Grrl Power #1041 – Shortstop
Smash cut to action!
I guess all cuts are smash cuts really. Well, unless it’s a dissolve or a star wipe, or one of those PowerPoint “a bunch of tiles flip over” transitions. It’s a good rule of thumb that if PowerPoint can do it, don’t put it in your movie. Although weirdly, Star Wars (Ep IV) got away with a ton of non-traditional transitions. Clock wipes, swipe wipes, bookend wipes, diagonal wipes, French door wipes, iris wipes, argyle wipes. It should look like a movie that was produced by someone sitting down at an editing suite for the first time, but it all totally works.
If you can’t tell, I’m not sure what else to add about this page. The only particularly notable thing is Anvil using her kinetic absorption to cancel her inertia. KE=1/2 m•v^2. (Yeah, I’m attempting to do something involving math and super powers, so buckle up.) If she gets knocked back, then absorbs all the kinetic energy when she hits the ground, well, she can’t absorb mass, so really, she’s just absorbing velocity.
It’s actually a little more complicated than that, though. She couldn’t just stop herself dead in the middle of a freefall. She could only absorb the energy when she hits the ground. It’s the moment when the velocity violently changes. I guess what she’s really absorbing Velocity Delta. “∆v” if you will. Hence, the name “∆nvil”
(Actually I just made that up as I was writing this post, but it’d be cool if I’d planned that from the beginning. Don’t tell anyone.)
April Vote Incentive is up! Looks like someone had better make sure their life insurance includes acts of Snu Snu.
Alternate versions over at Patreon include less cloth-y versions as usual, but also some of those color changing chokers.
Her shirt, since no one has figured out the kanji yet, says “I ahegao you. (As long as you ahegao me.)”
Edit: I updated the no-tanline nude version that was missing the tattoos, so grab that if you need.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
I’m curious. How’d she get knocked back in the first place. Was she thrown? Or can she consciously decide when to absorb or when not to absorb a kinetic strike?
Her ability to absorb kinetic energy is classified, so she’s probably downplaying it to not make it too obvious.
Back during the Vehemence fight she was thrown around, so while cratering the ground doesn’t turn her into chunky salsa, she’ll going flying a good ways until she hits something.
this does make me wonder… Achilles Anvil team up… Achilles just punches anvil over and over agai. he doesn’t get hurt because invulnerability, she just absorbs all the kinetic energy.
Cue bad guy getting curbstomped round one, because anvil has so much stored inside…
I feel that’d take forever since even though Achilles could go full out forever since he doesn’t get tired or injured, but he’s not particularly strong in the scale of ‘Super’ strong.
Right Achilles is just a normal strong guy. But you could say start a fight by by having Max drop a tank on Anvil.
also she might run into the Escanor at noon problem if she just walked around at thatlevel all the time ……
I do always believe Anvil needs to know to absorb damage.
But Vehemence has shown Anvil is very throwable.
Pretty sure Anvil thinks the guy she’s sparring with is very throwable as well…
Frisky Foreplay… ;)
She’s trying to push him down in the playground.
It is like the old parachuting adage: It’s not the fall that hurts you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Kinetic energy is always relative to the environment. It gets converted into another form of energy only when you run into something, or something runs into you, even the surface of the Earth. From the point of view of the two objects, it does not matter who is moving according to an outside observer, just that they two objects changed velocity.
For Anvil, she gets to absorb some of the kinetic energy sent into her by something as she runs into it, be it the Earth, a wall, a fist that can break engine blocks, etc. This would not prevent her being picked up or thrown, as the kinetic energy is being added in the wrong way for her to absorb.
Now she gets to do her “Puny god!” impersonation, depending on how much excess energy she has built up and how much inherent strength she has, which is a lot!
Vehemence was able to throw her as well. Kinetic absorption doesnt help with being thrown or flung.
Or maybe he told her how much he liked the back of her knees and she just threw herself.
Another good rule about Powerpoint transitions:
Don’t use Powerpoint transitions in your Powerpoint presentation
The impressive thing about the clip of transitions is how it is compiled without its own editing being jarring. It has to be in there, otherwise the video would be the length of the movie. Yet it only struck me towards the end that such had not stood out to me. Subtly done!
