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Old 12-28-2020, 10:15 PM   #71
SolemnGolem
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Latest best-guess from my UK quantum physicist friend is that the iron inside an iron star would be under extremely high pressure and temperature*, and would be solid metallic as a result.

From the DF viewpoint, this is going to be a one-way gate that brings in the stellar matter iron (which shares identical traits as meteoric iron) in useable form with a complex intermediary treatment that is as sophisticated as it is unseen.

Edit: *although at the extremely long time periods and theoretical near-heat-equilibrium, I wonder if it's more accurate to assume that the entire iron star is close to 0K.

Last edited by SolemnGolem; 01-02-2021 at 07:02 AM.
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Old 12-29-2020, 04:40 AM   #72
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

We're opening a gate into a star to collect stellar core iron?

One method could be to have the gate on one mountain, pointing across the valley to the next mountain. Open the gate and stand well back, then come back the next day to pick through the remnants of the target mountain for the woot.
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Old 12-29-2020, 06:05 AM   #73
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Originally Posted by SolemnGolem View Post
From the DF viewpoint, this is going to be a one-way gate that brings in the stellar matter iron (which shares identical traits as meteoric iron) in useable form with a complex intermediary treatment that is as sophisticated as it is unseen.
Yes, the vigorous waving of hands can indeed be good at cooling things down. So long as you (and your players) are comfortable with that, it's probably your best option, here.
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Old 12-29-2020, 06:15 AM   #74
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

But if stellar iron is anti-magic, wouldn't it destroy the gate once it came into contact with it?
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Old 12-29-2020, 07:00 AM   #75
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But if stellar iron is anti-magic, wouldn't it destroy the gate once it came into contact with it?
Perhaps it destroys the gate and a new one has to be built, on another mountain, to get a new batch of stellar iron. I don't think any of this should have to be a simple undertaking.
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Old 12-29-2020, 07:36 AM   #76
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But if stellar iron is anti-magic, wouldn't it destroy the gate once it came into contact with it?
Magic null, not anti-magic. A magical flame won't heat it, but it won't dispel the flame either. Normally it would simply be unable to be transported by a magic Gate, but wouldn't harm it in any way. Carried meteoric/astral iron, however, has no issue sticking with whoever is carting it around, so if they walk through a magic Gate, the iron will come with them - again, with no damage to the Gate. Once it's away from the stellar environment it might do something that would damage whatever the Gate is anchored to (assuming that's necessary), but SolemnGolem has that part covered with a vigorous waving of hands.
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Old 12-29-2020, 08:26 AM   #77
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Normally it would simply be unable to be transported by a magic Gate, but wouldn't harm it in any way. Carried meteoric/astral iron, however, has no issue sticking with whoever is carting it around, so if they walk through a magic Gate, the iron will come with them - again, with no damage to the Gate.
Depending on the magical mumbo-jumbo used, I could see a Gate allowing free passage of magically null materials, anyway. There are two ways to read Gate magic:

A) It's magic creating and maintaining a connection between two locations.
B) It's magic opening and holding open a connection between two locations.

In A, a Gate would generally not allow passage of materials that can't be affected by magic. In B, it would allow it just as easily as it could pass through a door held open with magical telekinesis.
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Old 12-29-2020, 08:30 AM   #78
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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?
Yes. All the way cold, in fact, as close to 0K as makes no difference. The iron star is one of those heat death of the universe, entropy has maximized, there is no more useful energy so nothing can happen kind of ideas. If protons could decay, they would have, so there wouldn't be any iron stars; but if not, that's all that's left.

(Perhaps that's why this iron is so dead to magic. Mana in that absurdly old universe succumbs, just like everything else. So not only does this iron not have any - zero Kelvin, zero Thaums -- it'll soak up ambient mana just as it'd soak up ambient heat until the iron gets back to being normal iron.)
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Old 12-29-2020, 09:28 AM   #79
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Depending on the magical mumbo-jumbo used, I could see a Gate allowing free passage of magically null materials, anyway.
Certainly! I was going off of the way Kromm described it working for DF. To review, let's take a pair of meteoric iron shackles. If you toss them through a Gate, there's no effect - the shackles stay in their current location and thud to the ground. If you restrain someone with them and toss said person through the Gate, both the shackles and the person (and anything the person has in their pocketses) stay where they are, without teleporting through the gate. If you instead place the shackles in that person's backpack and chuck them through, they, their backpack, and the shackles will all teleport through the Gate to the destination. I'm not certain if tossing the shackles-containing backpack through would work or not - I suspect it would by Kromm's guidelines.

FWIW, I'd personally be inclined to have everything but the shackles get teleported through the Gate in each of the above cases. To transport meteoric iron in an instantaneous fashion, you'd need a type B Gate from your description, which I'd have be markedly more difficult to manage. But, that's not the default for DF.

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
(Perhaps that's why this iron is so dead to magic. Mana in that absurdly old universe succumbs, just like everything else. So not only does this iron not have any - zero Kelvin, zero Thaums -- it'll soak up ambient mana just as it'd soak up ambient heat until the iron gets back to being normal iron.)
I like this idea. I think the webcomic DMFA does something similar - in that, materials with no magic are markedly more effective against Creatures (basically, the class of sapients that are inherently magical, such as demons; null magic weapons treat them as Beings, the human-analogues), but interacting with magic causes some of it to kinda rub off on the material (which makes it really hard to get items with no magic). As one character describes, you then need to remove the tainted layer for it to be effective again, so you eventually end up with daggers instead of swords.
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Old 12-30-2020, 03:39 AM   #80
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

First edition Chivalry & Sorcery to enchant a magic item like a sword the first step was a long process of getting the natural magic out of the raw materials so that you could then start putting the magic you wanted in. Making a magic sword was a multi-year process.
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