The Gaming Den

If the stones need to be a special shape to work, can we make that shape a little more inspired than a one meter cube?

violence in the media wrote:I thought we had established that these things weren't subject to random flipping? You know, in case we have all the guys with beards on one side of the boat or something.

I thought we'd established that for islands, which have lots of stones spread across their base (per Frank). If skyships are using a single stone, they might need to hang below it.

Why would you build underneath the brick, as opposed to atop it?

Because when the weight of the cargo is underneath the fixed points push to one side or the other is forced against gravity rotationally. But if you put the weight above the fixed points the lateral force pushes it down. Thus regular old gravity helps to stabilize you when the ship is held by chains to a point below the stones but would help destabilize the cargo if the ship was balanced above the stones.

Martin wrote:I think the plan was that you park up on a hill a few kilometers from the castle, where you have line of sight to the castle. You have a skymage with you, because you're the skymage army. Then the skymage sets the "rest point" of the floatstone to be the middle of the castle.

If you could do that, you wouldn't need skymages on the skyships. You could just set their point to their destination or thereabouts and let them go. I really don't see how that would be expected to work if moving the focus point is something that requires the skymage to be on hand.

Martin wrote:Alternatively, you go above a city in your skyship, place a chunk of stone on the bomb bay doors, and then set its rest point to be the center of the earth. Boom.

Seems like you're over thinking that one. How about you just carry regular stones and drop them out of the bomb bay doors. I mean yeah, it's not like dropping guided missiles or even iron bombs - but it can be pretty scary (if time consuming and inaccurate).

-Username17

Edit: better way of asking...

FrankTrollman wrote:If you could do that, you wouldn't need skymages on the skyships. You could just set their point to their destination or thereabouts and let them go.

... ok, so why can't you do that?

FrankTrollman wrote:

Why would you build underneath the brick, as opposed to atop it?

Because when the weight of the cargo is underneath the fixed points push to one side or the other is forced against gravity rotationally. But if you put the weight above the fixed points the lateral force pushes it down. Thus regular old gravity helps to stabilize you when the ship is held by chains to a point below the stones but would help destabilize the cargo if the ship was balanced above the stones.

Are the float stones limited to simple geometric chapes? Can you drill into them and bolt things on? If you have two flost stones (like in your image) can one skymage direct both of them in unison? How much tonnage can a float stone support? Are you going to have the airship version of the HMS Victory? Or will these be more like the Hindenberg? Would it be possible to make a float stone sphere with port holes and access points that you button up in case of attack? You could be a big floating sphere at that point and not care where you put your cargo.

Max Weight: A float-stone can support it's own mass, as well as an equal amount of mass before its position in space is affected.

Overloading:The more excess mass, the faster the float-stone will be affected. Every percentage point over its mass makes the float-stone sink at an equal percentage of the current rate of gravity.

Example: A 10 tonne float-stone carrying a 15 tonne load will fall at a rate of 50% of the rate of current gravity.

Falling:If a float-stone is carrying twice its own mass it (and its load) will fall as if gravity was working normally.

Affecting a Falling Float-Stone: An over-loaded float stone cannot be stopped nor slowed from falling by any means save reducing the load on the float-stone. A sky-mage can at best direct the movement of an over-loaded Float-Stone.

Falling and the Ground: The ground under a grounded Float-Stone will act as it normally would when subject to a mass equal to the overload affecting the Float-Stone.

Example: The above 10 tonne stone with a 15 tonne weight would only apply 5 tonnes of force on the ground. So, dry earth would be slightly impacted by 5 tonnes moving at 50% the acceleration of gravity; mud, more so. A liquid body of water would not, it's bottom/floor might, if it's solid enough.

So, that Escaflowne 'airship' could probably carry a lot more weight; but it has two float-stones in case they get damaged or one is blown off. Allowing the airship to remain afloat even if it loses a catastrophic amount of its current flotation support.

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How does that work?

Edited, Added how the ground you know, acts like the ground.

Judging__Eagle wrote:How does that work?

Some problems with centrifugal force - floating islands near the equator spin off into space. Unclear interaction with additional forces that may be applied to floating islands (eg, people jumping, things landing, etc). Unclear interaction with horizontal forces, if we want floating stones to have a preferred horizontal location as well as a vertical location.

Also, this is fun:

Judging__Eagle wrote:An over-loaded float stone cannot be stopped nor slowed from falling by any means save reducing the load on the float-stone.

That means that an over-loaded float stone will burrow to the center of the earth.

