New answers tagged magic
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Reality Check = OK!
Transillumination of body tissues is a thing. Thin tissues work best: if you close your eyes while facing a bright light, you can discern the shadow of you hand as you pass it back and forth before your face.
Certain (minimally invasive) surgical procedures rely on the phenomenon in order to determine if an instrument is placed properly....
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Plants still require resources from the environment to live. Thus, there will be competition for access to sunlight, and access to fertile ground, access to water, and an incentive to control the fertility of the ground, which all gives you the basis for an economy and agronomic technology.
So, you may indeed have fishermen and farmers if rotting fish can ...
1
Swap cause and effect
If you're designing a military campus from scratch, there may be many reasons why you'd want to have it be capable of being turned into a full scale military fortress, but there are also a good number of reasons why you wouldn't want to. It's a waste of resources that can be used for actual fortresses, it's not a good idea to have a ...
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The military has a lot of facilities that exist mainly for strategic location or other potential usefulness in time of war.
In peace time, it needs facilities for activities that will be suspended in war time, such as extended training of potential officers. It is subject to budget limits, so it makes sense to have some dual-use facilities - practical ...
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Let's look at real life here, specifically at the US. While the US has many military bases, it typically does not do basic training in war zones. You want to prep for the war before you get into it. This isn't a US specific policy - this is basically everywhere.
That being said, most training facilities are fortified - they look like army encampments ...
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I could easily imagine a situation where there is a major difference in tech level between different areas of the planet where martial arts would naturally come about in one area while magical development would flourish in another. Imagine something along the lines of the Meiji Restoration only instead of the westerners having advanced cannon and guns they ...
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There are two broad situations for martial arts and magic in your case:
You want to use martial arts against somebody who uses magic
Since the enemy has to do some gesticulation to draw a rune in the air, the most effective strategy would be to never let them do that. So, the main points of such a martial art would be to
Close the gap very quickly - you ...
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Super Martial Arts is a kind of magic
There is more than one path to power.
While some learn spells and runes to command the elements and shape the fabric of reality with their minds, others train their bodies to the breaking point until they unlock a new flavor of magic - one that looks like mundane combat skill, but allows its practitioner to move beyond ...
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the Basics
Short answer yes.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-physics/chapter/magnetism-and-magnetic-fields/
Well we know from Amperes law the relation between a magnetic field and the current pathing through the surface of that path. In short you can create a magnetic field with a current of electrons moving in a circle.
In a second step you ...
1
Martial arts are highly localised and depended on the weapons available in the region. If the government banned personal weapons then no weapons were used, European martial arts mostly used swords, many Eastern martial arts are unarmed, some also include archery.
Hence in a world with magic, martial arts will include the use of magic. They may also include ...
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In my personal opinion if you talk about martial art that is supposed to be effective...it doesn’t has to do anything with looking nice. It has to be direct and effective by
Using your opponents gap in his defenses
While having a posture that puts you in less danger
Using the knowledge of body’s weak points and joints limits to overpower you opponent (...
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It depends on each step in the situation.
For example, trying to hit someone with your fist can take a second. But drawing a simple 4 line rune while under stress can already take longer than that. Just imagine you are trying to write "Hi" faster than someone trying to punch you and you get the drift. I mean seriously "Hi" without the dot on the I is ...
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When I saw the title, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Naruto world. They have martial arts, magic, runes ... In this world the ninjas use their magic to do almost anything, from combat to cooking. I think that your world has a lower level of fantasy, but may be you can extrapolate some concepts.
For example, one element that is recurrent in ...
8
Chi Blockers or equivalent
In Avatar, The Last Airbender, Chi blockers use martial art attacks to disable the abilities of benders. Chi blocking is a martial arts skill that a non bender can use to defend against a bender.
If someone can cast runes by drawing in the air, martial arts would be aimed at stopping, interrupting and blocking such moves whilst ...
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The answer to this question depends on what you believe "martial arts" means. There are at least as many definitions as there are practitioners. However, I do find the most common trait is that they teach one to be able to fight in a way which is worth learning even if one never fights in their entire life. In that sense, your martial arts would evolve ...
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I think the question boils down to "how much magic do I need to MAKE them plausible".
These are living things, so they need a metabolism to sustain their bodies. So these questions arise:
what do they eat to build up their bodies and regenerate wounds?
what do they eat, breathe or otherwise use for the energy to maintain their heat, fuel their thinking ...
