New Submissions
Full Item Description
Pantarbe is a vitrious green-gray stone that has moderate hardness and chemical resistances. It is easily carved and shaped, but has irregular cleavage. The higher the purity of the ore, the more pronounced the glassy sheen is. Metallic Pantarbe resembles vitrious iron with a green hue.
History
Pantarbe is a foundation material for the Cry-Of-Freedom RP in the moderated forum (pending). The material has always been present and it is the entire reason that there is a setting composed of drifing sky islands and airships flitting from one to another. Like hydrogen and helium, this material exists to create lighter than air ships, but unlike zeppelins and hot air balloons, these craft cannot be destroyed by a well placed arrow or a careless match.
Magic/Cursed Properties
Pantarbe is a very light material, but in direct sunlight, it does something rather amazing, it floats. Given the purity of the ore and the mass and the amount of sunlight reaching the stone, a pebble might drift around like a hailstone in slow motion while thick high purity slabs might drift up into the air heedless of silly things like gravity and physics. Also, the larger the piece and higher the purity, the longer the stone in question will hang in the air even after sunlight is no longer present, IE night or cloud cover.
Purified Pantarbe
The ore can be crushed and smelted, though at some difficulty, once freed of the stone matrix, it will fly away if not worked in darkness. The resultant metal, also called Pantarbe or Worked Pantarbe, is rigid and strong, but lacking in flexibility. It is highly efficient in retaining solar power making it the ideal material for constructing airships. A sufficiently large airship constructed with Purified Pantarbe can stay in the air overnight without fear of crashing to the ground. Smaller craft must beech somewhere.
Sunstone
In rare cases, nodules of almost pure Pantarbe can be found, so long basking in sunlight (IE Space) that though they have lost their floating attribute, they now emit sunlight. These stones can be used as currency like precious gems, and as tools to keep airships in the air even in dark conditions. Unlike normal pantarbe, sunstone is very brittle and cannot be shaped. Attempts to do so generally cause the stone in question to break into worthless chunks.
A Note on Mining
Pantarbe ore is important as it keeps the islands of the sky floating. If too much ore is mined from an island, the mass of the island countered the lift of the ore and begins to sink. These islands will either stabilize at a lower altitude when their bouyancy stabilizes, or will slowly crash into the sea. Thus while important, mining the ore is a double edged sword.
January 12, 2008, 7:53
Could someone refine the ore and use it to binds sizable pieces of rock and earth such that they could create their own islands? Is there ore that was too small to stay aloft beneath the ocean's waves, and if so, are there divers who make a living going after it?
January 12, 2008, 12:04
January 16, 2008, 13:33
May be also the reason why no one ever succeeded to make artificial Pantarbe.
January 17, 2008, 2:40
January 12, 2008, 11:21
Grea idea overall. A mineral that can kick-start an entire new campaign (and apparently has!)
+.5 for the novelty of it.
January 12, 2008, 11:45
January 12, 2008, 13:58
January 15, 2008, 13:55
January 15, 2008, 13:53
Is it loose in the soil? However would that be enough "mass together" to generate lift?
January 15, 2008, 14:28
This would actually make things nice for airships, because they don't have to truly 'dock' at night. They can just keep themselves really close to an island (rope-attached to something to keep from drifting, of course), and the ship will just float on the island's stored up sunlight. Of course, then you've gotta worry about staging points for the Navies sucking all the sunlight from surrounding islands...
January 15, 2008, 14:35
As for it's presence, pantarbe is a remarkably common material in Epoa, though this doesnt mean that it's refinable ore is available in large amounts. There is enough to keep the islands floating and to built a comfortable level of civilization.
January 15, 2008, 17:40
Probably easier to say that Pantarbe retains a permanent, but low lift, it aquired with it was created. Otherwise the question is when did the inner ore get exposed to the sun...
January 16, 2008, 2:32
January 16, 2008, 12:54
The Great Weapon? A large cloud of black smoke. This will block direct sunlight and "depower" the island- letting it sink. The smoke will need to be reinforced/ reissued a couple of times (depending on winds) Sure it will take a day or three to crash an island. However the ability to cause an island to sink would be a terrible weapon. It would be a weapon of blackmail proportions.
Now if magic exists... this becomes a better tactic.. if you can generate enough power to blanket the area with dark.
If the island is small enough, a huge tarp would be more effective.
Or maybe this tactic can be used to cause an island to "tip" one way or another.