Martin wrote:... ok, so why can't you do that?

The structural reason is because then the sky mages would just be programming routes into automated sky ships and wouldn't be hauling them around like Hydrophobes. The in-game physics answer is because moving them is a continuous process rather than a programmable one. You don't just declare a point and then go to sleep while it goes there, you concentrate to drag it along.

This is probably the same reason you can't do the "snap back" effect to carry one into a building like a pendulum catapult - if it gets pulled too far out of alignment it just falls. So you'd have to incrementally move the focal point ahead of it - like how a magnetic train has to continually put the point of attraction right in front of the moving train rather than just putting an attraction point at the end of the line and letting it take care of itself.

vitm wrote:Would it be possible to make a float stone sphere with port holes and access points that you button up in case of attack?

Assuming for the moment that Judging Eagle's setup is about right, I can't see any reason to do that. A one meter cube is many tonnes, and a human being is about .07 tonnes. So the amount of cargo you could carry with stone is much more by mass than it is by volume if you tried to put your stuff inside. The stone can support a ship - or even a fort - that is substantially larger than it is - because most things worth carrying are lighter than stone and just about everything worth carrying has empty space in it.

-Username17

Hmm, I've actually got a Frensel Lens at home. It's made of plastic, is rectangular and fits inside the 1990's edition of National Geographic's Atlas that my family owns. It's pretty awesome, the atlas contains its own magnifier.

I'm guessing that yes, you could hollow out a Float-Stone. However, you lose lift power, and it's probably easier to build on top of a giant flat surface than it is to hollow one out.

Also, Float Stones could very well be hundreds, of not thousands of flat paving stones cemented in overlapping layers to create sheets of floating surface area (or to make bridges between floating boulders and the structures that they rest on), with more massive blocks placed underneath heavier structures in a floating island's surface.

You could also have each building on it's own float-stone boulder, and be linked to other buildings via bridges of thin float-stone. Creating a different take on "sky-trash" and their "mobile-homes."

I know that 'hicks in the sky' isn't what people want, but it is sort of funny. It would also explain why most of these places don't move. The residents have become backwards and lost the knowledge on how to move their home's float-boulder. Making Sky-Mages highly sought after, or at least useful when someone wants to find some new neighbors.

Does/should floatstone require an external input of energy (even something as generic as magical energy) to stay afloat? If I anchor my skyship while flying and leave, will it still be floating if I come back to it an arbitrary time later? There's logistical implications for either case such as can PCs find skyruins or the upkeep when they finally get their hands on a skyship.

I think that they should require external input, but the amount of input required is heavily dependent on the floatstone's size. The larger the floatstone the less energy you need relative to the size of the floatstone. That way, you can have floating surfboards but they're expensive and people want to make large flying cities and ships. This energy input could be easy (skymages know a recharge ritual that they cast when needed) or requires some sort of phlebotinum.

Oh, no, a float-stone stays in place.

You can make one move with sky-mage powahs! overloading it, or applying enough physical force to move the total mass of the float-stone and it's current load.

So, you'd need to apply at least 10.0000000... 01 tonnes of force to move a 10 tonne float-stone that is completely unladen sideways.

Stone Surfboards.... are made when people start quarrying existing float-stones and cementing the remaining bits together? Only someone with sky-mage training can possibly use such a thing.

However, this makes Magneto-style suits possible. Wait, they'd have to be pretty bulky though, and awkward. A stone back-pack with a full-body harness could work; or a stone-throne. I actually like the idea of a stone throne. It screams bad-ass if you see a dude sitting on a throne that floats off of the ground, and can actually fly.

Young sky-mage punks on flying boards, and venerable sky-mage lords on floating thrones also sounds kind of good. You can't go too fast on either, since you don't have any sort of belt keeping you in place when you suddenly have to stop or turn though.

Sorry for being unclear, I was imagining an airborne submarine or bathysphere. Maybe with float-stones magically shaped into the skeleton of the ship and then armor plating it. Something where you internalize or incorporate the float stone itself into the structure of the vessel.

I guess the chain gondola idea just strikes me as very precarious.

I think that the required input should at least go to zero for large objects so that there can be sky ruins. But also because I think a fairly important point of Redarkhan is that they don't have enough sky mages to actually attune all the stone in their major cities and move them around anymore.

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Anyway, Redarkhan is an interesting test point for the War Score.

See, in ages past a Sky City was essentially unconquerable except by Atayalan Weather Magic. And the reason for this is because their food and supplies come from a number of separate small villages that aren't connected by roads.

