speed

Requests for information (such as weapons, maps, history, grammar, spelling, outlining, ect) for your writing. Or where to post useful reference sites that you have found useful in writing. Anything from information research to writing guides.

Re: speed

Postby Pale Wolf » Tue Apr 05, 2011 6:43 pm

What.

No, seriously, what is this? Why is it in fic research? This is a complete babbling infodump of rubber physics that is, in many cases, outright wrong. In most other cases, I'm suspecting it's babelfished.

I just have no idea what your purpose is here.

In the interests of fairness, I will give you points for general accuracy on the physics bit, though I will then have to subtract twice their number because A: it's not quantum physics and I suspect you just added that word to sound authoritative, and B: relevance, there is none.

And then I have to subtract triple that amount of points for the sheer 'what' encompassed in your time dilation babble.
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Re: speed

Postby Wyrd » Wed Apr 06, 2011 10:12 am

So I'm not the only person to have that reaction to this?

Seriously, shouldn't anything in the fic research area include a question of some sort? You know, something you are trying to research?
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Re: speed

Postby Pale Wolf » Wed Apr 06, 2011 12:15 pm

Not necessarily. Resources on offer are also accepted - for instance, if someone suggests a site with good information about military technology for those who're writing military stuff.

In theory, this could have actually bordered on acceptable if he'd said 'I have some ideas for speed techniques' or 'these are my thoughts on speed' to put some context in all this. Still low-quality, but not rules-poking unacceptable.

It's not official-warning-level bad, but every post the guy's made is the exact same, and this is the guy behind that 88 000 word post in Vasey's thread.

So Bya, the Eye is upon you.

Hm. On evaluation, this could even become a useful fic search thread if we turned it into an actual discussion on speed, the methods involved, and the nature of it. I don't have time for that right now, but I'll be coming back and scrawling something later today, I think.
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Re: speed

Postby Pale Wolf » Thu Apr 07, 2011 6:41 pm

Well, so much for the 'today', but I got around to it!

Okay, first off, throw out the entire opening post. There are accurate points in it, but it's suited to one particular feel, and that is the 'I'm too lazy to think or study elementary physics to get things semi-right' feel. It's common, especially in martial arts manga, but I'm going to give actual physics and logic here.

The big problem with what he's proposed is that he simply has a bunch of different methods to achieve a similar goal, and then ranks them. This doesn't work. Each technique works differently, has different traits, can have thousands of different levels within the same technique, and can be combined with other techniques. I'll cover the various methods (that I can think of) more or less independently, discussing their traits and properties.

The first thing an aspiring 'accurate' writer needs to do is take a look at the 'one guy is fast, the other guy is strong' dichotomy you tend to see in martial arts manga/anime. For the most part, it's nonsense.

In terms of person-to-person combat, 90% of the damage comes from technique. The human body actually has a fair amount of force and energy in it, and martial arts training - the good martial arts training - is less about toughening up your body than it is learning how to use it. There's a saying, 'Learn techniques that can be powerful in the hands of an old, arthritic man, because you will be someday'. There's a massive difference in the amount of damage dealt by a punch you do with just your arm, and the damage dealt by a punch that, through very subtle movements of your body, you can put your entire body weight and three quarters of your muscle into, while making sure your movements don't leak off that energy that could be used to hurt the other guy. The second part of this also applies in ranged combat - shot placement. Where you hit is very important, because the human body is retardedly tough, people can and have survived gunshots to the head and getting hit by cars, and remained combat-effective. We only have so many absolutely-immediately-critical organs and vital spots, and most of them are protected by the ribcage (it ain't just a decoration) and skull (why yes, it is the hardest bone in your body - never punch someone in the face, finger bones delicate, skull bones strong). If you connect with the right places in the right way, you can take someone down fairly easily. Pure force-on-force bludgeoning is, in the end, going to come down to who has the higher pain tolerance, and you're both gonna get very hurt.

That said, we'll remove skill and technique from this equation. We'll assume they're at equal levels in all of our hypothetical people.

So, discounting skill, what contributes more to the damage you pump into the other guy? Speed, or strength?

