An Imago of Rust and Crimson (Worm crossover)
- Thread starter EarthScorpion
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Ben Who Devours
Hater Eternal
This might have been mentioned already, but I didn't see it. Anyway, in canon wasn't it theorized that Leviathan hit Brockton Bay in an effort to reach Echidna? So if Levi has gone somewhere else in Imago that suggests the Travellers have been butterflied away, either away from the city or away entirely?
Also, I'm pretty sure this is before Leviathan's attack in canon. It seems to have taken the place of the Simurgh hitting... Canberra, I believe.Ben Who Devours said:
Trier
Trying fate
- Location
- Digitally existent
When Tinkers, i.e. this world's inventors (or library-lottery winners), are thinking like that... Well, bastard humans, is all I can say.Samarkand said:
But please indulge me, 'Sparks'?
I wonder, how advanced was the knowledge of the first Thinker-Tinkers (1980+) and how long did the rest of the world's scientists/engineers have to work on their creations? That is, putting aside the problems with the infrastructure, the economy, the Endbringers, and others, how much do mundane engineers know of non-Trump-Tinkertech? How much do Tinkers even allow to be known?
Also, Danny tries to mend a faucet following some DIY manual only to get drenched. Taylor just sees petrol feeding his fire in the OP : (
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...Whoops, yes. I admit I read it immediately as referring to the Monarch butterfly and couldn't figure out why someone would design a clothing store around that. That was kind of stupid.EarthScorpion said:
I'd still argue 'Monarch' sounds old fashioned compared to, say, 'Royal' or 'Regal'. Anyone can appear regal, but you generally only get the one monarch, not to mention the industry's general obsession with appearing 'modern'. Unless they're going for the nostalgia route I suppose - which would make a lot of sense given, well, everything about the state of the 'modern' world in Imago - but even then, appealing to ideals of royalty? In America? Land of the Never Had A Royal Family?
I don't know. With the whole butterfly theme, it just felt like it jarred the suspension of disbelief a bit too much with the degree of blatant foreshadowing.
Re: the Hypertech debate:
Given the Endbringers have put a hold on technological advancement thanks to constant wrecking of infrastructure, space exploration/exploitation and international trade, the disparity in 'hypertech' and how available it is is mostly down to how many Tinkers there are, and the Tinker-Thinker, Tinker-Trump ratio. Tinker-Thinkers have reproducible results, so in that sense they're effectively 'master inventors' but are limited by the infrastructure which is taking constant batterings, whilst Tinker-Trumps can do the literally impossible, but only they can do it, so they're very limited to what one individual can output daily (plus there's also the issue of 'what happens if the Tinker-Trump dies?' - would their creations begin to stop working?). Plus there's the criminal element; firstly not every Tinker will have 'heroic' goals, though I'd imagine they'd be the best capes to take advantage of the system as it were, given how much hypertech probably sells for, as so are less likely to go black market unless they can only make things suited to criminal activities ie Bakuda's bombs, and secondly there's the cases of - such as noted with Brockton Bay's power situation - hypertech public facilities being built and then promptly stolen by a passing supervillain.
National mass-production - by which I mean, 'how you can get flat-screens and iPads cheaply into nearly every home in the US' - requires a hell of a lot of people beyond just the inventors that Tinkers fill the roles of. Country-wide transportation, logistics, resources, production... it's a big venture, and with it comes a lot of risk when you have supervillains and Endbringers running around (especially when you can't, say, 'get it cheaply made in China' or 'get the necessary rare metals imported from an overseas mine' thanks to Leviathan). It gets impossible to support international manufacturing chains, so you get more local production. One or two - probably Tinker built - factories, with enough output to service a few local cities. What you can get will very much depend on where you are and who the local Tinkers are. And... well, also bear in mind Tinkers can move around, so they'll go where their markets are. Which means increased disparity in wealth as 'poor' areas like Brockton get overlooked. Hospitals will have similar problems (probably moreso, assuming there's no 'Thinker' equivalent of healers and they're all basically Trumps, and the added trouble of medical technology having to rely on Tinker 'hypertech' to advance).