It can be easy to overdo the transitions. Just pick one or two that fit your presentation and just use those. In other words, K.I.S.S.
Huh, Where I work it was still KISS but it meant Keep It to Seven Slides (max)
Someone has to drop in that KISS is a rock band. I may as well be that idiot.
Way to step up and take one for the team.
So you get seven slides crammed full of crap so none are readable any longer? You’re supposed to put five to seven items on a slide, no more. Even better is to just do away with slides, powerpoint in particular. They’re usually nothing but a distraction anyway.
I learned of “Keep It Simple, Stupid” as Kelly Johnson’s adage. It’s worth remembering that Skunk Works managed to come up with various very advanced aeroplanes in record time, working with slide rules. “Computer-Aided Design” doesn’t really manage to make designing any faster. Then again, the starfighter initially had a nasty habit to blow up for no reason. Pilots took to wearing heavier boots so *something* would be found, so their widows would at least get a pension.
I’m somewhat surprised that the F-35 is by the same outfit. That one got handily turned into just about the most massive boondoggle imaginable. Kelly Johnson must be spinning in his grave.
I’d say that (modern) CAD would make designing faster, as someone who went to college and got a degree in it. One class had me do things the “old” manual way in designing, and it was hellish in how nightmarishly slow it was, not to mention, how it was more inaccurate for me. (I realize true professionals can do it by hand and have it look like the computer equivalent since the computer equivalent was after all based on them.)
It’s much faster to crunch numbers with a computer; it’s much faster to have a computer auto-generate things like how tall something is, where a circle is, etc. It can also help with visualization by generating an instant 3d model that you can freely look at from any angle, and instead of needing to redraw everything every time you make an adjustment, you can often adjust things with one or two keystrokes/mouse clicks.
Now, granted. Older CAD was far more clunky (since I also had to train in some older more archaic programs that were comparatively nightmarish).
And, while CAD programs are faster to show the design faster and refine the design faster, someone is still coming up with the design in their head and the computer doesn’t speed up the speed of the design process inside the brain.
But modern day CAD programs do make everything in design aside from the literal in-your-brain-conceive-of-the-idea part much much faster, more efficient, etc.
Computers let you keep track of a lot more things –provided you told them how to do all that correctly– and so you can build your aeroplane a lot more complex. But that is not necessarily a good thing. I wouldn’t say CAD makes the design go faster. Can a new fighter get designed, built, and delivered, in six months? Eurofighter? JSF? Not even Skunk Works can do a Skunk Works these days.
So I don’t think CAD is really a boon to the master designer, who knows what’s important and what’s not, who has a good feel for the numbers and can already see the design in his mind’s eye. What it does do is give opportunity to roomfuls of design academy graduates to “be productive” using fancy software. But that’s not the essence of design.
To give a simpler example: In math class we had calculators that gave only numbers back, already fancier than a slide rule. We were expected to be able to sketch a function’s graph from understanding the function and calculating a few points. You could call that nightmarishly slow, certainly compared to the graphing calculators that are now the norm. Now you just punch in a function and it’ll draw it for you. You can even use those things to teach kids some of the semblance of part of calculus without telling them that’s what you’re doing. But while that’s very fancy and looks shiny, it is not the substance. The goal is not to produce the graph. It’s fostering understanding the graph. And (for many) that works better when you draw it yourself. The speed of the drawing process is quite irrelevant.
Producing CAD drawings is but a means to an end. Now you have fancy computers and software and you can produce lots of them, very quickly. But somehow the aerplanes don’t get designed any faster. They certainly don’t roll off the production line any sooner. Or fly any better, in some cases barely if at all.
I’m reminded of the F-35 helmet debacle. Not only did those things cost a million a piece (it’s a f’n helmet!), but they were so heavy with fancy eye tracking for the “shoot-where-you-look” feature and whatnot else, that they were prone to break the pilot’s neck in tight manoeuvres.
The Russians had a better idea: Put an iron wire loop in front of the pilot’s eye, and track the position of the helmet. That requires far less in the way of “design” tinkering, and can be made to work at least as well. Could you make such a thing without fifty CAD drawings to offer management a wide set of possible choices as to the best shape and position of the wire loop?
