Chapter 103 — What Kind of Nonsense Is That?
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
To be honest, after receiving Rebecca's revelation, Gao Cen had instantly grasped that this little "repulsion trick" was simply the greatest gift this world had ever given him: simple, low-cost, stable, and the results were not bad at all.
Anyone who had ever come into contact with magical mechanisms would be familiar with this basic spell: whether it was a self-opening magic door or anything else, so long as a mechanism contained a structure that needed to be pushed, the "repulsion trick" was sure to be there. And how much force could it output? As a spell, its power depended entirely on how much magic you could supply and on the performance of the magical conductor material itself—and in Gao Yang's view, its conversion efficiency was extraordinarily high. The door of the mountain treasury was cast whole from heavy purple steel, each single leaf weighing several tons, yet the ancient mechanism controlling the opening and closing of those leaves could operate effortlessly with virtually no mechanical optimization whatsoever. Of course, this was because the ancient Gondor Empire had possessed black technology—the magical crystals they refined had monstrous performance—but the "inferior goods" of the present day were no slouches either; magical traps capable of shoving boulders around the ground were hardly anything rare!
And all these magical mechanisms employed repulsion arrays in a rather crude and clumsy fashion—the brute-force-and-brute-force-alone approach. In the spirit of "force creates miracles," they simply pushed with the repulsion arrays, almost never considering levers, gears, or other means of optimization...
So Gao Yang had high expectations for the magic-energy engine. He believed that even if he built it from cheap materials, the power it could provide would be inconceivable.
And after the "piston version" of the magic-energy engine had been discussed, without even waiting for Rebecca and Hedy to finish modifying the blueprints and verifying the details, he had already thought of pushing the repulsion array further—extending it to a structure akin to an electric motor.
A motor composed of a stator and a rotor naturally had additional advantages: its structure was relatively simple, so its failure rate was greatly reduced; when starting, the "repulsion points" on the rotor could operate directly at full load, giving it enormous starting torque—unlike a piston engine, which suffered from insufficient starting torque and had to wait for the rotational speed to rise before torque reached its maximum. Its size could be compressed to a very small scale, giving it a higher volumetric efficiency ratio when powered by the same magic net; and thanks to the particular nature of magical technology, the "rotor-type magic-energy engine" required neither brushes nor a "switching device" to frequently toggle the runic triggers—which, while lowering the failure rate, also extended the overall lifespan of the machine (because there were very few wearing parts). Quite the bargain...
But it also had obvious drawbacks. Setting aside any comparison between electric motors and internal combustion engines on Earth, and considering only the technology of "this world," the rotor-type magic-energy engine in Gao Yang's conception would require a large number of "repulsion points" distributed across the entire casing to ensure the balance and continuity of the power application. And placing so many mutually independent arrays together meant ensuring that they did not interfere with one another, that their output was precisely uniform, that their distance from the rotor was exact, and so on and so forth. Thus, while this lowered the technical difficulty of the engine's mechanical structure, it raised the difficulty of array inscription—and the latter... required technical talent that was far harder to cultivate. A bit more complexity in that regard would cause far greater trouble than a bit more complexity on the mechanical side.