This week for Magic Mondays we bring you an array for those hard to reach areas..
This week we show you the Long Shot array.
Notation: Top array: Create a Containment Field that excludes Air if Air is present.
Bottom array: Float Lead if Air is not present.
Description: This is one of the few blatantly offensive arrays that use two arrays working together to accomplish one task. This is something more often seen with utility arrays, where one needs a degree of specificity not commonly seen in offensive arrays, but the Long Shot does one thing only and it does it very well and for that it needs two arrays.
To understand its purpose and the need for two arrays, one must first understand its intended application. Unlike many other offensive arrays that can be used with musket rounds, arrows, bolts, swords, knives, axes and everything in between, the Long Shot was specifically intended only for musket, pistol and, more rarely, cannon rounds and its effectiveness beyond these are little to none.
Now, knowing what these arrays are intended for, along with its quite unsubtle name, it is easy to work out what the Long Shot does: it makes firearm rounds travel further and faster. One can argue that this is a immensely mundane use of an offensive array, especially when compared to some of the gruesome and grisly arrays often applied to weapons, however it all comes back to the specificity of why these arrays were designed. The Long Shot is mostly used in war where being able to kill the enemy before they can fire back is always a good thing, however it has found its home in the dark streets of Middelburg by snipers who know that every metre they can gain on a shot is worth its weight in orichalcum.
Both arrays work towards its goal of carrying the fired round further. The top array does so by destroying the air around it, lowering the air pressure (and thus wind resistance) around the fired round to near nothing. The bottom array (inscribed backwards onto the round so that the runes face inward) removes the effects of gravity on the round and allows it to float freely in the vacuum caused by the top array.
While it may be simpler for the top array to just create a ever-present containment field that excludes air, rather than making the field only when air is present in order to destroy it, but all this will do is have the wind resistance focused around the containment field rather than the round. It won’t get rid of the air resistance. By putting in the If-Then statement, the array destroys the air before it reaches the round, creating a near vacuum.
The reason why the bottom array only Floats the round when no air is present is the same as with any array with an If-Then statement: so that the array can store energy before being shot.
Eventually both arrays will run out of energy and the fired round will succumb to air and gravity and fall to the ground, but with the Long Shot a round can easily travel twice as far as normal.
If you want to get more arrays, check out our Journal of Array Design over on DriveThruRPG, now also available as a deck of magic cards.