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

or ambling up to the gates of a military base, and responding to being asked to stop by a sentry by starting to reach under your coat >.<

 

Sigh, okay, yeah... I'll get the clip. One minute:

Yeah, I can hear Superman bitching already that Grayven should have called him in so that all of these traitors looking to overthrow their legitimate government by invading Earth and killing a heavily pregnant woman didn't die.

Also, I giggle every time someone seriously announces they're going to use the "Purple Death Rays." It's just... so silly. True and descriptive, yes, but... still very comic-silly.

 

I would honestly be extremely surprised if the answer to that question was "no".

 

Em. This seems to be an anti-meta-person setup, but what will they use against highly automated non-living spaceships rated for 0 K environment by definition?

 

Are there any major polities in DC that use those?

 

Most of them? I mean, sufficiently advanced automation to make unmanned drones usually sits lower on tech tree than interstellar flight (unless we're talking psychic-based tech), and making most systems able to operate at 0 K and without atmosphere seems to be common sense for a spaceship. Unless the cold guns can simultaneously affect the entirety of the target's volume throughout, thus disrupting vital power systems deep inside, the effectiveness would be greately diminished, I imagine.

 

Cold guns were initially invented (by Captain Cold) to stop (The Flash's) FTL travel. Making stuff cold is just a side effect. Aiming a cold gun at a propulsion system is a perfectly valid tactic.

 

There’s a guy named Starfire, you may have heard of him.

 

... could also be really effective if paired with a battery of/ another weapon in the same mount that follows up the cold gun's discharge with a pulse/sustained delivery of heat-thermal shock is a hell of a thing for most alloys to deal with...

 

Well he all but said he was baiting them into attacking them. And he didn't even try to disable them. Even if only to capture intel.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean countries will just do as he says.

Also, they knew about this in advance rght? Lex didn't hide his shipbuilding. Did they really not drew any contracts up beforehand?

 

Actually, disabling them is exactly what he did.

A (non-drone) ship with its entire crew dead is, pretty definitively, disabled, after all.

 

Let's see

• Batman
• Megan
• Sure there are a few others.

I guess the real question is if any of them had a good enough sensor net to know when the ships were in system.

 

The Russians have one, the Chinese have one, the US has a couple stored in a warehouse somewhere... Oh you mean ships they could PUBLICLY use? Nope, no one has an armed space ship, no sir.

 

I think it's more "awkwardly standing around doing nothing, while everybody else is busy". Less that the humans are doing it without him and more that he's not doing anything.

 

American, so "Gray"

 

WTF? No, don't do that please.

With all the people talking in this episode, the those I've been wanting most to hear are the ones speaking when it's all over about what they learned, or should have learned.

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

I do enjoy the Renegade so much. Best part of the fic.

 

Reaching 0K is a bit like reaching lightspeed. Physics break down at that point. Making something rated for that should be rather high up the tech tree even in comics.

However seeing as exotic attacks have a tendency to be a bit all or nothing as we often see in paragon enemies that nosell them, choosing to have only exotic attacks and only two of them is a rather dangerous choice of load out.

 

About 5 seconds after Zoat started writing it.

Grayven's not exactly one to throw stones about being trigger happy.

No movement of energy could happen in a 0K environment even if one were possible, so it's not actually possible to design any kind of machine that would operate in one.

Doesn't China have an operational Durlan ship? And the Hawks definitely have one. And I find it extremely unlikely that the Russians with all their secret programs and the likes of Starfire on their payroll don't have at least an early prototype. And there are a couple dozen metahumans who can operate in space to oppose Lex if they so chose.

So, in short, even by the canon of this story that you yourself have established, yes.

 

Making systems able to operate at 0 K is inherently impossible. 0 K is the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases, at which there is zero energy in the system (except possibly potential energy in a gravitational field). Mechanical systems, regardless of what they are made of, will be a solid, frozen lump at 0 K. I believe that electricity-based systems would also cease to function, as the electrons would also be immobile and frozen and thus unable to flow; any electrical device that relies on chemical reactions (such as a battery or a capacitor) would definitely be disabled as the lack of molecular motion would prevent such reactions from occurring.

