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[Kadzar]

I would vote for missiles if they had a built-in Lucky Strike targeting system.



And, while I like the idea of the Oracle, and do believe we could achieve it in the near future, it requires enough new components to work right in order to function that I worry about pulling off a successful product.

But the thing that has me more worried is the targeting system. Even with telescopic lenses and no cloud cover or other atmospheric interference, I don't think we have the capacity to hit even a city-sized target from orbital range, which would be the minimum targeting precision we'd need to have a viable weapon.

But, even if the Oracle manages to work exactly as intended, it still won't be of much help since it does nothing to help protect our territories.
Even if we could target Zephyrs with it, or if we turned it on the Moskurg capitol, Moskurg already has a foothold in our home territory, and,
 if we don't develop something to take down Skyskiffs, they are going to take more ground each turn:

Their Lightning gives them a foothold in the air, but until their ability to actually dogfight is addressed they'll continue to be beaten back at every turn.

So even if we can manage to take a foothold in the Desert this turn, they'll have control of half the taiga at the same time. And, if they develop atmospheric counters to the Oracle, we'll need to develop something to defend against their continued assault, or if they decide not to bother, they can just pour more effort into the assault until there's nothing we can do to stop them.

The reason developing flying carpets was good for Moskurg wasn't just that it brought a "new realm of warfare", but that it gave them a very good defense while allowing them to target all of our most damaging-dealing assets. Whereas the Oracle would have pretty much perfect defense (for now), but only be able to target their least-damaging assets. The Oracle will have a use eventually, but it's not what we need right now.

[RAM]

Light Beam
Much as we would like to claim our brilliance in this matter, it really was more of an accident. One of our researchers was attempting to increase the range of a flare spell by granting it an inherent inclination to move, as opposed to relying solely upon its initial impetus to travel from its origin. Instead of a flare that wanted to move, they produced a flare whose entire volume consisted of light aligned in a single direction. It took quite a bit of testing to figure that out, but the spontaneous illumination of a small spot on the far wall was rather obvious in hindsight. Seeing that blinding flares can be effective as a weapon, we decided to see if this new light was harmful. The results were odd. At the initial testing it seemed no more damaging then a flare, though much more focused. This later turned out to be untrue due to a phenomena that will be discussed later, but it is not a highly impactful weapon unless it hits the eyes. At greater forces it inflicts a significant abrasive effect. When e started hooking it up to large magic sources in a controlled environment, it started punching holes in things, but it seemed to primarily result in heat, which is unfortunate...

A different effect was noted however. This effect we are preliminarily referring to as "chaos" as it seems to inherently degrade, well, anything, but mostly light materials and complex structures, it seems that the power required to degrade an object rises with its heft, but it also seems that the effect can travel through light materials to damage something that is visibly obscured. We have instituted lead-lining to the research facility and this seems to have prevented most accidents... Flesh rapidly burns without heat, as though it had been out in the sun too long, but far more rapid, and the pace rises with input energy. We feel that this "chaos" is directly inimical to existence, and, should we be able to refine this beam into pure chaos, it should be largely impossible to stop.

Oddly, the range seems to increase and the ratio of heat to chaos seems to reduce as it becomes less visible. Such attunement will have to wait, however, as we will be refining the device to work in place of our short-range anti-air weaponry that has been having difficulty hitting the enemy's faster vehicles. We expect this to be effective as the effect travels instantaneously.
A visible to high ulltraviolet laser. Taking advantage of magic to have 100% of the energy converted into the beam with none of the usual heat issues, and also to remove the pesky difficulties with focusing equipment. We should be able to freely tweak it to any frequency that we like...

[Chiefwaffles]

We don't need need to design something new to take down their fighters. We already know what the problem with the Lightning is - a powered turret.

We can just revise a super-low-power version of the KPD4 into the turret to allow for quick and easy turning.



The Oracle right now is defense through offense. If Moskurg's infrastructure and bases and camps and etc. are all being torn apart, they won't be able to advance.
Yes, they can develop cloud cover to avoid it. And they probably will. But hey can't his turn. And while they do that we can develop magic-based guidance (e.g. Lucky strike) that'll help the Oracle and our
Other forces while pre-emptively countering something like cloud cover.

[RAM]

They do not need to develop cloud-cover, they already have it, it is just a matter of whether they can and would use it on their rear lines. I am pretty sure that they have been flying through storms for ages now, so it is not as though cloud-cover has any disadvantage to them, it is just whether the storms that they have been maintaining constantly over the front-lines also stretch to the back-lines or if they need to do something to make that happen.

