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[Chiefwaffles]

Crystal Circuits are still completely viable if we come up with a fluff reason to do so.
Why do I want to try again at crystal circuits? For that bonus. We tried crystal circuits and we have experience; not just any experience, but direct experience with that thing. This isn't like "Well we can make light so we can make a laser" but rather "Well we have experience making light so we have better luck at making light". This is plus the probable benefits of the Crystalworks. Yes, we failed last time, but it's not like the revision is "TRY CRYSTAL CIRCUITS AGAIN". Rather, it'll be a new way of achieving crystal circuits using what we learned last time.
I would post a revision now to give an example, but I want to wait to see if there's anything from the Crystalworks that I can capitalize on in crystal circuits.

As for the frost towers, I'm sorry, but I just don't like it. Frost towers are perhaps the most boring item in the game. I'm sure revising them would make them more effective, but not anywhere near effective to justify for me using a revision on frost towers.


Though while Evicted's here...
Evicted, about how heavy is a HA1? At least in comparison to HC1-E's? I'm curious how possible it is to make a ship fitting a HA1.

[RAM]

evictedSaint, Can circuits and gems be used to produce spells by mundane peoples? I am not aware of circuits doing anything more than sustaining a spell that a wizard started...

You are making an insane amount of assumptions based on your own non-canon fluff, RAM.

1.) What?

2.) It's conjuration magic, and we're industrializing it.

3.) When industrializing it, yes.

4.) Conveyors are fluff and easily possible. We already harness mechanical power. To rotate things. If Evicted isn't comfortable with that then he can say we have orphans or something move stuff from circuit to circuit.

5.) If anything, I go too much into fluff. I'm not going to provide detailed explanations of how this application of magic works.

6.) If crystal gets damaged in the field new crystal can be summoned to replace it. Sure, the new crystal is magic-dependent but it's no worse than the rest and can be replaced properly later.

7.) The conveyor isn't a central part at all. The point is we're industrializing and mass-producing crystal instead of having skilled wizards slowly summon exact pieces. I already covered a few of the many possible uses of crystal, we can revise the Crystalworks to add more features, this does not suddenly make everyone forget how to summon crystal, and to be completely honest I don't really get the second half of your point here.

1 magegems are very expensive and still need a wizard to charge them, and they provide very little magical charge. You are talking about mass-scale summoning, magical transferrence, running a steam engine, running who knows how many magical circuits. This won't keep it charged for long enough to make it worth not having a wizard full-time. It is a mistake to include the current-generation mage-gems in this design. It just makes it more expensive with no benefits.

2 It is conjuration magic. Industrialising it means automating the casting of it. We could easily mass-produce this stuff just by running circuits of our existing spells. The whole assembly-line nonsense is just trying to get assembly0line benefits. Assembly0lines have no benefits to conjuration magic because you can skip over all the hassles that make an assembly line benefitious by producing a perfect end-result in a single step. Assembly-lines break up a complex hjob with many steps that all need skills and equipment, and splitting them up into simple jobs that anyone can learn. This is already a single step process, and a simple one at that, once you get over the complexity of applying magic. Breaking it up into smaller steps is just taking away good and adding bad.

3 In all instances, no. You have one device for, what, making a pole? You need to keep it steady the whole way and not over-extend and cut off the axe-head. Our conveyor definitely isn't that precise. If we can get a circuit that repeatedly summons(yet another new complicated thing to research) new blocks then we can make a more complex circuit to repeatedly make a whole axe. If we make a whole axe then we get a working axe. If we do it in parts then we need numerous circuits, all of which need to be aligned with the block or else we have a malformed axe, and the conveyor will not be that precise. We currently have precisely zero spells that change an existing crystal structure. This is not even conjuration at this point. It is a completely new field. Now, maybe, if you wanted to have one thing summon a pol and another summon an axe-head, but then you have to align them properly to get the axe-head to be summoned perfectly around the pole or else it will be wobbly or the summoning will be trying to summon over the top of the pole.