If any large-scale technological good is achieved - such as high-speed Internet - it practically invites the Endbringers to come smashing down on it or some supervillain to steal/hijack it or some corporate like Coil to simply take it over the old fashioned way in its infancy and market it at a high price (especially if Reaganomics are still shilling the 'virtues' of privatisation given the man's a martyr now). It'll just get strangled in the crib. Space is out thanks to the Simurgh. Foreign export/import is dicey (though not immigration, since doing that over an ocean is generally meant to be a one time thing). Air travel in particular has probably taken a considerable hit given the security/safety concerns capes bring; imagine the current security paranoia, then add in the difficulty of catching a cape incognito, and then add in only the rich will be flying and they tend to like not dying and avoid things that would risk it. Fun times; I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of transcontinental traffic was governmental. Even something like the Eurotunnel Leviathan has probably sat on at some point, if it even got anywhere in the first place.
It's not a case of 'science is stuck in the 1980s' its a case of 'the infrastructure is too screwed to achieve national mass production', and hence everything is based around the local level manufacturing capability and degree of available Tinkers. And how charitable they are.
It'd destabilize the gold markets, certainly.illhousen said:
Wouldn't do much to the economy as a whole, though; gold's not terribly important.
Someone who could produce vast quantities of oil, now...
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Gets Assassinated by Greenpeace commandos.Candesce said:
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
They would suffer from a rather unfortunate accident, probably while a rather famous group such as the Travelers were in town.Candesce said:
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Nah, this universe still has a functioning military, one that even takes parts in operations against the Endbringers and projects force. That's such a energy hungry body that for it to be highly active after more then twenty years of chaos, it basically requires something like an oil producing parahuman to still be around.Fiach McCarthy said:
Modern militarizes are expensive, and more so when they're active - we did less then they're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and our economy is healthier, and it still bit deep. If the military was JUST a jobs program there's ways of cutting that cost down, but here it's still an active meaningful force. It requires some special pleading somewhere. A team of resource producing parahumans is probably the easiest explanation.
- Location
- The end of all things
The problem with oil is that the amount you have to produce to destabilize things is really huge. A hypothetical oil producing cape is going to be very rich, but they might not even be able to compensate for lost imports. I could easily believe that there are several, but the only thing they are doing is keeping the economy from tanking even faster than it already is.
Metals, OTOH, require much smaller quantities to shake things up. Cheap platinum would be useful for catalysts everywhere. Any number of other exotic or expensive elements could also be useful for Tinkerfab. Things made this way are unlikely to ever be extremely cheap thanks to the relatively expensive labor involved. That could be one way of making it relatively available without making it as cheap as modern mass production might otherwise imply.
If you want to really make a mess, ask whether they can produce certain interesting heavy metals. Like uranium-235. I'm inclined to say that this is prevented by the built-in safety features that most powers come with. You can't create 10kg of fissile material for the same reason a pyrokinetic can't easily directly burn himself to death. Frankly, even a cape who could produce a gram of weapon-grade material at a time would be enough to jump start a nuclear program. Such powers are probably the sole domain of rumors and conspiracies. And black ops assassinations.
Metals, OTOH, require much smaller quantities to shake things up. Cheap platinum would be useful for catalysts everywhere. Any number of other exotic or expensive elements could also be useful for Tinkerfab. Things made this way are unlikely to ever be extremely cheap thanks to the relatively expensive labor involved. That could be one way of making it relatively available without making it as cheap as modern mass production might otherwise imply.