Everyone who answered that, hit yourselves. It was a trick question. Speed is strength.

Now, some math. If you're afraid of numbers, don't worry, my explanations have been said to be pretty comprehensible, and I've only got three equations for you for now.

First, force equals mass times acceleration. Here's what I mean by 'speed is strength'. Acceleration is what adds to your speed - the longer that acceleration is maintained, the higher your speed will be (given the length of your limbs, there are obviously finite limits on this, and you don't want to be too far out or your technique will suffer, too much extension means you can't put as much of the energy you've built up into the opponent. Mass is, for the purposes of this discussion, basically equivalent to size - how much body you have to move. Force is, of course, how much power your body can pump out in a hurry.

What this means is that your strength, divided by your size, equals your speed. They are directly related, and dependent on one another. If you have more strength, for the same mass, you have more speed.

That said, if you have more mass, then you'll need more strength to hit the same speed. So is there actually a way to have one strong guy versus one fast guy?

Technically, yes. Practically, rarely. First of all, look at 'fast versus strong' characters. Most of them are about the same size. We're talking a 10% difference in mass at most. There may be differences in speed and strength, but not the orders of magnitude speed/strength differentials depicted in anime. Second... that mass is probably muscle mass - which means more force along with the more mass, which means even if they're bigger, they're the same speed. Or faster. You only see speed opposed to strength in orders-of-magnitude size differentials - Zangief, the Hulk, gigantic monsters, whatever. In technology, for instance, the fastest aircraft and most agile aircraft are actually quite large - the F-15, for instance, is a beast because for all that it's large, almost all that size is more wings and engines that make it move even faster, and the Su-27 is even bigger, and even more agile.

Second, momentum equals mass times velocity. To add to our list of definitions, velocity is speed (it's technically its vector quantity, adding a direction to the numerical value, but let's not get into that). Momentum is 'how much movement do you have?' It's basically how much force you've built up, and maintained over the trip to the target. Conservation of momentum means that the momentum of the system remains the same at all times.

What this one means is that the momentum you will impart to your enemy (which means, how much he squishes if you've got sufficient energy to overcome the material strength of his flesh, or how much he gets knocked back if there isn't that amount of energy) is equal to the momentum possessed by your fist. Assuming it comes to a full stop, anyway, if it has enough energy it might just blow a hole through the guy and keep going.

What this means in terms of the speed/strength false dichotomy is... in terms of momentum, speed and mass are equal in value. More speed equals more squish. More mass equals more squish. (The math is a bit more complex than that, because speed as measured in meters per second needs to be equal to mass as measured in kilograms for maximum momentum, but for simplification let's just say the value of the two is equal. If the two are not equal, then you get more momentum out of more of whichever you have less of.)

Third, kinetic energy equals mass, times velocity, times velocity (again), divided by two. Energy is the... interesting... quantity of our fist->face system. Momentum does the squishing, but energy is required to overcome the material strength to force it to squish. It wouldn't be unfair to say the energy is the damage (though, too much of it and you might simply blow through and lose the rest of the energy on the air behind your target - which isn't entirely undesireable, but if you didn't hit a critical organ then it lessens the chances of enough damage getting dealt inside the body to put them down).

What this means is... well. Note how the equation was multiplied by mass once, but by velocity twice. This means twice the mass equals twice the damage. Twice the speed equals four times the damage. It continues on like that (in fact it gets worse - once you hit a velocity of 3 kilometers per second, the impact alone packs as much energy as its own weight in TNT). This means that speed does more damage than mass - in other words, that 'punch and crack the concrete' trick is going to be something you see from the small fast guy before the big slow guy (and the big fast guy does it before either of them). You can have a massive slow guy outdamage a small fast guy, but he's going to have to be orders of magnitude larger.



Note, most of this applies to 'conventional' speed. That is, high speed in accordance with known physics, because your body is just that fast. What all of this basically means is that if you've got conventional speed, your list of Required Secondary Powers is a mile long, and all the RSPs increase as your speed does. You need strength to generate the speed. You need perception fast enough to keep up with your body and not slam into walls when you're running. You need bones and muscles tough enough to withstand the high level of strength necessary to generate the speed, or your arm will develop compound fractures when you punch someone (and if you're running, enjoy your leg snapping in half when you try to get moving, and for that matter jumping because gravity doesn't actually have enough power to hold you to the ground to run). You need skin tough enough to withstand the drag of moving at higher speeds.