4 find a conveyor from the time and I will believe that they are possible... Woven fabric is all garbage. It will stretch and become unusable almost immediately, and catch on everything. Leather might work, but you need pieces large enough, which means joins, which again means catching on everything, and it will slip when a thick piece meets a thin piece, and leather also stretches, and needs maintenance to keep it flexible. Chain-mail might work. It would catch like crazy but the fact that everything is a concise loop would help, maybe enough. Metal will tend to bend, effectively stretching it though, and a conveyor needs to be tight, and it really needs a pattern for gears to act upon, although chains might work for that too if you don't mind stopping the thing on a regular basis and keeping it very slow. Crystal chains wouldn't bend. Although you might lose links, actually you would almost certaily lose links around the gears. If you could summon the crystals then you could replace the lost links, but relying on the crystalworks that would be impossible. Also, it points out another problem with the crystalworks... I really can't see it working to create chain-mail. Chain-mail is really important if you want flexible crystals without resorting to studding, so that is a pretty big loss if we really want to make use out of the crystals.

5 I almost certainly go too far into fluff, but you make absoultely no effort to explain why this energy would be immune to antimagic, nor why it doesn't want to go back to wherever it came from. You say what is wrong with the old, that our wizards are not allowed to make any permanent enchantments, which bodes poorly for giant birds, but never describe any properties at all for this new energy that swoops in and solves all our problems. If wizard energy is really this completely unique thing, and there is all this other energy around that is just normal and has no restrictions, then let's have our wizards switch to that better energy and not bother with this process at all!

6 We are talking about surface damage and extensive cracking. It is useless to summon more, the whole panel needs to be replaced, that means removing the old before adding the new. And there isn't really any way to remove crystal without damaging any connected crystal without very slowly grinding it away. Replacing worked crystals would be impractical in combat, or at sea...

7 The redundant and dead-end part is that it only applies to crystals. The conveyor is not really relevant because it won't work without better materials and would be inferior even if it did work. We do not need wizards to make complex designs any more than we need wizards to make simple designs. If we can do one with a circuit then we can do the other with a circuit. There is no advantage to simplifying it. We can make a small number of complex circuits, and then blast away with them for all eternity, only replacing them when we have a new design, or we can make a lot of simple circuits, still need to add new ones to make up for the changes in the new designs(unless they are universal manipulators, in which case that is the design we want rather than all this other paraphernalia) and then blast away at them forever. There is no advantage to the latter, and the extra magic needed to make a big thing and then add complexity to it rather than just making the small thing with the complexity pre-installed.

The real point of point seven is that we have cheap metal. The crystal is very similar to metal, and metal actually has some advantages. We want something better than crystal someday, and that would mean overhaulng the crystalworks to take advantage of it, assuming that the crystalworks is even capable of being compatible...

8 It only produces one thing. To make a different thing you need to realign the whole mess all over again. It would be easier to make a completely new large-scale circuit, so you gain nothing here.

9 It is ridiculously complex. Here is a list of new technologies:
 Crystal manipulation: We have never altered extant crystals before.
 Magical essence transferrence: We have pulled magic out of the air before, and even stored it in compatible receptacles, but that was ll done using purpose-specific materials. This is the unprecedented move of finding a specific enegry in nature, and a specific energy in a material, to which that material's existence is bound, and swapping the two without breaking the spell that was reliant upon the energy.
 Mechanisms: The conveyor is right out, no current conveyor would work and making a contemporary one is implausible. We might be able to make something work with clamps and vices? Pulling things around big wheels? We need to keep the things in perfect position and, well, it just wouldn't work. We can do impossible things with magic, this is not magic, it won't work.
 Repeat-casting curcuits: Our circuits so far as described as maintenance. There is no indication that I am aware of that they can actually cast spells. It is great as a casting tools, and throw in some mage-gems and they can keep a device running, but actually starting a spell? I believe that we still need wizards for that. Which is why our cannons should still need wizards, they need someone to produce the fireball that triggers it.
 Whatever else that I am too worn out to think of... I really doubt that it is just these 4...