If you want to really make a mess, ask whether they can produce certain interesting heavy metals. Like uranium-235. I'm inclined to say that this is prevented by the built-in safety features that most powers come with. You can't create 10kg of fissile material for the same reason a pyrokinetic can't easily directly burn himself to death. Frankly, even a cape who could produce a gram of weapon-grade material at a time would be enough to jump start a nuclear program. Such powers are probably the sole domain of rumors and conspiracies. And black ops assassinations.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Canon Worm has a gutted military that we know exists mostly because they get mentioned (being crushed) in passing several times. There's an old Sun Tzu quote about how an army is greater the fewer times it marches to war (I can't remember exactly how it goes). In Worm, it's been pounded on until it's irreverent. So yeah, that was a real consequence hitting them, they're literally dying and failing because they can't pay for there own defense.SolipsistSerpen said:
Here, the economic situation is the same (though we're seeing the low points more clearly), yet the army is strong. Something should be going on to paper that over.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Wait, what? We barely know anything about the army in canon worm. If they don't participate in endbringer fights, it probably has to do with non-tinker armor being tissue pAper against endies, and only large weapons doing any damage at all, while fighting vehicles being very expensive.TheLastOne said:
Afaict, imago army has what are basically a weaker version of drAgon's teeth as army special forces that help out With endbringer fights. Most of the "army" seems to be basically National Guard disaster relief units and military police. They're regionally assigned and thus don't cost as much gas as shipping around a BCT. This does mean that imagoverse US army has far less IFVs and tanks than IRL.
Rather than comment directly on the resources issue [1], I will indeed confirm that the US military is OM NOM NOMing every single parahuman from the PPD's work registry that's willing to work for them and has skills that are at all applicable. Or can be made applicable.TheLastOne said:
That is, among other things, how the military (which is to say, the lot who actually get involved in Endbringer fights which aren't attacking their hometown) can have power armour, coilguns, cybernetics, and flying aircraft carriers [2] with anti-grav and onboard fusion reactors. The military is a beast sucking up money and skilled labour and unique talents and turning them into things to hurl at the Endbringers (and other high rank threats). And it has the Endbringers to justify anything it does. And yes, that does mean that the fusion reactor on aforementioned flying aircraft carrier could power several cities, but instead is being used for military purposes.
Yes. I am in fact playing that traditional bit of comic books (nearly) completely straight, and then pointing an accusing finger at Nick Fury and asking him if he knows the opportunity cost of his flying aircraft carrier and just what could have been done with those resources if he'd just used land bases like everyone else.
[1] Although the US is occupying various bits of South America like areas of Venezuela (the oil-producing bits), because as it turns out, when you go and build up a conventional military as a job-producing measure, but a lot of it is basically cannon fodder against the Endbringers, you end up finding another use for it. And those combat capes who you've judged to be not much use against the Endbringers ("Has an aura which makes people firing guns at him miss! Can fire a SAW as a SMG! Speaks with an Austrian accent!") can be put to productive use against the people who - probably because they're all communist terrorists - object to you occupying their country after being invited in by a puppet regime which you back.
[2] Well, one. And in their defence, one of the reasons why they built it was that they were trying to see if they could build a "sacrificial" target which could be used to lure in an Endbringer as a high value target and so attack it on pre-prepared ground set up expecting them to show up. The Endbringers didn't play ball. It is quite possible dear ol' Simmie was trollfacing at the waste of resources involved in it.
Amorous Intent
Love the future
- Location
- Octavia, Venus
- Pronouns
- She/her
That's not how fusion works. Ignoring the fact that Tinkers aren't going to be building multi-billion dollar tokamaks like ITER, instead of compact sources like DPFs, you're still full of shit. If the magnets on ITER catastrophically failed, the plasma would explode outwards with all the sound and fury of a wet fart. There simply isn't the energy involved in the containment of the plasma to do more damage to the walls than the magnets themselves.LoreOfClark said:
It's even worse for inertial confinement schemes, where they're trying to get as close as possible to a 100% burn anyways, making anything Behemoth can do pointless. Oh noes! He's going to significantly improve the efficiency of our device! Jesus Christ how horrifying.
