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[helmacon]

Because people are stupid and can't even recognize genius when they see it, I've removed Linkgems from the F44.
You'll all regret this!

Can I get a joystick now? To further feed my genius hating fetish. _{Seriously, the current steering method is a sooo stupid.}

[Andres]

6 - ASAF-F44 Avenger: Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon, Gwolfski, Andrea, Andres
1 - Vigilant Sky Cutter: Lightforger
1 Mage-Slayers: RAM
3 - Antimagic Shielding: Kadzar, RAM, Draignean
1 Living Spell: The Watcher of Worlds: RAM

Death to linkgems.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[RAM]

RAM, we've made our points. There's no point in going further, and quite frankly it makes reading this thread absolutely painful.

If he's right, we get to shrug our shoulders and have a great little ship. If he's wrong, then we get a nice healthy I-told-you-so and can work on our own line of differently insane technology.

Let it be.

Uerg. They are wrong, like, four times in five, and we always go right back down the same "Let's get this great [insert anachronism] with five different [over-emphasised assertion of ideal outcome] features!" line. And keep ending up with things that don't even resemble the original proposal.

I do not want "I told you so". If I did I would be using them. I generally only bring them up in reference to new projects. But hey, since I have permission to make "I told you so"s...
 I said to prioritise the propulsion system because the craft would be useless without it, when, sure enough, we don't prioritise the propulsion, and then the craft is useless because its propulsion system consists of shaking the whole thing horrifically at quarter-second intervals. If the propulsion had been prioritised then the promised "we can revise a flying armour in the revision" could have happened, or at least we would have gotten "you sort-of understand it now, so you can get a bonus to it later". Instead we got "you can do repeating explosions, guess what you have been using in your infernal disappointment engines? Oh yes, repeated explosions used to propel an object! So we got zero progress towards the project actually working, and completely failed to live up to our promise of giving people a flying armour in a revision? Yay!!!"...

No doubt protectors would have been unstoppable if they had their mobility fixed? I mean, we did get troops into battle, the enemy did keep their distance while the protectors were functioning. It all played out exactly as I said. They were good enough but the air forces need to be accounted for and the protectors are too slow, and will continue to be too slow as long as they are designed with impregnable armour and heavy weapons and passenger space in mind. Our troops have armour, they don't need protection, they need a fast, self-propelled antiaircraft gun to hunt down aircraft or heavier ammunition to push through enemy wind deflection(Which would have given us enough range to at least blunt this latest disaster...). Otherwise they will just loiter out of range and bombard us forever. That is exactly what they did. They had the freedom to choose not to engage until the protectors broke down, and many protectors did not break down, but moving our troops around just wasn't that important and the guns didn't have enough range and weren't fast enough.

Or hey, I said that taming wild birds would be really difficult, we should just stick to my original draft of giant monster vultures which, while much more well-0built then giant hawks, were still more plausible. I can't speak for how plausible the summoned vultures that we never got were, but I can say with confidence that finding hawks, taming them, and mutating them, when we had no experience except for a few spells that had "concerns living thing" in common and existing tame equines(which were not even mentioned, I mean, ugh, leave out the one single piece of relevant experience that we have...) was, indeed, ridiculously overambitious, and resulted in... normal hawks...

Or I could point out that the crystalworks was a ridiculous over-engineered nightmare of mundane technologies that were ridiculous given the time period and complete lack of magic involved in their construction, blatantly excessive expenditure of magical resources, and complete abandonment of everything that makes conjuration useful. Fortunately, the outcome had no resemblance at all to the proposal. Being a convenient template-based summoning spell instead of an assembly line ripped from archival footage because someone wanted to turn this into a world-war arms race, because apparently there aren't enough of those... And, of course, I wanted a different, more broad-purpose form of antimagic resistance, such as living spells that could resist the antimagic, and thus be applied anywhere, and thus would have prevented this whole issue from transpiring by giving us a general-purpose antimagic protection instead of a pure "it will only get our crystals working again and you had better go back and edit that original design proposal because twisting it to apply to anything other than conjurations is going to be ridiculous and the G.M. might just decide to go back and check on it to see if your "let's use our crystal's antimagic resistance on something other than crystals" revision is even slightly consistent with what was established.

