2009-02-03, 03:22 | Link #1901 | |
Sword Wielding Penguin
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Water is much less dense than concrete. The magic blasts we've seen are roughly equal in density as it stands to the shields employed. See. If we're doing what I'm doing to nanoha's beam, to water. That is, somehow compressing the fire hose stream down to a small super dense ice crystal and flinging it at once a high speed into the concrete. It's not going to 'splatter'... it's going to behave more like a piece of H2O metal. (Assuming of course, you could do that to water.) Incidently, high pressure low area steam bursts at a power planet can CUT YOU IN HALF. And high pressure water jets can and have been used to cut wood and concrete. This is why depleted uranium is used in tank rounds. It's super high density makes it so that no matter what defense you use, you either have to use a disproportionately thick defense, or use a matching material as the defense. Thus, depleted uranium ARMOR PLATING. The 'CORRECT' response to defending against such a bolt would be applying the size compression to the defensive shield to counter it. However, you have two problems. 1: In order to protect against the small projectile, you lose your full body shielding. 2: Because the attack is compressed in not only space, but time, you must also TIME your defense to match it... because the attack is 6 seconds of energy in 1/8th of a second, while the shield being held in protective cover is not. Thus, you have to effectively locate the attack and slap the defense up overcharged at the moment of impact. Your 'shield' has effectively become a Point Defense where you throw a super high density micro barrier containing six seconds of barrier charge up in the path of the incoming shot just long enough to defeat it. Thus it is harder to defend than to attack. Now, as for nanoha barriers and local failure. They fail like a crystal fails. They're strong, but they are BRITTLE. The moment of local failure in the lattice structure instantly fractures out across the entire surface causing a catastrophic failure of that entire surface. In the case of of barriers failing, it occures so fast you don't really see the local failure before the whole thing comes apart. Titanium, considered a strong metal, is brittle. When it fails, it will SNAP. IT has to be alloyed with other materials to give it elasticity. It's this reason that diamond is not a good idea as a shielding material in combat. Diamond is certainly the hardest material known, but because it is a crystal, it is brittle and would not be able to take combat stresses without shattering. It is brittleness that makes it important to put steel reinforcement rods into concrete. |
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2009-02-03, 03:44 | Link #1902 |
Adeptus Animus
Author
Join Date: Jan 2007
Age: 36
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But using the water analogy can also be a bad thing, I mean, what if Nanoha's body is not a hose, but a dam.
I'm sure every one of us has built sand dams once, to stop a river from flowing or the like. At first it's easy, but the closer you come to closing it, the denser the flow of the water (magical energy) becomes, and the easier the dam (Nanoha's body) breaks. So concentrating more energy in a round might actually lead to dangerous effects if taken to a certain level. It's possible that Divine Buster (which, let's face it, is not a punch with a pillow) is as far as she can stress that much energy in one blast. That would then also why Starlight Breaker is bigger, because it's more energy, and thus needs a bigger 'gap in the dam' to prevent it from damaging Nanoha's body more then it does already. |
2009-02-03, 04:05 | Link #1903 | |
Sword Wielding Penguin
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A dam is generally made of earth and concrete, which are used because they are cheap and easy to work with on large scales. Both concrete and dirt are extremely suceptable to erosion. If you were to ignore the completely and totally insane cost and build it out of stainless steel and alloys, there would be absolutely no measurable erosion to the structure whatsoever over the course of an earthen dam's lifetime. (There would be some corrosion chemically, but that's a different principle.) The areas of dams such as floodgates routinely handle these high pressure flows you refference. And floodgates such as those on mansfield dam, just fifteen miles down the road from me, are at the base of the dam, where water pressure is at the highest. A dam failure is not a single failure, but millions of tiny failures that accumulate at a frightning rate. EDIT: The correct place for the dam erosion analogy would be Rein Eins and the final part of the book of darkness incident. A vast reserviour of magical potential, leaking out and becoming less and less controlled until it goes completely haywire and fails in a spectacular fashon. |
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2009-02-03, 04:40 | Link #1904 |
Once and Current Subber
Join Date: Dec 2005
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Actually, Jimmy's analogies are good here, and they're being held back by your lack of understanding of engineering.
