Interesting points developed in this thread:
- The STAR drive: infinite energy. search the thread for motion amplifier
- The mobius bomb: singularity factory. search for mobius bomb
- The wierd compute: Instant omniscience: search for wierd computer
Perhaps someone has already posted this idea or it has been proved not to work...
AND I CAME UP WITH SOMETHING!
genesis spell.
forward in time: for each, say, minute going on our new plane "the time machine", there goes, say 1 day in the rest of the planes.
backward in time: its cheesy, but nothing would prevent you from creating a demiplane that said: "for each minute going on the time machine II, the time goes 1 day BACK in the material plane.
Perhaps someone has already posted this idea or it has been proved not to work...
I don't know about here, but on BG someone posted it as the Coathanger of Doom, using basically that same thing (with some 'enhancements') to kill the unborn version of your greatest enemy and have him turn into a ghoul and eat his way out.
At least, I think it was on BG....
damn, google, doesn't love me
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=2287.msg71122#msg71122
No wonder google didn't love me, he/she/it called it 'wire hanger' not coat hanger.
by the way, i'd like to introduce you to the Nuclear Bomb.
Greater glyph seals from MIC
cast an epic spell using the conjure seed into it.
said epic spell conjures very dense material, just light enough to not become a singularity.
incredibly dense materials have a habit of starting nuclear reaction, turning themselves into energy rather quick.
boom.
but i was sorta wondering if it was possible do time travel without getting youger, and if you could go forward in time.
AND I CAME UP WITH SOMETHING!
genesis spell.
forward in time: for each, say, minute going on our new plane "the time machine", there goes, say 1 day in the rest of the planes.
backward in time: its cheesy, but nothing would prevent you from creating a demiplane that said: "for each minute going on the time machine II, the time goes 1 day BACK in the material plane.
Although Manual of the Planes talks about different time traits and not once does it even mention time flowing backwards. I would rather go by the old saying 'Rules tell you what can be done, not what cannot be done' and skip the Genesis idea. In other words, Manual of the Planes does not say there is a chance that time flows backwards, hence it is not possible for it to flow backwards according to the normal planar trait routes. Feel free to correct me though.
The basic principle involves a trick that makes something behave differently if an object is there. eg. filling the room with confetti and divining the location of each piece and then inverting the output (ie, places that don't have confetti are places where there's an object)
The result is that you can divine the location of seemingly undetectable objects (immune to divinations, invisible and no magic aura). If you used little beads made of force effects, you can detect incorporeal and ethereal objects as well (because I assume they also block force effects)
cast an epic spell using the conjure seed into it.
I think that's an epic spell. ;)
Not that it really takes much to do the same.
If you have a decanter of endless water, a control water spell will detect any invisible objects simply from the "bubble" they make.
IIRC, invisibility specifically mentions that you can be detected by stepping into a stream or leaving wet footsteps.
thats a nice idea jseah. how would you find out where all the tiny bits were?
That's why it's an epic spell, made to mimick thousands of locate objects. You can make invisible ping pong ball sized objects to cover a larger volume with lower resolution if you want (eg. you wouldn't be able to tell if a fighter was holding a longsword or a stick)
My idea for 'time travel' was to use font of power with time regression to rewind time as much as you wanted. you could even go back to when you were a baby. because you remember everything that happened to you before you used the power you would effectively become the smartest baby ever. you would adress the XP problem with a thought bottle.
This is the start of the dark route taken by perhaps the most sophisticated DnD Experiment ever designed. It's by the inimitable Teilaxu_Ghola, and they're called respectively the terminators, and the neo-terminators. Explaining them eloquently is beyond me right now, but suffice to say that Time Travel is basically a solved problem at this point. :: laughing :: Seriously.
This is the start of the dark route taken by perhaps the most sophisticated DnD Experiment ever designed. It's by the inimitable Teilaxu_Ghola, and they're called respectively the terminators, and the neo-terminators. Explaining them eloquently is beyond me right now, but suffice to say that Time Travel is basically a solved problem at this point. :: laughing :: Seriously.
Then Monties stepped in and time travel immunity was Pun-Pun's new shield. Good times, good times.
Wonder if the old Breaking the core thread is still around here somewhere. It was great.
Also the majority of dense materials usuaully need some sort of push to cause them to go nuclear, and even when they are pushed (natural or not) they only "melt down." While deadly, it is much different then nuclear weaponry which is actaully rather precise.
Real world physics work as well as real world economics in D&D.
tshern, i lost my manual of the planes, so can somebody quote the spell here. i just remebered it saying something along the lines of "anything you can think of" but i may of course be wrong. anyway, then well have to figure out something else.
Genesis.
I meant that Manual of the Planes doesn't mention any planes with backwards time or the possibility of such planes existing when they describe time traits. Or so I thought, BloodDragon could be right, but I am AFB as well, so I cannot check.
Edit: next objective: create a screwdriver made of sonic energy
We won't be doing that.
Lay the hole flat on a sheet.
Fold the sheet so that you're dealing with a single long rectangular strip. Fold that in half long-ways or "hot-dog" style.
Now you have an active side and an inactive side as the magic attempts to preserve the function of the intended topology.
Make a mobius strip.
Now there is only one side.
And no meaningful facing plane.
Either it is open, entirely, or it is closed entirely.
If it is open, and most will argue it is...*
The topology presented is a folded space.
:embarrass
It thus has a gravitational pull, and a horrifying effect on anything put in it.
Effectively anything that goes in just slides out at an angle into itself. Ow.
You then drop the hole. As it falls through the world's crust, it will contort and be compressed by gravity, distorting the space further and further and starting a chain reaction. Either it enters a steady state, albeit incredibly destructive, or it collapses in on itself as it folds space time, creating a black hole.
*I am not among them. I tend to suggest that it just breaks and becomes non-magical here, but most of those who argue magic follows physics will already be getting a migraine.
how can we make a screwdriver of sonic energy? its easy to shape force, but sonic energy is tricky.
id create this thread for people who like to use real-world science in optimizations.
--Things i think we should work with--
- Nuclear weaponry
- Time travel ??
- Quantum Theory
real-world science.. time travel... WTH
Start with lead with a density of 11,340 kg/m^3
After just one infusion thats 113, 340 kg/m^3
Its a level six infusion so an artificer can be doing this a minimum of 4 times a day, with enough time you can get yourself a black hole....
seriously, since i joined these forums, im thinking people who say roleplaying games might drive you insane might be right...
i have no idea why they think it would cause schitzophrenia.
but i can see pyromaniacness, delusions of greatness, rocktopus syndrome (the urge to drop celestial bodies on your friends), and a few others.
May I present to you.... the Redneck Nuke!
Step One: Create some sort of containment device. It can be any shape so long as it has enough space for it's contents.
Step Two: Use Major Creation to summon a pie shaped block of highly radioactive Uranium or other radioactive naturally forming element. (I'd recommend an Immunity to Fire spell or the radioactivity might cause you hair loss.)
Step Three: Cut out a small wedge of the pie and attach either a block of C4 or some other explosive of your choice to the outer rim. (It can be magical or not, but the main thing is that you need it to be remotely detonatable.)
Step Five: Load your radioactive pie into your container, including the explosive pie piece. (Make sure to fit the cut out pie piece back into it's original place.)
Step Six: This is where you can really get creative, but for simplicities sake lets just say PUT THE BOMB FAR AWAY FROM YOU AND PREFERABLY BY YOUR ENEMIES! ( I prefer a shrink item and teleport item spells for tactical nukage but thats just me.)
Step Seven: Activate your explosives and when the force from said explosion forces the irradiated pie chunk to slam into the rest of your radioactive pie... you get a big boom. (Granted not the most efficient boom, but a boom none the less.)
Step Eight: Sit back with a mug of ale and watch your world go to hell.
Not sure about the actuall physics involved with it, but the ease of creation makes me want to laugh.
Scratch that, first you have to have a legitimate reason for trying to discover uranium.
keep using your origin of species spell to create incredibly small(cell-sized) creatures. they should be puny weak and all, only one HD, BUT they should have the energy seed as a SLA. if you can handle the skill check make it an ex. when you have amasses, lets say, 10^100 of our germies, we use an area version of the compel seed with the orders "obey my orders for the next NI years"
then unleash them on the world. they can act like a disease, infiltrating people. but they'd be one of the most deadly ones ever, thanks to the fact that ALL the germs in your body can hit you with a bolt for 10d6 acid damage.
First you have to actually discover uranium.
Scratch that, first you have to have a legitimate reason for trying to discover uranium.
Hehe I never said WHY your doing it or how you know about it. Thats all on your characters background.
Perhaps I'm a very brainy wizard who loves science and arcane? Maybe I began to realize that there a series of reoccuring elements in the world? Maybe after long and intensive study I dicover radioactivity!!! Mwhahaha
After all, a portable hole is an item in the form of a circular sheet of cloth. And since it can be folded up into a small hankerchief sized object and this is inactive, I would argue that folding the cloth would disable the folded area. (After all, the hankerchief sized hole won't form a hankerchief sized entrance if laid on the table)
- Plus if you allowed the folded areas to work, this allows weird stuff like folding the hole into itself.
Which means that if you fold it into a rectangle, there's going to be a border where the hole is inactive, which prevents the mobius strip from working.
I'm not sure if you could make a mobius-strip-like object by folding a circular sheet of paper (and hence avoid having inactive borders). Perhaps if you propped it up.
Also, dropping the hole doesn't let it eat through the ground. Since the edges can be picked up (see description), this implies that objects touching the edge of the cloth don't go in. (otherwise your fingers go in and you can't pick it up)
This means that the edges of the hole would not go through the ground. Although it probably isn't a good idea to put your hand in.
Hmm, actually:
This hole can be picked up from inside or out by simply taking hold of the edges of the cloth and folding it up.
What does this mean? You can pick up the hole from the inside of the hole-space?
First you have to actually discover uranium.
Quite the aside, but first...
Uranium has to exist in the cosmology.
My worlds have earth, water, fire, air, positive and negative elements, of which all matter is composed of.
There was also Monty who Lord of Procrastination did. I forget the specifics of that but it was something along the lines of using the far realm to travel to the beginning and end of time simultaneously and have an ageless henchman open portals to check on you every few seconds. I think the original thread on that trick is gone.
I'm pretty sure that was Tielexu_Ghola.
I'm pretty sure that was Tielexu_Ghola.
Ah my bad. I was thinking it was a dirty trick for some reason.
1. Half-a-hole in a hole
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Buy two of them. Get a sheet of paper 6ft in diameter. Sovereign glue your holes to the sheet.
So now I have a 6ft ring of "edge" that I can pick up as per portable hole rules. Both sides lead into a pocket dimension.
I wonder what happens if you twist it?
What happens if you drag one edge around and put it into the hole on one side?
You could theoretically gather up the edges of the holes and pull it into one of the holes, and then double back through the portal into the first hole. This basically makes the "inside" hole casually disconnected from the universe, or nothing gets in or out of the internal space.
So now I have a 6ft ring of "edge" that I can pick up as per portable hole rules. Both sides lead into a pocket dimension.
I wonder what happens if you twist it?
What happens if you drag one edge around and put it into the hole on one side?
You could theoretically gather up the edges of the holes and pull it into one of the holes, and then double back through the portal into the first hole. This basically makes the "inside" hole casually disconnected from the universe, or nothing gets in or out of the internal space.
2) Misspelled title.
I'm pretty sure that was Tielexu_Ghola.
Yes, and using Monty\Terminator\Neo-terminator here is like.......... trying to hit a fly with a universe.
The bread slicer is absolutely hilarious. I maintain that there are only five items in the SRD... The Lyre of Building, The Candle of Invocation, Dust of Sneezing and Choking, Fighter and The Portable Hole. If you can't accomplish it with those, it's not worth doing and all other units are just compositions of those five items in some fashion or another.
What do you mean fighter's not a piece of equipment? He sure feels like one........ :S
I think I can start to see the issues and clarifications portable hole needs.
1. How is the direction of gravity inside the hole determined?
2. If I bend the active surface, what does it look like from the inside?
- Does the portal always appear flat?
- if it does, I can think of ways to use portable holes as a magnifying glass
3. What happens if a hole goes inactive when an object is half-inside?
- The bread slicer assumes that deactivating the hole slices whatever is crossing the boundary
4. The casual disconnection bit in "half-a-hole" needs you to twist space into VERY contorted shapes.
- I think there's a fractal Klein bottle somewhere. It's just folded up into an infinitesimally small point. (fractal pattern folding is needed to pack a 1-dimensional "edge" onto a 2D surface)
My normal feeling is that the topology of the portal is as follows:
The greatest contiguous plane of the morphed topology drawn by the hole's edges is the open part of the hole, and the opening on the outside is the same size as the opening on the inside. In other words, if you bow it outwards, it merely narrows the hole. This is only one of many many many interpretations I've seen, but it's why I chose to use a mobius strip.
I forgot to mention that you basically tuck the temporarily inactive edges into the active portion of the topology in my mobius bomb, which is basically what makes the world go weird. Basically. I'd prefer to avoid a migraine.
I think that the disconnect would indeed basically produce a fractal zone of n+ 0.x dimensionality while producing a topology very similar to either a catastrophe cusp or something along those lines.Decanter of Endless Water + Resilient Sphere.
Plan of action:
1. Activate Decanter in maximum mode (30 gallons per 6 seconds = 22.73 liters per second= 22.73kg of water per second)
2. Cast Resilient Sphere at a dampened caster level (don't cast at full potential) such that it's as small as you can get it to be, I think that's 7ft diameter. Persist this so that you have enough time.
3. Drop Decanter inside the sphere and Dimension Door out.
4. Watch and wait...
Calculations:
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7ft diameter sphere is 1.0068m in radius = 5.08m cube volume or 5085 liters.
1 day = 86400 seconds = 1.96 x 10^6 liters of water = 386.167 times the volume of the sphere
- Therefore, density is 386 times that of water... which according to wikipedia is around twice the density of the Sun's core...
1 round before it ends, recast the sphere at 8ft radius around the 1st sphere and persist that one also...
1 day = 86400 seconds = 1.96 x 10^6 liters of water = 386.167 times the volume of the sphere
- Therefore, density is 386 times that of water... which according to wikipedia is around twice the density of the Sun's core...
1 round before it ends, recast the sphere at 8ft radius around the 1st sphere and persist that one also...
So we often have a problem. Chartering a airship is expensive. Teleport has a weight limit. Life isn't fair or always easy. We can fix all of these things, presuming you can afford 56~ K in exchange for a monopoly on short range transportation. You will need ring-gates, and a portable hole. And madness.
Take ring-gates, carry them apart. Lay them on a flat surface, preferably a wall. lay the whole hole flat on the wall such that about a third is over the ring gate.... Grab the edge and push it through the ring gate. Send your halfling through, and get him or her to pick up the ring gate, turn it around, and lay the floppy part of the hole against a wall to activate it as per usual. You can do a number of terrible or strange things at this point, but I'm pretty content with unlimited weight continuous teleportation across 100 miles with no miss chance and no spell slots spent. Planar gates can make this insane, of course. Oh, you want an explanation? The hole doesn't know that it's in two places. It just opens properly, and allows you to step into the hole, where you then weigh nothing, and walk through to the other part of the hole's entrance, and climb out 100 miles away. You could really just do this by laying the hole on a board and shoving it through after folding it up some, but this is much cooler.
You can do a number of terrible or strange things at this point, but I'm pretty content with unlimited weight continuous teleportation across 100 miles with no miss chance and no spell slots spent.
That actually sounds like it might work.
I mean that a portable hole goes to an extra dimension right? So technically, what these ring gates and planar portals do is to connect multiple areas to the same extra dimension that you use as a way-station.
Or you could just lesser planar binding a lantern archon to do your teleporting for you. =P Overcoming the weight limitations with... portable holes!
*****************************************
On another note, with the Decanter of Endless Water, you can use it to power a waterwheel by locking it in permanent Geyser mode and sticking it into the wall at the top of a purpose-built tower.
The water going down drives a reverse Archimedes screw mechanism (which you preserve using unguent of timelessness) for a very high force but low speed. This can be ramped up using gears and belts to conduct the motive force around.
"Power lines" can be constructed to connect multiple towers to the same "grid". Remote locations can be accessed via the above mentioned portable hole + ring gates scheme.
Check out your local gnome tinker's guild. With some tightening up of administration, they might have the power to launch D&D's industrial revolution.
EDIT: I just need some way to work portable hole madness into this. Maybe using a twisted space to accelerate water?
You'll find me....
[INDENT]Where the gnomes do harbor...[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]Across black seas, and above mountains blue[/INDENT][/INDENT]
Ohhh Lass, that's where you'll find me...
[INDENT]With eyes on the stars...[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]and me hands laid steady on course..[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT][INDENT] Oh me hands on the pulse of the worlds...[/INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT]
But come ye nae a'looking...
Ohhhh Lass, come ye nae a'looking...
[INDENT]For there's no place for me![/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]But this blacckkkkwaterrrr ocean![/INDENT][/INDENT]
We actually plan to use this method of transportation in a game I'm in that's just getting started, though. Except we're just going to climb into the hole and then have someone shove it through the Ring Gates, like nice little boys and girls, instead of opening it up while it is inside the Ring Gates. :D
The Enveloping Pit in the MiC is also a fraction of the cost of a portable hole, and actually holds more things. You just have to be evil or lawful neutral to use it... which usually isn't a problem for me. :P
Shape your reverse gravity field such that it's a vertical rectangle with twice the height of the width/length of the base. The last dimension doesn't matter.
Stick a large solid lead cylinder into the side of the field.
With some anchoring, the cylinder begins to rotate. Put a shaft through the middle and whoopee! It's like a steam engine that doesn't need fuel! Plus the huge lead cylinder weighs effectively nothing!
Plus the motive force is insane and top speed is likewise at terminal velocity.
Calculations:
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Reverse gravity has a volume of 1 10ft cube per 2 levels, at level 14 caster, this makes 14x 10ft cubes (Widen), shapeable.
This means that the largest rectangular volume as specified by the shape is 30x15x20ft cuboid.
This means we can fit in a lead cylinder of 15ft radius and 20ft length. This works out to 4500*pi ft cube volume of lead, the weight of which will be our motive force.
Using the density of lead (11.34 g per cm^3), we arrive at the staggering 4.539 x 10^6 kg as our driving force!
This by the way is the amount of weight by which a mechanism shackled to the cylinder can lift. The amount of weight lifted can be traded for speed as per the standard gearing mechanisms.