So what would happen is that you would march your bronze age army into one of the villages (gaining a victory and occupying some land), and the sky city would tell you to fuck off because you weren't occupying enough land to make food scarce in the city above. So then you'd either:

• Divide the army to send some to march into another village, in which case they'd wait until you divided enough that they could crush your army piecemeal.
• Keep your army together, and march it off into another village on the other side of the jungle. In which case, they'd just reassert control of the village you left by continuing to send tax collection down to it as if nothing happened and continue to laugh at your demands because your occupation of village 2 is just as meaningless as your occupation of village 1.

But the consolidation happened because sky cities were at once no longer beholden to an Atayalan over-emperor and also now capable of fielding armies large enough to simultaneously occupy enough villages to starve out another sky city.

The key I think is that the War Score has to represent the fact that taking a fast unit and marching it through enemy territory does not by itself represent the actual conquest of anything.

-Username17

I think that the required input should at least go to zero for large objects so that there can be sky ruins. But also because I think a fairly important point of Redarkhan is that they don't have enough sky mages to actually attune all the stone in their major cities and move them around anymore.

I didn't actually get what the first sentence meant at first. You don't need to put in any outside energy to keep a float-stone floating at its current height. I'm all for such a setup. "Stuck" floating islands is fine as well.

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And since Iron is so much more common (and also, a lot stronger and tougher than bronze or brass is), you can field an iron-using army that is large enough to be a real threat. That's why iron-users are so feared. Right?

Gluing little bits of stone together to make a larger piece is, IMO, the wrong aesthetic. If you limit the number of stones a skymage can control, it also avoids another entry into the 'magneto suit problem' that Frank was talking about earlier.

FrankTrollman wrote:So what would happen is that you would march your bronze age army into one of the villages (gaining a victory and occupying some land), and the sky city would tell you to fuck off because you weren't occupying enough land to make food scarce in the city above. So then you'd either:

• Divide the army to send some to march into another village, in which case they'd wait until you divided enough that they could crush your army piecemeal.
• Keep your army together, and march it off into another village on the other side of the jungle. In which case, they'd just reassert control of the village you left by continuing to send tax collection down to it as if nothing happened and continue to laugh at your demands because your occupation of village 2 is just as meaningless as your occupation of village 1.

What about the option where you forage everything of value in that village and move on to the next one with your whole force? That seems like it could force a confrontation, because the tax collectors from the sky show up to find nothing to tax.

What about the option where you forage everything of value in that village and move on to the next one with your whole force? That seems like it could force a confrontation, because the tax collectors from the sky show up to find nothing to tax.

You'd have to go very quickly for that to make a significant dent. And that probably never came up in the age of bronze, what with the villages themselves being separated by literally trackless jungles.

What would work would be to march into a village, kill everyone, and then move on. But while that would accumulate real and lasting damage to the target sky city - it's the kind of thing that civilized people "just don't do."

I think at many many levels the game should encourage you to not murder baby orcs. Putting villages to the pyre should come with definable penalties such that players don't want to do it and can feel justifiably indignant at people who do.

-Username17

Cool. I've made a start on a culture writeup for a people who did that sort of thing and got smacked down hard for it. I'll post it when it's done, maybe their thwacking can be a cautionary tale that still reverberates.

To summarize...
* Stones require an involved ritual to 'imbue'
* No stone may be smaller than a meter in any one dimension (so a 1m long surfboard is allowed)

* Once imbued, the initial anchor point is at the stone's center of mass
* Displacement from this anchor point exerts a spring force (exponential?) towards the stone's center of mass (proportional to the stone's mass)
* The weight of the stone itself is rendered zero

* Stones with a minimum of 1m in every dimension do not require active maintenance for their anchor point
* Sufficient displacement from the anchor point disrupts the magic
* Alteration of the anchor point requires close proximity and concentration along a continuous path
* Speed of anchor alteration determines maximum speed due to inertia and possible over-displacement

You need rules for modifying the anchor point. I'm assuming that it is not another involved ritual.

virgileso wrote:Once imbued, an anchor point is chosen within the volume of the object (can include the edge)

This makes it impossible to ascend using floatstones.

virgileso wrote:The weight of the stone itself is rendered zero

This isn't actually needed, but it doesn't hurt.