In essence, conventional speed means you're more powerful in every sector, and if you've got too much of it you're gonna run into wierd shit (ie jumping because your 'run' is too powerful for gravity, and at really high levels you start to run into time dilation - note for those who read Byak's post, time dilation is a product of motion, no you cannot just vibrate your muscles really fast and start warping time unless you add in some magical 'extend the temporal frame' ability at which point that's really just an excuse for time magic, potentially a good excuse, but still just an excuse).

So, for those who want speed that doesn't make their speedster also the strongest, toughest guy in the game. Let's look at some alternate types of speed.


First, we get what I'll call assisted speed. This is speed not generated by the body, but generated by something else - engines, in the case of aircraft, flight superpowers (whatever they may be), wheels, magnetic levitation, roller skates, whatever. This negates the running turning into jumping problem - running is dependent on gravity to negate the 'up' push involved in walking, but assisted speed simply generates the push straight in the direction you want to go. Time dilation remains (though to be honest, by the time time dilation becomes an issue, you're hitting 'fuck you' levels of power). Skin toughness remains - if you can't stand that speed, you can't go that fast.

You don't need the perception speed, but you want it if you're going to be in cramped areas while using this, because you're still gonna risk slamming into shit. Bone and muscle toughness aren't critical to the idea of this kind of speed - you're most definitely going to want them if you plan to slam into people at your full speed, but if you lack them you can still use the speed to get places and then whack them. The force you require to generate this speed is still available if you plan to slam into people at full speed, but if you don't have the toughness to use it without turning yourself into jelly, it's not available for hitting people.

New problems added in: this doesn't really assist striking speed or how fast you actually move your limbs. You can move from place to place, but you can't move as fast as a conventional speed type in one particular place. No Katchuu Tenshin Amaguriken for you, for instance.

New benefits: you require assisted speed to fly. Every other type is dependent on your muscles, and unless you have wings, your muscles can make you jump high, but they can't make you fly.


Second: Screw You, Distance! Aka teleportation, or if you wanna get fancy, distance contraction or some other variety of spatial warping. Suffice to say, this type removes all required and implied secondary powers, and could add other abilities if you want them, or you can just say 'can only teleport mahself' and ditch 'em all.

Like assisted speed, it doesn't increase the rate at which you move your limbs. Most of the other implications are obvious enough, so I probably don't need to go into them.


Third: Let's Do The Time Warp Again. Time stop, or magical powers to accelerate time around you, slow time around the other guy (functionally the same). This one's... wierd. We don't really have a physical model for time manipulation, so it's hard to say precisely what happens. We know you move faster than the other guy. And only within your own existing range of movement, no flying for you.

Implicit secondary powers: perception sort of automatically accelerates, since you know, you're hauling your whole frame of reference with you.

And force... well. You are, in the bad guy's frame of reference, moving at like Mach 2. Which means you're going to hit just as hard as a conventional speedster moving at that rate. You retain the assisted speedster thing, though - if you hit that hard, can your body take it? That's one way to limit it, and another is to dictate that if you get too close, the bad guy enters your frame of reference and is only hit as hard as normal.

Required secondary powers: skin toughness is still there. In the air's frame of reference, you're moving at Mach 2, meaning the air's slamming into you at Mach 2, unless the writer pulls some jiggery to keep the character protected. I'd give suggestions and ideas, but I got three hours of sleep six hours ago, so yeah.

On the plus side, other than conventional this is the only type of speed that actually accelerates your body's movement within place, and not just from place to place.

Now, time stop... frankly, this kind of hurts my head. Your frame of reference is infinitely fast compared to the outside frame. Which means you hit the air at Mach Infinity, which means you need to withstand infinity joules of energy trying to pound your face into paste, you slam into the guy with infinite momentum... You're going to need to pull jiggery to make time stop work with physics, and while I'm sure such jiggery is possible, my mind's not quite in the usual shape to think on ideas for it.