We also do not know if logistics are modelled closely enough that attacking them could change the outcome of a battle. We would be dropping thousands of very inaccurate shells on hundreds of thousands of targets that are either mobile or can at least be repositioned. Assuming that it worked at all. It is a nice idea, but it lacks stopping-power and in my personal evaluation it is beyond the scope of our current abilities(at least three new high-performance elements, two of which we have almost no experience of.). We could work towards it. Get magic scopes, maybe convert Lucky Strike into "show me what we will hit if I don't take my finger off of the button" which could be applied to our current cannons. We could add an atmospheric circuit to a protector redesign. If it fails, then we still have a protector redesign instead of a spaceship that can't go into space. Get weightite summoning so that we have better ground ammunition and also something that can be summoned effectively as a mass bombardment. Get a force flm that operates without exhaust and instead just applies a direction, ideally with a choice of relative or absolute directions, to an object and causes it to move without actually applying an opposing force. We could even go for an inertia-pacification zone to ignore acceleration. Actually, inertia pacification, if it removed the inertia of the bullet when being fired from a cannon... nut then it would... Hmrn... It would be propelled by pressure rather than inertia... but would the cannon survive purely from its structural integrity if it effectively had no mass... And would the inertia pacification stop the bullet from having different inertia to its surroundings...

I really really really don't see that the atmosphere is viable, but if it is, if we can truly stretch our fireball experience that far, then how about this as a stop-gap measure to remove their fast fliers and heavy armour.
Pursuing Pressure Pebble.
Given our complete mastery of fireballs, and the fact that they produce mass, it should be is ridiculously easy to make any modifications that we care to. A homing fireball should be is a non-issue. They already move in a specific direction, makign them move much much faster is definitely easy, getting them to move in a different specific direction mid-flight should be is easy, and even if that wasn't enough, we now have lucky strike to intercept enemies, so a fireball that homes in on enemies is easy... They can cover a whole squad of 100, which ought o be spread out a little over a front, let's say 4 ranks deep, so 25 wide, with space between them for spear formations, so... 25 metre radius. reducing that to ten centimetres should multiply the pressure created by a normal fireball by... over ten million? Enough to crush adamantium into unrecognisable paste. And we have loads of experience with antimagic, not that it was ever a problem for fireballs once cast, and we will make a circuit of it... So we can, with the same amount of magic as a normal fireball that our apprentices can cast, create a high-speed homing projectile that will utterly destroy a ten-centimetre sphere of whatever it hits, and it will definitely hit.

Vacuum traps
Our temperature circuits maintain a constant temperature. As everyone knows, temperature affects pressure, a cold region will have higher density than a warm region. We have mastered circuits and temperature magic and mathemagics, so it is no challenge at all to adjust these circuits in any way we like. In truth, since they already influence pressure, this application will definitely be a non-issue.

The theory is simple. We use mathemagics on our existing pressure-changing circuits to refine them to a zero value, the complete absence of pressure. Since pressure is produced by the density of mass, this means that mass cannot exist within the circle. So, once actuvated, the circuit will immediately dematerialise the air within it. This will pull in the surrounding air and dematerialise that too, creating a downward vortex of air akin to making a hole in the bottom of a bucket of water. This will draw in any nearby aircraft and, once they enter the area projected by the circuit, have their pressure, and thus existence, removed... We just set these up in front of our ground lines and wait for the enemy to get lose. Turn them on, wait for the carnage to subside, turn them off, and release our air forces to destroy the stragglers. We can also have scout parties draw up such formations under the enemy's artillery if they fail to watch the ground, which is pretty likely considering that they don't have any windows on the bottom and are not close enough to the ground to tell the difference between a horse and a cow...

[Chiefwaffles]

Nothing's modelled, actually. Wands Race hasn't been using an actual program/etc. for battle outcomes for a while now. Evicted judges how each design benefits its side then chooses the side with the greatest sum of benefits. Sort of.
So if we start destroying their castles, forts, bases, camps, etc. etc., that's going to have a huge impact and will show up.


The thing about cloud cover is that Moskurg just doesn't have a way to create clouds and only clouds over a set area. Yes, a large part of their spells likely create a cloud cover as a side effect, but as a side effect. Their designs just won't be meant to disrupt orbital strikes. So this would fall under "using a spell for an unintended purpose," which is exactly what an Order, which must be given after the fact and rolled for, would be used for.

I mean, yeah. Moskurg would probably get something like a +6 if they revised a Cloud Cover spell. But my point is that they wouldn't have this beforehand, and by the time they do deploy it if they make it, we should have much better guidance (Lucky Strike, Lucky Strike-powered Guidance, Mindgem/Living, etc.) for all our weapons.


