OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
The crossover question was literally answered on the same page you made that post. It's also in the list of tags on the bottom.
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An Imago of Rust and Crimson (Worm crossover)
- Thread starter EarthScorpion
- Start date
The crossover question was literally answered on the same page you made that post. It's also in the list of tags on the bottom.
IMO, both of these agents are screaming Memetic Hazard themselves.
EDIT: I'm also feeling a bit of the SCP Foundation, but that's probably just me.
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RazorSmile
ROB Used To Be A Knife Missile
Like everyone else, the notion of Slaughterhouse as a memetic virus instead of a conveniently overpowered team appeals and merges very well with this industrial cybergoth alternate setting you're running here. I guess we know how the Broadcast shard manifested in *this* timeline, huh.
I like tinkerfab a lot as well. Your take on tinkertech on the other hand ... eh. I would almost rather have Tinkers have a conflated grabbag of powers that makes their crap possible i.e. Shaker-Striker power that alters the laws of physics while they are building to make the creation of the device possible and something that increases their fine dexterity/motor control a millionfold. End result: technology that is permitted by mundane physics but creation methods that are not.
Also, it almost looks like Taylor here has the neutered 'vaccine' version of Slaughterhouse?
I like tinkerfab a lot as well. Your take on tinkertech on the other hand ... eh. I would almost rather have Tinkers have a conflated grabbag of powers that makes their crap possible i.e. Shaker-Striker power that alters the laws of physics while they are building to make the creation of the device possible and something that increases their fine dexterity/motor control a millionfold. End result: technology that is permitted by mundane physics but creation methods that are not.
Also, it almost looks like Taylor here has the neutered 'vaccine' version of Slaughterhouse?
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Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
That would be a lot more limited though. No exotic effects, random forcefields, or transformation lazers.
RazorSmile
ROB Used To Be A Knife Missile
True enough but, if one looks at the stuff that is *theoretically* permitted by real-world physics, it starts to look a lot like comic book science anyway.
That said, I would still be okay with it even then.
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- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You still have tinkertech for all the crazy 'so long physics and thanks for all the fish' equipment (like the shields, time-stop bombs and so on).
And yeah, as noted above, some of the current prototypes and experiments and so on are getting pretty crazy.
And yeah, as noted above, some of the current prototypes and experiments and so on are getting pretty crazy.
Eh, in canon every power operates according to laws of physics and can theoretically be replicated. Humanity just doesn't posses the necessary knowledge.
The way it works here, you have tinkertech for bullshit stuff made of SCIENCE! and duct tape, and tinkerfab for prototypes of near-future technology. I am not sure what the existence of tech principles of which are understood by scientists but which cannot be created by anyone but a few select people would add to it.
Amorous Intent
Love the future
- Location
- Octavia, Venus
- Pronouns
- She/her
Ha, ha, ha!
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
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- Location
- Australia
No. No they are not.
They are comprised of a core of pure bullshitonium, wrapped in about two hundred layers of bullshit, then dunked in a vat of liquid bullshit before being handed out.
They are space whale magic in every single way. "Sufficiently advanced technology" works solely as an aesthetic explanation; in every way that could possibly matter, you're not going to be able to justify them as being actual sufficiently advanced technology.
I'm not convinced they even aesthetic work that way.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I sense a Doyalist /watsonian miscommunication here. Because watsonianly speaking, illhousen is correct. Doyalistly, space magic doesn't even begin to cover it.
Amorous Intent
Love the future
- Location
- Octavia, Venus
- Pronouns
- She/her
Let me expound upon this with some examples.
Chevalier's power to merge similar objects together and create a composite with exactly the traits he desires, besides being a Correspondence/Space 4 rote in both Mage games, is completely unphysical. There is no physical mechanism for this, proposed or otherwise. There is no quantum effect that is even similar if you squint really hard.
Then we have the powers of Coil and Dinah. Despite what you might think, word of god is that both of these are precognition powers performed by computers the size of a planet. Okay, simulating a planet with sufficient detail to predict the future is a transcomputational problem, so that makes sense. But there's a problem here. Coil can perfectly predict the answers Dinah will give, in blatant violation of the halting problem, which states that no computer of equivalent mathematical complexity can determine the answer to an algorithm faster than running it, and this is true for the entire arithmetical hierarchy. The only side effect is that Dinah's numbers change, meaning that her shard is capable of predicting the actions of an actor that has full access to an even more powerful computer!
This is just scratching the surface here. I'm specifically ignoring things that can be explained with soft scifi staples that have no basis in real life, like antigravity, force fields, parallel universe travel, et al, and I could still list more examples.
He's blatantly wrong on both accounts. Worm powers are physics in precisely the same sense that Star Trek technobabble is science, i.e., none at all.
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It would seem that in Worm canon, there are a set of scientific principles that are, to us, unknown unknowns. That is, we don't even know they exist. That doesn't make it magic, it just makes it soft-ish - par for the course for a superhero story.
This is literally the most obvious thing ever; there's one computer, and it supplies the information for both powers. Alternately, the computers talk to one another.
Antigravity is theoretically possible, assuming one is willing to accept the complete annihilation of the solar system as a side effect, and happens to have an energy source hundreds of trillions of orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we've ever built.
Hey, that describes the Entities to a T!
