Andrew1879 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2019 7:49 pm
I've noted this line of questioning for a future blog entry. This is a bit more complex than I want to go into on a forum, and is going to involve some policy declarations. Look for a blog entry with the working title of Two Roads to Rio sometime in the next month. In the meantime, feel free to discuss among yourselves and speculate on the form the canonical examples will take.
Re-reading this thread, it seems like maybe the title ought to be "Three Roads to Rio", comparing Weird Science, classical Enchanting, and pure clockwork/brass. I think I am starting to see that Weird Science and classical magical Enchanting would (I think) end up with products that might look quite different, but that should be functionally identical and cost the same. The real wild card would be what a brassman could produce in the product competition.
So first to double-check. If a Weird Scientist and a classical magical Enchanter both tried to design and build the same things, while the results might look wildly different, both
designs and the
builds would end up having the exact same rolls and costing the exact same amounts of money?
It seems like Brassman has an advantage that anything he comes up with can be duplicated by anybody following his plans. He could set up a manufactory and have assistants and laborers build as many devices as there is a market for. However he is limited to whatever could possibly be done with brass and steam and control engines. Nothing overtly magical.
Weird Scientists and Magical Enchanters need to personally tinker with each and every item going out of their shop, however they can get away with overtly impossible and magical effects.
So I think maybe the more illuminating comparison is what Slimcreeper did and add Brassman to the mix: Brassman, Weird Scientist, and Mage enchanter.
And that brings up the question, in a steampunk world in which Analytical and Difference Engines are not Weird Science, but simple clockwork. And in which a sufficiently skilled brassman can build a fighting mecha, what effects can be considered pure physics, and which effects require enchanting?
Using the example at the start of this thread of the walking, self-targeting gun, In the real world I would presume an engine that could control such a thing would be the size of several large rooms, with decades of engine programming, and the targeting program would take a month to calculate the firing solution (for the conditions that existed a month prior when the program was started). So I don't really see a self-targeting gun as even being possible from a brassman. If is was even possible, If you don't need 10,000 of them, I am sure it would be simpler and cheaper to just have an enchanter bind a tasked spirit to control the gun.
But I would be interested in seeing more comparative designs run up following the official rules. What can be done with each method, and what would it take to design and build one prototype?
As a thought experiment, let's look at something similar to a fighting mecha. A brassman would make a steam powered fighting vehicle that needed at least one pilot and/or gunner. A weird scientist might make a killer robot. And a classical enchanting mage might make a killer golem.
Of these three, the golem might be the smallest and most pleasing to the eye. It does not need steam power plants nor difference engines. It will have ingredients like the classical Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog. Now the first draft of the enchanting design might indicate that the perfect ingredients in it's creation might include 3 gallons of virgins blood and the liver of a Dragon, which the designer might decide to go back to the drawing board and look for alternative ingredients, until he eventually comes up with an ingredients list that he thinks he can work with. The final design will include mystical ingredients that are either very expensive, difficult to obtain, or both. But they will be clearly mystical and not technological. The final design might look like a moving statue. It will probably be controlled by a bound spirit, possibly hosted inside of a brightly glowing and very valuable gem.
As I understand it, the Weird Science design must look technological. The parts list will always be stuff that seems to serve some sort of scientific purpose, and include parts that seem to do the functions the item is doing. These parts possibly need not be configured in such a way as to accomplish the tasks they seem to be accomplishing, but they need to look as if they might be. The killer robot will need a steam engine, or some other power source. It will probably have a difference engine mounted within it. Now a calculating engine small enough to be mounted in a robot almost certainly is not powerful enough to actually control the robot, so the TRUE purpose of the difference engine is probably just to serve as a housing for the tasked spirit that is actually controlling the robot. But everybody will think that it is the difference engine itself that is controlling the robot. Likewise, the steam engine and the brass and everything else about the robot do not need to work according to the actual laws of mechanics. There just need to be enough expensive and thoroughly confusing parts that anybody who see's it might believe that it works on mechanical principles, even though a knowledgeable brassman might swear that it can't be doing what it clearly is doing. The parts list will not ever include any eye's of newts, but will include lots of finally machined parts and gears. It might include True Elements, but possibly under different names. For example the Weird Scientist might delair that his design uses something that he calls uranium-238 to run, and he must have that element and no other (just use the rules and costs for harvesting True Earth - it is an instance of True Earth, just under a different, less mystical, more scientific, name).
Again, as I understand it, the target numbers and costs to design and build these first too designs would be roughly identical, even though the final designs and parts lists are very different.
Lastly we have the Brassman. He might design some fighting mecha. They would be powered by steam engines or something better. They would have pilots and/or gunners to control their actions. It seems to me that making the design would harder, since it actually has to work according to the laws of physics, not the laws of magic. Likewise the building, assembly, and maintenance would need to be painstaking. The difference of course is that it does not take an actual enchanter to assemble them, any sufficiently trained craftsman can do so. The Mecha would probably be much bigger than a similarly capable robot would need to be, since the mecha would need to have space for crew. Further, the mecha needs to actually have all the parts to really work by the laws of physics, and can't cheat by using magic to overcome adequately capable components.
Comments? Discussion?
What I have not done is attach any target numbers or actual costs to these three methods, and I would be interested in seeing peoples interpretations.