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." 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'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. 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!" |
2009-02-03, 05:03 | Link #1905 | |||||
Sword Wielding Penguin
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(EDIT: By the way, the damn Analogy belongs to Keroko... it's the concrete wall analogy that's Jimmy's.) Quote:
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? Quote:
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. Quote:
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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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2009-02-03, 05:31 | Link #1906 |
Adeptus Animus
Author
Join Date: Jan 2007
Age: 36
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Erosion is only part of the problem, but erosion is strengthened by pressure. The more pressure, the faster the erosion. A storm causing the water to flood over the dam is but one way of being on the receiving end of a flood.
For example, the flood of Wilnis in 2003 was caused by a heatwave that had dried the dam, causing it to weaken and eventually a small portion of it broke down. The water, which suddenly had another way out, rushed into the small gap, widening it and causing the the town to be flooded in minutes. A clear example of pressure flooding. A small gap could have been found and contained quickly enough, but because of the pressure, the gap widened to fast for anyone to do anything against it in time. Water doesn't need to overflood a dam to cause a dambreak, a small gap in the dam is enough to cause massive damage. Also, on the subject of 'steel dams' we've done that. (all hail Dutch waterworks :3) However, Nanoha's body is more akin to a veendam then a steel dam. And there the 'when we were kids playing in the sand' analogy comes back. The dam we build was fine when we started, but when we tried to close the last gap, the pressure of the water flowing through that gap simply became too much and the damn would break. |
2009-02-03, 05:33 | Link #1907 | ||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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However, overall it is less problematic to think of magic as a form of massive particle than massless energy. This brings up analogies of us knowing how much effort it takes to squeeze say a gas to many times atmospheric pressure (400 times, according to your requirement), and the increased requirements on containment. Quote:
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Similar is the ignored possibility of the capacitator being in Nanoha herself. It is entirely possible the "ball" you see outside is more a "formatter" than a "prepared energy (actually energetic particles) balloon" - raw mana gets pumped out of Nanoha, into the ball where it is converted and emitted. In which case the strain is all on pipes inside the body. Please explain also, in this scenario, why you think the formatting system might not be damaged as flow goes through it at 10 times the normal rate. Finally, we'll assume the particle beam is all in the ball. Please justify why you think the ball can be induced to discharge its contents at 24 times the canonical rate. In all three cases, please substantiate your belief that containment measures can be improved to deliver enough force to achieve a over two order (actually three if you count the fact you are discharging faster as well) of magnitude increase over canonically demonstrated energy density. Then justify why you think it will not fail (note that the two are slightly separate concepts). Remember that in your beam, you've shrunk volume by 400 times, but the surface area (load bearing area of the containment field) decreases far less, thus area for area the containment field is under much greater stress. Especially since Divine Buster sometimes detonates on impact (StrikerS Ep1 for example), implying volatility under increased pressure (mana volatility under excessive pressure might be a reason why Nanoverse bolts and beams are so darn slow, becuase high velocity emission will probably involve higher pressures), or at least failure of the containment field under such conditions. Please explain the measures you plan to take to ensure this volatility will not cause your new "improved" beambolt to explode before it reaches its target due to loss of containment field integrity, or substantiate your belief that a two order of magnitude pressure increase will not threaten the stability of the ammunition. Quote:
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2009-02-03, 05:59 | Link #1908 | |
Sword Wielding Penguin