This means that the largest rectangular volume as specified by the shape is 30x15x20ft cuboid.
This means we can fit in a lead cylinder of 15ft radius and 20ft length. This works out to 4500*pi ft cube volume of lead, the weight of which will be our motive force.
Using the density of lead (11.34 g per cm^3), we arrive at the staggering 4.539 x 10^6 kg as our driving force!
This by the way is the amount of weight by which a mechanism shackled to the cylinder can lift. The amount of weight lifted can be traded for speed as per the standard gearing mechanisms.
Wait... Reverse Gravity beats decanter any day. All you need is a custom item of continuous Widen Reverse Gravity. Or a DMM Persistent Ocular Widen Reverse Gravity cast every day.
Shape your reverse gravity field such that it's a vertical rectangle with twice the height of the width/length of the base. The last dimension doesn't matter.
Stick a large solid lead cylinder into the side of the field.
With some anchoring, the cylinder begins to rotate. Put a shaft through the middle and whoopee! It's like a steam engine that doesn't need fuel! Plus the huge lead cylinder weighs effectively nothing!
With some finagling, I think we can actually use a amped up version of that to pull the moon down out of the sky like my original plan. :: thoughtful look :: It seems to me that you can probably use a second RG field to get a larger cylinder if you were to use a more complicated crank-shaft arrangement. Perhaps this will be of interest to you?
Animated Engines
;)
I would have thought that it would be the massive electric field from such a large concentration of electrons that would do the most damage there...
Charge is a scary thing, as a great man once said:
"If I had a coulomb of charge in my hand I'd be dead" *laughs* "Why are you laughing? You'd all be dead to"
So i would recommend getting yourself a faraday cage before attempting it, such as wrapping yourself in tin foil, or full plate, its all good....
Not exactly sure what all these electrons will do once let out of their cage, but i'd imagine that it is something nasty
Firstly, you can't teleport a resilient sphere.
Although all those electrons in the same place would generate a static charge so large that it would polarize virtually everything in a large radius around it. And when it explodes, which it will do basically instantly, it releases a huge flash of energy that vaporizes anything that's too close.
Depending on how resilient sphere works, it might not block electric fields (you can see through it after all, and it is made of force. Kinetic barriers do nothing to affect electric fields)
Assuming it doesn't:
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It would mean casting such a spell would instantly kill the caster unless done from a good distance away (a few hundred feet maybe).
This is because 10^44 electrons would exert an electric field so strong that anything nearby would have their electron shells distorted, probably having weird effects on chemistry and by extension killing all living things around it.
Actually, scratch that. I did some back of the envelop calculations and the force experienced by a single electron, 1 meter away from the mess, is 1.42 x 10^14 newtons.
This basically means that anything within... oh, 100km?, would instantly lose their electrons as the electron shell gets so distorted the electrons simply fly off. The naked nuclei remaining zoom to the resilient sphere and stick there. Until there's enough to offset the charge.
This is because 10^44 electrons would exert an electric field so strong that anything nearby would have their electron shells distorted, probably having weird effects on chemistry and by extension killing all living things around it.
Actually, scratch that. I did some back of the envelop calculations and the force experienced by a single electron, 1 meter away from the mess, is 1.42 x 10^14 newtons.
This basically means that anything within... oh, 100km?, would instantly lose their electrons as the electron shell gets so distorted the electrons simply fly off. The naked nuclei remaining zoom to the resilient sphere and stick there. Until there's enough to offset the charge.
I'd imagine that you could do even nastier things with other particles.
Things that i can think of-a strangelet bomb (after you plane shift to Limbo so you can control the surrounding matter).
Thats another fun toy-"I cast polymorph any object on the ground under you feet, turning it into strangelets. Goodbye, Mr Bond"
Let me tell you, throwing the moon at Mach 10 really sends you places.
Work your way up to warp 20, and use original Startrek physics to send yourself back in time.
The spheres description says that "nothing can pass through the sphere, in or out". including electrons.
Yeah, but electrons aren't getting out. It's simply the effects of their electric field.
Well, you could argue not even the electric field gets out. But then I must ask how does light get out?
Impassable barrier my ass.
Quantum mechanics, electrons tunnel out of that sphere no problem.
Impassable barrier my ass.
Funny stuff! I just saw a lecture by William Miller. Great stuff...
With respect to this thread, I'm interested in the Autocatalytic processes generated by Ice Assasin bombs... Rate of replication and such... Lots of existing models should be able to be fit w/in the DnD rules to see if the "rate of ascention" would match some of the non-pun-pun related builds.
Dirty Positive Bomb
Ingredients:
Energy Transformation Field, Spell Compendium
- 10,000gp of diamonds (material components)
Vivacious Creature Summons, Planar Handbook
Halaster's Fetch IV, Waterdeep
One 7th level spell of any kind
Apparatus:
13th Level Wizard
Directions:
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1. Cast Energy Transformation Field, attaching Halaster's Fetch IV (1d4+1 Vivacious Owls) to it. Cast the generic 7th level spell into the field to start it going.
2. The Owls' orders are to shoot each other with their beam attack, on average, 3.5 owls are summoned per casting, each firing an average of 4 beams per cast, resulting in an average 14 beams fired per cast. Thus, on average the field produces 2x the number of casts per original casting. Thus the field will always have sufficient levels of spells to continue summoning once every 13 rounds.
3. Once the duration of the spell is over, the owls will become free willed, flying all over the place. Since owls are solitary creatures, they will spread around pretty well. The owls have a positive energy aura which heals creatures in the area for 1hp per round, staying for too long in the area will cause creatures to explode, as per positive energy plane. The combo has a potentially unlimited range.
2. The Owls' orders are to shoot each other with their beam attack, on average, 3.5 owls are summoned per casting, each firing an average of 4 beams per cast, resulting in an average 14 beams fired per cast. Thus, on average the field produces 2x the number of casts per original casting. Thus the field will always have sufficient levels of spells to continue summoning once every 13 rounds.
3. Once the duration of the spell is over, the owls will become free willed, flying all over the place. Since owls are solitary creatures, they will spread around pretty well. The owls have a positive energy aura which heals creatures in the area for 1hp per round, staying for too long in the area will cause creatures to explode, as per positive energy plane. The combo has a potentially unlimited range.
Using RG lead cylinders to move the moon isn't going to work. RG conserves momentum, even if it's a perpetual motion machine.
If you linked it up to a photon drive... it might work. But the thrust is horribly low.
Oh I wasn't going to put them on the moon....
I was going to build a bit of a block and tackle out in space and pull the moon out of its orbit...
Though I do need a drive-train or generator system, effectively, for something I'm tentatively calling the Moonwagon... We can drop it, why shouldn't we be able to fly it away. Photon drives are an option, but I'm pretty sure there's a better one. I'll do some thinking.
- http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/repelMetalOrStone.htm
I think moon rocks count as stone. Simply put ETF on a air-tight airship and repel the moon out of orbit.
- For clarification, you're repelling moon rocks (which are less than 500lb) into the ground, which pushes the Moon.
- You can simply add a lot of these "drives" to push harder.
hmmmmm
the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres/second. thats 1798754748 metres/round. thats about 5396264244 ft/round. 1079252848,8 squares. so if we put 1079252849 commoners in a row, theyd accelerate whatever we had them hand over to just above the speed of light. the only problem being it would burn up rather quickly as a result of resistance. but..... if we put something just after the commoner chain, that would get hit rather hard... maybe putting a ring gate there, the carry around the other gate. whenvere we want to whack somebody, aim the ring gate at them, do sending to commoners.
539626425 commoners in a row.
we can dominate them, use awakened undead, or just pay them 1 sp/day.
53962642,5 gp/day to have a stone threwn with the speed of light when you want them to... anybody up for doig the math for what would happen if we fired it into the earth? (using ring gates)
Monty was the creation of psly4mne, in response to a neo-terminator technique I described using a new (at the time) concept on the non-determinism of transporting between uncorrelated time lines.
It was actually just discussed in some other thread as well. I mentioned it in conjunction with Pun-Pun who used it to gain advantage over all time travel shenanigans.
Also, it is a pleasure to see you here.
eexcellent.
539626425 commoners in a row.
we can dominate them, use awakened undead, or just pay them 1 sp/day.
53962642,5 gp/day to have a stone threwn with the speed of light when you want them to... anybody up for doig the math for what would happen if we fired it into the earth? (using ring gates)
We would get rid of the Commoners for sure.
also, what was this monty trick about?? the link in your sig just shows a white screen.
also, what was this monty trick about?? the link in your sig just shows a white screen.
That way lies madness. Some things are better left unknown. :D
I imagine you trust me as a pretty smart fellow, with a reasonable grasp of the system. Monty and the Neo-terminator are probably the most sophisticated things ever devised in DnD. Period, end of story. I recommend picking up a couple of PhDs first, and then maybe a couple of beers first.
ILL BE BACK IN A FEW YEARS!! WITH PHDS!!
edit: and yes, i trust you as those things
Reverse-Rocket
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http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/gustOfWind.htm
50mph, can be made permanent.
Ok, you cast Gust of Wind inside a 5ft cube box and permanency it.
50mph wind going through a 25ft area (the cross-sectional area of a line) moves 51.914 cubic meters of air.
Air density when you trap it at sea level is 1.2 kg m^-3.
Thus reflecting the wind (against the front of the box) gives 51.914*1.2*22.352 = 1392.458 kg m s-1 of momentum to the box every second. Equivalent to 1392 newtons of force.
Making multiple castings of gust of wind in the same box can arguably give higher force.
(this number maybe increased by having a higher air density in the box you're doing this)
Chain the box to something and as long as the weight of the box + load is less than 139.2kg (just over 300 lbs), the momentum gained from gust of wind can lift both the box and load against gravity.
Since you're bringing the box with you, the wind motion is always 50mph relative to the box and there is no maximum speed. (use this in space and eventually we'll have to employ relativistic corrections, probably take you a few years to get up to that speed though)
Multiple wind boxes and such contraptions stacked and chained together can be used to achieve higher thrust since the force exerted simply adds together.
Rotate box to thrust in different directions.
Stopping the box might be a bit of a problem, although chaining it to a large enough or secure object would work (like a big rock). Might also want to have permanent webs/solid fogs to serve as catch nets to slow it down.
Welcome to D&D's jet engine, insane efficiency ratio and no moving parts! What's more it needs no fuel and thus completely environmentally friendly!
50mph, can be made permanent.
Ok, you cast Gust of Wind inside a 5ft cube box and permanency it.
50mph wind going through a 25ft area (the cross-sectional area of a line) moves 51.914 cubic meters of air.
Air density when you trap it at sea level is 1.2 kg m^-3.
Thus reflecting the wind (against the front of the box) gives 51.914*1.2*22.352 = 1392.458 kg m s-1 of momentum to the box every second. Equivalent to 1392 newtons of force.
Making multiple castings of gust of wind in the same box can arguably give higher force.
(this number maybe increased by having a higher air density in the box you're doing this)
Chain the box to something and as long as the weight of the box + load is less than 139.2kg (just over 300 lbs), the momentum gained from gust of wind can lift both the box and load against gravity.
Since you're bringing the box with you, the wind motion is always 50mph relative to the box and there is no maximum speed. (use this in space and eventually we'll have to employ relativistic corrections, probably take you a few years to get up to that speed though)
Multiple wind boxes and such contraptions stacked and chained together can be used to achieve higher thrust since the force exerted simply adds together.
Rotate box to thrust in different directions.
Stopping the box might be a bit of a problem, although chaining it to a large enough or secure object would work (like a big rock). Might also want to have permanent webs/solid fogs to serve as catch nets to slow it down.
Welcome to D&D's jet engine, insane efficiency ratio and no moving parts! What's more it needs no fuel and thus completely environmentally friendly!
nothing cheers me up like obvious rules exploits
i suddenly have an urge to optimize cookies. and peanutbutter.
The world-record damage had some neat mathematics in it as well. So far I have done a pretty good job understanding all the scientific parts of the various TO tricks, which surprises me.
I feel the same way, Tshern. I am by no means a science major, and most of my knowledge I've acquired due to interest in the subjects rather than rigorous study.
The ring gate idea got me to thinking: do they conserve momentum? If so, you can pull Portal-esque tricks with them (provided a small enough weight is used) to accelerate something to extremely high velocities. Is there an item like the ring gates that lacks a weight limit? Or that enforces the limit per transfer rather than per day?
The simplest method would be to set the ring gates up vertically, with the exit side of the upper ring gate facing down and then entry side of the lower ring gate facing up. This would cause an object dropped into the lower ring gate to fall continuously through the gates (until the weight limit is reached). If you were to alter the orientation of the exit gate mid-transfer, you could launch the object with the built-up momentum, assuming the gates conserve momentum.
This could be used for all sorts of fun, such as setting up the gates above your target, building up sufficient momentum, and then moving the lower gate, effectively firing the object into the target with incredible force.
Worst case scenario, you can use multiple sets of ring gates arrayed in sequence to extend the acceleration process.
Now to make this marginally useful, you suspend the BoH upside down, with the Gate openings also appropriately rearranged, so that you drop things into the outer Gate, where they fall into the BoH, and through the opening, and back into the outside Gate again. Then when you dismiss the Gate spell, the object comes hurtling out of the BoH and smashes the ground (or whatever is beneath the BoH).
Do this inside of a vaccuum, and you can reach relativistic speeds, eventually.
Well, seeing as it's gravity, the planet comes up slightly as the object falls down.
So apart from accelerating your object down lots, you also accelerate the earth up by a proportionally smaller lots.
Hey, this could work for a momentum-generator. Since the gates can pretty much reverse the momentum direction, you can make momentum (and energy) appear out of nowhere.
Dr. Rocktopus, you just got your momentum drive for pulling the moon out of the sky, portable holes + ring gates to make a weightless transfer so you're not limited. Drop a long heavy lead chain on the moon's surface and nail the gates to the moon and you have it, a mechanism that will slowly pull the moon in a specific direction.
EDIT: With sufficient ingenuity, you can use a reverse gravity field to chain the weights to a lift system and create an emission-less drive.
It is trivially easy to create mass and/or energy from nothing in D&D, though. Obviously the 1st law of thermodynamics got thrown out the window very early during "creation" in all D&D worlds. :D
Most of the force spells however, don't do that. Telekinesis and Gust of Wind are two major ones. Repulsion effects are harder to use (although I believe I mentioned a repulsor drive pushing moon rocks)
We have an emission-less Inertial field drive, effectively. We can also, with a single spell, turn this drive into a mass driver and punch holes in basically whatever. I see, at this point, no reason why we shouldn't turn the moon into the death star. Just to prove to those bigoted jedi that it can be both a moon and a battle station.
- "Away" is achieved by using Reverse Gravity
Perhaps you could use the Gust of Wind in a box as auxiliary/attitude thrusters?
How's this Repulsor Drive:
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Repel Metal and Stone states that it will push an object in a 60ft line at 40ft per round.
So you set up a round robin where the pushing action on objects in the corridor causes the objects to force the end one out of the area and into a U-bend which simply redirects the force back up the corridor to recycle one more into the first square. Using ball bearings for your objects and filling the drive chamber with oil is recommended. Making the drive chamber out of adamantine is highly recommended.
Now, Repel Metal has a weight limit but you can exceed this limit by using multiple objects. If you fill the corridor with ball bearings, they all count as individual objects and the limit won't be reached. Further more, individual Fine objects don't apparently block line of effect so the whole corridor is affected.
Now, assuming you used sand grain sized iron ball bearings, you can assume the corridor has about the same density as solid iron. Which means that the power of the repulsion drive is the weight of a 5x5x60ft block of iron times the distance moved in 1 second (20/3 ft).
This is around 679603 watts.
The number can be upped by using a denser metal (like lead) or by using more than 1 Repulsion item.
Using more than 1 drive is also recommended.
FYI, that many watts will accelerate a 1000kg ship at 36 m s-2. Which is 3.6Gs. Unfortunately, the weight of the drive itself is just over 7500kg. Which gives a naked drive the acceleration of around 13.46 m s-2, just over 1 G and able to escape earth's gravity well.
The maximum total weight to have a 1G acceleration is 14 123kg.
Given that some drives operate off momentum and some off energy, and a rare few off acceleration, each drive has it's own characteristics and behaviour. Choice of drive to application is recommended.
Repulsor drive (this one) works by giving the ship a fixed KE
- Can't achieve relativistic speeds easily as efficiency drops the faster you're moving
- Has high power output but power to weight ratio is bad
- Suitable for high thrust, low acceleration applications
Gravity drive (RG + ring gates to make falling loop) works by giving the ship a fixed momentum
- Only works in high gravity fields, proportional thrust to gravity means a ship will be able to escape any gravity well
Wind drive (Gust of Wind in a box) is also momentum-based
- Cheap, excellent power to weight ratio (hence fast acceleration)
- Poor thrust and can't move heavy loads efficiently
Singularity drive (Indestructible Iron Rod (quintessence) stuck into a cleverly shaped warp that was once a portable hole) accelerates a ship at a constant rate, regardless of weight
- Super efficient and has potentially unlimited acceleration
- Needs a Phd. in Theoretical Physics to design
- Prone to accidents, spaceships using this drive have been known to undergo spontaneous collapse in dry dock
So you set up a round robin where the pushing action on objects in the corridor causes the objects to force the end one out of the area and into a U-bend which simply redirects the force back up the corridor to recycle one more into the first square. Using ball bearings for your objects and filling the drive chamber with oil is recommended. Making the drive chamber out of adamantine is highly recommended.
Now, Repel Metal has a weight limit but you can exceed this limit by using multiple objects. If you fill the corridor with ball bearings, they all count as individual objects and the limit won't be reached. Further more, individual Fine objects don't apparently block line of effect so the whole corridor is affected.
Now, assuming you used sand grain sized iron ball bearings, you can assume the corridor has about the same density as solid iron. Which means that the power of the repulsion drive is the weight of a 5x5x60ft block of iron times the distance moved in 1 second (20/3 ft).
This is around 679603 watts.
The number can be upped by using a denser metal (like lead) or by using more than 1 Repulsion item.
Using more than 1 drive is also recommended.
FYI, that many watts will accelerate a 1000kg ship at 36 m s-2. Which is 3.6Gs. Unfortunately, the weight of the drive itself is just over 7500kg. Which gives a naked drive the acceleration of around 13.46 m s-2, just over 1 G and able to escape earth's gravity well.
The maximum total weight to have a 1G acceleration is 14 123kg.