I’m sure CAD has its place somewhere, but I’m also quite sure it gets massively over-used. Because everyone just has to have it, because it’s seen as Shiny! New! Modern! Efficient! etc. etc. etc. regardless of reality, and even more regardless of actual practical utility. Ultimately it’s the skill of the designer that matters. CAD can probably help take out a lot of the drudgery. And, because drawing is now that much “easier and more efficient” cause more drawings to be required. That might get you to master draftsman sooner due to sheer practice. But it might well be it now takes longer for a designer to become a master designer.
I don’t have a lot of reading into the Skunkworks projects, but the Apollo missions were done with teams of people working the numbers.
I think that if you’re talking about two people in a race to solve a single complex calculation the person skilled in working a slide rule can probably match or even beat the person who needs to input it all into a computer first. But that speed parity or advantage just doesn’t scale well to a larger series of calculations.
Meh. When the customer asks you to make a plane that is suitable for every single application under the sun, you get a plane that is average at everything but not particularly good at any one thing.
Just look at the freaking blurb about what it is supposed to do from the Wikipedia page, and keep in mind that it is (was at least, before several of them took a hard look at the project and bailed) also supposed to satisfy the requirements of many different nations as well, in order to boost total units manufactured and thus keep the unit price down:
AND the airframe is supposed to support every freaking launch parameter except VTOL: Conventional, Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing, and carrier based operations.
Again, when you ask something to do everything, don’t be surprised when it does nothing particularly well. There’s a reason the Swiss Army Knife is in your survival or backpacking kit but isn’t in day to day use in your kitchen or an automotive garage. It is light, cheap, and can do a lot of things if you have a lot of time to work on a problem, but it just isn’t practical for daily use.
That’s the story anyway, but it doesn’t hold up. For starters, unit cost isn’t down, it’s up. There’s not one model, but three. They were supposed to be two thirds parts compatible, turns out it’s one third at most. But worse, the things barely even fly, which is well below “average”. It’s supposed to stay well away (40 km) from thunderstorms or static in the fuel tanks might have it explode. The list of things that make it unfit for service but that have been specifically waived for this model so they can start delivering anyway is quite astounding.
One of the things a good designer does is look at the requirements and refuse to build it. It might be it’s not impossible, but it’ll be an experiment, and that’s not the domain of production. So to take this on anyway is dishonest and disingenious. This thing has been engineered to extract maximum pork for Northrop Grumman. And yes, from many countries, especially the ones the USA likes to put pressure on to buy American for “interoperatibility” or somesuch. The NATO tithe. If it wasn’t about politics the thing wouldn’t sell at all. There are options that are better and cheaper in one neat package.
The F-35 isn’t merely a Swiss army knife. It’s trying to be the maximum model with all the tools in it so that it becomes too big to actually use. And so you can’t actually use it. But as the top model, it sure costs the most. That makes a ready mockery of the already silly claim “reducing costs by doing everything”. Just get an air superiority fighter if you think you need one, and buy a bunch of A-10s to do the ground support since that is now the common mission. That really is a lot cheaper. (If you’re worried about MANPADs, well, I don’t think the F-35 is any less vulnerable. It’s *loud*. Might well see a sound-guided missile because of it. An A-10 can have an engine eat half a wing and still limp home. An F-35… probably not so much.) Notice that an air superiority fighter cannot afford to be mediocre, so to try the F-35 for this is madness already.
Even in Swiss army knives, the selection is important. I have one on my desk when it’s not on my person and I use it probably more often than the kitchen knives I use for kitchen tasks. The manufacturer says the model has a dozen functions, I count four foldables in front and two in back, leaving it nicely slim and handy. Sure I could probably use some more tools. But this is a good selection for me to have handy, and this way it remains usable.
The selling point of a Swiss army knife is that it’s handy enough to be readily available, like when you’re not in a kitchen. The F-35 turns out to be very high maintenance and so not very available. But you always know where you can find it: In maintenance.
Sadly, modern militaries aren’t about the use. Certainly not the US, that one is ruled by industry needs. But the UK also had a discussion, and the outcome was to drop the harrier (while buying two carriers, what to fly from them? the F-35B was years away at that point, looking iffy) and keep the tornado. The tornado has a very specific mission that really wasn’t very relevant any longer, but flashy and so high status, whereas the harrier is boring ground support, all versatile and such. So why keep the tornado? Officer tenure.
