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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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[X] Azel

Personally, I prefer Skane of the given options, a friendly fire spirit should make huge difference there, espically with her skills and power, but that is much less than her picking herself.
 
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Azel said:
2. No, that restriction is clunky as fuck
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A minimum range existists on many of our siege weapons.
Azel said:
I'm honestly not getting why you consider a secondary water cycle with heat-exchangers "too many steps". It's just some piping with water in it. This here? This is vastly more complicated due to the amount of moving parts and that you are mounting water-tanks into a furnace that can melt steel. Those tanks would either need cooling or whenever you dump water into them, the thermal stress will let them rupture as the temperature gradient is a whole lot higher then in my design.
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That's why I said we make it out of adamant. Playing around with numbers, we don't actually need that much temperature if we just build the pressure.

Mind, I'm not really convinced you can make a steam explosion by dumping steam into water, but no one else seems to care.

And even then, I question how effective it'd be. Because at least the mytbusters test failed pretty miserably without building pressure.

I think you are severely underestimating the kind of energy you'd need to instantly vaporize a ton of water:
Q=c⋅m⋅(100 ∘C−T)+Δhvap⋅m

c = 1 cal/g
m = 1000000 g
Hvap = 540 cal/g
If we assume it starts at 25 degrees, a short calculation is giving me 651 million cal. There's 4184 Joules in one kcal. That's 2.573 billion Joules. And you have to dump that much energy in a time that approaches zero.
Azel said:
3. It's just one cubic meter per shot and the heat-exchange cycle is closed. This has been modeled in greater detail for AG-Vessels, but for static defenses, we can just install a reservoir of sufficient size.
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That's a literal metric ton of water per shot. You are going to need a tremendous reservoir above it, or extreme pumps that I'm not sure we can manage at this tech level to do it.

Or set a Decanter to Geiser and it manages to fill it in nine or so seconds.
 
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Abhishek M said:
How the heck did we go from fixing mutations to advocating for 95% Death Taxes, Government seizure of the Means of Production, Mass Mindrape to conform the population (that's what it would need to actually "work" for a general sense of the term) and the borgoise worry of there being too many unwashed masses in the world?

For Pete sake I was able to deal with FTL Ship designing when we we still building a basic road system but this started sounding like a lightly veiled political debate a good deal back. I might have pariticipa try ed pate in that and I am sorry for it. Can we get back to something else? Anything else?
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Just to be clear:
This world currently had 3 systems of government:
  • Direct rule by the rich (Magisters) in the Essosi cities. We're ending that, except in Braavos (which is an oligarchy where the rich rule, but where the lives of poorer citizens aren't total shit so we aren't meddling)
  • Government owning the means of production of the main industries (because that's what feudalism is, basically) and unashamedly controlling other markets through taxation and control of investments. All these other markets (artisan items, craftsmen...) are tiny and very local anyway. We're ending that too, because life for the poor is shit and we don't like incompetent feudal rule.
  • Government owning the major companies (us right now) and letting private business act, but designing tax rates and infrastructure to indirectly control markets. Oh, and we have a strong bureaucracy and strong social security too, and strong controls over the prices of basic goods (in Tyrosh at least). Hopefully that last one is temporary though.
Literally none of these systems are IRL systems anymore (well, mostly. Braavos could sort of fit China for example).
This is a political debate in the sense that we're debating imaginary politics for an imaginary kingdom.

The issue we are facing is the immortality of the elites allowing competent ones to concentrate power to the kind of theoretical extremes that basically never happen in the real world, thereby crushing meritocracy and the free market (and maybe even innovation it it gets too bad!) for all future generations.

The second issue (tarrangar's "what if everyone is immortal", also expressed by Lya) will never happen. We simply don't have the mages for it, and thus this service will always be out of economic reach for most people. His numbers don't work out, and it's obvious.