Actually a great thing would be to landmind the underside of an island with some bars. You then put a ship below the island's surface and have it use a concave mirror to reflect concentated light onto those bars.... lifting the island unevenly.
Also under the cover of darkness, mining from the underside of the island might be a terrible technique for war.
January 16, 2008, 23:45
January 17, 2008, 2:36
Sinking an island is a monumental task. The most common method is to simply strip mine the hell out of it and deplete the landmass of as much pantarbe as possible. This is not an overnight occurence but a process that takes years if not decades of concentrated effort. Darkness would certainly work, but it took more than three days of sunlight to raise an island, it's going to take more than 3 days of darkness to sink it. A concentrated effort several weeks long, an eclipse siege is possible, but requires a great amount of effort. One other thing, for every spell, there is Counterspell and Dispell Magic.
These tactics are certainly viable for eliminating smaller islands, but larger ones would likely be safe from such ventures, but a force capable of even mounting such an effort is likely to secure the capitulation of the islanders, effectively becoming either a deterent or terror tactic.
Short Answer: Yes these tactics are possible, but are difficult and costly.
January 18, 2008, 11:53
Sure some might have some excess solar energy, but you can make a prolong battle, and a couple of skiff shading it from above with the tarp or darkness tricks. Besides the smoke would have the same advantages as clouds as defensive tactics. However the longer they were in obscured sunlight, the less time they would have "after dark."
A tactic we used to use in Galactic Conquest (okay this is a game so old it did not make it on wikipedia). Most ships could not stray too far from a system. If they did, they would "become lost"/ run out of fuel/ run out of supply/ etc. So the trick was to have your "star ships" run a prolong battle slowly withdrawing, but still engaged. Eventually they would "run out of fuel" and disintergrate or you would pounce on them as they had to make that desperate run back to their system.
I could see the same thing with comming of the night.
It gives me the same feel as the battles on Barsoon with Radium Rounds at dawn.
January 18, 2008, 12:10
January 17, 2008, 4:03
January 17, 2008, 15:22
January 18, 2008, 2:26
January 18, 2008, 5:49
January 18, 2008, 11:36
January 20, 2008, 7:41
One could be that warmth from the sun activates the pantarbe, and that undersea volcanoes generate enough heat that chunks break loose and float into the air. That would also mean that big enough bonfires could save the day... For as long as you have fossil fuel at least.
Also, fog and clouds might cause a problem.
I would suggest that the pantarbe remains energized for a long period after exposure to sunlight / energy, and that only after a long period would it began to plummet noticably.
Like this example of a relatively pentarbe rich island:
Extremely energized (volcanic eruption): Rapid rise
Highly energized (weeks of schorching sun): Noticable rise
Very energized: unnoticable rise
energized: hover
and vice versa for lack of energy.
April 22, 2009, 19:00
Here's my thing... My brain wants to figure out how it works. Buoyancy is out, obviously. Here's what I've got, so far:
A: There is a certain magic field that the planet gives off, and the Pantarbe is repelled from it. This works from a physics standpoint, but you have to frame it one of two ways. Either the field stops at a certain altitude (which means airships just sit on top of this layer of magic--which makes this setting no more than high seas adventure without the seas), or its an r-squared kind of phenomenon (which gives you more or less a constant upward or downward acceleration depending on the amount of Pantarbe present and the total weight of the craft--not exactly conducive to any sort of precision manuevering or "sailing"). Both of these have problems, as I've stated.
B: A certain quantity of Plantarbe is capable of lifting a certain weight to a certain altitude. This doesn't work physics-wise, unless instead of an r-squared phenomenon from the center of the planet, its more of a magic feld which decreases in magnitude linearly with altitude above the sea. You can handwave this by saying that the magic field propogates upward through sea with little trouble, but in air it begins to weaken. Then a certain amount of upward force from the plantarbe-field reaction balances with the downward gravitational force on the craft. Thus a certain mass with a corresponding mass of pantarbe will equilibrate at a certain altitude.
I think B is the best way to go about it. So, a fully loaded vessel will cruise lower than an empty vessel, and some (albeit slow) altitude changes are possible--I imagine by shading your pantarbe arrays, you would slowly begin to lose altitude. It wouldn't be a combat worthy manuever (unless your pantarbe lost its charge fast--maybe for very small individual plates this would be an option).
Alright, as you can see, I'm being a huge geek about this. But even though this post is pretty old, its gotten me back on track on this story idea of mine, and has really gotten me thinking more than almost any post I've read. And for that, it definitely gets a 5.