Does flight speed equal combat speed

Originally posted by Disappear
if something is moving at the speed of light, you can't "see it" until it "hits you." no matter how fine-tuned your senses or reflexes are, you won't see what's happening because the object is moving at the exact same speed as the light reflecting off it.

basically, you can't see light in motion, because the ability to see light depends entirely on the light hitting your eye, meaning it's already there. and if you can't see light in motion, how could you practically avoid a beam of light before it hits you?

LOL, true. I thought of that long ago. But these comic beings (like Superman) aren't using light to see. They are emitting some strange energy from their eyes that is traveling far faster than light and in which it bounces back off light to their eyes faster than light does.

Either that or we just accept the BS for what it is. And I don't necessarily mean the comics but rather the theory of relativity itself.

Originally posted by Disappear
cosmic awareness isn't necessarily faster than light, it's beyond the normal scope of perception. it's processing information from all across the universe at once, not necessarily processing it more quickly. i suppose if you considered that there could be alternate visual vantage points, like thousands of cameras pointing at a single area, that you could 'see' the light after it's moving but before it strikes your eyes.

still, i remember a scan that said the surfer [or maybe gladiator] was listening to something lightyears away, and i just gave up.

Surfer has no conceivable way of mapping the Galaxy/"quadrant"/universe in anything like a lifetime, if he cannot process information at speeds far in excess of light.

say if it took him just a hundredth of a second to 'take in' one planet's name, you'd then have to add on another for the planet's mass, another for its orbit duration, another for its gravitational pull ... then multiply all that by hundreds of millions of planets (in any random galaxy), billions of galaxies in a quadrant...

it's not like he's looking in one direction, but sweeping his head to cover every inch of the cosmos. cosmic awareness is an expanded consciousness, with multiple vantage points and parallel threads of information being processed simultaneously.

compare normal senses vs cosmic awareness to a pocket mag-lite v. the sun. the mag-lite can only expose and process information in small portions, regardless of how quickly the light's being swung about. the sun illuminates everything around it and ALL of that information could be processed at once.

i'm pretty sure it'd make more sense for surfer to be cataloging the cosmos with cosmic awareness than for him to have to be zipping around exponentially faster actually looking at every individual thing.

you're not getting my point. I'm saying that the volume of information would implicitly require FTL transmission.

it's like trying to stream HD television across a dozen 56kbps modems to a P60 computer processor.

if you can split the data packets up to send across the array of modems, you still end up with a bottleneck at the processor, which cannot throw up a picture of sufficiently high resolution fast enough to it to look like "motion". each image will take forever to load, refresh, clear, the cache will constantly overflow ...

the bandwidth may be enlarged (sunlight versus mag-lite) but without a boosted processor, you will still be in darkness.

Surfer has to have a "conscious" picture of the universe around him for light-years in every direction. to have that requires that he be able to 'animate' those 'pictures' sufficiently fast enough to make sense of them.

all that on top of the fact that he has to be moving at FTL speeds in order to gather the data (his CA only extends so far, not on the scale of Galactus or Genis, who can sense the whole universe and beyond) which naturally cannot be done without multi-tasking (requiring FTL spatial awareness).

i agree he'd need significantly enhanced perception, but not necessarily to the degree you're specifying. in "mapping the cosmos," he's discovering the routes through the planetoids, through the galaxies, and picking up information along the way [planets hosting life, areas of danger like asteroid belts, etcetera.]

similarly, i have a mental map of my surroundings. i know the way from here to work, to the mall, to my friends' houses, and so on and so forth. i know exactly where there's road work, where there are shopping centers or places of abnormal traffic and so on, but i couldn't point out every nook and cranny of every turn in the road on the way. but i do have a mental image of my area, and could map it out rather accurately.

who is to say exactly what level of focus or detail in memory the surfer has? who is to say how acutely he is applying his senses when flying endlessly through space?

expand the scale by infinity (galaxies) and then reduce the time available to 'recall' the map of any given galaxy to almost zero and there you might have something approximating the minimum requirement of Surfer's thought processing capacity.

nothing can keep moving at FTL speeds in straight lines or in "plotted courses" for any reasonable length of time, without smashing through stuff. by 'reasonable length of time' I mean 8 to 10 seconds... as Surfer can see light years ahead of himself, but can travel at millions of times that distance per second, he would constantly be stopping to get his bearings, because he would be way off course if he was so much as a thousandth of a second late in hitting the brakes.

janus you are the biggest exaggerator I have ever seen.
SS is nowhere what you say he is. A simple laptop computer can calculate billions to trillions of information a second. The human brain is far far faster than that. It calculates astronomical amounts of info per second.