Regarding your previous post: They’d use rooms full of people, called computers, to run calculations before ready availability of automatons of the same name. Those are just better at crunching numbers. We know this. But that wasn’t the point.
Unless they are so good as to be transcendent.
*nods*
Kinetic energy manipulation has some other useful tricks. Like HEAT absorption.
When you think about it, the 2 are the same in a big way.
Heat is just vibrating molecules. The kinetic energy of individual particles.
Which is why Anvil can do this
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-241-appellation-incarceration/
The amount of ground damage done here is equal to the moment Max and Hiro finally give in and hook up
It might look a little bit like the right hand side of this.
That’s one serious workout.
but is the terrain equitably redistributed? randomly?
Interesting, does Anvil need her feet on the ground in order to absorb energy? There’s no purple glow when her shoulder hit. Or did she actively use her power to halt her momentum so the guy would pass her?
The purple is a visual aid, not an active representation of her power.
When the guy crashed in during the dinner and struck anvil several times, there was no aura.
Not sure if it’s been explained whether it’s a conscious action, or an entirely automatic one (or maybe a bit of both, in that she can activate it consciously to stop momentum, otherwise she runs the risk of, well, not being able to walk if her absorption stops forward momentum… )
This is what happens when you get dating advice from an Alari.
Heh.
Strictly speaking, she would be absorbing the mass of her kinetic energy, since energy IS mass. m=E/c^2
(Yes, this is an actual thing. Mass dilation at low velocities approximates to what you’d expect from plugging the kinetic energy of the object into Einstein’s equation. Heck, most so-called “rest mass” is actually the kinetic energy of subatomic particles.)
That’s why it’s less how heavy something that hits you is, more how fast it hits you
No lol That’s definitely not why it matters less how heavy the thing hitting you is and more how fast it’s hitting you. That aside, I think what people mean when they say speed matters more than weight is, anyway, that low weight can always be compensated for by just moving a thing faster (like with bullets or high-energy particles).
The mass-equivalent of her kinetic energy here would be unnoticeably small, about the mass of a pollen grain.
Yep. Probably less, even. But that’s kinda the point – a lot of energy is very little mass, but still mass. Thereby, absorbing energy is absorbing mass. However, she can probably get a LOT of energy without substantially changing her mass.
And the reverse is why things like nuclear produce so much energy (or, rather generate so much thermal, kinetic, and other forms of energy through converting a tiny amount of the fuel’s “rest mass”).
You are taking E=m*c^2 too far. You need to look at that in context. Mass is energy, but not all energy is mass. It can technically be turned into mass under the right circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it is mass now.
Also, what nuclear reactors convert to thermal energy (all thermal energy is kinetic energy, but not all kinetic energy is thermal) is not rest mass, but the change in binding energy in the nucleus due to it’s different configuration before and after the decay. Yes, the binding energy and the mass of a nucleus are connected. But more binding energy means less mass. So some of the released energy actually gets eaten because it turns into (a tiny amount of) mass.
Mmmh… while what you’ve said is technically mostly correct, it can be… highly misleading… and it can lead to some wrong conclusions. For example, it leads to the conclusion that introducing energy does not increase mass, yet the Earth actually gains and loses mass by merely being hit by the sun with light and reemitting it into space as thermal radiation. The following is quoted directly from NASA’s webpage:
The luminosity of radiant energy is 4 x 10^33 ergs/sec. Since 1 gram is worth 9 x 10^20 ergs, sunlight equals 4 x 10^12 grams/second or 4.4 million metric tons of equivalent mass per second .This is radiated over a sphere equal to the radius of the earths orbit 147 million kilometers in radius or 2.7 x 10^27 square centimeters. The Earth’s cross section is 1.3 x 10^18 square centimeters, so the ratio of the total mass per second, to that intercepted by the earth is 1.9 kilograms/sec. During the entire life of the sun…4.5 billion years, the earth has gained 2.7 x 10^17 kilograms, which is only 1/21 millionth of its mass. The problem is that the earth is in thermal equilibrium with the sun at this distance, which means that whatever energy or mass-equivalent it gains, it also looses by re-radiating this energy in the infrared spectrum. So, the net gain is only a small fraction of what it receives given that it is not a perfect black body.
