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Unseen Slave-I mean, Servant Engineering 2017-01-29 09:45:06 Post No.
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Unseen Slave-I mean, Servant Engineering 2017-01-29 09:45:06 Post No.
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I was sitting around thinking about uses for various low level 5e spells when it occurred to me- Unseen Servant has some incredible potential even outside of having floating slave labor for general labor
2 STR, size isn't noted so I'd assume Medium/Small- that means they can easily lift 30 lbs, and can push, drag, or pull 60 lbs*, though turning their speed from 15 (Roughly 1 mph) to 5.
What this means is that for things like setting up camp or doing chores they have plenty of strength, but if you were to try to have one (Or more) try to, say, pull a cart, they could probably only pull the cart itself without any added weight.
However it's worth noting that Unseen Servants 1- occupy a space and 2- never get tired.
What this means is that you could have an Unseen Servant crank a pedal system at a somewhat high speed, (After all, if they can move objects fast enough to say, scrub laundry, then fast movements obviously work) to turn the wheels of a cart faster than 15 feet per 6 seconds at more than 60 lbs. The fact they occupy a space is important here because it indicates that they can "sit" in the cart as they turn the gears without falling behind once they get above a slow walking speed.
With a simple system of gears and pedals like on a bike in it's lowest gear turned very quickly you could produce a lot of force from "only" 60 lbs of pushing, and this isn't even getting into ridiculous force multipliers such as Hydraulics- If a hydraulic rotary pump with the displacement 10 cc/rev is connected to a hydraulic rotary motor with 100 cc/rev, the shaft torque required to drive the pump is 10 times less than the torque available at the motor shaft, but the shaft speed (rev/min) for the motor is 10 times less than the pump shaft speed.copypasta'd from wikipedia- This means that you could spin a crank to move an engine, a task that would tire out a human very quickly if you did so at any reasonable speed but one ignored by an Unseen Servant.
cont.
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With this in mind, (And assuming hydraulic technology isn't efficient enough to be used for this yet so restricted to mostly gears, pulleys, and chains along with other fantasy setting technology), what kinds of devices could you build with this?
For now let's assume you're restricted to the base spell Unseen Servant, since I'm sure any Wizard researching this is going to think of ways to modify or make their own similar spell that'd be more efficient, and for a technology level "control" let's assume it's in the Forgotten Realms d&d setting, so roughly renaissance.
Continuing the cart idea, assume that you were to build a simple cart that's made as light as you could, designed roughly around a large 4 wheeled bicycle. Again as a control let's pretend you're driving on a nice flat dirt road without any puddles or major bumps.
If you designed a pedal system for 2 servants to push, that'd be 120 lbs of pressure* being applied at a rather fast rate. With that you could conceivably move a lightweight cart maybe 30 or even 40 feet per round. That's not much faster than walking, however you're moving an entire (lightly loaded) wagon at a decent pace, without needing to care for a horse or pay for it's lodging, food, grooming, and other expenses. With more work in setting you could probably get more efficient vehicles using stronger specially made versions of Unseen Servant.Also it's worth noting that if you kept your speed low enough you could carry an extra 800 lbs of gear or passengers with the spell Tenser's Floating Disk.
Unfortunately you'd have to stop every hour to recast the spell, however if another party member was "driving" you could cast the ritual (10 minutes) while still travelling.
*It's worth noting that the 60 lbs push power is for actually pushing objects such as boulders across the ground, not necessarily how much pressure they can apply to something like a crank. I'd assume the actual PSI of push is higher.
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proofreading is important kids
>This means that you could spin a crank to move an engine
*Crank a pump
>Tenser's Floating Disk
Turns out I was mistaken about that, it's 500 lbs however has no noted speed restriction, (Pictured)
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>>51461320
>>51461329
Without trying to be all smart with new devices, you can have the servant use a loom and produce textiles for you.
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>>51463257
Yeah that would work (And to be honest that alone would completely revolutionize industry as soon as some lazy wizard discovered it), however I'm trying to think of ways to push the spell even further.
If you consider that they could work a normal loom and that changes the state of industry the next logical step is tools designed specifically for Unseen Servants that take advantage of their abilities, such as being able to apply force in complex ways despite not weighing anything at all.
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>>51463257
Operating a loom would require a craft check.
You could have it power an automated loom, but it doesn't have the necessary intelligence to handle complex crafting.
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