ok so i'm building a sky ship like a Frigate warship and i'm making it out of mithril with levitate on it so it can float in the air, the mast will have control winds on so it can move. the escape rafts will have glide and invisibility on them (invisibility will be on a command word).the ship will have 3 uses of dimension door a day and unseen crew to run it.
so what else am I missing?
You might need some kind of protection from electricity effect on the ship, for when the metal hull gets hit by lightning in a storm.
as long as i'm not grounded I should be ok I think
how do you plan on getting ~50 million gold pieces worth of mithril?
Eberron had material for building elemental powered craft, specifically air ships and lightning rails that might prove inspirational.
Problem is.. your ship is to be polite.... gilding the lily with all those options built in.
Build it out of soarwood, with bronze plating or something.
Don't forget that you can magically enhance materials for fairly cheap, doubling the hardness, and doubling the HP.
Normally you do this to doors, walls, etc... but i see no reason you couldn't do it to other things like ship hulls.
Yeah, build it out of wood and save all the money.
Other propulsion could come from an air elemental pushing on the sails.
The Eberron version was made of "soarwood" and powered by a fire elemental bound into a ring around the ship.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
I wouldn't get to bogged down in the details of how many levitate spells are required to fly a wooden ship over a mithril one. Just take an ordinary ship and handwave the flying.
Say it flies because of a magic item in the hold, or carried by the captain. Something simple like that.
If you have Craft Construct, you can make it out of Stone and it will cost 30,000gp to craft. It will move on its own power as well.
It's more expensive to make it out of metal, but that's doable too. Sadly, Wall of Iron is like...totally iron, except you can make anything out of it -- it is one of the more unnatural restrictions on a spell I've seen.* So you'd actually have to buy the metal.
If you can afford the Mithril then I guess you can go that route though.
Using metal or Mithril will either up the cost or lower the max speed.
This is the easiest way to make an airship, imho.
*There were other ways they could have handled that.
Gargantuan animated object? :D
Consider how the ship will deal with flying monsters, and offensively placed dispel magics/antimagic auras.
Also, have emergency repair kits of some kind or other on hand, to repair damage.
With Craft Construct it is immune to anti-magic auras and dispel magic. So those are fine.
Dealing with flying monsters is harder as it only comes with a slam attack. It wouldn't be easy to give it the ability to handle such creatures. However, you could add people or other constructs to it that use ranged weapons of some sort.
Using the Shield Guardian template and it can have fast healing. Though one could talk to one's DM about finding a cheaper way for it to heal (Shield Guardian comes with a bunch of other stuff).
Drachasor wrote: If you have Craft Construct, you can make it out of Stone and it will cost 30,000gp to craft. It will move on its own power as well.
It's more expensive to make it out of metal, but that's doable too. Sadly, Wall of Iron is like...totally iron, except you can make anything out of it -- it is one of the more unnatural restrictions on a spell I've seen.* So you'd actually have to buy the metal.
If you can afford the Mithril then I guess you can go that route though.
Using metal or Mithril will either up the cost or lower the max speed.
This is the easiest way to make an airship, imho.
*There were other ways they could have handled that.
The best explanation for Wall of Iron not being useful for crafting is that its a Wall of IRON. Not wall of 95% Iron 2% carbon 3% other elements.
In order to use it for crafting you would first have to melt it down, then add an appropriate amount of alloying elements and carbon. Other elements they don't know the existence of, let alone how to isolate... Let alone the knowledge of the carbon being the hardener and the appropriate ratios and sources of carbon.
The carbon is the easiest to add, and truthfully pure iron with a bit of carbon in it is STILL better than 99% of of the crap medieval and before times were capable of making, quality wise.
If you were to take the wall of iron and directly turn it into weapons and armor, it would be utterly worthless. Pure iron is soft and weak. bronze is much better.Pure Iron has a Mohs hardness of 4, compared to 7+ for steel, all on an exponential scale.
Strength wise, the weakest Steel is 300% as strong as Iron. A jump from 80 MPA to ~250 with a bit of carbon. Typical steels used in weapons would be more like 800% as strong as pure iron.
They knew how to alloy iron back then. They might not know the chemical underpinnings of it at all, but they knew about mixing things in. Afterall, they could make steel with careful work.
So if it is 100% pure iron (which can still be used for some things), a Fabricate with the right materials should be able to turn it into something useful. A Fabricate can do months or years of work in a matter of rounds. A Fabricate cannot make use of Wall of Iron by RAW (at least for anything other than a wall).
But you cannot make anything useful out of it at all, ever, no matter what you do (except perhaps a limited wish or similar magic, DM permitting).
Drachasor wrote: They knew how to alloy iron back then. They might not know the chemical underpinnings of it at all, but they knew about mixing things in. Afterall, they could make steel with careful work.
