Fusion in D&D

[Eaglejarl]

I can't stop thinking of ways to induce fusion in D&D. Please help me find a solution so I can get this idea out of my head. Here's my assumptions:

*) Must work by strict RAW
*) It needs to work in a reasonable time frame -- say, a week on the Prime Material plane
*) The "Prestidigitation as fusion candle" trick does not work. (Too slow and I don't think the spell description allows that anyway.)
*) Every rulebook and splat book is fair game with the exception of psionics, Fast Time planes, and Epic anything.
*) Bonus points if it uses only d20SRD.com material.
*) Utter cheese is welcomed eagerly.

My first thought, which I raised here earlier and which doesn't work, was throw a Decanter of Endless Water in a Portable Hole and wait until there's enough water to fuse. That doesn't work for a multiple reasons: takes way too long, the Decanters get crushed before fusion starts, and probably others.

Any ideas?

EDIT, clarification:

*) I'm talking about nuclear fusion, not fusion with another person or Arcane Fusion
*) I really do mean the "no psionics or epic" part
*) My assumption is that if we can get anything dense enough, it will fuse. Hm. Maybe PAO up some hydrogen neutronium and slam parts of it together, perhaps in a 'gravity gun' style nuclear device?

...Well, I suppose there's always the "create a custom magic item that causes fusion." But that's lame. I was hoping for something clever.

[watchwood]

We don't have a practical way of inducing sustained fusion right now. I don't think anything short of a custom epic spell will allow you to make any kind of nuclear reaction go, given the comparative effects of the damaging 9th level spells.

[SPoilaaja]

Research a spell. Probably epic one.

[Rubik]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/fusion.htm

[Thiyr]

True Creation can do it. The limit on true creation is strictly volume. You can create something from any material. Create a superdense, superhot sphere of deuterium, cue fusion. Hardest part is finding the GP value of the deuterium, but you've got so much XP by the time you can cast true creation that it shouldn't be hard to pay it. just make sure you get a thought bottle made first.

edit: I don't know the physics of fusion terribly well, so my knowledge on getting fusion going comes from internet snippets, mostly howstuffworks. If I'm wrong on the process, sorry, I tried

[KillianHawkeye]

We don't even know how to create sustainable fusion in the real world yet. Trying to do it in a game that doesn't even begin to approach the idea of fusion is just not going to work.

[Eaglejarl]

True Creation can do it. The limit on true creation is strictly volume. You can create something from any material. Create a superdense, superhot sphere of deuterium, cue fusion. Hardest part is finding the GP value of the deuterium, but you've got so much XP by the time you can cast true creation that it shouldn't be hard to pay it. just make sure you get a thought bottle made first.

edit: I don't know the physics of fusion terribly well, so my knowledge on getting fusion going comes from internet snippets, mostly howstuffworks. If I'm wrong on the process, sorry, I tried

Well, that was...easier than expected. It feels like it shouldn't be that easy, and of course no DM would allow it, but I can't see why it wouldn't work by very strict RAW. And here I was expecting to have to do something complicated like "Use a resetting Lightning Bolt trap and a Decanter to generate hydrogen and oxygen, then use Bigby's Condensing Toenails to make it really dense, then dance three times widdershins (*) and...."

Thank you! Now I can finally stop thinking about this.


(I don't know the physics of fusion terribly well either. I'm assuming that "dense enough == fusion" is sufficient.)

(*) Wow. The spellchecker here knows the word "widdershins." Didn't see that one coming.

[KillianHawkeye]

(*) Wow. The spellchecker here knows the word "widdershins." Didn't see that one coming.

There is no spellchecker here on this site. If you have spellcheck, it is something that is simply a part of your browser (or a browser add-on that you've installed). As such, it probably knows words you've used before.

[Rubik]

Well, 'widdershins' is a genuine word meaning 'counter-clockwise,' so...

[Razanir]

Why not psionics?

[Rubik]

Why not psionics?I did suggest the Fusion power earlier.

