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With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

Discussion in 'Creative Writing' started by Mr Zoat, Jan 27, 2019.

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  1. Vaermina

    Vaermina Well worn.

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    Maybe you should ask your Vandal Savage construct about it...
     
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  2. moralrelativity

    moralrelativity Recovering pendant.

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    extent
     
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  3. moralrelativity

    moralrelativity Recovering pendant.

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    Apartheid? Apartheite?
     
  4. Handlewithcare

    Handlewithcare Versed in the lewd.

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    no one who isn't Red


    Shouldn't Ghia'ta's quotation marks be violet?
     
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  5. Chojin Patriarch

    Chojin Patriarch Veteran Lurker

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    "Some.. cities are like Apartheid South Africa.

    I nod. "And your government is theoretically a meritocracy but...
    Reads a bit cleaner. (Also couldn't find the form you used online.)


    Hmm... I'm guessing in this timeline, the Hyperclan was able to secure Ma'alefa'ak and undo his programming without interference. Presumably, M'gann and Kon-El didn't visit him during their trip, or the timing of the trip didn't align with the attack we saw in Paragon timeline...
    (And apparently I missed quite a few errors, or you fixed them before I read it...)
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2019
  6. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    Thank you, corrected.
    He has, but he hasn't told anyone that he has that.
     
  7. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    "Oh I think I have an idea. They probably have used shapechanging to copy metahuman abilities. That kind of thing is technically possible after all. But I wonder were they got the genetic samples?"

    Really Grayven, is not like you can't explain their abilities with in universe knowledge.
     
  8. Ganurath

    Ganurath Apologizes For Nothing

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    That implies a perfect awareness of everything she loves, and why she loves them, if Paul's orange enlightenment is anything to go by.
     
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  9. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    Thank you, corrected.
    I don't think so. Why?
     
  10. Buggy123

    Buggy123 I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    Their shapeshifting doesn't work like that. It's shapeshifting, and that's pretty much it. Clothes, details, etc they can mimick, but there are limits.

    It's really more like they just squeeze their mass into whatever shape, and rearrange muscles, etc, to fit. For instance, a normal martian form is actually physically weaker than a martian imitating a human because humans have shorter, thicker limbs. They certainly can't change into Superman's shape and get his strength and invulnerability, or anything like that.

    Granted, M'gann can change into a Star Conqueror form and gains increased abilities from that, but that's largely due to the fact that she splits up her brain into several multitasking parts. Raises a lot of questions about how shapeshifting your own brain works, but imitating superhuman powers it is not.
     
    Last edited: Feb 10, 2019
  11. Sceptic

    Sceptic Critical Irrationalist

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    Doesn't M'gann, in canon, change her blood to give Garfield Logan a blood transfusion? That argues that perhaps their shapeshifting isn't quite as simple as you suggest.
     
  12. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    Megan being able to copy the abilities of a Star Conqueror suggests otherwise.

    And also this:

    The people behind Young Justice are liars. How does "Superheroes being new" equal to "Wonder Womn has been ab active superhero for decades"?

    A lot of things they said about the show like "Superheroes not being as powerful" ended being fake.
     
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  13. Buggy123

    Buggy123 I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    I don't remember what Zoat's word on that situation is, but in general it does seem like that's the sort of shapeshifting he's going for.

    At the very least, I'd figure that it'd come up in the story by now if martians could replicate metahuman abilities with a dna sample, given that OL has been on a team with a martian for quite a while by this point.

    Yeah, but those abilities are basically telekinesis and related mental abilites. That's more like using your pre-existing abilites in a different way with a new approach, as opposed to adapting entirely new abilities from a completely different source of power.

    And M'gann apparently can't replicate all of the abilites of a Star Conqueror, either. When (in a Zoat-sanctioned omake) she was training with OL in Star Conqueror form (in part to prepare them both for fighting other Conquerors), M'gann had to borrow his Praxis Demons as a stand-in for the smaller Starro parasites that Star Conquerors can produce from their own body. If M'gann could do that, presumably she would've.
     
    Last edited: Feb 10, 2019
  14. Someguy Somewhere

    Someguy Somewhere The Critical Fumbler

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    I'm sad to say we lost TotalBiscuit last may to cancer. He did good work, and enjoyed doing his stuff to the end.

    I'm a recovered 40k enthusiast ( "Plastic Crack" is one of the more colourful terms for the hobby, given the pricing for models), so I'll jump in on this one.

