Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[evictedSaint]

Wands Race now has a discord!

To join, you need to post in the Deployment Zone with your preferred side.

[Kadzar]

It seems like we really need a counter to lightning right now, and the crystal armor sounds like the best route.

DESIGNS
3 - Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar

Plans?
1 - Fallacy's Plan: FallacyofUrist

@Gwolfski: Because the mountains are low-priority. Moskurg occasionally gets a foothold, yes, but getting a foothold is easier than advancing further. We don't really need the Mountains bonus anymore because of the Crystalworks. That, and a design that only helps in one theatre means every single other theatre will be left without a new design. So while we may make the Mountains harder to capture, Moskurg could get a design that helps them beat us in every other theatre.

I mean, I did originally have an idea for prefabricated crystal bunkers, so we could quickly set up shelters as needed, but I figured it wouldn't be able to protect our artillery crew unless it included armored turrets, which might be it's own thing, and the combat armor should hopefully do just as well.

[FallacyofUrist]

Chief Waffles is hereby named chief designer.
Because he's basically the only one making designs that get voted for nowadays.

DESIGNS
3 - Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar, FallacyofUrist

Plans?
0 - Fallacy's Plan:

That said, we must make some sort of improved shell using a revision, or we will stand no hope of defeating their navy. Either that or a sea-based forever frost tower, anyways.

[RAM]

Celestedemorte
A larger, stronger, more powerful frost tower that effects a pillar of air rather than a disk of air. This creates a massive version of the convection effect that we have been constantly observing around our firewalls and steam engines and fireballs and fire wasps and every single tiny little thing that we do with all this fire in cold climes. This creates a massive Massive MASSIVE wind force as untold millions of tonnes of air are compelled to move down as quickly as they are able, and with all their friends doing the same thing, that is very quickly indeed. This will, in short, rip their storm coulds out of the heavens, and all the pathetic insects shall plummet from the air with them. And, as fortune would have it, it seems that as the water grows colder, the number of storm clouds is reduced.

Enduring this insane force is no small feat. The worked-crystal tower's walls are ten centimetres thick and must be transported in great panels by rails and cavalry teams before being assembled by leaning them against each other and bound together with rapidly grown vines. A great copper pole, 5 centimetres in diameter and running along one corner of the pyramidal structure and sunk into the ground renders the tower and its surrounds immune to lightning as we have learned that lightning loves metal. Finally, there is a 1-centimetre thinck shell around the structure of summoned crystal, that can easily be renewed. Within, the traditional elements of the tower of forever frost have been combined with circuitry to create a massive multistorey circuit to better unify the magic, inhibiting magical seepage and wastage resulting in a much more efficient tower and magems are included to make its operation more consistent. Access is granted by a ladder through a hole in the centre of the crystal foundation slab and requires that a tunnel be duge which benefits from crystal supports.

DESIGNS
0 - Exploding Shell:
3 - Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar
0 - Black crystal:
0 - Celestedemorte:
0 - :
0 - :
0 - :
0 - :

Revisions:
0 - Conjure Water:
0 - Beachfront Frost Tower:
0 - Energetic Transfusion:
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:
0 - :
0 - :
0 - :
0 - :


Plans?
2 - Fallacy's Plan: FallacyofUrist, RAM

[/quote]
Thoughts:
Exploding shells seem to lack fluff. Some idea of the reasons why a fireball can be kept stable would be nice. But I am willing to support it at present. We need something and that is at least vaguely plausible. But it still comes down to "We have explosions, give us something that blows up" which ought to give us a penalty to the rolls.

Combat armour is expensive at least, and probably pretty much doesn't work. we already know that summoning antimagic charms is extremely difficult. We also know that antimagic charms do not interact with lightning. It is based upon the idea that crystals are already conductive enough to recieve lightning without damage, which does not seem to be the case, given that metal was more conductive, but it is unclear so that is not certain, but E.S. probably already decided one way or the other so that could be untenable but a good roll could find another way. Transparent crystal ought to be either impossible or a simple matter of cutting it, but given magic, it should be a revision, still an additional feature. Electrical-magical conversion is a design of its own.

