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Old 01-19-2014, 09:01 AM   #2
DangerousThing
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Default Re: Thaumaturgic Automata and Draw Power

Quote:
Originally Posted by scc View Post
OK, I was going through Fantasy and came to the Thaumaturgic Automata section (Page 67) and at the end it talks about how a machine trying to cast a spell has a problem in that it doesn't have FP or HP, and coupled with the picture of a laptop above something occurred to me: GURPS has methods for mages to draw FP from electrical sources.

So I opened up both Magic and Spell Charts and found Draw Power (M180), that in turn referred me to pages 178-179, which is where the trouble begins.

GURPS for some reason prefers to define it's energy conversation equation in terms of the killowatt hour, which makes some sense in that it's a unit of energy from a physics perspective, but because of it's innate temporal component it's hard to work with (So I need to stand around for an hour to see any benefit?)

There's also no guidance on figuring out how much energy you can draw from common sources, in this case RL batteries. For example I dug out an old laptop battery to try and get an idea of how much power a laptop battery might provide, it provides 14V and 4AH, how much is that in GURPS terms? And in per-electrical societies you'll have to deal in units such as horsepower. And while the amount required may make sense from a balance perspective in industrail locations, I doubt that PLAYERS have frequent access to those sorts of power supplies, most countries supply electrical energy at 240 Volts with a cap of 10 Amps, which works out to 2,400 watts
If an object can provide one kilowatt for one hour than it will provide one kilowatt-hour.

If the same object can provide its full power in 1,000th the time, then it provides one kilowatt-hour in about four seconds.

14V and 4A-hr is 61 Watt-Hours. It might be less if you try to drain it quickly, this depends on the battery. 61 Watt-Hours is 0.061 Kilowatt-Hours.
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