As I said at the start, you can mix these in any proportion you desire. For instance Superman is both high conventional (ridiculously tough body) and high assisted (he flies, fast).


To shoot down some further points.

High speed doesn't damage your lifespan. That's retarded. Unless you're paying some kind of price in life energy, superspeed will cost you no more than a good workout does for a normal person.

God speed: Just say no. If you've got that much of a speed advantage over your opponent in conventional speed, it's Fuck You level.

Kyokeimyaku: Just say no. Perceptual speed and physical speed increase when you're in danger, yes. It's called an adrenaline rush. It also doesn't increase your pain sensitivity - in fact, it decreases it.

Gale step: NO. First of all, remember what I said at the start. You're ranking things. Almost every one of those 'types' of superspeed you talked about are all conventional physical speed (interestingly, those ones are also the ones that don't make me want to put a gun and a physics textbook to your head and make you choose). There is no difference between them. They're categories for different levels of the same thing - there is a 0.1 m/s difference between high not-god speed and low god speed.

Second, vacuum blades. It sounds cool, doesn't it? Just say no. What they call 'vacuum blades' are almost always air pressure blades. Vacuum - actual vacuum - is a lack of pressure. You're going to need such a low pressure that it's roughly analogous to outer space before you do any damage - 'damage' meaning some bruising, maybe (if you get really lucky) the air getting yoinked out of their lungs with enough force to damage a bit of the internals.

So... air pressure blades, then? No. The reason for this is that there's no way to keep it together without magic. Now yes, you'll generate pressure waves through movement - this is what a sonic boom is. However, that pressure wave doesn't stay together. The air particles are going to spread out, the particles they're slamming into are slowing them down and they're bouncing around in various directions, about half of them to the side. So your only shape for a pressure wave is an expanding cone. No blades. And unfortunately, the range is limited - because it's expanding, that also means the amount of power in it is rapidly becoming less concentrated (as well as decreasing, because of drag). Your punch is no longer hitting his throat - now that same amount of energy is distributed among his throat, head, upper torso (remember, body's armour), shoulders, completely wasted on the air over his shoulders... It drops off fast.

Hawking radiation, black holes, plasma: Wtf? They have nothing to do with speed in the context you're talking about.
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Re: speed

Postby Wyrd » Thu Apr 07, 2011 8:14 pm

So, discounting skill, what contributes more to the damage you pump into the other guy? Speed, or strength?


To head off this argument hopefully before it starts, I've seen this before and anyone who objects to this needs to realize that you are using a semantically different definition of speed. That does not make either of you wrong, but I've seen very heated arguments develop over the fact that the posters were using 'speed' to mean different things.

High speed doesn't damage your lifespan. That's retarded. Unless you're paying some kind of price in life energy, superspeed will cost you no more than a good workout does for a normal person.


It does if your cells are always operating at high speed, or if your metabolism is hyped up enough to maintain the energy reservoir for your speed that it is causing more rapid cell divisions. Without certain genetic mutations(or being a child) your cells have a limited number of divisions. During childhood, there is a second gene that repairs the damage caused to the dna in each cell(specifically the telomeres) during each duplication that shuts down when you hit adulthood. Cancer cells usually have this gene turned back on, thus allowing them to grow so out of control without suffering degradation from it. Many biologists theorize that if we could figure out a way to turn this gene back on safely for your entire body, we could achieve a version of immortality.

An interesting twist on the 'fast aging' trope regarding speedsters that I have never seen but that would fit with actual biology is for a family of speedsters to know that they will live to roughly 26--because they only live a year or two after the immortality gene switches off and their bodies break down from rapid cell divisions.

Second, vacuum blades. It sounds cool, doesn't it? Just say no. What they call 'vacuum blades' are almost always air pressure blades. Vacuum - actual vacuum - is a lack of pressure. You're going to need such a low pressure that it's roughly analogous to outer space before you do any damage - 'damage' meaning some bruising, maybe (if you get really lucky) the air getting yoinked out of their lungs with enough force to damage a bit of the internals.


