Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
Same concept but different working. Ever wonder why you never get shocked by all the electronics in a car or the internals of a laptop? Despite not being grounded in the grounded they're still grounded, the hull for a tank or car, something else for a laptop.
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That's called "chassis ground" and can be a little misleading. Voltage is relative; by having all of the circuits in a complex device "grounded" together, you ensure that those circuits all stay relative to each other.
The reason car electronics and laptops don't shock you, even if you get in there and touch the wiring, is that the 9 to 12 Volt range that they run on is not enough to push current through your skin. But if you touch the electrodes of your car's starter solenoid when it's charged up, the many thousands of Volts present there will cause you a few points of burn damage.
A worse scenario is a washing machine ground fault. The third hole in your wall outlet is there so that if your washer motor shorts to the metal chassis, the current can escape to "earth ground" rather than wait for you to touch it and die a copper-tasting death.
Okay, now let's tie this back in: Let's say our arch-mage casts a lightning bolt at the washing machine. He's going to blow the circuit breaker, and the washing machine is getting the crap burned out of it, but I don't think the electrical components would be badly damaged, depending on the sheer number of damage dice. The ground fault protection should shunt the current to ground and spare the "vitals".
So, for all you robot PC enthusiasts, remember...Ground Fault Protection!