Low Tech Draw Power

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Draw Power is not the right spell.

In the first place, there's the Generator/Battery distinction.

But in the second place, if you have a treadmill or something else with a power train that you can tap, 1 FP/second equates to 360,000 watts. A sustained human energy output is 100 watts. So you need 3600 humans (or human-equivalent zombies) to get just 1 FP/second.

I worked out a lower-tech, more modest version in GURPS Thaumatology: Fantastic Cities. It did 1 FP/minute or a multiple. That was only 6000 watts. You needed 1 FP/minute to keep the spell going, so to get a net yield of 1 FP/minute you needed 12,000 watts, or about the output of a hundred men with ST 11—say, rowers for a bireme. Or about 20 harnessed mules.

It's an extra step (and should introduce inefficiencies, although I don't know how this would work out in terms of Draw Power vs Steal Power), but if Draw Power requires continuous energy, you could slow-charge a battery of some flavor (flywheels are TL5 or 6 IIRC, so you'd need to store energy in springs and other clockwork mechanisms), then rapidly discharge it to Do Something (which could just be spinning that giant wheel in reverse, probably with some weights added so it's not going ridiculously fast). Now the battery is functioning like an energy-producing power plant, so should be a valid target for Draw Power.

So, you could have 100 ST 15 Golems with Move 5 in appropriately-sized hamster wheels, charging some giant clockwork monstrosity. That would produce 112,500 Watts. We'll just say the setup has a 50% efficiency, so that's 56,250 Joules stored in the "battery" every second. That's 81 MJ (225 FP) per day. If we store that up for a solid month (I did say giant clockwork monstrosity), that's 2.43 GJ (6750 FP). If we then replace the golem wheels with extremely heavy gears or something else and then run it in reverse, then with the same 50% efficiency we're looking at around 56 FP per second, assuming we're able to discharge all that energy in a minute.

[scimon]

Or... find the copy I already own... sigh. PDF's.

So to produce a KW you need a Basic Lift of 200 or a Lifting Strength of 32.

(Or I just make them TL/3+2 with some Steam Engines. That can work. Steampunk is always fun).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scimon

Or... find the copy I already own... sigh. PDF's.

So to produce a KW you need a Basic Lift of 200 or a Lifting Strength of 32.

(Or I just make them TL/3+2 with some Steam Engines. That can work. Steampunk is always fun).

MW steam engines are TL5+1.:)

The most feasible scheme I can think of is to take a Niagra Falls level waterfall and make a "waterwheel" (TL6 turbine more likely) out of orichalcum and use lots of magic to put that in place. That'll get you more into the right level you need for enchanting.

There are breakpoints for good Q&D Enchantments at 250 pts (90 MW), 500 pts (180 MW) and 1000 pts (360 MW). You might want even higher levels but you're getting out of the range of Q&D.

If you want a game mechnically simpler solution your chief bad guy could jsut have the Raw Magic Store Advantage from Thauamtology. That's 100 pts of Enchantment capacity per 5pts (recharges at GM whim like when he makes a human sacrifice).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by scimon

Or... find the copy I already own... sigh. PDF's.

So to produce a KW you need a Basic Lift of 200 or a Lifting Strength of 32.

(Or I just make them TL/3+2 with some Steam Engines. That can work. Steampunk is always fun).

Mid-eighteenth-century steam engines were in the range of 50-100 horsepower, or around 35-70 kilowatts. That will give you a net yield of maybe 5-10 FP per minute. That's after a couple of generations of tech improvements, though; if the society as a whole isn't using steam engines (say, to pump water out of mines), your wizards are going to need to be mechanical geniuses.

[scimon]

I was thinking about Waterwheels too. Though quite like my mute sessile Golem with a reduced DX and HT (all he's made for is turning a crank, over and over again).

Means he's got 65 Lifting Strength for a total Basic Lift of 1280 or 6.4KW output. And I still need 14063 to generate 250FP a second.

