RP Professions and You! An honest question!

[Blazefrost]

How much do you all personally research the equivalent and relative profession material in real life?

Such as, if your character is a black smith, do you go with traditional fantasy blacksmith, as in heat ore, heat metal bar that pops out of the ore, hammer, quench, sharpen, done? Or do you go in depth with realistic smithing and smithing techniques, including which metal to use when, where and why? (including theorizing about WoW's various metals, ignoring level as a barrier to attaining and using them, and citing in game messages of that metal).

This question applies to other professions too! Does your character weave a certain way, cook with a certain flair, are they actually a farmer, a carpenter, woodworker, or glassblower? Do they brew potions following medieval ideals of alchemy, or do they take a more modern approach to how they make their potions hold so much kick? Does it have to do with their OOC class, or does their IC class, if applicable (Most civilians are civilians and can't tell a fireball from a pyroblast, after all)?

Let's discuss!

[Bertel Wobblespring]

My main RP character Bertel Wobblespring is tinker (Engineer) and I tend to use both researched details about a given procedure, object or material IRL and information we get lore wise about the same stuff in game and combine that with a healthy dose of techno babble and imagination.
I am not really going for realistic, as that would be impossible anyway given the nature of technology and materials in WoW.
I am more going for interesting and imaginative.

I would say I go pretty much in depth with describing how I make stuff if needed, and do the needed research if I'll have to:

Here's two examples of descriptions of inventions I have used IC'ly (respectively a transportation device Flying Hover Disk made by his uncle and a sketch of preliminary outlines for a interactive map for tracking purposes Gnomish Positioning System):


The Flying Hover Disk

As I said the idea is taken from an already known machine namely the possibly arcane driven Cloud Disk some claim to have seen used in Pandaria. The main difference being that this will be purely mechanical driven.

To understand what I am about to say and in defense of my uncle the following is based on my own notes of his explanation to me as I understood it, and from his first rough draft to the Flying Hover Disk.

This may result in that the finished product will be slightly different, with adjusted parts or added details to the description of how the mechanics work.


The Flying Hover Disk basicly works by phloginston being led into a micro carburettor where a rather small amount of volatile fire and air separately is injected*1). This results in a small controlled outburst of almost explosion like combustion that kick start the whole process, of this mixture being driven in circular movements through thousands of gradually smaller and more narrow titanium tubes creating an equally gradually increasing level of heat and pressure giving an ultra compressed and super overheated steam sprayed out through 200 of individually adjustable nozzles, arranged in 8 larger groups of 25, in a jet stream forming an uplifting pillow underneath the disk that is build as a hollow thin chassis of a rare mixture of alloys and coatings of various ultra light metals with an inch thick thermal insulating fire resistant coating both inside and on the surface made of a special hardened silica gel.

A heated catalytic micro converter filter distill and cleans the dirtiest and most uneven particles in the exhaust, which drives the disk, resulting in a more clean, smooth and consistent stable exhaust as well as overall drive of the disk.

It is going to be controlled by a glove like remote control unit responding to your smallest gestures controlling altitude, direction and speed.

Quadro dynamic gyromatic stabilizers and adjusters with build in speed buffers connected to and controlling the 200 individual nozzles, balancing their uplift, angle and momentum, creates the upmost stability of the disk.


All in all it will make it one of the most flexible and maneuverable machines for it's kind of purpose known.

Almost making it feel like it was a part of your own body.


*1)The fuel tank for the phloginston will be placed in the middle of the disk consisting of a larger tube forming a ring, right under the pilots feet, again shielded on the outside from the steam leading pipes by an inch thick thermal isolating fire resistant coating made of a special hardened silica gel. In the middle of this is placed two smaller fuel tanks containing respectively volatile fire and volatile air.



The interactive map: GPS (Gnomish Positioning System)

I am going to find or have made a map over ley nodes, lines, nexuses and collected data over the arcane energy field over Azeroth.

This will be programmed into a database.

When that is done I am going to have several arrays of arcane crystals tuned to different ley node's specific energy patterns, or frequency if you will, receive data going to a transformer that transforms arcane energy to electrical impulses (most likely a truesilver arcane micro converter will do for this purpose).

This will be build into the tracking and transmitter part, transmitting these impulses via radio waves to a receiver build into the map part.

The difference between the different electrical impulses will be send to a calculator (a standard parallel multi core dynamic binary processor, should do) also build into the map, or receiver part if you will, calculating the exact difference of the signals and the vectors from the interference of the signals, resembling the distance between different reference ley nodes, creating a coordinate reference system.

The finished processed data will direct the signal to the appropriate led light on the map, representing a certain coordinate and thereby place on Azeroth.


Thoughts about the size of the device:

I don't know the exact size yet, as the GPS is only in the early stage of sketching out the idea, but I hope that the transmitter part can be made as small as a standard buzzbox, and aim for that it at least can be fit into a backpack, as it is going to be transportable in order for it to have any real use.

The receiver part on the other hand, the part that will contain the map, the database, and will be responsible for the actual caculation of data, will be conciderably bigger though.

Maybe the size of a big dinner table, only solid.