[MUD-Dev] Re: Spell components, chemistry, and the like...

[Ling]

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Hal Black wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 02:27:20PM -0800, quzah [sotfhome] wrote:
> > 
> Some more examples:

[snip]

> cornstarch(s) + water(l)	-----------------> "goop" (sometimes solid,
> 							sometimes liquid)
> Try making some "goop" at home.  Get some cornstarch and mix in some water,
> when you squeeze it it feels solid.  If you leave it alone, it turns to a
> runny liquid.  Neat stuff. 8')

Sounds like silicon putty.  Details are something like: Leave it alone and
it'll form into a ball, place it on a slope and it'll run like a liquid,
hit it with a hammer and it'll shatter.  Look into the impulse of force
applied to an object for this behaviour.

[large snip]

> material is what it's made of.  Could be a mixture, complex structure,
> or pure molecular/elemental type.  Lots of room for development here,
> depending on how involved you want to get.  (are animals and plants the
> same or different subtypes of "organic", etc...)  There are mixtures,
> alloys, all kinds of neat stuff.  Go to your college book store and sit
> down with a Chemistry 101 book and thumb through it for a while for
> ideas.  There is some neat stuff in there. 

Like Adam Wiggin said, high explorer value. :)  Stuff like alloys is where
it starts getting interesting.  Take a look at the production techniques
involved in making steel.  Ideally, around 3% of steel should be carbon. 
Methods of manufacture from pure iron include throwing random bits of
leather junk into a molten mix and for impure iron, sticking pure iron
nuggets on it to absorb the carbon.  Then there's the rather funky
technique that produces blades that have wavy dark-light bands because the
blacksmiths varied the carbon content, Damocles blades, I think.  This is
what I like about rpgs, learning random stuff like this! 

  |    Ling Lo (cod)
_O_O_  kllo at iee.org