logical connections when you seem to want only solid "+1"s to existing tech and nothing else. A revision isn't just a +1 to one of the rolls. This is a solid revision - we're revising our spell to include growth, which is a thing that we already know how to do with plants. Even without life magic experience, our falcon spell would be enough to add growth to in a revision. Life magic just helps.
Author
Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 394038 times)