Meanwhile, all it takes for Behemoth to potentially wreck an entire region with a fission plant is to direct enough neutron radiation at it to cause a meltdown. Sure, there are all sorts of safeties designed to prevent that, but as Chernobyl and Fukushima prove, older plants won't be properly Endbringer-proofed.
A fuel tank need only be aerosolized and introduced to a spark to cause damage out of proportion to the device carrying the fuel tank.
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Ahahahaha.LoreOfClark said:
No.
Firstly, that's not at all how fusion works. The plasma is contained in a ring/torus, and used to produce heat, which turns water into steam, which drives a turbine. Same as in a fission reactor, where the heat of fission is used to heat the internal water, which heats a separate supply of uncontaminated water, which is turned to steam and drives a turbine. I'm not sure how you think the plasma will "slowly give off energy" when the magnetic field is reduced, or indeed how that energy is supposed to be collected, in the format you describe.
If the magnets do fail in a real fusion reaction, the plasma hits the wall of the torus and instantly flash-cools to "hot air". The wall of the torus probably melts a bit. That's it. That's the entire "massive explosion" you get.
There's also, frankly, not very much plasma for him to use, even if he could get it out without, as already said, instantly flash-cooling it down to useless hot gas as soon as it touches anything.
Plasma isn't some kind of magical "destroy anything it touches" substance. It's just very hot ionised gas. And the thing about very hot gases is that they are a) very hot, meaning they radiate heat away very effectively when not inside extremely delicate containment, and b) gases, meaning they plume and disperse like a bitch and radiate even more heat away. With nothing sustaining it, your plasma rapidly cools down and becomes pretty harmless (okay, hot gas can still scald, but frankly that's less damaging than a well-aimed handgun), and disperses harmlessly into the atmosphere.
Wrong again, and with as little understanding of what fission is. Fissioning material is under no chance of exploding, though you're right about the need for control rods. I won't bother explaining the process, but the thing that causes a meltdown is heat. Specifically, it's what happens when the reactor isn't shut down in time - by, say, some complete bastard of an Endbringer smashing all the control rods and safety systems - and the reactor vessel melts, kicking off an extremely nasty series of events that culminates, among other things, in massive clouds of internal-coolant-turned-steam laced with highly radioactive isotopes being spewed into the air and drifting down to cover vast swathes of land downwind.LoreOfClark said:
Considering Behemoths power would he even need a nuclear power plant to cause those kinds of destruction?
FlatlineAskari
*feline scrutiny*
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If you happened to be a giant walking assault on the laws of physics, could you in principle induce prompt criticality by cracking open the reactor, lifting out the fuel assembly and dialing your radiation death field up to eleven? Or would that require a really implausible neutron flux?Aleph said:
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Not sure, but it would probably be easier to just crush the fuel very quickly to cause it to initiate. That shouldn't be that hard once he has the fuel.sdjsdj said:
Well, those magnets would be pretty strong. Depending on how they fail, you could get some nasty projectiles. I'd certainly want a sturdy wall between me and the reactor. Happily, walls come standard with nuclear reactors. Engineers are just awesome that way.Aleph said:
Of more concern would be standing on the carrier that needed a reactor to stay in the air. That, and, you know, the nearby Endbringer.
FlatlineAskari
*feline scrutiny*
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Pretty sure that wouldn't work with fuel-grade material, even if you could crush it quickly and precisely enough.TheLastOne said:
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
You couldn't get a bomb from it (well, a good one) from it, but you should be able to speed up the rate it's fission, and produce all kinds of nasty things that could be scattered far and wide.sdjsdj said:
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Okay, lesson time.sdjsdj said:
Unless he went to extreme lengths, that would probably just make the fuel rods get very hot.
That's it. Radioactive material doesn't explode except under extraordinary circumstances, or it would be happening all the time deep beneath the Earth's crust. That's one of the main sources of heat within our planet, after all; radioactive materials. So, let's zoom in on a single atomic nucleus within the fuel rod to see what's happening during fission.
