Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

@DragonParadox, when we get to diamond crafting, could we explicitly aim for a high as possible quantity of bigger high quality artificial diamonds instead of going all the way to the diamonds so good-crafted they are indistinguishable from natural ones?

There are possible repercussions for trying to get into a natural diamond trade, while trade for high quality grade artificial diamonds should be open and thriving in 2006.

Went for a wiki dive, and the thing

DragonParadox said:

apparatus you conjure from the light of your anima is also vaguely ball shaped,

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we used for diamond crafting is apparently being used by Florida-based Gemesis founded in 1996, and in 2003 they were producing about 200 3-carat yellow diamonds a month, with plans to go to 5-karat ones. Yellow because apparently it is one of the most rare variety of naturals, later they also stared selling pure colorless ones.

So I would think there would be no problem for Molly to sell comparable or lesser volumes of colorless high-quality artificial diamonds, sidestepping any ugly side effects of natural diamond trade.

myrix said:

@DragonParadox, when we get to diamond crafting, could we explicitly aim for a high as possible quantity of bigger high quality artificial diamonds instead of going all the way to the diamonds so good-crafted they are indistinguishable from natural ones?

There are possible repercussions for trying to get into a natural diamond trade, while trade for high quality grade artificial diamonds should be open and thriving in 2006.

Went for a wiki dive, and the thing

we used for diamond crafting is apparently being used by Florida-based Gemesis founded in 1996, and in 2003 they were producing about 200 3-carat yellow diamonds a month, with plans to go to 5-karat ones. Yellow because apparently it is one of the most rare variety of naturals, later they also stared selling pure colorless ones.

So I would think there would be no problem for Molly to sell comparable or lesser volumes of colorless high-quality artificial diamonds, sidestepping any ugly side effects of natural diamond trade.

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Hmm... I think that sort of judgement call should come down to a vote as there are pros and cons on either side

[X] uju32

[X] Offer to get him a working computer/TV or any other electronic he might want by means if HMP instead
-[X] "If you won't let me pay you with money, let's trade in trade. You used your magic and powers to help me, so it's only fair that I return the favor. A laptop and a smart phone. That's like, the minimum if you want to do modern PI work. If you don't complain I'll even throw in an overhaul of your fuse box and get the power turned back on. Think about it Dresden, electric lights, hot water in your shower...

[X] Sit down and write down some of the stuff Usum knows which the White Council might not, that should segue into talking to Bob nicely, knowledge for knowledge but you will make sure he gets the better deal
-[X] STUNT: "I also wanted to sit down and to compare notes as it was. I have a lot of knowledge, and can get a lot more. I think we both will benefit from comparing what we know".

The knowledge exchange should not be a trade. It should be a part of "we are cooperating with good guys and helping them because they are good guys".

@DragonParadox

DragonParadox said:

[] Masterworks for money, you can make gems, you can make gold, you can make fine watches, heck you can make a light airplane from scrap if you really put in the hours, though that would be overkill you think. Now cars maybe... yeah restoring cars could work. Or you could turn your lie to Izzy into truth and work with dad
-[] Diamonds are a girl's best friend, make artificial diamonds or other gemstones
-[] All that glitters, ye old dream of making gold from lead, now with radiation

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Platinum-group metal transmutation:

RutheniumEdit

In addition to being a fission product of uranium, as described above, another way to produce ruthenium is to start with molybdenum, which has a price averaging between $10 and $20/kg, in contrast with ruthenium's $1860/kg.[3] The isotope 100Mo, which has an abundance of 9.6% in natural molybdenum, can be transmuted to 101Mo by slow neutron irradiation. 101Mo and its daughter product, 101Tc, both have beta-decay half-lives of roughly 14 minutes. The end product is stable 101Ru. Alternately, it can be produced by the neutron inactivation of 99Tc; the resulting 100Tc has a half-life of 16 seconds and decays to the stable 100Ru.

Given that Technetium-99 is among the most problematic long-lived fission products and - unlike its nuclear isomer 99mTc - has no known applications, production of Ruthenium from nuclear waste derived Technetium appears particularly promising. However, if Ruthenium that can be used without having to wait for nuclear decays to occur is desired, a particularly isotopically and chemically pure Technetium-99 target is needed.99mTc has important medical applications and the production of 99 Tc waste from it is unavoidable. If Ruthenium is produced from such a source, a relatively pure 99Tc feedstock can be guaranteed and it might be possible to generate economic benefit from both the waste disposal of 99Tc and the subsequent sale of Ruthenium.

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Rhodium said:

RhodiumEdit

In addition to being a fission product of uranium, as described above, another way to produce rhodium is to start with ruthenium, which has a price of $1860/kg, which is much lower than rhodium's $765,188/kg. The isotope 102Ru, which forms 31.6% of natural ruthenium, can be transmuted to 103Ru by slow neutron irradiation. 103Ru then decays to 103Rh via beta decay, with a half-life of 39.26 days. The isotopes 98Ru through 101Ru, which together form 44.2% of natural ruthenium, could also be transmuted into 102Ru, and subsequently to 103Ru and then 103Rh, through multiple neutron captures in a nuclear reactor. As Ruthenium can also be produced from lower value feedstocks such as Technetium or Molybdenum (as described above) it might be possible to produce very high value Rhodium via successive neutron capture (and beta decays) from low value molybdenum or even "waste" Technetium.