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You are still failing to address the fact that the highest moment of energy and 'pressure' is the moment before firing. Not the firing itself. And we are clearly shown that she packs all the energy of her buster into a small area (the buster's sphere) in this moment prior to firing. If she couldn't pack this energy, it would either leak in some fantasticly extreme fashon, explode in her face, recoil back through her with a backlash that would PROBABLY kill her, or simply not allow her to force it any further. The only real potential hinderance I have yet to see anyone argue with is if it is actually safe for nanoha to 'depressurize' 48 times faster than normal. Which I would then counter with, if she fires 1/24th, she's only depressurizing about twice as fast. (As if packing the whole six second event at normal size into a buster only half as long.) And even then, it would still be less strain than a SLB or B3 SLB X5. *Shrug* People seem determined to prove that all of what Nanoha does has to be the most perfected form possible. And I have to throw down the guantlet and say that sure, she's an ace, but she's human. She's not perfect by any means, and that her buster's beam is not the most efficient use of her energy by two orders of magnitude. (Yes, two orders of magnitude. Because 960 to 1 is two decimal places, which is two powers of ten, which are known as orders of magnitude. But we know that.) Good discussion though. Yes, I'm a heretic. ^_^ |
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2009-02-03, 06:08 | Link #1909 |
Adeptus Animus
Author
Join Date: Jan 2007
Age: 36
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Why I'm saying Nanoha is a dam is because the magical energy is already present in her body long before she even starts casting a spell. It's like a lake of magical energy. To release it, she has to 'open' a part of the 'dam' containing it. She can open a small gap to let a little bit of energy trickle through for low level spells, but as soon as she tries to push more energy through that small gap, she increased the pressure on that small gap, increasing the chance of a 'dambreak'
To safely channel the energy for a Divine Buster, she needs a larger gap which would create less pressure on the dam. This method is not necessarily perfect, and chances are she could tweak the gap to be smaller to allow less unneeded energy to come through, but Nanoha is particularly noted for her control so such a tweak would be small. Unlike Hayate, who has a vast lake, bigger then Nanoha's, but is not as good in opening gaps as Nanoha, leading to more loss of energy. This would then also be why Starlight Breaker is dangerous for her health, because it pumps a lot more 'water' through a hole that isn't created to handle such a pressure. |
2009-02-03, 06:34 | Link #1910 | |||||
Sword Wielding Penguin
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I'll bite today.
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I see a subtle stacking the deck setup. Quote:
Still, carrying on. If you assume that nanoha has to provide a feeding pressure for beam upkeap at the same rate in which the beam is discharging, it means she has to draw in, process, and forward that energy at the rate of discharge or it will immediately drop off to her rate of feed. If she can do that, there is no point to the beam's required charge up time at all. Quote:
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2009-02-03, 06:47 | Link #1912 | |
Sword Wielding Penguin
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So nanoha is a dam holding back X magical water. The water's rest state is putting pressure on the dam. We'll call this the ambient pressure. When you open one flood gate, the pressure is released ever so slightly and it trickles out. The problem occures when you say that she tries to force more water through the flood gate. Where'd she suddenly increase the ambient pressure of the lake? Because asside from some kind of pump in the gate, or external activity increasing the ambient water pressure. The flow of water through the flood gate remains the same. (Assuming of course, you don't adjust the flood gate to various levels like HALF open... which they can do.) The only possible ways for that flood gate to damage this dam would be either the flood gate isn't letting the water out fast enough that the lake rises, overtops, and washes the whole dam away. Or the flood gate tunnel is made of styrofoam packing peanuts and erodes away the moment the water goes through it and the dam gets ripped open. But you can't FORCE the water through flood the gate, because that requires tweaking the reservior itself. (Or one HELL of a turbopump.) |
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2009-02-03, 06:53 | Link #1913 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Major healing magic is probably some kind of pseudomatter trick (read: "band-aid skin") due to the limits of natural reproduction. It seems likely, given the known limitations of healing magic (they seem to do OK on small wounds but heavy wounds still put people in the hospital), that most healing magic is of the former basic type, if the latter type is practical at all. Boost magic is probably the magical equivalent of adding chemical catalysts. If you are unhappy with those questions, I must wonder, how will making it pure energy (remember, lightspeed and all that) make this any easier to solve? |
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2009-02-03, 07:15 | Link #1915 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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ROFTLMAO. I didn't forget it. However, since in my assessment such problems are no more easily solved using massless energy theories, I did not consider it an advantage for energy. And even if it was marginally easier to solve using an energy theory, but I wonder why it would - the possibilities with massive interactions are so much more plentiful, its disadvantages of being utterly inconsistent with more easily evaluated attacks and observable mana clearly taken precedence.
