Ok, minor semantic issue. Back to topic.

~J

haven't read that one yet.

Third book in the Secrets of Power series, Find Your Own Truth, by Robert Charrette. In essence, it deals with negating nukes via magical ritual.

i can't--or, at least, i don't want to--imagine that working on a global, permanent (or even semi-permanent) scale. performing that ritual in a location that a nuke is divined to strike, at the time it's divined to strike? sure. sustaining that sort of effect on the entire planet? i don't think anyone has that sort of power available--and if they did, i don't think they'd be able to keep it hidden.

My Question....

Astrally Projecting Magician. Ground-zero.

Nuke detonates.

What are the effects on the astral at GZ? What are the effects on the Magician?

? ? ? ?

Depends on how and where the blast occurs. Presumably if the detonation causes relatively limited death and destruction of nature, such as an airburst over a desert, you are only going to get a level 6 mana warp -- which (in SR3) causes 6L damage to astral forms per CT and other effects as per MitS pp. 85-86 -- or perhaps even just a level 5 background count. On the other hand, if this happens over a jungle or a large city, you might be hit with a level 9 or even 10 mana warp. The Cermak blast caused a level 7 mana warp.

Since the massive radiation and the heat and overpressure envelop such a large area almost instantaneously, that mana warp would probably form before a projecting mage has time to escape. Still, only a level 10 mana warp is potentially capable of killing an otherwise unharmed projecting mage instantaneously, allowing the mage to get the hell out of any weaker warp during the first CT. Still, I can't imagine it being a pleasant experience.

It actually is semantics, but more importantly semantics are the important part. Seriously, semantics == meaning. "Oh, we're just arguing about what the words mean." If there's no attempt to reach agreement on that, why bother to have the words in the first place?

That said, it's still a minor semantic issue because in this case the issue is the question of whether it is correct to say that a missile detonates when one component of that missile detonates. I would argue that it does, but that level of precision-of-meaning isn't important to this discussion (and I'm too tired to care about it to the level that I usually do).

~J

There is an omnisentient being that makes nukes work or not, they are the Horrors known as the writers (just a poke).

So far there are only 4 nuclear weapons used in the awakened world. One has been sabotaged by the people that launched it, the Cermark blast which was supposedly monkied with by some sort of magical barrier, the Kashmir nukes where 2 of 4 missiles didnt make it out past launch which could easily be written off as a third world country's lack of care for precision weapons like long range missiles, and the Winternight bombs. Only 2 of those nuclear incidents had a strange nuclear blast that would say something may be messing with nuclear weapons. The Cermark blast has been said that someone tried to use a huge barrier to stop it, which if it was even possible to do may have caused the change in its expected blast.

I cant remember, where did Winternight get their bombs? And did they release a statement saying how big their bombs should have been?

Also, the 2 missiles launched by Pakistan still leaves 1 accredited to India, since there was an exchange betweeen the two. There is no mention of any of Indias missiles malfunctioning or warheads not preforming up to their expectations, in fact it states all 3 bombs exploded. If there was a super being stopping nukes from working, why would it only stop 2 of the 4 missiles launched, allowing 2 to land in Kashmir and work properly and then also allow India to nuke the place?

So far I see no evidence that some astral being is stopping nukes from working or the basic laws by which they work have changed.

And to beat a dead horse even deader. Did I say we werent argueing semantics? I said its not just semantics, the post was retarded. I stand by that because that post servered no purpose other then an attempt to derail the thread, get you some attention, then try to make you look like the hero because you dropped the issue first. Which you appearently do a lot seeing that a few posters before me said they werent going to get into it with you because you post stupid stuff. I guess I should have followed their lead, especially since I knew you were going to use the payload arguement before you did. I was just curious if you would go that far to argue with someone for no reason.

Knock off the baiting and bashing while it's still low key.

If anyone feels the need to argue further with an individual on the matter of semantics and post value, take it to PMs.

Thanks.

