Thank you for the citation.
But it doesn't support your argument; it refers to the anima banner, the glowing, Dragon Ball-esque manifestation that an Exalt gets when they get busy. The anima/aura is smaller, and doesn't glow for most people.
The text for expression in Vampire explicitely says that this is what ancient monsters pursue to twist minds with their words.
Yes. Ancient monsters.
There's a reason why ancient monsters divorced from humanity default to Expression over emotions
The issue is also logistics and getting the raw materials. That takes time. And welding titanium is IRL DC9 challenge.
Not an issue in Chicago which is a major trading city and transport hub on both the Mississippi and the Great Lakes.
Welding titanium is a problem for mortals, who require special equipment to do so in an argon atmosphere.
Not for an Exalt with Tool Constructs, Transcendent Lord of Flies to ignore environmental damage and the ability to implement the sort of fabrication techniques that would be cost-prohibitive for a 2006 automobile company.
I would be surprised if we were doing anything quite so mundane as welding.
Might be an issue with language. How do you call trucks / vehicles that transport long (6 meters typically for pipes / beams and 2X3 meters for plates / sheets) materials? I have
this in mind. These are how you usually transport metal sheets, rolls of foil, beams and pipes by car. It's not an issue of weight, it's an issue of size.
That thing can move double digit metric tons of raw material, and requires special unloading from the truck bed.
Way outsize for a project of this scale.
Think delivery van instead; the GMC Savanna/Chevrolet Express has a maximum internal payload of around 4000 pounds
Like so
It's harder to obtain ingots in time. In a city like Chicacgo you likely can obtain sheets, pipes, platers of metal in standard sizes in a day. Ingots of raw materials would take much more time, and we'd have to spend additional time processing them.
Plural is because you are likely to source copper from one firm, titanium from another, and aluminum blocks from a third one.
I do this kind of strange purchases for a living. A laboratory needs strange materials purchased regularly. These are the kinds of trucks I came to expect.
The form factor of the raw material doesn't really matter.
Could be sheets, pipes or bags of metal dust, and TTC would process it just fine through an electric arc.
The time is not going to be materially different, and as an Exalt, we have access to fabrication techniques too expensive for era-appropriate car companies anyway, from additive manufacturing to high-pressure casting and friction-stir welding.
And like I said, this is Chicago.
The third largest city in the US.A major rail and road hub as well as transshipping hub for both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system.
Picking up a couple hundred kilos each of individual elements is not the sort of contract order that takes days to put together.
Its a call and pickup job, especially if you're paying cash or premium prices.
I suspect this isn't even
There don't appear to be that many supplies firms on this tier that mono focus on one element, and those that do operate in volumes far beyond our needs.
Big laboratories appear to buy in bulk for multiple projects though.
An artisan working on a single project is working on a much smaller scale. Two to three tons of material is what's needed here, and a lot of that's just carbon and aluminum and copper. Add lithium and rare earths for the drivetrain and batteries of an EV.
Like I said, the Rolls Royce Phantom is 2.6 tons.
Assuming steel is 40% of that weight, you're only looking at around a ton of steel by weight.
For comparison? The loadbed of a Ford F-250 light truck like this
Will carry around 2 tons of material in its bed, and tow 5-7 tons behind it.
Its a personal vehicle in the US(the one in the picture is towing a horse trailer), and also often used by some tradespeople.
This is a situation where Molly borrows her father's truck(or, more likely, hires one from a rental company) to go pickup her raw material acquisitions, unloads it herself into the construction garage that she is using, then uses the same truck to tow the finished vehicle on a car trailer for delivery.
