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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Left-Hand Mutant said:
"disrupt physical chakra constructs" seems like the theme here. will also mess with Kisami's jutsu.
The issue is that it will also disrupt our own summons/SC, and "invent a chakra battery, then flood the combat with SC and summons" seems like a promising combat route for us.
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Yeah. It's kind of confusing. I can see the chakra constructs weakening, but then there was some physique debuffs on the originals. And then the jutsus deployed were normal...Perhaps it weakens chakra potential internally?
 
So. I think I've worked out a way that we can vastly improve our competency in combat at relatively minimal input-value when it comes to time on our part. It requires a single seal that, because it is based on a seal that we made doesn't fall into the usual "but why hasn't anyone else done this" problems.

To confirm that this works with minimal adjustment, we will first need to determine that momentum, like heat, is stored in storage seals, as an extant form of energy held within the item being stored. I leave this as an exercise to the reader; there's many ways we could do this.

Once that is determined to be true, we just need to make a storage seal that when set up properly will store an object that flies over it at arbitrary speed. The storage part of it can be complicated and messy: requiring it happen at a specific height, requiring multiple seal elements, whatever, so long as the unstoring step works about the same as normal storage seals.

Once we have done that, we can use the fact that the motion of a storage seal imparts speed on its contents when released mid-motion (this is part of how macerators work in combat!) to store an object going at X speed, take that seal, and then store it at X + X, and then X + X + X, until we're just shy of breaking the sound barrier with our punches. Considering that, IIRC, our current macerators release their contents at around 40 m/s and provide a +6 bonus to taijutsu. The sound barrier is at around 300 m/s. I bet we could get a substantially higher bonus with that.
 
Cariyaga said:
So. I think I've worked out a way that we can vastly improve our competency in combat at relatively minimal input-value when it comes to time on our part. It requires a single seal that, because it is based on a seal that we made doesn't fall into the usual "but why hasn't anyone else done this" problems.

To confirm that this works with minimal adjustment, we will first need to determine that momentum, like heat, is stored in storage seals, as an extant form of energy held within the item being stored. I leave this as an exercise to the reader; there's many ways we could do this.

Once that is determined to be true, we just need to make a storage seal that when set up properly will store an object that flies over it at arbitrary speed. The storage part of it can be complicated and messy: requiring it happen at a specific height, requiring multiple seal elements, whatever, so long as the unstoring step works about the same as normal storage seals.

Once we have done that, we can use the fact that the motion of a storage seal imparts speed on its contents when released mid-motion (this is part of how macerators work in combat!) to store an object going at X speed, take that seal, and then store it at X + X, and then X + X + X, until we're just shy of breaking the sound barrier with our punches. Considering that, IIRC, our current macerators release their contents at around 40 m/s and provide a +6 bonus to taijutsu. The sound barrier is at around 300 m/s. I bet we could get a substantially higher bonus with that.
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Importantly, this would also (probably) use the macerator stunts, so we wouldn't need to get new ones.

@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped Interested in your thoughts on this re: how workable Hazou thinks this is.
 
Cariyaga said:
So. I think I've worked out a way that we can vastly improve our competency in combat at relatively minimal input-value when it comes to time on our part. It requires a single seal that, because it is based on a seal that we made doesn't fall into the usual "but why hasn't anyone else done this" problems.
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Why are only ninja who know about macerators capable of asking what happens if you store a moving object?
 
Velorien said:
Why are only ninja who know about macerators capable of asking what happens if you store a moving object?
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I believe the intent is that without the macerator buff you "only" achieve speeds that the object could naturally obtain. So a thrown kunai, stored mid-throw, would "only" be as fast as a thrown kunai when unstored. The mechanism Cariyaga describes here allows for the kunai's speed to increase indefinitely, each time it's stored, until it's far faster than any ninja could have thrown it.

So an ordinary ninja might use this idea to "borrow" the abilities of a RW teammate, for what good it does when you're not a RW-spec yourself. Probably some use but I can't imagine it'd be especially potent compared to what the RW-spec could do themselves. But then Hazou, with the macerator version of the trick, could accelerate the kunai to speeds unknown to ninja warfare, and reap greater benefits from that.

