[1 Dismissal] Expanding on Phoron Research and Cutting out the Mystical Hoodoo

[Bauser]

The only reason it's just "uneducated chemistry" is because it didn't work. The parts about turning lead into gold and making themselves immortal are the magical aspects.

Historically, alchemy has been full of magic. And during the times when it wasn't full of magic, it was full of spirituality at least.

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[LanceLynxx]

The only reason it's just "uneducated chemistry" is because it didn't work. The parts about turning lead into gold and making themselves immortal are the magical aspects.

Historically, alchemy has been full of magic. And during the times when it wasn't full of magic, it was full of spirituality at least.

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ahem

Magic THEMES might have been used, but it was ALWAYS chemistry all along. It wasn’t ever something else. Alchemy IS chemistry, albeit without the scientific method and just using esoteric claims to explain something.

For instance

Turning lead into gold IS possible. It just takes a LOT of energy to convert the materials.

Or a more esoteric one, let’s say Dragon’s Blood, which are some red deposits made from gold and other reagents, and what was depicted in Basil Valentine’s painting “Third Key”.

It was really just the discovery of nitric acid hydrochloride, aka “Aqua Regia” or “royal water”. It dissolved gold, and the red deposits were just gold chloride after crystallization.

So you see

It’s “magical” only in the way you explain it as an ignorant “alchemist”.

The science behind it is not magical at all, it is chemistry.

Magical “CLAIMS”, thus, unverified and unproven concoctions, are just that, claims. Nothing magical about it, only untrue.

[Bauser]

Okay, and why would NanoTrasen hire someone who's entire discipline of research is provably founded upon making untrue claims? At best, it's a lot of unnecessary and obfuscating decoration.

[Snakebittenn]

What a non-argument. Why would NT hire literally any of our characters?

There is magic ingame. Even more now that you can find voodoo poppets in mining crates.

[Kaed]

Randomly spawned silliness is not the same as standards of character design and setting causality.

You can also find bats that randomly spawn in crates in cargo, but that doesn't mean NT stores bats in their cargo bay. It's just a goofy mechanic, not part of the lore.

[MoondancerPony]

I've created a PR addressing your concerns, [mention]Kaed[/mention]. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4720

I hope it's thorough enough, tell me if you have any complaints with how I rebalanced them. It's mostly a stopgap solution until someone figures out how to make the things in question more phoron related.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Okay, and why would NanoTrasen hire someone who's entire discipline of research is provably founded upon making untrue claims? At best, it's a lot of unnecessary and obfuscating decoration.

 

all knowledge starts by making a claim others say is untrue, the research is proving it's true, and publishing your results is the "you 'mirin?" that everyone else claims is still false so you have to have 20 other guys replicate your results, and even then that asshole professor from harvard wont SHUT UP about your flawed methodology

[Pacmandevil]

Them being directly named after magical shit is a meme, and should be addressed. but the chemicals themselves are mostly fine.

Eg, take a queue from tg who ironically has a more serious medical system, and rename shit like "liquid fire" which implies something fantasy, to something like "Chlorine Trifluoride", or "Phlogiston".

I still think that the secret chems as is aren't worth spending time to figure out, and should be a lot more like goon's. but that's probably out of the scope of this discussion.

[Bauser]

all knowledge starts by making a claim others say is untrue, the research is proving it's true, and publishing your results is the "you 'mirin?" that everyone else claims is still false so you have to have 20 other guys replicate your results, and even then that asshole professor from harvard wont SHUT UP about your flawed methodology

Right, but alchemy is based on claims that have already explicitly been proven false

It's not like it has any merit as some advanced future science, like it's going to come back and we're all going to find out gasp!! It was true all along!