Given that some drives operate off momentum and some off energy, and a rare few off acceleration, each drive has it's own characteristics and behaviour. Choice of drive to application is recommended.
Repulsor drive (this one) works by giving the ship a fixed KE
- Can't achieve relativistic speeds easily as efficiency drops the faster you're moving
- Has high power output but power to weight ratio is bad
- Suitable for high thrust, low acceleration applications
Gravity drive (RG + ring gates to make falling loop) works by giving the ship a fixed momentum
- Only works in high gravity fields, proportional thrust to gravity means a ship will be able to escape any gravity well
Wind drive (Gust of Wind in a box) is also momentum-based
- Cheap, excellent power to weight ratio (hence fast acceleration)
- Poor thrust and can't move heavy loads efficiently
Singularity drive (Indestructible Iron Rod (quintessence) stuck into a cleverly shaped warp that was once a portable hole) accelerates a ship at a constant rate, regardless of weight
- Super efficient and has potentially unlimited acceleration
- Needs a Phd. in Theoretical Physics to design
- Prone to accidents, spaceships using this drive have been known to undergo spontaneous collapse in dry dock
Presenting the Gravity Drive mk2:
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Using Ring Gates of course. If you stick a metal rod through the gate, it's other end comes out of the other gate.
Nothing says it has to be in the same orientation.
Therefore, you can redirect gravitational force into some other direction of your choosing... XD
Or in fact, any force you like!
Simply get ring gates, stick an 18 inch diameter metal pole partly through it. Angle the other gate in some other direction and the other half of the pole is anchored to the wall.
Any force pushing the 1st half pole into the ring gate is redirected onto the wall in the direction you left the 2nd gate in.
This is best demonstrated with a picture:
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/RingGateDrive.jpg
Use a heavy metal pole attached to a gigantic weight, and you have the Gravitational Drive mk2! And since the pole never fully goes through the ring gates (by making the ends of the pole capped at larger than 18inch diameters), it doesn't ever count to the weight limit.
By making your counterweight arbitrarily high, you can exert however much force you want.
Unfortunately, you can't fly by using counter-weights, counter-intuitive though it may seem. Unless you leave the weight on the ground, in which case you have a 100 mile range.
Nothing says it has to be in the same orientation.
Therefore, you can redirect gravitational force into some other direction of your choosing... XD
Or in fact, any force you like!
Simply get ring gates, stick an 18 inch diameter metal pole partly through it. Angle the other gate in some other direction and the other half of the pole is anchored to the wall.
Any force pushing the 1st half pole into the ring gate is redirected onto the wall in the direction you left the 2nd gate in.
This is best demonstrated with a picture:
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/RingGateDrive.jpg
Use a heavy metal pole attached to a gigantic weight, and you have the Gravitational Drive mk2! And since the pole never fully goes through the ring gates (by making the ends of the pole capped at larger than 18inch diameters), it doesn't ever count to the weight limit.
By making your counterweight arbitrarily high, you can exert however much force you want.
Unfortunately, you can't fly by using counter-weights, counter-intuitive though it may seem. Unless you leave the weight on the ground, in which case you have a 100 mile range.
The Device
- Q-switching device: A commoner with readied action to rotate top ring-gate toward target when desired lasing power is achieved.
- Stimulated Emission Analogy: Legion mage1 mechanics.
- Pump Beam Analogy: A Ghost-touch dagger in a Gravity field, launched by a commoner with a readied action on seeing the legion mage enter the "lasing chamber"
- Lasing Chamber (Beam Confinement): The legion mage is a incorporeal via shapechange; the chamber is nothing more than two horizontally oriented rings stacked vertically with a 10' separation. The chamber is vacuum pumped down to an ultra high vacuum. The legion mage is immune to fire.
- Gas / Lasing Medium: The legion mage gas2
Operation Protocol
- The legion mage jumps into the lasing chamber such that he falls through the bottom right (not the top ring) and starts entering a permanent falling regime. Legion mage readies a free action to turn into a very large, massive creature upon coming within a desired distance from his target.
- "Pump" beam forcibly releases a dagger into the chamber, firing it downwards. This is likely done with a trap.
- Dagger strikes legion mage, creating a clone mage, who also starts falling (he starts with the same position and momentum as the original). The dagger will fall faster than the mage at equilibrium, even in a ultrahigh vacuum. This destroys periodicity in clone-dagger collisions. Each such collision creates another clone with the same position and momentum.
- When sufficient clones are flying at terminal velocity towards the bottom ring, the top ring is rotated towards its target. This can be achieved in a vacuum by making the top ring be housed in a vacuumed sphere constructed of metal.
- A beam of incorporeal legion mages is shot out of the metal sphere at terminal velocity. As a free action, the legion mages activate their readied actions and transform into dragons. As trillions of Huge Dragons travelling at very high speeds suddenly impact the target much lulz are had.
1. Legion mage is basically a mage who acquires NI hit points via shambler cheese, uses the Master Transmogrofist class to get the oozes' split ability.
2. Incorporeal creatures can occupy the same space and once lasing begins there will be enough of them to consider the chamber filled with a gas of legion mages.
A singularity of a black hole has insanely high gravitational forces.
Get a Cosmic Descryer who is somehow immune to damage (say he's a warforged with regeneration) and boosts his caster level to whatever is needed to cast a "high-caster" reverse gravity for range.
Find a black hole.
Stay a safe distance away and cast your super-long range reverse gravity onto the singularity.
Now, gravity is reversed around the singularity, I... wonder what happens... You just turned a black hole into a white hole.
Strangely enough, a gigantic explosion mightn't occur. That's because inside the event horizon of a black hole, the space and time lines are switched. (er... being inside the black hole is like traveling faster than the speed of light)
You might just end up with a cuboid shaped singularity. Watch as universe breaks due to simulation errors...
Just ran some checks, and that works fine, T_G, since incorporeal creatures weigh nothing on the material, so the ring gates will teleport them all day long.
I believe we now have all the classically accepted components of the death-star, minus conveniently placed exhaust ports. Later, this weekend probably, I'll draw up some plans including hex maps and the like. I think that the Death Star should be readily available as an adventure module for COers. On the principle that such a thing is fantastic.
I believe we now have all the classically accepted components of the death-star, minus conveniently placed exhaust ports.
Hilarious.
Aw, come on, I'm sure we can manage a external self-destruct switch.
Perhaps if we used a Singularity Drive through a steady-state mobius bomb to generate our force, we can have the bomb get knocked out of it's steady state if shaken too much.
The rest is an included design "flaw" where a magical-lined chute conducts a spell down to the core. Explosive Fireball the thing and it goes down to the core, triggering the mobius bomb to turn into a singularity and causing the "Death Star" to implode.
Edit: ninja'd on the incorporeal vs gravity problem. Curse my slow connection speed.
As far as ring gate themed WMDs, jumping into one isn't a good idea, since you'd come out the same angle. One could come up with plenty of ways to be suspended directly over the bottom ring, but Telekinesis is the simplest and most versatile. Also, the rediculous rate of transport by falling projectiles complicates aiming rings by turning the "exit" side. So to avoid having to set up the WMD above the target and moving the bottom ring when you're ready (which would also need to be done incredibly quickly unless you don't mind the iron ring gate being destroyed when the projectile impacts it at near light speed. Of course, if a readied action occurs at instantaneous speeds, that doesn't matter (D&D physics FTW!).
Either way, Teleport Object only makes things better. With rings 1N (entry ring 1) and 1X (exit ring 1) set up as normal, place ring 2X anywhere within 100 miles of The Device, then when ready, teleport ring 2N between rings 1N and 1X, and bam. Easy aiming, better delivery.
And finally, not surprisingly, the entire process becomes even more abusive with Planar Bubble and Genesis. Remember that transfer limit of 100lb/day? And remember the maximum distance between rings of 100 mi, preventing you to work across planar boundaries to places where time flows much, much more quickly? You see where I'm going with this? Cast Genesis to create a demiplane where the rate of time relative the Material is arbitrarily high, higher than Alyssa Milano. The most legitimate method for the next step I can think of is using epic magic to create/animate a creature on your Genesis plane, then shapeshifting into said creature (if anyone can think of an easier way, shoot). Then cast Planar Bubble and stand by The Device. Now the projectile(s) can be of an arbitrarily high mass.
The most legitimate method for the next step I can think of is using epic magic to create/animate a creature on your Genesis plane, then shapeshifting into said creature (if anyone can think of an easier way, shoot). Then cast Planar Bubble and stand by The Device. Now the projectile(s) can be of an arbitrarily high mass.
No need for epic spells. Just hatch a pseudodragon (or whatever) there, and make it your familiar. It is a native of the plane from being born there, and you can cast self-only spells on it.
The only worry is that basically, as the gravity rises due to the contortion and compression of the space, the hole (which does have weight as an item I believe) is going to get heavier and heavier, and after a certain point it's going to get very hard to keep it steady-state...
You can counter that through a Reverse Gravity spell, which is shapeable. So you can leave little holes out of it for where ever your equation says to do so.
Although the interaction of Reverse Gravity and the space-warping nastiness of a portable hole doesn't bear thinking about.
Perhaps to give it a time delay. So whatever intrepid Jed- *ahem* wizard fireballs the thing will have time to hypersp- er, I mean teleport out of there before the resulting collapse wipes out the local area of space-time.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#portableHole
It might just be 0.
The problem being that portable holes still follow gravitational acceleration, IE. they fall when you drop them, so they will still collapse. The fact that gravity is a bend in space time and that massless photons are still attracted to it further demonstrates the point.
Yeah. I think we can bound the collapsed space using carefully shaped RV fields to curve the singularity in on itself so that it literally snaps itself out of existence. Basically, we rely on the fact that the portable hole is bending the space holding the RV fields, and arrange them in such a way that they lock around it like shutters after a certain amount of distortion. We can use a similar technique with some changes to get our S-drive to steady state oscillation. You are correct, we have just gone completely, absolutely, utterly infinite. We have a singularity drive.
No need for epic spells. Just hatch a pseudodragon (or whatever) there, and make it your familiar. It is a native of the plane from being born there, and you can cast self-only spells on it.
Ah yes, now I remember hearing that approach somewhere. I've got a feeling it was another of your posts, Phaedrus.
Two ring gates, one above the other with the entrance and exit sides facing each other. Put a metal rod into the entrance at a 45 degree angle but only halfway through. I would assume it would come out of the other end also at a 45 degree angle. Now turn the rod to be perpendicular to the ring gate, logically the other end would also turn to be perpendicular. With the ring gates positioned correctly the two ends of the same straight rod are touching each other. Now use a mending spell to fuse the two ends of the rod together.
That's the point where I just stop thinking about the situation for fear of damaging myself.
Halfligsareppltoo: we have... an iron rod with two ring gates attached to it. strange. i have no idea what we could use that for, though.
everybody: seriously, in a few more posts about it, im starting a thread to build the death star.
Two ring gates, one above the other with the entrance and exit sides facing each other. Put a metal rod into the entrance at a 45 degree angle but only halfway through. I would assume it would come out of the other end also at a 45 degree angle. Now turn the rod to be perpendicular to the ring gate, logically the other end would also turn to be perpendicular. With the ring gates positioned correctly the two ends of the same straight rod are touching each other. Now use a mending spell to fuse the two ends of the rod together.
Nice find there!
At this point, what you have is circular rod. It's really no different from an iron donut except that instead of the rod bending around, it's space bending around it.
The question comes when you pull the portable holes apart. Since the force exerted by the person pulling them apart is completely separate from the restoring force exerted by the stretched iron rods, you wouldn't find the portable holes anymore difficult to pull apart.
I think what happens is that the space warp from the magic ends up exerting an exponentially increasing force on the iron rod causing it to break (a result of stretching forces traveling up and down your rod, I think it goes up by a factor of 2 each cycle, where the time of 1 cycle is the time it takes to transmit a force from 1 end of the rod to the next, it's not instant). This force would just keep going up without a limit until your rod breaks so adamantine won't work since the force is NI.
The question now is that if we cover said iron rod with quintessence to make it indestructible. So we have NI force meets time-stasis invulnerability.
I believe the stasis wins. (since it's specifically invulnerable while the force is only NI)
Which means with a clever bit of redesigning, we angle the rods so they meet at 90* and use the Force Drive. Then we pull the gates apart a little and aim it so the angle would go up. However, the rods are in quintessence, so they experience NI force without breaking. A part of this NI force is communicated to the joint where it's pulled down.
Connect the joint to another quintessence-protected shell and you have net NI force exerted on the shell which now can be used for thrust.
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/RingGateDrive2.jpg
- the downwards pointing NI force is the one you can use, the other 2 feed back into the ring gates to continue the buildup
You can avoid breaking your ship or needing to quintessence the whole thing when using the drive by moving the ring gates such that the force doesn't build up to destructive extents.
Which means that you can build it up to destructive extents by jamming the restoring mechanism. But it definitely is more stable than a Singularity Drive.
Note that an exponentially increasing Force Drive (jammed in "on" mode) attached to a quintessence-ed projectile will start moving fast. Very fast. And keep accelerating at an accelerating pace.
Within a few hours, I expect it to achieve relativistic speeds, depending on how small you can make your drive. (the smaller it is, the faster the buildup of force)
And... I believe that works! We have another NI drive apart from the tricky and unstable Singularity one.
It's more stable and thus might not be suited to use in the Death Star.
******************************
What rune is it that vapourizes water? Could be good for the Death Star's auxiliary thrusters.
I've been thinking about the S-drive, and I suspect we can, with a little effort, do two things:
Throw the gravity well so that we can use it as an inertic drive with no "moving" parts.
Toss a "bolt" of warped space. Basically a gravy gun, if you read schlock mercenary.
Ideas on how? I have some, but they aren't what I'd consider clean.
Had a burst of inspiration:
Singularity Missile?
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Use the Mobius Bomb as the warhead, arranged to undergo catastrophic collapse when something pushes the front.
Attach a drive, any drive, to the back and off it goes! Might want to be careful about storage though.
Attach a drive, any drive, to the back and off it goes! Might want to be careful about storage though.
singularity drive
yes, lets break ring gates some more.
Step 1: cast genesis. make a HUGE chunk of matter in the middle of the plane. continue recasting genesis until we have NI miles empty space on all sides of the matter chunk
Step 2: drop the mobius bomb on the matter chunk
Step 3: create a gate (as the spell) VERY far from the singularity. so far the pull being exerted by the singularity is only, like 10G or something. this gate should be about 17 inches in diameter
Step 4: on the other side of the gate, place a ring gate against the spell gate. the pull from the singularity will keep it in place, but since it cant fit it wont be pulled through
Step 5: place the other ring gate on an adamatine stick sticking a few feet out from our ship/vessel/whatever. the pull of 10G exerted by the singularity will keep pulling our ship. we can turn the stick left and right to steer.
yes, lets break ring gates some more.
Step 1: cast genesis. make a HUGE chunk of matter in the middle of the plane. continue recasting genesis until we have NI miles empty space on all sides of the matter chunk
Step 2: drop the mobius bomb on the matter chunk
Step 3: create a gate (as the spell) VERY far from the singularity. so far the pull being exerted by the singularity is only, like 10G or something. this gate should be about 17 inches in diameter
Step 4: on the other side of the gate, place a ring gate against the spell gate. the pull from the singularity will keep it in place, but since it cant fit it wont be pulled through
Step 5: place the other ring gate on an adamatine stick sticking a few feet out from our ship/vessel/whatever. the pull of 10G exerted by the singularity will keep pulling our ship. we can turn the stick left and right to steer.
It's fairly complex, and hard to describe in text, but the gist of it is that just curving the portable hole in either direction requires an immense amount of energy, and doing so causes some very severe gravitational effects - either you attract everything towards the hole or you repulse everything away from it. If you were to actually force it flat against itself it would either explode or implode, depending on which way you bent it.
Oh, and if you manage to force it flat in either direction without it destroying itself, it would form a cosmic string along the edge of the fold.
Yes, when you apply physics, the portable hole is the single most destructive item in D&D.
As Malkavon says, when you fold the hole, there's a gravitational force, but the energy needed to fold the hole stays exactly the same as needed to lift a corner of a piece of cloth since magic apparently does the rest...
This all said, I'm pretty sure that the singularity drive can still be arranged by using RV fields correctly.... basically an RV field is probably the worst physics idea ever. Here's why:
As you bend space sufficiently, you start to get changes in the actual physical topology of it. Basically, what was once a straight line is no longer. The RV field bends with the space containing it, but what it does, effectively, is reverse the incline of the curve. Depending on what that does and how you interpret its affect on the position of the RV field relative to the curved space inside the singularity, you can get wildly differing and incredibly bizarre effects. If the RV field covers part of the INSIDE of the hole, you get even more bizarre results.
I am, at this point, fairly certain that you can use RV fields to create a nearly-naked singularity, frozen in mid-collapse, and then cause it to oscillate. This is ludicrously dangerous in and of itself, but failure here is.... Undesirable. That said, it is infinite power and motive force, and with some care, you can use the shuttering trick to basically shape the actual gravitational foot print. I am at a loss as to where to go from there. Obviously, it would be simple to make it pull or push things, but that's actually not very helpful, because unless you can basically spread it evenly to make an... well... an inertia field, you're going to instantly reduce whatever you're pushing and its contents to paste as you try to make this thing useful.
I'm also sort of idly wondering if you could use it in materials synthesis, compressing normal materials into doped diamond and the ilk. As for plasma, ridiculously easy. You can even do something horribly terrifying and have it emit gravity "pulses" by shaping the outbound foot-print, and then using oscillation and patterned shuttering to actually throw bolts of distorted space outward at the speed of light. :: sob ::
That said, it is infinite power and motive force...
Which is never ever desirable unless you are aiming to destroy the whole plane/layer. Infinite force applied to mass results in infinite acceleration which with infinitesimal times results in reaching the speed of light which in turn nets us infinite mass (relative to everything else) and thus an infinite gravitational force on everything in the universe. Which after another infinitesimal time period gives us a complete singularity. And that's pretty hard to work with.
<...>
I've looked over my above referenced post again, and it seems that the NI force drive probably won't work. Or at least it won't until someone clarifies it.
Being that if you change the location of a portable hole while something's inside it, that thing moves with the hole. So if you displace one of the holes while the iron rod is through it, the rod follows.
This means that if the rod (that is stuck through both holes) is welded to itself, moving one of the holes means the force instantly goes to infinity (or just enough to break/bend your rod, and then rod breaks/bends).
