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Titan of Steel (Dungeoncore)

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I just write said:
If I were going to use singularities in my reactors, I'd actually prefer to use really tiny ones, wait for them to evaporate into Hawking Radiation (with their mass carefully calibrated so I have a safe amount of energy coming off this), and repeat. That said, I really have no reason to do so given how efficient Protonium is as a fuel, particularly when coupled with an MHD generator converting the momentum of charged particles directly into useful mana.
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What about the summoning protons without electrons?

That would be a reactor that scales well into the higher power ranges and let you get output greater than linear wrt to size. If the dungeon needs more firepower than nuclear fission (eg. melting a mountain rather than just scorching it), this would be a way to get it.
 
So, if the problem is containment, then what could you summon-in-place to (for a split second) contain absurd amounts of energy output? Like, suppose you summon an OMG-BOOM thing in the centre, then summon insta-black-holes around it in every direction except the one you intend to fire in? Then you just need to deal with the radiation from the black holes, which you could perhaps deal with via smaller black holes.

I should mention that I am not a physicist.
 
Cyanz said:
So, if the problem is containment, then what could you summon-in-place to (for a split second) contain absurd amounts of energy output? Like, suppose you summon an OMG-BOOM thing in the centre, then summon insta-black-holes around it in every direction except the one you intend to fire in? Then you just need to deal with the radiation from the black holes, which you could perhaps deal with via smaller black holes.
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kpkdktswnw2015 said:
Black holes themselves arent matter
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Singularities are ridiculous concentrations of matter (the mass of Earth in the size of a coin, and stuff like that) that produce this spacetime effect you're speaking about here due to the force of gravity. The reaxon why he can't summon them, if any, is that he doesn't have the mana to haul off and summon enough mass to make a planet, and even if he did it would eat the world. A black hole small enough to summon would "only" pretty immediately go up in a multi-megaton explosion, a problem that would most likely not be solved by throwing more black holes at it. ("How do we stop this nuke from destroying everything?" "Nuke it!" "Lolwut?")

In general, black holes are an incredibly dangerous non-solution to a power problem that I Just Write has a vested interest in not solving so absolutely because that level of power generation would end the story - it would make all conflict disappear, one way or another.
 
Point taken, but the point is that I Just Write needs ways to abuse physics for containment. The black holes were meant as an initial idea and example.
 
Thinking about it, there should be a way to create electrons directly as usable electrical power, bypassing the need for reactors of any kind. The actual physics involved would be... complicated though. Probably want to use something along the lines of betavoltaics, and you'd probably need to vent excess electrons in the world's most spectacular lightning storm every now and then, else risk drawing mile-wide bolts of lightning from the nearest planetary surface as a bunch of nearby protons go "LET US IN, WE KNOW YOU HAVE ELECTRONS IN THERE."

Actually, there should be issues with proton build-up right now anyway. And if you're using MHD generators then you'd actually get more out of using electron degenerate matter as fuel rather than proton degenerate matter; as electron matter has much higher kinetic energy than proton matter due to differences in mass.

Though on the other hand, electron matter behaves strangely with regards to heat in a way that proton matter does not. Not sure if or how that would impact total power gain, though it would probably mean an electron fueled MHD generator would require a different design from a proton fueled one. Either way though you're going to need to be venting semi-regular blasts of extremely unstable and exotic ionized plasma exhaust in order to avoid your reactors from collapsing into miniature neutron stars, or worse.

In short, the Titan should probably be trailing one hell of a (highly radioactive) lightning storm around with it. Or possibly vast quantities of hydrogen gas that occasionally erupt into spontaneous but brief firestorms, if you. Or a Bronsted acid if your reactor shielding isn't perfect. Or maybe just a big ole cloud of quark plasma that is also a lightning storm at the same time, it depends on how you dispose of excess proton plasma after it's gone through the MHD generator.
 
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Neruz said:
Thinking about it, there should be a way to create electrons directly as usable electrical power, bypassing the need for reactors of any kind. The actual physics involved would be... complicated though. Probably want to use something along the lines of betavoltaics, and you'd probably need to vent excess electrons in the world's most spectacular lightning storm every now and then, else risk drawing mile-wide bolts of lightning from the nearest planetary surface as a bunch of nearby protons go "LET US IN, WE KNOW YOU HAVE ELECTRONS IN THERE."

Actually, there should be issues with proton build-up right now anyway. And if you're using MHD generators then you'd actually get more out of using electron degenerate matter as fuel rather than proton degenerate matter; as electron matter has much higher kinetic energy than proton matter due to differences in mass.