Wow, "I told you so"s are so helpful! I told everyone that the propulsion needed to be a special priority, because without that we would have nothing. Especially not that flying armour revision that was promised... It is a good thing that we won't be doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same mistake again. I do hope that we don't get a bad, unfair roll, such as a three, and find that our design continues to stink so bad that we will inevitable vote for the great new idea to get a SUPER-EASY!!! antimagic revision bundled up along with all the fixes that the aircraft needs. And won't it be nice when we roll a 3 on our antimagic revision and, surprisingly enough, don't get competent antimagic. It is not as though we need that or anything...

 And if anyone points out the glaring inconsistencies with past trends, G.M. statements, the designer's own words, common sense, and logic, then they get jumped on and have to start defending against accusations of making things up and a flat refusal to make any justification whatsoever for the vast majority of the assertions made against them, a healthy dose of logical fallacies or outright inaccuracies or weird edge-case interpretations of their statements, and basically zero action towards reasoned debate. And precisely zero admissions made concerning numerous proven errors. Like just now, that statement that we can't penetrate armour beyond short range. Unless I have missed a vehicle, that statement is demonstrably false. They have two heavily armoured vehicles. one can be penetrated at medium range and the other is a canoe, and thus only so armoured on the bottom. Given that th context is an aircraft, only armoured on the bottom means that either the aircraft can shoot it at a different angle, the aircraft can get close enough to shoot it at close range(and it is a canoe, you can shoot the people on top of it from a pretty generous angle, especially if they look over the sides to see their targets) or the aircraft just straight-up isn't doing what it should do.

Face it, we are never getting off of this nightmare line. People actually voted for the Titan of all things!?! How was that monstrosity ever going to be plausible? I mean, maybe, just maybe, hypothetical ridiculousness, it might have been possible to get something that big with numerous guns on it, and it didn't actually end up winning the vote thankfully. but the whole proposal? That thing was never going to pan out. Four sixes would have been dumbstruck if they got a third of it... When was the last time that a voted design actually met design goals? At this point we basically aren't playing anymore. We are just giving strong suggestions to evictedSaint as to what design to come up with for us. And they are good designs! Don't get me wrong, but it would be really nice to see us vote for something that could actually get into the game for a change. So, what to do if I can take this latest "I told you so" to the bank. *Sighs* Guess we will have to roll a three to find out...

[Chiefwaffles]

RAM.
You need to stop this.

All this accomplishes is polluting the thread further. Like Draignean said, people have made their points. If you must vent, please take it to PMs. But this is just too far.


EDIT:

Can I get a joystick now? To further feed my genius hating fetish. _{Seriously, the current steering method is a sooo stupid.}

Never. Spheres are the control method of the future.
I've already made a design for a mobile computing device that uses exclusively spheres as input. You can't stop the future, helmacon!

[Andres]

Future design: AS FP1
Fireball Projector

The FP1 is an artillery piece using that utilised our experience with circuitry and our mastery of Fireball to revolutionise artillery. The FP1 is essentially a large wand with a sufficient amount of circuitry and aethergems involved in its design.

Our HA1 fires shells which explode with the power of a PSF. The FP1, powered by its gems, instead uses the circuits of its design to cast PSFs. (Or rather, a modified version of PSF to match the range of blastshells.) This has the effect of creating an artillery piece with the same payload as a HA1 but with no moving parts, no propellant requirement (which means no recoil), no heavy shells or ammunition whatsoever, and no large barrel to ensure the projectile's accuracy.

The end result is a very simple device that does the same amount of damage as a HA1 per shot, except it's smaller, lighter, more reliable, more energy-efficient, more accurate, much more portable, easier to operate, easier to set up and pack away, less reliant on supply (all it takes is a single apprentice to operate one), needs less material to make, has a longer range, and is capable of fully-automatic fire if it has a sufficient amount of power running through it. It is better in every way to the HA1 and promises to usher in a new age of bombardment and small arms, an age littered with the blasted remains of Moskurg corpses.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[helmacon]

Tbh, I did like RAMs fighter design a little better, so if enough other people are in agreement I wild be willing to vote for that instead. It was posted a little late though, I think too many people are already committed to CWs design.

[Kadzar]

Look, I'm totally on board with the idea of the F44, and I'd be willing to vote for it next turn, but your all seem to be forgetting one thing;

MOSKURG CAN NULLIFY OUR MAGIC WITH EASE!