[Chiefwaffles]

Seriously? I'm only going to respond to the stuff which isn't just trying to pick apart my fluff. I mean, seriously; you have to make interpretations when dealing with a setting like this. My interpretation is that turning the process into an assembly line one will make it more efficient, and you're saying it won't because reasons.

1.) Magegems are not very expensive. We have three sizes, and only the biggest one is Very Expensive. The Crystalworks is a singular creation and can have an apprentice or two make routine visits to keep it charged

2.) Making non-canon assumptions to break apart my fluff.
3.) Making non-canon assumptions to break apart my fluff.
4.) Making assumptions to break apart my fluff. And we have magical circuits that'll summon crystals. Why does this make chainmail impossible? We're not restricted to rigid machinery here. Also:

4.) Conveyors are fluff and easily possible. We already harness mechanical power. To rotate things. If Evicted isn't comfortable with that then he can say we have orphans or something move stuff from circuit to circuit.

5.)

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Crystalworks is the nature of the crystal. It turns out that when a human summons crystal, they "spend" a bit of their total magic potential and put it into the crystal. This magical energy can't stay outside of its natural host (the summoning wizard) for too long, and thus eventually returns, dispelling the crystal. Maintaining it simply resets the timer by replacing the "old" energy with "new" energy. The method of production using circuits simply creates the energy without forcing it to rely on "borrowed" magic, meaning the crystal lasts forever. This means that the crystal also can't be dispelled by Moskurg anti-magic because there's no magic to dispel in the new crystal.

6.) Summon crystal in the gaps. It's not that hard.

7.) I'm responding to your "real point" line here. Crystal is slightly stronger than steel and a lot lighter and we can summon it in the field. We can use it for many things and it's not like once we make a Crystalworks we can do zero changes to Crystal afterwards.

8.)

New lines of circuits and conveyor belts can be added to the factory as needed as we design more crystal-based items.

9.)
Crystal manipulation: That's literally what we're doing with our crystal-based spells.
"Magical essence transference": A.) This is because we're summoning with circuits. B.) This is the main point of the crystalworks.
Mechanisms:

4.) Conveyors are fluff and easily possible. We already harness mechanical power. To rotate things. If Evicted isn't comfortable with that then he can say we have orphans or something move stuff from circuit to circuit.

Hell, we're already powering machinery that bores rifled barrels.
Repeat-Casting Circuits: Our circuits can do a lot of things, going above just maintenance. This is both inferred pretty much every time Evicted talks about circuits, and we have statements like these:

Hmmm...alright, let's say an A magegem could hold enough magic to power 2 flares, if you had some circuit design that could convert the energy into a flare spell and fire it off.

I really hope this isn't coming off as rude, but I'm not particularly fond of just letting these kinds of attacks on my stuff go unanswered. I'd appreciate it if you could just PM me this stuff and I could also respond by PM, since the main reason I'm rebutting your arguments here is so other people don't get the wrong idea.

[evictedSaint]

Evicted, about how heavy is a HA1? At least in comparison to HC1-E's? I'm curious how possible it is to make a ship fitting a HA1.

Hmmm...let's say that one of your ships can carry a HC1-E without fear of sinking, despite the heavy weight the steam engines add.  I'll say that an HA1 is as heavy as three HC1-E's.


Rolling Design for crystalworks now.