Spacecraft have their systems rated for a broad range of temperatures, including ones approaching 0 K. If memory serves, the Apollo spacecraft, for example, were rated for temperatures ranging from 3 K up to ~540 K, depending on which side of the spacecraft the component was on relative to sunlight. However, it would be impossible to make the systems still work at 0 K, and most spacecraft use a thermal conditioning system (i.e., coolant pumps) to help balance temperatures across the spacecraft rather than have such extreme temperature gradients, by transferring heat from the hot side to the cold side, in some cases supplemented by automatic heating elements to help keep critical systems (and propellants!) thawed out. Indeed, deep space probes (to the outer planets) have a problem of needing to keep the entire spacecraft's systems warm enough to operate; one of the limiting factors on the lifespan of the Voyager probes will be how long their radiothermal generator ("atomic battery") power sources can keep the remaining instrumentation and radio systems' heaters running; the New Horizons probe that went to Pluto and beyond went so far as to try and reduce the electrical heating requirements by densely packing as much as possible around the RTG so that its waste heat could help keep the systems warm. (In the inner solar system, it's more of a problem of balancing temperatures to reduce stresses, keep all components in their thermal ranges, and dumping the waste heat because there's no air to act as a heat sink, so you can only get rid of waste heat through radiative cooling and, possibly, by dumping hot coolant mass overboard, meaning the use of large radiators for thermal control.)

 

Well, yeah, stuff that's been hit directly would obviously cease to operate, but something built to work at 2.73 K and with no atomosphere around won't shatter and crumble after being hit by a freeze ray the same way normal materials would on Earth. And even assuming the all the affected systems would be a total write-off as opposed to restarting (or at least being quickly reparable) upon heating up by a degree or two, so long as the structural integrity of the vessel is maintained, it will ablate the effects of the beam, which brings us back to the question of how well it propagates through a large volume and mass object.

 

Some chemicals break down at cold temperatures, requiring heat to maintain themselves. Making things cold affects electronics by making them superconduct, removing all resistance. This will fry basically anything not designed to superconduct, because the resistor you had to regulate your voltage, and your inductors, and your capacitors, now... don't. Instead of "stopping", the electrons assume an even probability distribution -- If you know their velocity exactly (zero) you don't know their position at all (they gone!). And that isn't restricted to electrons, they just start caring first. Actually reaching 0K would cause anything made of matter to first collapse into a Bose-Einstein condensate, and then piffle out of existence as it teleports randomly through the universe when its velocity gets so low you lose its position.
Of course, none of THAT matters if the cold gun has some kind of comic bullshit Heisenberg compensator from Star Trek, which it probably does because that's what it takes to be able to say you're putting things at 0K in the first place. Making something actually 0K should take infinite work to perform. The cold gun by itself is an energy source to rival any of the other bleed or cosmic generators they've come up with.

 

Very New 52 of him.

Then again, Earth is under threat of aliens all the darn time.

 

There’s no reason to be gratuitously hurtful.

 

Is it wrong that in my head, I see Lex spinning around in his chair/throne going "wheeeeeeee" the first time opportunity he got when no one was looking?

Maybe childish, but humanity no longer being so dependent on the pants on the outside brigade would be a hell of a trip for him.

 

Honestly? Were it canon Lex, then he'd just fuck it all up and the "Pants on the outside" brigade would have to come in and clean up his mess. Again.

 

Looks like the death beams do just that. Kills life on the ship, leaving the ship itself intact.

That’s an easy way to get extra ships I suppose.

 

He did ask for them to open communications, all the records indicate that. (Almost) every advanced civilization in the Galaxy would have respected that and at least tried to communicate.

Even an American citizen can not just stroll into on of our military bases without prior authorization. If would be like if someone dressed up as a Russian soldier and tried to storm a US military base during the height of the Cold War.

Some won't be "happy", but few governments can complain without it coming off as hypocritical. I suspect that the UN will try drafting something to create their own unified space defense force along with a treaty prohibiting nations from building one, but Lex is so far ahead in space technology that they would probably try and just buy them from him.

I worry more about a military force that is not loyal to any government though. If something happens to Lex, then who would the fleet go to? I would not trust anyone else from taking over the world with it. (heck, I don't exactly trust Lex not to. But he would be more inclined to buy power rather than take it by force.) What sort of "checks and balances" on Lex's behavior are there going to be? This is a whole new level political intrigue for me.

 

What if we said "please"?