Therefore I focused on "what happens if a tiny group concentrates a disproportionate amount of power and never ever dies?"
In real life, death stops this from happening. Quarrelling kids, strong inheritance taxes (even the USA had very painful inheritance taxes until about the 80s!), antitrust laws, and the pursuit of short-term gain stop the scenario I am describing ("what if five people own all the land and businesses in Westeros?") in America or France.
[Having to explicitly write this out was painful]

I brought-in real-world statistics to show that ridiculous concentration of capital (not revenue, capital) within the 1% is a problem (is it a coincidence that the biggest periods of prosperity for the USA - before the Great Depression, the decades after WW2 - were also those where concentration of economic power was lowest and inheritance taxes were high? No! Note that inequality was massive then, but that just to show that I'm not complaining about inequality: I'm complaining about excessive concentration of capital (and thus power) within a small group).
Now in real life, this wasn't the end of the world. The country didn't collapse.
But with immortality, things have the potential to get really crazy.

And I agree with Azel: we need a clear general system to stop this from happening. It shouldn't rely on us personally.

And like Azel said, most of what you talked about ("Mindrape", "Death Tax"...) is not what I have been supporting.
Although progressive inheritance taxes were a thing until very recently, like I said. Progressive taxes meaning "the tax rate is low for small inheritances and high for large ones".

Furthermore, like Azel said, banning Reincarnation or having massive inheritance taxes aren't the solution (and it would cause rebellions too). What we need is economic activity that doesn't create a massive poor underclass, progressive taxation that limits truly insane wealth, and sound internal policies to limit monopolies and stop a single family from controlling entire government departments or something.
Does this make sense?
The idea is to allow free entreprise, and allow people to get very rich. But once people start getting richer than Rockefeller and control huge swathes of the economy, THEN our legal system keeps them in check.

Meanwhile we also work to support the poor to limit unrest and needless death, but no such much as to make everyone want to live on government handouts (we couldn't afford that anyway).

The "Reincarnation makes you count as dead" thing is mostly there to keep the feudal order functioning for a while.
Hey @Azel, what do you think of that?

Abhishek M said:
Can light Planeshift? No? FTL! Also speaking of Talons Frenchness how is that Gas tax going? (Hey others can allude to real politic too!)
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Just to be clear: the main issue isn't the gas tax (gas taxes were already high, they're nothing new and the increase is pretty small). Most people are protesting against the reduction of government subsidies on diesel.
Diesel in France has been subsidized for decades, so poor people who drive a lot (French cities are built so that poor people drive more than rich people) bought diesel vehicles. Now the government wants to push diesel vehicles out of the market, so they are reducing the subsidies quite a bit. This is in effect a "tax" that disproportionately affects the poor. Not a popular thing to do!
So even though most French people are in favour of doing something to protect the environment, they are against this law.
Worse, it's turned into a popularity contest for Macron. He's had a series of embarrassing verbal blunders on live TV that have shown him to be haughty, elitist, and dismissive of anyone who isn't rich (I'm not making this up, he straight-up said that "there are the rich and those who are nothing" and that "you can get a job by crossing the road" - ie, that France's long-term struggle with unemployment was only due to lazyness!).
Things are weird now, and the situation is unresolved. Macron has yet to offer a real alternative that others are ready to accept, and the protesters aren't backing down.
 
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Azel said:
I don't see why we should make any weird exceptions for Dragons. They don't get any more of a free pass then Inevitables and need to go with the times.

Lofwyr isn't sleeping on a bed made out of stock-options either.
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Because dragons are useful, and it really don't harm our economy, that they save up all their money over centuries and centuries, maybe make it an income tax only, so all the money dragons have hoarded, and plan to keep there for the rest of their life, don't get repeatedly tasked.

Yeah this is a better idea, instead of a tax on your estate, you get an increasingly high percentage income tax the more you earn.

And just to be nice, commercial earnings, and loot taken from enemies on the state should be taxed separately, because we don't want dragons who are great traders, to think it's not worth hunting Efreeti and devils, because it will push their income tax up so much, that they only get to keep 1% of what they loot.
 
TotallyNotEvil said:
Mind, I'm not really convinced you can make a steam explosion by dumping steam into water, but no one else seems to care.
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That's not what I'm doing. First, there is no steam in the system at all until the canmom is fired. Second, the pressure is built up in the cannon tank. That's why it's sealed and only connected to the heat distribution piping by a solid heat exchanger. Which, according to my math, is capable of building up the necessary heat and pressure in less then 9 seconds, which is why we use two tanks that can be cycled in between.