[evictedSaint]

Design: Crystalworks [6, 5-2, 4]

Though elaborately named, the "Crystalworks" is a workshop in the capitol designed to churn out crystal items at an amazing pace.  Though crystal designs are usually too difficult for apprentices to cast by themselves (aside from a few notable exceptions), we have found a way around their inherent limited abilities to allow them to contribute to the production process.  Our apprentices have been reduced to little more than glorified powersources, charging arrays of magegems that in turn power gold-etched circuits strung together with thick crystal power conduits.  These circuits in turn produce a pre-inscribed crystal design written into the circuitry.  These circuits are interchangeable, able to be slotted in and out of the assembly line as needed.  They are a bit slower at producing crystals than a regular mage, and grow in size alarmingly quick as the crystal item they're set to produce increases in complexity, but we're able to set entire arrays of crystal designs down at once that is ultimately faster than what a mage could produce on his own.

These crystals also exhibit a unique quality - they do not fade.  Unlike man-made crystals which dissolve into aether after a month with a gemstone anchor, machine-made crystals remain indefinitely.  That, or we just haven't waited long enough to see one fade away.  The downside is that machine-made crystals tend to be a bit more brittle, but a small decrease in quality is to be expected when mass-manufacturing. 

All future crystal designs drop by an entire expense level and gain a mild fragility factor.  The Crystalworks, despite the high initial cost, is relatively cheap to maintain.  Expensive.

[Andres]

1 - Cheaper circuits: Andres

Makes our cannons cheaper, makes our steam engines cheaper, makes the crystalworks cheaper.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[Chiefwaffles]

Will we need to revise our Crystal Axes and Caltrops to use the Crystalworks' crystal or will they do that automatically?
Also, how useful is machinemade crystal for things like armor or reinforcement for our designs and soldiers, and how does it compare to steel?

Revision: Powered Crystal Circuits

When we last tried crystal circuits, it was discovered that the routing of magic through the crystal-based circuits would case damage to the crystal, rendering the circuit inoperable. We've discovered that this is due to a sudden change in magical currents shifting the material, causing those hairline fractures.
But we've discovered a way to fix this - by incorporating a cheap AAA-sized Magegem in our circuits, we can introduce an extremely minor but steady baseline magical energy level across the circuit. This isn't enough to actually operate the circuit, but it drastically reduces the extremes experienced by the circuit. It was these extremes that caused the fractures and damage before.

The AAA-sized magegem is tiny and cheap, so the benefits of crystal circuits isn't hampered at all by its inclusion. The power output required of it is extremely tiny and we figure most circuits could potentially even last months before running out of power. Though the magegem saps negligible amounts of power input from other sources to keep running, so they don't require any special maintenance or attention.

With this change, we can try Crystal Circuits again, using all the experience we learned from both that attempt and the Crystalworks to get a much better chance of succeeding.

TL;DR: Try Crystal Circuits again. I included the link above to the original revision and the actual TL;DR for Crystal Circuits is there. Basically, this means less heavy, more reliable, and cheaper circuits. And should even have a bonus! Should!


If anyone wants to, here's a revision to make crystal less brittle. It's completely understandable to not want to do this since it does mean no practical revision this turn. I do want to do it at some point though. Probably. Depending on exactly how brittle machine crystal is.
Revision: Crystal Polymers (Tougher Crystal)
By making some tweaks to our crystal circuits and spells, we can change the structure of our crystal. The internal structure of crystal is changed to be laid out in a more "weaved" fashion, with interconnecting "stands" of tiny crystal connecting to other pieces. This change in the structure makes crystal a lot less brittle, as with the less rigid format it can't "snap" or break as easily.

With this change, our Crystal is much more tougher than before. It still shares the actual hardness and every other property of crystal, but it's no longer nearly as brittle!

TL;DR: Fancy fluffy way of saying "less brittle crystals". With good rolls, machine crystal could potentially even be better than natural crystal before this revision. Potentially.
I'm not particularly versed in materials science, so feel free to tell me if this is blatantly wrong. Since this is fiction, I'm okay with a "little wrong" though.

1 - Cheaper circuits: Andres
1 - Powered Crystal Circuits: Chiefwaffles
0 - Crystal Polymers (Tougher Crystal):

[RAM]

I really hope this isn't coming off as rude, but I'm not particularly fond of just letting these kinds of attacks on my stuff go unanswered. I'd appreciate it if you could just PM me this stuff and I could also respond by PM, since the main reason I'm rebutting your arguments here is so other people don't get the wrong idea.

