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Thank you, corrected.
Trinity. Supervillains futz about with time, resulting in a timeline where the JSA never disbanded.
The 'millions of people' images comes from Supreme Power.
With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)
- Thread starter Mr Zoat
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Yep. Recall what happened when Savage shot him with a radion blaster:
Come to think of it Grayven might want to whip up some radion bombs and such for the next time he has to fight other New Gods. If he's protected by his rings and they aren't he could fry a whole mob of New Gods at point-blank range that way for no risk to himself.
edmantgoog
init high just high
And the JSA one? Which issue?
Ha, I see where this is going.
Yup.
'Get fucking started because we're not nice people'
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- australia
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
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- Baton Rouge
I'm somewhat skeptical of their ability to fight Martians effectively when the equivalent of a single police officer is one of the most powerful people on Earth. He's not top ten or anything, but he's certainly up there. There are billions of Martians, and their ancestors gave the Guardians trouble. Plus they have that whole telekinesis thing that isn't so easily blocked.
I wonder if they have anything specific for Lanterns. It seems like it would be low priority, because aside from the Greenies, who are completely restricted from killing and have their own oversight, the only Lanterns Earth would know about are Grayven and Sinestro. Grayven is at least mostly diplomatic, and not hostile to Earth, and Sinestro seems like he hates the Lanterns from Earth more than he has any specific problem with the rest of the planet. Eh, probably just more incentive to get a space fleet.
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- Ashtabula
I suppose it just depends on whether or not DC is pushing him as the most powerful of the Justice league this week or now. I remember as a kid, they used to trumpet him as being much more powerful then Superman....then he would get his ass kicked because fans didn't care about him.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
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A single Martian, yeah, that would give them trouble. The planet as a whole, though? As long as they have decent Master/Stranger protocols, they can just toss some nukes at the surface of Mars and the flames would cause enough casualties that Martians as a race would be done for.
On the one hand, the fact that Sinestro and Grayven did show up means that more Lanterns might end up doing so. On the other, I'm not sure if the Earth understands how Lantern rings work well enough to develop countermeasures beyond "throw a telepath at them and hope for the best".
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
- Location
- Baton Rouge
In this story, I would put him below Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Lanterns, but above the rest in terms of combat ability. He's certainly more versatile than everyone but the Lanterns.
That wouldn't work for a couple reasons. One, Mars' atmosphere on the surface can't support a flame, nor do I think there is much flammable material. Two, most of the population lives underground, which is a fairly good shelter from missiles of any kind. And finally, it's only practical to send missiles for a few weeks every two years, because Earth has to actually care about Delta V and transfer windows, while Mars doesn't. Mars then has months of time to shoot down or redirect any missiles, which should be fairly easy considering their trajectories would be easy to calculate and know, and how stealth in space is virtually impossible with close to IRL technologies.
The main thing protecting Earth is the fact that Mars is both isolationist and friendly. Given only their currently known population, space ships, and inherent abilities, Mars would wipe the floor with Earth unless some major dieties became involved.
- Location
- texas
The light that lanterns throw out is a form of light according to DC.
As in vulnerable to things that affect light.
Like say Dr Light's photokinetic suit.
Dr Light can take a lantern's construct and then hit him with it while asking "Why are you hitting yourself? Huh? Huh?"
He can also absorb the emotional light energy just as he can absorb other light.
The emotional light spectrum also responds to thought, the entire basis of how lanterns work.
Telepaths control thought itself. Hector Hammond has both taken control over Hal's ring telepathically, but also drained the energy out of the ring to fight Hal with his own powers.
These are things I only know of off hand, but Hal Jordan has been a superhero since 85. I can assure everyone that not every threat to him in over three decades of comics has been a viable threat because of the color yellow or because Hal is a moron who relies on boxing glove constructs.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
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Who says Mars has those technologies? I mean, it'd be stupid not to, but who says Earth is the only planet that's being stupid about their tech development? The only things we know for certain is that Mars has spaceships better than ours and telepathic technology that we just don't have at all, but that has no bearing on their point defenses, and given the thing you brought up about underground bunkers, I could easily see them not bothering to develop technology to shoot down missiles.
Other than that, your points are taken, but honestly I think you underestimate humanity. As long as Master/Stranger protocols are upheld, their infiltration capacity will be muted, and aside from that, they're just tough shapeshifting telekinetics with one very easy-to-exploit weakness. The Martians might win, but I doubt they'd wipe the floor with us; we'd at least wipe out large portions of their invasion forces before they claimed victory, and that's not factoring in the capacity for, say, Superman with psychic protection to fly to Mars and threaten their leadership directly to make them back off.
I'm not talking about supervillains, I'm talking about government response teams, which by definition require their assets to be feasibly accessible to the government in order to be able to use them. Neither light control nor telepathy are easy for any given government to access. As far as I know, light control's been cracked by a grand total of two people on modern-era Earth in the entirety of DC comics, both of whom preferred to wear silly costumes and blast people in the face rather than share tech or work for the government. And telepaths are just generally hard to track down and generally are unwilling to work with the government even if they do get tracked down. If the U.S. government had a telepath, they'd be far more inclined to use him to cancel out a mind-controlled Superman (by, say, mind controlling him right back) than they would be to use the squad they have; since they're still relying on the squad, they clearly don't have a telepath on the payroll, so they can't use a telepath against a rogue Lantern either. The only other option I can think of is a skilled magic user ambushing a Lantern, and guess what else the government doesn't have easy access to yet?
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- Hampden Park
Trinity, issue 20.
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
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- Baton Rouge
In the absolute worst case where Mars managed to develop space flight before they made big guns, they could simply fly up to the missiles and damage them with telekinesis such that they can't detonate. Mars would then get another unremarkable crater.
