Looking for Speed, -or- How to Shoot a Telephone Pole Really Fast

[Domriso]

So, in a campaign of mine, I have a masterfully intelligent character. He is also a Wizard quickly approaching 13th level. This leads to my idea.

We're reaching endgame, which has a massive army being led by an ancient revived evil warlord blah blah blah, you get the spiel. Point is, this most recent session (today) the DM revealed that the enemy has not only invented but successfully implemented satellites.

Yes, satellites.

Now, technology on this world is low, but our characters know about other, high-technology planes, and have indeed visited them before. Point is, we now have to deal with satellites and all that comes with that kind of spying capability, but while my fellow players are dealing with the minutia, I have another idea that I want to try.

I want to make the Rod of the Gods.

In essence, this is an orbital platform which fires tungsten rods at the planet, essentially creating megaton blasts without nuclear weaponry. My thinking is that, with this weapon, I should be able to wipe out the army while it is on another continent, thereby avoiding the death and destruction which will come from an actual battle taking place.

To be honest, once I hit 7th level spells making the platform and outfitting it becomes rather easy, especially with my high intelligence. The problem I'm running into is getting the damned rod up to speed.

Ideally, I want to reach about 7 km/s, but I have no idea how to do that. The orbital platform would be in geostationary orbit, so gravity itself wouldn't be affecting it much. I can't really find any spells which would offer a way to provide thrust, at least none which could get me into the ballpark of what I need to reach.

Hence, I turn to you, excellent warlocks of the Playground. Does anyone have some ideas from Pathfinder to work with?

Help me, Playgrounders, you're my only hope!

[Kazyan]

Consider how ordinary guns work, then scale it up to D&D levels.

Step 1: Create an Explosive Runes bomb on a sheet of paper. The standard "here's like 1000 runes" trick.
Step 2: Create a hollow cylindrical chamber made of Riverine, large enough for a tungsten rod of the desired size to snugly fit in. I believe magical force is translucent--this is important.
Step 3: Place the runes face-down in the chamber, so that someone can read them by looking through the bottom.
Step 4: Shove rod in chamber, so that the runes are sandwiched between it and the Riverine.
Step 5: Orient assembly so that it points at your target.
Step 6: Get a lackey to read the runes through the translucent "barrel".
Step 7: Arbitrarily many runes explode, producing an awesome amount of thrust, all of which is directed into the tungsten rod. The "barrel", made of riverine, is indestructible.
Step 8: Rod is now a bullet.

[Irk]

easy, commoner railgun.

[Domriso]

Hm, I had thought about using explosives and discounted it, but that actually sounds pretty awesome. So, make a huge barrel, create a large enough explosion, fire it like a bullet. Should work, I think.

Any other ideas?

[zlefin]

What're the effects of outer space? That would affect how well various options might work. I don't recall any RAW on the topic, and dm rulings would have a big effect on what will work.

Get an air elemental to push it?

Why set up a station in geostationary orbit? Why not simply teleport the Rods up say a couple thousand miles? That's still enough to get a lot of kinetic energy, and they can just drop from there.

[Erik Vale]

Find something that doesn't need to breath with a reeeeeealy high fly speed. Have them fly towards the place in one round then throw it, it now has a velocity of fly speed+thrown distance/6.

Or, have it be launched by something with the distant shot enchantment, which is +5 enchantment so it will cost at least 72000. This weapon can now fire from line of site, so it's velocity is distance/6.

If your dm is allowing you to use physics to nuke things though, do the commoner rail gun with a long enough group [you may need thrallherd], anything moving to fast causes a nuclear explosion due to it breaking apart and breaking apart air [apparently].
You could do it rogues with improved evasion.
:smallyuk::smalltongue::smallbiggrin::smallcool:

There is also a set of classes that allows you to do huge amounts of falling damage to whatever you land on, about half in the area around you, and you take none, I'll try to look it up. If I'm right, just make him resistant to fire and give him a solid push towards the planet.

[Anxe]

You'd need a barrier between the explosion and the tungsten as well or the tungsten will be destroyed. A riverine plug should work.

Translucent Window|Runes|Riverine Plug|Tungsten telephone pole.

So how much force do we need? Two sticks of dynamite in D&D deal 3d6 damage in a 10' radius. An explosive runes spell deals 6d6 in a 10' radius. An explosive runes spell is thus equal to 4 sticks of dynamite. A stick of dynamite weighs 1 pound in D&D. This website: http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/energies.htm says that 1 pound of explosive releases about 2MJ of energy. So we've got 8MJ (8,000,000 joules) per explosive runes spell.

I'll assume that the force is only applied over 1m to make things easier. That means that 1 joule accelerates 1kg to 1m/s, right? I'm a little rusty on this part of physics. Thus one explosive runes spell would accelerate 1142kg to 7km/s if all the force was directed at the exiting object.

That seems wrong... I'm not accounting for recoil here and I'm also making an assumption on the application over 1m thing. Still, you wouldn't need many spells to do it would be my conclusion. How big a telephone pole are we trying to shoot?