Personally what I want to know is whether storage seals preserve orientation relative to the seal, or in terms of absolute reference. If an object stored in motion does not orient relative to the seal when unstored, when Hazou unseals his moving kunai it might very well slam right into his chest instead. We'd need to make sure that the momentum preserved by the seal would actually point in the direction we point when we unseal it in battle.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
I believe the intent is that without the macerator buff you "only" achieve speeds that the object could naturally obtain. So a thrown kunai, stored mid-throw, would "only" be as fast as a thrown kunai when unstored. The mechanism Cariyaga describes here allows for the kunai's speed to increase indefinitely, each time it's stored, until it's far faster than any ninja could have thrown it.
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In other words, you need to ask two questions.

1) What happens if you store a moving object?

2) What happens if you unseal a storage seal while it's in motion?

If the same person asks both of these questions, what are they still missing?
 
Velorien said:
Why are only ninja who know about macerators capable of asking what happens if you store a moving object?
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What IV said. But also:

I do still think that it's entirely likely that no one would have tried this, as while macerator-like effects are something that lots of people have come up with (or, at least, some folks in Rock have done similar), the idea of storing the resultant object while in motion would not come naturally. I mean, look at us: so many people playing this quest for years and it took me this long to come up with the idea even with the modern perspective on motion and heat both being energy. In addition, of course, to the idea that experimenting with seals in the way Hazou does so casually is anathema to most sealmasters, even research ones. And this insight would require a research sealmaster's efforts to do anything with, because the way I was envisioning it...

Well. First off, I don't think it would be very easy to store an object in motion to begin with, with a basic storage seal. We can do it, but like... the timing would be really really hard... and impossible to do with a basic elemental clone, and potentially dangerous to do oneself, depending on the methodology. Secondly: Doing this at combat-effective level requires throwing your object at high speed, capturing it successfully (so at least two people to cooperate) and being certain of how it will emerge. The latter part can be done with a clone, so I won't penalize it too much for that. Third: It may be actually impossible in practice to "catch" objects in motion with a basic storage seal, even if possible in theory, because of needing to touch the seal or something about that.

The unique insight my seal design brings is more or less a *duration* of storage for a single object so that it can capture the item in question as it passes rather than needing to happen precisely the moment it touches the seal. (There may be other effects to it, but that's the basic idea.)

So, having said all that: let's do a probabilistic analysis of this.

Call that a 20% chance that someone would try this, if they had the idea. The kind of creativity and willingness to engage in it that Hazou operates with is notably rare according to many in-setting.

I'll say... 50% chance that someone has some combination of things that allows them to safely do testing. 40% from base odds that someone has Earth or Water affinity, extra 10% to cover people learning new affinities, clan shenanigans allowing it, etc.

Let's call it a 30% chance that someone has a friend willing to help them with sealing experiments. Again, most people aren't Hazou.

Let's call it a 15% chance that the research sealmaster survives long enough for this to spread or leak -- this one's really low because of how many things have been lost to the ages IRL, and the sheer amount of death in-setting.

What's the odds that someone comes up with this idea to begin with? Well... that's hard to put numbers to. This is going to be long and rambly and probably I'll come up with numbers that aren't important, but let's try to work it out anyway. There have been 626 people that posted in this thread, total. That's not really a fair number, though: Let's call it 75 for everyone that has made more than 500 posts in the thread. Given the way we interface with the story I think it's fair to consider us "research sealmasters" for the purposes of this analysis. The thread has been running for about 8.3 years. Okay. We're getting closer to good numbers here. 75 research sealmasters putting in, I'll say, an average of thirty minutes of thread-investment per day (obviously people like me and faflec and everyone who is reading this right this instant are outliers, but I'm trying to be generous to the "this is easy to come up with" side.)

That's about 45,442.5 man hours of eyes on the topic from sealing researchers (We have no idea where this falls on the bell curve of likelihood to discover. I assume median, but it could be on either end.). How much time does the average sealmaster spend doing research? Well, I don't know that this is something I can reasonably guess, so I'm just gonna say: Given the culture of ninja and the predilection for people to throw themselves pointlessly into combat in spite of not having a combat specialty, Ebisu*, let's call it an average of 30 hours a month. This sounds like very little. It is. However: This is averaged across their lives, including time on missions, with family, etc. So. How many sealmaster years does it take to equal the investment of the hivemind here? 126 years.