Simply put, this mkes antimagic gems that convert mundane lightning into magic. That is a design. It also summons antimagic charms, another design, one which could easily fail. It also adds transparent crystals and crystal armour, two separate revisions. Finally, it grants us infantry armour when our infantry is irrelevant and rock armour when rocks are being destroyed all around us. If the lightning immunity effect fails then it is uselessm and the project seems far too ambitious to succeed to that extent. We need to actually destroy their airships which are sitting outside of our range. Or properly nullify their lightning rather than get aemour made of super-crystals that can only be fielded to one sildier in a hundred.

Black crystal is nice, but if we are doing a design for a different material, I would like some more properties than just being really resilient. We can already make resilient crystals by making them thicker... It is still good, of course, but just doesn't capture my imagination.

The Celestedemorte is a direct attack on their lightning clouds. Employs airflow to make use of our existing excess of cold towers(Cycling the air keeps new air around them which needs to be chilled...), Pulls their air forces out of stand-off, and creates wind conditions that destroy the ability to use carpets. A revision ought to get it into the water... I forget if the frost towers have a 100 kilometre radius or diameter, or maybe it increased since then? Regardless, consideering that it also had volume enough to kill off the jungle, 20 kilomters of altitude with phenomenal volume should be easy, and ought to suck their storm clouds into the ground before they can build up, and a nice lightning rod drains it all away harmlessly regardless. I cannot imagine it being a national effort, not with our current frost towers, and combined with our existing frost towers and the fact that it is a weather-pattern-scale convection effect it ought to be able to cover the whole battle-line. It is a very direct leveraging of magic upon natural forces and directly undercuts all of their advantages using very familiar elements. Easy, relevant, and powerful. This is realyl the only sane project.

Conjure water has been a long time in coming. It would be nice if permanent conjuration of water worked, for a logistical effect and basing it on our permanent crystals should be doable. But it would probably up the difficulty to unreliable levels. I am feeling greedy so I want permanent water... Really, water supplies are such a vulnerability, this would be so good. ?Ugh, I just wish that our permanent conjuration magic wasn't tied to a big dumb facility back at the home-front.

Beach-front frost towers are very good. They should make landings suicide as cannons do not play nice with troops marching on ice. Unfortunately, the enemy is flying... But the directional technology and mitigating effects on their weather are very nice and seem revision-level given our tower experience.

Energetic Transfusion is wonderful, but I think that it is a design. I do not trust it as a revision. It is my vote if it going to a design and clarifies that it is implmented on frost towers and crystal clads and has a mobile land-version.

Antimagic mist could be an ambitious design. Summoning antimagic gems is very difficult. Microscopic antimagic gems are again very difficult. Also, it is useless against fire pots and lightning, so... Not to mention that the greatest weakness of our fog spell is that, rather than being a nice big cloud at a random location as one would expect, it is a big wedge forming from our mage, acting as a great-big "shoot here" sign, and this, if anything, makes that even worse. Crystals are denser than air. Making them smaller does not stop them from being denser than air... You could maybe try imbuing them with mist-power but that is clearly a design of its own unless we get some sort of supporting design to make such revisions easier. Finally, using clouds against wind magic has already been proven to be stupid, antimagic has already been proven to fail against effects already in progress, unless they are our summoned items, which are special somehow... At best they can just avoid it and have to find some way to throw their ordnance, maybe some sort of twisted-rope device, or summoned weather patterns. The corrct way to do this is to revise the equaliser into an air-burst of floating seed-pods...

[Andres]

Lightning Resistance - The main feature of Combat Armor. Using techniques derived from our extensive experience with anti-magic (Equalizer, AM Charms, AM Bombs, etc.), we can turn most/all of the sudden energy from lightning strikes into magical energy. We already turn magic into other forms of energy (fireball, etc.), and have extensive experience with absorbing magic into fixed points, so this shouldn't be hard. The magic is dissipated via humming/glowing, and if that's not enough, there can be some slots for AAA Magegems on the armor (that can be drained/replaced) to hold any overflow.

This is overambitious and a waste of an opportunity.

