One question I cannot answer.

So, I'm writing a technologically advanced fantasy world.

Fantasy Gun Control is averted hard, hell, the Dwarves even have ICB Ms and nukes. Hell, there is even something resembling the internet, although it's not readily available to your average person (it's quite expensive) so it hardly counts.

Magic is mainly functional magic*

- it's all useful, but it's pretty difficult to use without blowing yourself up.

But there's one problem. I cannot answer one question.

Why would they bother developing such technology if they have useful magic?

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Is there a magic equivalent of a nuke?

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am...

Yes, there is, actually, but it makes a conventional nuke look simple.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

It sounds like a case of people distrust magic or it is hard to access for the masses. It also sounds like it's better to integrate technology into the world than rely on raw magical power regardless of its abilities.

If magic is overly complicated—i.e. the benefits don't often outweigh the effort of using it, compared to technology—it's a non-issue.

This is more steampunk than proper fantasy, then, though. It's not necessarily the setting that makes fantasy, fantasy, so much as it's the magic. Without the magic, it's just historical fiction of a different history, or science fiction, depending on what rough technological era you're in...

I am now known as Flyboy.

Well, magic is readily used, accessible by the general population*

and is everywhere. While often subtle, it's certainly there upon closer inspection, and sometimes it's blatantly there... like that magical nuke.

edited 28th Aug '11 12:21:56 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Well, if you have Magi Tech that has advantages over pure magic, then that's one reason. Another is if magic is very complicated, limited to a few naturally talented users, or necessarily dangerous to the user. There's no reason why they shouldn't have, if magic has any disadvantages that technology doesn't. It's not like they're choosing between the two; they can still use magic where magic is useful, and tech where tech is useful.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Then the simple reason they'd use magic instead of or in conjunction with technology is because you could (presumably) do things with it you can't do with pure science.

I.e. how hard can it be to get into space with anti-gravity magic? Etc.

It's also possible they wouldn't evolve technology in the same way. For example, we have gunpowder because of Chinese pharmacist equivalents trying to make medicinal herbs out of the various minerals that make up gunpowder. With healing magic...

I am now known as Flyboy.

Well, technology IS less prone to exploding in your face if you make a mistake...

Except gunpowder.

One limit is that you must get the energy for a spell from SOMEWHERE. If you're going to detonate a 1 megaton magical bomb, you must supply it 1 megaton of energy. If you're going to start a fire, you've got to give the spell enough energy to raise that material to its autoignition temperature.

You must do this for technology too, natch.

None of those "I'm casting spells but have no clue where the power for it comes from" shenanigans.

edited 28th Aug '11 12:28:06 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Technology Levels is a farce, though. Technology doesn't spring up from the aether, it is invented in response to certain situations, or accidentally discovered because of some strange circumstances.

With magic, this could skew everything. Maybe they never invent things like anesthesia or medicine or surgery or anything like that, because of healing magic. Or, instead of siege machines, they use mind-controlled animals. Or whatever.

You could artificially restrict the magic into nothing, but at that point you might as well call it science fiction and be done with it...

I am now known as Flyboy.

It is exactly like that - they can do things we can't (partially floating cities.. kind of), and we can do things that they can't (personal computers) simply because the two lines of technology / magic (or lack thereof, for us) have evolved completely differently.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, so forgive me if I've gone on too much of a tangent (and if so, tell me what you're looking for :P)

One problem is saying they have "x" technology is extremely arbitrary without getting pretty extremely specific.

Basically... The humans and dwarves originated on one (the largest) continent and the elves on another (this planet has 15 continents and some 20 races, btw, but only a few are important to this).

The Dwarves began exploring the world*

, using purely technology (sailing ships), first ran across Orcs and this didn't go well, but the dwarves did gain the World Island*

^{This island exists in a location where, from the top of the mountain, you have three separate continents in visible range on a clear day. Controlling those waters is a huge strategic gain...}

out of it. They later met the Elves, who were pretty advanced with magic, even having some long-distance communication systems. They traded, and, naturally, each stole each others secrets at every opportunity. The Dwarves began to integrate magic into their technology, and the elves... began to work technology into some of their spells.

Just a bit, at first, but eventually this evolves into things like >99% efficiency steam engines. You can also do grander things, like rather spectacular partially floating cities, and I'll use this as an example of how you can get magic and technology to interact:*

*

^{OK, it's not really floating, it's off the side of a mountain about 1+1/2 mile and it's got a bridge to it and that bridge and its foundations are enchanted such that it can support the entire weight of the city at the end... pretty much infinite tensile strength steel. Actually, it's not infinite, it's just insanely high.}

*

^{The bridge itself has 26 rail lines, a road, an aqueduct, power cables, a fortress half way across just past the last support, and the dwarves plated it in adamantine as a gesture of goodwill.}

*

^{It also requires 3.352×10^19 joules of energy per month to keep the enchantments working, which is approximately a third of the energy produced by 1/3 of the electricity in the united states in a year. This is powered by converting about 400 kg per month of unenriched uranium directly to pure energy in a magical reactor of sorts.}

*

^{They store enough weaponry, food, water and misc. supplies in the city for a theoretical 80 year siege as well as approximately 150 short tons of uranium metal - enough for about 300 years. This isn't as bad as it sounds, the lower layers of the mountain it is attached to contains extensive pitchblende deposits on the line of 7/10 of a cubic kilometer of viable ore.}

*

^{The mountain itself is a fortress worthy of its own thread. In fact, I may just make one in World Building about it because it's awesome.}

As well as more mundane things, like a candle that almost never burns out.