There are some interesting phenomena that occur with really high speeds in a medium. There is a variety of shrimp that creates small flashes of light by opening their claws really, really fast. What someone could do if they could move at similar speeds(or what an object moving at such speeds would do) is up for debate at this time as those shrimp are the only source of that phenomena of which I am aware.

So... air pressure blades, then? No. The reason for this is that there's no way to keep it together without magic. Now yes, you'll generate pressure waves through movement - this is what a sonic boom is. However, that pressure wave doesn't stay together. The air particles are going to spread out, the particles they're slamming into are slowing them down and they're bouncing around in various directions, about half of them to the side. So your only shape for a pressure wave is an expanding cone. No blades. And unfortunately, the range is limited - because it's expanding, that also means the amount of power in it is rapidly becoming less concentrated (as well as decreasing, because of drag). Your punch is no longer hitting his throat - now that same amount of energy is distributed among his throat, head, upper torso (remember, body's armour), shoulders, completely wasted on the air over his shoulders... It drops off fast.


The more focused the air pressure starts off, the less dissipation it suffers over the same distance. Now, without something like ki to hold the air together, the effective range of such a strike drops off very rapidly, but Kuno managing to injure someone less than an inch from his blade is within reason. Alternatively, it is possible that the 'vacuum blades' from Ranma are shaped ki filled voids that are propelled by the air trying to fill in the space and failing, squeezing it forward at high speeds. This does require going outside of conventional science, but it is believable enough for a fic, IMO.

Now, back to my opening comment. There are several reasons for the stereotype of big and slow. One is that creatures that are large tend to be capable of only short bursts of speed because of all of the reinforcing their bodies need just to support their weight. Elephants running at full speed cannot maintain that speed for long without damaging themselves, though even at a maintainable speed I would not want to be in one's path. Classic examples of strong people are things like smiths, who have muscle development that is focused on endurance and a habit of slow, constant movement that doesn't convert easily to speed. A bodybuilder, on the other hand, usually develops all of their muscles, which means that they have strength in the right places to be impressively fast.

Speed in combat tends to refer to a lot more than just how fast any given part of you is moving. Involved in what martial artists are referring to when they talk about speed are flexibility, reaction speed, striking speed, aggregate speed(how well you can combine the motions of your body for maximum effect), etc. You will see very few musclebound fighters because all of that bulk gets in the way. It reduces flexibility and makes it harder to coordinate muscles for maximum effectiveness. Note that I said musclebound, such as a bodybuilder, not muscular, such as Bruce Lee. Lee was insanely fit, but he sought maximum strength and speed, which meant avoiding excess bulk.

There is also the difference between fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers. Fast twitch fibers, as the name suggests, contract faster and give you better acceleration but have poorer endurance. Slow twitch fibers contract more slowly but can do so many more times in a row before suffering fatigue. When you build up your slow muscle fibers, you increase your ability to overcome resistance, and when you build up your fast muscle fibers you improve acceleration and reaction time. Fighters really need both, but some training styles, genetic tendencies, and personal preferences will result in the development of one over the other.

For example, someone who heavily developed their slow fibers would be able to pick up and carry a lot more weight, but someone who developed their fast fibers more would be better at catching or throwing fast objects.

Further, when someone refers to the speed of a weapon, they are very rarely referring to how fast the dangerous part of the weapon is moving. They are referring to how easy it is to change the momentum of a weapon, to react to changes in situations. A rapier is a lot easier to redirect than a maul because it is so much lighter, and thus will be harder to avoid and more likely to hit, but it will also deal far less damage with each strike than the mass of the maul can manage. Please don't try to bring up the math involved in this, as you are dealing with a minimum of three levers if you want to calculate force input and finally collision force. It is just better to leave things vague unless you have a specific case that you need to calculate.

