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[VoidSlayer]

Whatever gets us lucky strike to work with as a component.

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
4 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, voidslayer

[Gwolfski]

I want the space thing.

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles,gwolfsk
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles,
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
4 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, voidslayer

[Kadzar]

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles,gwolfsk
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles,
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
5 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, voidslayer, Kadzar

[Gwolfski]

I messed up the quotes last itme, this is fixed:

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles,
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles, Gwolfski
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
5 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, voidslayer,

[RAM]

Spoiler: I have made my attitude towards personal messages quite clear, so I will not be reading this, but in case there is something there of value, I am putting it up for public consumpption. (click to show/hide)

I believe that it's counterproductive to just be saying the same thing over and over again.
Namely, cloud cover.

You have brought it up as an issue many times and I have attempted to shown why it is not an issue many times. Even if you don't agree with my reasoning for why it isn't an issue, I don't think you should be repeatedly bringing it up. People already know that you think it's an issue.
Doing stuff like this could result in evicted not giving us a credit to make up for Moskurg's espionage credit after all. Since it isn't just civility he wants - he also wants less of the back-and-forth unendless arguing. This is something he said on Discord -

evictedSaint - Yesterday at 8:04 PM
I'm tired of scrolling past 1200-word replies between the two of you

Spoiler: I think that Truestrike is unlikely to work. (click to show/hide)

 Coregem is a new technology. Fortunately, lucky strike seems to be self-actuating, so it should be unnecessary.
 Lucky strike is a completely new field and we don't even have a working copy of the spell. So a new version is a significant new technology.
 extremely downscaling a thing is a new technology. Fortunately in this case the thing being "downscaled" doesn't seem to have much in the way of size issues, and downscaling it won't work well because it is supposed to move heavy artillery and armoured turrets, but putting it onto our small-arms will probably result in something too large to use effectively. So this also is probably unnecessary.
This would be three new developments as written, and it is difficult to pull off more than one per design. Fortunately two of them can probably just be removed.

Coregem wouldn't be "a primitive CPU". It has to identify enemies, that is target recognition which is not simple. It has to combat-track evasive targets in three-dimensional space and fully predict the bullet's flight-path, which is not something that you would use "primitive" processors for. And then there is that matter of determining range and rate of change of acceleration and all manner of things... If this is all just provided by lucky strike, then the coregem is irrelevant and we shouldn't waste our efforts on it. If the coregem has any role at all then it is a large undertaking. Don't expect to get "this task is so simple, it will be easy to develop the technology. ... This task is so difficult, the technology running it must be so amazing" to work consistently. I know that downplaying flaws and inflating successes is a thing, but I don't like it. I feel that a wasp would not be able to hit very often under these conditions, and that the coregem isn't even a full wasp.

The design completely dissects Lucky Strike and turns it into a sensory device. I am not opposed to this, but it seems like a lot to expect when we don't even have the basic spell working yet and it is not the vast majority of the design in question. We have precisely zero experience with this thing, we need to be extremely gentle if we don't want it falling apart.

I would recommend removing the coregem and using the propulsion as-is with no modification. Also I would be hesitant to implement the thing due to increased power draw, but if it really can guarantee hits against deflection-shielded targets then the reduced rate of fire would be worth it. Then again, if it can do that then it is a hard-counter to all their deflection magics...

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles, gwolfsk
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
0 - Blastwave:
1 - Rocket shell: RAM
0 - Light Beam:
5 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, voidslayer, Kadzar

[evictedSaint]

Design rolls in a couple hours or so.

[helmacon]

-snip-

I also dislike true strike, but I don't have the time to write an alternative. If you were to write a more general usage of lucky strike, I would likely vote for it.

[FallacyofUrist]

Well, we do get two revisions per turn for now on, so fixing it shouldn't be too hard if it fails.

[RAM]

Prosperity Pebble
A derivative of the antimagic charm/aethergem, this charm continuously accumulates magic and focuses it into pure luck derived from the Lucky Strike spell, much as an antimagic charm generates sound. This makes an aura of good forune around the wearer that constantly makes them more successful in everything that they do and allows them to naturally evade harm and failure. We expect this to aid in aiming, survival, sneaking, choosing between possible enemy troop movements... everything really.

This relies upon luck being an actual thing, rather than lucky strike being a pure divination effect with no actual luck involved. And it is as general-purpose as I could think of.

