I'm writing a story where humans combine tech and magic and was wondering if you guys had any ideas to add.

One example I thought of goes as follows. One day a soldier was training with his lightning enchanted sword when he was struck by an idea. Why use fuel based power plants when you can easily just convert magic directly into electricity?

To test the idea, he would run appliances off his sword, however he would keep exhausting his magic supply. Most humans just don't have the magic to support their energy needs.

His solution? Sunstones, black rocks that convert light, heat, and radiation into pure magical energy, long used by wizards for recharging their own magic. By hooking ring shaped devices to larger sunstones with the same lightning enchantment as his sword and plugging cables into them, he was able to generate large amounts of power. Over the years the process has been greatly refined to allow for maximum efficiency.

4570482 Wait, why does he have a sword in the first place?

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The existence of things such as enchantments have delayed the obsolescence of melee weapons and firearms are still only flintlocks.

Play Final Fantasy 6 (aka 3) for SNES. Boom. You'll get like fifty ideas for crazy magitech shit, and you'll have played an awesome game.

Seriously, I really don't like FF games that much, but damn if the magitech in that universe isn't cool. You might find the fluff for the Dwemer of the Elder Scrolls series and the Skaven of Warhammer Fantasy to also be of interest.

For example, an idea I've long toyed with but never acted upon is that the Diamond Dogs are the pony version of Skaven. If you're going with the "magical gems are useful power sources" trope (and I think you should, because it fits in-universe well), it starts to make sense: a somewhat technologically-advanced race, disgusting and repugnant to society at large, hiding far beneath the surface in their kingdom of warrens, but possessed of a brutal cunning and hunger for domination. Quite honestly, I think Dogs are a far underdone antagonist archetype in a fandom that's obsessed with casting changelings in the generic faceless villain role, given their potential. They're humanoid, so give them crude gem-based laser rifles and cruder steam-ish-punk power armour.

I also like the idea of melee weapons not yet being displaced, because every fantasy story needs a good swordfight. Logically, it'd be because their firearms are primitive, due to the presence of unicorn battlemagi filling the role of ranged firepower, and the generally technological ineptitude displayed by the ponies. It's a simple matter to attach Sunstone to a sword, as you say, but much less so to the shells of a Minotauri Harquebus or the more-primitive Gryphon matchlocks.

In fact, I would argue toward portraying ponies as members of a decadent, wasteful society that only really appreciates technological advances as quaint relics of other cultures, to be purchased but never adapted or created. What we've seen of them is a culture that values the status quo, hinting at isolationist and occasionally overtly xenophobic tendencies. I'd imagine they see themselves as the sole guardians of culture and dignity in a world of combative brutes, despite inadvertently contributing more to the downfall of various cultures through their subtly greedy, lassiez-faire, didactically-constructed society than any other race.

Needless to say, I'm not particularly fond of ponies. I blame the Conversion Bureau.

Anyway, despite their so-called "advancement" in magical technology, ponykind basically uses raw, unenchanted Sunstone as an energy source like any other fossil fuel: they mine it (not difficult at all, given the gems' existence as condensed magical energy, of a type only found in Equestria on the surface of certain areas exposed in great degrees to the sun (hence both the name and the concept of "rock farming")), and destroy it to release great amounts of energy--exponentially larger than could be summoned simply by magically "tapping" into a Sunstone, as a battlemage of old would do. Where a human locomotive burns coal or oil to effect internal combustion, an Equestrian magical-release engine uses telekinetic force to crush sunstone, releasing a great deal of magical energy that can be harnessed by their various devices. Presumably there will be some clever form of rerouting that allows the engine, once started, to continue reacting until it is depleted of active fuel.

Naturally, the products of such violent reactions leave behind a great deal of waste product: Byproduct, as it is called, is a coarse grey-black powder, recovered from magic engines and rather haphazardly disposed of. With enough energy and application of force, a unicorn mage could very easily reforge Byproduct back into Sunstone, but Equestria has little economic need for such an expenditure of effort, given the cheapness and wide availability of fresh plantations of Sunstone throughout its northwestern reaches.

You see where I'm going with this, of course.

Byproduct is of course highly toxic to Equine life, especially by inhalation, but the ease of its storage in the myriad ancient tunnels, dug by unnamed beasts of ancient origin (cough cough), that run throughout Equestria leaves little for the users of these devices to worry about. Until the Sunstone runs out or there is a lack of space to store Byproduct, of course, but nopony worries about such nonsense.

Of course, raw "Pushing" telekinetically-charged Sunstone can be refined into various forms: solid blocks can be used in various everyday items, powering them with a single enchantment, the complexity of which is dependent only on the skill of its original caster. The lights of cities throughout Equestria are ignited by a burst of luminothaumic energy released by the destruction of a type of Sunstone refined to emit large quantities of light-based magical energy, which can be transmitted anywhere almost instantly.

That was a mouthful. Fun to do, though. Hope it helps.

4570482 magic can delay some technology, but are the same time it can allow others to advance far more, image human wizards and engineers creating by accident a stargate yet still have industrial tech.

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Needless to say, I'm not particularly fond of ponies. I blame the Conversion Bureau.

I know the feeling. Even before TCB I have harshly criticized the ponies. I think it started with Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000.

Liking those ideas.

