Magi-Rotation Drive

The Birth of an Era

Automation and industrialization have come to Iocrade - while still limited in scope and scale, the Yalenva Emirates have been responsible for a steam revolution that has driven them to the forefront of military and economic technology. The Canate Princes have, meanwhile, made use of their endless supplies of undead labour to experiment with production lines and hopefully find ideal efficient processes to help drive their production of goods. But among these early dabblers in industry, there has been one who has the most promising output - Fiuthnolla, and the Magi-Rotation Drive.
The refined design is relatively simple - it simply draws ambient atmospheric magic and uses it to power a simple wheel and axle of varying sizes. Variations have been created and are in the works to help expand the potential of this technology, but as it stands, the drive is already an incredibly powerful innovation. Magic has always needed only a modicum of energy to exert immense force, up to and including actively defying the laws of physics. It was a trivial matter, once the principle was sound, to create a device capable of essentially infinite energy drawing upon it.

Principal

The Magi-Rotation drive draws on the same ambient magic that is shaped as part of spells. A small portion of that magic is used to draw in more magic, and the rest is used to exert force and create rotation in the wheel, which in turn spins an axle. This axle can then exert substantial energy to turn further wheels, gears, cogs, and other implements that allow for the creation and operation of industrial machinery. This works because magic, by its nature, operates essentially on a different set of rules to normal reality: a small amount of magic can be used to harness larger amounts of magic with relative ease. The drive only needs a basic magical jumpstart (or a mechanical one in more recent models with more closely integrated magitechnological systems) to be able to draw in plenty of magic to allow them to continue operating in near perpetuity. They can be shut down with a simple Dispel Magic spell, but this merely drains the small battery and pauses its movement - another jumpstart is enough to resume operations as normal. Nevertheless, most Magi-Rotation Drives are encased in lead to protect against magical influence, with a specific area through which magic can enter which is normally well-concealed.
The Magi-Rotation drive makes clockwork technology naturally possible and viable - everything that can be made to work by turning gears or wheels can be made to work by a Magi-Rotation drive large and strong enough for the task. Drives can also be made quite small, and fairly cheaply, allowing for plenty of fine control. These are also used to switch the states of various dials and gears that are used in basic binary mechanical computing, primarily in basic interactive clockwork automatons that function based on directions in punch cards. Because they do not need fuel, and function on relatively simple principles, the Magi-Rotation Drive is, furthermore, very low-maintenance, requiring years of neglect before total failure, though routine maintenance is typically performed every three months with monthly inspections.

History & Application

The Magi-Rotation Drive is the work of one Kaleb Grat, a genius inventor responsible for the Fiuthnollan technological revolution. Alongside the principles of cyclers - or revolvers - and breechguns, he was responsible for the Magi-Rotation drive as well and considered it his most important and amazing invention. While Grat has since sunk into dementia, and now resides in a demiplane of his own creation, the Clockwork City. Its operations are largely a mystery - but it is known to be expanding continuously, and building up manufacturing for unknown purposes. Regardless, the underlying principles of the Drive are now common knowledge and used extensively and thus his loss, while profoundly felt culturally, has had little material impact on the technological advancement of the Fiuthnollan people and culture.
The Magi-Rotation Drive is used to power any number of mechanical devices in Fiuthnolla - the most common application is industrial machinery, especially factories and automated farms that operate with the press of a button, and until shut down manually, or until malfunctions provoke a shutdown. Magi-Rotation drives can also function as clocks by simply defining a very slow rotation speed for a drive of sufficient size. This not only allows machines to operate indefinitely with minimal support but to operate with specific timing, up to and including seasonal, annual, or even multi-annual timescales, though issues of maintenance and finesse of the machinery have prevented this from reaching decades. Overall, this has been an incredible industrial boon for Fiuthnolla, and has led to massive automation and industrialization of agriculture, mining, forestry, manufacturing, and so much more.
Furthermore, basic computing has become a regular fixture of Fiuthnollan life - as it stands, the primary application is various shapes of automatons. The most common is a basic bipedal shape with arms and legs, which can perform most relatively simple tasks that a human typically could. However, recent years have seen bespoke devices designed for specific tasks - tall narrow-legged quadrupeds that can navigate farmlands without stepping on any crops; "Digging Centaurs" with a human-like upper body attached to a powered minecart for digging for metals, sand, and clay, and similar flatbed devices that quarry stone; stout machines that enclose trees with their arms and rapidly deliver axe strokes from every direction and associated cart-like machines that receive and move the timber for woodcutting; and all kinds of industrial assembly machines responsible for hammering, screwing, squeezing, and other processes.
The Magi-Rotation drive, furthermore, has plenty of military applications. On top of the basic Clockwork Warrior, who tend to be humanoids with heavy arms for striking and extra frontal armour, there are mechanical horses that provide automated power and movement to both riders and towed vehicles such as armoured carriages. Furthermore, the Magi-Rotation drive can be used for precise aim calculations by perfectly rotating a cannon or gun to a specific position, though making a device, small, powerful, and durable enough to consistently work with the powerful Fiuthnollan rifled cannons has been a challenge thus far. Almost every Fiuthnollan ship is powered by both sails and Magi-Rotation drive, allowing them to build up impressive speed when moving with the wind, and to maintain high speeds when moving against it. There are also many prototypes in the works, chief among which is the Battledragon - a response to Yalenva airpower and various flying monsters, this weapon will, once developed, be a swift, maneuverable air-ground battle system carrying both magical and conventional armaments, and capable of high speed and maneuverable flight.

Type: Machine, Power Source, Mechanical
Field: Engineering, Magitech
Applications: Harvesting, Manufacturing, Industry, Weaponry, Transportation