[Pacmandevil]

yeah the alchemy meme stone chemical is in fact a meme, and shouldn't be a secret chem. I can see it being something for wizards - but making it craft-able on station is a bit "eh"

[Alberyk]

yeah the alchemy meme stone chemical is in fact a meme, and shouldn't be a secret chem. I can see it being something for wizards - but making it craft-able on station is a bit "eh"

 

The only real magical secret chems that do exist, philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, are linked to something already related to magic. Magic exist in the settting, and those magical chems are part of the niche and situation, so, I do not see what is the issue with this, because for one to use transmutation, they were already in contact with magic somehow before.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

all knowledge starts by making a claim others say is untrue, the research is proving it's true, and publishing your results is the "you 'mirin?" that everyone else claims is still false so you have to have 20 other guys replicate your results, and even then that asshole professor from harvard wont SHUT UP about your flawed methodology

Right, but alchemy is based on claims that have already explicitly been proven false

It's not like it has any merit as some advanced future science, like it's going to come back and we're all going to find out gasp!! It was true all along!

 

Proven false in our real world.

This is a fictional setting.

What is true or false is entirely up to us.

FTL does not exist either, nor does phoron, yet these are accepted at face value.

[Scheveningen]

Only thing that matters is the balance you strike within the realm of plausible deniability.

It's fine to have wizards. Fine to have cultists, etc, but the balance should be struck within a concept that it should still make a decent amount of sense in existing. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to have several characters who retain their knowledge of alchemy shift-to-shift. It is ridiculous that these characters can know recipes like Azoth or liquid light and reproduce them from memory. It is literal alchemy, even, why are the characters allowed to retain knowledge of a clearly magical-related field? I genuinely don't know if this is supposed to be an admin issue or a lore team issue, but my hunch says that the lore team can make a ruling to heavily restrict what knowledge that the characters themselves will retain. Granted, we all knew secret recipes would do this. The few people that cared got argued with to the ends of the earth.

"It's magic, we ain't finna explain shit" only provides an inconsistent narrative to work in tandem with other elements that exist in the game community where character creation guidelines are heavily enforced within the area of plausibility. But, really, that matters little until you call the non-antagonist characters into equation that know that alchemy even exists to begin with.

It doesn't make sense as to how the lore staff flip-flop on topics such as this. How is it acceptable that the lore team hasn't taken personal issue with characters that stylize themselves as alchemists of the Nicolas Flamel caliber (and thus NanoTrasen is absolutely okay with employing these people who act so brazenly and open about it, otherwise they wouldn't be there), but they pushed the CMO age requirement for CMO up to 35 and doctors up to 30?

Jackboot's also lobbied for ages to get an economy update rolled out to better immerse people with their characters who exist within the universe to better manage their budget and earnings. For developmental reasons that's never really bore fruit on a complex scale, but JB himself has tried to make up for it to make a simplified chart to better exemplify who in what position earns how much, and so on. But his excuse here is that, "It's fun, chill out, stop whining about it", so color me a bit befuddled here because I have zero idea how to argue against someone who displays that they don't care as much about the subject as the initial person complaining does.

Don't confuse me for trying to make this only about the lore team. It's the consistency issue and the direction in which they take in some scenarios yet will decide on taking the other end of the fork in the road other times for dubious reasons.

Why are these roleplay standards being enforced so inconsistently? Isn't it important we balance how much each character knows about their fields and also to hammer down on the characters that go too far out of their field, even if it's the least bit related?

In fact, forget all of those questions. Here's one: Should we even care about the concept of 'lore needs to justify mechanics', or should we just act like this is "just a game" and stop having concerns about any minutiae of detail that might be the slightest bit interesting to character design and overarching lore development?

Like, you guys spend so much time writing those newscasts on a regular basis, so it's kind of a shock to see concerns about consistency in the lore being handwaved when you actively try to fill this world you're creating with roleplay fluff that people won't necessarily need to mechanically use in a round. It's weird that you don't care to give a serious, well-thought out answer when a gameplay element is subject to lore criticism and gameplay criticism at the same time.

Edit:

I'm not suggesting we need mechanical removal of secret chems. I'm not suggesting we remove alchemy. I'm suggesting that both the lore team and the administration figure something out on how to better moderate the in-between so that we don't have everyone and their mother in Research that's an 'alchemical expert'. It's kind of just stupid to have serious established characters with down-to-earth or professional ways of conducting themselves react sensibly to people who claim they're alchemists, and then as soon as they challenge the 'alchemists', said alchemists showboat and also display hard evidence that they can make these secret recipes. It's terrible to deal with.