So if it is 100% pure iron (which can still be used for some things), a Fabricate with the right materials should be able to turn it into something useful. A Fabricate can do months or years of work in a matter of rounds. A Fabricate cannot make use of Wall of Iron by RAW (at least for anything other than a wall).
But you cannot make anything useful out of it at all, ever, no matter what you do (except perhaps a limited wish or similar magic, DM permitting).
They understood a few things, but it wasn't enough to turn iron into steel.
They could turn Iron ore into a very high carbon bulk iron, and they knew that adding certain things like limestone to it will make it cleaner. Raising the heat very high and later pounding the s@#* out of it will serve to reduce carbon content and even out inconsistencies as well. They didn't KNOW thats what it did, but they knew it made it stronger.
for thousands of years iron working was passed down as secrets, little better understood than magic. seriously.
Really good steel was phenomenally expensive, worth its weight in gold coin. It was that rare.
Todays tool and spring steels would be like Adamantine compared to the crap we had back then.
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Way back when, when a blacksmith went to make some steel, they probably went through hundreds of pounds of inconsistent pig iron trying to find pieces that weren't utter crap and had the right properties. It took a long time and a lot of skill, but they would go through a lot of waste iron trying to find small bits of steel.
Even then the steel pieces were small, and had wildly varying carbon contents. In order to put it together into a single, homogeneous whole that wouldn't break and shatter they eventually invented this cool process called folding.
Folding the steel pieces together mixed the various crap quality steels together into a more uniform, less random larger piece. Thankfully today we have turned steel making into a Science, rather than a secretive art, and folding is unnecessary, even silly. Folding today is purely for aesthetic value in knives and the like, outside of a few specialized uses when you need to take advantage of two separate metal properties.
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Unfortunately, pure 100% iron is pretty much useless for most tools even cooking equipment. Its soft, weak, and rusts very easily. Even if you fabricated something from it, it wouldn't be worth making anything much more than a weight out of it, or ammunition for a catapult or sling.
Like I said, they could make steel. I am not sure why you started off denying it and then went on about how they did it. Yes, it was a lot of work, expensive, and they didn't understand the underlying principles, but with that work and expense they could do it repeatedly. In the game, steel is not that expensive either, a Steel Light Shield costs 9g and a Heavy only 20g.
But you cannot make steel with wall of iron, not at all. You cannot make pots, dinnerware, or any number of other things iron could make easily enough, even if it was 100% pure. Despite its gamestats, which are pretty good (and better than stone).
Anyhow, the point is, use wall of stone to make structures on the cheap since it is free and Wall of Iron does not work (unless your DM lets it).
Drachasor wrote: Like I said, they could make steel. I am not sure why you started off denying it and then went on about how they did it. Yes, it was a lot of work, expensive, and they didn't understand the underlying principles, but with that work and expense they could do it repeatedly. In the game, steel is not that expensive either, a Steel Light Shield costs 9g and a Heavy only 20g.
But you cannot make steel with wall of iron, not at all. You cannot make pots, dinnerware, or any number of other things iron could make easily enough, even if it was 100% pure. Despite its gamestats, which are pretty good (and better than stone).
WEll whatr i was trying to say is that if they were anything like medieval and earlier peoples in steel making, they COULDN'T make steel out of it.
They just wouldn't have the first clue of what to do. They would be starting from step 1 without any help. The steelmaking process evolved as a happy accident from contamination of smelted ores, and millenia of accidental discoveries leading to them slowly refining the process. pure trial and error.
If you gave them a 100% iron ingot, they would give it back because it was useless to them.
So yes, its POSSIBLE to turn it into steel. Fairly easy all things considered as well. But thats like saying its fairly easy to make glass.
Its only easy if you know how, and they most assuredly wouldn't have the faintest clue.
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As far as the cheap price of steel items, consider the following.
The game makes little difference between iron and steel, both having hte same stats. This is important, because for much of history, they basically were the same. Steel was just slightly better quality iron. A little less carbon, and less silica. It as still fairly crapish.
Now a sword made from true, high quality steel would historically be considered a MASTERWORK. not fromn being fancy, particuarly complicated, or the time requiored to actually FORGE it. It would be masterwork because it would be superior in material quality in every way. the material itself could take weeks or longer to produce though.
All of a sudden the D&D 'masterwork' designation has more meaning, that matches up historically. For steel at least. 300GP is ~6 pounds of gold. A masterwork sword would be ~150% the cost of its weight in gold then.
Realistically, if you were to take an average bladsmith and give him chunk of spring steel, he would create a 'masterwork' sword damn near every time.
90% of the worth of a sword is in its quality of steel.