Lucky Lens
This is a somewhat magnified lens on a tube that can be affixed to a gun, near to its firing chamber. By invoking the circuit, the viewer links the spell to themselves and allows the spell to focus on whatever the viewer is trying to hit. The lens then projects a vision using a flare spell onto the lens, depicting where the chosen target will be from the viewers perspective when the bullet would reach the same distance as them should they make the decision to fire at that moment.
Making a lens is not crazily easy, but we have good crystal engineering and there are no requirements on it beyond any magnification at all, so that should not be a big detractor and might get us beginning lensing. Flare spells and circuitry are well established, so making an image shouldn't be much trouble. The whole of the output is the image, so it is a simple operation at that end. And the rest is prediction, which seems to be what lucky strike does?

[Andres]

I don't understand what the OGS47 is. Is it some kind of rectangular piece of crystal you nail onto a gun? Some kind of circuit rune? An external engine with an effect field?

Glory to Arstotzka.

[Chiefwaffles]

The exact specifics in its form doesn't really matter. I'm leaving it up to evicted and the rolls primarily. Ultimately, it's intended to just be a small component added to our existing guns and integrated in our future weapons. How exactly its added is something for evicted to decide.

But yeah, it's meant to be an upgrade to our weapons in general. Though stuff like the HA1 may take modification (because I think you have to move the entire HA1 to aim it), and we'll see how our luck turns out in terms of its immediate application.
Worst case scenario in application, we get the tech but we don't get it on any of our guns. This is fine because we'd be revising the Lightning turret anyways and can just throw it in that revision. And until we get functional artillery again the lightning turret is really the only place where its application actually matters.
Best case scenario, it immediately applies to every gun we have. In which case, great.


Mostly I'm just trying to be a little less micromanage-y in my designs, for everyone's sake.

[helmacon]

@ RAM

I'd be willing to vote for either, though I think the first would be more likely to work out better. Actually, yea. Go ahead and add my vote to the prosperity pebble.

[evictedSaint]

Design: TrueStrike [4, 1, 6]

Neglecting the "numbers and letters" style of naming, TrueStrike remains true to its origins as a Moskurg-derived spell.  This upsets numerous generals and commanders, but the name has been chosen and will thus stick.

TrueStrike is mainly a derivative of Lucky Strike, a Moskurg spell in which the projectiles are "blessed" upon firing, letting them strike truer against foriegn targets.  The spell is particularly effective against stationary or slow-moving targets, as the spell seems like a derivation of "Divining" magic, which predicts where the target is likely to be.

The spellwork is...a mess.  Desciphering the spell alone was an arduous task, requiring length translation from Moskurg to Arstotzkan.  The spell doesn't follow the rigid "line-by-line" method of spell-weaving as we do, instead relying heavily on what seems to be...poetry?  The lines make no sense, and seem to coincide in the right places by utter chance.  Entire segments of the spell seem to do absolutely nothing, but are crucial for it to function.  Most annoying is a particular cornerstone of the spell in which the user must loudly praise the Southerner's God in order to properly direct the threads of magic through the spell.

Despite our best efforts, we could not remove that particular bit.

Eventually, we manage to distill the spell down to a module, requiring a golden scroll, a D-level Aethergem, and silver etchings - along with the usual copper scroll, anti-anti-magic circuits, and anti-mage sequencing gems.  This can be socketed into an R1 to gift the spell to the weapons projectiles, which boosts the accuracy from Medium Range all the way out to Extreme Range.

We were unfortunately unable to hook the spell up to automatically fire the gun for the user, but the user should see remarkable improvement to their aim at all distances.  National Effort.

[Chiefwaffles]

Ugh.
National Effort, only for the R1, and it's just Lucky Strike. I mean, disregarding expense it's actually really useful, but National Effort on something like this just makes it effectively useless. I really do wish we could stop getting such awful rolls. A 4/6 on Effectiveness/Bugs is nice, but just isn't useful with a 1 on Expense.

I guess we're better off just discarding this design while being happy we have our own version of Lucky Strike to work off of for future designs. I definitely don't think the Expense credit is worth it quite yet.
_{imagine what we could have done with those rolls on the Oracle.}


But I've asked evicted and it seems like basically what we did here was just decipher Lucky Strike. Most of the effort went into doing that, at least.


This feels necessary:
Revision: Powered Lightning Turrets (MKPD)

We create a radically downscaled version of the KPD4, deemed "MKPD" - the "M" standing for "Miniature". The difference in scale should be so great that the MKPD should have an almost negligible power draw.
Then we put a MKPD in the Lightning turret, hook it up to the power input, and put the controls along with a seat in the center of the turret for the gunner.

