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Magic kinda solves the problem of needing energy to power things, doesn't it? Think about it, how long does a sword of thunder stay magical? Say a word, and you've immediately got an unlimited, constant supply of electricity. Sure, this might not be enough to charge a rail gun to fire multiple shots each round, but after thousands of years of refining the process, why wouldn't there be a magical solution to the problem of limited resources?
I've heard that no one will go to wizard college for years to learn how to cast light since anyone can go out, and buy a flashlight. However, light is a cantrip, and you could cast it as often as you wanted. What about prestidigitation? That spell is extremely useful if you're creative enough! No more having to do laundry, your food & drink is always hot/cold, and all the thousands of little things you can do with it (using enough creativity) without using any kind of resources.
All of this is thinking that only going to "wizard college" can give you access to it, but that was back in the days of Old Golarion. Look at how much our world has changed just from having decent public education. Kids are being taught in elementary school things that would be considered advanced science and math 1,000 years ago, and Starfinder is set multiple 1,000's of years into its future. Add in wizardly magic to the public school's curriculum, and you've got a society that churns out mid level wizards by the time they're ready to join the workforce.
Think about what would happen in our world if we had a device that had a functionally limitless supply of light (like an everburning torch). Sure it takes years of study to be able to create something like that, but eventually, with the permanency spell, or just the creation of certain magic items, any technological item we have today could have a magical component that eliminates the need for batteries or fuel; just power it with magic. Have an electric car? Stick that thundering longsword in the battery slot, and drive forever!
Even if a magic item eventually runs out of power, how long would that take? A lot of spells have a duration of "permanent" so how long is that really? How long does a +1 sword of thunder stay powered? If I recall, most found magical items are already 1,000's of years old (that's some of the baggage of having a magical world with super ancient magic: permanent tends to be PERMANENT).
What do you think?
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I get the impression no-one in Golarion has made a serious effort to power machines with lightning to perform commonplace activities. It might be possible to make an electric car, but why not make a flying carpet instead? What can mechanical automation do that an army of skeletons/golems can't?
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Put half of a weighted wheel in an area of reverse gravity. It will accelerate to the mechanical limits of its construction.
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Spells have a finite duration, but they aren't a finite resource. There is no point X where you can't cast light anymore.
There are quite a few low level spells that can be maintained 24/7 by a single low level caster. (Hour/level durations + extend metamagic) multiplied by appropriate spell slots. At 4th you'd only need 2 2nd and 3 1st level spell slots and you've got 4 hours of leeway.
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...A gate to another plane might not work in an accelerated frame of reference for example, so if a spaceship moves, it loses its connection to the plane of fire and an new one needs to be established...
Since Golarion did move around its solar system, and there were Gates on Golarion, it isn't too unreasonable to assume that a Gate on a moving ship would stay with the ship. At least it should be possible to tie a Gate to something physical (like a doorway, or some other object) that would keep it with the ship.
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Solar energy is abundant and readily available (especially in space). The limitations we have at the moment on Earth are the efficiency of solar panels (which have improved quite a bit over the last few decades), the size of the collecting surface, material costs of the panels vs. energy costs (takes a while to amortize the initial purchase/installation at current prices), and variable intensity of sunlight due to weather and planetary rotation (which is largely not a factor in space, unless hiding behind a moon or something). Assuming a much higher tech-base, which Starfinder does, solar collectors are probably fairly omnipresent; they may not be the primary means of energy production, but they are likely to exist as boosters and/or cost-reduction measures (since sunlight is effectively free).
Magical or planar energies may also be in use, but the limitations may cause them to be rarer: maintenance is likely to be more difficult/require the ability to cast spells, planar "visitors" may be attracted to the portals/gates, etc.
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Depends on how magic works with the new game.
Considering they cast spells the same way (specifically as spontaneous 6 level casters like bards), and overlap on specific spells... I don't see much reason to assume magic in starfinder is going to be super different.
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The magic infused in the world is what powers arcane stuff. If you want realism, imagine that magic has a finite bandwidth, like an ISP or electrical power grid or the water pressure in your apartment building. With very few users drawing juice from the system, your performance is awesome. But when hordes of casters/customers are sucking out as much as they can, there will be performance issues. Either everyone's performance will suffer loss or the system will overload from the strain and fail like a server DDoS'ed to death.
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Do you think the light spell would power a solar panel? does the light spell provide any heat at all?
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Potentially oddly useful space flight spell: Tree Shape. Just bring some planters along, then crew members can turn into trees during their down time. Act as low level CO2 scrubbers as they sleep.