Who says that SS even travels at a constant speed? Ever heard of average speed?
SS could simply slow his speed some as he nears his destination but his average speed for the entire trip remains high. It is not as hard as you think. For example, It will take me 8 minutes to reach the Sun if I'm traveling at light speed. But while I'm traveling I will clearly see the Sun growing (getting closer) very slowly. I have plenty of time to adjust my speed so that I wont hit the Sun. I can reach the Sun without hitting it if I started 100 seconds away (Even 5sec is enough for me).

So assuming SS only has 100x the reflexes as me (I know he has more) then he should be able to travel anywhere in the universe without passing his destination if the trip takes him at least a second.
This is easy. Just travel at great speed in the first few seconds then reduce your speed to a more manageable one in the later seconds and you will find yourself reaching your destination that was 5 million light years away in 5 secs. Thus you averaged 1 million light years per second.

did you, janus, say the surfer can travel several million lightyears per second?

I recently sold a story about a character developing (among other things) quantum consciousness. Ie, when fully developed, he would be able to "see" wavefunctions, this revealing all sorts of information about a given object/process. He was also learning to parallel-process info at superhuman speed.

I don't see why the Surfer couldn't do this.

Originally posted by Mindship
I recently sold a story about a character developing (among other things) quantum consciousness. Ie, when fully developed, he would be able to "see" wavefunctions, this revealing all sorts of information about a given object/process. He was also learning to parallel-process info at superhuman speed.

I don't see why the Surfer couldn't do this.

Who did you sell this story too?
You write stories? Got any I can read?

Originally posted by h1a8
Good point! Everyone is assuming that all being's brains are single processors. The human brain is actually a vast MP computer. It just doesn't process each bit of info one at a time. So SS should be able to process multi pieces of info just like a human or better.

Who did you sell this story too?
You write stories? Got any I can read?

It'll be in their June 2009 issue (yeah, I know, but that's how paper publishing goes; takes 6-12 months between acceptance and seeing it in print).

Originally posted by h1a8
The conclusion doesn't follow the premises. How does being able to travel above C automatically gives you the power to dodge asteroids while above C? I can run about 20mph but if i try to dodge random obsticles, that are within 5ft of each other, at that speed then I will fail miserably. You need both the necessary reflexes and necessary instant acceleration to change directions. And this is assuming that SS isn't in hyperspace when above C.

How many times have you seen Surfer ram into objects while traveling at speed due to a lack of reflex? Weigh that against the number of times he has dodged or nullified blasts at point-blank range, plus the additional fact that he was created to be a herald of G, for which speed and accompanying reflex is not a large assumption at all, and you begin to see why that is an easy conclusion to make.

Originally posted by h1a8

Then WW beats WWH any day of the week. Was it you who was arguing with me about that?

Yet you insist that we go on averages. And close range is an opinion. I consider close range to be within 10ft. SS blocking a beam of energy from beyond 10ft is only considered light speed reflexes and not FTL ones. The armada thing may be FTL reflexes though (but not nearly on the level of traveling 100C or more in space dodging asteroids). And even so it isn't SS's average, right?

Nope, but once again if you would present evidence pertaining to WW having FTL reflexes outside of blocking according to your criteria, I would be pleased.

There are many other examples, as have been presented in various threads. What it proves is that SS does have FTL reflexes at tremendous speeds. The fact that he does get hit answers the point about him having a lower average. This of course means that it is even more possible to hit characters like Superman and WW, who have been hit by far slower.

Originally posted by h1a8

It makes no sense for someone to use a definition of a word in a different manner than what everyone in the world knows it to be. It is even sillier to assume that a writer would do this.

The fact that words can and have been used differently by different proponents shows otherwise. I have already given you plenty of examples in previous discussions. It is even sillier to assume that a writer would not do this. A simple look at time travel pop science already give a multitude of differing opinions on how time travel can be obtained, or how it affects characters. Case in point, grandfather paradox vs multiple created realities.

Originally posted by h1a8

If I believe it to be fallacious then I wouldn't accept it. But no human is perfect.

And yet you have accepted it even while admitting that it is fallacious.

Bump

Funny I found your old thread by googling it, the one you long forgotten about since 2008.

Your welcome