Naturally, technology has long evolved (as has magic) and what they've got compares to, in many aspects, what we've got.

edited 28th Aug '11 1:28:49 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

...so you've answered your own question. Why don't they use magic instead of technology? Why would they? They have Magitek pretty much down-pat, it seems. Your magic is more limited than the design I did, and I went for a more classical medieval setting (albeit one with Asian and Middle Eastern culture for good measure), but the basic concept is grasped. Why choose between a fusion reactor or a magical generator when you can have a magical fusion reactor?

I am now known as Flyboy.

Yeah, you did get me thinking more about it.

Also, it's a magical fission reactor.

But this also brings up the question... why is the city in the sky instead of down on the mountainside? Well, they got sick of it being destroyed by orcs.

edited 28th Aug '11 1:46:09 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

This is fantasy. Huge, inefficient designs are excused by genre requirements...

Or...

I'm hiding something for the sequel. *cough*.

Moral of the story: if you ever read something I write, and something that seems like it's suspiciously absent from the story as a whole after showing up once gets left out for the rest of the book, there will be a sequel.

Or, in plainer English, the reason given for something's existence to the characters and, possibly, audience doesn't mean it can't have other uses.

I am now known as Flyboy.

Re: the city....

That seems pretty insanely unlikely. The torque on the foundation of the bridge from a city at the end of a mile and a half lever is going to be outside the usual definitions of reality. Even if you assume infinite-tensile-strength bridge and enchanted super-foundation, I have to imagine that that sort of torque is going to be causing serious structural damage to the mountain.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Or they enchanted the mountain, too...

I am now known as Flyboy.

Yeah. Just how much magic are they spending on this, and what's the purpose? If it's largely a monument to pride, or a reminder to other nations how powerful they are, then I can see doing something like this. If it's meant to be fully practical, then it would probably be easier to do something else—anti-gravity, maybe, or some other neutral-buoyancy thing.

Also, I'm trying to remember my basic physics here, but it shouldn't take that much continuous energy output to maintain something in a steady state. The equation for work done is force exerted times distance traveled; even if the magic is exerting enough force to lift a city, if it's not moving anywhere there's not much actual work being done, hence energy being used.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

He beat me to it. And yes, it's insanely impractical and inefficient. That's why it requires just over 3 kilotons per second to sustain it. That's right. It uses the energy it took to destroy Hiroshima every 5 seconds. This energy goes into keeping the bridge and foundations intact, and to keep the mountain from shearing off its roots and collapsing in one giant ass landslide.

The purpose is because it was needed - they needed a city for all of their Nice Stuff(tm) where the orcs would stop raiding it.

You're right, it wouldn't require that much energy if they were not affecting many cubic miles of material in the mountain and around it.

edited 28th Aug '11 2:17:39 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

The mountain wouldn't tip, the side would just crumble...

I am now known as Flyboy.

The original purpose was a stop-gap with just the initial fortress just off the end of the last support where they could hide their Nice Things(tm) and leaders when needed.

Then someone decided it would be cool to extend the bridge further still and build a weather station out there. And then a house so that they didn't have to walk back to the fortress every time. And then someone thought, you know, why not build a sky-port for our airships there? And it went from there. Once they built the larger reactor in the city itself (the fortress has a smaller one), there was nothing to stop it from growing into a major city.

They never hit a point where they went "no, we can't do it" and money was not a massive issue either (but was the limiting factor early on).

It's essentially a status symbol at this point, but its original purpose was relatively practical, actually.

edited 28th Aug '11 2:22:47 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Allow me to point you in the direction of one Utsuho Reiuji. She runs one with the power of a (literal) god.

Oh. It's one of those things on a small list of works I see around here constantly, and yet have never experienced.

Then again, all of my fusion reactors are magic. I use it as a Real Life example of a Minovsky Particle, because I'm too lazy to make one from scratch.

edited 28th Aug '11 2:38:44 PM by USAF713

I am now known as Flyboy.

Yes, but this is a fission reactor, not a fusion reactor. Key difference.

And it runs on unenriched uranium metal.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

I would say that they use technology differently than we do. They don't use it replace magic, they use it to bolster magic.

Say you can make a fireball appear from nothing. This would be quite useful in and of itself, but then why don't you encase few liters of flammable gas in a steel cylinder, throw the cylinder at your enemies, ??????, and profit?

Still Sheepin'

If you need to provide thermodynamic inputs to spells, why not make "spell grenades" that have explosives or fuel inside and can be burned to create a specific high-energy effect? Like, say, melting a bunch of ice, or lifting something heavy, or breaking through armor. (The idea being that you put a spell on the grenade to use the explosive energy to do whatever.)

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)