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[Chiefwaffles]

Revision: Insulating Crystal

We build upon our efforts to create insulating crystal from the Combat Armor project. With this foundation, insulated crystal shall be an easy task.
The structure of crystal is changed to no longer facilitate electricity flowing through it. We already have plenty of experience tweaking crystal to achieve particular ends, and this is no different. The Crystalworks allows us unprecedented control of the properties of crystal, and things such as Crystal Glass only prove this. While we may have had not enough time to finish insulating crystal as a part of Combat Armor, we can use the work done there to gain a head-start here.

Insulating Crystal is to be primarily used in layers. In instances such as Combat Armor, our Crystalworks shall create the insides of the Combat Armor out of insulating Crystal while ensuring a path from the head to the ground in conducting crystal. As a result, the occupant is virtually entirely protected by lightning and other similar environmental hazards, and the electricity harmlessly flows to the ground.
This layered approach can be used for practically any design, with Combat Armor being the highest priority. With this revision, we aim on equipping as many designs as possible with the new crystal variant.

TL;DR: Use our experience from the failed attempt in Combat Armor to make insulating crystal. This should be easy given we already gave it some effort as a part of Combat Armor. Should typically be incorporated in designs via layering conducting crystal on the outside, giving a path to the ground, with insulating crystal protecting the occupant/design/tech/whatever. Should be applied to Combat Armor and preferably everything else.


Also, yeah, let's just do one revision at a time. I'm not including this one yet, but I'll push for it after this current revision goes through. For now, I'm just removing my vote from Lightning Rod.

Revisions:
1 - Conjure Water: RAM
1 - Beachfront Frost Tower:
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:
2 - Blastball: Chiefwaffles, helmacon
2 - ETA: helmacon, RAM
1 - Crystal Durability: Andres
0 - Creepy Crawly Crystals:
0 - Furthest Forever Frost:
0 - Antimagic Bomb Concussive:
0 - Lead Overlayed Crystal Ordnance:
0 - Big Dummies:
0 - :
0 Save the revision credit for later use:
0 I want to see the results of the most popular revision before confirming the second revision:

[andrea]

Revisions:
1 - Conjure Water: RAM
1 - Beachfront Frost Tower:
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:
3 - Blastball: Chiefwaffles, helmacon, Andrea
2 - ETA: helmacon, RAM
1 - Crystal Durability: Andres
0 - Creepy Crawly Crystals:
0 - Furthest Forever Frost:
0 - Antimagic Bomb Concussive:
0 - Lead Overlayed Crystal Ordnance:
0 - Big Dummies:
0 - :
0 Save the revision credit for later use:
0 I want to see the results of the most popular revision before confirming the second revision:

edit: Blastball will not only allow the rifle to work and possible upgrades to our cannons, but will also be more effective at dealing with their anti-heat armor, both on soldiers and on ships. While fireball would lose much of its effectiveness against anti-heat armor, blastball can still deliver quite a punch.
It really open the way to many things. (including the IDE)

For anti lightning, Chiefwaffles proposal of layered insulating/conductive crystal is effective and has the benefit of being easy. Energy conversion, on a revision, seems the kind of stuff that will not be able to do even on a 6. modifying the crystal a bit is revision tier, devising entirely new mechanisms seems to me far more ambitious, and I prefer to go with simple. Our troops need lightning protection now.

[RAM]

Revisions:
1 - Conjure Water: RAM
0 - Beachfront Frost Tower:
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:
3 - Blastball: Chiefwaffles, helmacon, Andrea
1 - ETA: helmacon
1 - Crystal Durability: Andres
0 - Creepy Crawly Crystals:
0 - Furthest Forever Frost:
0 - Antimagic Bomb Concussive:
0 - Lead Overlayed Crystal Ordnance:
0 - Big Dummies:
0 - :
0 Save the revision credit for later use:
0 I want to see the results of the most popular revision before confirming the second revision:

[helmacon]

When I specify a working prototype, I mean "something that actually grounds lightning" as opposed to the efficiency of the energy transformation.

A "series of connected mage gems" implies "as many as it needs to work. Your attempting miniaturization without having a product first.

ETA wants to charge Magegems via lightning and protect our soldiers while Lightning Rods is just intended to protect our soldiers. This makes ETA more ambitious. (That and it's wasting the ambition so we rely on the enemy to recharge our stuff.)   

uhh... Your design does the exact same thing as mine. It grounds lightning into a mage gem. My fluff specified how we could possibly do that, your fluff just said "do it" with no explination. Yours is more likely to get a penalty, because it doesn't say how it is possibly with our current capabilities.