Once an object is experiencing a significant amount of relativistic mass dilation, it really doesn’t matter very much what the thing is. When it hits, it will be lethal (to you and the surrounding community). https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
The various wipes used in ‘Star Wars’ are another of George Lucas’ tributes to the Saturday morning serials such as ‘Flash Gordon’ which were such a big influence on him.
Lucas cribbed a lot of Star Wars from Kurosawa’s 1958 film “The Hidden Fortress”, which itself had blurry-edged wipe transitions.
Sparring one day, fight to the death the next. Such is the life of super soldiers.
Death by super snu snu!
It must be hard for the super tough super gals to find a date.
Having to choose between muscle-headed himbos and
hands-off reverse-torture mind-f**king short-range
telepaths.
Absolutely awesome artwork! The dust and atmospheric effects are stunning. Panel 1 in particular takes me back to Africa as a pup.
Ha. Delta-v -> nil describes that process perfectly, but that would make her Avnil instead of Anvil. Also, the m in the mv^2 is Anvil’s mass, so she’d get more out of it if she absorbs a change while carrying something heavy.
it’s not velocity Dave, its acceleration. Velocity is movement, and it’s hella relative. Acceleration is change in movement, so it’s more likely what she is absorbing to stop momentum. The formula for kinetic energy uses mass because acceleration can change it’s weight, and acceleration only comes to play when something changes velocity, hence when she touches the ground. it can make sense in physics.
So she is more likely she absorbs force (F=ma) rather than an energy/momentum (e=mv^2/2, p=mv).
Force is a continual change in momentum. She specifically absorbs the effects of a sudden change in momentum, which is impulse.
Anvil has been pretty explicitly stated to be absorbing kinetic energy and I don’t see any reason to think otherwise.
In particular, most of your reasoning there doesn’t hold. The only premise that’s true is that, yes, the m in the kinetic energy formula comes from F=ma (plus the work-energy formula). But even that’s misleading, since that’s ‘comes from’ in the sense of ‘is typically proved from’ from not in the sense of ‘is explained by’. You could even go the opposite direction, proving F=ma from the kinetic energy and work-energy formulae; it’s just that lessons on Newtonian mechanics usually start from Newton’s Laws, add on work, then get to energy conservation from there.
The main issue with what you’re saying is that acceleration isn’t the kind of physical quantity that can be absorbed. Acceleration is just the change in velocity per unit of time, which makes it just part of how an object moves and so not some extra thing that can be absorbed, transferred to another object, or transformed from one form into another (unlike energy!). It’s not that acceleration “only comes [in]to play when something changes velocity” it’s that acceleration literally just is the change in velocity (per unit time – can’t forget that it’s change over time not simply change).
Just like grade school. First pull the hair of the girl you like.
who still used Power point? or is that the joke?
I haven’t given or made a presentation in years (and I would like to keep it that way). Is a different app more common now or have people simply stopped giving slideshow presentations?
I still get power point presentations hitting my desktop on a regular basis. It’s part of our software suite, and it’s handy for throwing together quick and dirty presentation.
Can’t do everything in Excel. Well, technically you could, but you shouldn’t…
I have used Powerpoint to make graphics for a scientific article that is published in a fairly prestigious Journal.
Powerpoint is very versatile.
That’s the root cause of the replication crisis right there.
On another note, so powerpoint lets you make graphics, as do many many other programs. And so you can fish them out of that silo named “powerpoint file” and you call that “versatile”. Back when we’d have a program that does graphics and we’d take that graphic and put it in a presentation file. That’d be business as usual, not “boy is this program versatile”.
I think it’s a mindset issue and of course salesmen would rather sell you(r boss) an “integrated” cookie-cutter “program suite”, rather than (one or a few of) a bunch of tools that work well together. The former is a children’s toy, complete with shiny bells and whistles and bright colours and whatnot. The latter makes up the craftsman’s shed’s wall.
We get thrown into the middle of things..!
At this point Dabbler and Sydney show up.
Must be hell on shoes. I wonder if the super-powered tailor does their shoes too.
Yep. What use are hardened clothes when your shoes give out the moment you go Super?