The potential for this to just dissolve into even worse Tippyverse theorizing makes me kind of dread the whole game.
You have nothing to worry about: this sort of thing has happened to every iteration of the game, staring with the first, in Gygax's games, and will continue to the end of RPGs. :D
Oh, no. Quite the opposite. There is absolutely nothing here that I've not seen before, and the theorists are missing quite a few ideas I've seen propounded over the years...
EDIT: (I forgot to get to my point) but with tech in-play, actual or hypothetical tech, you suddenly have built-in limiters...
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How so? Most 'limiters' I've seen are usually along the lines of 'don't apply modern day science to a setting that doesn't have it.' A setting with supe science pretty much leaves the field open to crazy.
How many caster levels can your average ley line support?
Magic is not an infinite resource with infinite shelf life unless you decide it has to be like that. Each world follows its own rules, as the folks from reddit.com/r/worldbuilding would tell you.
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The magic infused in the world is what powers arcane stuff. If you want realism, imagine that magic has a finite bandwidth, like an ISP or electrical power grid or the water pressure in your apartment building. With very few users drawing juice from the system, your performance is awesome. But when hordes of casters/customers are sucking out as much as they can, there will be performance issues. Either everyone's performance will suffer loss or the system will overload from the strain and fail like a server DDoS'ed to death.Maybe this is the reason Golarian is gone. The magic got used up, and with magic being such a vital and intigrated part of the world it just ceased to exist and took about 100 years of knowledge with it.
With magic as part of the starfinder setting that seems hard to believe.
How so? Most 'limiters' I've seen are usually along the lines of 'don't apply modern day science to a setting that doesn't have it.' A setting with supe science pretty much leaves the field open to crazy.
Because you've suddenly got tech that fails for tech reasons. This is a fundamental part of most tech stories - places where tech fails. Thus, I strongly suspect that it's going to run into, "Tech doesn't work, when..." type things.
With nothing but pure magic, you have no limits, because the only relationship it has to actual physics, is a passing similarity - enough to tell a quasi-recognizable story.
From the very beginning, D&D and variants has had "science" in it (a certain module where players encounter a rocket ship comes to mind), and whenever that's mixed with magic, insanity applies.
This is no different... except now we'll have a set of codified rules about how magic and technology interact with each other. At worst, we're no worse off - anyone who wants to completely alter all of reality can already do so, pretty much at will, so long as they have the appropriate magic.
With Starfinder, we'll either have that level of crazy, or less, because we'll also have defined rules.
Hence, "quite the opposite."
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Maybe magic IS how a lot of stuff is powered in Starfinder time. That might also explain Drift stealing of pieces of other planes when doing faster-than-light travel (the part of the drive that generates the enormous energy required is sucking it from other planes because it would be too dangerous to store the required amount of antimatter onboard, and in the process of sucking up all that energy, it just eats some of the outer planes in the process).
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How many caster levels can your average ley line support?
Zero. There isn't any indication that ley lines are anything but a throwaway reference for an archetype. Certainly not that they 'support' Spellcasters.
Magic is not an infinite resource with infinite shelf life unless you decide it has to be like that. Each world follows its own rules, as the folks from reddit.com/r/worldbuilding would tell you.
Yes, that's true about world building, which is why it's an odd inquiry to pursue. The pathfinder setting doesn't really support your assumptions. A lot of magic is extraplanar or drawn from extraplanar and a lot of those planes -are- infinite, so there isn't any reason magic wouldn't be. Other Spellcasters are powered by themselves (they generate their own magic, which doesn't run out over their lifetime, or beyond if they extend that life or cheat death), magic gets stuffed into items from all kinds of places, and sits around for thousands of years without any sort of decay. Or in other cases remains active for thousands of years.
@Tacticlion- fantastical science fiction, yes. Actual science, not so much.
But tech failures for tch reasons don't have much impact on magic, or exploiting it,
Though there are certainly limits with pure magic, most of spells have limitations, and there's always anti magic sphere and disjunction...
Even if magic is not infinite, it still makes a great power supply since you tend to get much more out than you put in.
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The problem is one of power. We already have effectively have infinite energy in the real world in the form of solar power. (I expect an enchanted sword to fail sooner than the sun even if there aren't rules for it.) The problem is that you only get that energy so fast. If I want to run my microwave, I need to be getting enough energy every second to run the microwave for that second, or else store energy over a longer period to run my microwave for a little while. (The storage and retrieval generally has some hefty inefficiencies associated with it.)