Though on the other hand, electron matter behaves strangely with regards to heat in a way that proton matter does not. Not sure if or how that would impact total power gain, though it would probably mean an electron fueled MHD generator would require a different design from a proton fueled one. Either way though you're going to need to be venting semi-regular blasts of extremely unstable and exotic ionized plasma exhaust in order to avoid your reactors from collapsing into miniature neutron stars, or worse.

In short, the Titan should probably be trailing one hell of a (highly radioactive) lightning storm around with it. Or possibly vast quantities of hydrogen gas that occasionally erupt into spontaneous but brief firestorms, if you. Or a Bronsted acid if your reactor shielding isn't perfect.
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My current reactors actually conjure an equal amount of Protons and Electrons in order to avoid issues with ridiculous charge imbalances. An Oxygen afterburner deals with the Hydrogen gas produced as a result, meaning that the output is almost entirely in the form of ridiculously superheated steam.
 
I just write said:
My current reactors actually conjure an equal amount of Protons and Electrons in order to avoid issues with ridiculous charge imbalances. An Oxygen afterburner deals with the Hydrogen gas produced as a result, meaning that the output is almost entirely in the form of ridiculously superheated steam.
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Making the Titan a perpetual high temp\low pressure zone that vents cloud banks, which given the temperatures involved will have a habit of spontaneously turning into various kinds of tropical storms.

Probably an improvement over venting the exhaust plasma directly, but that would mean that anywhere the Titan hangs out for a significant length of time is pretty much guaranteed to suddenly discover itself in the middle of an extremely peculiar 'cyclone' comprised of a steadily expanding circular storm-front that slowly starts rotating from the coriolis effect.

In short, that country is going to become very hot, very wet and very windy in the not too distant future. Depending on the volume of exhaust. Amusingly the rest of the planet will steadily get colder as the massive clouds of steam reflect more and more sunlight back into space. Hang around long enough and you'll eventually plunge the entire world into an ice age with the Titan sitting in the middle of a planet-wide storm system centered above a chunk of perpetual monsoon jungle.
 
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Neruz said:
Making the Titan a perpetual high temp\low pressure zone that vents cloud banks, which given the temperatures involved will have a habit of spontaneously turning into various kinds of tropical storms.

Probably an improvement over venting the exhaust plasma directly, but that would mean that anywhere the Titan hangs out for a significant length of time is pretty much guaranteed to suddenly discover itself in the middle of an extremely peculiar 'cyclone' comprised of a steadily expanding circular storm-front that slowly starts rotating from the coriolis effect.

In short, that country is going to become very hot, very wet and very windy in the not too distant future. Depending on the volume of exhaust. Amusingly the rest of the planet will steadily get colder as the massive clouds of steam reflect more and more sunlight back into space. Hang around long enough and you'll eventually plunge the entire world into an ice age with the Titan sitting in the middle of a planet-wide storm system centered above a chunk of perpetual monsoon jungle.
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The sheer energy density of my fuel insures that there actually isn't too much exhaust, mass-wise. Probably a few kilograms per second, at most.
 
I just write said:
The sheer energy density of my fuel insures that there actually isn't too much exhaust, mass-wise. Probably a few kilograms per second, at most.
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On the other hand you're also using vast amounts of energy, I would have to do far too much math to work out exactly how much material you'd need to go through. A few kilograms per second seems like as good an amount as any off the top of my head, those few kilograms per second of superheated water are still going to have to come down as rain at some point though. Being superheated will also be dumping a lot of heat into the surrounding atmosphere, raising temperature and therefore evaporation even further.

Doing some extremely quick and dirty math, you'd get a notable increase in local temperature and humidity over the next five to ten years, with the most obvious weather effect being constant intermittent light rain-showers in the immediate area around the Titan during colder seasons. You'd be seeing increasing numbers of out of season cyclones within a century, and probably be looking at major worldwide biosphere changes within a millennium.

So yeah, not going to cause issues in the immediate short-term future, but the very existence of your Titan is guaranteed to cause major weather problems within a couple of centuries, and major worldwide chaos a few centuries after that. The short-term increase in temperature and rainfall in the Titan's immediate area will probably benefit the people living there over the next decade or so, as long as they can adapt to a slowly but steadily increasing tropical climate. The exact time-scale would depend on how superheated the steam is, as the more energy you pump into the atmosphere the faster the weather will go wonky.

And of course, if the Titan hangs around for long enough it will flood the planet through steadily rising ocean levels. Fortunately I'm fairly sure you'd hit the weird 'tropical storm ice-age' state before that happened, making it less of a flooded planet and more of a snowball.