First of all, while we do have experience with anti-magic, we have no experience when it comes to turning electricity into magic energy, or turning any mundane force into magic, really. This will be difficult to do. As part of its own dedicated design, fine, but not as an addition to armour.

Secondly, is that this idea is throwing away one of two opportunities, both of which are better than what you have.

1. Instead of absorbing and dissipating magic, just make crystal insulate against it. It's a simple upgrade of our crystal as opposed to doing something completely new (turning mundane energy into magical energy), it's more likely to succeed, and the greater ease let's us do more with crystal.
 1.1. Since electricity insulation is a simple thing rather than a complex thing, we can fit in another minor thing into the design: making the crystal tougher. The last revision has shown that our crystal is insufficiently durable to do the things we want it to do, so we end up having to use more of it than we should. A general durability upgrade will not only make our entire line of crystal materials stronger, it'll be very helpful for future engine/cannon designs.
  1.1.1. To make it even easier to achieve this, maybe include something like "maintaining the crystal's sharpness is not a priority"?

2. You're taking the idea of turning mundane energy into magical energy and using it for armour. Not a bad idea, but there is so much more we can do with that. Many of our mages are stuck being used to power devices and this kind of technology would free many of them to do other things. We'd need to change the energy source from electricity to something else and increase the storage capacity of our magegems, but we could do a lot more with this technology than merely making lightning-resistant crystal.

Ultimately, for the sake of simplicity and continuing our crystal cannons/engines, as well as to make our infantry useful again, go for simple electricity insulation and a general durability upgrade rather than electricity-magic energy conversion.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[Chiefwaffles]

Good point, Andres. While the current lightning resistance is also intended as a stepping stone towards more applications of that kind of thing (such as Energetic Transfusion), I'll implement your changes.

DESIGNS
0 - Exploding Shell:
4 - Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar, FallacyofUrist
0 - Black crystal:
0 - Celestedemorte:

Revisions:
0 - Conjure Water:
0 - Beachfront Frost Tower:
0 - Energetic Transfusion:
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:

Plans?
1 - Fallacy's Plan: RAM

RAM, you forgot to include Fallacy's vote change from his plan to Combat Armor, so I just fixed that for you.

[helmacon]

Well, energetic transfusion was meant to be posted as a design. I guess I messed it up. I'll rewrite the fluff a bit to clarify where we use it after lunch.

Plus, if we do energetic transfusion first, we could do the Crystal combat armor as a revision. It's just turning our existing Crystal armor into a full suit, and adding a transfusion array on the back.

So, my opinion is energetic transfusion for the design. One revision for the combat armor, and one revision for either exploding or flack shells.

[Andres]

The second modification is tougher crystal. We make further changes to Crystal's structure and change it to be less "perfect". It retains its hardness, but will no longer be as brittle. In fact, if this modification goes well, Crystal should be less brittle than the best steel.

It would be wise to not limit the improvements strictly to brittleness. The fact that we still use metal at all means there is more to be done with the material than fixing its brittleness. It should not be "we try to make it less brittle", it should be "we try to improve the durability so that it's at least equal to steel in every way".

I'm also not sure why it's "less perfect".

Combat Armor should make Moskurg's lightning practically useless. The lightning will simply be dissipated by the armor, and as our magitech is now largely lightning-resistant, their lightning will no longer have the effect it used to have. Our crews can continue manning cannons to shoot down carpet riders and airships even as lightning hits them.

TL;DR: Crystal plate armor that uses a transparent-crystal faceplate, crystal, and a method to transfer lightning into magical energy based on anti-magic. Lighter, no more weak-spots for arrows and other lucky hits, better protection in general, self-repairing/easy-to-repair, and protects against lightning. See above lines for a bit more detailed description of benefits.

This still makes mention of energy transmutation.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[Chiefwaffles]

I edited in your feedback, Andres.

And helmacon, as for energetic transfusion, my problem is that it seems a bit niche for a Design. Crystal Armor should fulfill the same role while also greatly increasing the combat effectiveness of our troops as well as improving crystal in general. Energetic Transfusion may lead to charging our stuff with lightning, but that would be relying on Moskurg casting lightning to charge our stuff.

