# Strange use for Decanter of Endless Water



## Bob5th (May 24, 2006)

I've been trying to come up with cool ideas for a ship that I'll be featuring in my campaign soon and I came up with this one earlier today. It's kinda out there but I was wanting to get some feedback on it. 

Glue a bunch of Decanters of Endless Water onto a ship and turn them all onto geyser mode for movement.

I guess mostly I was wanting to get an idea of how fast they could push something and how much each one could push. I was thinking since a DC12 Strength check is required to hold on and since it will take a Strength of 14 to make the check on average then maybe the push of it should be equal to what a Strength 14 human could push. I guess that fact that each one will be pumping 300 gallons a minute might cause problems as well.

Well any feedback is welcome as are any other for making a interesting ship.


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## RobotRobotI (May 24, 2006)

That'd be pretty cool, right up until someone says the command word at the wrong time and the ship smashes into the dock.


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## Al'Kelhar (May 24, 2006)

Also, IIRC as the water comes directly from the Elemental Plane of Water, a bunch of ships using this as a propulsion method would eventually flood the planet...  Ok, so it might take millennia... But those on coral and sand islands, BEWARE the curse of the "Ships that move without sails and oars"!

Cheers, Al'Kelhar


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## Hypersmurf (May 24, 2006)

The Decanter-JetSki and the Decanter-powered horseless carriage are venerable standards in my world 

-Hyp.


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## RigaMortus2 (May 24, 2006)

Hypersmurf said:
			
		

> The Decanter-JetSki and the Decanter-powered horseless carriage are venerable standards in my world
> 
> -Hyp.




Along with the "outboard motor-powered" Floating Disk, right?


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## Hypersmurf (May 24, 2006)

RigaMortus2 said:
			
		

> Along with the "outboard motor-powered" Floating Disk, right?




Absolutely 

-Hyp.


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## MarkB (May 24, 2006)

And the decanter jet-pack?


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## Joker (May 24, 2006)

We use em for forced enema's.

...


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## Nebulous (May 24, 2006)

Joker said:
			
		

> We use em for forced enema's.
> 
> ...




Wow. Who needs an Iron Maiden for torture if you got one of those?


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## cmanos (May 24, 2006)

Joker said:
			
		

> We use em for forced enema's.


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## lukelightning (May 24, 2006)

Joker said:
			
		

> We use em for forced enema's.




Forced enema's (possessive) what?


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## shilsen (May 24, 2006)

lukelightning said:
			
		

> Forced enema's (possessive) what?



 Anything. All your base are belong to forced enema.


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## DanMcS (May 24, 2006)

cmanos said:
			
		

>




That's what they looked like, too.


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## lukelightning (May 24, 2006)

If you were making a water-jet-powered boat, it would be better to price a magic item according to that use rather than trying to use a decanter.


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## kenobi65 (May 24, 2006)

I've used the _decanter_ for ship propulsion in my game, too.   It's a fun idea.

_Decanters_ are also great fun for pasting vampires.  They don't like it so much.


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## mvincent (May 24, 2006)

kenobi65 said:
			
		

> I've used the _decanter_ for ship propulsion in my game, too.



Ditto. The only 'wierd' use for a decanter of endless water that I have _yet_ to see is someone using it for drinking.

As for the original poster, without delving too far into calculations (which I'm sure has actually been done before for the decanter), I believe one decanter is about the equivalent of one motor: i.e. 1 would make a fine jetski, 2 would make for a nice speedboat, etc.

I figure speeds at about 60' (same as a fast horse)


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## TheYeti1775 (May 24, 2006)

We must not let the Gnomes ever see these ideas.........


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## ARandomGod (May 24, 2006)

mvincent said:
			
		

> Ditto. The only 'wierd' use for a decanter of endless water that I have _yet_ to see is someone using it for drinking.





Bravo!


Actually I have seen it used for drinking before.  Desert city, bult around a fountain, the fountain was bult out of several decanters on gyser mode shooting water straight up.

Water from the fountain was then channeled out through the city in a number of ways. 

Water based economy, very stable form of government.


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## IanB (May 24, 2006)

Many, many years ago, a cleric in our game used boots of levitation + decanter of endless water for flying around (rather imprecisely to be sure), so the jetpack idea is actually not too far off.


