Bay 12 Games Forum

Chiefwaffles, I like your F44 design, but there's something preventing me from voting for it: the linkgems. It's a new kind of technology and one being developed for a critical design. I don't care how simple you think it is, it is not worth even the chance of it making the design more difficult. We need as many bonuses as we can get. If you want communication between the two, use a pipe or something.

the potential military applications of a giant exploding thing

Huh. You know, the F43 would make a great base for the ammunition for a supercannon. With the Expense Credit we could make quite a few of them to boot. Something for later.

Glory to Arstotzka.

Looks like a tie between saving the credits and expensing mage gems.  Coin flip in an hour or so.

But it isn't a tie. The vote is 3-1 in favour of using them on magegems.

Gems that are double-charged seem to "wear down" over multiple charging/discharging cycles.

Shouldn't regenerative crystal negate this?

Expense Credit 1
2 - Magegems: Chiefwaffles, Andrea
1 - Save the credit: Andres

Expense Credit 2
3 - Save the credit: Chiefwaffles, Andrea, Andres

Orders
4 - Do not reveal the F43 in the next battle report: Andres, Helmacon, Kadzar, Chiefwaffles

This was not a failure. This was an advanced prototype, a proof of concept more of anything, a successful proof of concept I might add, as it proved that such a machine can theoretically work. That said, Moskurg may see this wrongly for the failure that it wasn't and have increased morale as a result. Therefore, I will propose keeping the results of this experiment a secret.

ORDERS

1 - Do not reveal the F43 in the next battle report: Andres

Glory to Arstotzka.

I wouldn't say they're as exposed as you're making them out to be. They may not solve our current problems, but the F43 will either do nothing from a lack of cannons or break by presence of them. If you wanted me to vote for it, you should've advocated for more groundwork techs instead of the Protector so that an aircraft would be a more viable option.

I'm going to keep on harping on about how the Protector sucks and how much of a mistake it was to design it until it stops being relevant.

Glory to Arstotzka.

andrea, if you fully add in an aethergem into your design, I will vote for it. Incidentally, it is imperative that you realise that we have AAA aethergems, which are Cheap and charge just as quickly as A aethergems. Aethergems would be very valuable to a flightpack design.

Glory to Arstotzka.

Chiefwaffles, get rid of the HAC-1. A cannon isn't a good weapon for aircraft to begin with. The weapon will also increase weight, take up space, and result in a more complex design. The thing's a bloody aircraft, so it's going to have maluses already and I don't want another Protector because you wanted to squeeze in something that would make the design the worse. Get rid of it so that we can have a very good scout/light bomber.

Glory to Arstotzka.

EDIT: And turn the bomb bay into hard points so that something which negatively affects flight doesn't have to be so necessarily great. Maybe also include additional aethergems instead of bombs to give it increased flight time.

Aerial mobility unit
Blastballs allow us to increase the range of our shells, but a single big explosion has proved to not be the most efficient way to deal with the problem. Rather, they would work far better with a continuous rather than impulsive effect. Therefore much like the wall of flame or channeled fog we modify our traditional blastball to achieve a constant force applied on the point of summoning.
The first application of this new spell is in an add-on to our combat armor: a Crystal box positioned in the back of the combat suit, in the shape of a backpack. This box contains mostly A or AA magegems (as our designers see fit. Target cost is VE) and circuits that summon the continued blast spell on concave plates on the sides  of the soldiers, near his Center of Mass. Those plates, are on a swivel mount and while normally they are blocked in position, the soldier can unlock them and move them to gain limited control during powered flights. This device will allow unprecedented mobility to our troops: jumping higher than a building, charging faster than a speeding bullets, impacting the enemies stronger than a locomotive ( and surprisingly, we actually can make the last 2 comparisons in this modern age). An AAA battery powers a small light in the visor , signaling the charge level of the aerial mobility unit (AMU). Provisions are made for adding an aethergem or at least linking to one externally through circuits, should such devices become cheap enough in the future.


Here, soldiers can fly, but at useful ranges without being killed by cannon.

This design is heavily flawed. Worst about it is its lack of aethergems, which should've been an obvious inclusion but is noticeably absent. I mean come on, it requires a constant influx of energy. That's the perfect application for aethergems.

Design: AS-AMA43
Aerial Mobility Armour

This is a new kind of combat armour. On its back is a small box-like contraption that, despite its appearance, most closely resembles a wand in nature as far as its effect goes.  The box thing is a KPD - a Kinetic Propulsion Drive. It is a Blastball-derived propulsion system filled with circuitry that takes some knowledge from our Firewall. Instead of producing a single brief, large, omnidirectional push as with a regular blastball, it instead produces a constant monodirectional push.

IDEs rely on an omnidirectional blast moving pistons which then move machines. The KPD relies on a monodirectional blast which moves machines. By removing a middleman and focusing energy in the one relevant direction it needs to go in, speed and energy efficiency will be MUCH higher than with IDEs, the difference possibly being even greater than that between IDEs and steam engines.

Circuitry lining the interior of the armour produces "hard points" which anchor the effect of the KPD. In effect, this should mean we don't have to design a complex set of circuitry for the KPD to produce its pushes in free air. It's like if the KPD was a pencil and its flight production was the act of drawing a circle. The hard points mean it can simply trace a circle, rather than have to draw the circle freely with no aids. This inclusion should decrease design complexity and is enabled by our experience with circuitry.

The AMA43 is powered by AAA athergems, with Cheap, Expensive, and Very Expensive variants available, each having longer flight durations than the last. They also come with magegems to store energy when flight is not being produced and to provide an emergency source of energy in case the aethergems run dry.

Glory to Arstotzka.