A point where I firmly agree with Pale Wolf is that the human body, and more importantly most of the time animal bodies, are generally ridiculously difficult to shut down. Our own minds get in the way, which is why animals can often keep going in a fight long after they have suffered wounds that will be fatal... in a little while. Boars are known for pushing themselves down a spear to get to the person attacking them and kill them before they finally die. This is why boar spears have a crosspiece that the boar can't push itself past. Berserkers can do this to some extent, depending on their nature and whether they are trained or, as Akane is often portrayed, merely prone to ignoring everything when angry. A true berserker from legend will keep fighting and killing as long as it can find something moving. Traditionally, the only way to stop one is to get around thirty archers to keep shooting him/her full of arrows until they are physically incapable of movement. The bearsarkers of the Vikings trained themselves to a more limited form of this bloodlust so that they could keep fighting until the end of the battle, despite any injuries, but not be a threat to their allies. In modern times, you are most likely to see this on someone on PCP, where they keep fighting even after being shot a dozen times because none of those shots hit something instantly fatal.
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Re: speed

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Fri Apr 08, 2011 4:20 am

Okay, the village idiot has some questions! :O

The first is about momentum. A common tactic in various fictional martial arts media has one or more of the fighters moving (running, jumping, diving, falling, et cetera) in order to add to the effectiveness/power of their attack. So, with the arm being a part of the body that's in motion, would there be a difference in force applied if the fist is extended for a strike but stationary, or if the fist is moving for a punch?

If speed is strength (can't move mass without strength), does that mean that mass is potential energy?
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Re: speed

Postby camk4evr » Fri Apr 08, 2011 1:40 pm

I'm too tired to answer the first question (having just woken up and I need to think about it a bit more) so I'll leave it for Pale Wolf to answer that one and answer the second.
If speed is strength (can't move mass without strength), does that mean that mass is potential energy?


No, but it is a component of potential (and kinetic energy). Generally speaking Energy is the product of Force over a Distance (E=F*d) and Force is a product of mass times acceleration (I'm staying away from chemical, electical, and nuclear potential energy as they don't have a place in this discussion. Yet). For example, if Ranma were to leap straight up in the air his potential energy at the apex of the leap would be his mass times gravity times his height above ground (or his target^_^).

Here's a wikipedia entry onpotential energy that can explain it better.
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Re: speed

Postby Wyrd » Fri Apr 08, 2011 9:29 pm

The short answer is yes, running means that you have more speed behind your punch, so as long as you aren't losing more force to an inability to properly anchor yourself and use all of your muscles to maximum advantage, you will hit harder.

Longer answer: Imagine being in a car. While in that car you throw a ball straight up. The ball then comes straight back down into your lap, even though the car could be moving anywhere from not at all to 70 miles an hour. However, if you threw that ball out of your window at something motionless, such as a stop sign, the speed of the car gets added into your throw, making it hit much harder than if you had been standing still relative to that sign.

A thought occurred for me for a way to have super strength without super speed. Imagine if only the amount of tension the muscles generate was increased, without increasing the rate at which they contract. This would allow someone sufficently enhanced to run at the same speed while carrying 5 tons as they can while unencumbered. They would move a little faster than an unenhanced person because they wouldn't have to worry as much about the resistance of their own body weight and wind resistance, but this would still not necessarily be super speed. There would also theoretically* be a point where enough weight would begin to slow them down.

As for speed without strength, consider the reverse, that your muscles can't generate a total lift greater than ordinary muscles but the fibers can contract faster. This would give you a slow acceleration as you don't have the superstrength to overcome your own inertia, but it would allow for a steady accelleration until you reached a terminal velocity where the force you can add with each step is insufficient to overcome resistance from gravity and atmosphere.

A specific move that could give the impression of super speed is rapid fire short speed teleports. Flash step from Bleach seems to work this way, with each jump teleporting them a short distance to something they can push off for the next jump. The more skilled the user is, the further the jumps can carry them and the less of a delay there is between landing from one jump and initiating the next. This method of superspeed provides no bonuses whatsoever to impact damage, but is great for maneuvering for better position and both acting and reacting to the events of a battle.

*We're talking super powers here, so any discussion is merely hypothetical.

