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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98 - Less Wrong
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Comments (308)
You can't buy nuclear or other WMDs for a hundred Galleons. And the instruction implied buying, not to stealing (and what wizard capable of stealing nuclear warheads would want or need such a paltry payment?)
More to the point, Harry - or any wizard - can just Transfigure WMDs. Quick, free, and no need to carry dangerous stuff around.
He can also Transfigure antimatter. If he can come up with a reliable remote trigger, that is gram per gram the deadliest thing known to Muggle science. It was also foreshadowed a bit (chapter 14):
As above for any weapon I can think of. Antimatter and nuclear weapons trump any area-effect attack. Poisons and biological or chemical agents can be Transfigured too, unless you need them to last for a long time before acting. Magic trumps Muggle personal weapons. ETA: not Harry's magic, though, and guns can be useful against weak or unprepared wizards. Electronics, computers, and software are Sirs Not Appearing In This Fanfic.
Interesting. An irreplaceable Muggle artifact that was created by expending life in some manner, so sacrificing it would release "life energy"? I think though that defeating Death in such a purely magical would not be appropriate for Harry.
I doubt he can Transfigure antimatter. If he can, the containment will be very hard to get right, and he would absolutely have to get it right. How do you even stop it blowing up your wand, if you have to contact the material you're Transfiguring?
Maybe Tazers! They'd work against some shields, are quite tricky to make, and if you want lots of them they're easier to buy. Other things: encrypted radios, Kevlar armour (to avoid Finite Incantem). Most things that can be bought for 5K could have been bought in Britain in the early 90s, apart from that sort of paramilitary gear. Guns are unlikely because the twins would have heard of them.
Consensus on /r/HPMOR was that Harry would have specified a type of gun and its ammo, since if he just said "guns" the twins would probably have brought muskets.
Where would they even get muskets today? In a museum?
My opinion too. Guns capable of killing a troll or being highly effective against powerful wizards would break the budget AND be hard to obtain (Anti-material rifle for the former, which Harry probably cannot fire, and submachine gun for the latter), but there are other possibilities. Early in the fic Muggle rocket launchers are mentioned. I think that in the Third World, an RPG with a few rockets may go for under $1000.
The twins just scanned the list, and the twins probably wouldn't have recognized, say '9mm automatic pistol' even if they know what guns are.
I don't think that Tasers were really a thing until 1994, which saw the first version that didn't use gunpowder as a propellant (and hence was not legally a firearm). Harry could still have heard of them by good luck, of course.
He transfigured a taser for his fight against Moody.
OK, thanks.
Transfigure the containment device first. Then find a way to transfigure the antimatter inside it. To solve the wand contact problem, transfigure the empty container into a full container. Then his wand is in contact with the container, but the container doesn't actually change.
Granted, it's extremely dangerous, especially when practicing.
Yes, there is the problem that no-one knows what containment for macroscopic amounts of antimatter looks like. We have some ideas, but nothing that would be safe for Harry to try.
What? Harry doesn't want a gun because his magic is weak? In canon, guns are moderately effective against wizards. Carrying a pistol or a submachine gun around is the most blatantly obvious force multiplier, especially given that any other spell Harry can cast has at least a half-second casting time AND a two second cooldown.
Guns would be useful against opponents who 1) were not prepared to face them (as the troll was prepared to face specific threats like sunshine), 2) were not adult wizards with shields raised. So yes, that leaves some options against which a gun in the bag of holding would be useful. (Harry will need to practice firing it though.) You're right, I'll update my comment accordingly.
Where are guns in Canon please?
The only mention of guns in canon that I can recall is at the start of Prisoner of Azkaban, where the muggle side of the Sirius Black scare mentions him as armed and dangerous, and the Daily Prophet agrees that muggles are saying he has a gun, which they describe as being something like a muggle wand that they can use to attack one another.
I assume that a great many wizarding children went on to imagine the muggle world as some very interesting variant on the stereotypical Wild West, where "boomstick" was probably a better description of a shotgun than usual.
It's pretty standard fanon that magic interferes badly with electronics. (Canon is similar but less specific.)
Which bugs me. I want to see glorious contraptions based off physics real and fake alike. Too many people try to replicate Tolkein's bucolic countryside scenes with their fantasy universes.
Transfigure a critical mass of uranium, ok. Transfigure several subcritical masses with a working trigger? Much more difficult. Since, as far as I can tell, you have to be within visual range of the thing you are Transfiguring, this would be a bit of a last-ditch option. At least with war gases you could work on the contents of a bottle, or something.
If he can make a model rocket, he can make a uranium gun design. It's one slightly sub-critical mass of uranium with a suitable hole for the second piece, which is shaped like a bullet and fired at it using a single unsynchronised electronic trigger down a barrel long enough to get up a decent speed. Edit: And then he or a friendly 7th year casts a charm of flawless function on it.
That was a lot more than a model rocket.... probably weighed at least 5kg. Also, the fact that either he OR Quirrel could make a working large rocket engine without knowing the exact composition of propellant, precise geometry of nozzle, etc indicates that Transfiguration can work at a really high level of abstraction. He probably would have no trouble at all transfiguring a nuclear weapon with a mechanical timer trigger.
well of course, can't you transfigure animals?
Actually, yeah, you can. I think.
http://hpmor.com/chapter/15