I'd like to point out that Frank and JE have suggested radically different models for the physical restoring force. JE apparently wants a constant restoring force (which makes it easy to calculate exactly how much weight a floatstone will support) while Frank suggested a quadratic one, where the amount of weight it can carry is a question of how much displacement you're willing to tolerate.

Frank also suggested that if you get the stone too far from the anchor, it breaks the link, and the thing just falls. So I guess this would be like stretching a rubber band: as you pull on it, it pulls back harder and harder the farther you pull, until at some arbitrary point it just snaps. Or, if you want to get even more fancy and extend the physical metaphor, you could have a small range of inelastic stretching just before the breaking point, where you permanently "stretch the rubber," so to speak, so that if you let go, the stone won't come to rest at the original anchor point, but a little more towards the direction you were dragging.

But Frank also made a metaphor to a magnetic rail line, where you have to move the attractive point gradually, rather than just setting it at the destination. That's kind of an odd choice of metaphor, because the reason you can't set the magnetic attraction point at the destination is because it exerts a force that is reduced with the square distance, rather than increased. Which is different from both of the previously suggested physical models, and would have very different implications.

I suppose you could have a force that grows quadratically up to some maximum and then falls off quadratically after that, but that's getting kind of complicated and arbitrary...

If you want the restorative force to work like a spring, then if someone wants to move quickly, they always set the anchor point as far away as they can; therefore, you need to have some clear limit as to how far it can be set (possibly varying somewhat based on the level of the sky mage). And that limit should probably be somewhere between "comparable to a long-range attack spell" and "touch." (Touch would require some very interesting skyship designs, since the skymage will need to stand on a platform out in front of and above the floatstone.) Making the maximum distance you can be from the anchor point smaller than the maximum distance you can be from the floatstone would also make these kind of dangerous to try to use as weapons, since any opponent close enough to target is also close enough to manipulate your floatstone (given the requisite magic).

FrankTrollman wrote: What would work would be to march into a village, kill everyone, and then move on. But while that would accumulate real and lasting damage to the target sky city - it's the kind of thing that civilized people "just don't do."

I think at many many levels the game should encourage you to not murder baby orcs. Putting villages to the pyre should come with definable penalties such that players don't want to do it and can feel justifiably indignant at people who do.

-Username17

It might be a good idea to figure out a detailed array of things strongly discouraged by "civilized" factions. I get the feeling that a number of political players could get quite creative with their justifications/actions otherwise.

For example:
We know that butchering innocent villagers is right out. What about destroying valuable farmland? If someone attacked a Redarkhan village and left the noncombatants alive, but burned the fields and salted the earth to the point where it was barely suitable for subsistence farming, they could do damage to the food supply. It would take time and work for the villagers to prepare new farmland out of the nearby jungle.

MartinHarper wrote:This makes it impossible to ascend using floatstones.

Because the center of mass of an object is not tangential to the top surface of an object, you can set the anchor point to said tangential surface and have it rise quite easily.

I'll add the anchor modification rule.

Yeah, we're going for different models right now.

I'm not really keen on "anchor points" existing in some point in space, mostly b/c I don't see it based on word description alone, and that's not good.

I'd rather have the entire stone block stay in place until a force is acting on it. However, since the Float-Stones themselves don't have weight, once you stop pushing they stay put. In other words, they have no inertia in and of themselves [edit: this is... fuzzy for me just now, no inertia ever would mean that something not only can be moved, but stops moving once a force stops acting on it). ... I think I mean no gravitic inertia]

Which gives me an interesting idea. Maybe these objects are a type of inertial damper that can stop an amount of inertia equal to their own 'normal' inertia when untreated/unritualed.

So, pushing them up, down left or right would require a force greater than that needed to push the Float-Stones (plus/minus any carried weight depending which way you push).

On size constraints; you need at least one surface that is a metre across, to draw/paint/ink/carve/inlay the longest line of the symbols that are used to defeat gravity.

Most of these symbols include: lighting, rutabaga, purple, rhino, lobotomy, water barrel; you know, the sort of word combination that reduce the gravity of an area.

No inertia actually means that it has infinite acceleration in all directions.

Although I do really like the rubber band analogy. You can move the rocks by pushing where the other end of the rubber band is and dragging the rock behind it. But if you move the other end too far before the rock has caught up, the band will snap.

-Username17

I think JE's idea was actually that they obey only half of the law of inertia: they remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, but if currently moving, they naturally come to a stop of their own accord if no force acts to keep them in motion.

Which would probably be better modeled by saying that they have a high coefficient of friction against the aether or something, but I think that was the concept.