Could you imagine how many Nikes The Flash would go through? (And without super-proofed clothing, he’d not be just the Flash, he’d be The Streak…)
The Flash has had an aura that protects him from all those inconvenient effects of speed since forever. It’s been a plot point in a lot of the older comics.
In Anvil’s case, the clothes would also need to be dirt repellent. She’s rolling in the dust a long way from home. I’m sure that Deus would let her use the facility shower and laundry. He’s just a generous guy like that.
I like that, in a way, this means Anvil absorbs any type of energy BUT kinetic. When kinetic energy is converted to another form (heat, deformation, etc) Anvil can redirect that to put the energy into her energy bag of holding, and then she can release it again. As a fun corollary, if her powers are active, I think that means oobleck should not work as well with her.
Then again, the question of “limits” is still raised – up to where do her powers go? Can she stop a bullet, as she resists the deformation of her body (and of the bullet) that the bullet should provoke given its momentum, by converting it to her own energy cache continually? What about a bullet train? For that matter, can she build up energy by just punching a random object continually, absorbing her punches’ energy? Or running? Or standing under a waterfall?
I think DaveB mentioned at some point that the absorption isn’t 100% efficient, and that the inefficiency eats the gains for low-energy impacts such as running or showering. Anvil therefore wouldn’t be able to charge herself up just by beating the daylights out of a punching bag, as she’d be getting back fractionally less than she put in – but she could serve as a sparring partner for someone else, and get some useful absorption from their input.
Internal energy sources slowly use up her own energy, so punching a wall or running don’t really help her get stronger. A waterfall tends to be diffuse enough that she will not absorb that much energy. When she does a HANO jump (High Altitude, No parachute Opening), she absorbs the energy of the ground impact or whatever/whoever else is under her. The ground still deforms because of Newton’s Third Law (the equal but opposite forces one).
I don’t see how that interpretation fits with several story points, e.g. her own energy and her stored kinetic energy being different things operating under different rules (“nose boop” first blood at the pre-Vehemence fight), how physics work with her (stealthy landing behind Sciona’s not-dumb not-robot without ground deformation; things she carries such as Sydney being affected; and… well, the point of “absorbing delta-v” in the first place, if she’s effectively absorbing it in one direction but not in the other there’s a big issue re: Third Law)
Perhaps he should focus on the fight instead of focusing on her inner knee.
Interesting foreplay these superpowered people have.
Tough Girl Super: “Hey! Punch me though a wall first!”
Adamantium headboards and Vibranium rotors…
The math is quite easy to do, but the reason it’s easy is complicated to explain.
Well, velocity isn’t real as it’s merely a relative property, not actual energy. Acceleration is real. All physical reactions are time symmetric. Meaning that if you reverse time, you reverse the velocities and therefore their momentums, and everything happens exactly the same as if things were moving at those velocities in those directions with time going forward.
Math wise, a brake on a wheel is an accelerator that accelerates the wheel in the opposite direction of the spin on the axis the brake is on. If you time reverse that, the wheel is having acceleration applied to it by the ground moving under the wheel, and instead of stopping, the brake is releasing the wheel, allowing it to gradually spin faster.
In this same vane, whether someone smacks Anvil with a bus or Anvil impacts the bus, either way the imapct is an acceleration event. The reason she can’t absorb velocity when falling is because there’s nothing to really absorb. However when she impacts the ground, that’s an acceleration event and thus she can absorb it. So that’s what she’s absorbing, math wise, is the acceleration.
“But wait,” I can hear some people say “gravity is acceleration and therefore she should be able to stop in mid air”
Actually no. While on the ground or otherwise being prevented from falling such as standing on a floor of a building or an airplane, you can measure the “acceleration” of gravity. However jump off that building or out of that plane and any accelerometers you have will suddenly register zero acceleration even though your relative velocity vs the position of Earth continues to go up. This is because when you are falling, you are deprived of an inertial reference frame. You aren’t falling toward the Earth, you are merely moving toward the point of slowest temporal velocity.
The “acceleration” of gravity can be analogized to being caused by drag along the temporal axis of 4 dimensional space time when you measure time as an angle rather than a linear velocity… Here’s a video that explains what I’m talking about here, sort of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPi1lyAx4ws
Anyway, the point and the TL;DR is this:
When you punch Anvil, you are imparting an acceleration to her, she absorbs that. When Anvil impacts the ground, the ground is imparting an acceleration to her, she absorbs that. Anvil absorbs acceleration.
