I really can't see us getting better than a -2 on that roll, and a -8 wouldn't really raise an eyebrow from me. I mean, sure, it would be sort of amusing and weird to see a value that high, but I would not claim it to be unfair. A reminder of the actual proposal, which is easy to miss on account of being obscured by the vote poll.
Antimagic-immune circuits: Protect our circuits from the effects of antimagic so that they can channel magic and cast spells even within an anti-magic field.
Thoughts:
: Protect how? No explanation of method, no opportunity for a bonus. There is no point to providing a link to the proposal because "Antimagic-immune circuits" is the entire proposal.
: direct opposition. Antimagic nullifies magic. This makes magic work. Not just persist but actually allows spells to be cast within antimagic. They could just as easily say "we revise our mind-reading to be immune to whatever is stopping it" or "we revise our flying carpets to be immune to being damaged by cannons". They have a design with an effect, we are attempting to completely nullify that effect. Bot just reduce or divert it, but make it vanish completely. Hard counters are a lot to ask out of a design, this is just a revision, one with no justification at that.
: Small scope. We already have a magical effect protection device that has universal applicability. The antimagic charm. We also have armour that could reasonably be attached to various things. If only our circuits are functioning then our other spells become useless and we are forced to rely solely upon devices. Devices which will all cease to exist when the enemy use a sonic weapon and evaporate our crystals for the second time.
: Inappropriate. Our circuits do, to my knowledge, have no history of being antimagic immune. Or resistance to magical fields, in fact they had difficulty with hot and cold fields.
: Insufficient. It makes no mention of where the circuits drive power from. There is some people who recall hearing that our power-sources worked within antimagic, but no citations have been provided that I am aware of. There is to my knowledge no suggestion that mages can provide power to a circuit while within an antimagic field. We know, from the mundane, that without mages our power supplies are greatly reduced. Even if this works perfectly we may well still be unable to activate any magic in an antimagic field.
: Incompatibility. With no specifications provided, it is entirely possible that the antimagic-immune circuits will be, for example, larger, hotter, more wasteful, don't work as circuits if they are too curved, don't work as antimagic if they are straight for too long... As a revision to circuits, they should be compatible with all current circuits, but that does not mean that they are compatible with all current devices that use circuits. We could revise a cannon to be larger. It would work the same way, with the same mechanisms and could be automatically applied to all of our vehicles that use that gun, if it fits! If you have it in a turret of a specific size then it is not going to be upgraded. If you have it on an open platform with a bit of space then it is going to be upgraded just fine and we can get that upgrade for free... Just because we can automatically upgrade all our circuits to antimagic doesn't mean that they won't spill out energy all over the place and need twices as much energy input to operate, thuse forcing us to completely redesign our stuff to provide twice as much power.
Antimagic is not just a design, it is a BIG design. Getting a partial hard-counter to it just by asking for one in a revision seems implausible. I don't like our odds if we base it off of existing endeavours in that field or use witty references to smooth over the rolls, but making zero effort at all to justify the proposal looks identical to squatting down, looking up, enlarging the eyes o three times their normal size, and desperately begging for a ridiculous negative modifier. If this works then we should officially give up on having actual designs, and instead just issue wish-lists. I honestly believe that "carpet eater: a circuit-based beam that goes through all metals and makes flight-devices instantly explode at medium range if it points at them." is a plausible design.
...okay?
Got something to say, RAM?
I am a person who thinks that making circuits antimagic immune requires a design. Therefore you respect my
]opinion.
Well, technically you didn't say that, but I doubt that you can figure out why. One could also make an argument for my statement being irrelevant to yours, but that would be technically incorrect, given how very clear the implication is. Ad then again, I don't entirely believe that it requires a design, it could achieve the same thing with three or so revisions or a freak occurrence, but again, the context makes it very clear that "requires a design" actually means "cannot be achieved with a single revision". So it comes out to a game of "spot the logic error" which might be fun for some.
I was tempted to just come up with a dozen quotes of you saying it was definitely easy as a revision, which really isn't consistent with respecting the alternate opinion. The correct course is to just sink to your level and not justify anything, just provide the most simple and direct counter with no argument and devolve into ignorant savages. But the witty and informative "spot the logical fallacy in my own statement" might actually teach you something, so let's see if we can't score a win for Team Comprehension!
--------------------------------------------------------------
Antimagic shielding references Faraday cages, which is an amusing anecdote and I would be sorely tempted to give it a +1 from the witty reference if I were judging it. It also mentions antimagic particles which can be blocked. It is not an entirely outlandish theory and crystals do, indeed, block things. I find it pretty lacking myself, but it does at least exceed the "because shrug" competition offered by the circuits. Meanwhile I provide a thesis featuring observations of their antimagic and references to existing knowledge and modifications to an existing technology that is already relevant, but supporting that sort of thing would just be silly. Shielding is a happy middle-ground.
Shielding creates "a new type of crystal" while circuits "change our circuits". The two are not really any different in this regard. Our stuff is already covered in crystal, changing the surface is not that big of a deal. The changed circuits would not just magically alter every instance of circuits. They would need to be changed in the designs and rebuilt and redistributed. Effectively there is no difference. They both come down to "change the properties of this existing material to produce a new material that can hopefully be implemented immediately" and I am more optimistic about being able to slap on a problematic new surface than a problematic new internal mechanism...
Author
Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 393052 times)