Consider a Create Water drive. A caster spamming Create Water over a water-wheel generates unlimited energy (so long as you keep them alive and working), but a higher level caster can power a cart uphill rather than just a wheelbarrow.
The Reverse Gravity drive requires a really large, dense wheel to deliver lots of power, and if left to spin freely without impedance will result in a flywheel explosion.
My guess is that magic works for low-power devices like phones, but the cost restricts it to situations where "infinite battery life" is more important than saving a few grand by just using a battery. For things like cars, the level of magic required to provide that much power is probably prohibitively expensive. Permanency ain't cheap on high-level spells. Magic isn't mass-produceable either- to double production of your magic-electric car, you need to hire twice as many people who have studied for a quarter-century. That suggests high-end luxury goods to me.
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If you're going to assume the basic tenets of physics are true in a world with magic, then it's likely those rules also apply to magic itself in some way that's not significant to gameplay.
At the scale of a Pathfinder PC, it doesn't matter where the energy for an electrified sword comes from. But it very well might matter if billions of people are using them to power hair dryers and ovens. It's very iffy and unscientific to assume that because there's no perceivable side effect for one person doing a thing that there are similarly no side effects when an entire civilization does them.
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How about an Elemental Fire rocket engine, inside the reaction chamber is a gate opening to the elemental plane of fire, the fire is expelled out of he rocket nozzle and pushes the rocket forward! this rocket can reach relativistic velocities and never runs out of fuel! Is this a plausible device in SF?
For what it's worth, this one doesn't actually work because (or at least wont work very well) because physics is a tricky mistress.
You see thrust in a rocket engine is provided by the combustion reaction of some sort of fuel source and an oxidizer. When they combust they they generate a large amount of gas at high temperature and pressure which is then passed through a nozzle, which produces thrust.
It is unclear how the elemental plane of fire functions exactly, but it's probably not producing enough gas at high enough pressures to be usable to make a rocket engine.
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Not everyone ha magic, yo can't buy it at your local grocery store.
Actually, you can. Every settlement, no matter how small, has magic items and spellcasting services available. Even a "thorpe" (the game term for a settlement with fewer than 20 people) has a 75% chance of having any given magical item of up to 50 gp value available (that's basically any and all first level scrolls as well as 0 level potions), 1d4 minor magic items of greater value available at all times, and routine access to first-level spellcasting.
Everyoe in Pathfinder does not fly around on magic carpets and magic broomsticks rendering the horse obsolete.
Yes, and that's the question. Why don't they? Given the by-rule existence of a magical market economy, and given the extreme value-for-money that magic items give, why isn't the horse obsolete? If you take the rules in the books at face value, you quickly end up in something that has become known as the Tippyverse, a high-magic universe that looks more like something out of The Jetsons than out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Magic is involved in all FTL travel, which would mean it was available to anyone with money.
I might be mistaken but my understanding has been that Drift engines were only technological, though I suppose the writers might want to leave the idea for enchantments for more accurate navigation, greater speed, damage regeneration, and so on.
Magic is involved in all FTL travel, which would mean it was available to anyone with money.I might be mistaken but my understanding has been that Drift engines were only technological, though I suppose the writers might want to leave the idea for enchantments for more accurate navigation, greater speed, damage regeneration, and so on.
While ships most likely integrate a many magic components, one of the few things we know about The Drift is that it's unreachable by magic. So you are correct in assuming the Drift Engines must be purely technological.
More importantly, due to the nature of the Drift, using portal technology for anything but refueling in a post Gap civilizations would be... possibly impossible, but the "possibly" qualifier only being in there since we only have one interview to go off of.
I could imagine some pre-Gap Generation ships that extensively used portals to refuel, though any such ship could potentially maintain a permanent portal back home making the need moot... haven't cracked open a spell book to the Level 9 spells in awhile, so I'm more familiar with conceptual function than mechanical numbers by this point. Still, if you assume there is no home to portal back to, that could be an interesting deep space encounter. How would a Generation Ship devolve after the chaos what was the Gap?
^Suddenly I got this idea that Drift Drive uses something that has to be set up, so you have to use slower-than-light ships to set up the Drift, although these can maintain permanent portals (Drift or otherwise) back home as much as desired, so even though they might take many generations to do their jobs, strictly speaking they need not be generation ships. The incessant expansion and planar environmental disruption of the Drift finally honked somebody off, who wiped memories from the Gap to make sure that nobody would be able to expand the Drift further.