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Plausibility of your magic
Depends on the laws of your magic
Plausibility or Fun Facts about that body
We know:
They have some sort of brittle and hard skin
Their inner core is 1200 degree Celsius
Your claim is that makes them impossible to kill conventionally
My first concern is the inner temperature. 1200 degree is the property to melt stone
http://...
3
I think the hot aliens will be protected by the the Leidenfrost effect.
https://www.engineersedge.com/physics/leidenfrost_effect_13089.htm
The Leidenfrost effect is a phenomenon in which a liquid, in near
conact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid’s boiling
point, produces an insulating vapor layer keeping that liquid from
boiling ...
1
As an alternative though, consider biological control systems.
(Quote from: @Starfish prime (first answer))
I think the English (or Germans) back in WW2 trained chickens to peck at a dark spot against a light background.
Then loaded the chickens into a missile with a some sort of window/screen in the cage, with a mesh of sensor threads in front of the ...
1
Consider Frank Herbert's Dune series, a universe where automation is outlawed and instead a special breed/race/tribe of humans has been bred to have massively enhanced brain power and are used as human computers.
Other humans have been bred to replace other automated systems.
Your universe could have something similar.
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There is a story "Specialist" by Robert Sheckley. It is about space ships made of living creatures each with a different specialty. And interesting what humans had to do with that.
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If you have magic, presumably reasonably powerful mages could inscribe runes of repulsion, that push living things away from them?
Have a spacious cell with these runes inscribed on all six walls pointing inward. Toss in the offending TK, and they instantly get pushed to the middle of the room. With a little practice and a large enough room, they could ...
0
Enchant the cells
magic is mostly used in enchanting
You don't need lots of science here, simply enchant the walls of the cell against TK. The stronger someone tries TK, the more pain they feel.
That could also lead to a breakout story, where one guy finally pushes through that pain barrier (perhaps at the cost of his life) to break the walls down ...
2
The alternative option is that you don't imprison them
As you can see from the other answers, imprisoning someone is going to be complex and expensive. It's also high maintenance and high risk. This is amplified by the lack of industrial base in a medieval society. Generating vast quantities of steel and concrete isn't really practical for your average ...
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Depending on your geography, mountain caves/mines would be very useful here. Rock tends to form in layers and when tectonic plates smash into each other, the layers crinkle up and form mountains. Mountains are good for mining because layers that are normally buried deep underground are now close to the surface.
If you house your prisoners in a mountain ...
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If you can't control things inside the spaceship with computers, you might want something akin to cloud computing. All of the computers are located away from the front lines, unaffected by the disabling magic. Your ships are fly-by-wire machines, full of mechanical linkages and analog controls. Link the two together using a relatively simple two-way radio ...
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Communism, to say it simply, originates from Marx's economical value theory, that workers(proletariat) create the value and factory owners(bourgeoisie) unjustly appropriate it. Marx then proposed that it should be fixed by temporary dictature of proletariat which would build true communism where the economic value is equally distributed. No society succeeded ...
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Communism wouldn't have had the same effect - one of the main motivators was for the workers to overthrow the ruling class with the idea of obtaining equality for all. At the time Russia was primed for such a motivator.
White supremacy wouldn't have moved them against their own (white) leaders but instead against other groups within Russia.
As such the ...
3
There are many scenarios that solve your problem. Here are a few. They aren't at all mutually exclusive and probably all would work together.
Your Society is a Giant Mexican Standoff
If everyone knows magic, then how can anyone do anything bad with it without immediately being jumped by his/her peers? Literally every man, woman and child is a walking ...
1
Like Morris said, just because someone knows how to code doesn't mean they can take down the world banks from their laptop. All the world's governments and militaries have used magic to build and sustain a defense against terrorism and dark magic. Same with large companies, and common houses with people who don't invest their skills into magic are secured ...
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The mechanics of how to so something is not the same as having the power to do so. A person might be able to control enough magic to start a small fire close by, such as lighting a candle, but few would be able control enough energy to make a large fireball at a distance of 5 KM.
You could also have the magic be evident and the process lengthy. Everyone ...
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There are two fairly obvious approaches to me:
What I have done with my own magic-heavy setting, also built around a rough equivalence between magic and computer programming: dangerous things are easy if you know how to do them, but knowing how to do them is the tricky part. The basics are taught to every schoolkid, so they have an idea of how their world ...
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Dig catacombs.
I'm not suggesting burying them alive individually, as another answer does. What I'm suggesting is a relatively spacious dungeon, deep underground. It might be useful to divide the space into rooms, but it would not need doors; indeed, the goal is to have as little loose or movable material inside as possible, so that your telekinetic ...