Still, in a year or two there's going to be a bunch of very confused peasant farmers trying to figure out wtf is going on with the unusual and out-of-season weather they've been having ever since the Titan showed up. In a century or three the descendants of those same peasants will be cursing the Titan for greenhouse-effecting the climate, bad Titan, Greens Party is not impressed.

e: Oh, and rainbows. Gonna be lots of rainbows.
 
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If magic causes weather problems (and surely *this* titan isn't the first - in fact, a certain dead desert shows otherwise), maybe there's similarly a weather-problem solving spell? Because frankly, that sounds like a boring problem.
 
Cyanz said:
If magic causes weather problems (and surely *this* titan isn't the first - in fact, a certain dead desert shows otherwise), maybe there's similarly a weather-problem solving spell? Because frankly, that sounds like a boring problem.
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Funny you should mention that; the Storm Titan actually powers themselves by kicking up what amounts to a permanent level 9001 lightning storm, getting their energy by pretty much constantly zapping themselves with lightning. They almost certainly know a lot about weather manipulation.
Neruz said:
On the other hand you're also using vast amounts of energy, I would have to do far too much math to work out exactly how much material you'd need to go through. A few kilograms per second seems like as good an amount as any off the top of my head, those few kilograms per second of superheated water are still going to have to come down as rain at some point though. Being superheated will also be dumping a lot of heat into the surrounding atmosphere, raising temperature and therefore evaporation even further.

Doing some extremely quick and dirty math, you'd get a notable increase in local temperature and humidity over the next five to ten years, with the most obvious weather effect being constant intermittent light rain-showers in the immediate area around the Titan during colder seasons. You'd be seeing increasing numbers of out of season cyclones within a century, and probably be looking at major worldwide biosphere changes within a millennium.

So yeah, not going to cause issues in the immediate short-term future, but the very existence of your Titan is guaranteed to cause major weather problems within a couple of centuries, and major worldwide chaos a few centuries after that. The short-term increase in temperature and rainfall in the Titan's immediate area will probably benefit the people living there over the next decade or so, as long as they can adapt to a slowly but steadily increasing tropical climate. The exact time-scale would depend on how superheated the steam is, as the more energy you pump into the atmosphere the faster the weather will go wonky.

And of course, if the Titan hangs around for long enough it will flood the planet through steadily rising ocean levels. Fortunately I'm fairly sure you'd hit the weird 'tropical storm ice-age' state before that happened, making it less of a flooded planet and more of a snowball.

Still, in a year or two there's going to be a bunch of very confused peasant farmers trying to figure out wtf is going on with the unusual and out-of-season weather they've been having ever since the Titan showed up. In a century or three the descendants of those same peasants will be cursing the Titan for greenhouse-effecting the climate, bad Titan, Greens Party is not impressed.

e: Oh, and rainbows. Gonna be lots of rainbows.
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Just going to note that I plan on switching everyone over to more advanced industrial hydroponics as soon as I can manage it. Fortunately, the Dwarves are quite proficient at such methods.
 
Wait, wait! You're using cannons that work by creating mass with inertia (presumably from mana), thus causing said mass to immediately fly off at high speeds due to said inertia.

NEUTRON PARTICLE BEAM WEAPON GO. Forget normal projectiles, create a neutron with relativistic inertia, then create a bunch more and point them all in the general direction of things that you don't want to exist anymore. I'm sorry mister Grand Dragon, I can't hear you over the sound of your flesh undergoing atomic fission.

I wonder what a quark-based particle beam would do, apart from collateral damage. Probably need to use Top quarks to prevent them hadronizing, shit now I'm going to spend the next three hours figuring out if a quark beam would work as a viable weapon.
 
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You could also make a higgs boson bomb that creates a massive intensity higgs field on detonation, causing the immediate space\time to collapse into vacuum decay which then expands everywhere at the speed of light and eventually consumes the entire universe.

Probably not very useful, but it would be a nice 'fuck you' button to push in the event of impending doom. I wonder what a higgs particle\wave beam would do, assuming you don't go over the energy limit needed to hit vacuum decay, it should create a beam that causes the mass of everything 'hit' to go haywire. Probably causing spontaneous black hole\matter degeneration events, but I can't write off the possibility it could be used to cause something to have negative mass and promptly fly apart into a rapidly dissipating cloud of elementary particles.

