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Old 2009-02-03, 05:03   Link #1905
AdmiralTigerclaw
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Location: Subspace, Texas
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Avatar_notADV View Post
Actually, Jimmy's analogies are good here, and they're being held back by your lack of understanding of engineering.
I understand more than you give me credit for. Trust me, I didn't max out my mechanical principle scores (120/120) because I sucked at them. You're mis-interpreting what I said.

(EDIT: By the way, the damn Analogy belongs to Keroko... it's the concrete wall analogy that's Jimmy's.)

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For example, while erosion failure is a source of long-term damage to a dam, truly catastrophic failures are caused by water pressure. This is why many dams cannot be used to prevent flooding altogether. The river's flow through the spillway can be blocked and the water will accumulate, until at some point the force placed on the dam by the water exceeds the dam's structural strength, something warps or bends or cracks, and a dam failure results, much to the displeasure of anyone downstream. It's not "well, we're worried that the rushing water will wear away the dam," it's "if we don't open the gates the whole dam will go and you'll get the entire lake at once."
The dam analogy still fails. What Keroko is trying to present (Or at least APPEARS to be trying to present), is the gap of the floodgates and or spillway, that if you make that smaller while the water is running through it, it somehow harder and harder to keep the integrity of the dam. There was nothing stated about overtopping the dam and going beyond the pressure the dam was designed to contain.

I was pointing out the historical events of dam breaches that resulted from such erosion factors. You start with a leak, the dam's still holding. The leak and pressure erodes bits of the dam, the leak gets larger, the erosion rate grows with it, until the erosion is taking chunks of concrete out of the wall and ultimately compromises the structure and THEN the pressure does its thing.


If we go with the analogy as you're trying to present it, the dam overtopping would be nanoha charging up five tandem starlight breakers while boosted to blaster III power level. How can she hold that much 'pressure' back?


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You can't make an invulnerable dam out of stainless steel and alloys. It would be stronger, to be sure, and certainly more corrosion-resistant. However, it too will have a finite amount of water that it can hold back, and that finite amount isn't necessarily the amount of water it takes to overtop the dam; if the lake behind the dam is more full than your design specification calls for, the dam will fail.
I know this. It will still have a pressure failure point, but because it will be solid metal, it will be damn near (pardon the pun) impossible to cause erosion damage to it that occures in historical catastrophic dam failure because it won't be made of materials that erode as easily as earth and concrete.

Mansfield dam, as I mentioned I live close to. Is sixty years old, and they will NOT let the water overtop the dam and go onto it's spillway because of the risk of the structure failure due to pressure. (It's old. It has some stress fractures.) And I most certainly DON'T want to see twenty thousand people in downtown austin suddenly have to check if they know how to swim because sixty four miles of lake just came down on them.


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I'm hesitant to use Reinforce as a source of analogy. She's not a mage, or even very like a mage; furthermore, she's damaged and not functioning properly to begin with. It's very hard to extrapolate from her failure mode to the "normal" functioning of a Mid mage.
I'm just pointing where the dam erosion analogy belongs. Rein's not really relevant to the topic.

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It's also pointless to talk about beam and shield "density" like it was something we could measure. Bleh. We can discuss their behavior as observed, but saying "Nanoha should shoot super-time-and-space-compressed Divine Busters" isn't much different from saying "Goku should shoot ten Kamehamehas at once instead of just one!"
No, it would be like asking Goku turn his Kamehameha into a a pencil sized shot.

I'm not asking that of Nanoha to make her shot ten X bigger, I'm essentially saying she should take her 'blowdryer' and make it an 'air rifle'.
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