Also, please note that I am assuming any power we discuss has the prerequisite powers to not kill the user. Should anyone wish to discuss those prerequisites, I am happy to go there, just that my discussion at this point is focusing on the actual speed and alternative ways of achieving it that may not have the same prerequisites. For example, the fastest probe we have ever launched into space also had the slowest acceleration, because its ion drive didn't generate much thrust but was able to do so continuously over the course of months.
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Re: speed

Postby Pale Wolf » Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:08 pm

Okay, the village idiot has some questions! :O

The first is about momentum. A common tactic in various fictional martial arts media has one or more of the fighters moving (running, jumping, diving, falling, et cetera) in order to add to the effectiveness/power of their attack. So, with the arm being a part of the body that's in motion, would there be a difference in force applied if the fist is extended for a strike but stationary, or if the fist is moving for a punch?


Basically speaking, the energy and momentum come from velocity. Running, jumping, whatever, allow you to build up more speed relative to the opponent, which leads to an inevitably higher impact.

If the arm is stationary - if any part of the body is stationary, for that matter - its muscles are not adding to the fist's velocity. Punch in place, and you get the damage from the velocity your arm can generate on its own. Charge with arm extended, and you get the damage from the velocity of your body. So you want to punch at exactly the right time - when you're in hitting distance of the bad guy, so that you get damage from the velocity of your body plus the velocity your arm can do on its own.
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Re: speed

Postby Cheb » Mon Apr 11, 2011 2:25 pm

A common tactic in various fictional martial arts media has one or more of the fighters moving (running, jumping, diving, falling, et cetera

There's an itty-bitty side effect at that. The Battle for Wesnoth game mechanics has a "charge" attack modifier (mostly limited to horsemen and knights using spears). It doubles both the damage dealt and taken :twisted: So yeah, any running attack is a nice trade-off: you lower your defense for extra damage dealt which works both ways. :twisted: Not a tactic I'd recommend for noobs.
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Re: speed

Postby Wyrd » Mon Apr 11, 2011 3:53 pm

Cheb wrote:There's an itty-bitty side effect at that. The Battle for Wesnoth game mechanics has a "charge" attack modifier (mostly limited to horsemen and knights using spears). It doubles both the damage dealt and taken :twisted: So yeah, any running attack is a nice trade-off: you lower your defense for extra damage dealt which works both ways. :twisted: Not a tactic I'd recommend for noobs.


That is the reason for the traditional tactic for dealing with a cavalry charge is a spear wall--the opponent impales themselves with their own momentum before getting within striking range of their lances. There are ways around this, such as having archers target the spearmen who have to be stationary and have their spears planted to withstand the impact of the cavalry, but that is just part of general tactics.

Without being able to plant yourself, though, the sheer mass of a charging horseman will generally mean that they won't suffer double damage from an ordinary strike, though a good strike will still have a higher relative velocity than vs a standing opponent and thus result in more damage. The rider, however, is firmly anchored to their steed, allowing them to maximize the damage they deal. To clarify, the rider should get a bigger bonus to damage than their target(assuming the target isn't something like an ogre which could be large enough to negate the other advantages of the horseman).
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Re: speed

Postby ckosacranoid » Tue Apr 12, 2011 11:21 pm

ok....who just took way to many hits of speed to even understand the tread?
i am not even going t even figure out what just went though here and just think about the hit of speed that i thought was the subject.....no i am offering anyone druge or puching thier use....just being very confused....
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Re: speed

Postby Cheb » Fri Apr 15, 2011 6:13 am

hat is the reason for the traditional tactic for dealing with a cavalry charge is a spear wall

In Wesnoth, the spearmen always strike first, even when you attack them. And the cavalry takes 120% piercing damage. Charge a goblin spearman at night (additional +25% for the time of day) and your knight takes a nice, shiny, round 300% damage from that puny pointy stick. Poor $unit_name, I knew him once. :P

Without being able to plant yourself, though, the sheer mass of a charging horseman will generally mean that they won't suffer double damage from an ordinary strike,

No, not when they have a good chance of offing most Lv.1 units with their first strike. :P

Well, back to Ranma 1/2... A knight charging against anyone of NWC will end grabbed by his spear and thrown over their shoulder together with his steed :twisted:
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