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Old 12-28-2020, 10:44 AM   #61
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Originally Posted by SolemnGolem View Post

I'm not even sure what form of matter the iron would be on the inside of such a theoretical stellar mass. Plasma?

If the heat has radiated away, then presumably it would be cooler than plasma, though I'm not sure about the effect of gravitational density. Perhaps it's a metallic soup?
If its star followed our rules of stellar evolution i think it might not exist. The iron cycle only happens in very large stars and only after they get very hot. They probably do go "BOOM!" one way or the other.

<shrug>The material very easily could be literally "unearthly" in some form though.
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Old 12-28-2020, 10:50 AM   #62
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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But a person, mechanism, or thing that does not rely on magic, could reach through the gate, collect a sample, and move it back through the gate.

In DF terms you'd probably not want to do this with a living hand or appendage. Perhaps some extremely-heat-resistant orichalcum or similar mechanical servitor could do this.
It would be the GM's call, but I'm not certain magical protection wouldn't help. Certainly, you can't "grab" the metal with magic directly, but using magic to make something heat-proof might allow it to grab the metal without issue.

If you heat a meteoric iron brand, then apply it to the flesh of someone under the effects of Resist Fire, does it burn them? The spell isn't interacting with the meteoric iron in any way, it's just making it so the character doesn't get burned. On the other hand, Resist Fire is meant to stop damage from objects that are hot, so an argument could be made that Kromm's second criterion is in effect and the meteoric iron would bypass the protection. So, as I said, it would be the GM's call (personally, I'd be fine with Resist Fire preventing burns from hot meteoric iron).

Of course, if indeed the star has cooled down (perhaps the universe you are connecting to has experienced heat death?), that may be a moot point... or you may need protection from extreme cold!
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Old 12-28-2020, 11:30 AM   #63
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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An iron star isn't an ordinary star, though.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist; the silicon burning phase (which results in iron) lasts about a day and is an immediate precursor to a supernova.
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Old 12-28-2020, 01:25 PM   #64
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

This popular magazine article indicates that modern science (as of 2019) is uncertain whether iron stars will form, and their formation is dependent on how certain unknown physics constants work out a very long time into the future from now. Given the uncertainty over the physics, I'm happy to say "handwave it, it sounds fun for my DF game".

As regards extraction, then, it seems that a magical heat guard for a local tool is fine, and then the heat-guarded tool is pushed through the gate and retrieves a certain amount of meteoric iron in a potentially very hot and/or exotic state... which is then brought down to somewhat more conventional temperatures and physical states in the DF side of the portal.
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Old 12-28-2020, 02:09 PM   #65
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Something I failed to consider before - if it's a highly-condensed plasma or similar, once you have it away from the star it's probably going to expand violently, essentially exploding. I'm not really certain what the best way to deal with that is. Perhaps have the gate and a disposable servitor doing the work inside of an orichalcum sphere? Said sphere is probably going to blast into the air when the meteoric iron is pulled through, so you'll want an Utter Dome or similar over it (just using an Utter Dome would be insufficient, as the iron would simply pass right through it).
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Old 12-28-2020, 02:13 PM   #66
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Something I failed to consider before - if it's a highly-condensed plasma or similar, once you have it away from the star it's probably going to expand violently, essentially exploding. I'm not really certain what the best way to deal with that is. Perhaps have a disposable servitor do the work inside of an orichalcum sphere? Said sphere is probably going to blast into the air when the meteoric iron is pulled through, so you'll want an Utter Dome or similar over it.
I was thinking something similar - plasma is even more sparse (diffuse?) than a gas, so if the desired end state is a metal, then you'll likely need a significant cooling-down intermediate step. Maybe funneling it through a charged vacuum, then through a solid cooling chamber to get it as molten iron for shaping.

You'd also probably need a much larger volume of plasma to eventually constitute a much smaller (and denser) volume of solid iron metal.

One other consideration is whether or not it's important to replace the meteoric iron thus removed, although the actual removable mass would be negligibly low.

Perhaps the dungeon supervillain is the equivalent of a Crosstime Conservationist from the Infinite Worlds. "Whatever you mine from the dead cosmic future, make sure you replace with an equal mass from our Universe's spacetime!"
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Old 12-28-2020, 02:14 PM   #67
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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I am curious how meteoric iron became associated with antimagic.
I thought this was a combo of "what mortals call magic is the leftover dregs of the Magic the Gods used to create the world" and "meteoric things are not of this world."

But I also sort of think it was a cool adjective in the right place at the right time.
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Old 12-28-2020, 02:20 PM   #68
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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You'd also probably need a much larger volume of plasma to eventually constitute a much smaller (and denser) volume of solid iron metal.
Depends on the make up of the star - perhaps it's markedly less dense than terrestrial iron, but then the incredible gravity of the star may allow for compressing a plasma to be more dense than terrestrial iron (there's a lot of room between "terrestrial iron" and "neutron star" densities to potentially work with, here).
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Old 12-28-2020, 03:49 PM   #69
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Something I failed to consider before - if it's a highly-condensed plasma or similar, once you have it away from the star it's probably going to expand violently, essentially exploding. I'm not really certain what the best way to deal with that is.
You want to cool it off, which probably involves it expanding in a medium that can absorb the heat (and won't be a contaminant; perhaps nitrogen). The energy content isn't that high.
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Old 12-28-2020, 08:27 PM   #70
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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I am curious how meteoric iron became associated with antimagic.
It is a restriction of the old folklore tradition that ordinary "cold" iron was anti-magic. Figures in folk stories were immune to fairy glamour &c. because they had some nails in their pocket, or because they touched a horseshoe and so on. But game designers and extruded fantasy writers dealt with characters who routinely wore tens of pounds of ironmongery, and didn't want them to be immune to magic. So they first supposed that cold iron was a special kind of iron, and then specified that it was special in that it was meteoric (and therefore never smelted, and therefore "cold"), and then transferred the property explicitly to meteoric iron to avoid defeat in the argument that "cold iron" is just a poetic expression for iron, bladed weapons especially.
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