How long does the average research sealmaster live? Well. it is known to be a fraught job, even by the standards of ninja. The average ninja is a genin, and the average ninja lives 3 years, according to Inferno Vulpix, who is Known to be the guru of such statistics. He also shares that Chuunin live an average of 1.55 years and Jounin an average of 2 years. At least in Mist, sealmastery is more of a chuunin specialty. I'm gonna assume that remains the case elsewhere. Given that sealmasters still take combat missions because they're fucking idiots like Ebisu (see also: Kurosawa), let's be generous and say it lowers their average lifespan by 30%, to 1.085 years.

So, wrapping back around, that is 116 average-sealmaster-lives that our investment equates to. This does not seem like too far off of a number, even if this math is fucky and me throwing numbers at a wall, so it's close enough to play ball with.

How much research time is put toward storage seals? To answer this, we'll need to know the total-effective-research-GDP, for which we'll need to know the average number of sealmasters in a village. Well, we've been told that in Leaf, where Jiraiya makes his home, they aren't especially common (this is not true now, of course, but historically is what we're concerned with right now): at most one per clan, and frequently significantly less. Let's call that four or five on average per major village, and 1-3 for a minor one. Assuming that storage seals were available at the start of the village era, 70 years ago, that means somewhere around 25-30 ish active research sealmasters across the whole Elemental Nations. Call it an even 30. They've been working, as previously established, at 30 hours a month on average for their lives, and in the 70 years since the Village Era's start, they have managed a total-effective-research-GDP effective 756,000 research hours spread across all fields. (30 hours a month * 30 sealmasters * 70 years)

But how much time toward storage seals? We know from Jiraiya that Rock has worked on time-delayed storage seals about forty years back, but not much more than that. Let's call it... on a guess, 8% of total-research-GDP toward storage seals and storage seal accessories. That's 60,480 man-hours toward munchkinning storage seals.

Now we're getting somewhere! That sounds like a lot. However! It does not take into account the likelihood of coming up with this particular adjustment of storage seals, it is just raw brains thrown at storage seals. The important part, is that having done some research, talked to a couple friends of mine involved in research fields IRL, and asked on the MfD discord, is that the odds of having a particular insight are somewhere between 5 and 10%. (This is probably wildly higher than it actually would be; there's lots discovered every year IRL that we could have discovered in the sixties.)

So let's multiply it all out, taking into account all of this. 60,480 * .2 * .5 * .3 * .15 * .1 = 27.216 probabilistic research hours on this problem in particular across the whole of the EN.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader whether 27 research hours split across a dozen nations is sufficient to come up with this.

*I'm shitting on Ebisu relentlessly here. This isn't a dig at y'all's writing or anything. I'm just annoyed at him and he makes a good example.

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...Anyway. All of that is to say, based on that fermi estimate I don't think it's unsimulationist that no one have thought of this.


e: Some things I forgot to mention: I don't think that research prior to the village era is especially likely to be relevant on the scale of things, because of the massively-increased odds of research being lost with a single sealmaster's death.
 
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Velorien said:
In other words, you need to ask two questions.

1) What happens if you store a moving object?

2) What happens if you unseal a storage seal while it's in motion?

If the same person asks both of these questions, what are they still missing?
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Being a research sealmaster. Being willing to experiment with seals, given that they are a research sealmaster. (This is notably not guaranteed, and increases one's chance of death to sealing failures to be so, beyond that that research sealmasters themselves have. See: The SIN incident.) A research methodology that answers these questions (the scientific method doesn't exist! Spirits are the answer to many scientific questions!).

Those two questions elide a lot of the background in what it would take to answer them. It doesn't really matter if some genin works out that he can store his friend's throws if he doesn't think to bring it to a sealmaster's attention and dies in, on average, 2.15 years.
 
While I don't necessarily disagree with the logic you present, I think I would prefer to pursue rune research instead. Sure, this stone might be unturned, but we know more-or-less for a fact that Runes haven't been done since the Sage. And we know that runes explicitly are not subject to the 'must not break the setting' limitation that seals are subject to.