1
You have people with power. Just remove their power.
The simple way is to have a material that react badly to magic.
Put that in their brain or in a neck collar.
You can now use simple prison. Anyone trying to use power to escape or bully others will be dead.
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If you want something approximating a prison cell, I think you'd benefit from the use of layers of different materials.
The innermost layer should be something very strong+hard, heavy, and "impure" in nature -- perhaps stone or concrete? Strong+hard so that it resists physical attack. Heavy (>2T) so that they cannot use some other material to apply ...
1
I would suggest a large open stockade, enclosed by a large wooden walls. Painted on the ground roughly 60 yards from the walls are lines. If a prisoner crosses the line he is pin cushioned by archers on the walls. There would be no guards inside the stockade and prisoners are left to get on with it. All food is brought in by hand and left at the line.
I am ...
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Can they levitate themselves?
If not, dig a pit and put them in it.
Can't get a lot more impure material than soil and dust.
...you might now be imagining a small hole in the ground. Dig a deep pit.
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Plants that concentrate Carbon-14 in their leaves.
As radioactive material tend to glow in the dark, radium, plutonium or many other would do the job.
Then, the said plant would have to cope the radiation, but well … If earth lifeform are able to deal with UV and insane oxygen concentration, I'm sure your magic vegetal can survive this.
Edit: You can get ...
0
A dragon is big, an Anglar is small. One would imagine that multiple Anglar squads attacking one after the other from various directions will be relatively safe if they're faster than the dragon, and get the dragon with multiple weak strikes.
I'd suggest either damaging or putting weight on the dragon wings. The attacking squads attach entangling material (...
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Plants would have difficulty to obtain the concentrated excess energy required for, say, 1 watt light output. More viable are fungi or animals that can get the energy by respiration (burning oxygen). They will require feeding and care, like any carefully bred creature.
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Suspend them mid-air using tight metal ropes, but coat them using some form of rare (impure) material. This does three things:
reduce the amount of area they contact, limiting their power
they can only contact impure materials, reducing their powers more
reduce the amount of stuff they have control over
Combined, they only have very little control over ...
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Submarine torpedo aiming systems and artillery electromechanical sistems of ww2 may give you an idea of what you can do without computers, which is a lot. We just dont invest efforts on this path because its easier and cheaper to use computers but an electromechanical system can show and handle complex data as speed, altitude, gravity, engine throttle quite ...
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Bronze door with steel locking bar
All you need is
a bronze door that's too sturdy to just rip out (since the telekinetics CAN touch and move the door itself. Doesn't have to be bronze, ideally something "impure" but strong.)
secured by a steel locking bar (or some other strong material that's not available inside the cell)
The inmates can try to push ...
2
"[they] can control objects if they are touching its material (...). It is way harder for them to control impure materials but they can still control it."
Build any cell you'd like, as long as its walls and doors are solid, then coat it carefully and thoroughly in a thin layer of the most impure material you can get (think paint), so that the prisoners ...
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Oh, this is a very interesting question! I wonder if you were thinking of any feudal system in particular when you decided to ask this. I'm guessing you meant the Western kind.
The short answer would be: I don't think so.
The long answer would be: while such a society could exist in the short-term, I fear it would not be able to endure organically. Human ...
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Weld the door shut
If the entrance is sealed then telekinesis won't help. When they want to get out, they need to be cut out using tools that the prisoner doesn't have access to.
The prisoner would have the door welded or forged shut or completely bricked in.
You leave some small holes for food, water, sewer and air
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Schistostega pennata is a luminous moss that grows in the darkness of caves and gives off light as a greenish-gold glow. It is not enough light to see by but it is strong enough to guide someone's way.
There also exist bioluminescent protists (plant-like organisms), fungi, and bacteria. Plus a few other plants.
If your world has genetic engineering (or ...
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You can do surprisingly large amounts of things with old technology. The hard part will be fighting with the enemy.
As many of the other answer have pointed out, we've done astonishing things with limited computing power. The Space Shuttle AP-101s were roughly on par with the power of a Nintendo Game Boy! (Gameboy is faster but 8 bit, AP-101 is slower ...
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It's worth mentioning that Spaceflight is a mechanical challenge, not a computation challenge.
What do I mean by this? Well, spaceflight existed here, on Earth, pretty much before computers did:
Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, and the electronics on board was a radio transmitter and a power supply. If you look at the schematic for the transmitter, it had ...
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