This should allow for the Lightning's turret to very easily and quickly track targets of any speed as the turret can be very quickly rotated using the controls inside by the gunner.


This one could be considered a stretch, but all we're doing is just ripping out the useful part of TrueStrike and wiring it to a known type of crystal.
Revision: Mageglass Targeting Suite
Note: "Mageglass" = "Reactive Crystal Glass" = That crystal glass we use to make Magegems.

The idea here is simple - take out a component from TrueStrike and make it its own device as to avoid the typical Moskurger kludges holding us back with TrueStrike.

Spoiler: Fluff (click to show/hide)

The Mageglass Targeting Suite takes just the "predict where the target is likely to be" from TrueStrike. We don't need to bless our projectiles. We don't need to guide them. We don't need to automatically bless projectiles, so on and so forth. The majority of this revision is simply taking out all this stuff.

Once the appropriate element is isolated, we can make have the circuitry simply send its output to a chunk of Crystal Glass [based off of / from] the Magegem Crystalworks fabricators - "Mageglass". The Crystal Glass will glow as magic goes through it, allowing us to highlight targets """divined""" by Lucky Strike. Instead of wasting power, resources, time, and effort on the actual "blessing" part and making the projectile go where we want, we simply rip out the useful part - "divining" enemies - and have it output to Mageglass.

The Mageglass Targetting Suite should be applied to the Lightning Turret first, and Combat Armor visors second.

TL;DR: Take TrueStrike, rip out "divination", and wire it to Mageglass (the special-ish Crystal Glass we use to make Magegems) in order to highlight targets. Should be much cheaper since we don't have to actually bless the projectiles, which one would assume to be the hard part. (After all, you have to "program" each projectile with the destination, have it actually be "guided" there, continue updating on target, etc. etc.).



Chances are we're probably just going to do one revision at a time, though I'm putting both in the Votebox since I, personally, would like to get it over with quicker.

REVISION 1
1 - Powered Lightning Turrets: Chiefwaffles

REVISION 2
1 - Mageglass Targetting Suite: Chiefwaffles

[RAM]

The average net total from three 6-sided dice is ten-and-a-half. A net total of eleven is, well, mostly unremarkable, decent, moderate, and various other terms to describe something that has no defining features to put into a description, but it is nearer to good than it is to bad and "awful" is right out.

Also, cost is generally regarded as the best feature to roll badly on. Effectiveness tends to discern if it functions at all. Bugs tend to bring you to the realm of doing more harm than good, expense means that you have a thing that helps, but you want more of it. So I would actually consider this to be a solidly good roll. I mean, better if it had been 6+1+4 but 4+1+6 is still nice.

Honestly, for our first spell in a completely new school, this is pretty good, I might have liked a bit more considering that we invested an espionage in it, but I can easily see this as the result of flying too high and getting melted aviation peripherals(M.A.P.s).

Glowy Glazing for Gaudy Gazing.
Light-Amplifying Material Plates
A circuit, ideally with the ability to be toggled on and off, perhaps using some very simply peg that completes the circuit and can be produced in redundant quantities, but the engineers are(as always) free to use their own initiative that activates a highly modified flare spell. This works similar to our temperature circuits, but instead acts upon a refined flare spell to add more light if it drops below specific levels. The difficult part of this will be that it is not intended to apply to the material, but rather to the vision that it allows. Things viewed through these clear crystals will appear as though it is ideal conditions. Given that our forces are fighting under black stormclouds, this should be a massive improvement to visibility. Ideally this would be applied to all viewing ports, prioritising our pilots but also extending to our gunners, drivers, and armoured foot-soldiers, in that order.
Getting it to apply to, and modify, light, seems very ambitious. The flare does illuminate though, and the crystals are known territory that have already proved receptive to an enchantment in the form of regeneration. It is technically just a modification to flares, continuing to use them for illumination of things. It really is a lot to ask from a revision, but I am feeling lucky! Well, a little, my luck senses are a bit rusty...

Conveyance Augmentation By Linking Entities
We take our standard circuitry, grind it up, Use it to fill cloth tubes, cover them in tar, then wrap that in leather. This ought to make a flexible "sock" that can transmit vast concentrations of magic. We run these socks through the armour of some roughly slapped-together crystals carts that contain reactors. Use some tar and a clamp to glue one of these socks to a magem and it'll keep the thing charged from the reactor's supply. We hope that these will allow our Mundanes and Crystalworks to operate much faster.