It's a matter of "this probably is a low hanging fruit" vs "this is a golden apple which fell from the tree and gave us a Severe on the way down".
 
Buggy said:
While I don't necessarily disagree with the logic you present, I think I would prefer to pursue rune research instead. Sure, this stone might be unturned, but we know more-or-less for a fact that Runes haven't been done since the Sage. And we know that runes explicitly are not subject to the 'must not break the setting' limitation that seals are subject to.

It's a matter of "this probably is a low hanging fruit" vs "this is a golden apple which fell from the tree and gave us a Severe on the way down".
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If you can suggest a rune that can be used for general improvement to our mobile combat effectiveness without further expenditure of XP toward it, I am all ears.

(Genuinely!)
 
So, thing I'd want to put in the plan along with Cariyaga's idea.


Rune of Clever Name Or Something I Don't Know 'Monkey Patch' Kinda Works But Also Not And Doesn't Really Roll Off The Tongue:

Upon activation, the Rune briefly accesses the pocket dimension that holds the contents of a storage seal placed atop it. A minor action is performed on the contents (heating, cooling, macerate it, etc, whatever we have more experience with). The contents are not exposed to the world, nor do they cease being timeless, even for a instant.
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Edit: I asked, we're out of free days in the current plan. Next plan I guess.
 
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Sir Stompy said:
[X] Action Plan: Let the Dogs Out Yourself
Word Count: 298
  • Sanity check and optimize with Mari/Kei
    • Thank Kei for her analysis of the Hyena situation, we won't be pursuing the Hyena Scroll
    • Report about Noburi refilling Sasuke and Kei Ruri
      • How do we respond to this? Should we go to Naruto? Ignore it?
    • Suggest Kei/Yuno/Noburi explore the Flame Shade caves to derust
      • If she thinks that's too dangerous, suggest a chakra beast hunt.
  • Dogs:
    • Clear with Cannai first.
    • Ask the Horizon Chasers if they'd be willing to move to Toad.
      • Pangolin could get rather dangerous for Dogs, as it seems the Dogs and Hyenas are on a collision course with the Pangolins.
      • The Toad Sages have invited Hazou to visit and the Horizon Chasers would be their honored guests
        • Double check that with the Toad Sages during one of their visits to Leaf
        • Ask them if they'd be willing to lean on the Toad/Pangolin a little alliance to get permission for the Horizon Chasers to visit
      • Hazou is willing to escort them himself if necessary.
    • (Don't mention to Kei/Mari) Ask Cantahapuyu if she feels comfortable training a human in Technique Hacking, or if the biological differences are too great.
  • Sealing Research
    • Don't begin this until it's clear that we won't be interrupted midway by the Horizon Chasers
    • Use the IN for infusions when possible
    • First track - RRBs
      • Full Prep, invoke as much as possible. Use Kazushi as an assistant if Kagome is busy
      • Reroll a -9 or worse on Sealing/Calligraphy
    • Second track - mixed
      • No prep
      • Only reroll for the mixed track if Hazoupilot thinks he's risking a sealing failure
      • Uninjured Difficulty Check on Great Seal
      • Research Light Shift Seals
      • Finish Substitution seals
      • Then (time permitting) Explosive 2.0
      • On the same day as the infusion for RRBs, research Force Walls w/ SSA
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Okay, WC is below 300. Thanks for the help @Buggy with finishing that off.
 
eaglejarl said:
Hazō sees no reason it would be impossible. Come up with an exact definition of what you will research and then spend a prep day to get difficulty.
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To confirm:
If Hazou rolls a ball over a storage seal on a level surface, and seals the ball mid-roll, does it continue roll once unsealed?

Hazou seals his canteen while jogging. When he stops jogging, he unseals the canteen. Is the unsealed canteen stationary, or does it "jump" away from the scroll with the momentum of the jog?

Question 1 should confirm that momentum/velocity is preserved.
Question 2 should confirm that the preserved velocity is relitive to the seal, not geocentric or something.
These should be trivial tests, and Hazou probably knows the answers offhand.
 
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