Er... which means that if you quintessence the thing, we have a truly infinite force meeting an invulnerable object... >_>
Pending some clarification about this, I think we have a problem here.
It wouldn't. Currently, the jury is still out on whether the bar breaks or not. But either way, the bar isn't moving very much. It's just exerting NI force against itself.
Dr. Rocktopus:
I think perhaps it might be easier to use normal iron bars and let them bend, followed by repairing with a mending spell to avoid metal fatigue. It might be possible to get an intelligent item to cast mending every round. (seeing as detect magic at will is a valid intelligent item power, mending at will doesn't seem too far off)
While it's not infinite, it provides the exact force needed to bend your bar (which can be raised by using adamantine) which can be channeled.
This number is still very high (we're talking giga-pascals here) and the stability of this drive compared to the Singularity Drive is definitely (IMO) worth the lower thrust.
Especially since you're risking the destruction of all creation whenever anyone so much as taps the shell of the Singularity Drive unit.
On a side note:
Given that we're applying relativity here, doesn't the nature of ring gates tend to screw things over? I mean that it provides weird effects.
I mean, a straight line through a ring gate comes out the other side as it's a space-bending effect, not a teleportation.
(This is evidenced by the fact that spell effects, which can't be teleported, can go through a ring gate)
In which case then, if you have a caster who passed a Reverse Gravity field through a pair of ring gates (who's position is relative to those two). It might be possible to get the RG fields to overlap.... with unknown consequences.
Or, for that matter, extend a wall of force through a Ring Gate (by making the plane you're using be perpendicular to the gate and affecting both sides of the gate) to get portable walls of force?
- What happens if you did that to a pair of gates that were near each other and used the gates to push the walls into each other ala the NI force drive?!?
Also, how does a Ring Gate interact with gravity? 100 miles straight up is noticeably lower. Does it conduct gravity through the gate? If it's just a "straight line in this direction ends up over there" effect, then yes, gravity goes through.
Then we have this weird effect:
Done in weightless environment, if we put, say an apple, in between two ring gates that were as close as possible without crushing the apple, all the gravitational effects from the apple (that were directed in the directions the gates cover) would pile up in between the two gates. (something placed between the gates would be affected as if by an infinite line of apples, the gravitational force is zero, counter-intuitively. )
Show
It is conceivable that by many many ring gate pairs and ring gates leading directly to other ring gates, that we could build a sphere of ring gates around the entire world, each of which leads to the other side of the sphere.
This effectively reflects all of the world's gravity in every direction, causing the world's gravity to be completely negated. Internal stresses within the planet would no longer have gravity holding them together and the planet basically explodes under it's own internal pressure.
This effectively reflects all of the world's gravity in every direction, causing the world's gravity to be completely negated. Internal stresses within the planet would no longer have gravity holding them together and the planet basically explodes under it's own internal pressure.
Alternatively, seeing as the world is approximately a sphere, you can intersperse the ring gates within their 100ft radius and still reflect approximately the same amount of gravity. This considerably reduces the number of ring gates needed.
Simply, to cover a goodly sized portion of the gravitational sphere of influence to form an appropriately sized gravitational weapon would be say 1/1000th of the earth's surface.
That's still 1.53x10^12 portable holes though, not efficient. But theoretically, that kind of result would be quite weird...
We... I, having read through your tech on the idea of ring-gates as contiguous space, think we can use a properly protected ring gate to Show Them The Way using the singularity core... We can even switch it on and off by covering the "emitter" end with an AMF...
Oh! Tractor beams! Repulsor Fields! Oooooh.
Thats another fun toy-"I cast polymorph any object on the ground under you feet, turning it into strangelets. Goodbye, Mr Bond"
I missed this on my first read through. I am enamored of this idea now.
It's just that it lasts for only a certain time.
I turn the ground you're standing on into LAVA!
Or a pool of dragon bile...
Alchemist fire... oh, you name it...
I've been playing with something... What happens if you haunt-shift and animate the portable hole that forms the singularity drive's core? I have no idea.
For that matter, what happens if you haunt-shift components of the NI-Force drive?
what happens if we shrink one end and puts an object through the other that cant fit in the small end?
What happens if we shrink one end of a ring gate and put it through the other end of the same ring gate?
You can't. But uh, well, it's a good question.
If we take ring gates to have the spatial "straight line" go from one point on 1 gate to the corresponding point on the other gate, then if you shrink one gate, it's space-lines will be compressed by the amount you shrink it.
That's already nasty. It means that the active surface of the shrunk gate behaves like a gravity well.
As you move the normal gate and the shrunk gate together, the space-lines going from 1 gate to the next get more and more twisted (and compressed) as they try to connect 1 gate to the other. This means the gravitational force as the two gates approach each other goes to infinity as the separation goes to zero.
There is still a question:
What happens if you push an object through a normal gate which has the other end shrunk?
By tracing space lines, this means bits of the object is suddenly inside itself...
I have no idea. I do know that probably, the weight limit will prevent the ring gate from going into infinite recursion unless you find a way to bypass it. :|
I have a way to get the NI-force drive to work, by the way. Use a spring, mend it to itself as per the rod... Instead of pulling the gates apart or changing their relative angles, rotate one gate. This tightens the spring for "free," winning us a way of controlling output, storing energy, and applying motive force!
I should've thought of that earlier. By winding/unwinding a quintessence-ed spring, you can ratchet the force around however much you want.
Although each spring will have it's own optimal region. Meaning the region in which the increase/decrease in force is approx. linear and thus you have th highest control over.
Outside the region, the increase in force starts to take into account the higher power factors and eventually goes exponential when you hit the spring's limit and the quintessence-invulnerability starts providing part of the force.
So yeah. by building different springs of different size, length, coil radius and material, we can have virtually any force we want. All without any moving parts, including space!
I like this much more than the Singularity Drive.
What shall we name this second drive?
BEHOLD!! THE UNENDING SPRING DRIVE!!!
or what about just spring drive.
Which suggests something like:
Spatial-Loop Torsional Reaction Drive
for casual reference, call it the Torsional Drive will work.
We should give it a name that is just a horrible complication of it's mechanism, true to the SF naming conventions... =P
Which suggests something like:
Spatial-Loop Torsional Reaction Drive
for casual reference, call it the Torsional Drive will work.
How about using a synonym for "loop", like "arc", then you can call it the Spatial Torsional Arc Reaction Drive or STAR Drive for short.
How about using a synonym for "loop", like "arc", then you can call it the Spatial Torsional Arc Reaction Drive or STAR Drive for short.
I like that better. XD
Let's use that. ^^
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/SpringDrive.jpg
Made using Powerpoint.
The reason why springs work when bars don't is because you can't stretch bars that are invulnerable.
Springs "stretch" but what's really happening is that the coils are (un)coiling as the spring stretches. So it should be permissible under invulnerable conditions.
You can adjust the force exerted by coiling the spring more or less by rotating the ring gates. The force isn't NI, but can be made so (or almost so) by super-coiling the springs.
A different version of it can exert rotational force on the shell and thus serve to rotate your ship.
I relooked at the conduction of gravity by ring gates.
My conclusion is that allowing ring gates to conduct gravity is a bad idea. Very bad idea.
Here's how it goes: (if it conducts gravity)
I put 1 ring gate face down on the floor (active side facing the ground). We'll call this the "input" gate.
This means objects near the face of the other gate will experience a gravitational pull around 1G towards that gate. Think of it as having an imaginary planet right behind the second gate. We'll call the other gate an "output" gate.
Now, if I nail the "output" gate to the ceiling of my house, everything under the "output" gate is weightless. This is because the "imaginary planet" pulls objects up toward the "output" gate about just as much as the real planet pulls them down.
Which does mean that if you turn the "output" gate to point upwards, everything just above it experiences net twice gravity.
- This effect disperses very fast as the "area" of gravitational lines coming through the gate is small (18inch diameter)
- You can do anti-gravity too. Turn the gate on the floor to face upwards, and (by symmetry), the position of your "imaginary planet" is above the "output" gate. Which means the active face of the gate repels objects at 1G.
Here's a nice drawing to demonstrate it, courtesy of Powerpoint again:
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/GravityManipulation.jpg
Not too problematic (yet), since you can't exactly do much with 1G over a small volume.
Here's the problem. Get a 1G "output" gate and orient the setup to get a small area of twice gravity. Stack another "input" gate over it in the correct orientation and the 2nd "output" gate will exert 2G force.
Can you see where this going?
Get a large field of "charger"s (pairs of "input" and "output" gates pointing at each other to grab the local gravity) and you can multiply the final gate's attractive/repulsive force to many many times local gravity.
There's all sorts of interesting things you can do with that:
Many such high-G repulsion "output" gates placed near each other can be directed at a single point to create a compressive force far larger than anything except a STAR drive can exert.
Make a "true" repulsor shield.
Create a water "pump" by toggling the gate's attraction/repulsion repeatedly to draw water up a pipe. (simply rotate the "input" gate within the high-G field)
Anti-gravity trains? (that doesn't need rails!) All-terrain hover tanks? In-atmosphere gravity drive?
Too bad the range of the gravity effect will be too short to be useful as a anti-ship weapon.
Note that is useful on the Death Star (unlike other spaceships), as it's large enough to generate it's own gravity. (and that it's Singularity Drive can be used as artificial gravity I'm sure)
Use positrons. In most respects, it will behave identically to the electron bomb (with a reversed polarity), but when the positrons contact any conventional matter, they will annihilate, releasing further energy for an added punch.
So may I nominate that this become a handbook of collected and articulated exploits?
So what do you think:
"Option A"}
Hauntshift a necropolitan sorcerer named Palpatine into the core of the death star, letting us maintain complete control over the gravitic field and force output, or build something hilariously cool and hilariously fragile? I'm sort of sold on the idea of Palpatine floating through the corridors as a force ghost, his dark essence the animating force behind the entire installation. I always felt like it was Palpatine that really made the original three episodes, conveying a sense of almost cosmic malevolence.
If he haunt-shifts the installation, I think we can rig it out so that he can actually manifest while still controlling the core with a little optimization. This would render the singularity drive basically perfectly safe, because there's a malign intellect controlling its oscillation. Additionally, hella flavor and an answer to a lot of the problems with the basic design.
Hauntshift a necropolitan sorcerer named Palpatine into the core of the death star, letting us maintain complete control over the gravitic field and force output, or build something hilariously cool and hilariously fragile? I'm sort of sold on the idea of Palpatine floating through the corridors as a force ghost, his dark essence the animating force behind the entire installation. I always felt like it was Palpatine that really made the original three episodes, conveying a sense of almost cosmic malevolence.
If he haunt-shifts the installation, I think we can rig it out so that he can actually manifest while still controlling the core with a little optimization. This would render the singularity drive basically perfectly safe, because there's a malign intellect controlling its oscillation. Additionally, hella flavor and an answer to a lot of the problems with the basic design.
Also he can just animate other objects as needed, since I believe you can animate multiple objects at once, neh?
Although I must point out that the possessor of the Singularity Core must know hell of a lot of math. Just because he can control the movement of the core does not mean he understands how to move it properly.
It just means that a catastrophic collapse is impossible. Which is a major improvement, but not an answer to all problems.
I'm working on a motion amplifier for engines in massive space stations, just so that we can have two versions of the Death Star, one with an unstable engine, one without.
1. Place your drive unit inside a small cube.
2. Stick a pair of Ring Gates onto 1 side. By stick I mean weld.
3. Push a thick iron rod through 1 gate until the extent it sticks out from both gates is the same.
4. Repeat from 2 for each of the 6 sides of the drive unit cube.
5. Put another cube around the whole contraption
6. Weld the pairs of iron rods on the drive unit cube to the outer cube.
7. Quintessence-protect the entire drive unit cube, 6 pairs of ring gates, iron rods and the outer shell.
Done.
Just built the ship around the outer shell like an engine unit.
Here's a Powerpoint pic of 1 side of the setup:
http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh47/jon_seah/DriveAmplifier.jpg
Now when the drive unit pushes itself, the inner cube moves a bit.
This would normally cause strain on the iron rods as they are bent, but wait, they're invulnerable. This means the correction force on the rods goes to infinity.
However, since the rods are anchored back at the outer drive casing through a ring gate, all the force is directed at the outer drive casing instead of the inner drive unit.
Which means the force on the iron rods rises to just high enough to move the outer casing (and whatever connected to that) along with the inner drive unit.
This essentially means that your engine only needs to push itself, the amplifier will provide the rest of the force needed to move.
Now, all that's needed is to optimize the engines for weight to thrust ratios so that you can obtain the acceleration you needed.
Certainly, I would not be designing a death star module.
Don't haunt the death star. Be the death star.
(Use the technique presented in the Improvements on a Sandwich thread)
Engine Materials:
6x Quintessence-protected 5x5ft sheets of paper
3x pairs of ring gates (you only really need 1 pair per direction)
1x Permanency Gust of Wind casting
Using invulnerable sheets of paper as the 'box' for the Gust of Wind. Since paper is so light, I'll discount it's weight.
Each Ring Gate is 1lb, so total of 6lbs for the Drive Unit.
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Equivalent to 1392 newtons of force.
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6lb = 2.7215kg (as google says)
Therefore, acceleration is approx. 511 m s-2. Or around 52G.
Since the motion amplifier stuck on the outside drags everything else around, you have a 5x5x5ft paper box dragging a moon-size space station around. At lethal accelerations.
- I find the idea of having a relatively small paper box drag a moon around to be quite funny. XD
Need some way to turn it down since you can't turn off a permanent spell, nor can you accelerate at less than 52G.
- It might be possible to adjust the acceleration by having little invulnerable paper hooks on the outside so you can hang weights on the drive unit to tone down the acceleration. Adding 6lbs halves the acceleration.
Use a standard Force Drive instead (in a paper box) so you can crank the acceleration up and down.
Only the engine's acceleration matters, the actual amount of force is irrelevant, at least now that we have the motion amplifier.
Just in case anyone else tries it, no, you can't use the motion amplifier to go FTL unless your drive can go FTL.
Ready for madness?
What is the curvature of an infinitely large sphere?
It limits to zero. We can actually expand the mass shadow of the singularity drive until it's as large as the plane, then start reducing the meaningful curvature of the gravity well it generates. Fine, that's cool but not useful..... Until you start thinking in curves of three or higher dimensions. You can literally just make the universe slide away from you by bending the space it sits on. It's not moving, and neither are you. You're literally shifting the wee hunk of TS-fabric that you sit on, like dragging a needle through a fluid cell.
That's the basis of the Alcubierre Drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
It might be easier to make the singularity extend into a shell around the ship, with some tweaking and reverse gravity, you can create the expanding and contracting motion of space-time.
This allows you to travel FTL as you're not moving, space is.
A simplification would be that you're shuffling space itself around your ship.
An interesting bit is this portion:
*some problems raised* "Some methods have been suggested which would avoid the problem of tachyonic motion, but would probably generate a naked singularity at the front of the bubble."
Oh hey, the problems are solved if you have a naked singularity! Wait a minute, what do we have here...
We can actually expand the mass shadow of the singularity drive until it's as large as the plane, then start reducing the meaningful curvature of the gravity well it generates.
This is not good, by the way. Gravity travels at the speed of light, so you're limited to a "light cone" from the point where your drive is constructed.
You might be able to travel FTL while inside that sphere, but you can't exit.
Might still have it's uses as colonized system transit.
Also, if you can extend your shell like that, then it's trivial to make the gravitational waves fluctuate madly and destroy everything in a cone expanding at light speed.
The destructive wave should stop eventually as it spreads out though, so you don't have to worry about destroying some other solar system you weren't targeting.
That wasn't very clear... sorry, but I am tired.
And, well, there's a few other options... I think we can probably fold space more directly.
Remember, even though there's not a topologically accessible edge to our closed form mobius that we're using as a singularity, the edge is still accessible to a hauntshifted individual animating the object. I think that you will actually have to have a ghost in the machine to make FTL possible using this technique, because it is the ability to grab the Un-There edge that grants us the ability we need.... see, we can widen the normally flat toroidal topology "wrapped" by the folded hole. This means we can expand it outward, creating areas of negative curvature in space time by decompressing the hole's space beyond its original parameters. In other words, we can actually create the precise topology described in the Al-Drive.
Let me try to understand what you meant by the last paragraph:
"Since you're casually disconnected from the outside of the bubble, you can't actually access the portable hole. This might lead to problems in that you can't stop.
This is solved by haunt-shifting it, since the possessor of the portable hole can manipulate it directly. "
If that's so, then yeah, we NEED a person to be the drive. If we can't find a suitably brainwashed/mindcontrolled person to do the job, Awaken Construct should be able to do it.
While infinity is technically possible from that STAR drive, the result is the total destruction of the portion of the universe that is within the light cone of the STAR drive's activation.
That is, unless you put it inside an event horizon. (the drive will survive it since you can cover the thing with quintessence)
But then if you're using a portable black hole, you may as well go the whole hog and just use the Singularity Drive.
One way of going at lightspeed without causing the end of the universe would be to reduce your effective mass to zero. Not sure how to do that in D&D, although turning your ship incorporeal might do the trick.
(I'm not sure if incorporeal things have mass even if they weigh nothing)
But if you're going to the trouble of turning your spaceship incorporeal, then just go the other way and get a teleport. There just needs to be some way to target many many objects with Teleport Without Error.
Can we find a way to generate (reliably) an astral rift?
I can't think of a way to get everything in under the weight limit for teleport or shrinking the ship without doing something stupid like counting the ship as a weapon and giving it the sizing property. Or demanding that it be crewed by gnomes who've taken VoP.
Incorporeal != Ethereal.
They are quite different things, I meant the incorporeal-ness of a shadow. Not the one generated from the Etherealness spell.
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Right, I forget, we can make things count as creatures. Cast Animate Objects (Permanency) + Awaken Construct on the ship, making the entire thing count as 1 "creature". Which just happens to be customizable, like warforged.
This should include everything from the sub-light drive unit to the weapons and anything nailed down.
Weight limit should be easy, Animated Objects have strength score. There just needs to be some way to up it to high enough levels to carry all the creatures.
In preparation for "warp", anything that's portable (and therefore not part of the ship) is placed in portable holes. And that will solve the majority of the weight problems.
So: "Such creatures are insubstantial and can’t be touched by nonmagical matter or energy."
from the SRD suggests that they do indeed lack both mass and weight, since, you know, mass is just another way of being touched by nonmagical matter if you believe dear ol' Higgs.
