Movement has been covered here several times, but I'm not sure that we've really taken the high ground into consideration, beyond things like making Mars trips shorter.

Now, as a disclaimer, I'd recommend against putting on a spacesuit and having a spirit use Movement+Levitate. That might get you to space, but you'd have no real orbital velocity (that would take like a F30 spirit), and would fall straight back down when you ran out of tasks. In addition, if a corp builds a rocket, it can't just plop a spirit inside and expect it to survive space without some big honking support spells or massive biosupport to generate a mana field.

That said, there do appear to be options. For starters, you could use Movement to rapidly get to the edge of the manasphere, at which point the spirit disembarks. This dramatically reduces the total atmospheric drag and shrinks fuel requirements (which has a multiplicative effect, as you can carry less tankage, which means less fuel, which...). However, if you can solve the problem of keeping a spirit safe and comfortable outside the manasphere, then Movement really opens up a can of worms.

For starters, Movement multiplies velocity, not accelleration. Therefore, the instant that the spirit drops Movement, the ship immmediately reverts back to its Newtonian velocity. So, while you could *get* to orbit, you couldn't stay there unless you kept Movement running the entire time, or accellerated to the point at which you could keep orbit without Movement--but in the meantime, Movement would have sent you halfway to the Moon.

Secondly, what happens when a ship under Movement closes with and gently docks with a station running in Newtonian mode? Or, for that matter, another ship running at a different Movement multiplier? Does the other body come under Movement for half a second, causing it to tear off the docking collar and spurt ahead? Do either or both bodies change their base or Movement speeds? And, once docking is complete, can Movement safely be dropped from the ship without (again) tearing both ship and station apart as the ship "drops out of warp"?

On a more grounded note, the same issues apply if you drive a car (*cough* KITT *cough*) with Movement up a ramp into a semi that also has Movement on. Mythbusters, alas, didn't have any handy bound spirits available to test that out on.

So, thoughts?

Simple. You divide by 0 and the universe implodes.

Wow... sounds like its straight from some sourcebook's sidebar. :-)

I think it's all achademic until you get the spirit to perform Movement INTO a Level 10 Manawarp instead of THE HELL AWAY.


Wait a tick, was space a Manawarp or a Void? What book was that again?

Double post, crappy work connection.

It's a -10 void now, but the difference is about the same as that between ph1 and ph12... both will kill a spirit very fast if it's not protected, just in different ways.

But if you want that Movement goodness in sustainable orbits... that's where the spirit has to go. Unless there's a way for the spirit to keep Movement up while staying safely inside the manasphere...

Do multiple spirits using the Movement power each multiply the movement?

Note: Not really curious but its a funny mental picture: "JOE! Quick, re-bind engine #3!"

I don't have my books with me at the moment (Always a great start to a post about rules) but could you, in theory, use Levitate on another person then with a spirit service 'raise' the subject a few thousand feet before dropping the spell?

Wow... a grappling fire spirit flying upwards burns the target on the way up until they break free and fall to their death.

WOW. I suddenly feel the need to play a summoner very, very badly. :-)

...gahh, all this talk of spirits and orbital velocity. I'll just stick to simple good ol' fashioned rocket science with simple good ol' fashioned rocket fuel.
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In theory you could. Practically, you'd start running into LOS after a few hundred feet. But that's actually good enough for what you're looking for anyway.

Honestly, getting physics to kill people for you is sometimes easier than doing it yourself. People might say the first murder was Cain killing Abel with a rock, but I'm pretty sure a caveman pushed another caveman off a cliff or down a hill first.

Then I guess the next question is if the Spirit of Man can gain/have Movement. If so then I'll have to dig up my old Conjurer of Man.

You're talking about an average flight speed of Force(spell)*Force(Movement)*(Force/3)(hits). So, a F6 Man could barely match the base speed of an Air.

Your thinking small, the Summoner of Man summons F12 SoM without a sweat.

...I''ll stick with a Vostok or a Proton. Old school stove bolt tech, but reliable & no drain backlash to worry about.

Yes, but imagine how much more payload you could carry on one if a spirit was backing it up...

And by "you", I mean "a corp".

12(Levitate Force)*12(Movement Power)*(Hits/3?)

144m/Pass then, at a min, pass is three seconds if I remember...We have 48m/s or roughly 158ft/s. To reach plane level (35,000 Feet, something even the most highly bod centered troll could not survive) it would take 221.518s, or 74 passes. On one success (If I'm reading what you're saying correctly.

On that same formula it would only take a optical (If that rule still persists in SR4) telescope of the 'target' (For LOS purposes) and you could have someone on the moon in 266,945.139 passes, or 9.26892844 days. I think thats faster than most ship travels to the moon, correct?

