4.) A goddamn counter to Lucky Strike. (Cheaper Equalizer shell?)
Is there some sort of problem with my antiluck wards? You keep asking for this and yet I have never seen a vote for them nor heard any protest about their flaws...
Crystalworks has a few major problems.
1 The magegems are a mistake. We burn our entire reserve of A batteries and we still have to send a wizard out to recharge them. It is basically throwing away our previous turn's design for nothing. If you want a ower room you need more, like a magic accumulator or something... We could probably do that in a revision of antimagic charms to have them pass the magic into a circuit that they can't access...
2 "having one circuit summoning precise crystal designs is inefficient and wasteful." is obviously untrue. This is magic, conjuration magic, it summons specific things in specific forms. That is what makes it better than reality. You want to replace magically poofing something into being exactly as you want it, which is what we are good at, with complex mechanisms which we are bad at. Also, instead of poofing a crystal into exactly the form you want, which is actually what crystals are good at in the real world, sort of, but this reshapes crystals. Crystals are crazy strong in a whole lot of ways, but they are also brittle, like, by definition they are a very specific structure.
3 This invents a whole new field of external crystal manipulation. Apparently it is easier to bend, remove, or twist crystal than to summon, say, a precise axe-head? Crystals do not bend, crystals are very sensitive to missing bits as structural weaknesses. Crystals CAN somewhat overcome thing by being malformed, they can have new crystals growing from old ones at an angle or something. Wroked crystals of any complexity will be weaker than summoned crystals of the same form.
4 It is mechanical. I already addressed this but the whole design is ridiculously complex. The conveyors are basically impossible. Just try to imagine the practicality of designing a conveyor. It is going to slide around and fall off its morings. It is going to sag and wobble and wear out and stretch. Conveyors are advanced future-tech of dreams. And then we have these modification circuits. We have no way of intelligently activating them at just the right moment, soo they are continuously active? So the conveyor needs to precisely move over them? not going to happen. Contemporary factories produce lots of things that don't meet specifications, this factory will produce only things that do not meet specifications. Oh, and we have a random steam-engine, just because wasting magic is fun... You want this to work you need to rip out the automation or start producing magically intelligent mechanisms. A team of workers could, maybe, move crystal blocks from one modifier to another and activate it with the precision of someone who is supremely bored. The conveyor is just not going to wokrk at all. It is a single design, probably a pure research design. Unless, that is, that we want to explain exactly how to make a conveyor work with ye-olde materials.
5 It makes no sense. We are replacing one energy with another, but no explanation of how we are doing it? Extracting "natural" essence from the mundane world and then converting it into a pattern that is compatible with magic would be a design by itself, relying on a completely ew extraction discipline. We get the antiluck wards now, then dedicate a whole design to making wards that drain the world's natural essence and direct it into crystal slabs, which can be used as tower shields or flat armour plating. THEN we can move onto somethign else. A present all we are doing is taking a chunk of crystal, which is just as much summoned as the old hunk of crystal, and replacing one type of magic with another. There is not part of that which makes them either permanet nor dispel proof.
6 It takes away the greatest advantage of conjuration. Conjuration is great because of its ability to be replaced. A crystalclad ship will be very fragile. Crystals are great at holding a shape, they will be very resistant to being penetrated, but they are prone to shattering. Our crystals are very resilient in this respect, but they are still brittle, they will crunch and chunks will fall out. Crystalclads should have plates of summoned crystals protecting them, that can be replaced when damaged. An easy task for summoned crystals, an impractical task for permanent crystals.
7 it is a redundant dead end. It only applies to crystals. The conveyor might help production if it worked(it won't). The anchoring might help other conjurations if we didn't mind preparing them in advance(wasps and smoke are not particularly portable...). The crystal manipulators might actually be useful for making crystal mecha if they were protable(they aren't) and if crystal cound be bent by them(it can't) or they could make a crystal joint rotate(but that would be telekinesis...). The crystals are already redunant with our metal bonus aside form speciality uses. If you really want this to work then go figure out how to make mithril, we can probably just stick magic into molten electrum... The crystals have advantages over metal, but metal has its own advantage. Crystals don't bend...
Even if the crystalworks worked, it would only give us one material. Crystals are good, but they have flaws. The strength and lightness is wonderful, but the brittleness will really show its flaws against heavy impacts like artillery balls. A crystalclad that can't repair itself is doomed. And these crystals are dead crystals. They are specifically more "efficient" than magically forming crystal directly, which is fortunately false because it would doom our attempts to have intelligent crystral entities that could heal themselves by being fed magic...
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Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 392824 times)