Drachasor wrote: Like I said, they could make steel. I am not sure why you started off denying it and then went on about how they did it. Yes, it was a lot of work, expensive, and they didn't understand the underlying principles, but with that work and expense they could do it repeatedly. No they didn't actually. That's why things like the forgotten secrets of Damascus Steel were that legendary.a (I believe we're still trying to recreate it today.) It's why the vastly inferior forms of steel used in the Middle Ages were hugely expensive. It's why Japanese swords like the katana were made the way they were, to get around the fact that the steel they developed was so flimsy and terrible..
LazarX wrote: Drachasor wrote: Like I said, they could make steel. I am not sure why you started off denying it and then went on about how they did it. Yes, it was a lot of work, expensive, and they didn't understand the underlying principles, but with that work and expense they could do it repeatedly. No they didn't actually. That's why things like the forgotten secrets of Damascus Steel were that legendary.a (I believe we're still trying to recreate it today.) It's why the vastly inferior forms of steel used in the Middle Ages were hugely expensive. It's why Japanese swords like the katana were made the way they were, to get around the fact that the steel they developed was so flimsy and terrible.. Just because Damascus Steel is a potentially unknown steel alloy does not mean steel hasn't been made for over a thousand years. There were a few ways to make steel that are over hundreds of years old. They just can't mass-produce large quantities of steel -- except Fabricate certainly could work, and I see no reason why it wouldn't work well on the iron from a Wall of Iron sufficiently rusted.
As for Japanese Steel, they had really, really crappy iron sources, so they had to put a lot more work into it. Don't generalize that to other cultures.
And again, the game we play has Steel as a relatively easy thing to get. So it is hardly rare.
JTibbs wrote: The game makes little difference between iron and steel, both having hte same stats. This is important, because for much of history, they basically were the same. Steel was just slightly better quality iron. A little less carbon, and less silica. It as still fairly crapish.
Now a sword made from true, high quality steel would historically be considered a MASTERWORK. not fromn being fancy, particuarly complicated, or the time requiored to actually FORGE it. It would be masterwork because it would...
But we aren't talking about making high quality steel. We're talking about making use of the iron of a Wall of Iron. Logically speaking, if it is iron, there's no reason why you couldn't use it to make stuff. The techniques to process iron ore would work perfectly fine on an oxidized iron wall, and some techniques might well work on the iron wall itself.
So let's not pretend that the last line in the Wall of Iron description isn't a little silly. It's a flat-out ban on making ANYTHING (save a wall) with the Wall of Iron.
Jeeze, why are you guys making such a fuss about this? I make one comment on how this was a pretty silly line to have and you are blowing it out of proportion. This wasn't even in the context of making weapons or anything like that, but a Flying Ship (and since animated Stone works for that, we can't really complain about the iron, yes?)
Drachasor wrote: JTibbs wrote: The game makes little difference between iron and steel, both having hte same stats. This is important, because for much of history, they basically were the same. Steel was just slightly better quality iron. A little less carbon, and less silica. It as still fairly crapish.
Now a sword made from true, high quality steel would historically be considered a MASTERWORK. not fromn being fancy, particuarly complicated, or the time requiored to actually FORGE it. It would be masterwork because it would...
But we aren't talking about making high quality steel. We're talking about making use of the iron of a Wall of Iron. Logically speaking, if it is iron, there's no reason why you couldn't use it to make stuff. The techniques to process iron ore would work perfectly fine on an oxidized iron wall, and some techniques might well work on the iron wall itself.
So let's not pretend that the last line in the Wall of Iron description isn't a little silly. It's a flat-out ban on making ANYTHING (save a wall) with the Wall of Iron.
Jeeze, why are you guys making such a fuss about this? I make one comment on how this was a pretty silly line to have and you are blowing it out of proportion. This wasn't even in the context of making weapons or anything like that, but a Flying Ship (and since animated Stone works for that, we can't really complain about the iron, yes?) The last line of the spell description is just total BS and shouldn't exist. Until it's edited out, just play your games like it wasn't there.
Just houserule it like this:
"The wall of iron,being pure iron is unsuitable in strength and hardness for use in weapons and other items. To be used it must first be processed into a new alloy. As such, the iron from Wall of Iron is more valuable than iron ore, but not significantly. Wall of iron sells for 1 CP per pound."
Thus a wall of Iron cast by a 12th level wizard would net 368GP 2SP and 5CP.
Compare that to Spellcasting as a service. To get a wizard to cast Wall of Iron for you at 12th level, you would have to fork over 720 GP, or just under TWICE the price you could get selling the iron.
Also keep in mind that most people would refuse to buy that much raw iron, especially in one piece. To sell it you would first have to fabricate it into Ingots, and sell them individually. Its doubtful you'd be able to sell all the ingots in anything but a large city or metropolis anyway, since you would be attempting to sell 18.41 TONS of pure iron.
IF you were to try to sell the iron, most blacksmiths would go "oh, sure I'll buy some iron. I'll buy 100 pounds off of you. Here's 1GP for it, thanks" and then you would be stuck with 18.36 tons of it still.
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