I'm thinking there may need to be Leylines involved. Or steam engines or handwavium.

[Pursuivant]

There was once discussion of allowing Low TL Draw Power mages to pull energy from natural phenomena. The effect would be to turn waterfalls, areas with strong & predictable winds, etc. into highly desirable magical "nodes" where powerful mages could draw essentially unlimited power.

If you just limit Draw Power to the bad guys, then it sets up obvious battlefields and conflicts with strong ecological overtones. For example, bad guy dams the biggest river with multiple Draw Power-assisted Create Earth or Shape Earth spells, flooding the lands upstream and greatly reducing water flow volume and speed downstream.

A powerful mage in a TL3-4 campaign could also possibly create multiple waterwheels and windmills, all linked somehow to channel magical power to a single location. Not as ecologically disruptive as the first option, but it sets up situations where mages have a strong incentive to control any location where natural potential energy can be turned into kinetic or mechanical energy and then harnessed to generate mana.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

There was once discussion of allowing Low TL Draw Power mages to pull energy from natural phenomena. The effect would be to turn waterfalls, areas with strong & predictable winds, etc. into highly desirable magical "nodes" where powerful mages could draw essentially unlimited power.

It's definitely not RAW, which require you to tap power from a constructed mechanism of some sort.

I'm inclined to disagree with it. In the first place, magic is a matter of symbolism. Yes, you can perform the mathematical abstraction of saying that machines use energy, and weather phenomena use energy, and living organisms use energy, so the same spells could work on all of them. But the tech college is about "machines," as the weather college is about "weather" or the fire college about "fire" or the plant and animal colleges about "living organisms." I think you lose the magical flavor if you treat a river as a "machine." (Of course, if you build a water mill, the MILL is a machine, no question.)

And in the second place, it seems to me that magic powered by the energy of natural phenomena is already accounted for—by the concept of Normal-Mana areas. What is a powerstone doing when it recharges but benefiting from part of the natural energy flow around it?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

There was once discussion of allowing Low TL Draw Power mages to pull energy from natural phenomena. The effect would be to turn waterfalls, areas with strong & predictable winds, etc. into highly desirable magical "nodes" where powerful mages could draw essentially unlimited power.

It was published in a prior Pyramid Kick starter. The article was titled "Supernatural Energy", authored by me and covered Control (Mana), and various ways to share power between mages or draw upon differing sources.

[RGTraynor]

(face palm)

What exasperates me most about this forum is that with a game system more focused on realism than just about any other one out there on the market, people are so heavily, heavily resistant to "It can't be done," and jump down all manner of rabbit holes to try to eff the ineffable and kick realism and scientific fact in the jimmies.

TL3 cannot, cannot, cannot create the MW level necessary for Draw Power. The largest and most efficient water wheels ever built pre-17th century produced only a fraction of a MW. Full stop. Never mind flywheels or gearing or any low-tech, non-magical Rube Goldberg scheme anyone has in mind. Cannot. Be. Done.

Now if you want to handwave things so that TL 3-4 fantasy mages can use Draw Power all the same, sure, whatever. Change the parameters of the spell, allow it to use natural non-tech sources, sure. Or just declare that that there waterwheel produces 10 MW, so there. Your table, your game.

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

What exasperates me most about this forum is that with a game system more focused on realism than just about any other one out there on the market, people are so heavily, heavily resistant to "It can't be done," and jump down all manner of rabbit holes to try to eff the ineffable and kick realism and scientific fact in the jimmies.

So, making use of the large amounts of power involved requires the use of Magic. That makes the whole discussion one involving Magic. Magic kicks realism and scientific fact in the jimmies by its very nature. Therefore, the discussion of how to use magic to overcome the difficulty of generating that much power in a Low-Tech setting with Magic seems reasonable.

If it were involving a Low-Tech setting without Magic, sure, that would be unreasonable. But also moot, as there is no way to Draw Power without Magic.