GURPS magic terraforming

[beccaelizabeth]

Now I'm wondering about the usefulness to terraforming
of the Purify spells.

Purify Air makes a one yard radius four yards tall into pure, breathable to humans, air.
That costs 1 fatigue, and more fatigue makes a larger area.
Create Air might be more useful in some contexts, 45 cubic feet of air per second for five seconds.
Both say must be recast cannot be maintained.

So that's pretty limited.

But a sufficiently skilled caster can do it for free, once a second, every second.

The problem with that being eventually you get crit fails, and that menas eventually you get demons.

But if you use the Power spell for one point of energy you make the spell 'always on'.
That means it would purify air once a second every second forever. Or create air, same. ... huh, wonder what that would do to the planet eventually...

Power costs 500 energy and is a ridiculous amount for such a small thing, except, if you can terraform with it, it isn't small at all. Even if you can only run life support, you run the air system with a single magic item that can't break down without being damaged externally. That's worth something.

And if you don't get a demon when you first make it, you don't get demons.
... you could still crit fail at the making and activating stages, but, after that, no demons.

So what if you got some Industrial Magic up in this problem and got Purify Air enchantments with the Power on turned out in industrial quantities?

Well the first thing you'd do is fit them to CO2 emitters and fix your carbon problem, so that's worth a lot of money. I don't know the exact parameters on the breathable air they make but if we assume it's to medieval air standards it's... well, potentially very helpful.

550 for each purification unit.
GURPS Technomancer has rules for setting up factories. Costs a lot of money and one huge slow and sure enchantment, but then you have magic for creating more magic, and you can get 10 energy per mage per day out of it, with a maximum of 400 mages per factory and a minimum of four. For every 5.5 mages in the line you get one unit per day. The limit is how many mages you can recruit.

It reckons the math works out at $50 per energy point to buy a finished item, so whatever you need purify air for better be worth $27,500.

If it keeps the planet habitable forever after, seems cheap, but what do I know?

Purify Water works out exactly the same, 550 for always on item.

Purify Earth is a much spendier spell, base cost 2 or 4 for poor soil like sand. Item cost is 400. Create Earth item cost is same, but 6 per casting cost. Getting an item made that can cast either continuously is... ambitious.

For comparison, a suspended animation coffin costs 2000 per human sized space, always on.
Ultra tech means of achieving similar cost between 50K and 500K, depending on how good they are. Magic doesn't auto revive, and in fact needs an Awaken spell to reverse, but it preserves very well.
Building a chamber would cost $100,000 which compares well to the tech versions.
Awaken wands cost 300 fatigue to create and you need at least one per location to be safe, but that's only $15,000.
Also there's probably ways to complexly link and limit but I'm sidetracking my sidetrack already.

ANYway, 400 for an item is $20,000 but then you need to Power it, and unlike the air or water, it needs to be moved to a new area, since the Earth won't move. 4000 fir the 4 point version of Power, and I donlt even know about the rest. Enchant a Gilem and get it to walk a pattern? Do something complex with a flying carpet?

The advantage with magic is it powers itself thaumatologically, doesn't need repairs, and is really ridiculously simple to set up. Use a combination of items that costs a piddling amount comoared to a space ship - yes even the $200,000 of Power - and eventually you get something that's good to live in.




The thing is though
the thing is
if you can create something from raw energy
you don't need a planet.

You use assorted Movement spells to keep it in place
and you just
grow your own
earth rock metal
maybe ringworld?

Sure it'd take a really long time
but
once set to run
it keeps going

steadily churning magic into matter
until someone turns it off.

You can build
anything
and use create/purify
to make it habitable.

(Also probably some light and warmth spells, but those too exist.)


I mean technically you can stick volcanos and geysers on it if you feel the need.



And as previously noted, once you have built one of something, and it is enough itself the Schematic spell works on it, you can just
copy it.


So you can get entire magic powered fleets of replicators
that don't need matter to start work
they're doing direct from energy Creation.


I mean it might be simpler to make factories to start with
but as sustainability goes
you can't beat
something from nothing.



So then you get into the problem
does msgic run out?

Or would you eventually have to worry about having made too much matter?




... magic powered ships for the win...



I'm pretty sure terraforming would either take forever (air would unpurify itself too)
or require larger numbers of units than at all plausible.


But that's... much less fun
than replicator thaumotech.

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

Dancing Object does the kind of repetitive work the earth would need.


Also figuring the effect of Movement spells on spaceships takes more math than I do.

[beccaelizabeth]

use Flying Carpet like sails
each square foot will move 25 pounds

but 'maximum move is equal to caster's effective skill' IN 1G
and without that it is providing 1G Plus caster effective skill move of acceleration

that's mathy

[beccaelizabeth]

also I went through many wiki tables before deciding 'six squares carry one human' is a good enough approximation. I mean add their gear and you're looking at eight at least. But a three by two carpet seems tidy?