I think you're underestimating the advantage that Mars would get with its free access to space and reactionless engines. There wouldn't be boots on the ground, or really any need to bother with infiltration. Send a hundred ships to the Earth-Moon system, then rain down moon rocks onto Earth cities until they surrender. Being near Earth gives Earth more of an advantage because rockets can launch at any time, and lasers might be useful from the surface, but even with Lanterns and Superman, I don't think Earth could actually fight a Martian invasion fleet. Being able to resist the efforts of a telepath or two doesn't mean they're immune to a couple dozen telepaths attacking at once.
If they wanted, Mars could accelerate a huge asteroid into an impact trajectory with the Earth, and the Lanterns would be the only ones who could do anything at all to change the casualty numbers.
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He's mostly thinking in terms of individual martians.
There's a Justice League story which takes place during a White Martian attack. Someone -I think it was Flash- says to Plastic Man and a martian posing as Plastic Man 'tell me something only Plastic Man would know. The martian reads his mind and tells him something.
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- texas
And every time Dr Light was captured, who gained access to his light manipulation suit? The Government.
The government had psychic research projects in the real world in which telepathy doesn't seem to exist, in DC comics not only does telepathy exist but it can be taught to some people.
The Hawkman villain Count Viper, George Washington's psychic spy in the Revolutionary War, taught the Fiddler psychic (not magic as originally believed) powers.
And let me fix something for you- The project to take out Superman doesn't have a telepath on the payroll. That in no way shape or form means that the government as a whole has no telepaths. The FBI doesn't have stealth jets, that doesn't mean stealth jets don't exist.
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Criticism of WTR on the Worm subreddit. Note: Please don't go jump into that thread to respond to it. I'm mentioning it here because I think the criticism has some merit to it, not because I'm trying to gather a lynch mob. He's pointing out that in WTR, the fact that Paul is pretending to be a teen is leading to constant shipteasing with teenage characters and ends up seeming very questionable.
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Prince Charon
Just zis guy, you know?
It shows a good reason not to pretend to be a teen (where you have a choice). The problem is, of course, that if he revealed it now, even if people believed him, he'd have to explain why he kept that a secret.
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
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- Baton Rouge
Contrast that with it being the currently top recommended series in the r/rational monthly recommendation thread. Where the commenter says the worst part about the story is that he often stays up too late to read the newest updates.
'disappearing into the ether'? how exactly do Thangarians pull that off?
For that matter, with their tendancy to charge into melee combat rather than shoot from a distance, armor piercing rounds probably work well against Thangarians.
Supreme Power is actually a Marvel comic, but it's a reboot of some old Justice League knockoffs Marvel came up with to match up against the Avengers way back when, so it's still a viable comparison for Zoat's point. Hyperion is the Superman analog; alien baby that came to Earth in a rocketship, in the reboot, he was raised by US government agents and fed a steady diet of propaganda, but in the end it made him more cynical than loyal. Then they realized they'd significantly underestimated his power level.
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Hestia&theCourt
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Regarding the missiles, I don't think most Martians have the telekinetic range to properly disable a missile flying fast enough to get to Mars in the first place. Even M'Gann would likely struggle with that, and she's noted to be exceptionally strong as Martians go IIRC.
As for the moon rocks scenario, this planet has a number of people who can fight and disable those ships before the damage gets that bad. And another point that I think we both forgot: the Green Lantern Corps exists precisely to stop this sort of thing. If the Earth lanterns aren't enough to handle it, the Guardians won't take that lying down, given their previous involvement with Mars. Earth might lose in that scenario, but Mars won't win.
Again, I think you're forgetting about Superman in that asteroid scenario. And Wonder Woman. And Captain Atom.
No, that can't possibly be right, because if they had it, they'd use the damn thing and we'd have Dr. Light, as sponsored by the government. This never happens, and so the government clearly never got their hands on it.
No, again, that's stupid. If they have a telepath, then they would damn well put that telepath on the team meant to stop Superman in the event of telepathic coercion. That's literally the most expedient option for stopping Superman in the event of mind control, and the government isn't stupid enough to not realize that. Your example of the Revolutionary War psychic says absolutely nothing except that they had a telepath back then. If they had one now, their plans would look very different.
Well, that's contradictory, given that during the Burning Martian storyline Plastic Man was noted as being explicitly immune to telepathy. Unless... wait, did you mean the Martian read Flash's mind? Because if so, that wasn't very clear from your phrasing. Regardless, that's stupid Master/Stranger protocols; given that you've established that psi-baffles exist in this universe, nobody with the power level to engage a Martian should be going anywhere without one of those in the event of a Martian invasion, so the point would be moot.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
IT is the bullets that does it. I mean when was the last time you saw in any bullet hit the target in cartoons?
- Location
- texas
The point of my example which obviously went straight over your head is that psychic powers are teachable in the DC franchise.
The Government isn't limited to finding telepaths, because it's possible to make them. As in a non comedy version of the Men who Stare at Goats.
And you're proof the Government never stole technology from Dr Light is that they didn't make a superhero?
Military defense is generally a higher priority for governments than kittens getting rescued out of trees.
Hestia&theCourt
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No, my point is at no point in this fic at least did they ever have a telepath in their anti-Superman program. Which obviously means they don't have one. Which then means that it follows that they don't have anyone willing to teach them, either, because then they'd have a telepath.
As for Dr. Light, military defense is what they'd use that tech for, yes. Note the rather conspicuous lack of them ever using that technology for anything.
GullibleCynic
Grammar Marxist
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- Earth
Weaponer Kalmin might be an interesting addition
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