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No, it is a Flower Pot, bowl of petunias to be more specific.

actually the real question I beleive is why it's last words were "Oh no, not again!" a very hotly debated topic

Jan 3, 2013 -- 10:25AM, MrCustomer wrote:

actually the real question I beleive is why it's last words were "Oh no, not again!" a very hotly debated topic

That was kind of answered in Life, The Universe, and Everything; let's just say that improbability physics really likes the Arthur Dent vs. Agrajag deathmatch. (This was also one of the more... egregious paradoxes involving time travel in the series, so much so that even the characters hang a lampshade on it.)




Freet0, may I ask what the point of this exercise is? Are you just trying to splat a player with a Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference, or are you trying to develop an unorthodox tactical nuke? Because there are better ways to exploit physics within the game - even if you limit yourself just to damage numbers instead of real effects like the commoner railgun. Good examples are the Hulking Hurler (which, last time I tried to build one, broke a few hundred billion d6 damage in one throw - basically, it's Weapon Focus: Texas) and anything involving Minor Creation and/or Decanters of Endless Water (I've seen people attain fusion bombs this way).

Jan 3, 2013 -- 10:25AM, MrCustomer wrote:

No, it is a Flower Pot, bowl of petunias to be more specific.

actually the real question I beleive is why it's last words were "Oh no, not again!" a very hotly debated topic

Then you must be taking about some other reference which I am unfamiliar with.

It seems to me that throwing the chamber pot (hopefully we all know what that is or can look it up somewhere else) at someone would be a LOT more hostile then just throwing a pot of petunias.
 

Jan 3, 2013 -- 12:47PM, StevenO wrote:

Then you must be taking about some other reference which I am unfamiliar with.

Oh, are you in for a treat. It's one of the more oft-quoted anecdotes from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (one of the ones that shows up in every version - radio play, books, BBC series, and Hollywood movie). The radio series is perhaps the best, but the books are much easier to come by in North America.

Here's the relevant passage. Show

We discuss some use of physics-based magic here (which, oddly, was just bumped!). Most is practical.

Then you realize you can use Major Creation to create several cubic feet of plutonium. (Use the psionic power - it doesn't have material components, so you don't need a sliver of the stuff to start off.) Plutonium's critical mass is ~35 pounds; at this point it undergoes fission on its own (this doesn't necessarily mean an explosion, but it will always give off an ungodly amount of heat and radiation (this is why the term "meltdown" exists, if you're curious). In lay English, an atomic bomb uses subcritical mass fissile material, and triggers a chain reaction by using an explosion to ram the masses together; once you go supercritical you get a big boom, more or less.). Major Creation comes online at level 9, at which point you can make over ten thousand pounds of the stuff at once - along with a sizeable crater, particularly if it all appears at once at the end of manifesting instead of gradually over the entire manifesting time. Assuming, of course, your character knows about plutonium or a similar fissile substance (unlikely).

After playing around with that for a bit, Lokiyn happened upon the idea of emulating the atomic bomb explosive-charge triggers with a pressure wave coming from putting an ever-increasing amount of an incompressible substance in an indestructible, magically-controlled volume. He suggested using Resilient Sphere or Telekinetic Sphere + decanter of endless water or bottle of endless sand, and nesting the spheres around a tiny amount of fissile material (you put a minimum-size sphere centered on the fissile material, then put the bottle just outside and sphere around both it and the first sphere; expendable minions act as targets and triggers). The constant flow in between the two spheres will grow under pressure for the duration of the spells. The inner sphere expires first, causing the super-heated, super-pressurized contents to rush in and cause the plutonium to go supercritical (note that the sphere disappears instantly, which is a lot closer to the "ideal" situation used in physics problems!). Then the outer sphere expires, releasing the entire contents at once, and you get a fission bomb. It's possible (we don't have enough information to actually crunch the numbers) that the plutonium fission will give off enough heat to actually start fusion in the water as well; this is most likely if you're using the salt water option (on the assumption that's not pure salt-water but rather ocean-style water, with a passable amount of deuterium/tritium-based water molecules in there), basically giving you an H-bomb. Again, this requires knowledge of fissile materials like plutonium to pull off. (The less dramatic version omits the fissile material but uses the same basic idea to create a pressure bomb, which is a lot closer to the mechanical know-how of the D&D world as it's the same idea behind a powder-keg, just with common magic.)

[EDIT: While these bombs have a limited lifetime, require careful timing to create and the countdown to explosions start as soon as the durations of the spheres start ticking, you can "pause" the timers using Quintessence (assuming you prepared a lot of it in advance). Any number of methods exist to remove the quintessence remotely, allowing multiple bombs to go off at any point in the future.]

You can also accomplish similar things with Shrink Item and breakable spheres (imagine a gumball machine full of shrunken (read: stasis until impact, at which point they expand) balsa-wood super-thin spheres filled with an incompressible substance like water; make the outer shell out of a telekinetic sphere or resilient sphere and then shake it to create the impact needed to end the shrinking (if this doesn't work, fit a tiny minion inside and have him clap), then dismiss the sphere), but in order to go nuclear on its own without some fissile core you'd need something much denser than water to fill them, I think. I could crunch the numbers on this, but I'll admit my physics degree was some time ago (I mostly do cognitive modelling now and even when my physics was fresher, my emphasis was astrophysics, not particle physics, but I could try). You'd still be able to get a pretty impressive pressure bomb this way even with just water.

(EDIT: If you really, really want to be ridiculous, and you have an ocean or two as raw material, you can fill a sphere with beads from Dust of Dryness instead of pure water, then fill the space between the beads with water, then Shrink Item the whole kit and kaboodle, and then fill the outer blast shell with these. This stretches the wording of Shrink Item a bit (as it lets you shrink one nonmagical item, but presumably if you cast Shrink Item on your backpack, it would also shrink magical items inside the pack too). Figuring out exactly how much water pressure you'd get with this is left as an exercise - remember that the component spheres (packed with beads) have to fit within 2 cubic feet per level in volume for Shrink Item to work, and Shrink Item gives you a 1/4000 reduction in volume, while the final sphere (packed with the shrunken component spheres) has a diameter of 1 foot per level.)

At the end of the thread, Loren_Pechtel also pointed out that the unrestricted, limited-only-by-volume nature of Psionic Major Creation allows for a physicst to go even worse than this - his examples were antimatter (!), neutronium (look it up, it's basically the densest form of matter around), or even anti-neutronium (I haven't checked his math on this in detail, but he's on the right order of magnitude when he says a single Major Creation could create an explosion with a crater right through the earth's crust).