The sole and only reason that I am arguing on this topic is so that other people can correctly understand the situation. I would never bother with P.M. in this way, there would be no value to it. I should like to remind you that we are here to choose designs and as such our designs are subject to criticism. If I have been critical of anything other than your proposal then I apologise for that. Fortunately Evicted gave us layered circuits instead, which is an extremely plausible idea, and we just got free persistence from the aether. Only time will tell if this also means antimagic immunity, as we lack access to enemy antimagic with which to test it.

Crystal fire-plates
We produce fire-resistant plates of crystal and spread them around ship-decks, tents, gunner positions, and whatever else to provide a disposable surface that can be thrown away to remove the fire.

Crystal Barrels and Shells
Use the magic of crystals to make all our cannon-barrels and cannon-shells compatible with each other in terms of size. Send spares to replace the ones that break...

Manually-detonated fireballs
They will strengthen their wind to stop our birds.

Shot-shells
Pack our cannon-shells with shot to spread their blast over an area.

1 - Cheaper circuits: Andres
1 - Powered Crystal Circuits: Chiefwaffles
0 - Crystal Polymers (Tougher Crystal):
0 Crystal fire-plates:
0 Crystal Barrels and Shells:
0 Manually-detonated fireballs:
0 Shot-shells:

[helmacon]

Personally, I feel like auto regenerative Crystal tissue is the best way to fix our Crystal circuits

[evictedSaint]

Will we need to revise our Crystal Axes and Caltrops to use the Crystalworks' crystal or will they do that automatically?
Also, how useful is machinemade crystal for things like armor or reinforcement for our designs and soldiers, and how does it compare to steel?

You'd need to revise your existing designs to work with your new manufacturing system, as they'd need their own circuit boards and whatnot. 

I don't know how useful they are.  I haven't rolled for anything like that because you haven't tried anything like that.

[RAM]

Cavalry ought not be dead quite yet, especially if they ride out to spread caltrops to slow an enemy advance or lie in ambush to hit the enemy from a- well we can hope that they don't bother with the danger-sense spell anymore...

[Chiefwaffles]

@Evicted: Well I mean like how brittle is it roughly? I know you don't really do technical stuff but it's hard planning without knowing how brittle it is. But I'm going to assume from your response that it's still an acceptable+good replacement for metal in most armor designs assuming nothing goes wrong in the process of attaching or making the armor.

@helmacon: That'd probably fix it but seems a bit too ambitious for revision? My method is basically just adding in a Cheap AAA Magegem. You know those capacitors on motherboards that keep the system clock and run practically forever? That's the kind of thing I'm thinking about.

And I'm conflicted about the state of Crystal Axes + Crystal Caltrops. Is it worth a revision? The Crystal Axes would automatically go down a level in expense thanks to the crystalworks and should be roughly as effective, and the caltrops should mostly do their job (though like RAM said, they do have that danger-sense thingy) but is it worth using a revision on it?
Or maybe we could try designing a new standard issue crystal weapon, but I don't really know how we could improve on our standard issue weapons other than "make it out of crystal."

[evictedSaint]

Hmmm...let's saaay it's slightly more brittle than high-carbon steel?  It won't be a major factor unless it's in a piece of equipment that regularly experiences systematic stress, like a joint or lever or something.  It'd be fine as a breastplate - it's not going to crack if you trip and fall while wearing it, or even if someone hacks at it.  Might have issues with bludgeoning weapons like hammers, though, but no one has any of those kinds of weapons.

[Andres]

Weren't crystal weapons supposed to be markedly superior to steel in every way? Wouldn't mass-produced crystal still be better than steel if it's just slightly worse to hand-made crystal?

[evictedSaint]

*shrug*

sure, whatever.  same brittality as hardened steel.