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Exactly. The humans in my setting use sky ships despite being mostly at an industrial revolution.

In terms of telling a story, there usually just isn't any point to it. Fantasy and sci-fi usually don't mix because Magic and high-tech fulfill the same narrative role anyway - they are a source of additional choices for the characters of the story, enabling them to solve and/or cause problems that a single person normally couldn't. They provide justification for involving them in unusual, often more exciting and just generally larger-scale storylines than complete realism would allow for. Having both is just a particular flavour ofthat, but still the same plot device and for the same purpose.

You can make it actually the point of the story, of course, and there's a whole awful and clichéd "evil corporate invades unwashed hippieworld" subgenre that runs on it, too. Roger Zelazny did a lot of actually good ones about it as a difference in perspective, trying tp blur the line where a "futuristic" story become indistinguishable from a "mythological" one while making sense either way. The way you're telling it, though, sounds more like a video game exploit - combining some incompatible mechanics of it to get something for free that you shouldn't be able to do with either. The protagonist struggling to overcome obstacles and resolve conflicts despite their limitations is half of what any story is even about. Short-circuiting that isn't a good way to start one.

4570482 Well they could use magic to fix previously unavoidable problems related to the tech. Supercomputers emit large amounts of heat, you could use magic to either absorb the heat to power the computer or enchant the casing with a cooling enchantment. Guns and cannons cause large amounts of noise, making them a problem for covert missions, even silencers have their problems, magic could make a giant cannon completely silent, perfect for taking down large building in the middle of the night.

Gravity spells are canon, you could do plenty with that alone. TF2 medi-gun could be thing, and we already use drugs to turn off pain, which in fiction and real life been used to make demon-like soldiers. (The laughing dead for you Eragon fans.) Flight suits could actually let you fly. Books could be implanted rather than read. Portal gun. Shoes that Increase a persons movements to bullet time.

How about an area made to absorb all forms of energy. Think X-men first classes villain but as dome. Or a shield made to absorb all forms of energy, Kinetic or otherwise, and can either launch it back or store it to power something else. Of course this would be most useful for those of us with a large supply of out of commission nukes.

Flying car. Ones already on the market IRL, but with magic it wouldn't have to look like a car with identity issues. (The next model will be much better, but it isn't on the market yet.) Cloaking suits, Kinetic absorbtion armor, personal gravity belts. A sonic grenade, which can be set to stun or kill.

Glasses that can let you see things outside our natural spectrum: Night vision, temperature, radiation, life, movement, etc. Alchemy, if not like in fuma than we could make a more efficient form of what we have IRL. A particle accelerator efficient enough that it can actually be profitable. We can make gold already, but to make a gram of it, it would take fifty years of continuous use.

Solid holograms. 3D printers on a larger scale, like the ones in Subnautica, but they can make more than a few submarines. Or pokeballs. Just get a bunch of masterballs and catch everyone. Everyone. Imagine what the pokemon world would be like if masterballs were the norm. Oh no Mewtwo's loose! masterball. Oh no Entei is attackin-- masterball. Oh no it-- masterball.

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you could use magic to either absorb the heat to power the computer or enchant the casing with a cooling enchantment.

Good ideas.

TF2 medi-gun could be thing,

A crossbow shooting syringes filled with health potions?

Flight suits could actually let you fly. Books could be implanted rather than read. Portal gun. Shoes that Increase a persons movements to bullet time.

One of my characters has a cape that becomes wings and super speed boots.

How about an area made to absorb all forms of energy. Think X-men first classes villain but as dome. Or a shield made to absorb all forms of energy, Kinetic or otherwise, and can either launch it back or store it to power something else.

Kinetic absorbtion armor

I was thinking of giving the character I mentioned above a chest-plate made from a magic shield that converts most of an attack's force into magic for him.

Flying car.

How about sky ships?

Glasses that can let you see things outside our natural spectrum: Night vision, temperature, radiation, life, movement, etc.

We think a lot alike apparently. One of the main characters has an artifact called the "All Seeing Eye." When combined with the computer system in his helmet, it gives him all of that plus stat-o-vision. He mass produced a less effective version as well for the average consumer.

4573001 I was talking about the other one, I don't play much tf2. Yet to play the medic but if random encounters song is anything to go by it might be a blessing. The one with the ubercharge.

And cool. I've always, loved aura vision. Glad you liked the ideas. But considering what the world is like, you could just take stuff from real life, slap magic on it and keep on pushing. If you watched the game theory video than you already know we've already weaponized sound. And we've been doing it for years. And if you haven't than here's a tip, if you ever surrounded by Somali pirates just play some Britney spears, that should scare'm off. I've been looking into crazy gadgets for years now and you'd be surprised on what you'd find. Did you know there's an actual xray camera lens? It doesn't use actual x rays but for every teenage boy whose thought of what they do with x ray vision it's perfect. And we have flying cars! The next one will even be able to get off without the need to taxi. Fuck you rush hour!

If you want any other ideas thrown at you I'm always a pm.

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I was talking about the other one, I don't play much tf2. Yet to play the medic but if random encounters song is anything to go by it might be a blessing. The one with the ubercharge.

Ah. I see.

I also love gadgets and such.

If you want any other ideas, I'm always a pm.

I'll keep that in mind if I need more, thanks!

4573230 Not a problem.