It doesn't matter if the F44 rolls all 6's across the board, we are going to get slaughtered this turn if we don't have anything to stop their antimagic. We cannot afford to invest this turn building a wunderwaffe when all of our gear is currently broken. Even if the plane does manage to get off the ground (despite its problems and Moskurg antimagic), it alone can't make up for our entire neutered army.

I'd be willing to vote for any other anti-antimagic design that has significant support, but I can't support some design that ignores our present predicament because people are chasing a future fantasy.

[andrea]

considering past evictedsaint comments, which both me and waffles remember, I am confident we can AM-proof our circuits with a revision. Could be wrong, mind you, but I believe we can.

[evictedSaint]

Design: ASAF-F44 "Avenger" [4, 4-1, 4]

The F44 "Avenger" is Arstotzka's second attempt to put a man in the air.

The KPD Mk.2 is a rather ambitious affair.  Our Mathemagicians analysis of the previous engine showed that an uncontained explosion beneath the craft does provide propulsion, but a large part of the expansion is lost around the edges of the craft.  The blastballs work in our cannons because the muzzle forces the expansion in one direction to provide propulsion; because there's no "muzzle" on the F43 the energy was largely wasted.

We make some progress modifying the propulsion methods of our blastball, but making it directional is a bit tougher than we expected.  It's easier to make the expansion constant, however, so we achieve some partial success on that front.  Using the characteristics of our new blastball spell we can create an engine that generates lift.  The KPD Mk.2 engine is essentially a crystal cup, into which a number of nickel circuits and copper scrollwork is integrated.  We make liberal use of the conductive/non-conductive crystal to channel energy towards the base of the cup where the continuous blastball can be generated and directed outward.  The intensity of the generation can be modulated to provide differing levels of thrust.

The KPD Mk. 2 is linked to the second major invention of this design; the Aether Reactor.  Taking advantage of the double-up method of increasing magical energy generation, the Reactor is about the size of six adult men standing close together and uses D-level gems.  It has a relatively high energy output for its weight, but it frequently burns through magegems and requires replacing.  However, the smaller size of the reactor compared to the F43's power supply means we can afford to armor it with crystal.

The pilot and gunner cockputs are no longer linked as the reactor and KPD Mk.2 dominates the center of the craft.  The pilot is still equipped with a set of rotating spherical controls, which adjust the angle of the KPD's output up to ten degrees.  It's still sensitive to shifts in movement and center of gravity, and the pilot must focus very carefully to avoid going into an unrecoverable capsize.  The gunner is still unpowered and uses an HAC-1.

The craft can reach high speeds, but acceleration is slow. It is shaped vaguely like an arrowhead, with the pilot at the front and center. The gunner has a field of fire that extends 360° around him, but only 5° down and 45° up.  The F44 can drop a pair of Explosive HA1 artillery shells, but the mounts are unshielded and both must be dropped at the same time to keep weight balance.  The craft can survive a ballista bolt in most places, but the reactor is sensitive to damage.

It can fly and shoot, but the power requirements makes it Very Expensive.

[Kadzar]

Alright then:

Revision: Antimagic Shielding
Moskurg Antimagic has been a thorn in our side for a long time, but now it's become unbearable. That's why our designers have devised a new type of crystal which protects our magic from antimagical interference. It works much like the mythical "Faraday Cage" of Arstotzkan legend, blocking out harmful Moskurg antimagic particles so that those inside are free to cast as much as they like. There's no guarantee that spells cast inside the shielding will be protected once they leave the barrier, but our mundane projectiles should at least still work perfectly fine, and our Protectors should now only be stopped by their faulty suspension.

1 - Antimagic Shielding: Kadzar

[Draignean]

2 - Antimagic Shielding: Kadzar, Draignean

[helmacon]

3 - Antimagic Shielding: Kadzar, Draignean, Helmacon

[andrea]

4 - Antimagic Shielding: Kadzar, Draignean, Helmacon, Andrea

Seems a bit ambitious to shield all our magic ( in a box) rather than just the circuits. Still, could be worth trying

[helmacon]

This is a magical box right? Not, like, an actual physical box. Just an anti anti magic field.

[FallacyofUrist]

We're going to do that in a revision?

Well, they're not going to be able to antimagic it out of the sky, unless it gets stupidly close to the enemy.

It does fly, right? High up?