If you encounter something that can somehow defend against all the physical bullshit the Titan can pull, then a dark matter weapon might also do the trick. Enough dark matter would create a gravitic 'shock wave' that would pass straight through and 'crumple' pretty much anything, due to dark matter only interacting with gravity. Of course you'd have to be real careful where you aimed that gun, unless you want to punch holes through planets and\or stars.

Oh the possibilities of arbitrary on-demand energy-mass conversion. "I'm sorry did I destabilize your quantum atomic structure by throwing W and Z bosons at you to undermine the electroweak force holding your atoms together? I can't hear you over the sound of you disintegrating, imploding and exploding at the same time."
 
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    • From time to time, everyone has fantasized about how they would run the world if they took it over, and I was no exception. However, very few people also were able to predict all the problems that came with having to run even a small fraction of said world. Sadly, I wasn't much of an exception here either.

    The instant I got back to the city where I had killed the Blue Dragon, I immediately burrowed myself into the ground. Despite the sheer mobility and firepower afforded by my battleship chassis, the fact was that I would be needing way more power generation than it could provide if I wanted to build enough infrastructure to hold together an entire freaking country!

    Mostly, I let the facility-building run on autopilot while I focused on churning out VTOL transports stuffed with Clockwork Knights and my Infiltrator Cyborgs, though with the way I was about to be using them they wouldn't be infiltrating so much as providing a face that didn't immediately send the locals running in terror. Within thirty minutes, the flying machines were launching from the massive sunken hangar in the ground by the hundreds, with one shuttle landing at each town that I found.

    There was one major reason that I was doing all this so quickly, and that was because I needed on the ground information about the territory I had just de-dragoned as quickly as I could possibly get it. I wanted to get the people here to the point that they could beat every single Grand Dragon that came at them into a pulp even without my help, and that meant I needed to proliferate my tech-base as hard as I possibly could. In order to do that, I would need to know where I was even going to be starting.

    The information that was coming back was extremely disheartening, and I should really take it piece by piece if I wanted a good shot at explaining it correctly.

    Let's start with the realm formerly ruled by the Blue Dragon; in a lot of ways, this place was one of the better off locations. There was a coherent national identity between all the various towns, an official system of communication (if heavily slanted towards propaganda), a semi-functional educational system able to turn out a good number of Mages, and very few bandits or monsters running free to torment the innocent. On the other hand, the educational system did everything in its power to stifle innovation on pain of death, the law enforcement was the Drake Guard, only the highest tier of society had access to healthcare (by which I mean healing magic), and sanitation was a joke.

    There were about eight other areas like that where the Grand Dragons had taken an unusually intense interest in building a power-structure around themselves, but for the most part the Dragons had been content to simply pummel anyone who looked like they were building up a power base and take anything they wanted by force. In places like these, conditions were even worse. Large cities were non-existent aside from the Dragon's dens, all manner of scum and villainy roamed the countryside, and individual villages often viewed themselves as having zero common interest with their neighbors. On the other hand, it was only in these places that I was able to find Adventurer Towns, populated by monster-hunters and magic users of all stripes.

    Much to my shame, it was only after getting a pretty good picture of how things were going for the humanoid species out there that I thought to check on the other Dungeons around these parts, recalling the Drake Guard's policy of repeated and thorough plundering.

    Oh, the Dungeons in the places where the Grand Dragons really didn't give a shit about statecraft were doing rather well for themselves, if rather confused when some of my Clockworks showed up to give them the news and ask them how things had been going. It was the Dungeons in Regno that really infuriated me.

    The first sign that anything was off was that the Drake Guard had universally vacated their bases outside every single Dungeon, but things simply got worse from there. Time after time, my creations marched through shattered corridors littered with th corpses of slain Dungeon inhabitants, every single item of value having long since been carted off. Stone walls and floors had been smashed and entire family units of Goblins and Fae had been put to the sword, leaving only a grim tableau of devastation. However, it wasn't until I thought to check why none of the Dungeons had talked to me that I discovered the depths of the atrocity that had just been committed.

    Deep at the bottom of every single Dungeon, where a living, personable core once rested on a pedestal, there were only fragments. All across Regno, the Drake Guard had smashed right through the savaged defenses of the Dungeons they had spent years torturing to extract powerful artifacts and magic, and slain the being bringing the structure to life. Only once did my Clockworks encounter a Drake Guard contingent while they were still inside their victim's halls; I left a single survivor to interrogate, before checking to see if I had been too late here as well. I had.

    How in the world are you even supposed to react when you find out that not only has a genocide just been committed against your own species, but also that you didn't even notice it happening until it was too late to stop it? Silently, I gave the member of the Drake Guard I was interrogating a carefully measured dose of gas-form Sodium-24; they wouldn't notice anything until long after I was done interrogating them, but neither would they be in the world much longer to keep spreading misery.

