Powercells And The Draw Power Spell

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Bruno

A stone on top of a mountain is metastable, and contains a lot of potential energy that a stone in the valley does not. A stone in the valley is metastable, and contains a lot of potential energy that a stone in Death Valley does not.
...What happens when you steal power from the rock balanced on top of the mountain

Intent is usually fundamental to magic; you can't do that unless someone put it there to power something.

But when you draw power from an active circuit, you divert power from that circuit - the lightbulb turns off, the electric motor turns off. When you steal "power" from a battery, you discharge it. But that implies if you steal "power" from a wound spring... the spring unwinds? That actuates a machine (doing work), rather than preventing work.

I'd say the spring doesn't unwind. Although if you manually unwind it, you can compress it again as per usual.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, let's try a grandfather clock, the kind with weights that you raise internally and that descend slowly to power the movements. If you "discharge" it, what happens?

They stop moving. Rewind the clock to start them again. If necessary, manually move them to the 'unwound' position and start from there.

Or maybe you need a more sophisticated energy transmission system than a single level arm for the spell to work.

Probably. Alternately, you might find that you have to winch the arm down, unload the rocks, and set the shot up again from scratch.

The other is that what the spell is engaging with is the engineer's conceptual model of the mechanism, the Platonic form of the machine, and a natural system doesn't have that conceptual model, because no one built it

.

That's my thinking

Or maybe you just need different spells to engage with organisms, or with weather, or with the Earth's geological structure. . . .

The ones for organisms can be found in the Necromantic college. I can easily picture Elemental College spells (probably with lots of prereqs) that allow pulling from waterfalls, wildfires, volcanic vents, etc. a la "More Power"

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

They stop moving. Rewind the clock to start them again. If necessary, manually move them to the 'unwound' position and start from there.

I do not believe that the weights would be suspended in midair, and prevented from falling. That would be a potentially permanent magical effect from a short-term spell. And it would be as if you magically drained the electrical energy from a dry cell, and all the chemicals were still there, and unreacted, but were no longer capable of reacting with each other. Okay, I'll let S.M. Stirling pull that one through an appeal to divine intervention, but it's too high-end and too implausible for GURPS Magic.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The battery in the lap top could certainly be removed and used for Steal Power. Saying that it couldn't be stolen from before then would be overly picky.

So then can you cut off the arm of a ballista, and attach the shortened remnant to some sort of mechanism?

(Yes, it's designed for rapid discharge. But it sounded as if you were okay with Leyden jars, which are capacitors and also discharge extremely rapidly.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

So then can you cut off the arm of a ballista, and attach the shortened remnant to some sort of mechanism?

(Yes, it's designed for rapid discharge. But it sounded as if you were okay with Leyden jars, which are capacitors and also discharge extremely rapidly.)

The battery still works by itself or with other electricty-using devices. The arm of the catapult does not function in any catapult-like manner when separated from the rest of the catapult nor was it designed to do so.

The catapult arm would then be an integral part of the catapult rather than a discrete sub-system. It also never stored "energy" in a way usable by other machines normal to its' TL in the first place.

[scc]

For catapults, trebuchets and ballistae you can probably cast Steal Power on them if they are wound/drawn/whatever but unloaded, a similar set up might be possible for generic giant springs.