Now, with the spell creation rules, I am now wondering about various spell formula.

I'll go over the general guidelines in Street Magic;

Sorcery Cannot Affect anything to which the user does not have a magical link

Sorcery cannot alter the fabric of the space./time continuum

Sorcery cannon divine the future with any certainty

Sorcery cannot summon or banish spirits

Sorcery cannot raise the dead

Srocery cannot creat magical items

Sorcery cannot bridge the gap between the Astral and Physical planes

Sorcery cannot create complex things

Magic is not intelligent

That said, I wonder about various spells that people would be interested in and perhaps what drain codes they would have under spell creation.

The spell I've been wondering about is a spell that would use a forcefield like effect (like armor or physical barrier) create a blade out of a sharply angled Physical Barrier-like effect (though would likely have no piercing point). This seem to fall either into the no Complex things area or at least pokes at the edges of it with a stick.

Create (Precious Metal) kicks ass as far as spells go and it has precidents (The Wealth power and the Create spells of previous editions).

I'm also interested in an "destroy bodily waste" spell that a person can cast on himself to avoid using the restroom. It would be very useful for important people who fear that their toilet seats will be rigged with bombs or their bidets will be filled with deadly contact poision.

A more malicious version of the Bugs spell would be grand. If the target fails the test, they think that bugs are UNDER their skin and will go to extremes..."remove" them. Man, I've gotta stop watching X-Files reruns...

Permanence is only +2 drain. If you roll Edge on the resistance test, you're fine.

Nah, the trick to that spell is to release it anonymously on the Matrix, watch the metals markets collapse, and snatch up a Mega or two in the aftermath.

Permenant complex matter creation (create food) has been canon in previous editions.

However, I should point out that metals are far less complex than H2O so your assertion doesn't help at all.

For these purposes I consider multiple particles in the nucleus to show more "complexity" than a couple of covalent bonds connecting "simple" atoms.

Everyone who is going to allow a permanent [Critter] Form in your game for a +3 drain code, please raise your hand.

I missed a chart somewhere... what's the weight of a "unit" of metal? The only prices I saw were by the abstract-sounding "unit".

Well, there are references to the sale of dragon hoards knocking prices back, but that's a bit much... Lofwyr must have had a chunk the size of the moon to buy S-K.

Maybe he had a shitload of telesma and artifacts on top of it. Apparently there are a LOT of wealthy collectors of artifacts in Western Europe.

Dang. That just seems odd when you consider making enchanted gear with orichalcum. Or is it assumed that most of the orichalcum by weight dissolves away into the ether when you use it to enchant?

Perhaps it doesn't dissolve "into the ether". Maybe it's merely transformed, leaving behind some worthless by-product (heretofore referred to as "gold goo"). Maybe sometimes gold goo is toxic. (That'd be a great glitch side-effect.)

Does it say anywhere that alchemical gold is even remotely pure?

Uncontaminated by toxic waste or non-awakened harvesting yes, but for all we know a 10 kg block of alchemical gold has only a gram or two of what an actual chemist would consider gold.

I think you're right. Check out the side bar on SM pg. 82, which gives examples of alchemical reagents at various stages of purity. A raw unit of alchemical copper, for example is "a crumbly rock with a large green vein running through it." A refined unit of same: "a rough ingot of copper." Radical: "a flawless pearl of pure copper."

I suspect leaving out masses wasn't an accident this time around. A core SR4 philosophy is not providing stats for things unless necessary to give the GM flexibility to do what works in his game. The examples given all indicate that the final radical form is pure and small enough to incorporate into a handheld item, but that's about all the commonality you're going to get or need require. Each rougher form is correspondingly bigger, but exactly how much bigger is going to depend on what kind of material you're dealing with.

So we need not allow the listed SR4 prices and SR3 weight conventions to destroy the metals market. What ticks me off is that the prices of radical metals are so low for the cheap stuff. This stuff is supposed to take quite a lot of man hours to find in restricted and dangerous places. The labor costs should probably overwhelm the value of the underlying metal if it were just melted down and sold for industrial uses. Should radical iron really be that cheap? As cheap or cheaper than every form of animal/plant/herbal radical? Maybe I just don't realize how abundant easy to find common metal deposits are.

The reason metals are cheap is because of the scale of the operations. Once they find it they remove all of the surrounding landscape to get to it.

Fairly safe to say, then, that Create (Gold) via Permancy is Right Out, Synner old bean?

We'll skip the issue of Create (Oricullum), obviously.

-- Wak, imagines that there *are* people researching Transform (Lead) to (Gold).

Metal transformation could actually work ingame if you required artificing rather than a spell. Would not yield too much profit per hour and give magical companies something to do.

Is it safe to say that despite the fact that refine/create processes only have to be checked once every 8 hours, you can't do multiple batches at the same time?

On the one hand, the rules allow for you to have a life, meet contacts, do runs as long as you get back within 8 hours, etc. On the other hand, using that same time to manage multiple batches of orichalcum would seem rather unbalancing.