Beasts of Burden and War.

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

I wish I had mod powers so I could edit a dozen errors into that post.
darkmaster
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Post by darkmaster »

That would be amazing. And Frank, it always sucks when your computer turns into a door stop. If you were in the neighborhood I know a guy who's got a docking station but, you know, oceans and such.
Kaelik wrote:
darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.

If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
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Lokathor
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm sorry, my laptop fan died and bricked my computer. Until the new one arrives and I see if I can recover any of my writing projects from the hard drive, you'll be subjected to hilarious autocorrect errors from me.

-Username17
Damn man. Did you have backups? Or like Dropbox or something?
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erik
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Post by erik »

If you feel like it for converting any large+ sized mountable critter just slap on a half-dragon/celestial/fiend template and they get wings/fly speed.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Lokathor wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:I'm sorry, my laptop fan died and bricked my computer. Until the new one arrives and I see if I can recover any of my writing projects from the hard drive, you'll be subjected to hilarious autocorrect errors from me.

-Username17
Damn man. Did you have backups? Or like Dropbox or something?
I would assume all of the components inside are fine. Usually, when a fan dies and your components overheat, your computer turns itself into an expensive brick because the alternative is that it turns itself into an expensive brick with a creamy, molten interior. I actually thought when he said "new one," he meant a new fan, though now I'm less sure. Either way, the hard drive in particular should be salvageable. I would expect the CPU to go before the hard drive, and once it goes heat stops being an issue.
Koumei
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, it's almost never the hard drive itself. Now getting the hard drive out and connecting it to a new device is a total pain in the ass (as is simply replacing a CPU or fan rather than buying a new laptop altogether), but generally the HDD is fine.

I have only once had the drive die, and that was for a desktop PC. It was going for a car ride, had a seatbelt on and everything, but some small bump killed the drive. No amount of witchcraft could bring it back, so we had no option but to ignite a sparkler-bomb on top of it.
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darkmaster
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Post by darkmaster »

I'm not sure what you're talking about, laptop hard drives are super easy to get out, you just have to remember to take the battery out of the laptop first. Hell PC hard drives aren't that hard to handle either.
Last edited by darkmaster on Sun Jul 06, 2014 5:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik wrote:
darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.

If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
Koumei
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Post by Koumei »

You can take a desktop HDD out in your sleep, but more and more laptops are being built to be disposable such that you actually can't get to the insides without essentially destroying the frame. Some have a simple panel on the underside that you unscrew, some require you to lift the keyboard out (which is a pain in the ass) and then get to the internal organs that way... and others tell you to go fuck yourself.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
kzt
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Post by kzt »

Well, if you get a short in the HDA you can have the whole box lock up, no fans, no lights. Even that doesn't mean you can't get data off the drive, but you'll likely need someone to replace the drive printed circuit board and possibly more, up to doing a clean room platter swap. However that's pretty unlikely. Particularly if Frank noted the fan having failed before the computer died, then it is probably a bad PS or system board, whichever overheated first. He should be able to pull the old drive out and install in the new PC and (if needed) boot the PC on the old drive. Then back up all the data on an external drive, since components that got really hot might not keep working for all that long.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

This thread inspired some thought in my RPG group, and I started working on supplementary material for one of our newer settings. Thanks for the discussion, everybody! Here's the product of today's brainstorming:

[D&D] Air Power in the C.O.C. Confederation

The Champions of Civilization (C.O.C) are a cross between an international bank, a regulatory commission, a gentleman’s club, and unsubtle Illuminati. In short, they are the first megacorp in the history of the PFConquest2 campaign setting, and they have had a dramatic impact upon it. Perhaps the most iconic is the dawn of air power in war and trade. Though ultimately less significant than a system of standardized weights and measures, libraries of cartographic and contract records, and the establishment of professional journalism, it is nonetheless true that when you ask a random person on the street what the greatest achievement of the COC is, they’ll probably mention airplanes.

Airships: You Get What You Pay For

Airships are not the first method that people have used to take to the sky. But they are the tool that the COC used to create and subsequently control a system of air trade, and they remain the most economical method of transporting people and goods by air.

The most basic airplanes are astonishingly simple in design. All you really need is wood, tanned hide, and a few Small Air Elementals willing or bound to provide propulsion. A wooden skeleton provides structure and a “skin” of leather along the outside provides insulation from the elements. Imagine an enlarged hide canoe with a deeper draft, wheels attached to the bottom, and a pair of stubby wings with handles projecting out at set lengths. With a few artisans and a properly specialized level 5 wizard or cleric, you can build this thing in under a month. With more money, time, skill, and magic, you can make something much more impressive.

Launching an airplane requires that you generate enormous forward momentum. While a plane with enough bound elementals does fine with just a flat runway, small and inexpensive craft use gravity to provide the initial push. Small runways go down hills before curving into upwards-facing ramps, and a plane's elementals can focus their energies on lifting a plane into a stable flight once it shoots clear of the ramp. Flat runways are still preferable for landings, and the massive stacked-wing planes used for commercial air travel and freight weigh far too much to make effective use of the curved design.