I like the idea of the teleporting\planeshifting ship... We can use teleport to sub in for super-luminal. Unlike the ethereal, there's not really a correspondence proper between a location on the astral and a location on the planes coterminous with it, so while we can go super-luminal there, once we can teleport the ship it's easier to just use planeshift or another heavy-hitter in the teleport school for long distances.
d20srd.org:
Timeless. Age, hunger, thirst, poison, and natural healing don’t function in the Astral Plane, though they resume functioning when the traveler leaves the Astral Plane.
That's some rather funny timeless traits. If things can move on the Astral Plane, then those effects should occur, since chemical reactions operate through collisions which is movement. Stop chemical reactions and everyone on the plane goes into stasis.
In fact, since on the Astral Plane, gas obviously still expands, wood burns, and people choke when strangled, then we have a problem. More like an internal contradiction.
If you don't age, get tired or need to eat, then your body isn't carrying out metabolism. Which means you don't need to breathe. (never mind how the energy needed to move is produced)
The fact that people still need oxygen on the Astral Plane implies that some form of metabolism is still going on, but just that it's different.
I would conclude that the Astral Plane's timelessness is some form of continuous "intelligent" intervention on everything in it, which somehow causes the specific entropy of any biological process to be 0.
Note that this applies to biological processes only, because wood (and people) still burn and stay burnt. They don't burn and keep burning without turning to ashes.
It still doesn't explain poison-stoppage but that's the closest I can think of.
Teleporting will probably work just fine for us, frankly, though it does add another layer that I was hoping to avoid. Likewise, becoming incorporeal will work just dandy as well, though I am at a loss as to how you might do it.
By 15th level, your ship becomes permanently incorporeal, turning corporeal for up to 1 minute per day, preferably used to fire a superweapon of some kind.
Still, that's a bit high, and rely on that many class levels is a bit crazy. And I think we needed to optimize how to use equipment properly, the other bits of this forum are for how to make a character who can afford a ship. Or build one.
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Frankly, why do we need any FTL apart from teleport? Just bypass the problem!
Here's the scheme for galaxy hopping:
Cast Teleportation Circle (TC) on the floor of a moderately sized ship with decent propulsion (say a Motion-Amplified Force Drive). Make it permanent.
Put the target on your main port's TC (described by pointing to a very specific TC serial number, say using barcode). Which likewise goes to your ship using the same identification pattern.
Animate Objects (Permanent) + Awaken Construct the ship, which now becomes a creature.
Don't load the ship.
Teleport without error the ship to your intended location (which can be anywhere on the plane). Which changes the location target for TC since it points to your ship.
Say, we're colonizing a planet. Teleport the ship to somewhere near it (position determined by divination) and use the circle to send in the crew. The crew then guide the landing and secure the area before using the circle to send 1 guy back to say they've landed.
By making the equipment you want to transport able to fit within a portable hole (by modularizing it), you can get people carrying backpacks full of portable hole-ed equipment through the TC to the ship, unload, then send the portable holes back for another round.
Basically, if you have a teleport-able Teleportation Circle and a home base, you can send almost anything you want anywhere.
With that, I think propulsion problems are over. Battleships don't really need much more than a coordinate to teleport to, wizard casting it brings along the vital crew, and the rest of the less essential crew can TC in afterward.
There is a problem with the scheme though, since it relies on the definition of a location to be relative to a large object.
The size of the object needed to count as a location is also assumed to be around the size of a spaceship.
Let's set a few goals:
Laser (a destructive beam of normal light)
Missiles
Radar (without using epic levels)
Radio?
Life Support
Cloaking
Or was the intent to do it without active spell use?
Missiles:
1: animate object on a sheet. it would be supberb if we could make this sheet of adamantine, or atleast steel
2: fold up the sheet to a missile shape.
3: fill it with greater glyph seals. these glyph seals should contain explosive fireballs.
Cloaking: it sounds silly, i know, but awaken construct on the ship, give it class levels, and maximize the hide check.
Life Support:
food: eternal wands of minor creation and goodberry. create berries with true creation and make them feed more people with goodberry.
air: call/summon collosal creatures and give them necklaces of adaption. we can store the creatures in big air 'batteries', and use them to provide an unlimited source of air.
Preferably able to detect as many objects in the area as there are. And also preferably able to display it in a nice 3D format (holographic display is easy, the problem is getting the illusion to display the information automatically)
Laser
Could we somehow abuse the Daylight spell? Full daylight is quite powerful and if you refracted it into a more or less coherent beam, you could burn stuff. It will also go through walls of force, although I don't see it damaging metal unless you have multiple such spells.
Cloaking
Well, it's really just hiding from radar. Since at the ten+ miles range of space engagement you can't really see anything anyway.
If we need LOS hiding, invisibility on the construct ship?
Life Support
I was thinking that funny spoon item that makes food if placed in a bowl. Plus a Decanter of Endless Water.
IIRC, there was also this Bottle of Air item that allowed anyone to breathe from it. If we rig up some sort of air pump to it?
- Air pump might be a bad idea as ship pressure will start going up unless you do controlled leaks.
- Hey, that solves a major problem in space, leaks. If you get holed, your Bottle(s) of Air will slowly replenish the pressure.
Missiles
Dear me, I must be forgetting stuff. Just stick a Force Drive onto a hunk of metal and there you go, dumbfire warhead. Push anything to high enough speeds and you can smash whatever you hit into tiny bits.
Guided warheads means animate object + either a communications relay to your ship or detection equipment on the missile.
There are a number of interesting conclusions from using a Motion Amplifier on a drive:
1. Acceleration and Maneuverability of the ship solely depends on the drive unit. You can change everything about the ship, going from a tiny fighter to a moon-sized battle station, and with the same engine, you go at the same acceleration.
2. Since that is the case, capital class ships like Destroyers and Battleships can twist, turn and dart around just as well as fighters can.
Therefore, the short-range fighter and, by extension, the Carrier class is completely useless.
3. In fact, if you add in teleportation, then all spaceships fall into one of a few roles:
Transport -For moving objects (sub light) that won't fit into a portable hole
Battleship -Space is a dangerous place and guns always work XD
Shuttle -Battleships displace a lot of air, which might be disastrous if you go rocketing around in an atmosphere
Patrol Boat / Scout -Can't build enough battleships to patrol everywhere, so you have a scout which can call in a teleporting battleship if enemies are sighted
Colony -More like a building than a ship, meant to turn into a teleportation circle building after landing
4. Simple shields like solid fog, wall of force and prismatic wall, which can all be made permanent means any non-phasing or non-cancellation weapons are nearly useless.
Especially since no decently outfitted battleship will be without those.
5. If we accept that the Alcubierre Drive works, then Transports, which can't teleport, will be using that and thus become immune to everything that isn't a gravitational weapon. Not to mention the problems of targeting an FTL object.
6. Therefore, there is little point in engaging ships in combat, instead focusing on preventing enemy ships from destroying your cities from orbit with invulnerable near-light missiles.
7. Since the drives need no fuel, and there are plenty of suggestions given to replenish food, water and air, all ships have a basically unlimited range and lifetime if they have something as simple as an Eternal Wand of Mending to repair radiation damage. (Eternal wand of Lesser Restoration might be needed as well)
If they have a shield, then even that's not needed.
The only thing ships are limited by is the crew's mentality. If they can go on, so can the ship. And the universe help us if the ships are autonomous Awakened Constructs.
8. Which means galactic wars in D&D is more a game of intelligence, strategy and planning. No Star Wars style combat, since firing anything at a shielded ship has basically no effect unless you're willing to invest in shooting Rods of Cancellation at your enemy.
The problem becomes how to best use your limited numbers of battleships to deliver crippling and unexpected strikes on your enemy's resource colonies. While intercepting them doing the same to you.
The occasional FTL moon will probably also hit a key star or two, probably resulting in the total destruction of that entire solar system as a habitable area.
So yeah, the rules of the game are different. It probably isn't like any other SF setting out there.
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Also, I think I've an expensive solution to Radar.
Divination spell answers 1 question, which will be: "Is there a hostile presence within X-Y-Z coordinates relative to me?"
If yes, then narrow the search to smaller cuboids and so on.
Once it's been reasonably sure that you're talking about 1 object within a certain cube, you use Discern Location to get the exact coordinates.
Plot the results on an illusion and there you go, Radar map out to as large a distance as you have Divination spells.
Although it's highly outdated and the drives are basically just wind drives and the elemental ring from Eberron.
I made a number of custom items and weird interpretations, like Silent Image able to project light in any direction you specify as well as information being able to be processed by magic items.
- Specifically, a camera like effect (scrying) + Silent Image to project an image of the sky over the ship.
you, you just create a thread somewhere, or something, you drop us a link, and i'll come help you.
Is there a way to turn it into a grey goo disaster?
Need to find a way for the nanobots to make more nanobots from just about anything lying around. Might need giving them craft checks.
So our radar operator will be a binder. Well, better than a cleric. Gods in an SF setting... how weird.
Hmm... you're going FTL, aren't you? I was going to suggest using Mindsight + Shapechange (Formian Queen), but that "only" gets you a 50 mile radius, and you can only see sentient minds, anyway. I think there is another form that gets something crazy like 1000 mile radius, though (Spellweaver, maybe?). Still probably not useful for this purpose.
Hey... I saw a nanobots thread.
Is there a way to turn it into a grey goo disaster?
Need to find a way for the nanobots to make more nanobots from just about anything lying around. Might need giving them craft checks.
My buildomancers can produce a grey-goo disaster
Particularly Mad Old Lord Yang.So yeah, 50 miles ain't going to cut it. For a land radar, that maybe fine, not for space.
At the least, your radar has to detect nearby rocks so you don't run into them.
Or unless you're shielded, then it doesn't matter.
I was thinking of cheating and using Contact Other Plane to tell if it is even worth scanning in the first place.
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I think that's one of the major problems with the entire thing, D&D ranges are too short. If you had fireball spell turrets and Cancellation missiles (or ones that carry glyph seals for all the spells in the sequence needed to pass a prismatic wall), then you do end up with exactly the kind of combat Star Wars has.
Complete with green beams (disintegrate), explosions and rainbow coloured shields. All at essentially point blank range, since none of them go very far apart from the missile.
The much smarter combat style is to lurk around with an undetectable ship and drop Cancellation missiles with a STAR drive set to go near lightspeed.
Expensive, I know, but there's no way to defend against those besides not getting hit. Quite possibly by not being spotted. Once you're spotted, a teleport to move the missile nearby you and you're dead before you can blink.
Plus a single hit from a 99.9% lightspeed object that has rest mass of say... 1 ton?... should be able to fry just about any reasonable sized ship. And put a pretty big dent into the Death Star (not to mention the shockwaves in the internal atmosphere would probably kill all the crew)
Well... more like crack it like an egg if it doesn't have internal forcefields to section off areas.
In fact, with a STAR drive, who needs nukes? Relativistic missile is way better, all the power you need and no fallout. Better than a Death Star laser even, unless that doesn't take money to fire.
If you need fallout, or otherwise render the area unusable, just fry the darn continent.
Since the STAR drive can be set to go at any speed you want, that single missile can efficiently destroy anything. Need to blow the Sun up? Estimate the amount of energy needed to lift it's mass to infinite distance, up it an order of magnitude, set the missile, and off it goes! Time to teleport out of the system I think... (you get about 16 minutes at 1AU distance, approx. time for a round trip for light)
- Anything that isn't double-shielded that is. And the solution to that is to have two rods of Cancellation...
Heh, who thought the name "Star Destroyer" would better fit a box with a foot-long rod attached, than a dreaded cruiser ship?
Unless said ship carries these missiles... XD
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I read the buildomancers thread. Hmm... is there a way to get the constructs to craft new ones by themselves?
Or just start churning out magewrights to churn out other magewrights
I'm sure there's a cleaner way.
In fact, with a STAR drive, who needs nukes? Relativistic missile is way better, all the power you need and no fallout.
I am almost certain that you would be causing some nuclear effects with that kind of impact... you know, far enough away from the initial impact site that the atoms were not discorporated, but still possessing enough energy to be hurled into each-other at dangerous velocities. If there were any ground left to make radioactive...
Fallout won't be much more than a large dose of cosmic radiation. Mainly created near the center of the fireball.
There will be some radiation if you turn the energy up enough, but nowhere near like a nuke.
I think that to generate significant radiation through sheer high speed collision of objects, you need to use so much power that radiation will be the least of your problems.
Fragmentation of your planet into a new asteroid belt might be worth getting more worked up about.
Here's this, the STAR Relativistic Cannon.
Get a STAR drive, put the pillar generating the output force into a Ring Gate. Put the other end of the ring gate inside your missile. So your expensive STAR drive stays inside your ship.
Place a glyph seal on the Ring Gate inside the missile, storing a Teleport Object. This teleports the ring gate into your ship the moment the missile fires. (don't give it time, since the missile is going so darn fast)
Activate the STAR drive to high enough acceleration that the missile reaches desired velocity before it escapes the Teleport Object range, the missile flies off, (no reaction force, as per STAR mechanism) the glyphs seal activates and the Ring Gate comes back.
Restore the Teleport Object stored in the Glyph Seal and reload into next missile.
Note that the missile can be virtually anything. A crew member you didn't like the face of, his coffin, a damaged beyond repair section of ship, or even a nearby floating rock.
Fired for the low low cost of a Teleport Object casting and half a quintessence-protected drive shaft.
Too bad the STAR cannon can't double as an engine, unless you like your ship squashed like a pancake.
Too bad the STAR cannon can't double as an engine, unless you like your ship squashed like a pancake.
Speaking of that, the singularity drive, though monstrously expensive, does give you a weapon that will cut through shields. It's "only" going to propagate at the speed of light though.... Can we do better than that?
Fire a small empty one at someone. Done.
Getting hit by one with the insane gravitational flux (sometimes going negative) has got to hurt.
Might not hurt as much as a relativistic missile, but sure is faster.
No need to make it a construct, who says we need to stop it? XD
Also, antimagic field >> rod of cancelation.
We can line it up so that basically the solid fog or prismatic sphere will only rip off a portion of the rock we use as a missile with the above out-lined STAR cannon! Also:
"DUST OF NEGATION
This fine purple powder comes in a folded paper packet.
When cast into the air, the dust creates a cloud of faint
violet sparkles in a 10-foot spread from the point of origin.
This cloud functions as an antimagic field, negating all magic
effects within the area.
The cloud persists for 2 minutes (or 2 rounds in windy
conditions).
Moderate abjuration; CL 11th; Craft Wondrous Item,
antimagic field; Price 3,300 gp."
LoM
Ones that cover the whole ship, so hitting it with anything that isn't a gravitational weapon won't work.
You need a disjunction or Rod of Cancellation.
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By the way, in a normal game, what's to prevent you from using the Dust of Negation as a missile weapon? Get your gnome tinkerer to put it around an explosive alchemist fire vial.
After all, the text says that the trigger can be anything you like, as long as it's not too complicated.
I think "detonate in 6 seconds" isn't complicated...
Coz Elder Glyph of Warding (Lords of Madness) is a 9th level spell that can store 9th level and lower spells.
If you time your hit, you can make a disjunction go off just before the missile hits the shield.
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By the way, is there a way to make a computer in D&D. One with enough cycles per second and memory to run something like... Pong, say.
With that, you can do orbit calculations and such things.
The priority is getting the AND, OR and NOT gates working for as cheap as possible, since we're going to need tons of them. Glyph Seals storing Light/No Light spells with the trigger being exposure to light or darkness can work, but that's expensive for 1 gate. Recharge them from an ETF should work.
Then we need a programmer to see how to turn these gates and memory states (glowing stone = 1, normal stone = 0) into an OS.
I felt you should know.
By the way, is there a way to make a computer in D&D. One with enough cycles per second and memory to run something like... Pong, say.
With that, you can do orbit calculations and such things.
The priority is getting the AND, OR and NOT gates working for as cheap as possible, since we're going to need tons of them. Glyph Seals storing Light/No Light spells with the trigger being exposure to light or darkness can work, but that's expensive for 1 gate. Recharge them from an ETF should work.
Then we need a programmer to see how to turn these gates and memory states (glowing stone = 1, normal stone = 0) into an OS.
I think we could probably use divination of some form as a Turing Oracle, all puns intended, and just circumvent the modern conception of a computer altogether.
"Prescience (Su): At will and as
a free action, a weird can duplicate the
effect of any of the following divination
spells: analyze dweomer, clairaudience/clairvoyance, contact other
plane, detect thoughts, discern location, find the path, foresight,
greater scrying, legend lore, locate creature, locate object, tongues,
true seeing, vision. Caster level 18th; save DC 16 + spell level."
From the description of the elemental weird, MMII. Something like that would work.
"What's the definite integral of *horrendous function*?"
- Something we can do, but takes forever
If so, then try this:
"What's the simplest proof of Fermat's Last Theorem?"
- A proof, requiring creative logic, non-trivial for computers to do
If that works:
"What's the answer to Graham's Problem?"
- An answer to a problem we haven't solved (it's just a number)
If that works as well:
"*input function X* Will this program halt?"
- Can divinations violate information theory? (they seem to) In this case, it's the halting problem
If even THAT works:
"What's the simplest set of axioms that is both Complete and Coherent?"
- Godel's Incompleteness Theorem disproved by contradiction?
The last one should be basically impossible, so there wouldn't be answer.
EDIT: All it needs to do to replace computers is being able to answer the first question, that will do for standard applications.
Although you still can't play computer games with divinations. Too low cycles per second.
Even if not, it's always fun to hear someone else describe the functionally impossible as merely non-trivial.
It might be able to. I'm not sure about Fermat's since there's a lot of suspicion that it falls into undecidability, as I'm sure you know...
Since our divinations are a free action, we have a non-finite amount of effective processing power. Normally, I tend to hold that information theory is inviolable even in DnD, but free-action divinations are seriously problematic, because they take no time, functionally, from the perspective of the game engine. Likewise, there's no speed attached to processing the answers to the divinations from the Air Weird's perspective..... So I think we have a true turing oracle here. Which is ****ing terrifying to me.
We don't have a great cycles per second, but all problems can be solved in one cycle if they're deemed solvable. I hold that Godel's can't be disproved at a fundamental level even with magic, so the answer there would be "There is no such set." But other than that...
Questions:
Can we construct an equilibrium state for any of the alcubierre drives or the faster than light drives?
What is the least expensive and most stable alcubierre drive we can construct?
I like to read it though.
I have no problems with a Turing Oracle though. After all, the kinds of magic systems I envision are allowed to change rules, like changing how magic itself works. It gets complicated from there.