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2009-02-03, 07:39 | Link #1916 | ||||||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Nice of you. BTW, how does it feel being bitten by a half dozen people simultaneously?
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As for the charge up, what happened to incantation (even though its not said, the energy's conversion program is being loaded and formed up), in-body pressurization ... etc? Quote:
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Last edited by arkhangelsk; 2009-02-03 at 07:57. |
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2009-02-03, 08:00 | Link #1917 | ||
Adeptus Animus
Author
Join Date: Jan 2007
Age: 36
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It should also be noted that Zafira and Vice were still bandaged and in cast when they left the hospital the day of the final battle, yet showed no sign of injury during their fights. And on small healing magic, since they are particles that radiate, doesn't that make the effect energy based still? This also makes me wonder, if they are particles shouldn't that make it impossible for our mages to create Devices? After all, if they are particles, and generated in the body, then making a device should mean an equal amount of particles disappear from the body. Imagine Raising Heart being made from Nanoha's right lung. <_< Quote:
In short: It's magic. |
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2009-02-03, 08:22 | Link #1918 | |||||
Sword Wielding Penguin
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[QUOTE=arkhangelsk;2195867]
Energy, because it is massless, goes at lightspeed. How will you trap it in a sphere? And don't say it is magic. And how can you create enough structure for a tool when all the luxons are flying around at lightspeed (in fact they can't go at any other speed). "Magic" ^_^ Assuming it's acting as either magic light, or magic particle, the same way you trap it in a particle accellerator. 'Magic' magnetic field. Quote:
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It is clearly a charge cycle as the introduction of cartridges shortens her time to fire. And we are told explicitly that cartridges are compressed magical energy. So we KNOW they provide explicitly an energy boost that cuts the charge time out. Quote:
Considering my point about cartridges neutralizes your point about beam O war... It really does seem more efficient to throw the ball, which is what I suggest anyway by turning the beam into a bolt. (A bolt's really just a fancy name for a fast moving ball in this case.) The ball is the buster energy, delivered all at once, in a small nasty package. Quote:
So go glay dodge ball. There is only one control you need on that ball. "Go thataway!" *BANG!* It's a straight line weapon. Just as is the buster. No 'controls' are required. Point at desired target, let whatever method you can bake up to accellerate your sphere do it's job, and allow impact to do the rest. The point remains to take the energy she wastes delivering to a two meter wide surface over six seconds, and pack it down to a nice bundle of energy and smack the target with it all at once rather than drawn out and very inefficient beam. |
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2009-02-03, 08:30 | Link #1919 | ||||||||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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More seriously, I won't deny that magic has energy (without energy, scientifically you can't do anything, and since magic can obviously do something...). It also obviously radiates energy (at the very least, it glows, which would be rather difficult if it doesn't emit light). What's important however, is that it is emitted from massive particles, otherwise we'll have all kind of problems with containemnt and the like. Quote:
If anything, if they are energy in the scientific definition, it'll be quite impossible to get the mana to coalesce into anything remotely physical looking. Besides, if they are really energy and you can't get it externally, you'll have to wind up annihilating part of your body to get energy, so that's not much of a solution there either. Quote:
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Acceleration itself is a pretty meaningless concept for massless energy, because acceleration implies a change of speed, and energy only has C. Quote:
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Last edited by arkhangelsk; 2009-02-03 at 08:49. |
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