Nonmagical hot air balloons and zeppelins have also become significant methods of air travel, with the most advanced airships in production currently coming out of the gnomish kingdom of Alimar. These still often leverage magical sources to provide power, efficiently boiling water, coiling springs, or generating lift. Balloon travel goes much more slowly than airplanes, but they are much in demand for hauling larger volumes of air freight or acting as observation platforms. Some Crusader Kingdoms use special airships designed to camouflage themselves as clouds, to reduce the risk of being engaged by teleporting demons. Throwing more money into aircraft research tends to yield more reliable improvements than investing in breeding a better monster, and much of the money in R&D for national air forces goes into vehicles.

Winged Horses and Giant Birds: Working with the wind

There are a wide range of flying monsters dumb enough to be domesticated or smart enough to appreciate the benefits of joining up with a nation full of friends with opposable thumbs. Most are giant birds or flying horses of some description. All can generally outmaneuver a plane or balloon, though they may lack a well-crewed vehicle's stamina. Even the dumbest trained flying monster is still keenly aware of air currents, especially in the territories they call home. Riders are trained to use spells or missile weapons in flight, and stronger monsters may also carry sky marines capable of boarding enemy airships.

Though flying monsters are capable of traveling long distances, they do require time to rest and recuperate between flights. Military exercises outside of a nation's borders require that space be secured for air force supply depots, though the monsters generally require much less space than airships would. Some of the better known monstrous air forces within the COC Confederation include the Giant Vultures trained by the necromancer lords of Gloom, Hippogriff knights in the Crusader Kingdoms, and the scarce but almost-tireless Yrthak Watchers of the Sun-and-Moon Kingdom.

Drakes and Wyverns: Raw Power

The orcish empire of Jormunga has the most feared air force in the COC Confederation. This is because they have forged pacts with the lesser dragons of the northern mountains. These monsters relish combat and love plunder, and their devastating natural and magical weapons make them a force to be reckoned with. They are also arrogant, prideful creatures who want to make sure that the orcs they work with are kept in their place. A drake would rather carry battle armor than a couple extra sky marines, and they demand that long-term riders continually prove themselves in struggles for dominance. Long-ranged firepower is mostly provided by breath weapon, and Jormungan Sky Reavers often close to melee after the initial bombardment of energy blasts.

Jormungan sky piracy became a problem almost immediately after air shipping became a thing. The orcs had a long tradition of raiding, and big airships full of ransomable VIPs and high-value, low-weight goods were far too tempting to pass up. Many conspiracy theorists speculate that the main reason Jormunga got admitted to the COC Confederation was that it gave the imperial princes an incentive to stop raiding international shipping, and a major part of the reason Jormunga agreed was an unpleasant incident with 3 massive airships running skeleton crews and gasbags filled with something unusually explosive. Sky pirates still do sometimes work with drakes and wyverns, but the practice is officially condemned by the Jormungan Empire.

Giant Insects: Drone Warfare

Vermin are mindless. They are basically impossible to train conventionally, and they are ungraceful as flying mounts. However, if properly utilized, a giant bug's lack of brains can be a substantial advantage. When a bug handler marks a "target" with scent signals, their giant bees will assault it without concern for their own lives. You can also raise a lot of giant insects at once, since training requirements are minimal. The Goblin Khanate maintains hives of giant paper wasps in the mountains along their northern border. These are seen as insurance in case of air assault from Alimar airships, giant eagles from the Beast Lords, or Jormungan Sky Reavers.

Weather Control: No Fly Zones

With very few exceptions, a sufficiently powerful storm can wreck any airship or flying monster foolish enough to stay in the sky. The azata Storm Lords of Shambala and the Niefel Jarls of Jotunheim are masters of magical weather control, but they lack the overwhelming air forces of more organized states. Their ritualists compensate for their weak air force through readiness to call fell storms upon enemy airships that violate their borders. While this is primarily a defensive tool, it is effective enough that few nations would contemplate wasting resources on a strike into Shambalan or Jotun territory unless the stakes were truly dire.
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Sun Jul 20, 2014 7:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
fectin
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Post by fectin »

Upwards facing ramps are actually not helpful. Speed gives you lift, and they steal speed.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Lame, I had a fun set-piece in mind under a plane jump. Thanks for the clarification, I guess we'll stick with conventional runways.
fectin
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Post by fectin »

If the wind were consistent, the downhill part would still work (generally, we don't do that because it's more advantageous to take advantage of the wind, and I could imagine a jump if you had to clear an obstacle at the end of the runway (!!), but yeah.

You do see ski-jumps at the end of many aircraft carriers, but never US ones. Apparently, we tested that approach and all it does is snap your landing gear.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
kzt
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Post by kzt »

fectin wrote: You do see ski-jumps at the end of many aircraft carriers, but never US ones. Apparently, we tested that approach and all it does is snap your landing gear.
US carriers use much bigger/heavier aircraft and enormously powerful (and expensive, big and heavy) catapults to launch their planes compared to those style carriers.
fectin
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Post by fectin »

That's unequivocally true.
Bigger and heavier means more endurance, more ordnance, and more capability though. On top of that, CATOBAR carriers have the highest boarding and sortie rates by far. They're also much, much harder to run, but have a truly incredible deck cycle.
To pervert a DnD trope, it's linear STOL, quadratic CATOBAR.
Last edited by fectin on Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Orion
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Post by Orion »

If Dwarves must have a flying mount, I recommend sky bison:

Image
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Orion wrote:If Dwarves must have a flying mount, I recommend sky bison:

Image
There is nothing I do not like about this concept. I can just see a dwarf climbing atop their beloved sky bison mount and shouting "yip yip!"
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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