There's a spell in an Pyramid article -- one of the Tech College ones, specifically. The spell converts sunlight over an area into mana points. Optimally (sun directly overhead, no obstructions) it produces 5 FP per hex of area per hour, and costs 4 FP per hex of radius per hour. If cast in space, it produces 6 FP per hex of area per hour. While it does not specifically mention a magic item, either one to cast the spell or one with the effect working on it, lets assume it does for now. Basically it's a big ol' super-efficient solar collector.
Fiddling with the numbers, if cast in space as a 15-hex radius superhex (one hex in the center and fifteen hexes out from there), it will cover 631 hexes, produce 3,786 FP per hour and cost 60 FP per hour, for a net profit of 3,726 FP per hour, or just a hair over 1 FP per second. A one MILE disk would cover just over 3.24 million hexes, produce 19,462,220 FP per hour and cost 3,520 FP per hour, for a net profit of 19,458,700 FP, or 5,405 FP per second. That's a lot. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Yeah, I'm building a space-based Near-Infinite Mana Generator. But I've got plans for it! What if you send a Solar Collector to the 'Belt, and have it power the construction of Golems to mine for valuable materials? Or to Venus or Mercury? And then use the materials recovered to build new Collectors, or add to the older one? These would all be very neat things. Problem is, I don't know how to do the math for it. Specifically, I'm tripping over the inverse of "at point N from a light source you get X amount of light, at point N2 you get 1/4X, and point N3 you get 1/9X, etc." I get that one, but whet about when you go closer to a light source from a known point? I know how powerful it would be from Earth orbit, and I can calculate for the 'Belt, but what about Venus and Mercury? Does anyone have some advice, hopefully not involving SIN, COS, or TAN? _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