EDIT: Here's my powered turret revision. I think this (or something that accomplishes the same goals) should be a huge priority in revisions given how much of a problem the combat report made out non-tracking turrets to be.

(Near-)Future Revision: Lightning Powered Turret

We simply put an extremely downscaled KPD4 on the lightning turret and have it be accessed by controls inside the turret. The KPD4, being so downscaled, will be useless for actual movement, but will be able to very easily and very quickly rotate the turret with little to no power consumption. It's connected to the Reactor via the same wire as the actual turret gun, but the power draw should be negligible.

With this in place, we give the gunner a nice "comfy" buckled seat to sit in next to the controls and turret gun. Hopefully, the turret should experience great improvements in tracking capabilities.

[milo christiansen]

Pardon the observer here, but is that "Moskurg gets an espionage credit" bit in the turn reports an error, or did I miss something?

[RAM]

No, it is Evicted saying that we need to get along more. I felt that things were pretty civil at the end there, but there is no point whining over it.

[evictedSaint]

Seems like the Oracle Variant B is winning.  Design in a blah blah blah.

[Light forger]

Oh this is back up... (looks at oracle and screams internally)

So lets go through a few of the issues with the idea of a KKV with our tech.

• Pressurization: There is a very good chance we can't seal the vehicle well enough to keep the atmosphere inside which means the crew passes out at around 16,000ft(depending on where we are in relation to the equator).
• Oxygen: Not only is their no mention of creating oxygen to make up for what we would using but, also we would need to remove the co2 from the air. I don't see how our current regulation circuits do that.
• Targeting: So this is the big one in the since we are trying to complete a equation while both missing key variables and the other variables being guesswork. First off we have no way to gauge of the speed of the craft once we are in orbit. In addition we have no way to gauge how far the craft is from the planet. In addition seeing anything from orbit is really really hard and I doubt our very first telescope will have anywhere near the zoom level.
• Also their is a above average chance that our crystal could shatter or melt when coming through the atmosphere their is a reason tungsten is used for KKV's.
• Even if it does work the mission time is likely going to be fairly low it could take half a day going up and maybe a quarter coming back down combining with limited room for both food/water and, waste in conjunction with orbital mechanics the amount of time this thing can be useful is going to fairly low.
• Also a pure meta reason I kind doubt eS is going to add something this is almost uncountable for the other-side it would be like Moskurg making a giant island wide permanent lighting storm that only harms Arstotzkans

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger

I'm not thrilled with AS PAW46 but, it better then whatever we will end up with from the oracle.

[Chiefwaffles]

Pressurization: There is a very good chance we can't seal the vehicle well enough to keep the atmosphere inside which means the crew passes out at around 16,000ft(depending on where we are in relation to the equator).

This is an easy one.

Crystal. It's better than steel (and we can lift it) and it's effectively 3D printed. It should be easier for us to create a sealed vehicle than it is for modern-day engineers. Since we can just print the crystal in the right shape.

Oxygen: Not only is their no mention of creating oxygen to make up for what we would using but, also we would need to remove the co2 from the air. I don't see how our current regulation circuits do that.

I think I've touched on this before, but oh well.

The Atmospheric Regulator Circuitry, the ARC, is an important and explicit part of the Oracle. It makes up a significant part of the effort to go into the Oracle and is not just an afterthought. It explicitly keeps the atmosphere inside the craft breathable, and is based off of our mastery of the Fireball, which works via gases.

Yes, this is something new, but it's not an afterthought. It's at least a third of the design efforts. And it's based off of the Fireball. And I don't need to explain how well we know the Fireball.

Targeting: So this is the big one in the since we are trying to complete a equation while both missing key variables and the other variables being guesswork. First off we have no way to gauge of the speed of the craft once we are in orbit. In addition we have no way to gauge how far the craft is from the planet. In addition seeing anything from orbit is really really hard and I doubt our very first telescope will have anywhere near the zoom level

Right. I see a pretty big misconception here that I'd like to clear up for everyone beforehand.
The Oracle isn't actually orbiting around Earth. It's just hovering really high up. Not extremely easy, sure, but it's not like we're trying to invent a modern understanding of orbital mechanics here.

Also their is a above average chance that our crystal could shatter or melt when coming through the atmosphere their is a reason tungsten is used for KKV's.

We have the denser "Weightite" Crystal which also still retains self-regenerating capabilities, so this shouldn't be a noticeable problem if one at all.