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If information theory is inviolable, then divination itself would be quite impossible.
For the sake of argument, let's do this: "What, if any, is the name of the person who will attack me within this week?"
The divination is casted again three days later.
Simply because, assuming that the universe still uses the atoms and such physics, even a plain Newtonian universe is already complex.
- Mathematically complex, quite irreducible.
To predict the future, to a functional degree of accuracy (X guy will attack me in Y time), means that the divination is able to compute, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, the future of the universe.
Simple Chaos Theory will tell you that to double the time of accuracy, increases the initial precision of measurement by 1 order. Which strongly implies that to predict things even a week in advance require the divination to be able to measure positions and energy to below the Heisenberg Limit.
Plus, in terms of raw computational power, to make that accurate prediction within functionally 6 seconds means you just simulated (with approximations) the universe forward by 1 week.
Since the divination's answer also affects the future, it must return an answer that will fit with it's predictions.
- Viewing the trajectory of the universe, as it explores it's phase space, as an equation, the change imposed by the divination spell will change the final destination, which then means the change has to be different.
- Therefore, the divination spell must be able to find an answer that has the corresponding universal trajectory fall within the bounds of interpretation of that answer.
- In other words, the divination spell must not only compute the universe's trajectory through it's phase space, it must also solve the equation that generates a self-referencing answer. This is an eigenfunction, which is... non-trivial, as they say.
- It's a bit like solving a Time-Dependent Schrodinger's Equation for multiple electrons, only over the entire universe as well as the future, plus computing what change will generate it's answer. Plus a language parsing function that can convert the potential answer into an area of 'predicted' phase space to check if the new trajectory due to the answer will end up in there.
- The solution to this gets worse, since on an infinite-size plane, there will be a wizard who will be casting divination AGAIN, within a week. Most likely you, if you survive for three days.
- Therefore, the divination will have to compute it's overlap with the next divination, which implies that it will have to predict the next divination's answer or it will not have an accurate prediction of events. Which means that the divination has enough computing power to simulate it's own processes as well as the universe's (both of which are complex).
While somehow being restricted to predicting only 1 week?
- Which is only possible if you violate information theory and have the answer pop out of a black box. The question is, what kind of answers are we allowed?
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It's even worse, really. Remember that Mind Blank people can't be divined?
Let's use the above question, if the only person to attack me within that week is currently Mind Blanked and will attack me on the 2nd day, the divination returns null since it can't see him.
Yet, let's say, if that person attacking me provokes another person (non-protected) to attack on the 5th day (after I win but fail to kill him), then somehow, the divination can see the 2nd person attacking even if the Mind Blanked person is out of the simulation, which should cause the prediction to screw up royally.
Furthermore, the 2nd person attacks after the 3rd day, and I will be casting divination on the 3rd day (as originally outlined). Let's say I changed my mind that day and decide to ask, "What's the current price of a STAR drive ship ticket in Port X?"
If I never got attacked by the 1st person (who is invisible to divinations), from the answer to the 2nd divination, I decide to go on an off-planet holiday and therefore avoid ever being attacked by the 2nd person.
But if I was attacked by the 1st person, I use the original question instead and will meet the 2nd guy in a fight.
So, does the 1st divination ever return that the 2nd guy attacks me? It's already complex and I'm sure the situation can be made even more problematic with multiple contradictions and back-predictions required, forcing the divination to be able to compute more than 1 week forward.
And let's not bring in time travel into the mix.
The OR gate is simple as it is just two tubes leading into one.
I envision the NOT gate to be a single tube constantly fed with water (a constant 1), part of the tube would be on a hinge attached to a spring. The input you want to negate would be aimed at that section so if it is pushing out water the spring compresses and the constant flow is interrupted.
The AND gate would be like the NOT gate except instead of a constant flow the second input is the main line.
With AND and NOT you can emulate any circuit, OR is there to make things easier. You should only have to pay for the elements of construction (some wood, metal for the spring) and make a few simple craft checks. However, this is just for the circuitry to do anything useful with the outputs you'll have to look into minions probably.
This should have a pretty fast clock cycle and can get faster by raising the elevation of the water source.
We can get a basically arbitrarily high water pressure so many different ways. Would a decanter of endless water work for the incoming flow? I see no reason why not, but I figure I should ask. As for the circuitry being useful, if we can get it in at huge-or-under per major whole component, we can drive IO using a hauntshifted sucker.
1 x Decanter = 9000gp = 30 gallons
300gp / gallon
1 x Wall of Ice scroll lvl20 = 2000gp = 33,403.7 gallons
1 x Fireball scroll lvl5 (to melt ice) = 375gp
7cp / gallon
It depends on how long you're going to run your computer for.
This also reminds me of dwarf fortress, anyone know that game?
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Is it possible to make a glyph seal charge another glyph seal?
IE. one discharges, but the spell is targeted at the other glyph seal which stores it (no actual effect, spell is not lost)
Then there's a much easier way since glyph seals possess basic processing function already.
Stored a Light spell: 1
No spell stored: 0
Glyph: "If surroundings are bright, cast spell. "
Have a mobile platform which has an intelligent item (Ring of Telekinesis) and a glyph and a continual flame inside a box.
The box has a slit, which shines the continual flame's light onto the glyph on the wall. Which triggers it, if there's a spell in.
The ring has Turing machine-like instructions to move the platform up and down the row and seeing whether the glyph on the platform is charged or not (reading the memory on the wall) and discharges the glyph on the platform to write the bit back into the strip.
I agree that it violates it to a point, the question is where do you draw that line?
I would say that it draws the line at the deep end of infinity. XD
As I pointed out with my overly lengthy post, to do even the most (apparently) simple predictions will go straight off the deep end.
Unless your divinations are simple current information ones (like asking for the current stock price), it's... impossible to have divinations at all!
It still dies even with the simplification: "This is the prediction assuming this spell wasn't cast. "
Since teleportation and planar travel violate speed of light limit, all of the universe can potentially impact the relevant locations, so all of the universe has to be predicted.
Let's say it's a time-travel based approach. The prediction fails on the 1st run and tells you that this is the "trial" run for the prediction. The simulation runs, the spell records everything that happens regarding the target subject matter, and 1 week later, the spell then rewinds time back to the point where you cast the spell and reports.
- We'll say that this takes X amount of computational power.
The problem comes when, in the process of this, you cast divination again in three days. Since what you would do in the 1st spell's trial run is affected, the 2nd trial run has to initiate another trial run, resolve that, and rewind for the answer so that the 1st one works. But hey, the 2nd run takes X amount of computational power too!
Which means that computational power of the spell obeys (at least) this equality: X = 2X
The only solution is 0. Since that's obviously wrong, it has to be something different. No solution?
But it gets worse, since there can be unlimited numbers of "nesting" divination simulations inside each other, and that more than 1 person is casting divination in that 1 week frame, each with it's own nested loop, the equality becomes: X = nX
Where n tends to infinity as fast as the number of interactions between all divinations, nested into itself! Which grows bloody fast.
Yeah, deep end of infinity I think. We need X to be a higher-order infinity, such that a0 ^ a0 is negligible compared to it. Where a0 is a conventional infinity. (number of integers)
What this means is that to all practical purposes, divinations pull information out of nowhere. I'm sure there's a way to fudge some sort of system of interconnected divinations (in the nested "trial" loop) such that to answer all the questions requires that the mechanism of the divination needs to be both coherent and complete.
Possibly by asking for proofs of some basic set of axioms individually. Each question can be answered because Godel's Incompleteness Theorem isn't violated by the set you're asking for. But to generate that set requires a complete and coherent set which does violate that theorem, so the divinations answering the questions must violate the theorem if they are to answer. The problem being that each question itself is innocuous and non-complex.
- eg. asking for the proof of the basic mathematical axioms from another, more fundamental, set that you didn't define, but needs to be complete and coherent
I think this is possible since no set can be both complete and coherent means that you can formulate statements that can't be proven right/wrong in that set. Which would include those axioms. To prove them requires you to have a more inclusive set of axioms to work from. If those still aren't complete and coherent, you just go down 1 level and ask again. Repeat until the divination can't answer, because the new set you're asking for violates the theorem. Then you know that the set you have now requires a violating set to derive, but the divination just gave you your current one, so you know that the divination operates on a complete and coherent axiom set.
In other words, oh god ow.
Even normally unanswerable questions like: "The current position of person X" when in battle with him and the person is divination immune.
You can probably even find a Vecna-blooded.
Goes like this:
"What is the position of person X?"
- Unanswerable
*damn mind blank* "Alright, where's all the non-gas-filled space within 200ft that I cannot divine the nature of using this spell?"
- Returns three locations. One's in your backpack and one's in the corridor on the outside of the room.
*Hmm, I'm carrying an artifact, which explains the backpack. That leaves the corridor*
*Hmm... need to be sure*
"Will I be violating a Vow of Peace if I put a fireball at *unexplained position* and know the full consequences of my action?"
Win.
I think the yuirwood trick is the only thing left that can block this.... and even that we can still pick up where the woods are, we just won't be able to implicitly discern information about the actual nature of what's underneath it.
Anything under the canopy of yuirwood is immune to divination.
So I grow a bunch of trees in yuirwood, using feather tokens, and then replant them so that they cover my ships hull in a fashion that will keep them save and additionally use them as radiation shields We'll probably need 25-30, which I ran as about 15k worth of trees, to make it count as a glade of yuirwood, but it is still a good bargain, I think.
Alternatively, animate construct+permanency on the ship, and then cast mindblank on it. Not sure either of these will stop it, but they give you at least a chance of being missed by insufficiently clever questions.
---------
Mindblank doesn't work. Divinations that specifically target it fail. Failure is not a non-answer....
If I'm to design questions for this, I need all the information I can get.
And "under the canopy of" will take some defining. I doubt yuirwood covers a dungeon built underneath it.
Which means it won't cover inside the ship.
Scratch that, if your ship is solid, this pair will reveal location:
"If I fire my STAR cannon in X direction with Y velocity, which point will the projectile reach at Z time?"
"Assuming there are no solid objects in this path but gravitational forces stay the same, which point will the projectile reach in Z time?"
- This works out if there is an object in this direction.
"If I fire my STAR cannon in X direction with Y velocity, at which time factor can I use such that the answers to both questions previously asked are the same?"
- This works out the distance. In light-seconds, but yeah, it's just math after that. Divine the answer if you're lazy to solve relativistic eqns... XD
Since you have infinite questions, you can ask for any direction and time of flight you want, hence theoretically covering all of space.
- You immediately detect the distance to the first solid object. And once you've worked out the object's position, it is simple to disregard it in the next scan via an "ignoring all objects in X space" clause to detect the next one behind it.
Actually, this IS a radar. It's like a quantum radar or something like that. If a *test object* in this direction will hit something, then it returns a yes, without actually firing the object. Sort of like wavefunctions of probable STAR cannon firing direction collapsing into the only solution of your enemy's position. :D
Yay for IF statements and hypothetical situations.
Now we just need a way to get ahold of an air---wei--rd-----
Hello Polymorph Any Object, what are you doing there? Chilling? That's cool.
Maybe you'd like to turn me into an Air Weird?
Oh, hello assume supernatural ability! Good to see you, thanks for picking up.
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Does yuirwood prevent sending from being used under it's canopy?
It's a tree, I see. Very cool! I want one!
Questions to use after determining yuirwood-protected areas:
"Assuming the requirement of teleportation that the destination must support the target object is waived, will a teleport object at a sufficient caster level be able to move me to X coordinate relative to me?"
- X location being a test 5x5x5ft inside the space of the ship.
*holds up grain of sand of exactly 1mm3 size*
"Assuming the requirement of teleportation that the destination must support the target object is waived, will teleport object at a sufficient caster level be able to successfully move this grain of sand into X(Y) location?"
- X(Y) location is a 1mm3 subset of a 5x5x5ft cube that you asked earlier.
The subsequent yes/no answers create a 1mm3 resolution map of the volume. Repeat for the whole ship to obtain a millimeter resolution image of all objects on the ship. (!)
Quantum Radar Mk II
Give up yet? XD I don't think even dimensional lock will help as I just state "a teleportation effect that does not employ interplanar travel".
With a bit of ingenuity, using hypothetical users with sending spells, I can get sound, mind read, working status and virtually any result I like. Probably more than you know of your own ship.
Ha! It's owning the pants off Metafaculty.
I have a feeling Metafaculty operates in a similar way to this, hence the ability to defeat mind blank.
Excluding YW though, I see no way to stop millimeter imaging of the freaking ship. What have we done, Jon, what have we done?
As for Air Weird, it's in MMII.
It needs refining but here we go:
Craft Homunculus. IIRC, homunculi can be made out of anything, they just take xp to make.
Give your homunculi the craft homunculi feat. Obtain a location that deals level drain (or have a caged up level drain monster) and drain 1 level. Which won't remove the feat but will place the target homunculus at mid point to next level. Homunculus uses that half-level to craft more homunculi...
Yay! Minor grey goo disaster. Relatively easy to get rid off and very slow.
Weird. =P
Not like it'll stop this. Contact Other Plane, Foresight and Vision can be all massaged into giving whatever results you want.
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I can't find the line in Lluirwood that says that divinations don't work in them. Got a page number?
*************************
What have we done, Jon, what have we done?
XD
Hmm? I think of it as the next stage of D&D magic progression, where we leave behind such trivial questions of "How to maximize effect of this spell?", and examine the more fruitful and interesting one, "How do we exploit the fringe effects this spell has with reality?"
When our current assumptions and 'proofs' about the world are challenged in fantasy settings, mostly by the introduction of magic, we can either close our eyes to the possibilities, or examine them.
The reason why such massive unexpected effects occur with these things is that any violation of limits we're used to (speed of light, information theory, computing power, etc.) generates a number of interesting phenomena upon close examination.
Usage of the presented method to bypass the normal limit will net results not possible under that limit.
The more the effect does not subscribe to the limit, the more out of the world the results get.
eg. Fireball creates heat from nowhere, you can use it to boil water to drive an engine (weak, expensive)
Gust of wind generates continuous force, you can use it to drive an engine (weak, cheap)
Reverse Gravity generates force dependent on external unconstrained variable (weight of object placed in the field), you can use it to be an engine (strong, expensive)
Ring Gates and quintessence violate two rules at the same time (invulnerable objects and space folding), you can use it to be an engine (NI strong, cheap)
Yuirwood, Unapproachable East, Pg100, paragraph two.
Prescience, MMII, PG 92, right before Air Weird's description.
We can just use contact other plane over and over and over until the law of large numbers lets us discern which answer is the one that's not stupid. As for the damage to int\wis, it doesn't stop us from using our SU ability, so there's no limit on who we can contact, or how many times. I recommend far-realm entities. ::laughs::
UE? Aw... I don't have that.
Never mind though, I think the millimeter radar should work on objects underneath the yuirwood protection. Since the grain of sand isn't under it now, I can perfectly well tell what the grain of sand will do.
As for the elemental pool, yes, you'd need to prepare one, but I think you can just make them as a weird, so you'd simply start as a weird on the elemental plane of air, and engender a pool in the ship of your choosing, hovering over the deck with one misty arm outstretched in an imperious gesture.
For the world, you see, is yours.
The path which might be considered to be the least costly involves taking X trajectory and launching a green flare exactly 123 seconds later in the course. "
Captain: "Say what? Green Flare? We don't have..."
Signalling Officer: "Er... Actually, I bought some magic fireworks when we last docked..."
Captain: "Ah... ok, I see. So we have our flare. Tell me, how is this going to help win the battle?"
Intelligence Officer: "Exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds after the flare is launched, the captain of the rebel ship will lower shields, allowing us to fire the STAR cannon. "
Captain: "... ... and why?"
Intelligence Officer: "We did not attempt to divine the intentions of the opposing crew during the prediction as it would take unnecessary runtime, do you wish it?"
Captain: "Why, yes, of course. "
Intelligence Officer: *about to leave bridge* "Oh, and tell Gunnery to aim 6 inches to the right. There's a... will be a pebble-sized obstacle in the firing line when the opportunity appears. " *exuent*
Captain: *sigh* "I wonder who's running the ship now... All right, execute plan. "
For the world, you see, is yours.
Not quite yet, we have yet to get a ship to plane shift... wait, it's a construct... never mind me.
The divination tricks probably wouldn't work if the entire plane (including your ship) was in an anti-divination area. Although I'm sure you can even do crossplanar tricks so get out of there and bombard from above.
Hey, has Tshern read these bits? If he did, I have a feeling the Iron Siege is about to get MUCH harder.
I'm sure Dispater would be able to find a way to mind control a Weird, somehow. Doesn't even need that. Enough devils doing the questioning (say 100 Divinations per round from binders), as well as an efficient algorithm, will be able to pinpoint any challenger utilizing anti-divination protection.
It appears to be within the EWL of a 13th level character with landlord and a cohort with landlord. Admittedly that's a hack, but I also decided to make it larger than the HMS Titanic.
I'll begin work on the Death Star after exams.
Shuttle Class (35x 5x5x5ft cubes of internal space)
Engine: Motion-Amplified Gust of Wind (Adjustable weight, 0-20G acceleration)
Structure: Wood
Hull: "Wall of Iron" x6
Shield: Permanent Prismatic Wall x6
Weapon: STAR relativistic cannon
Radar: PAO to Air Weird, elemental pool on deck
Guidance System: Permanent Animate Objects on ship + Awaken Construct
Minimum Crew: 2 (one in Air-Weird form, one is the ship)
Standard Strength: 3 (+ captain)
Life Support: Bottle of Air, Everlasting Rations, Decanter of Endless Water
Range: Infinite
Cargo space: 30x 5x5x5ft cubes, no maximum load
I'm trying to figure out if we can use a sun as a ship-hull.... :: thoughtful :: I think we can but I haven't quite pinned down how.
Although the link sounds interesting, I've no idea where I might get that and I'm not inclined to search too hard for it. =/
Hmm...
Hey, thought of something dumb. Fabricate can make stuff from raw materials like a craft check can. What happens if you eschew materials it? XD
Things left to do:
Grey-goo (incomplete)
Nanoassembler? (ie. object duplicator)
Terraforming
Planetary Shield (without spamming permanent prismatic wall)
Gravity Manipulation
Matter Fabricator (trying not to use true creation here, I'm talking increasing the mass of a planet...)
Questionable things of no practical purpose:
Shkadov Thruster (Class A Stellar Engine)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
Space Habitat
Dyson Sphere (Class B Stellar Engine) (should put quite a strain even on Mad Old Lord Young's fleet of constructors!)