[RAM]

Well, energetic transfusion was meant to be posted as a design.

DESIGNS
0 Exploding Shell:
1 Energetic Transfusion: RAM
1 4 Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar, FallacyofUrist
0 Black crystal:
0 Celestedemorte:

Revisions:
1 Conjure Water: RAM
1 Beachfront Frost Tower: RAM
0 Anti-Magic Mist:

Vote-blocks
0 Fallacy's Plan(ES,CW,BFT):

RAM, you forgot to include Fallacy's vote change from his plan to Combat Armor, so I just fixed that for you.

Do people honestly fall for such blatant attacks on someone's character? You also "fixed" the empty slots, which, owing to their consistency, were completely harmless, and made adding new designs easier. Please do not 'help' so much in the future. If you actually want to help consider adding other people's designs to the list, it is difficult to do it properly on the same post as the design and... Actually, how about a rule that votes and designs can't share a post. The amount of hate generated by proposing that would be hilariously ironic. Anyway, people are rather impatient and are always foolish enough to vote for their own ideas so they always votebox right on their design post. Which is difficult to do right, so they just don't votebox. Which is really the better way to do it, but it leaves the votebox needing to be filled. Which should be the duty of the next person to vote. As a payment in order to have the right to vote it is very fair. And yet it so often doesn't happen. But anyway, given how much you hate clutter, I got rid of those messy dashes for you.

And I would just like to reiterate me request for people to vote for something other than an infantry design. Armour is basically useless. The lightning is destroying terrain, somehow... Maybe the mountains have explosive ore? We should look into that... Regardless, crystal armour will not stop the lightning from killing our troops, it will just make it less accurate, or actually more accuarate, given that the cannons are less common than the operators and thus killing a cannon with two shots is better than killing its crew with three. Anyway, even if this made our entire army immune to lightning(It won't, these are very specialised crystals, unless the design has changed completely? Oh, it has, let's just fix up the vote-box to reflect that it is no longer the same thing as it was when it was voted for... I assume that the designer will still be voting for it though...) They are still bombarding us from outside of our range and can still destroy our equipment. So it is still insufficient.

[andrea]

I don't see why voting for revisions now.

DESIGNS
0 Exploding Shell:
1 Energetic Transfusion: RAM
1 4 Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar, FallacyofUrist
0 Black crystal:
0 Celestedemorte:

Revisions:
1 Conjure Water: RAM
1 Beachfront Frost Tower: RAM
0 Anti-Magic Mist:

Vote-blocks
0 Fallacy's Plan(ES,CW,BFT):

Also, what blatant attacks on somebody's character? he merely pointed out that you used an older quotebox? it is a thing that happens.

[Chiefwaffles]

I did get rid of the empty slots because they had no point and were unnecessary clutter. I don't really know how you saw that as a character attack, but whatever.
Can you please be less hostile, RAM?

DESIGNS
0 - Exploding Shell:
1 - Energetic Transfusion: RAM
4 - Combat Armor: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Kadzar, FallacyofUrist
0 - Black crystal:
0 - Celestedemorte:

Revisions:
1 - Conjure Water: RAM
1 - Beachfront Frost Tower: RAM
0 - Anti-Magic Mist:

Vote-blocks
0 - Fallacy's Plan(ES,CW,BFT):

Also what Andrea said.
And Combat Armor fulfills the same role as it did. If people don't want me modifying my designs after the fact, then they can tell me that. But I have yet to had a single person (without a personal vendetta against me) tell me otherwise.

[helmacon]

And helmacon, as for energetic transfusion, my problem is that it seems a bit niche for a Design. Crystal Armor should fulfill the same role while also greatly increasing the combat effectiveness of our troops as well as improving crystal in general. Energetic Transfusion may lead to charging our stuff with lightning, but that would be relying on Moskurg casting lightning to charge our stuff.

That's it's immediate benefit, yes. But it is not the main purpose. The main purpose is a stepping stone into magical energy generation from mundane means. An alternate route to the "Meteoric Generator". It would lead to a cost reduction in mage gems, and most importantly, it acts as a medium between natural forces and magical forces. Since our whole gig is mageitech, a better melding of regular machinery and magical energy has any number of applications. The whole lightning rod thing is just what makes it worthwhile to delve into this line of research.