And, yes. Of course you can stick an ETA on the ground. It would be difficult to design something you couldn't set on the ground.

We need to counter lightning right now. It should have been the design. Judging by the bonuses we got, armor would have been fine as a revision, but we did it add the design instead. So we have to do this now.

[andrea]

I agree with that, but after discussing a bit with CHieffwaffles, he proposed a new revision. See his "insulating crystal" proposal , creating layered crystals conductive on the outside and insulating on the inside, which should be easy to make and effective in protecting soldiers, without the complexity of absorbing lightning with magegems.

[helmacon]

Ok, yea. Stick some of it over our cannons and engines while we are at it. I can get behind that.

Also, we basically have flexible circuits with our scroll thing. If used correctly inside of our combat armor, it could very easily become power armor.

[VoidSlayer]

For power armor, why not develop vines that can move the crystal armor around like muscles.

[andrea]

That might be an interesting development of plant tech.

But at that point, why even have a soldier inside?

[VoidSlayer]

That might be an interesting development of plant tech.

But at that point, why even have a soldier inside?

To control it directly, we can develop the AI later...

[Chiefwaffles]

Future Revision: Bioaulos
(Working title)

We may not be able to create great accomplishments using plant magic, but we may have found another use for it.
Using a special form of plant - similar to the muscle humans move with - we can easily influence its length using plant magic. The plant is strong and durable.

By connecting the ends of this plant across an artificial joint, we can create magic-powered movement in ways remarkably similar to a humanoid.

This is done as a revision to plant growth because we already know how to influence the growth of plants at a large scale. We simply greatly decrease the scale for power and speed.

[andrea]

we would need to create a suitable plant, but I believe this is a reasonable future development.

[RAM]

I feel that Creepy Crawly Crystals ought to have more future potential than insulating crystals, as it adjusts the situation of the summoning in a defined way, rather than just asking for new properties in the crystals themselves. And, given that, as problematic as it may be, lightning apparently travels in straight lines in WandRworld, insulation will probably work, as miserable as it is to say so. Also a decent chance to end up with lighter and flawless crystals as a bonus, on account of them being effectively crystallised in a vacuum. Given that the regeneration is drawn from the original summoning magic, it ought to recreate the orignal circumstances too, thus retaining its properties rather than being corrupted over time.

By controlling the summoning process, it ought to be possible to affect other changes to the summoning process, such as overlaying the crystals on lead for make abundant heavy+rigid munitions. Or summoning inside of people, either as a weapon or implants...

Also, the G.M. apparently likes things with names. Even if they are formulaic references.

Creepy= Created from nothingness.
Crawly= Regeneration, they spread out slowly to restore damage.
Crystal= true.
Creepy-Crawly= underwater vacuum= vacuum crystal.
CCC= alliteration.
We just need a +1 from half of these naming traits and it will still blast through all obstacles!

[evictedSaint]

Seems like blastball is winning. 1 hour until vote lock.

[RAM]

It should be noted that fireballs already possess an expansive force. This is what results in them being a fireball that expands on impact rather than a arrow or similar. This does not seem to be explicitly mentioned in the proposal so it seems worth mentioning that this is a rebalancing rather than a new addition.

As for myself, I feel that it is a bit silly to have a fireball without a detonation change as that is currently what is preventing our apprentices from defending against carpets, but meh, no point trying to save the disaster train.

[evictedSaint]

Revision: Blastball [2+6]

Our massive experience with manipulating elements of the fireball makes this revision trivial.

Uch like the flare, we adjust the core components of the PSF and SPSF to better for our needs.  The spell can be tweaked on the fly as-needed, and concussive variants are referred to with the "-C" modifier.  The SPSF-C now provides the necessary force to propel rounds out of the R1 out to Extreme Range!  Accuracy suffers beyond medium range, but the "effective" range of the gun is now long range.

Our cannons now no longer require water to operate, removing the rather complicated boiler attachments.  The HA1 remains Expensive, however, as it still requires three apprentices to fire at once.  The HC1-E drops to cheap, but it's already all but obsoleted by the HA1 at this point and we rarely use it outside of naval combat.  The HAC-1 remains Expensive, as the gun is already made to a higher precision than our regular cannons and the boiler component is already very small.

Some of our mages speculate that the new variant of the low-heat high-expansion fireball could be used to make a better version of the steam engine, but for the moment that piece of equipment remains unchanged.