Apollo 11 launch July 16 1969, and passed behind Luna on July 19 1969. So thats a fair bit slower. Also could line the space elevator with fiber-optic cable and have ground mages/spirits chucking spells across the gravity well.

A spirit taking you up to the edge of the manasphere would make it quite a bit easier to reach escape velocity. Has there been anything published on the upper height of the field versus low earth orbit?

1) iirc, sustaining spirit powers does not require LOS. as such, the spirit doesn't ever have to go into the void, provided the target is in it's line of sight when it starts the power.

2) movement *does* have an affect on the capacity of those russian rockets. if movement increases it's speed by 4 times, for example, it will get to it's destination in 1/4 the time, thereby using up 1/4 the amount of fuel. when it comes to rockets designed to take you into space, 1/4 the amount of fuel is a *lot*

3) even if movement does only increase the accelleration, you can accellerate beyond the max as i recall. thus, movement would still increase the effective maximum speed of a vehicle.

that being said, the spirit movement power does not work by increasing speed. it just gets you from point A to point B "somehow". we don't really know how... it just does it. if i had to give you an explanation, i would say it shortens the distance somehow, without shortening the apparent distance (and yet somehow not increasing the apparent speed) to the people under it's effect.

what can i say, it's magic...

...it would still take one heck of a high force spirit to move even 45 MT (the empty weight of a Proton with payload). Or, is mass no longer a consideration?

As I understand the increase to vehicle acceleration was something like adding the Spirit's force. Also, it did not have an effect on the actual maximum speed of the vehicle, only in how quickly it was able to reach that speed. I do not have access to my PDFs at the moment (as I am at work) to actually research this.

Well, the BBB says on page 289 this about Movement (power)...

Mass is no longer a consideration. Movement doesn't care what you're moving, under RAW. The only apparent limitation is that you can't use it to make the moon orbit any faster or slower, or move the earth, or else some fool would have.

Also, my understanding is that Movement does not increase accelleration at all--it simply multiplies velocity. This has its good points (easier to calculate and deal with), and its bad points (when you shut it off, you "lose" the extra velocity immediately, since your total Newtonian accelleration was still based on whatever you pumped out the back end).

So, it's not as simple as saying that Movement 4 gets you to orbit on 1/4 the fuel, because "orbit" isn't just a destination, it's a velocity vector. And unless you expect to leave Movement on the whole trip, or can safely absorb momentum from a station that you dock to, you're going to fall out of a stable orbit as soon as you drop the power.

However, if LOS isn't required to maintain Movement (and I think that's right), then the spirit could stay dirtside, and the limit would just be to how many services you can get--would "sit in the Ares HQ and keep Movement up on Z-O" count for the year-and-a-day service? That would make it almost too easy.

Well, an Ally spirit can have any power that any spirit your tradition can summon is allowed to have. Makes thatm rather versatile.

Get yourself a decent Force Ally ( ~ Force 10 or so) and you can really crank out the mph.

Now on the prankster side of things... summon up a Force 2-4 spirit that has Movement and use it to slow an orbital launch... Oh drat! Your rocket is moving at 1/2 or 1/4 speed... Don't think ya will be launching that today, do ya?

Of course, this begs the question... is Movement stackable from multiple sources working together? If so, how? Additive or Multiplicative?

Thats 'raises the question' by the way.

But on the Movement note, I'd actually say 'Air' would be damn fine, as the only difference between space and air is the lack of oxygen. So hell, Air spirits would be terrain anywhere thats not on the ground or in water.

Begs, raises, whatever. You guys still understood my point / question. Which I might add has not been answered.

But yeah, on a terrorist angle, one can really screw people up with Movement. Then again, from a Law Enforcement perspective... it'd be rather easy to catch the perp if he's moving at 1/4 or 1/6th speed. Heck, even 1/2 speed would significantly turn the tables.

I can see it now...

Lonestar Joe: Shouldn't we chase the bank robbers?
Lonestar John: Nah, I've got my ally slowing them down. They aren't going anywhere fast. We have enough time to grab a donut and coffee.
Lonestar Joe: That's pretty slick John.

Void kills spirits. You need some hefty protective spells to keep them alive in space. Fortunately, a high-powered ally is perfect for the job, because you only have to pay karma/edge *once* to get them forever, and in fact, because of the spell sustaining loophole, *you* can overcast the spells (astral armor? I forget which spell it was that protects against void), and the ally can sustain them--indefinitely--without losing -2 as if sustaining its own spell.

