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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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I propose this, attempting to match the mechanics to the given description rather than the suggested resolution.

Take a modern, high efficiency, diffuse LED lightbulb. Not an extreme one, just something in the 10-15W region. When you look directly at that bulb up close, it's locally blindingly bright in the sense that you're unable to see detail on the bulb, but not in the sense that it's uncomfortable to look at, even sustained.

Imagine tiling the surface of the zone with those bulbs. It appears that bright from the outside, and it's uniformly as bright as that surface on the inside.
 
Veedrac said:
When you look directly at that bulb up close, it's locally blindingly bright in the sense that you're unable to see detail on the bulb, but not in the sense that it's uncomfortable to look at, even sustained.
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How close is close?

If you're looking directly into that sucker from a foot or so away it's going to be uncomfortable to look at pretty quickly.
 
FaintlySorcerous said:
How close is close?

If you're looking directly into that sucker from a foot or so away it's going to be uncomfortable to look at pretty quickly.
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It's physically difficult to look at a sprawl of them from a foot away without closing one eye (which seems like a weird reaction honestly, but it's the observable), my eyes start watering, and I get persistence of vision artifacts pretty quickly, but it's certainly not painful like looking at the sun. I think even with 100% coverage (aka. inside the zone) you'd be physically totally fine if you closed your eyes, though if you stayed in there for a meaningful amount of time it'd take a bit to adapt back to normal lighting conditions.
 
Veedrac said:
Imagine tiling the surface of the zone with those bulbs. It appears that bright from the outside, and it's uniformly as bright as that surface on the inside.
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Seems more complicated and less straightforward than just describing what the omnidirectional version does out to X zones and using a real-world reference for if you concentrate it into a beam.
 
DanZapman said:
Seems more complicated and less straightforward than just describing what the omnidirectional version does out to X zones and using a real-world reference for if you concentrate it into a beam.
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I... don't understand? Surely 'the description says it's observably this bright, let's find something that looks that bright locally and math how much energy that is if the whole surface is that bright' is the straightforward way of doing what you say? The issue with trying to anchor to Luxor or some random handheld flashlight is that nobody knows how bright that is (in a useful non-numeric sense) or what factors to apply. These don't get in the way if you are just using a fixed brightness reference, especially one a normal person can get for a few dollars.
 
Veedrac said:
and math how much energy that is if the whole surface is that bright
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The thing is that step is unnecessary.

Veedrac said:
The issue with trying to anchor to Luxor or some random handheld flashlight is that nobody knows how bright that is (in a useful non-numeric sense) or what factors to apply.
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The Luxor is pretty well documented and the numeric aspects ARE the useful sense since this is a text quest. Also you can just look it up to see how bright it is.
 
DanZapman said:
The Luxor is pretty well documented and the numeric aspects ARE the useful sense since this is a text quest. Also you can just look it up to see how bright it is.
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But how on earth do you make sure the calculated brightness matches the description?

With the light version it's easy: the light has a fixed surface brightness. The big version has the same surface brightness. With the Luxor beam you're taking something whose observable brightness is known for the indirect reflections of a collimated beam off a seven mile column of air, and trying to match that to a spherical surface of a given observable brightness. I think that's not impossible but it just sounds annoying as heck.
 
Veedrac said:
But how on earth do you make sure the calculated brightness matches the description?
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Well, if my proposal is accepted, then the rune does magic with chakra and the QMs agree that the runic output is the quoted figure.

Veedrac said:
The big version has the same surface brightness. With the Luxor beam you're taking something whose observable brightness is known for the indirect reflections of a collimated beam off a seven mile column of air, and trying to match that to a spherical surface of a given observable brightness.
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None of this seems relevant. We want to know what the beam does because we want the beam to kill Akatsuki.
 
Hazou's Epic Rune of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Steal Your Forbidden Lore, This Means You, Shikamaru

Does exactly what Jiraiya's Epic Seal of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Punch You In The Face, This Means You, Hazō does, expect this is a runic version that mimics Akane's voice saying "Fire Element: Elemental Mastery Technique".

(I'm sorry, I can't help it)
 
faflec said:
Hazou's Epic Rune of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Steal Your Forbidden Lore, This Means You, Shikamaru

Does exactly what Jiraiya's Epic Seal of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Punch You In The Face, This Means You, Hazō does, expect this is a runic version that mimics Akane's voice saying "Fire Element: Elemental Mastery Technique".

(I'm sorry, I can't help it)
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Five thousand years later, when the age of the shinobi was little more than a myth, the name "Shikamaru" continued to live on thanks to the archaeological discovery of an ancient rune inscribed with a threat to his forbidden lore.
 
DanZapman said:
The point is to NOT need to do math. We have another rune being prepped to focus it into a beam with rune magic.
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OK but why is this a thing you're optimizing for? You can obviously just make arbitrary statements about how much energy is in this or that, but having narrative physical consistency is always something I've liked about MfD (it is, after all, how SINs and EM nukes and Skywalkers came to be).

Also the math is not particularly hard.
Assume 20W bulbs and luminous efficiency of 25%, for 5W light output.
Assume a zone is about 10m diameter. I can't remember what was used for eg. Elemental Mastery, so I'm winging it.
A bulb is about 7cm diameter.