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Platinum said:

PlatinumEdit

The cost of platinum as of October 2014 was $39,900 per kilogram, making it equally as expensive as rhodium. Iridium, by contrast, has only about half the value of platinum ($18,000/kg). Iridium has two naturally occurring isotopes, 191Ir and 193Ir. Irradiation by slow neutrons would transmute these isotopes into 192Ir and 194Ir, with short half-lives of 73 days and 19 hours, respectively; the predominant decay pathway for both of these isotopes is beta-minus decay into 192Pt and 194Pt.[11][12]

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Source:

Molybednum($20) to ruthenium(~$2000) to rhodium(~$750,000) is the highest yield pathway here.
Rhodium is currently down to around $500k a kilogram in 2022; dunno what it was in 2006.

Exmorri said:

Pistol user authentication is a much harder problem than it may sound, where politicians have been suggesting it since the late 90s and "development" has been more talk than reality. Some of the problems with alleged smart guns include:

1) Fail-deadly authentication is a waste of time. The attacker can spoof or damage the authentication system, with muddy fingers or physically thwacking the device or removing the battery, and be able to fire it anyway. But fail-deadly is what users expect in other respects, because,
2a) Fail-safe authentication in a gun makes for an unreliable gun, and there's almost no customer demand for unreliable guns with new and interesting ways of jamming if the fingerprint scanner has a bad day, or you lose the auth token, or whatever else. This is something you wish for your enemies to have, not yourself and your friends.
2b) Even if you solve fail-safe personal authentication, there's a second layer of challenges in being able to give/lend it to a friend or family member temporarily, and "gun I can't lend to my buddy" is another kind of unreliable gun that most customers don't want.
3) Guns, by nature, are subject to intense physical forces (internal explosions) and the closer you put sensitive electronics in them, the more chance for something to go wrong, but the further the electronics are from the firing, the easier it is to disable them,
4) Guns are expected to have long-term reliability and durability on the scale of years, but years-long batteries for those electronics are very hard to produce, even more so if you expect the sensitive electronics and batteries to keep working after the gun gets run over by a car or dropped in the mud for a week.

A smart gun that only lets an authorized user fire it is a problem where a cyberdevil may be the only possible solution, because it invokes bullshit technomagic to solve these problems.

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Yeah. I don't expect us to actually build a functional mundane one with our tech score. It's just that the really hard part isn't necessarily the hardware, especially since it's a custom build and not something for production and use by any old idiot.

As long as it integrates the electronics into the firing system throughly enough to make the whole gun count as part of the devil's 'body' we don't have to give a crap about the base device actually working.

The only real point in bringing them up is as a benchmark for electronics in this use case and a base to start with.

uju32 said:

Molybednum($20) to ruthenium(~$2000) to rhodium(~$750,000) is the highest yield pathway here.
Rhodium is currently down to around $500k a kilogram in 2022; dunno what it was in 2006.

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Interesting idea, but:
1) 100Mo is only 9.6% of natural isotopic content of Mo. So, add a step and make it 200$ per kg. That's not the issue, the issue is time it takes to do isotope separation. I wasn't able to find the data for Mo, and data for U is most probably classified, but that isn't a fast process.
2) 100Mo is transmuted into 101Ru, not the natural isotopic content. We need a further reaction to transform it into 102Ru, which is probably done via 101Ru(p,d)102Ru reaction (it was the only one I was able to find). This takes time, produces a lot of radiation (which would cause activation of all materials around us and probably kill our family), and most likely has separate reactions going on (i.e. the output is below 100% 102 Ru, with a lot of other nuclear products which has to be separated from the output).
3) 103Ru transmutes to 103Rh with a lifetime of 35 days. Assuming that we get a 5 time rate increase for a natural decay, where we don't actively affect the material at all (arguable), it's still 35 days of constantly running TTC to make 103 Rh non-radioctive (it is generally considered safe after 5 to 10 half-lifes to handle radioactive material).
4) The price of Rh is very non-stable. It is in fact the most unstable precious metal on Earth.
5) The amount of attention this will bring to us is much higher than diamond production. A very smart high schooler could, in principle, make a CVD installation in their parents' garage and work out a revolutionary production method. But elemental transmutation and isotopically pure rare metals is definitely nuclear stuff. Assuming that radiation detectors around Chicago won't pick it up, resellers will have a lot more questions for us.

Iridium to platinum is possible, but not very profitable. Unless we build a radiation-resistant bunker where we will store the material as it decays, we could only use 193ir. It has isotopic abundance of 62.7% sharply cutting into our profit margins.