    While I love the lore, 40k weapons are several shades of crazy. For those folks that have never partaken in this particular sci-fi universe I'll give a short description of what a Bolter is:

    Picture a Gyrojet rocket pistol from the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice" and the AA-12 Full automatic shotgun with Frag-12 exploding shells from the film "The Expendables"...you got that? Now picture if they had a very, very angry baby, and you're in the ball park. It's a select fire, .75 caliber rocket propelled firearm, with armour piercing high explosive ammo. Which are waved around by 7 foot tall genetically augmented, power armored crazies, who wave them around like a sub-machinegun.

    As cool as huge grenade bullets exploding xenos and heretics apart from the inside is....it's not exactly practical. Real world doesn't use mini rockets like the Gyrojet because, unlike a normal bullet a rocket needs to burn to accelerate up to speed. Means that up close, they're not moving fast enough to do much damage (the Gyrojet around could be stopped with your finger at the end of the muzzle, despite being lethal man stoppers 20 meters down range). The other reasons were price and quality control, with the rocket vents sometimes being miss aligned and sending a shot wild. As for explosive ammo, it's considered overkill on a anti-personnel level, since something like the .75 cal size hole in your torso is likely to kill you enough as it is. It's bulky, unstable and hard on logistics. 40k can wave some scitzo-tech explanations at this over the years, but it IS part of the reasons why the Bolter is left to the special forces Space Marines, while the run of the mill Imperial Guardsman gets the 'puny' Mars Pattern Lasgun.

    If we have the tech to make effective explosives fit in a bullet, then we generally use that as propellant instead and use lots of smaller faster bullets instead. Once you get enough mass moving fast enough, weather or not it explodes becomes mostly redundant. This is where the rail gun comes in.

    Railguns are being developed in real life that would use inert ammo and electricity to fire ammo fast enough that it's reaches that 'redundant' catagory. Paul, if he feels the need, can change the size, mass and muzzle velocity of his Construct Railguns ammo to fit whatever need he has at the time, and if something bigger comes along he can simply scale the power levels up to match on the fly. Poke a hole in a piece of paper, remove a Cobra Terrorists trigger finger, or core a battleship lengthwise. It's only a matter of scale for Paul, with the limiting factors being mostly air resistance and over-penetration. Firing too fast in atmosphere and your bullet has been rendered hypersonic confetti, and with too much power for a target and you've reduced the civilians behind them to chunky salsa.

    You ever see that episode of Stargate, where SG-1 compares the Jaffa staff weapon to their own earth made P-90? It's a similar issue here. The Bolter is a weapon of fear, made to intimidate your enemies. The Railgun is a weapon of war, made to kill your enemies.

    If you want to poke around some of the physics and exotic ideas in Sci-fi weapons, I'd suggest poking Project Rho. It's a site to help sci-fi writers with hard science, and they've got a good collection on side arms.

    http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmintro.php
     
  15. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    Dude do you even read what you type?

    Why would she create mind controling parasites? She wants to be a Hero and doesn't have her soul made of orange light not is she Pragmatic Neutral like Oh El.

    Not to mention that those parasites? Is basically how Star Conquerors reproduce.
     
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  16. Buggy123

    Buggy123 I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    They were explicitly doing a training exercise to prepare for combat with other Star Conquerors. Not quite 'no holds barred', but mind control was definitely on table; she was manipulating his senses to try to disorient and blind him. If she could make actual Starro parasites, she would because it'd be a better exercise, just like if OL had weak enough barriers for her to mind control him outright, she would. Regardless of what method she uses, she can just stop as soon as the exercise is clearly over, because that's how training exercises work.

    If you're standing in for a actual combatant in a training exercise, and then don't do things that a enemy would, then you're just letting your partner down. Using a paintball gun instead of a real gun during a combat exercise is reasonable, because you don't want to actually kill your training partner(s). Refusing to point your gun at them is not.
     
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  17. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    I think that A) Megan wasn't gonna to basically have babies just for a training exercise and B) There was the risk of her not able to control the parasites.
     
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  18. Buggy123

    Buggy123 I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    Why? Why would we assume that what is basically just a unusual form that she shape shifted into would:

    A: Give her the entirely new ability to split off bits of herself.
    B: Create the thus-unmentioned risk of having those new bits gain a mind of their own.

    I mean, yes, maybe it turns out that the default form of martain reproduction works like that. They're described as amoebic, so maybe they make new martians by just shapeshifting off new chunks. But even if that was the case, then that still wouldn't be a actual new ability (and most likely they'd behave nothing like Starro parasites), and so it wouldn't be evidence that she could actually fully replicate Star Conqueror abilities.
     