[Itanimulli]

Is this literally over a few researchers calling themselves alchemists as a fucking joke? Please tell me it's not. And if you didn't know they were joking, now you do. You can dismiss a lot more questions from passerby by going 'It's fuckin' magiks' than going "Well you see it weekwiyahs the positrons t'be poifectly aligned and a dose of ewektwicity to pulse at exactly 72 amperes per sekund."

It creates mystery and hype for the chems, and makes the researchers simply able to know things that others d o n o t. It keeps the appearances fairly rare, or at the least, keeps them from mass abuse (unless you are counting my own idiocy, which has gotten me accused of 'killing with a compound for the sake of killing') by every assistant and his mother.

Regardless, it's also not that magical, it's just been given a cool name that hints to what it does and what properties it has. Hence liquid light being liquid. That puts off light. bizarre, init it?

With all this out of the way:

More secret chems plz.

[Scheveningen]

Is this literally over a few researchers calling themselves alchemists as a fucking joke? Please tell me it's not. And if you didn't know they were joking, now you do. You can dismiss a lot more questions from passerby by going 'It's fuckin' magiks' than going "Well you see it weekwiyahs the positrons t'be poifectly aligned and a dose of ewektwicity to pulse at exactly 72 amperes per sekund."

 

[mention]ParadoxSpace[/mention] Was it really a joke? Your character and mine had a pretty long debate on comms on the subject of alchemy, and it was pretty clear-cut that your character was convinced that alchemy was real.

I'm very unconvinced with the statement that it was "just a joke." If I didn't have outright sour experiences with certain characters in regards to how they displayed their mechanical knowledge of the secret chems existing in addition to being able to produce them, I would not even be writing this post to declare my negative opinion of the whole thing.

 

It creates mystery and hype for the chems,

 

For you, sure, all I've seen is certain scientists showboating and freely tipping people off that there is actually a legitimate way to turn things into gold. The very definition of alchemy. I wouldn't have an issue with this if the aforementioned scientist characters could keep it to themselves or within their own department. From my experience, they have not.

 

Regardless, it's also not that magical, it's just been given a cool name that hints to what it does and what properties it has. Hence liquid light being liquid. That puts off light. bizarre, init it?

 

It's not magical but it's been given a moniker of magical origin (Specifically, Azoth)? That hardly sounds remotely close to scientific taxonomy.

[Snakebittenn]

No, Eri is not joking that it's alchemy. He is legitimately an Akhanzi alchemist.

And we try to demonstrate it to public just so they can feel kinda hype about it. We don't want to just cackle to ourselves in the darkness of R&D.

[Ornias]

What a non-argument. Why would NT hire literally any of our characters?

because they can do their jobs lol

a scientist who doesn't do actual science would be fired

"who gets to decide what 'real science' is! unathi believe in alchemy!" yeah, but you're hired by humans, for a human company, which does top-of-the-line-research, and hired you for your scientific prowess. you have a diploma. they didn't hire someone to be an alchemist.

if these chems aren't magical, they should have their names to clearly represent that. why does anyone have an issue with changing the names of chemicals to better fit a sci-fi setting unless they want to claim it's 'muh alchemy'?

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Non-alchemist names would be a good idea. Just throw in some vaguely scientific names and we can just assume that they were previously unknown to the periodic table.

[Bygonehero]

Magic is an important foil to sci fi. There's no reason to hate on it.

[Scheveningen]

Magic being a foil shouldn't be treated as the radical extreme that people are content to treat it as currently. It's magic but it's intended to be taken seriously at face value. It exists and seems pretty convincing, but there should be some room to call it illusionist tricks until it starts affecting people on the physical level. Magic isn't supposed to be goofy.

[LanceLynxx]

For you, sure, all I've seen is certain scientists showboating and freely tipping people off that there is actually a legitimate way to turn things into gold. The very definition of alchemy.

 

Um

Changing elements into others is something we already know how to do. Turning things into gold is a thing. It's just not efficient and cost-effective due to tremendous energy required to do so. (Unless we harnessed fusion power, which we don't)

basic overview in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

 

It's not magical but it's been given a moniker of magical origin (Specifically, Azoth)? That hardly sounds remotely close to scientific taxonomy.

 

We have reagents literally called "space lube", "space cleaner" and others......