[Kelb_Panthera]

A couple of things:

1) Why? Nuclear fusion doesn't really serve much purpose in a D&D world when a simple permanent wall of fire pointed at a boiler gives you a perpetual energy engine so it's not useful as a source of energy. The major creation; anti-osmium bomb exceeds its destructive power by orders of magnitude. I just don't see the point.


2) It's a bit presumptuous to think it's even possible. D&D, by all appearances, uses the classic primal elements model for reality. Atomic science has no place in such a model and that would make fusion, fission, and anti-matter things that also have no place.

3) Do you just want fusion or do you want sustained fusion? The latter is considerably more difficult but -may- be doable, though it will require at least modifying some extant magic items.

[Phelix-Mu]

I am much in line with Kelb. There is no atomic model present in RAW, so there is a high probability deuterium does not exist. Water itself, while it presumably freezes/boils/evaporates as per real life (in conjunction with the statement that real-life physics stuff works unless stated otherwise), anything more complicated than that basic level of stuff is probably contradicted somewhere in the rules.

Furthermore, density itself is a problem in the RAW. A quart of water fits in a quart wineskin. If you heat that water up to near boiling, it still fills the same volume in D&D. If we are abrogating the relationships between pressure, temperature, and volume, it's unclear that anything like fusion would ever be possible.

Finally, as Kelb wisely points out, real-life rules are substantially less exploitable than the D&D faux-physics. Perpetual motion, mutable mass, unlimited free energy, absence of heat decay, possibility of reducing temp directly without moving heat about, instantaneous communication, temporal dynamics that make almost no sense when taken to logical extremes. The list of what is possible in D&D is a veritable wet dream for the average irl physicist.

[Incanur]

*) Bonus points if it uses only d20SRD.com material.

1) Cast wish.
2) Word your wish carefully.
3) Profit.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to take a stab at it (already got some ideas percolating, actually) I was just kinda wondering. Point 3 was asked so that I might better direct my thoughts toward the desired outcome.

A noteworthy thing, IMO: resilient sphere has the lovely quality of being perfectly indestructible by non-magical means. It should work beautifully as a containment field for the reaction if you're looking for sustained reactions.

[Rubik]

A noteworthy thing, IMO: resilient sphere has the lovely quality of being perfectly indestructible by non-magical means. It should work beautifully as a containment field for the reaction if you're looking for sustained reactions.Make yourself invulnerable to radiation, travel to the interior of the sun, cast Resilient Sphere or Telekinetic Sphere, then take the nuclear material wherever you want?

[Phelix-Mu]

I previously had a bit of a thought experiment going attempting to use ring gates as a one-way system of transferring temperature, but I've forgotten half of my way-too-complicated design. It did involve resilient spheres, though.

A decanter of endless water produces a fixed volume every round, regardless of the surrounding pressures, from what I recall. While you might need to coat the decanter in riverine or otherwise make it indestructible, it should be possible to exploit one to create NI density over time if contained in an indestructible space.

Finally, I think it's possible to create infinite pressure gradients via transitional spaces like portals or gates, where NI pressure can be present on one side, and an inch away (on the other side of the portal) the pressure can be near to zero. I might need to examine some RAW to verify this, but such a dynamic should make it possible to achieve arbitrarily high acceleration of an object across the gradient. Could be useful if that's how it works out.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Oh! Forgot about riverine. Definitely gonna want to make most of your reactor out of riverine.

[Phelix-Mu]

And dip it in quintessence for a convenient off-button.:smallwink:

[Drachasor]

For the Decanter, you just use a Teleport Object trap to teleport water into a Wall of Force container.

But actually anyone with a Component Pouch already has material undergoing fusion. True Creation requires a bit to cast, it has no material cost, therefore it is in the pouch for free. QED.

But more strictly going by RAW fusion doesn't exist. You also aren't limited to light speed. Heck, crash into someone going 1,000 miles an hour and it is no different than doing it going 5 feet per second.