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  19. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    Don't forget that the bolts are tipped with armour piercing water.
    Yes, M'gann does not want to produce horror babies.
     
  20. Sceptic

    Sceptic Critical Irrationalist

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    Are there any other kinds of babies?
     
  21. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    ...

    It depends from whose perspective. From the perspective of most fish, fish babies are really convenient. Spawn and forget. They even get to eat them later if they swim in the wrong places. The horrifying bit is what their own bodies to do them in order to make them reproduce.

    For comic martians, they could probably split off a part of themselves to act as a facehugger type Star Conqueror and reincorporate it later. In this story they can't do that.
     
  22. hance1986

    hance1986 A pitiful excuse for a man.

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    Should be ' Whites '
     
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  23. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    Thank you, corrected.
     
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  24. nick012000

    nick012000 Gone for Good

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    Well, there's one obvious solution to this problem: give the Martians an external enemy to unite against.

    False-flag an attack by the Guardians, maybe?

    Or maybe just cause an *actual* attack by the Guardians, if you can arrange for suitably slanted information to be leaked to the more corrupt members of them like Scar.
     
  25. Valint

    Valint I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    Sure. Given that J'onn has presumably been sending reports back home, it wouldn't be too tough to argue that the Martians need to start preparing to defend themselves against Earth (just in case), and gradually transition to unifying the society around Earth as a threat that might end up hurting Mars as collateral damage even if not deliberately.

    I mean, from a human perspective, a stagnant navel-gazing Martian society is the best case scenario, with a chaotic society in shambles the next best. A unified and revitalized Mars, ready to take an active role in extra-planetary affairs, is pretty much the worst case scenario for humanity, without a human-friendly puppet in charge or a strong alliance that doesn't exist (and probably can't, without a unified human government).
     
  26. Hazardouz

    Hazardouz Getting out there.

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    are the characters that are exclusive in the Grayven side story going to appear in the Illustres OL side and vise versa?
     
  27. The Slumbering Crocodile

    The Slumbering Crocodile Sleeping in the mud

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    This is accurate for the normal-human-scale bolters, that people like Commissars use, but the Space Marines have a dual-propellant system -- "normal" bullet propulsion (which may be railgun, for all I know, bolters supposedly have AIs Machine Spirits, so it's not out of the question that they have enough local power generation for it, especially when linked to the PA) and the gyrojet rocker. It's actually mentioned in one of the novels that firing a Space Marine bolter would break a normal, unaugmented human's arm.

    To be clear, IIRC the bolter was originally developed as an anti-Ork weapon, a species which can, in fact, survive a .75 cal hole through the torso. It is rather overkill against normal human opponents, but seeing as Astartes are usually only sent against powerful enemies (Orks, Dark Eldar, Chaos Space Marines, Demons, other very tough xenos/warp creatures/worshippers), it's a perfectly reasonable primary weapon.The only time they'd use them against normal humans are during rebellions or against massed cultists, where the bolter's ammo is a bit wasted, yeah. The have other weapons for that sort of thing, like chainswords.
     
  28. Odysseus2099

    Odysseus2099 Versed in the lewd.

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    Just to note, Bolters do have normal explosives to propel them forward. The gyrojet was added to make it keep increasing velocity after it left the barrel because they'd gotten to the point where if they made the initial propellant detonation any larger the kick would stagger even a space marine in power armor. So instead of giving up on making it go faster, they added a gyrorocket so it would continue to increase speed after it left the barrel.
    That's deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, not necessarily water. Incidentally, have you ever heard of metallic hydrogen? I pretty much headcanon it as that, even if I know that's not what the authors probably meant.
    I don't see why individual human nations can't form alliances and trade deals with individual martian states even in the case of Martian unification. I doubt any resultant superstate would be so micro-managing as to control who its members can and can't trade with. And if it was I doubt it would last very long.
     
  29. Mr Zoat

    Mr Zoat Dedicated ragequitter

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    You mean, like Circe? Or Nylor Truggs?

    Unless someone died, everyone in either timeline is around in the other.
    Yes, but I'm not convinced that would be any better for armour penetration. For a start, it would turn into hydrogen gas or water at room temperature and pressure.
     
  30. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    The problem is that's just the thing Renegade aka Noble Demon loves to do. So to avoid suspicious he can't do it.

    I still think it will either end with someone accidentally waking up a Martian enemy and Grayven beibg blamed or Grayven ending so ANGRY he accidentally conkers Mars.
     
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