Re: Floaters - Was: SJ magic (items) - you might not want to read if you are about to eat

I can't believe we are *actually* talking about turds in space!

Ask a silly question: here is a silly answer!

;-)

<tone lowering mode engaged>

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dreamer" <dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk>
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] SJ magic (items) - was: Locate Portal conversion


>> > Maybe a Sewage-to-Rock spell might be useful, so a ship doesn't
>> > waste any material?
>>
>> And why do you want to retain mass? You don't need ballast. On a small
>> basis, you might be able to grow plants in treated sewage, purified with
>> some sort of spell ("Deck Tomatoes" perhaps).
> [snip]
>
> Retaining mass means that you are doing (permanent)
> Transmutation, not Creation - if you are breathing the air you
> don't want temporary Transmutation where the magic is just faking
> up extra volume/mass for the spell duration.

Lets nit-pick and see what happens:

1) Someone throws a turd overboard (it possibly retains a small air 
envelope),
2) The volumn of the ship's air envelope gets smaller by the size of the 
turn + any air a turd takes with it.,
3) The ship skims the atmophere of a planet and regains the lost air,
4) The planets atmosphere drops in size,
5) After thousands of years as a floater the turd falls into the gravity of 
a planet (slightly expanding its atmosphere).

The circle is then complete. Eventually things balance out as all planets 
have their shot of....erm...sewerage meteors.

> Some DMs are a bit strict about conservation of mass - if you
> want to change the mass you fetch it from somewere or dump it
> elsewhere, for air the Elemental Plane of Air is obviously
> popular. Magic is looked on as energy - yes you can directly
> change it into mass, but that requires an awful lot of it.

You can still retain this mass (in the multiverse) without having to retain 
it all on the ship. All that happens is that over time spacefarers move mass 
around and cause a certain amount of pollution. Unless you were a druid or a 
priest of nature, you probably wouldn't be bothered.

The elves are more likely to worry about keeping this sort of thing on 
board. Humans are a race that sees nothing wrong with cultivation of natural 
landscape, diversion of rivers for irrigation or dumping chemicals (and I am 
talking about the average fantasy human culture).

The dwarves have a history of dumping dwarven citadels and taking over new 
asteroids. I can't see them being concerned about floaters.

The tinker gnomes probably have all manner of fancy "ship's heads" designed 
to throw floaters out of the air envelope (obviously they sometimes go wrong 
and cover the deck!)

Yuk! :-)

Halflings tend to live among other races, so would pick up local floater 
based cultural values.

Lizard men wouldn't be interested - unless they could incubate their eggs in 
it!

I'm going to drop this now (unless I find out that Beyond the Moons is 
adding some sort of poojamming page to deal with this sticky subject)!

<dream sequence>
http://poojammer.spelljammer.org/
Beyond the Moons presents the official *turd* edition conversion of...

Stooljammer - AD&D Toilets in Space
<end of dream sequence>

;-)

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
(with apologies to Static) "No poo in the 'verse can stop me"