Gravity manipulation I think is basically a done deal if you use the singularity drive. Would you like to consider the singularity drive off limits for the duration of this thread? It would hurt my head a lot less.
His books are available at barnes and noble, if there's one near you.
But we still need the drive, unless we throw away FTL.
Point taken on the planetary shield though, Active Defense > Passive
Let's see, throw two more on the pile, both are just demonstration projects of no use:
Star Lifting
- Anyone like to mine the sun?
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
Klemperer Rosette
- World Construction! Plus needs to be actively stabilized! That's a pretty insane feat!
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
As I see it, a Dyson sphere will probably take more than 10^20 hours. But to do it any other way will just take forever. At least Yang gets it done in a few thousands of years.
Is there's a cheat? Like chain Fabricate on walls of iron or something. (does that even work? And we probably need an infinite spells and action loop trick)
In any case, for the Laser, could you place a Daylight spell inside a fiberglass box and redirect all the light into one deadly beam?
Attaching Daylight to a Hallow spell makes it come from everywhere in the volume, hence you can make huge fine sheets of fiberglass to redirect the light.
Sunlight on the surface of the Earth (being used as the definition of full sunlight for the Daylight spell) is calculated to be at 342 W/m2.
A 60ft radius sphere has a surface area of 4202 sq m. Which means that at the full extend of the daylight spell, the total energy is 1.43 MW (about 1 dynamite stick every second). Focus that into a coherent beam (not sure how) and you got your death ray that will go through wall of force.
Won't go through prismatic wall though.
If you use Hallow, that' a 40ft emanation, which means that you can use a mass of glass walls extending into the area perpendicular to the edge. This can potentially increase the power output by hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
The issue is that divinations still require knowledge to use. I mean I guess you could argue that perhaps you could instantly derive a full system of knowledge, but you wouldn't be able to really grasp that or apply it. Or maybe you could. Odd thought. I wonder. Worth suggesting that some degree of comprehension is currently required.
In that case, then we can just scrap theoretical scientists. Engineers will be the highest qualified job...
Anyway:
Matter Fabrication
- Wall of Iron
- Wall of Stone
- Fabricate (with eschew materials)
- True Creation (expensive)
Anything else?
;)
It will certainly obsolete normal libraries. Wow, man, what a strange world this would be to live in!
People don't breed that fast and even with 1000 lyrists, the man hours per year will probably support the population growth of 10+ million population.
Oh well, lyrists on the market simply mean property prices crash. No problem there. The question is how to get enough people to live in a Dyson shell... Need a way to grey-goo-create people to do that.
After that, it's galactic conquest! Fleets of teleporting, shielded ships armed with STAR cannons. Toril will burn, Eberron doesn't stand a chance and Kyrnn drowns in a hail of relativistic asteroids...
*evil laughter*
Hm... I'm starting to wonder if an early, relatively small-scale test of a relativistic missile is the true cause of the Day of Mourning.
Anyway, unfortunately, Fabricate with Eschew Materials will not work if the cost of the materials would be > 1gp, since the material component is
The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created
, and Eschew Materials only works for noncostly material components, being those that do not cost more than 1gp. The epic feat Ignore Material Components would work, however, but then again, if you're doing epic, that's a whole 'nother story.
I'd contribute something positive if it wasn't so late, so next time.
Time to find the cheapest worked material. Does stone count? If not polished iron will do. (1sp per lb = 30lb per 30gp, not bad for a low level which can be spammed)
I'm trying to find a way to create lots and lots of weight from nothing. Type of material doesn't matter, only weight.
one of my bbeg's are star-lifting the sun to power a gigantic robot. i felt you should know.
we're gonna rule the universe big time. We now need a way to teleport from campaign setting to campaign setting without doing spelljammer, and the whole multiverse can be made into a giant slave-hive to make cake for us.
also, the development of the new campaign setting Unlimited Galaxy (new name up for adoption) starts today! join me here and help make DnD a more incomphrehensible game to play!
Although solar power satellites orbiting the sun, as per Dyson Swarms, will produce TONS of energy. Probably way more than you need for any giant robot.
Besides, power your 'bot with STAR drive...
i might use a dyson swarm instead, with MYLO churning out sattelites.
on the other side of the plane, a hundred minions is churning out eschewed fabricates to create a new star. how expensive is gasses?
also, i just came up with a funny trick.
eschew materials reamoves material components under 1 gp price.
i take this for meaning market price.
most spells with costly material components specify how much their components cost. a few, like fabricate, does not.
fabricate is also the only spell that gives better output the more material you put in.
so, you could use true creation with dweomerkeeper to flood the market with cheaply avaible hydrogen. this would mean that more hydrogen would be created with each casting of fabricate.
its not a terribly useful trick, and the true creations are probably better off just adding hydrogen to the star, but i find it pretty amusing.
I've found a way to emulate the weird's ability with a single item, by the way. Amulet of Second Chances
Class: Station
Engine: (Awaken Construct + Permanent Animate Object) Wind Box
Structure: Iron
Armour: None
Special: Awakened Permanent Animate Objects on little pieces of glass made into lenses. By changing the angle on the lens, the light from the sun can be deflected somewhere else.
Engine is for course correction.
Enough statites, and you can focus the beam onto a different statite that is a consolidator, which refocuses into as tight a beam as you can manage and beam it where it's needed.
Try not to fly through the beam path. Given the size of the glass panels eligible for Animate Objects, the beam you'll be using will fry pretty much anything in it's path.
Make the beam tighter/more powerful and it'll have a further effective range. If it's like a coherent laser, it'll still be deadly somewhere out at Jupiter orbit at a reasonable size. (1000 sq ft of collection area at 1AU)
I think this will do for a strategic weapon.
Can we hauntshift the... location itself? Before it is assembled? And reduce the cost to just fabrication costs rather than animation costs?
I fixed up the trick RE: the amulet for quantum radar, by the way. I'm still ridiculously impressed with your trick using the grain of sand.
If information theory is inviolable, then divination itself would be quite impossible.
I disagree, you are assuming divination happens in real time, but what if the answer was computed before the existence of space-time? Just looking up a pre-generated answer should be doable in 6 seconds.
And if all divinations where precomputed before space-time it would obviously not have been bound by the rules of spacetime, and it could have messured the position in everything of the big bang before it occured at which time it might have been possible to violate the heiseberg uncertanity principle.
If it is something more organic, like say a human with that recursion amulet... there are only so many synaptic pathways that can be built before the hippocampus gives out or seizure activity starts ruling the day in the brain.
I suppose a NI large auto-hypnosis score could solve it, so long as it is a non-physical mind doing the memorizing to avoid the limitations of a physical medium for storing information. Any monster have a 'perfect memory/never forgets anything' trait?
One problem with all these infinite divinations flying around is that of memory... while I am not sure how a weird's 'mind' works, given that it does not have some huge intelligence score it may have a hard time remembering all this information it is gathering.
If it is something more organic, like say a human with that recursion amulet... there are only so many synaptic pathways that can be built before the hippocampus gives out or seizure activity starts ruling the day in the brain.
I suppose a NI large auto-hypnosis score could solve it, so long as it is a non-physical mind doing the memorizing to avoid the limitations of a physical medium for storing information. Any monster have a 'perfect memory/never forgets anything' trait?
Well, we'll actually just finish our divination then cast path of the exalted and use a Deity to compute the information and spit out the answers we need. Also, technically, air weirds are immortal oracles made of... air, so i'm inclined to suggest that they have no finite memory as they lack a physical brain. I don't know how well they'd be able to process stuff... We probably really do need path of the exalted. We can use a thought bottle for.. um... off-site storage of memories. :: laughing ::
I disagree, you are assuming divination happens in real time, but what if the answer was computed before the existence of space-time? Just looking up a pre-generated answer should be doable in 6 seconds.
And if all divinations where precomputed before space-time it would obviously not have been bound by the rules of spacetime, and it could have messured the position in everything of the big bang before it occured at which time it might have been possible to violate the heiseberg uncertanity principle.
What about effects that block divinations? If the divination simply accessed already pre-calculated information shouldn't blocking divination be impossible since the answer already existed before you took action to block it?
Also, technically, air weirds are immortal oracles made of... air, so i'm inclined to suggest that they have no finite memory as they lack a physical brain. I don't know how well they'd be able to process stuff... ::
This is probably 2nd ed bias creeping in, but I always imagined elementals as being more... physical. Made all of air, sure, but made up of physical stuff with physical operations (albeit strange ones). I would prefer an Outsider, who are more explicitly 'made of belief' and less restrained by physical laws for their being... or a Far Realms being who doesn't need to follow any rules! Pseudonatural Weird?
Hard to say. We're leaving RAW territory now, though.
Hey now, if you can start applying particle physics to RAW, I can apply neurology ;)
"Broken Super Symmetry in an Advanced Theoretic General Relativistic Interpretation of Rules As Written leads to Novel Eigen-Decompositon of Problem Space"
Would make a modest, but appropriate title.
And then every post needs to say one of the following at least a couple times:
- physics
- quantum
- mathematics (not just math, it's gotta be "mathematics", cuz math isn't smart enough)
- multi-dimensional space (it's okay to specify a number, just as long as it's more than 3D)
- manifold
- conical intersection
- diabetic coupling (massive pseudo-kudos if you use this with a straight face)
- pseudo
- "mind blowing"
Certainly you understand.
As a result, my language isn't always precise, and often I get excited about silly things. I didn't mean to offend anyone by trivializing fields of study. As for the use of the word quantum, it comes from the hackish phrase job quanta or time quanta, which refers to the specific expected block of time that a machine will allow you before a context switch. The radar always completes a scan within its quanta, before another process or in our case, player, gets to interrupt it or alter the state of the machine. On most modern machines, and in DnD, there's really.... well, there are very few interrupts with sufficient base priority to force a context switch. This is a monstrous over-simplification, but I need to get back to kernel hacking.
As it stands, I'm not convinced there's an ability that defeats it.
Incorporeal Illithid Slayers would remain undetected by that method
As it stands, I'm not convinced there's an ability that defeats it.
I'll always advocate looking at things in the abstracted rules of D&D before thinking about it in the real world sense.
In D&D, space is quantized into 5 foot squares. The existence of things smaller than 5' squares is possible, yes, but no effect I am aware of references anything but either the target or some sum of 5' squares. In other words, spells don't reference where in a 5' square they hit , they just target whatever is in the square (OR they target a visible target within line of sight. If the spell description has "creature(s)" in the target line, you cannot hit them unless you've got LoS). If there is a question of whether or not something will strike a creature in the square, and an attack roll is involved there are rules for this: you get a 50% miss chance due to total concealment. If the spell has an area of effect and line of effect, but no line of sight, the target is hit 100% of the time. Etc, I'm sure I don't need to go through all the cases.
The bottom line is that if you're using spells (or combat abilities), the best spatial information you'll get out of them is 5'. Unless otherwise specified, hitting a creature will not reveal any information about the creature, either.
How about what is the volume of ghost-touch sand that could currently be teleported to this five foot square without spill-over?
heh
Okay. Now you know the volume of the object. A step towards determining size, perhaps. But I'd be pretty surprised if you could pull more information out than that.
ROFLMAO
As for shape, "What is the shape of the displacement within the sand that we would teleport there?" or something to that effect might work. Again we hit the idea that we get a non-interaction under RAW basically, but I think we can use negative images to build a picture of reasonable clarity.
I think we could probably do this:
As I add ghost touch sand in a vertical column to the 5 foot square, presuming no spill over, what is the amount displaced at (small intervals of added sand)
This lets you know basically the vague minimum shape. You can repeat passes along a horizontal axis by saying a horizontal column, it should get you enough information to interpolate the actual shape of the object. No RAW prevents us from doing so.
(Missles) What if you used an Arcane Archer with range increasing tricks, had a warlock make you collosal sized, cast your favorite glyph tricks on a collosal sized arrow the archer picks up (to prevent the arrow from shrinking) and then fire it with the arcane archer phase arrow ability?
I am fairly new to DnD mechanics so I'm not sure, but wouldn't this allow you to fire from inside your ship at another ship and have your arrow go through most of thier protections? It wouldn't have the range of your STAR cannon, but would it work??
Technically, I would argue that since the arrow will be flying through space (and phasing through space at that) the arrow would continue to fly until it hits something, so this could be fired at a target outside the archers range, it would just take a while to get there.
What if you combined two abilities of the Arcane Archer for this and fired a seeking phasing arrow?
Also, just for fun, what if you cast polymorph any object on the enemy's ship? Turn thier hulls into paperand laugh as the ship explodes from the force of the vacuum of space. (assuming thier ship is pressurized, which is farly certain)
Or turn the ship into real world elements (and this thread was for real world physics, so I argue this is possible) and turn thier ship into weapons grade plutonium?? Wouldn't that much weapons grade plutonium in one place be at critical mass and start exploding? Even if it doesn't I'm sure you could do a variation of the electron bomb from earlier in this thread to start the fireworks.
- Essentially, this works out to whether the thing will move in X seconds. Now we know it's mobile. Or not.
I would argue that you can teleport to a smaller size than 5ft. Although it could just be my simulationist tendencies kicking in.
"Will my health, as I understand it, be significantly affected, as I understand it, if I do not cast Contact Other Plane at the end of this week assuming I am at a similar state then as I am now. "
EDIT: I think there's a wording error somewhere. Maybe.
I disagree, you are assuming divination happens in real time, but what if the answer was computed before the existence of space-time? Just looking up a pre-generated answer should be doable in 6 seconds.
And if all divinations where precomputed before space-time it would obviously not have been bound by the rules of spacetime, and it could have messured the position in everything of the big bang before it occured at which time it might have been possible to violate the heiseberg uncertanity principle.
I got my answer to this one now. If the divination was going to be run such that the answer generates a result that is consistent with itself, the simulation that it refers to, in your system, will have to include the divination itself in the simulation.
Hence, even more infinite computational power required. The infinity for this scheme is bigger than the "on the spot" computing one. That's coz this scheme has to include all possible divinations (infinite number) interacting in all possible ways (infinite factorial) such that their answers do not violate each other (infinite factorial ^ infinite factorial).
Good luck with that one. (It's larger than the number of ways to write an infinite dimensional matrix of complex numbers, which is just infinite^infinite)
If such a scheme did exist, then divination would still be able to access pre-recorded information and then everything stays the same and asking questions about secondary effects becomes perfectly easy. Pre-computation does not prevent breakage of information theory.
By my own argument here: http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=3821.msg148537#msg148537
Too many people using it to probe the future means that the future becomes chaotic and completely non-trivial. For the Weird Radar to work on future events, it needs to break some fundamental axioms of logic. Or that only 1 person use it at a time.
So yeah, only current or abstract information, no playing around with time please.
wow, divinations are wierd...
both sides ask which strategy they should use to win
assuming that there will ALWAYS be a way for both sides to win, then divinations must fail, because they cannot both win.
but there is no way that divinations can fail in the rules, unless people use protection (AKA, nothing will cause a divination to fail just because the answer is uncomputable)
so, i think we just proved that divinations cannot predict or read the future
funny, i thought this thread was going to make obscenely powerful stuff, not snatch away the diviner's favorite toy :D
The divination itself only predicts from things as they currently stand. Even if someone else is about to use the divination to counter the original prediction, it hasn't happened yet and is a null value for calculations. Therefore, a divination is valid at exactly the moment it is issued. However, the farther you get from the point of evaluation, the less certain it is.
So what you basically get is the guy who uses his divination closest to game time is the guy who wins.
If you look at the future as a series of strings hanging out from the end of a rope, the divination follows the string forward and tells you what you need to know.
Once your opponent uses his divination, he alters the path, and the universe takes a divergent course down a different future.
Your original query remains valid, in the time frame it was taken from. However, it's no longer valid from your point of view, because the time frame you're moving down has changed. But that has nothing to do with the original question.
The bonuses to this type of interpretation is that it solves the quandary of multiple divinations in a given D&D world. And since we already know that multiple divinations do function in some way or another in those worlds, we need a solution that actually meets with the effects we see.
You take a snapshot of the universe, which shifts it slightly based on your reaction. The next person who takes a snapshot of the universe shifts it slightly again, which may or may not have a bearing on your original picture.
So the closer you get to the point of action, the less time there is for another snapshot to move you away from your desired target.
You can pick either A, or B, depending on which you prefer ^^
A.
One always occurs before the other one. If a divination takes place at exactly the moment the spell completes, and *for the sake of equal evaluation* both spells ask the exact same question, and both casters are exactly the same level at exactly the same with exactly the same experience and exactly the same stats, one will still occur before the other one.
If we assume that a divination occurs in a state of timeless calculation, then one calculation must complete before another one begins.
Or
B.
If two divinations occur at exactly the same time, and are worded the same and ect. ect. ect., then they will give back exactly the same answer, both of which will not include the other divinations effects. This is because the gather information stage would occur before the information deportment stage, and it is actually the information deportment stage that would shift the universe from one thread to another.
Since the stastical chance of this is extremely small, it would never, or almost never, come into play.
Personally, I like B better, because it makes more sense to me.
******************************************************
Using that interpretation (divinations do not account for other divinations)
Then, it is simple to screw up all divinations about the future by simply using it over and over, as fast as possible. Certainly not problem with the weird computer.
Which means that while the Weird Radar works for current information, if your enemy has a Weird Radar as well, all future predictions will be off if you make them, but will be accurate if you don't make them.
It still results in Weird Radar cancelling each other when used to predict the future. Instead of giving null answers, they just give inaccurate ones, which is just as useless as the future changes infinitely fast in an unpredictable manner. (infinite divinations per round)
At least it doesn't block the other applications, like the millimeter radar. Or the abstract questions.
Every other race has been either genocided or enslaved, any uprising quashed by a few choice executions at the right time.
The pantheon has been STAR Missile-ed out of existence. Devils are rarer than liquid helium on the Plane of Fire. Dispater's Iron Tower is under siege by the Empire's battleships, his defenses slowly crumbling. The many Planes of the Abyss are charred into nothingness by STAR drives running at infinite overload.
*************************************************
I think this is what it looks like. The 1st Weird Radar, the Portable Hole Singularity and the STAR drive are enough to destroy any credible opposition.
Is Tshern still running the Iron Siege?