These are interesting ideas, and nuclear-forged Rhodium would + synthetic gems would be rad materials for jewelry crafting (very small market, but very high price; probably present it to someone like Mab or someone else to demonstrate our supreme mastery of craftsmanship), but they remain much less feasible than gem making or jewelry making using normal materials.

I still say the easiest way to get valuable material is to wait for a flood, and use TTC to make a sluice that covers an entire river. In a river known for gold or other valuables we could get several pounds for sluicing a proper flood.

The important question to ask about money making is "how much money do we need and what for?".

I would argue that we don't need more than a couple of million for now, if at all. My reasoning is this:
1) We won't need money for long-range transportation once we have RVD. We would only need in-country transportation to areas which we can't reach via rivers or oceans / seas. That, at most, requires, thirty grand for a given large country, if we want private fast transportation.
2) Every stuff that can be done online is going to be done via cyberdevils, who we will likely raise to 5 dots at some point. So, we only need a lawyer on retainer. But we need a good one. Probably several actually.
3) We want our family to live a comfortable life. That shouldn't take more than 50k per month, likely significantly less.
4) Once we get our kingdom, and have a good lawyer firm on retainer, money won't be an issue at all via all the patents, and media rights we will be getting. We will likely get our kingdom within a year.

So, I think we need at most a couple of million dollars. Meaning, win the lottery goddamn, and then only do crafting for personal wonders and plot, not for money.

bengalqueen said:

Idea! What if we fix up his car? He drives an ancient hunk of junk because all of the recently-made stuff has electronics that don't play nicely with techbane, and it constantly breaks down on him.

Cars specifically fall under our mechanics specialty for Craft, so we roll 14 dice with an Excellency. We can easily rebuild his car from the ground up to be reliable and perform well in detective stuff, while excluding any circuitry and such that his techbane would set off. We can make him a legendary-success-tier car built for wizard detective work, techbane-proofing and all, without getting him nervous about cyberdevils. Even do it at 10x speed since cars are specifically called out as qualifying for the higher rate in the description for TTC. Add a quick rinse with a hose to trigger the difficulty reduction, and we can give him something really awesome and useful.

Thoughts?

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It's a good idea, but trying to fit all the ways that we can repay him into one vote gets really clunky.

Earth-Destroyer said:

I still say the easiest way to get valuable material is to wait for a flood, and use TTC to make a sluice that covers an entire river. In a river known for gold or other valuables we could get several pounds for sluicing a proper flood.

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Or we could just spend a summer up in Alaska in some out of the way valley using the Tool Charm to slurp all the gold sitting in creeks and other out of the way places that haven't ever been economically feasible to extract up to this point.

Hell, given our abilities and ability to not only ignore cold but thrive in it, we could just take a trip to Alaska in the dead of winter, use the Crown for prospecting purposes, then TTC our way to all the gold we could need.

There are almost certainly Yeti or something in Alaska. In the world of DF it just makes sense that everywhere not populated by humans is populated by something else.

fictionfan said:

There are almost certainly Yeti or something in Alaska. In the world of DF it just makes sense that everywhere not populated by humans is populated by something else.

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Molly Carpenter, Queen of the Yetis has a nice ring to it.

Goldfish said:

Molly Carpenter, Queen of the Yetis has a nice ring to it.

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I personally suspect that many, certainly not all, of the cold magical beings owe some form of loyalty to Winter and considering our Enemy Point (minuscule in the grand scheme of things but) with them... I would advise caution.

Also aren't the Yeti from the Himalayan Mountains not Alaska? Or has pop culture lied to me yet again?

Azais said:

Also aren't the Yeti from the Himalayan Mountains not Alaska? Or has pop culture lied to me yet again?

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They're indeed from the Himalaya. The US have Bigfoot or something like that.

Goldfish said:

Or we could just spend a summer up in Alaska in some out of the way valley using the Tool Charm to slurp all the gold sitting in creeks and other out of the way places that haven't ever been economically feasible to extract up to this point.

Hell, given our abilities and ability to not only ignore cold but thrive in it, we could just take a trip to Alaska in the dead of winter, use the Crown for prospecting purposes, then TTC our way to all the gold we could need.

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Tool charms are not really that good at things like large scale processing of raw materials. One could make the point that you are 'crafting' the water into gold flakes and waste water, but that is a bit too far of a reach IMO,

@DragonParadox , Molly thought to ask Harry what does he think about their last case...

Arhin said:

@DragonParadox , Molly thought to ask Harry what does he think about their last case...

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Sure I can cover this in the next update, though it should be said the normal case for Harry is not something we see in the novels or even the short stories. A normal case is more like 'I lost my lucky key chain at X event, can you help me find it mister wizard?' He does not actually pay the bills by playing hero.

Of course he does struggle to pay the bills because as it turns out most of his effort on long term improvement is on the daring do. So if I understand the question correctly it's more 'how does the last case compare to a normal case with dad?' Since if Michael is in on something than you know it is the 'fun' kind of case.