It makes more sense only if a magical power actually intervened at the time, but only with specific knowledge of the location of the nuclear device. For example, Leonardo using his ABM/ASM system against the nuke in Black Madonna; or Lofwyr's astral self, which had spent half the novel hitching a ride on Talon's aura (*cough* lame *cough*) defusing the nuke at the Ragnarock concert after battling Alamaise by basically sticking an astral claw into it. In the case of System Failure, the C5 had learned of apparently quite specific locations (hence the ability to enact countermeasures for the city's Fanpro likes... er, for some cities over others) of the nukes, and it was Jean-Claude Priault (the S-K justice) who, when confronted with this line of questioning by the C5 military analyst, tells him to shut his pie-hole.

There are a few things I've been thinking about.

We all know peoples emotions affect mana.... perhaps it's the subconscious fears of billions of people against Nukes that could lead up to the something that effects how nukes work. Even though I dont think thats what happened in SF.

I've always wondered if the consciousness of large populations could lead to the spontanious births of spirits of man of unprecedented power, or some such creature. I mean if Millions of people wish for a savior for example, that could have an effect on the astral.

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Second. I'd think a stop nuke spell wouldn't be that hard if you went about it the right way. Not focusing on stopping nuclear reactions but maybe on a mechanism that allows a nuke to detonate. Like a huge AOE electronic systems glitch spell. But thats obviously not what has happened in SF and the other incidents.

-

hmm, kinda like god (or maybe jesus) exist as a free spirit of man because enough people belive in said entity existing (or have existed)?

reminds me a bit to much of the gods of forgotten realms, and their fights over belivers...

Kagetenshi: The Wikipedia article on it says the neutron cascade in an implosion-type Pu239 fission device will last for about 0.8 microseconds. So yeah, the window's pretty tight.

fistandantilus3.0: Plutonium-239, which is the most likely fission fuel, has a half-life of 24,110 years. Perhaps more importantly it has very low rate of spontaneous fission, so you'd need to pass a whole lotta time through that 10kg mass to make it useless. What the "shelf lifes" are for all the other materials inside the warhead that are required for it to go off as designed, I have no idea -- far less than that of the Plutonium, quite possibly. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if a fully armed two-stage warhead had a large probability of fizzling after being smacked by, say, a single year. Regardless, the whole space-time thing does indeed make increasing the friction to burn through the heat shields a likelier explanation.

p. 47 MiTS. Spells can speed up or slow down processes, such as
healing or chemical reactions, and allow subjects to move
quickly, but they cannot directly alter time or space.


So yes, if you have the right kind of spell you could make Uranium or what ever go inert, other things rust or rot away. Its how they describe the effects of healing a person magically. You arent healing them yourselves, you are making the healing process take a very small fraction of its normal time, well you are super speedign the process so its doesnt take as long.

Thanks Frag-o, I'll check that out. Nice catch.

Im not a glass person and the few people that I have talked to that deal with glass as a profession have told me that glass does act as a liquid. So I stand corrected since the wiki has better proof then the word of a lay person.

EDIT: No worries will_rj. lol I can admit when Im wrong and the more proof shown the better, I like to be better informed.

EDIT2: The second will post was very informative, thanks.

Wikipedia supports that glass has a relaxation period of 10^32 years (100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years). Given enough time it would indeed flow, it is just that the universe hasn't existed long enough for this effect to be obserable.

Yeah, WRT the spell it doesn't matter as much. It kinda screws with your description (or at least increases its required potency), but once you're using magic to make something fall apart, how it falls apart doesn't have to relate to how it normally acts.

~J

Well how it normally acts is kind of important to the description of the spell and how I make it work in the game. Sure I could just smash the glass with a hammer or a fireball. But under the impression glass acts like a liquid speeding up its "liquidification" process made the goal reached cooler in the first place and its quite. And its important to make sure it fits in the canon rules, which is the reason I brought the idea up, while showing that a spell capable of making radioactive material inert.

But being shown that glass doesnt act as a liquid over reasonable time, Ill not use the spell that way again.