Wheelbreaker | Tech and Magic

If you're lucky it is the art of lying. If you're not it won't matter what it is.

Magic in Wheelbreaker is a system of semi-scientific beliefs and practices that involve poorly understood mechanisms of the universe. Science differs from magic in that the mechanisms of science are not occluded by any means and are clearly, though rarely completely, understood.

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For example the mechanics of a lever or a pulley are easy to see and anyone can observe them and deduce the math behind their operation. Magic however is something which cannot as easily be observed, often times needing an individual who is sensitive to magic to observe how magic is effecting something. For example, the gravity pillar of a disk is observable to everyone, and the orbital mechanics of a gravity pillar are observable and understandable to anyone who would put their mind to understanding those mechanics, but the mechanics by which a disk generates a gravity pillar instead of a more typical gravity well cannot be deduced without magical sensitivity. Anyone lacking that sensitivity would simply be unable to form an understanding of gravity pillar generation.

Now it would be tempting to imagine magic as something like ultraviolet light, which cannot be seen unless you are sensitive to that wavelength of light, but magical forces and magical observation always involve a certain amount of circular logic that is not present in scientific forces. That is to say that magic is always self justifying on some level. Sensitivity to magic appears to be unique to thinking beings but as the Volagog show, is not an inherent quality of thinking beings.

The self justifying nature of magical forces is perplexing. Take the nature of divinity, if a people are warlike then they have a powerful god of war. But is it the powerful war god driving them into conflicts more often or is it their warlike culture that empowers the god? Is their god a reflection of their attitudes or are they a reflection of their god's influence? And all magic fundamentally resolves to that sort of issue. In practically every case where magic is concerned there is no provable prime mover, no clear starting point.

It should be noted however, that not everything that is referred to as magic in Wheelbreaker is actually magic as defined above. Sometimes "magic" merely refers to a system of beliefs which holds that certain actions, beliefs, or behaviors can curry favor with the forces of the world which is not informed by rigorous scientific study. This informal use of the term is frankly more common in day to day language than the technical use of the word. Most people aren't magicians and so the distinction between magic and Magic is not important enough to make a distinction.

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Technology in Wheelbreaker often involves the interplay of magic and science, many scientific processes have magical side effects that make their use more difficult than you would initially think. Chemistry is very difficult in Wheelbreaker as at the atomic scale it is difficult to prevent observation from interfering with what is being observed and at that scale it is difficult to distinguish between magical and non-magical forces. Many of the issues with understanding the mechanisms of chemistry could be solved with large mathematical models and complicated statistical analysis of large datasets but without chemistry it would be almost impossible to build a sufficiently sophisticated computer with which to perform such calculations. This leaves scientists and engineers in a tricky situation as things like semiconductor physics are firmly in the realm of science fiction as they cannot provably demonstrate what the parts of an atom even are.

While magic does provide significant roadblocks to scientific inquiry it also provides possibly a more valuable boon to the sciences, easy and efficient transfer and storage of energy. When an individual person of sufficient learning and with sufficient talent can make for themselves everything necessary to safely collect the energy from lightning and store it for later use in an object that is small enough to be man portable without difficulty then a lot of engineering challenges become matters of logistics. For example, electric airplanes are difficult to do as battery technology is heavy and not very energy dense, an all electric space program is not viable for similar reasons. But in Wheelbreaker most things are electric because energy storage is far easier. Many smaller electric devices can be powered by magic users directly without need for any sort of obvious power source, and other electric devices simply collect power from the ambient heat around them.

So in the real world a lot of the easiest forms of power generation (burning stuff for heat) aren't efficient and generate pollution, in Wheelbreaker the easiest forms of power generation are slow and require expensive materials or knowledge to produce. This leads to a lot of technology in Wheelbreaker still being designed around maximum efficiency and economies of scale. While it would be possible for every person on a disk to have an electric car and for all freight to be transported in electric airplanes such a thing would require an impossible amount of money to achieve and so most people instead take public transportation, ride a bike or animal, or drive a combustion motorcycle and most freight is transported by electric train.

Internal combustion, and burning fuel to use the heat energy or for light more generally, is common on many disks in Wheelbreaker but all of those disks have facilities that can pull the chemicals released by the exhaust and smoke out of the air and convert it back into a burnable fuel. The process is very slow but the facilities are very large to compensate. This allows for limited use of fuels that produce greenhouse gasses without significant danger to the climate of the disk. Industrial operations must generally apply for a permit if they intend to burn fuels as part of industrial processes to ensure that reclamation facilities have the capacity for the factory's output. It is only on poor disks or disks without easy access to bifrost shipping lanes that reclamation facilities are operated at any significant capacity as most other disks have ready access to cleaner and more convenient sources of power. Generally speaking any disk with even a modest economy has a dyson sphere and a power station on the surface to cover basically all of the large scale power needs the disk may have, thus freeing up a lot of easy to collect energy for small scale and/or personal use. No point buying gas all the time and maintaining a combustion engine all the time if it's easy enough to get an electric engine and learning how to power it by leaving the battery in the sun for the afternoon or leaving it near your heater overnight.

Below is a list of some of the common technology found in Wheelbreaker: