Force 1 levitation lets you move 250 KG at 1 meter per round. If I were lifting anything lighter than a car, I would gladly trade weight for speed; instead of 250 KG at 1 meter per round, I would have it move 125 KG at 2 meters per round, or something like that. Would you allow this?

I imagine that at the higher forces, you'd be flying around like DBZ characters; I hope you know enough about me by now to realize that I don't care.

I wouldn't allow it, but it would probably fit right in with your game. would you let it stack with the movement power? I don't have a book handy but I imagine you could get some scary movement rates with a force 8-ish spirit and spell.

OOOOOOOHHHHH yes. Magic kicks so much ass.

Maybe you could have Greater Levitation, where you can do this but for +2 drain.

Be sure to let it scale all the way down. 250kg @ 1m/CT -> 0.015kg steel chunk at 5464m/s = 235.5 grains at 17926fps = kinda like a sporting rifle, only at over 6 times the velocity/36 times the kinetic energy. Should be enough to penetrate at least 4" of armor steel, or, with a correctly shaped steel chunk, to spectacularly fuck up any metahuman.

OHHHHHH yes. That would rock so hard. And it wouldn't arc, as long as it stayed in your LOS.

You did not in any way put a monkey wrench in the power trip with that post.

It is still possible to achieve pretty good speeds with SR4 levitate, for example a mage with a magic of 6, a force 4 power focus, and rolling 15 dice (and getting 5 hits) goes at 60 km/h. Adding his edge (of 3) and rolling 18 exploding dice moves him at 84 km/h.

Sure it's not the high subsonic speeds that previous editions mages could achieve, but its still pretty respectable.

Not... awesome... enough!!!

Maybe, you could have a levitate brain spell, and just levitate their brains right out of their heads! 3 guesses to who gave me the inspiration for that idea.

Ok, so figure out how fast you want to go

chump mage: magic 4, 8 dice, using edge 11 dice
Starting mage: magic 5, 10 dice, using edge 13 dice
Starting mage w/ p focus 3, magic 8, 13 dice, using edge 16 dice
Powerful mage magic 8, 12 dice, using edge 16 dice
Powermage + focus 4, magic 12, 16 dice, using edge 20 dice

Top'o the heap magic 10, 14 dice, using edge 20 dice
+ focus 6 magic 16, 20 dice, using edge 26 dice.

so the scale looks something like this:

chumps (4 x 4) levitate factor 16
top 'o the heap (w/focus w/o edge) (16x7) levitate factor 112

assuming we want our top o' the heap mage to top out around the speed of sound (~1200 km/h at sea level), we'll fudge and say around 10 km/h x the 'letivate factor).

This would make a chump using the same spell go around 160 km/h.

For reference, the SR4 stock speed multiple is 1.2 km/h per levitate factor. This means that the 'supa fly' spells would have to work ~ 8.33 times as well as regular levitate.

That'd permit relatively low-Force Levitation to accelerate a sufficiently small grain of dust to ≈ c.
No. Bad emo samurai. No soup for you.

Erased.

Speaking for myself, one movement power per customer. No shoes, no shirt, no service.

Ok, a quick web search shows your right. It doesn’t make any sense to me but your right.

A model rocket engine has a fixed amount on chemical energy witch will translate into a fixed amount of kinetic energy

That would mean it takes more fuel (chemical energy) to accelerate from 100kphto 200kph than from 0 to 100kph (3 times as much fuel). In the absence of wind resistance this doesn’t make sense, to start with what do you use as your reference point to determine your speed,

Edward

if you don't mind my asking, why precisely does that not make sense?

i would certainly say that velocity increases (as compared to energy expenditure) follow some kind of diminishing returns type equation. certainly, if i run at half my maximum speed, i can do so for more than twice as long as i can run at 100% of my maximum speed, IMO.

what i find fascinating is that it works out to such a simple equation... the constant is only 1/2, not something wacky like pi, and the exponent is just 2, not something wacky like the square root of 5.

First the multiplier is simple because the units are all metric, with metric the constants always come out nicely as long as you don’t actually include a natural physical phenomena (such as the charge of an electron or the speed of light) metric defined one unit (the meter) and all other units where created based on that, this includes the measure of speed, the measure of mass and the measure of energy

Running is a bad example when you run you have to change the velocity of your legs more often the faster you move. Its /almost/ a fixed amount of energy per step (there are also problems getting energy to the muscles and dealing with waste chemicals).

Consider 3 objects in the absence of an atmosphere or any other resistance

All 3 objects(A B C) have mass 1 and are at the arbitrary stationary

2 objects(A B) are affected buy a force of one unit for one unit of time. They gain one unit of speed and thus one unit of kinetic energy.

One of those 2 objects (A) is again affected buy a force, the same force in the same direction for the same time. When observed from object B object A now has speed one and thus kinetic energy one

However if the same force on A was observed from C A was already moving so it gains one unit of energy for a total of 2., reversing the formula we get a speed of the square root of 2
Thus speed a-b =1
Speed b-c = 1
Speed a-c = root 2
1+1=root 2

Now strange stuff like this is supposed to happen under the theory of relativity but not until you move at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

That is why it doesn’t make sense

Edward

Scaling the levitate the otherway, you could lift an arcology up very very slowly, assuming you bypass it's OR threshold.

You've got an object sitting in a neutral environment (no air, no gravity, nothing to screw with this example). It weighs 1 kg, it's doing 0 mps. 0 momentum, 0 KE. You've got another object in that same environment. It weighs 1 kg, it's doing 10 mps. Momentum is 10 (momentum = mass * velocity, 1x10=10), KE is 50 (KE = .5 M * V^2, .5x1x(10x10) = .5(100) = 50).

These two objects collide efficiently, and become a single 2 kg object travelling at 5 mps. Your momentum is still 10 (2x5 = 10), as momentum is conserved. However, your KE has just plummeted to 25 (.5x2x(5x5) = 1x(25) = 25). Energy is conserved as well, so where did that other 25 joules go? Heat. Your objects are now 25 joules warmer.

When you've got a rocket firing in space, it sends reaction mass in one direction at a given velocity, the rocket in the other. The amount of velocity gained by the rocket is directly linked to the momentum of the reaction mass going outwards, not to the kinetic energy of the reaction mass.

The same force, different applications.

Let's assume The Force is/has a force of 1md/t^2. When it accelerates Object A, with mass 1m, to a velocity of 1d/t, it does 0.5md^2/t^2 of work -- The Force is applied on Object A for a distance of 0.5d -- increasing Object A's kinetic energy from 0md^2/t^2 to 0.5md^2/t^2. When it accelerates Object A from 1d/t to 2d/t, it does 1.5md^2/t^2 of work, applying 1md/t^2 of force on Object A for a distance of 1.5d, increasing the kinetic energy of Object A from 0.5md^2/t^2 to 2md^2/t^2.

And, again, it would be better to resolve these issues of yours with a physics teacher than someone who almost flunked high school physics on an RPG forum.

Two applications of the same amount of force to objects with different masses will result in a matching change in momentum, not energy. Energy's relation to mass is geometric, but it's relation to velocity is exponential (as I laid out about 3 posts ago). If you don't buy this, I suggest taking some physics courses or looking it up online. Wikipedia has a decent article on this.