I recall that the Iron Tower was invulnerable. What if you tried to break it using the ring gate bending trick? (gotta find some way to make ring gates 9miles wide)
And... just out of curiosity's sake, ARE you using a mild version of the weird computer? XD
Quote from http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm
under line of effect:
An otherwise solid barrier with a hole of at least 1 square foot through it does not block a spell’s line of effect. Such an opening means that the 5-foot length of wall containing the hole is no longer considered a barrier for purposes of a spell’s line of effect.
Description of ring gates:
These always come in pairs—two iron rings, each about 18 inches in diameter.
18inch diameter ring is just under 2sq ft. Which means spells get line of effect through a ring! (since you can cast spells through a ring, the ring qualifies for line of effect)
Eg. sticking two rings back to back on opposite sides of a wall will allow a fireball exploding on one end to go through the rings and affect the other side of the wall.
Need it matter whether there is a wall or not? If the fireball explosion went through the ring, it can go through the ring anywhere.
Spell reflector anyone?
Well, amplifier more like.
Fireball exploding on one side will go through and hit the other side. Which can be anywhere, facing anything. Including right next to the original area for double hitting?
Plus going through the ring doesn't actually block line of effect. Since you still hit a wall that has a 1ft hole but also everything behind it. In the case of these rings, the explosion hits the imaginary wall and goes through the ring and continues behind the ring as normal. (because 1.5ft diameter barriers to not block line of effect, think of the ring as the wall and the "wall" as the hole)
Which means that with two sets of rings to bend the line of effect twice, you can get the fireball to overlap with the sets of rings over and over again. Limited only by range.
Which means that with this 4-ring set up, any burst or spread effect will hit targets in it's area 1 time + 1 time for every 5ft nearer to the 4-ring setup the target is from the edge.
Combo with locate city bomb and... >.<
Scratch that, first you have to have a legitimate reason for trying to discover uranium."
...and plastique!
I dont remember the caster level but it was somewhere around 4,000
Talisman of the sphere
Sphere of annihilation.
you can move the sphere at a rate of 20,010 feet every 6 seconds. that equates to 3 miles a round.
But on a serious note.
What happens when you cast anti-magic field on a portable hole that has something in it?
I know another way to travel to the future at least.
What you need
The ability to cast Temporal Stasis
A powder composed of diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire dust with a total value of at least 5,000 gp. (material component)
Craft Contingent spell feat (complete arcane P.77)
The ability to cast Dispel Magic.
3000 gp & 240 xp(assuming you are 20th level caster)
Step 1: Craft a contingency of Dispel magic, targeting you or your area, make the contingency something like, oh, let's say 1000 years.
Step 2: Cast Temporal Stasis on yourself, automatically failing your saving throw.
Now assuming noone comes by and dispels your temporal stasis, you will be locked in a timeless state, not aging, and being entirely protected from harm for 1000 years. Once 1000 years goes by, your contingent spell goes off, auto dispelling your own spell. You pop out and there you are! 1000 years in the future!
(Not at all as cost effective as creating your own demi-plane, but hey, it works.)
Also, if you put an iron bar through the ring gate on one end, but only halfway through, then you placed the end sticking out of each ring against each other, and pushed, what would happen?
Example -) (- (--) and push.
Isn't there a range limit?
Deactivating the portable hole while it has something through the portal is the basis of the Automatic Bread Slicer.
Iron Bar + Ring Gate...
Oh no! Someone figured out the secret of the STAR drive?! Quick, crew beat to station! This is not a drill!
But seriously, it's nice to see another person who comes up with this independently. It means that I'm not the crazy one here.
Iron Bar + Ring Gate...
Oh no! Someone figured out the secret of the STAR drive?! Quick, crew beat to station! This is not a drill!
I knew he would figure it out from the beginning of time(time travel + wierd computer). if you were in such a fuss about people figuring out, you could just have asked. sheesh.
Wow, can't believe I skipped this thread previously. The Moebius Singularity is BRILLIANT! I seriously cannot believe that I missed it, I, with my great love for all things Moebius. I used to spend hours of time meant for revising for my exams constructing Moebius strips(with as many as 8 full turns) out of foolscap paper, and observing how they changed when cut(and then cutting the results...).:D
Lol, me too(except i din't had exams to think about).
i started on a simple python script once, when i was new to coding, that would take the number of initial turns and number of cuts, and then output the number of strips and how many turns they had. never finished it, though.
1)How much mental power does the weird have to be able to do all of this in her head? the answers come immediately, but she has to remember infinite answers to infinite questions.
2)you are putting all of your trust in an elemental, and they are fickle as fickle can get. More fickle than pickles.
3)if the other ship can influence your elemental somehow (magic, or whatever) then you are in serious trouble.
4)if anyone else get's a weird too, then... weird things will happen.
The Weird's (su) ability is gained via one of the many ways that you gain (su) abilities of creatures.
Your elemental won't be influenced. Since you'll know it's coming long before it gets here. And you'll know exactly how to counter it.
Same with anyone getting another such setup. Once you got it once, you "win" since you can easily stop anyone else setting it up.
On the subject of the Weird Radar and information processing/comprehension: combine the Prescience ability with the Omnificer. Free action divinations + no-action Knowledge (any) checks at +infinity mod. should give us sufficient data processing. Also, by virtue of the infinite Knowledge skill = infinite memory (because Knowledge checks are to see if you recall a bit of data, not if you learn something new!), we've just removed the physical limitations for our Weird Computer's memory.
Hey- can the quantum radar detect things made of gas?
It goes like this:
Contact Other Plane / Divination essentially allows you to play 20 questions with whatever subject you wish to use it on.
And the questions can be of any kind, however long you like, and include weird things like "if the line of questioning as written in this book were to be followed..."
And it'll get answered if it can be answered at all.
The Millimeter Radar (finally remembered the name)...
gives you unlimited questions. In zero time.
So yeah, there's absolutely nothing you won't get to know.
Unless, of course, I'm totally wrong- in which case, tell me.
The amulet of second chances might work, though...
EDIT: also, Contact plane has a pretty decent chance of giving the wrong answer, so you have to ask each question a few times. When you ask infinite questions, even the tiny chance you will get it wrong becomes infinitely likely.
ALSO there's a chance a "diety or other force" blocked the div, so dieties can do it. There are a few flaws in this plan.
Talisman and sphere:
Isn't there a range limit?
Yes, but it doesn't have to be 20,010 miles AWAY, just annihilate everything around you in whatever the range is, in one round.
Also, Has this thread (and anyone in it) figured out the life support thing yet?
Like someone else said a few pages back
Murlynd's Spoon (or rod of splendor's
)Decanter of Endless Water
Anyone figure out Oxygen? (i don't think permanency gust of wind with vents would work, my second thought was equally as bad, commanding mindless undead to "breathe" out of bottles of air, and use a simple vacuum to pump their lungs.)
We just use a huge set of trials for each answer. Rule of large numbers says that we should get a predictable distribution of answer types, allowing us to figure out which is which.
That's true, but you are asking infinite questions, so the random one in a billion fluke is bound to happen, well, infinite times.
Also, it's still too dependent on deities for my liking- Contact Other Plane is not Divination. Also, COP only lets you ask one question per round- I'm not sure how that interacts with casting the spell infinite times, exactly, but it might be important.
When the whole plan rides on the one spell, I think it should be analyzed to the letter with a +20 magnifying glass, or else your spaceship could meet a rather painful end.
Actually, we don't normally use contact other plane, if I remember correctly... What was it that we used.... We could reduce a lot of these questions to binary answers in sufficiently large numbers of attacks.. :: hums :: I'd need to re-read the thread and I'm working on a project right now.
I think you were planning on using divination, but it wasn't covered under Prescience, and this is the next best thing. The amulet of second chances works if that trick of yours flies. RAI it clearly doesn't.
Maybe you should have a construct do it.
How about gating (summon wouldn't be any good, as the 'corpse' would disappear) in an air elemental every now and again, and killing it, thus reducing it to a collection of component atoms... air.
You could just leave a gate open to the elemental plane of air, but I can't help think it's a bad plan!
Or simply issue necklaces of adaptation all round.
How about using a 'side effect' of the plant growth spell: Have a bunch of plants, then simply cast plant growth on them. The growth of plants by so much in such a short period of time would suck up a lot of CO2 and create a lot of oxygen. Then you simply harvest your carrots, pineapples and strawberries, chow down, trim back the undergrowth to where you started, and repeat.
Beats the heck out of living off thin gruel made by a spoon, too!
It also keeps your ship pressurized in case of a leak.
It also keeps your ship pressurized in case of a leak.
The only problem is that, as far as I can tell, the bottle doesn't shoot out oxygen, it just lets someone breathe from it.
(thus would be awesome for a space suit)
The air is preserved. And you just draw standard breathable air from it. Meaning it has oxygen and is at atmospheric pressure.
In fact, if you let your ship leak air, the subsequent lower pressure in your ship will draw air from the bottle by itself. Enough bottles, and you'll refresh the air in your ship automatically.
Can I get a recap in layman's terms of thie Weird Radar and quantum singularity thingy and. oh, everything since Operation Moon Drop?
As I understand it, you use a Weird (MM2) which has the Prescience ability, allowing it to cast a variety of divination spells as a free action. This means it can ask anything about everything all at the same time, within the confines of the spell. You use your magic to ask if you could teleport a grain of sand to a specific location, and then one right next to that, etc. until you map out the exact location of what you are looking for, it's shape, everything aboard, etc. with very high resolution.
It can beat any means of defense yet thought up.
On the same note, can someone explain the STAR drive? I can't make heads or tails out of it, but it seems neat.
Recap (without the explanation):
Portable holes bend space, by folding portable holes into each other, you generate a space warp similar to a weirdly shaped black hole.
Haunt Shift it, together with some math-fu in placing Reverse Gravity fields and Ring Gates, together with lots and lots of quintessence.
This gives you a controllable singularity drive. Which can also do things like shoot tractor beams and repulsor fields and various nasty gravitational weapons.
FTL is also possible. You can shuffle the universe around your ship at faster than light speed. Suffice it to say, it's complicated and involves math I don't understand.
STAR drive abuses an invulnerable spring and the way Ring Gates violate conservation of momentum. You can make force appear out of nowhere. An arbitrary amount of force.
Motion Amplifier is a modification to engines that forces the "load" to move at the same speed as the "engine" without the engine having to pull it.
Weird Radar is using unlimited "ask a question" style divination spells to be able to get answers to any question. Including things about divination-immune objects by using indirect questions.
There was some problems with asking abstract questions that could violate information theory, or not. Argument wasn't concluded.
Grey goo is still incomplete. An interesting line was mentioned in getting Mad Old Lord Yang's fleet of constructors build themselves. Not sure how to do that.
What was grey goo supposed to do again?
In short, combining all the tricks of this thread gives us a lesser version of The Hearth of Gold.
What was grey goo supposed to do again?
Infinitely replicating nano-machines, using M.O.L.Y and Aid Another abuse IIRC.
The ones that require orders of magnitude more work than Mad Old Lord Yang can get his hands on in a reasonable time.
Maybe an unlimited use Wish item that wishes for 25000 GP worth of dyson sphere every 6 seconds? (although infinite wishes is a little cheesy)
Anyone knowing anything about magewrights? I haven't heard of them.
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A secondary problem is that the solar system doesn't contain enough mass to build the dyson swarm/sphere. We're short a few Jupiters' worth.
I'm thinking lots of decanters and some transmutation device. Along the lines of:
rock-> crush stone to sand -> mix with water to get mud -> transmute mud to rock -> repeat
wall of iron doesn't cut it, sorry. Perhaps if we found a way to grey goo create wall of iron traps.
It doesn't replicate itself though... although (ding! little lightbulb appears over my head) you can PaO into creatures, yes? so you turn drops of water into tiny little crafter nanites that all aid another one master crafter, and the rate of crafting goes up nonlinearily if you use quick crafting.
As far as I can see, the major problem is that the little crafters don't make more crafters, they only build what you want them to. So you have the first construct with the water PaO stuff into fine animated objects, or whatever (probable with craft bonus+0) that help build other stuff.
Limiting factor: only makes one nanite/round max.
EDIT: is there any way to get these guys to make magic items?
BUMP.
We can make our platforms out of anything whatsoever with the epic feat Ignore Material Components, using Fabricate.
There are ways to generate lots of mass. Decanter + PAO, Eschew Materials + Fabricate (or the more powerful version, Dweomerkeeper (Su) Fabricate =)
Too bad they're all arithmetic. We need an exponentially increasing way to make mass. I was thinking something like this:
X uses eschewed fabricate to make some materials
X enchants/animates the materials to make a second X
rinse and repeat, then use those Xs as the mass required to build the Dyson Sphere.
Too bad I haven't found a way to do that short of Origin of Species epic spell.
We just need a way to crank our caster level up to the point we can Fabricate the whole thing directly, then use Limited Wish to emulate it so we don't spend milennia casting the spell. Anyone have any insane caster-level cheese we can use?
Short of infinite CL, no. We're looking at CL in the range of scientific notation.
On the order of 10^6, +- 2 orders of magnitude depending on which spell you use.
Specifically, an (Su) Fabricate seems to be the one to try.
Does all of this CL have to come at once, usable in one action? Or can it be done gradually, such as in a timeless plane? If so, Necropolitan Red Wizard Dweomerkeeper, with his Sim's leading their own circles doing the same thing. Given a long enough time frame, they could Fabricate anything (though only the Red Wizard himself could fire off the Su Fabri, and only once per day if you want Great Circle Leader). Add in a second whole contingent from a cohort, and a third from the cohort granted by Mentor.
It doesn't matter how you get it. Just get the sphere built.
But try to keep the time taken to less than a decade... k? ;)
Build your demiplane right and no one needs to know how long it took, and no one can do a bloody thing about it (other than the DM throwing books at you) :P
This may have beeen suggested before, but if you are a psion and high enough level, you could use time regression to go back a round, which doesn't sound all that great, but happens to be really good. Here is how it would break down.
1. Use your method of divining to ask ifinite questions, and do your radar and everything.
2. Use a quickened time regression.
3. You are now a round in the past. The power points you have spent come back (because you have not manifested Time Regression yet.), but not only that (here's the kicker) and you still remember what the divinations told you. Yep. But still, you know all of this, a round before it actually happens. Which means because of your radar, you know exactly where everyone will be 6 second before they go there. Given the immense speed that you can travel, (or if the ship can teleport.) you can most definately exploit this.
Also, you can Time Regression again, and get yourself another 6 seconds to act. In fact, you can go back as far as you want, because each time you do, you regain the power points you spent, because you haven't manifested time regression yet. (or atleast, thats how i think it works.)
Quickening doesn't help us with Time Regression because the radar functions entirely with free actions. What we want is a power stone for Time regression so that we can rewind time however much we want back to the point we obtain it or anywhere in between, whenever we want, because it resets it's own use. This also avoids the experience cost of manifesting TR.
Build your demiplane right and no one needs to know how long it took, and no one can do a bloody thing about it (other than the DM throwing books at you) :P
Approval ratings are very high.
Quickening doesn't help us with Time Regression because the radar functions entirely with free actions. What we want is a power stone for Time regression so that we can rewind time however much we want back to the point we obtain it or anywhere in between, whenever we want, because it resets it's own use. This also avoids the experience cost of manifesting TR.
An excellent option, that I think probably completes the device very elegantly.
Divination - Unlimited Knowledge
Time regression - Unlimited (Reaction) Time
Fast Time Plane - Unlimited Actions
...
Yep, I think that solves just about any problem. Although a more elegant solution to the Dyson sphere would be welcome.
I'll try:
Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural spell... Apply to Limited Wish:
From SRD: When a limited wish spell duplicates a spell with a material component that costs more than 1,000 gp, you must provide that component.
Oh look, that requirement's gone now since there's no material component. Fabricate 10 cu. ft./level worth of material (pick something heavy. Like Iron).
If you can swing Verminord and Hivemind casting, it's possible to reach CL 1000+. Or maybe you just hire a chicken-infested commoner and use Greater Consumptive Field loop. Casting time is 1 standard due to Limited Wish.
I just noticed...building or using the motion amplifier in a gravity well, if not in the center of it, would be a very bad idea, as gravity pulls the inner drive casing and thus the whole device inexorably towards its center. I haven't done calculations, but I think you could easily shove whatever planet you happen to be on horribly out of its orbital path, killing all life from any one of several reasons.
o.O Why didn't I think of that...
Bury the Motion Amplifier below the ground, but not at the center of the earth.
The earth pulls the motion amplifier downwards, which pushes the rock, which pushes the earth...
Wait... the Motion Amplifier transmits it's motion into as much force as necessary to move. IE. the thing will drop towards the ground at 9.81m s-2 and won't stop or slow down for anything at all.
That's... not good. It'll push the earth around at an ever increasing speed, either fragmenting the earth or punching a hole through it, depending on the yeild stress of the rock. I think it's the hole, seeing as the earth is really fricking huge compared to rock...
Nice one. If you could hook up a giant invulnerable plate of quintessenced-iron the size of the earth and put a motion amplifier on it, it really will push the earth around...
Same principle as the Shkadov Thruster, only Motion Amplified...
Say...can that be how to set up a moon-based STAR drive? You build it in space, drop it into the gravity well with a wedge of some sort on the "down" side, and it automatically tunnels itself to the center of the moon, where you then set up your engine room around it. If nothing else, we have a nice, reliable way to punch holes almost exactly halfway through planets or any other large bodies.
Quickening doesn't help us with Time Regression because the radar functions entirely with free actions. What we want is a power stone for Time regression so that we can rewind time however much we want back to the point we obtain it or anywhere in between, whenever we want, because it resets it's own use. This also avoids the experience cost of manifesting TR.
Actually, if you don't mind my fuzzy reading, you might not even have to pay the experience cost, because the round in which you manifested the spell would be in the future. It's hard to think about, you cast the spell, you pay the experience, go back a round; but since you are back in time a bit, you haven't payed the experience yet....unless something specifically says you cant do this of course.
It does indeed specify that you pay the experience cost even though you reset the round. It's sort of like using the "undo misfortune" function of Wish.
Aw man, sorry. I haven't read the power in a while, I had forgotten. We can find some way to get around the problem though, this IS the CO boards afterall....
The way to get around it is to use a power stone as described earlier. Being the psionic equivalent to a scroll, the experience cost is waived, and our mastery of time is second only to Monty and Pun Pun.
I believe I have found a way to construct the Motion Amplifier while within the gravity well of a planet without it inadvertantly burrowing to the planet's core. Simply build it over a Reverse Gravity "net" that will hold it in place.
Then, once the Amplifier is complete, you just have to make sure your engine compensates for gravity whenever you move near a planet.