Area of bulb, assuming approximately a circle, ~0.015m² ~0.004m².
Area of zone, ~630m².
Watts, 630 / 0.004 × 5 W ~ 790,000 W.

So about 800 kW light output. Remember that this is light output, not input power. I think Luxor is probably around the 10 kW range, so this is significantly more than that, but not to my eyes unreasonably so. Please note that these numbers should be about right to the order of magnitude, but not much closer than that.

Some more math suggests this is not hugely greater than the radiative intensity from the sun at noon, also 300 kW over that area, which seems surprising? Sunlight is mostly infrared, so it's not that crazy, this is still much brighter than the sun, but it's still weirding me out how close they are.

E: edited with corrections and adjustments
 
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faflec said:
Hazou's Epic Rune of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Steal Your Forbidden Lore, This Means You, Shikamaru

Does exactly what Jiraiya's Epic Seal of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Punch You In The Face, This Means You, Hazō does, expect this is a runic version that mimics Akane's voice saying "Fire Element: Elemental Mastery Technique".

(I'm sorry, I can't help it)
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You laugh but I'm legitimately going to vote for this next cycle.
 
DanZapman said:
QM spoons. I would like to reach the goal of "Yeah this kills Akatsuki if you land a hit" as simply as possible.
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idk that this is a thing you can get at this point, so I don't think the math is helpful for it. These theoretical optical lasers are pretty good for blinding at distance, but figuring that out inevitably involves math, and killing is hard. If you go gamma, probably you can get to lethal, but having any confidence there is going to be mathy again. Of course QMs can just say 'this laser happens to be blinding or lethal or whatever, by fiat', and that's fine, but also that's not really for you to decide.
 
Paperclipped said:
Namikaze Minato's Revolutionary Soon-to-be-World-Changing Uber-Sealing Style (Note to Self: Come Back and Name This Later)
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Ai, how did that ink spill there?
Paperclipped said:
Grants the user the ability to make seals out of pure chakra, anchored to the user's chakra system.
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Feels like some overlap here between what Sharingan and Iron Nerve can copy. Mmmm. What benefits could there be to seals anchored to chakra systems? Effects powered by more chakra, like runes? Does it open up using a class of seal effects that normally only work on objects on yourself? Anchoring seals to others? Interactions with aura? Jiraiya found a way to counter Flying Thunder God with seals.
 
Ok I know I said it as a joke earlier, but I am becoming more and more interested in adapting the Cannibal Seal we found in the Basement into a runic form, or at least a portion of it. Specifically, the part of it that activates in response to being seen by another. If we can materalize it as part of a complex rune, like say the Remote Explosive Rune suggested earlier, we could have a situation where an enemy looking at the rune causes the rune to activate and kill the enemy.

This would have interesting implications for Itachi as well. Does the Sharingan's precognitive abilities work against it here? If Itachi, looking 3 seconds ahead in time with the Sharingan, sees the rune, does the rune detonate? Can we make an advanced explosive that explodes Itachi because he saw it happening with his Sharingan?
 
faflec said:
k I know I said it as a joke earlier, but I am becoming more and more interested in adapting the Cannibal Seal we found in the Basement into a runic form, or at least a portion of it. Specifically, the part of it that activates in response to being seen by another.
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Absolutely, 100%. I'd been considering suggesting this myself; the reason I didn't is, intuitively, I expect this sort of effect wouldn't be easier to replicate with a rune. Runes, so far, seem to be more about large-scale powerful effects, not intricate stuff like this.

Worth dropping a prep day on this, though, for sure.
This would have interesting implications for Itachi as well. Does the Sharingan's precognitive abilities work against it here? If Itachi, looking 3 seconds ahead in time with the Sharingan, sees the rune, does the rune detonate? Can we make an advanced explosive that explodes Itachi because he saw it happening with his Sharingan?
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Ooooooh. Haven't though of that. Brilliant. And given that spacetime shenanigans seem easier with runes, then if we can replicate the "activates on sight" component, then adding this on top shouldn't be too difficult.

And I'm pretty sure we have the blank for the Cannibal Seal (right? I remember asking that repeatedly, and repeatedly forgetting the answer), meaning we can study it to get veterancy...

Okay, this seems like a legitimately promising anti-Itachi tool.
 
Prepared Explosive Rune

This is a modified explosive rune that only explodes after its existence is visually perceived by a person.
 
faflec said:
Ok I know I said it as a joke earlier, but I am becoming more and more interested in adapting the Cannibal Seal we found in the Basement into a runic form, or at least a portion of it. Specifically, the part of it that activates in response to being seen by another. If we can materalize it as part of a complex rune, like say the Remote Explosive Rune suggested earlier, we could have a situation where an enemy looking at the rune causes the rune to activate and kill the enemy.

This would have interesting implications for Itachi as well. Does the Sharingan's precognitive abilities work against it here? If Itachi, looking 3 seconds ahead in time with the Sharingan, sees the rune, does the rune detonate? Can we make an advanced explosive that explodes Itachi because he saw it happening with his Sharingan?
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I suspect perception => explosion is going to be much more difficult to set up than perception => mental effect. How about we start by designing a variant which, rather than cannibalism, drives the reader to an equivalently all-consuming obsession with improving the living conditions of civilians they've never met? Hazo and Tsunade would, of course, be naturally immune.
 
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