It starts when it's hit by a neutron. This causes the large, unstable nucleus to split into two smaller nuclei, a state which is more energetically favourable. It also spits out a few neutrons, since larger nuclei need a higher neutron-to-proton ratio than smaller ones. This reaction also causes quite a lot of heat, so that bit of the rod gets hotter. Not all of the neutrons will hit other nuclei, some will just escape the rod entirely. But some will, and spark other reactions. The "critical mass" is the point at which you've got a big enough hunk of material that you're producing as many neutrons as you're losing. Past that point, you're producing more than you're losing, and so each reaction sparks more than one daughter reaction. At this point, fission accelerates and the rod gets very, very, very hot. This is why you have control rods - they soak up the neutrons flying around in the reaction chamber and reduce the number of them that can spark more reactions. It allows you to alter how fast the fission is progressing.
Now, this fuel-rod-and-control-rod assembly is in the reaction chamber, a big ol' tank of water. Naturally, since the rods are getting very, very hot, so does the water. You can't use that, though, because it's got trace elements of radioactive material in it, and would probably kill you if you so much as took a dip in it. So instead, you pipe this boiling hot inner coolant through a series of tubes that wind around a second, separate supply of water, which is uncontaminated. The heat transfers across, converting the clean water to steam. The radioactive material doesn't. This hot, expanding steam then rushes out under high pressure and drives a turbine, producing delicious electricity.
When a plant melts down, the fuel rods are not the part you need to worry about. Sure, they're horribly radioactive, but radiation does not have an infinite range. Frankly, if the reactor chamber has thick walls, you probably don't have to worry too much about it once you're the edge of the plant.
No, the real threat is the inner coolant and other radioactive materials, which is mixed with highly radioactive isotopes from the fuel rods. When the core melts down, the rods get hot enough that they melt through the bottom of the reaction chamber [1] - and that releases the coolant. Which turns into steam, laced with all that horrifyingly radioactive material, and billows up into the air in a great big cloud.
And what goes up, must come down. So whatever's downwind of the plant gets showered in decaying isotopes. And wouldn't you know, they're throwing out neutrons, too, because many of the products of that initial radioactive decay are radioactive and unstable themselves. So they start chucking out high-energy neutrons as they decay, which hit things around them. And trigger radioactive decay in some of them. The whole area gets irradiated, both with the byproducts of the initial reaction that escaped the chamber, and with the byproducts of those byproducts that are scattered all over the fallout area. And some of those byproducts have very long half lives.
If Behemoth wants to cause damage, he shouldn't go waving the fuel rods around or pushing them to go all Hiroshima. He probably could, if he threw utterly ridiculous numbers of neutrons at them to make up for the way it's not weapons-grade and simulate the conditions of a nuclear bomb, but at that point it's more his own powers than the actual fuel rods. And all he really needs to do is crack open the reaction chamber, or maybe vaporise water and fuel rods both. The fallout as the particles settle will do his job for him better than he ever could by using them as a weapon.
[1] Actually there are a lot of things that can happen there, because the combination of superheated steam and hot metal inside the core is not a good one, and can cause hydrogen to form from the water and then explode, unpleasant reactions between the fuel and the coolant, fluid hammers and all manner of other nasty stuff. But in general, the root cause is one or more fuel rods overheating to the point where they melt, and break open the reaction chamber so that radioactive material can escape.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Was hawaii ever mentioned in canon? I imagine leviathan could make the place near uninhabitable just by hitting the Oahu aquafer
SemiSaneAuthor
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Behemoth or Simurgh could likely do horrible things to Yellowstone, setting of said Super Volcano would royally screw over the USA and make a volcanic winter that would cover the planet. They haven't done this (yet) so they have some kind of game plan other than destroying things, it is improbable that they are working to (Spoiler)Stop Scion(spoiler). So ... What is their plan?