Sci fi is, at its core, an attempt to write a story in a time period for which the author has no reference point. This is completely irrelevant, of course, because unlike Star Trek, Worm is about superheroes. Sci fi mixes with science like oil mixes with water; if you know enough about science, you can do it, but the uneducated frequently think it's impossible, and wouldn't recognize the real thing if it were right in front of them. Superheroes mix with science like positrons mix with electrons; both are annihilated in a spectacular display, leaving nothing but a crater the size of Rhode Island.
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Amorous Intent
Love the future
- Location
- Octavia, Venus
- Pronouns
- She/her
Except it stops being "unknown physics" when it directly contradicts known physics in irreconcilable ways, like using an anti-graviton beam to cut open an event horizon--a mathematical boundary--to escape a black hole (Star Trek: Voyager). This makes exactly the same amount of sense as using a scalpel to part heaven from earth and cut open the horizon. Worm manages to do worse by violating theorems, which are inviolable by definition.
Also, people need to stop wurbling about "muh canon." ES threw that out the window in chapter fucking one, and good riddance.
This would hold a lot more water if Chevalier's power wasn't literally sympathetic magic.
Why would precog powers cooperate when literally no other power does this? Doubly so when the whole goddamn point was pitting powers against each other in competition.
Also, Coil and Dinah's powers come from two different Entities, making your claim even more implausible. I'm pretty sure Coil's power can also perfectly predict Contessa, in spite of her power being from a third Entity that had only brief contact.
So you agree that Worm has nothing to do with physics whatsoever.
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In setting, they may not be absolute, or even similar to reality. It's not a concern of the narrative, but just the framing.
But I agree, this has basically no relevance to this fic which is crossovered AND AU'ed significantly.
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ckk185
Crazy Bunny Girl Scientist
- Location
- Port city
Unknown physics practically means bullshitium for all we know. Or we can be wee bit more polite and say Space Magic.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Meh, I always thought it was 'convenient' that the one surviving team of murder-hobos was over-powered the same way it's 'convenient' that when I walk into a large hospital there are a lot of doctors around. It's not random or accidental. There are selection pressures in place and you don't read about the guys who wanted to be murder-hobos but couldn't cut it or the ones the S9 decided weren't worth recruiting.
Ah well, we'll see if they end up making more or less sense as a memetic virus.
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They probably work better as a memetic virus.
If you look at it from another perspective, the canon S9 are just minions for Jack, the only invariant part of the S9 that survives through the whole thing. Riley, Crawler and Manton made up the rest of his core team, difficult to replace, but the S9 can continue as long as Jack lives to mindfuck new members. And the rest of the S9 are effectively abalative serial killers. That, and Cauldron conspiracy stacking the deck for them because they make a shitton of triggers along the way. You probably COULD replace Jack, but it'd take Administrator or similar covert secondary power.
As a memetic virus, all those complications go away. All you need is patient zero(Jack) and at least one carrier getting away undetected. Then it'd cause triggers and attract the infected, forming the Nine once more.
Actually, that exists, and is entirely contained within the tinkerfab category. Indeed, that's the "root" of it. You have to work out how to make the tinkerfab without the aid of a parahuman before you can really begin mass production.
For example, if Railgunmakerman, Element Transmutorgirl, and THE HUMAN BATTERY! get together, they can make a tinkerfab railgun which works using superconducting magnets which require Element Transmutorgirl to personally make them because no one else can get the right purity for the designs, and which has to be carried by THE HUMAN BATTERY! because there isn't a compact power source powerful enough to allow it to fire. It's still tinkerfab, because it works mundanely. It's also something which can't be replicated by conventional engineers because no one can make the magnets right, and it can only be fired by THE HUMAN BATTERY! if you don't want it to be vehicle mounted.
Some tinkerfab things are mass produced using tinkertech machines, which puts a hard limit on how much of them you can actually make. This is especially true of high end microelectronics, because the Imago world's capacity to produce silicon chips is - after all - has a median level of about that of 1995. Bullshitonium is used to mass produce high quality silicon chips which go into mundane, high end devices. Armsmaster has his incredibly carefully built and protected set of tinkertech tools he uses to carry out high end tinkerfab work. And so on.
So, yes. You do in fact have tinkerfab things that no one else knows how to make without parahumans, because they require bullshit powers to produce, but do not, in themselves, require bullshit powers to work. The divide between tinkerfab/tinkertech is in their manner of operation, not what's required to produce them.
I am aware that this fic doesn't follow canon, and that parahuman powers most likely have supernatural origin.
My point was a response to a specific argument: since RazorSmile didn't object to other parahumans being changed, there is no reason to complain that tinkers were changed as well in a similar manner.
In other words, I was arguing that they run on the same bullshitium as the rest of parahumans to begin with, ES just made it more explicit.
Eh, probably should've been more clear. Sorry for provoking a derail.
Also, I do like the logical conclusion that Star Trek tech runs on some unknown dark power concealed by a shady conspiracy.
Thanks for clarification. Always interesting to read your world-building posts.
FlatlineAskari
*feline scrutiny*
- Location
- Elsewhere
- Pronouns
- Any
Alternatively, they're on a Snark hunt, and their eight friends are otherwise engaged.
Loving the grim meathook near-future more with every update. Seems ... kind of J. G. Ballard-ish?