12-28-2020, 10:44 AM | #61 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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<shrug>The material very easily could be literally "unearthly" in some form though.
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Fred Brackin |
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12-28-2020, 10:50 AM | #62 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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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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GURPS Overhaul |
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12-28-2020, 11:30 AM | #63 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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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12-28-2020, 01:25 PM | #64 |
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
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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. |
12-28-2020, 02:09 PM | #65 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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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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GURPS Overhaul Last edited by Varyon; 12-28-2020 at 02:13 PM. |
12-28-2020, 02:13 PM | #66 | |
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
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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12-28-2020, 02:14 PM | #67 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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But I also sort of think it was a cool adjective in the right place at the right time. |
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12-28-2020, 02:20 PM | #68 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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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12-28-2020, 03:49 PM | #69 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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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12-28-2020, 08:27 PM | #70 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Meteoric iron immunities
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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