The water supply isn't an issue either, since you can directly get that easily from storage tanks in this time.
 
Duesal said:
Not really worth it.

With armor comes a chance of our magic failing in combat. That's why arcane casters mainly wear robes instead of armor.
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And Viserys just doesn't need the AC boost, to be honest. His AC is already extremely high before we buff it with spells and gear.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
The "Reincarnation makes you count as dead" thing is mostly there to keep the feudal order functioning for a while.
Hey @Azel, what do you think of that?
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I originally wanted to support this, but now I'm against it. We want that part of the state to fail in the long run, so leave it be for now so that we can get rid of it later.
tarrangar said:
Because dragons are useful, and it really don't harm our economy, that they save up all their money over centuries and centuries, maybe make it an income tax only, so all the money dragons have hoarded, and plan to keep there for the rest of their life, don't get repeatedly tasked.

Yeah this is a better idea, instead of a tax on your estate, you get an increasingly high percentage income tax the more you earn.

And just to be nice, commercial earnings, and loot taken from enemies on the state should be taxed separately, because we don't want dragons who are great traders, to think it's not worth hunting Efreeti and devils, because it will push their income tax up so much, that they only get to keep 1% of what they loot.
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Single individuals hoarding vast amounts of capital is precisely the problem. They do harm the economy that way, can outright crash it by releasing their capital in an uncontrollable fashion and can amass vast amounts of power by using it strategically.

None of these things are desirable for us.

We need property taxes, not income taxes or we are still locked in an infinite wealth acquisition spiral.
 
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TalonofAnathrax said:
The second issue (tarrangar's "what if everyone is immortal", also expressed by Lya) will never happen. We simply don't have the mages for it, and thus this service will always be out of economic reach for most people. His numbers don't work out, and it's obvious.
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We don't have the mages for it now, 4 years after magic returned, and with the Scholarium having been around for at most half that, that don't mean we wont have the mages in 20 years.

And if my numbers don't work out, then show where they don't work out.

1 spellslot per day, equal to 18250 in 50 years, if you use something like the bedroll to restore your spellslots, then that doubles it to 36500, if we assume we can have bedrolls crafted for reincarnators, but that they wont want to only do reincarnation, and so they will only use half their 4th level spellslots on it, that give us 18250 people reincarnated for 1 level 8 archivist, this is not quite enough, we are probably not going to have 1 level 8 archivist for every 18k people in our Imperium, 20 years down the line, but people who reach 8th level, aren't the sort of people to stay at that level, so a lot of those who reach 8th level, will probably also reach beyond, and that gives them more spellslots to use.

I'm not sure if the spellslot list I found for archivist is accurate, but according to this, apparently archivists reach 4th level spells at level 7, and start with 2 spellslots, Archivist – Class – D&D Tools if that's the actual spellslot distribution, then immortality for all by reincarnation, is even more plausible than I thought.

I'm going to use that for now, we will assume they only use half their maximum spellslots on reincarnate, but that they have been supplied with a bedroll, which mean they can keep 36500 people reincarnated once every 50 year at level 7, at level 8, they add a 3th 4th level spellslot, increasing the people they can keep in reincarnation to 54750, level 9 add 2 5th level spellslots, and you can prepare a spell in a higher level spellslot, so once at level 9, they can keep 91250 people in reincarnates, level 10 adds 1 4th level and 1 5th level spellslot, taking the amount of people they can reincarnate in 50 years to 127750, 11th level add 2 level 6 spellslots, once again increasing available spellslots by 2, allowing them to reincarnate 164250 people in 50 years, 12th level add 2 slots more, taking the total amounts able to be reincarnated to 200750, 13th level adds 3 slots, taking the available slots to 255500, 14th level add 2 slots, taking the total to 292000, 15th level again add 2 slots, taking the total to 328500, so yeah my numbers for how many Lya could reincarnate was wrong, but not by that much, and I was lowballing it for how many a level 8 Archivist could reincarnate.

And that's not adding in the fact, that if Lya wanted to reincarnate that many, she would probably make a mass version of reincarnate, that takes a higher spellslot, if she made a 7th level version that reincarnated 5, then that adds the equivalent of 12 slots to her calculations.
 
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