Anyways:

Spoiler: Energetic transfusion ReWrite (click to show/hide)

Energetic Transfusion
We have been working with magic for a very long time now. Thanks to our MathMagicians, we have come to understand what we have been doing exceptionally well. To put it simply, we take magical elements, sometimes called mana, and turn it into different kinds of natural elements, such as fire, or crystal. Theoretically, it should be fairly simple to invert the process.
Our first attempt, the Energetic Transfusion Array (henceforth abbreviated ETA) is primarily designed to work with lightning, as electrical energy is the most similar to magical energy. Both are rather nebulous concepts on their own, but more importantly, they can both be funneled down through and controlled by our circuits.
The ETA uses a small, thin strip of metal as a lightning rod to gather the electrical energy. The energy is forced down through an inverted summoning circuit, and dumped into a series of connected mage gems. This should collect the electrical energy, convert it, and store it safely away in the gems.
The first generation of ETAs are designed to be attached to our vehicles. They can be mounted anywhere on a crystal clad, set up on the tops of frost towers, or even ride between cars on the crystal trains.
The conversion process may not be 100% efficient, but our primary focus on the design is to create a working prototype, with less concern on size or efficiency.

The combat armor seems cool, but i think it is wildly ambitious to try to get ETAs , transparent crystal, and an armor revision all in one design. We design ETA first, then revise it into an armor suit. ETAs would also allow us to charge up and turbo our attacks during storms, if they ever try to counter our frost towers. It's a hard counter to lightning, and a preemptive soft counter to their counter, as well as a step into extremely useful energy tech.

[Chiefwaffles]

I mean, with ETA + Transparent Crystal + Material Swap, Combat Armor wouldn't be that hard to do. But that's not too relevant as Combat Armor is now Tougher/Insulating/Transparent Crystal + Material Swap.
Each part is individually really easy - the crystal modifications are done with decades of experience and the Crystalworks. The nature of the Crystalworks should allow us to easily change the structure of the crystal, and our extensive experience with Crystal facilitates that.
The material swap is the easiest. It's just replacing the steel with crystal, and generally material swaps aren't hard at all.

As for just ETA in general, I think it'd be better in a design to just make something that generates magical energy independently without relying on Moskurg. Sure, the ETA can be extended to not rely on lightning, but at the cost of a design I think it's just better to make something that doesn't rely on the enemy using spells that they'll know powers our stuff.

[RAM]

, what blatant attacks on somebody's character? he merely pointed out that you used an older quotebox? it is a thing that happens.

It looks for all the world like an extremely insideous approach whereby someone implies that someone else keeps failing and present yourself as being helpful. IT is a systematic effort to marginalise someone and essentially cause them to be socially deleted. I would prefer it if the thread focused upon ideas rather than the people presenting them. However there is a consistent trend of ideas that I see as being very successful in voting and very ineffectual in outcome, so I vehemetly oppose them, with publically stated reason that people can argue against. These ideas tend to come from Chiefwaffles, who has stated that I am personalyl attacking them. I am not, I am making rational arguments against leading proposals. I am also, sadly, forced to point out the argument tactics that are used against me becaue they are exteremely insideous so ignoring them is not a practical option. Sadly, it is even possible to use them without noticingm so it isn't even as though anyone is necessarily seeking to harm anyone here.

As for ideas. I just remembered a big problem with the new armour design. It goes from conductive armour to nonconductive armour. It sonds good, but in practie, a human with two thin nonconductive layers is usually more conductive than the air. So nonconductive armour is probably more dangerous than the current metal armour. Lighnting doesn't hit things and ounce, it goes through things and causes damage on the way. Protection relies upon making it go somewhere else. Resistant armour doesn't do that unless the occupant is in an air-tight(well, electrically-tight, actually) enclosure with significantly greater resistance along its most conductive path than the surrounding air has, and air is actually quite resistant. In short, the new version of the armour does not actually protect against real lightning. But this is fantasy lightning, so I guess it will work regardless.