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## mvincent (May 24, 2006)

IanB said:
			
		

> Many, many years ago, a cleric in our game used boots of levitation + decanter of endless water for flying around (rather imprecisely to be sure), so the jetpack idea is actually not too far off.



That is a popular method, but when I did that (with a gnome character of course), my DM still had me make a strength check each round to control the direction of the nozzle.


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## ceratitis (May 24, 2006)

shilsen said:
			
		

> Anything. All your base are belong to forced enema.




ROFL      

another thing to do is get the taraske (mm forgot how to spell that) to eat it and replace the usual stoper with something strong enough to hold the gazer until it disolves in his stomach... this combines the afore mentioned enema with a real bad ulcer and can be deadly too   

another thing is to make a basment trap with it. player walk it, door slams shut and a magic mouth startes the gazer mode.

Z


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## Hypersmurf (May 24, 2006)

ceratitis said:
			
		

> another thing is to make a basment trap with it. player walk it, door slams shut and a magic mouth startes the gazer mode.




"_The mouth cannot utter verbal components, use command words, or activate magical effects._"

-Hyp.


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## mvincent (May 24, 2006)

Hypersmurf said:
			
		

> "_The mouth cannot utter verbal components, use command words, or activate magical effects._"



A small construct (permanently animated object) could say the command word instead, but then adventurers could probably just repeat the same command to stop it.

Better to place the device out of earshot, or have the decanter already activated but with the water being held back by a sturdy pressure valve. Or maybe the activated decanter is contained inside a sturdy chest (and no adventurer is going to leave a chest unopened).


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## Kalshane (May 24, 2006)

Al'Kelhar said:
			
		

> Also, IIRC as the water comes directly from the Elemental Plane of Water, a bunch of ships using this as a propulsion method would eventually flood the planet...  Ok, so it might take millennia... But those on coral and sand islands, BEWARE the curse of the "Ships that move without sails and oars"!




I have a sudden urge to create an adventure that involves stopping a mad wizard out to destroy the world. When the PCs finally confront him they discover his evil plan was to flood the world via decanters. Of course, they'd probably lynch me.

Luthor: "I wasn't going to do this for another few weeks, but seriously! Turning all of humanity into apes? That was your master plan?!?!" (shoots Grodd)


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## werk (May 25, 2006)

Well, if you can make one of these convenient little holes to the elemental plane, and command the rate that the element can come through, I'd think they would exist for other elements/para-elements/quasi-elements too.


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## Viktyr Gehrig (May 25, 2006)

Hypersmurf said:
			
		

> The Decanter-JetSki and the Decanter-powered horseless carriage are venerable standards in my world




Turbines. So much cheaper than using the gravity-shaping effect of _genesis_ to create perpetual motion...


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## Rhun (May 25, 2006)

You could give your city-watch _decanters_ mounted on wagons to use to put out fires...or to use as crowd control.


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## ShadowRaven (May 26, 2006)

Rhun said:
			
		

> You could give your city-watch _decanters_ mounted on wagons to use to put out fires...or to use as crowd control.





I like this idea


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## Nareau (May 26, 2006)

Hypersmurf said:
			
		

> "_The mouth cannot utter verbal components, use command words, or activate magical effects._"
> 
> -Hyp.



I was subjected to exactly this trap by Pielorinho many years ago.  Since the _Magic Mouth_ couldn't be used to activate the device, it instead asked us a riddle.  The answer to the riddle was "poor," which sounds just like the activation command "pour".  You should have see our faces when we all gleefully shouted out the answer to the riddle, only to realize we'd doomed ourselves by doing so.

After deactivating the trap, our party wizard (2e) took the decanter for himself.  He tied it to his quarterstaff and named it "stick".  He then used it very effectively as a firehose to keep bad guys at bay.

We also used it with a _Feather Fall_ spell at some point to escape witch-on-a-broomstick-style.  Pielorinho decided that _Feather Fall_ worked by reducing your mass dramatically, so we all held onto a rope tied to stick as the wizard hopped on and flew us away.

Good times, good times....