F=MA, Force equals Mass times Acceleration. Now that said, she’s not exactly absorbing the A portion of that. She’s absorbing the acceleration imparted to her, which is the F, not the A, because she doesn’t absorb her own mass. SO… If an object impacts her, you take the mass of the object, multiply it by its velocity, and you get the amount of force she absorbs. If she impacts another object, you take her velocity, multiply it by her mass, and then you get the force she absorbs.
BTW, this should allow her to also prevent herself from being thrown. The act of picking her up is an acceleration event that she should be able to absorb. The fact that she doesn’t can indicate either that she isn’t aware of this or that there needs to be a certain threshold of force over time to be met before she can absorb it. Hence her absorbing the impact after being thrown rather than the throw itself.
You could say that she can only absorb the F if it is over a certain fraction of her own mass. For example, if it’s 1/100th of her mass, then she can’t absorb the F unless the F is equal to or greater than 1% of her mass. So if she weighs 100kg, then with the 1% threshold, the minimum amount of force that needs to be applied in a single instance for her to absorb it would be 1kg of acceleration. This would also prevent her from absorbing the force imparted by wind drag unless she were to exceed a certain velocity. This in turn means she should be able to prevent her from burning up in the atmosphere if accelerated to a higher than terminal velocity, as the she would merely absorb the force of the drag rather than heating up from friction.
Just some thoughts.
At your BTW point there is also the option that it is an active power and that she would simply not have the reflexes to activate the power in time.
I’m surprised Anvil hit the ground hard enough to get an “Oof!” out of her with her ability to absorb kinetic energy. Unless she was just trying to save Forklift’s feelings?
Just a slight exaggeration to indirectly say; ‘good throw/punch’, during a friendly sparring match.
Also indicating ‘if you do that to somebody else (non-super), or way harder, it will have an effect’.
If she can control when she absorbs the energy, then it would make more sense for her to use the momentum of her tumble to get back on her feet, rather than stop while lying on the ground and have to get herself up. She probably absorbed a lot of that impact, just to keep from getting some bones broken.
That’s my take on it, anyways.
I was thinking the same thing, better to come back up into a ready stance than sandbag the entire blow and end up flat on her face with no momentum. Also, timing the sudden stop helped draw Dozer into launching himself in her direction, allowing her to get inside his defense and setting up a very effective ambush.
Just because she can absorb the energy, doesn’t mean she doesn’t still feel the impact
I assume Dave was just setting up that Δnvil joke lol but I can’t help trying to head off people going away with a mistaken picture of kinetic energy, so I’ll just say: even when mass is unchanged, mass still factors into ΔKE and so ΔKE is more than just Δv (or even change in v^2 or Δ(v^2) if you like).
So even if Anvil’s mass is unchanged she’s still absorbing more than just her change in velocity when she absorbs her own kinetic energy: she’s absorbing a quantity that her mass factors into too. It makes a huge difference that she doesn’t just absorb her lost velocity, since if she weighs 50 kilos then she’s absorbing 25 times (m/2 times) more kinetic energy from hitting the ground than if she weighed 1 kilo (which wouldn’t be true if she only observed her lost velocity).
That’s not so useful for setting up an Δnvil joke though xD
This is exactly the way kinetic absorption happens in the Super Powereds Book by Drew Hayes. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend. It is, in my opinion, the most realistic take on super heroes I have ever read. It’s about kids with super powers going to college to learn how to be licensed heroes. It tackles some of the same issues that Dave brings up with things like collateral damage and such.
Here’s another one that’s heavy on the *science* in its superhero science fiction: https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/34152071413/flicker-phone-tag
Flicker is a speedster except physics still applies. When she goes at relativistic speeds the air around her converts to plasma, when she throws a rock while moving that fast it gains mass, etc. She has the requisite secondary powers to survive all this but she is still by far the most powerful super in the setting, far more so than expy-Superman aka The Volunteer.
Not sure who linked it before, but I read the entire Doc Future story a month or two ago. Fun ride, and the author’s other works are also on my reading list now.
I’ve been wondering: Is Anvil resistant to lasers/directed energy attacks? On an atomic scale, photons heat an object by transferring momentum/kinetic energy. Can she get stronger by sunbathing?