    Once that unpleasantness was done and I had turned the man loose to die an agonizing death in a few days, I pretty much broke down at the enormity of what I could have prevented if I had just changed the order I had done things in. Quickly, I delegated temporary command and construction authority to my twenty highest-ranked Gremlins, ordering them to set about installing proper sanitation, travel and communication infrastructure immediately. That done, I retreated into myself to grieve. I really needed some time to process what had just happened, or I was likely to do something extremely counterproductive like set my Clockwork Knights to interrogate the entire population for Drake Guard loyalties.
    Clockwork Knight #0824971 was operating severely outside their originally designed mission parameters. Said parameters normally amounted to excessively lethal combat in which it was perfectly acceptable to reduce everything in sight to so much radioactive slag. Instead, #0824971 was acting as a visible bringer of good news and security to the people of a moderately large town near a river, a task where nuclear-powered plasma weapons were most emphatically not acceptable to use.

    Currently, the human-like mediator platforms were meeting with the town's council of aldermen in the combination church and meeting-house that dominated the center of the town. #0824971 and the other Clockwork Knights had meanwhile needed to stay outside, after one of their number had crashed through the floor and into the basement due to the sheer weight of the metal making up their bodies. They had of course offered to repair the damage after hauling said Clockwork Knight out of the basement, but the whole incident was largely being glossed over by everyone involved.

    Still, this left several bulky and imposing combat automatons standing in plain view of everyone in the town, most of whom looked really quite fearful regarding the whole thing. Given what these people had previously been subjected to, #0824971 figured it made sense. Their only frame of reference for what a government did was thugs backed up by a nuclear-powered dragon. The fact that the town's Drake Guard contingent had promptly been forced to either disband or be arrested for a later investigation into their actions likely hadn't made a very good impression either.

    It was after an hour of general tension regarding the whole affair that events began to really occur. A woman was walking by with a small child in tow, carefully averting her gaze and gripping the young girl's hand tightly in order to keep them from escaping. The blonde-haired child in question had no such fears, calling out "Mommy I wanna go look at the shiny people!" the instant she saw #0824971 and their fellow Clockwork Knights.

    #0824971 watched impassively as a brief tug of war ensued between the two, the child trying to slip out of her mother's grasp, and said mother desperately attempting to hold her child back. Ultimately, the child won and ran straight towards Clockwork Knight #0824971, her mother following desperately behind.

    For the briefest of moments, the automaton measured the threat level presented by the child in order to determine an appropriate response. It took only a second in order for #0824971 to prepare the appropriate countermeasure to ensure their safety, even as the unknown child closed to within arm's reach with the extremely lethal combat automaton. The resulting encounter was over as swiftly as it began, as #0824971 offered the child an apple and asked "What is your name, little one?" crouching down as they did so.

    The child snatched the fruit out of the Clockwork Knight's hand almost instantly, answering "My name's Emerald! What's yours?" before she swiftly set about demolishing the delicious fruit she had been given.

    Clockwork Knight #0824971 pondered this for a few moments. They had a designation, yes, which kept them from being confused with other Clockwork Knights, but that was different from a name. A name implied identity and individuality, concepts that were quite foreign to Clockwork Knight #0824971. Eventually, the automaton answered "I was not provided with a name."

    Emerald looked up from the fruit she had mostly consumed by now, before saying "Your dad must have forgotten something then." She didn't get to finish what she was about to say, as that was the exact instant Emerald's mother caught up to her, and hauled her away.

    For the next several minutes, #0824971 found their thoughts persistently looping back around to that brief encounter with Emerald, and the idea of names as a signifier of personal identity. It was this persistent line of thought that lead the Clockwork Knight in question to make their first ever decision not dictated by the ethical framework they were imprinted with, the directives from the Command Network, or even the necessities of combat. With great solemnity, #0824971 sent a message into the Command Net that would have repercussions they hadn't even considered.
    clockwork knight #0824971
    I am requesting a name and cosmetic alterations to facilitate an individual identity.
     
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    • YOU HAVE RECEIVED A NEW QUEST
    NAME YOUR CREATIONS
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    One of your creations has requested individuality. Will you grant its request? Yes/No
    Requirements: chose a name for unique unit, customize exterior.
    Bonus objective: got a name them all. Come up with a naming scheme and let your units customize themselves
    Rewards: you have named units. This helps maybe?​
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    I've been reading too many litrpgs recently...​
     
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