Spider


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## Recurver (Jun 22, 2015)

The RAW states that on geyser mode it produces 300 gallons per minute. that's it. it must always produce 300 gallons per minute. since pressure in psi is simply the resistance to flow using an aperture to restrict flow would raise the psi to whatever you wanted (within the limitations of the metals used to restrict) that being said the psi produced to run the engine on a nuclear submarine  is only about 3,400 psi at max. this could be achieved very easily simply by making the water go through alot of pipe first with an aperture  to control the psi. one decanter could pheasably get a very large ship to go as fast as a nuclear sub. that speed is roughly 29 Mph


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## Greenfield (Jun 23, 2015)

The problem with any calculations of thrust is that you need more than volume/mass per second, you need the velocity its ejected at, and that's just not there.  As in, you can pretend to calculate something, based on something, but at the base of it you're making things up and calling them facts.

What are the facts?  The item says it can produce a stream of water 20' long and a foot across.  In order to have a solid stream of water a foot wide, you need an opening a foot wide.  

We know the decanter doesn't have that, but let's pretend it can somehow do that anyway (here's where we enter the realm of "making things up.  )

Go get your garden hose and turn it on, hard, without a nozzle of any kind.  Aim it up at an angle.  Can you reach a target 20 feet away?

If so, you've confirmed about 40 to 45 psi.  (Pressure regulators in most city water systems cap it at 50.)

Do you feel that mighty thrust from your hose when you do this amazing feat? (sarcasm intended).  There's hardly any, is there.

Multiply it by about two hundred.  (Standard hose is 3/4 inch across.  A stream a foot across has a surface of Pi x 6 x 6 square inches, or 113.0973333 square inches over all.  The hose area is 0.441786 square inches, a bit under a half.)

So sit yourself on a mechanic's creeper or similar wheeled gizmo and see how much speed you can build up with the hose.  By my calculations, it won't have enough to overcome the basic friction in the wheel bearings.  You won't move.

Multiply by 200?  You should reach a screaming 0.75 mph.  As in three quarters of a mile per hour, of a quarter of normal walking speed.

Now apply this to a wagon on a muddy road (the roads will be very muddy if everyone is using these.)  At 9k per decanter you'll top 200k per wagon, easily.  And that's only if you weren't planning on loading anything into the wagon.  Hauling cargo would require a lot more decanters.

There are about a thousand cheaper and easier ways to build a self-powered wagon or watercraft.  

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but with all these decanters around, wet is the only kind there is.


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## Greenfield (Jun 23, 2015)

Now let's start making up numbers in a different way.

Again, we'll presume that somehow the decanter can produce a solid stream of waer that's larger than the opening.

300 gallons per minute is 30 gallons per round, or about 5 gallons per second.

5 gallons per second through a 1 foot opening is...

Well 231 cubic inches in a gallon, 1,155 cubic inches per second.

The column it produces is a foot across, which is 113.0973336 square inches.  One inch of the column (length wise) would be 113.097... cubic inches.  

So the water is moving at 10.21244 inches per second, which is about 7 miles per hour.

Five gallons of water weighs 40 lbs .  An adventurer, with gear, could be called 200 to 240 lbs.

So one fifth to one sixth the thrust needed to move that adventurer at a hustle

In hard number terms, its about 34 foot-pounds of pressure, give or take a few decimal points

<Edit>
Whoops!  Major math foop.  I used the Feet per Second to Miles Per Hour conversion, when the speed I had was in inches per second.

Drop things by a factor of 12.  End result?  A little less than three foot pounds of pressure.

Sorry for the mistake.


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## nijineko (Jun 25, 2015)

Bob5th said:


> I've been trying to come up with cool ideas for a ship that I'll be featuring in my campaign soon and I came up with this one earlier today. It's kinda out there but I was wanting to get some feedback on it.
> 
> Glue a bunch of Decanters of Endless Water onto a ship and turn them all onto geyser mode for movement.
> 
> ...





well, if you don't mind a bit of 3.0 that made it into 3.5 by virtue of never having been updated, the stronghold builder's guidebook has tons of stuff with which you could outfit a ship, as does stormwrack. in fact, by combining the two, i found that the folding boat (from the dmg) is the equivalent to one stronghold space from SBG. so i treated it as a 1ss stronghold and went to town enchanting it with fun stuff. (think flying, phase shifting through solids, submersible, and more).


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