Never mind all the drink names like "changeling sting" and so forth. those are /reagent/ names. If you wanna fix the entire thing, make drinks show their chemical makeup instead.

EDIT:

If people just want to change the names of the chems, that's fine. But although this was the stated focus of the topic, I doubt that it was the intention.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Guest

[Bygonehero]

Its pretty easy to handwavingly explain most wizard powers with in character info

[Bauser]

The "changing chemicals is actually possible!!" defense is weak and tired, because the way you (Lance) justify it runs contrary to the explanations offered by the alchemy itself. Yes, it is possible to use great amounts of energy and complex technology to actually rearrange matter so that it is molded into something entirely different. But that's not what the alchemists do, that's not how alchemists explain their work, and so it is pseudoscientific.

When they are in-game trying to make the philosopher's stone, you can bet they aren't talking about using exotic materials and powerful EM fields to force molecules into new configurations; they're talking about thaumaturgy (magic) and the theory of 5 elements (magic) and astrology (magic). You can't lean on the scientific aspect of alchemy when it's under attack (here) and then allow it to be abandoned in practice (in-game). It's disingenuous.

[Itanimulli]

The "changing chemicals is actually possible!!" defense is weak and tired, because the way you (Lance) justify it runs contrary to the explanations offered by the alchemy itself. Yes, it is possible to use great amounts of energy and complex technology to actually rearrange matter so that it is molded into something entirely different. But that's not what the alchemists do, that's not how alchemists explain their work, and so it is pseudoscientific.

When they are in-game trying to make the philosopher's stone, you can bet they aren't talking about using exotic materials and powerful EM fields to force molecules into new configurations; they're talking about thaumaturgy (magic) and the theory of 5 elements (magic) and astrology (magic). You can't lean on the scientific aspect of alchemy when it's under attack (here) and then allow it to be abandoned in practice (in-game). It's disingenuous.

 

The philosopher's stone isn't even something we can use without a wizwoz being present, or some magical adminbus.

[LanceLynxx]

The "changing chemicals is actually possible!!" defense is weak and tired, because the way you (Lance) justify it runs contrary to the explanations offered by the alchemy itself. Yes, it is possible to use great amounts of energy and complex technology to actually rearrange matter so that it is molded into something entirely different. But that's not what the alchemists do, that's not how alchemists explain their work, and so it is pseudoscientific.

 

Okay, here's the thing, if anyone presents the same arguement ("Changing elements is impossible, that is magic"), I will adress that arguement with the same rebuttal ("It's not magic, we actually already do this IRL, here's more info").

And since it is the same thing being said over and over, the answer is the same. I'm not going to change it just because it is presented again. I have adressed the point clearly and accurately, thus, I will repeat it every time someone uses the flawed "changing materials is magic" arguement.

And again

It is not alchemy. It is chemistry. Alchemy is purely the way it is explained and the method of experimentation. The underpinning of alchemy is still chemistry. It is purely a difference in presentation. Which is a per-character basis. Each one explains however they want since there is no "chemical lore" for this.

If some people roleplay like this (serious alchemy) and it's an issue for you, a suggestions box is not the place to complain about it. Either deal with it ICly or file IR's / char complaints instead.

I ICly just laugh it off as some ignorant people who don't know how chemistry really works, and make fun of them.

But I digress.

 

When they are in-game trying to make the philosopher's stone, you can bet they aren't talking about using exotic materials and powerful EM fields to force molecules into new configurations; they're talking about thaumaturgy (magic) and the theory of 5 elements (magic) and astrology (magic). You can't lean on the scientific aspect of alchemy when it's under attack (here) and then allow it to be abandoned in practice (in-game). It's disingenuous.

 

Philosopher's Stone requires the presence of a supernatural being on station already. Therefore, in that setting, magic is already real in-lore.

Otherwise, we return to the previous point: If you don't like the way a character is acting, either deal ICly or file complaints.

That said, the chemicals that don't require magical items could be changed to whatever handwavium chemical-sounding name fits it better, I don't mind that at all. But if we go there, I'd suggest revamping ALL the reagent names to fit into a chemistry-naming-meta. "Space Lube" doesn't really sound like a chemical compound from the IUPAC