Even if it does work the mission time is likely going to be fairly low it could take half a day going up and maybe a quarter coming back down combining with limited room for both food/water and, waste in conjunction with orbital mechanics the amount of time this thing can be useful is going to fairly low.

This is definitely possible, but well worth the potential benefits.

Also a pure meta reason I kind doubt eS is going to add something this is almost uncountable for the other-side it would be like Moskurg making a giant island wide permanent lighting storm that only harms Arstotzkans

If evicted isn't allowing the Oracle at all for meta reasons, then we would know that beforehand. Evicted isn't that cruel.

[RAM]

iN THEORY, WE HAVE MATHEMATICALLY PERFECT CRYSTALS, AND A SCREW-HATCH CAN GET A PRETTY DECENT PROGRESSIVE SEAL, caps lock can be a nuisance, temperature-control is a thing that we can do, so thermal deformation can be mitigated. In practise? Seals are really difficult to get right. We don't have rubbers of any kind and trying to compress crystals is just asking for disaster. If we didn't have mathematically perfect crystals and thermal control, then I would say that it is basically impossible, we could play with leather pads or something, but no. With them? Ehh, I would say that it is an added difficulty and complication, more reason why it is far too much for a single action, but probably theoretically possible. Since it is not actually loading and firing a cannon anymore, it is plausible that the crew cabin could be permanently sealed, so that is a plus...

Agreed on the oxygen. There is some theory that we have temperature regulation circuits that just directly fix the temperature, and that, combined with a spell that produces gasses, equals a spell that can fix the ambient gas composition to something breathable without converting the crew into gas(which would probably have utility as an effect...) or creating new gas, it just changes the existing gas. I figure that they actually operate spells and adjust them as needed, which would mean that we would be using a brand-new air creations spells and a completely unprecedented air destruction spell to counter it, that were each targeting specific aspect of the air rather than the "hotter or colder" of the temperature circuits, but that is an assumption on my end. I also figure that we don't have anywhere near the expertise with gasses to pull it off even if we did have an air-composition-fixing circuit. But again, this is all assumptions on my part. If it works as intended, then it just magically keeps the air at breathable levels directly. I feel that to be an extremely big if, but I may be in the minority there. So I put this one in the "impossible to pull off, even if we devoted a whole design to it, but theoretically works otherwise" category, based entirely upon my own assumptions, and I have been very wrong about what we can achieve before.

First telescope ever and it spots buildings from space, agree that it is overly ambitious even with mathematically-perfect crystals. Also we have no way to know where "down" is, so figuring out if you are looking at the spot directly beneath you, or the spot a dozen kilometres to the right of it, is not really possible. And they have constant storms from what I can tell, that include clouds, so, like, probably an order with a hefty bonus to remove it and a high chance of random bad weather getting in the way. but it could work if we roll really well...

continuing the previous into the following. They are not actually orbiting. Due to unlimited fuel they will just be loitering. Probably still needing to maintain a pretty high speed to maintain position relative to the ground, but much less than orbital velocities. And the crystals are indeed tough, so it seems viable? And apparently weightite is supposed to be a crystal now, a super dense one? When crystals are basically all about complex structures that kind of inhibit insane densities? I figure that it will be lucky if it breaches ten grams per mil, but whatever, a big enough lump ought to hurt, and will probably keep together due to not actually being at full orbital velocities.

Of course, the whole "not orbital velocities" thing does have its flaws. Due to inertia and surface area, a certain amount of speed will be required, but geosynchronous low-loiter should be much slower than orbit.

The enemy just build gauss guns and can control air along with levitation magic. I imagine that they can get to space easier than we can.

Of course, this all assumes that magic works at all in space. It could be that magic is generated at ground level and once you get out of the denser atmosphere you are stuck with the magic that you can carry with you. Which would actually benefit us, especially if we refined our dedicated batteries, but would still be a brute on space missions and could be something that E.S. would pull to keep us going too crazy with lunar colonisation.

But then, maybe moon magic is different to WandRWorld magic, so we could get a whole new set of spells for the satellite wars...

I would vote and add the other optiuons and reind folk that apparently we can vote for as many different things as we want, but my broser is dying and I can't be bothered restarting it and coming back for all this, so good luck! Imma Just vote for whatever LightForger wants...

[Chiefwaffles]

Okay.
How about this to prepare for the Oracle, since it seems to address peoples' number one concern?

Design: AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike" (Ordinance Guiding System)

Sure, Lucky Strike is a good spell and all, but it just doesn't work for what we need. Our weapons are already accurate - built without the crutch that is Lucky Strike. Instead, we need to prepare for the future. We need to create something that will allow our weapons to work nearly perfectly at any range!