[malonkey1]

Well, you could argue that Implosion might create an implosive force sufficient for fusion.
If not, you could find a way to get a pellet of deuterium (Based on deuterium prices, I'd actually say a kilogram of DO2 wouldn't go much beyond a couple of gold.) Take a few battalions of weak Warlocks (or a couple more powerful ones, preferably Hellfire) and have them all blast away at the pellet.

[TuggyNE]

Well, you could argue that Implosion might create an implosive force sufficient for fusion.

Unless you can find a Deuterium elemental this won't do you any good: implosion does not target objects. (Which, sadly, means it can't technically affect undead/constructs. :smallannoyed:)

[CIDE]

Make yourself invulnerable to radiation, travel to the interior of the sun, cast Resilient Sphere or Telekinetic Sphere, then take the nuclear material wherever you want?


That's easy. WotC treats radiation as a disease. Immunities are all over.

[malonkey1]

Unless you can find a Deuterium elemental this won't do you any good: implosion does not target objects. (Which, sadly, means it can't technically affect undead/constructs. :smallannoyed:)

Well, theoretically, all water elementals would be at least partly Deuterium Oxide (1 molecule per 20 million).

A huge Water Elemental takes up a space of 15 ft. * 15 ft. * 16 ft. in height. Let's assume that they only use 1/2 of this space, for a total of 1800 gallons.

1,800 cubic feet = 50,970 L = 50,790,000 mL

water has a density of 1 g/mL, so the Huge elemental would be about 50,790,000 grams.

Water has a molar mass of ~18 grams (yes, heavy water is slightly heavier, but we're ignoring that for simplicity).

50,790,000 grams of water, 1 20 millionth of which is heavy water:

50,790,000 * 1/20,000,000 = 2.5395 grams of heavy water in a given Huge Water Elemental. Probably not enough for a decent amount of fusion.

So, to get 1 kg of heavy water, you'd need to extract it from nearly 400,000 Huge water elementals.

Alternatively, you could just try to find that 1-in-20-million pure "Heavy Water Elemental". Another way to do it, would be to create an Ice Golem (See Frostburn) entirely of Heavy Water Ice, which would probably be more than enough heavy water. However, this burns through 32,000 GP and 2,320 XP, plus whatever steps you'd have to go through to make it a living construct (maybe develop a spell that gives it the Soulspark Construct template?).

However, we're also not looking at other potential fusion materials. Arguably, you could fuse a plain Water Elemental for its Hydrogen, but that'd be less than optimal (although much simpler). Alternatively, you might look at Fire Elementals, depending on what makes them up. It's possible that your DM might have them as natural fusion reactors to begin with. But that's reaching.

[Drachasor]

I'll take this moment to say I was very disappointed in what the "Heavy Water" spell in PF does.

[Thanatosia]

If you set multiple commoner railguns feeding into a central point, could you make a black hole?

[Drachasor]

If you set multiple commoner railguns feeding into a central point, could you make a black hole?

I don't think you'd be able to do this, realistically speaking. Much like the Warlocks using EB, you just aren't going to have enough. Especially if you take relativistic effects into account, then the objects get too heavy for the railgun.

[TuggyNE]

I'll take this moment to say I was very disappointed in what the "Heavy Water" spell in PF does.

Yeah… that's one of the most feeble 4ths I've seen in a while. Skill check against a spell DC? Nothing much happens unless you fail by 5 or more? Do not want.

[Adverb]

Fusion is a thing that happens any time you have enough pressure, though in some cases "enough" is a very high number.

Finding deuterium/tritium is tricky, because D&D doesn't recognize isotopes, or for that matter the periodic table. Depending on your DM's leanings, you might have better luck firing off True Creation for super-dense hydrogen or helium and getting a proton-proton or triple-alpha process started.

Creating "enough" pressure could be done with one of the infinite damage tricks. Fire damage is one way, though my preference would be for an ubercharger who hits things so hard with a club that it kickstarts a fusion reaction.

[malonkey1]

My preference would be for an ubercharger who hits things so hard with a club that it kickstarts a fusion reaction.

Sounds like an epic feat.