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Old 2009-02-03, 04:05   Link #1903
AdmiralTigerclaw
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Location: Subspace, Texas
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Keroko View Post
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.
The dam analogy is bad because the subject causing the failure is not pressure, it's erosion. A breach to a dam structure results in a high pressure flow yes, but that high pressure flow creates fast moving water which erodes the structure by picking up small loose bits one particle at a time. If the failure proponent was pressure alone, the entire structure would fail all at once at the very moment a critical pressure was reached. At the moment of breach in a dam, it retains its structure but over the course of the breach, the erosion weakens the structure until it reaches a point where the critical pressure is greater than the structural strength, and that is why it bursts.

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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