Spoiler: Fluff (click to show/hide)

The TrueStrike system has two components: The Coregem and the MKPD.

The Coregem is a simple concept - a solid-state [if not too hard] AAethergem (solid-state as in like the Aethergems that power the Mk.2 Reactor). But instead of simply gathering and holding magic, it uses its magic capacity to host what's essentially a complex circuit in "magic" form. We've modeled it extremely slightly off of a wasp mind, taking from our limited experience of summoning wasps (and thus their minds) and general minds (falcons).
But don't let that fool you - the Coregem is ultimately just a fancy way of condensing complicated circuitry; it's an iteration in circuit design.

This Coregem is used to host components of Lucky Strike. Not the whole spell in order to save time translating more parts of the Moskurg gibberish.  But enough parts.

Instead of just relying on the nebulous Lucky Strike to make our projectiles hit better, instead we take the part of it responsible for "detecting" the targets (as far as we can tell) and "hijack" it so we can process the targeting information ourselves. This is fed through the Coregem which then outputs to the MKPD.


The MKPD, or "Miniature Kinetic Propulsion Drive", is a major component yet is straightforward.
It's a radically downscaled KPD.

As in, radically downscaled. The KPD4 is capable of accelerating huge and heavy things such as the Lightning to insane speeds. We don't need that at all. We just need something to aim a gun and rotate it for us. So we downscale the KPD4 significantly until its power cost becomes almost-negligible and is able to rotate (and preferably) hold any gun we have, from the AS-HAC-1 to the Lightning gun to the AS-HA1. Hopefully the MKPD can just be powered by the Coregem, but if that fails we can always add in a few AAethergems.

The Coregem processes Lucky Strike targeting information then sends it over to the MKPD. The MKPD will orient the gun to aim at the exact angles needed to hit the target. If the gun is connected to a power source, TrueStrike will automatically fire the gun. We aim to include future compability, so TrueStrike should also automatically "reload" the weapon if possible. Otherwise it'll emit a nicely-shrill beep for the gunner to insert new ammunition or to fire the weapon if it's not powered.


Coregem - We take a (solid-state [like the Reactor2 aethergems] if possible) AAethergem, model the "magical insides" extremely slightly (the modification itself shouldn't be hard because of the Crystal Glass gem manufacturing process) after bits of a wasp mind, and use it as basically a primitive CPU. Basically just condensed bit-more-advanced circuitry.
Lucky Strike - We translate just the "targeting" bits of Lucky Strike and put them inside the Coregem. The Coregem interprets the targeting data, and feeds exact angles to the MKPD in order to hit the target.
MKPD - An extremely downscaled KPD4 that's just strong enough to rotate (and hold in place if that's needed) all of our existing guns; namely the AS-HAC-1 + Lightning turret gun but also preferably the HA1 too. Shouldn't have great power desires. Powered by Coregem, but add in extra power generation if needed.
Integration - Just some simple integration to existing circuitry should allow TrueStrike to automatically fire a weapon if it's hooked up to power. Also future compatibility for reloading the weapon automatically if we ever do that.

Operation - Coregem picks up target, interprets data, sends exact angles necessary to hit target to the MKPD. MKPD aims gun at exact spot, TrueStrike fires the gun (if possible), and either reloads it + repeats or beeps for gunner to reload it then repeats.


TL;DR - An automatic targeting system for our guns.


I still prefer the Oracle, but this:

• Solves the targeting issue for Oracle in the future.
• Allows for fully autonomous guns if we do automatic reloading/CAF/guns that don't need reloading or even just mostly-autonomous guns if hooked up to power; it'd just need humans to reload it.
• Greatly helps the Lightning turret (May have to be integrated in revision, but upgrading the Lightning's turret is planned anyways right?)
• Greatly increases the effectiveness of all our existing cannons

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    2 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
1 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles

Because while I prefer the Oracle, sidegrading our artillery to do the same thing but now with 20% more magic (the PAW) won't really help us.

[FallacyofUrist]

Okay, sure. As long as we do space next turn.

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
2 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist

[helmacon]

Add me to the... uh... Huh. All these designs kinda suck. If I had more time I'd re write the manticore, but I don't.

I guess just add me to the true strike then...

[FallacyofUrist]

0 - Living Cloud:
Variable - ASAF-O47 "Oracle": Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant A: Chiefwaffles
    1 - Oracle Variant B: Chiefwaffles
2 - AS PAW46: Andres, Lightforger
3 - AS-OGS47 "TrueStrike": Chiefwaffles, FallacyofUrist, helmacon