This week on Magic Mondays we bring you an array that can sink the Titanic.
This week we have the Ice Breaker Array.
Notation: Cool (at a speed of 32 degrees Celsius per second) a volume of Water 200 times the circumference of the array if a volume of water 200 times the circumference of the array is present within the range of the array.
Description: The short and the sweet of this array is that it creates icebergs. It is used by ships in order to slow down or even bring down enemy ships, usually to prevent enemy ships escaping or to give time for their own ships to escape.
As with most of the arrays in the Runed Age, there are some maths behind the workings of this one, although this week the maths will be far easier than normally.
Cannonballs came in all shapes in sizes, but in the main ranged from a diameter of 8cm all the way up to 17cm. For the sake of this array, let’s assume the ships would use their biggest guns in order to get the greatest amount of ice, so the 17cm diameter 19 kilogram cannonballs. A cannonball of that size with this array hitting the water would turn about 36 cubic metres of water into ice in less than a second. That is a lot of ice. That’s 36,000 litres of ice, or 17,000 two litre ice cream containers. Imagine a few dozen of these appearing in front of your ship in the blink of an eye.
The average temperature of ocean surface water is 17 degrees Celsius. It’s a bit warmer at the latitudes around Alfresia, but still well within the 32 degrees per second limit put into the array. Ocean surface water also freezes at -2 degrees Celsius, but even 19 degrees of temperature difference can easily be achieved by this array. That is not the problem, the problem is the energy cost of this.
Freezing 36,000 litres of water inside a second costs a lot of energy. It takes about 4200 joules of energy per litre per degree Celsius to freeze water. We have a lot more than that. For this array you will need 4.8384 gigajoules of energy. That is quite a lot of energy, more so that you would get from just firing the cannonball out of a cannon.
For this reason, these cannonballs are often “cooked” over a fire to store the energy in them until it is released. Ordinarily, energy is released automatically when it enters the array. The if-then statement in this array, however, means that no energy will be released until that is triggered. In this case, the trigger is to for the array to be surrounded by at least 36,000 litres of water.