Man, superpowered foreplay is dangerous…
I guess it might take a little extra to stimulate a person with super toughness.
Delta-v very big in rocketry, I wonder if her and Max might go into the emissionless shuttle launch business after this is all over…
Max still has to breathe, but she could probably earn huge bucks hiring out as a first stage, which is exactly why members of Archon get paid big bucks.
As a government employee, and military at that, she can’t pull private gigs like that in her spare time, unless maybe she got permission from higher up the command chain. But I suspect in a real world with supers, she’d be splitting her time with Nasa.
Halo, OTOH, would probably be under orders to spend half her time working for NASA. Her flight capabilities are absurdly valuable from that perspective.
In fact, in Wearing The Cape, (Archon had a guest appearance!) that IS a common job for supers with good flight powers, and as a result the space program is greatly advanced relative to our world.
From a math standpoint, her power would also be ‘half-efficient’.
I believe the physics of impact is that half your falling energy goes into the ground, and half rebounds on you. That’s why if you smack somebody with super-strength, you should also go flying in the opposite direction.
So if someone smacks Anvil, she gets to digest half the force of impact, while presumably the half going back into the puncher is neutralized by their own powers. It matters because if she releases that force back at him, she actually IS hitting them as hard as she was hit. If she absorbed the full force, she’d be hitting them TWICE as hard… on top of what she was doing.
Depends on the ratio of masses, actually. You have to conserve both energy, AND momentum. (Linear AND angular!) How it gets partitioned between the two objects is a function of relative masses, and how much of the original kinetic energy gets turned into work/damage.
In Anvil’s case, she apparently can store her share of the work, instead of taking damage.
If she can absorb kinetic energy would that make her immune to the effects of energy based weaponry or could she still be damaged by burns. Like could Anvil be hit with a fire based weapon or explosion and absorb the energy fire or the impact and heat from the explosion or would that cause harm? If not does this mean Anvil could put out a fire by simply touching it?
Son (DaveB), I am disappoint!
I tried clicking on the pink triangles in Anvil’s name, but they *weren’t* links to awesome Anvil art!!
Me too! :D
Today’s final panel is brought to you by Pareidolia. At the top of the BOOM dust cloud is a part of the rock formation that reminded me of a face. When I first saw it I thought for a moment that she had knocked his head off.
Holy cow! She would be the ultimate projectile! If she absorbs the impact from contact with stuff, and could fine tune that to include air (she wouldn’t get much energy from it), she would be able to bypass air resistance and from that, bypass terminal velocity.
Ok, Ok, she’d still be affected by vacuum drag, but that still puts her potential speed as a projectile far higher than anything else for any given input of energy
kinetic absorption of gas impact could also let her use targeted air resistance to guide her flight (kinda like sky-divers) She let’s a little air impact hit her right outstretched hand and boom, she’s turning right
Meep meep.
quick call Frix. we need to turn her off and back on again…
technically speaking anvil probably is absorbing kinetic energy as she flies thru the air, as air impacts her (friction), but amount is probably very small, maybe barely noticeable. she might even be absorbing small amounts of kinetic engergy from doing everyday things, like impact of feet walking, touching things and moving air or water hitting her.
and since heat is mostly kinetic motion of molecules she might be able to absorb energy from heat, with practice. and since almost everything in universe is related to motion, or kinetic energy, she might be able to become one of most powerful beings in her universe, depending on limitations of her biology, such as breathing and aging
“Super powered sparring is synonymous with terrain redistribution, unless it involves two telepaths.”
For a counterexample, check out the end of the 1998 film “Dark City”.
Mind Control as an extra ability was my thought too. Though if we’re talking just pure telepathy, probably not.
You’ve been playing BoTW haven’t you?
Unless you have the power of flight, being in the air just makes you a target with a predictable trajetory.
“Do you know what we call flying soldiers on the battlefield?”
“Air support?”
“Skeet.”
Unless you have the power of flight, taking to the air just makes you a target with a predictable trajectory.
Sorry for the dup. It looked like the first one did not get posted.
Do we want this guy to be nicknamed Hammer, or would that be too much?
Now that is something you could make dirty jokes about.
But she definitely can touch this…