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Coscott comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Dumbledore gave Harry the rock. Relevant? Or Harry just taking advantage of his resources?
I think that large rocks transfigured into something small are in general useful, and Dumbledore knew this.
There's a mention of him being one of the few people who have used transfiguration in combat and lived, I imagine he has a set of techniques like this of which carrying a transfigured rock is the simplest.
That's... actually pretty brilliant.
I have a variety of ideas about transfiguration grenades and things.
It's always bothered me that we generally see dark wizards doing this.
It's a safety thing. If you're trying to kill people, you don't care much about their safety.
Sorry, I meant dark wizards abusing transfiguration.
Would you mind giving a few examples? None spring to mind.
That's my point. We don't see dark wizards abusing transfiguration even though it would make sense for them to.
Actually, should be workable with no fluids.
A grenade which does not produce gas? Which does not create anything that enters a person's body? What exactly is your mechanism of action here?
Well, it would produce shrapnel...
I'm a little suprised that when Quirrel was having Harry come up with creative improvised weapons, that Harry did not mention the deliberate use of dangerous transfigurations as a chemical weapon.
The trick is to transfigure a (high-strength metal) shell containing an extremely compressed solid or nonvolatile liquid. The stored energy is in the elastic force.
Specifically, I imagine the following:
If you can transfigure as fast as Quirrel, you can just transfigure mundane feedstock into this sort of thing pre-charged.
Some pretty simple but custom charms would make this even better.
However, if you can partial-transfigure as fast as Quirrel (and cast the Bubble-head charm, and almost instantaneously cast wandless wordless Finite), you can probably do much better (and more efficiently) with a multilayer system of magical cybernetics (combined with whatever buffs, self-spells, potions, etc already exist), flash-transfigured Iron Man suit parts, and (for the smallest transfiguration-size per output) flash-transfigured antimatter.
I can actually imagine Harry duct-taping a small bottle of water to his wand so that he can always have a ready feedstock for transfiguration.
Shrapnel enters the body. Now, you don't always care about transfiguration safety when you're fighting to kill, but it's still an issue.
Hmm, speaking of shrapnel... If one were to be hit by shrapnel from an object that had been Transfigured into a smaller one, would the shrapnel explode troll-style when the Transfiguration is Finite-d? If so, this seems like an useful effect...