High-powered allies make excellent astronauts--if properly protected and with the right skills in their formula, they can do anything that a metahuman can do, but without taking up mass, using food, water, or oxygen. But then, high-powered allies are second only to CZs in the Chuck Norris department, and I wouldn't trust a billion-nuyen Mars mission to a CZ.

I think some of the problem is that there are huge karma sinks, but no hard caps. So, while RAW works perfectly fine for anything that low-level runners should be capable of doing, a prime runner mage who saved up a couple hundred karma can get Chuck Norris as an ally. And then, if they get a couple hundred more karma, do it again.

And, given the assumption that the corps have a lot more power, resources, and interest in bleeding-edge capabilities, you start asking why corps *don't* have spirits doing everything from making supertankers run at near-mach speeds to providing orbital lift to mass production of orichalcum to allies inhabited into jarheads serving as corporate prime rigger/hackers.

That's where it starts to break down. Because if you follow RAW, you get a world where the use of high-powered spirits, while numerically rare compared to the size of the overall economy, is almost certainly the highest-profile part of a nation's or corp's infrastructure. Which tends to lead to something more like magocracies than we actually see.

...this is what I mean. What I thought was going to be an interesting thread on technology of space travel in SR derails into yet another unrelated discussion on magic.

...maybe we need a SR Techno forum where only topics on Technology are discussed.

...I was referring mainly to the Magocracy tangent.

why would you end up with magocracy when as a result of the mages doing all the work?

the people doing all the work are not generally the people running things so sure, mages can do all sorts of awesome stuff. and that stuff keeps them on the front lines.

you don't (or shouldn't) make someone a general because they are a skilled warrior... you keep your skilled warriors on the front lines where they can do what they do best. you (should) make someone a general because they have a keen mind, an eye for planning/tactics/strategy/logistics/whatever, because people will gladly follow them, etc.

so yes, a mage can save a corporation a lot of money with their abilities (as well as making a lot money in other ways). but hey, that just makes them effective workers... and being an effective worker only gets you so far. if you're not good at managing, you're not going to make it very far in management, no matter how good you are at actually doing the jobs of the people you're managing.

Magicracies will appear when the voting populace are primarily mages. Until then people value greed and self-advancement over dictatorial powers.

I'll try...

Is there anything anywhere that gives a ballpark number on what it takes to build a manasphere?

That said, if you have corp cash, it shouldn't be too hard, especially if you're using Movement to boost SSTOs into orbit carrying modules and supplies. Bigelow is doing a good job IRL of proving that useful cube is cheap and easy to create, and useful plants are not very dense. Just add modules as needed, and integrate the plants into the whole life support system so that they're automatically cared for. Lots of hydroponics and genetically engineered plants are the order of the day. Heck, you might have to import a lot of CO2-producing bacteria or something if you have too few metahumans on board (since we tend to require large ongoing amounts of mass to support us, we're less efficient than bugs for this purpose).

So, once you have your station built and outfitted with sufficient greenery that your spirits won't go poof, you use Tele^H^H^H^H Metaplanar Shortcut (or fresh summons) to get them up there, bypassing the void. Then, they can use their spells, powers, and (for allies) skills to really speed up the construction process. Once a corp with a few loyal mages and their high-powered allies gets going, they'll be able to exploit the whole solar system. I'd expect a considerable race for spirit-aided space travel at that point--the advantages (mostly, but not just Movement--see OP) swing the economics from speculative to wildly profitable.

I looked around before starting this thread, and found a good one back in February that covered space travel with "living ships"; ships that have their own manasphere. At the extreme end, you get something that looks a tad Juraian; but that isn't necessary to tool around in the solar system. With a spacefaring mage and an ally or two, plus other spirits on tap, you can pretty well run a high-cube/low-mass ship around wherever you want in a reasonable timeframe on a reasonable fuel budget (particularly if you posit the existence of working nuclear salt water rockets, fusion-powered VASIMR, reasonable antiproton production and storage, or plasma sails).

Here's a thought for you--if you can conventionally accellerate to significant (.05c-.10c) reletavistic speeds, can Movement break lightspeed? I know that Frank in particular has described Movement as something like magical time dilation, so I'd say yes.

I'm at work, but was it Target: Wastelands that gave info on space and habitats? There's a bunch on the Wiki too. I remember a bit from somewhere about Ares using a space station with a weak manafield to attack The Hive.

Seemed like the spirits and all magic was effected by the strength of the field. This could mean that there isn't an upper limit to earth's gaiasphere, so much as there is a tapering off and a subsequent tapering of the effectiveness of any magical effects.

If that was the case a spirit of great power might not be able to maintain Movement at a reasonable distant to make an appreciable different in lift. You'd think with magic and space travel being around as long as they have been, someone would have gotten chocolate in the peanut butter by now.