Power Abuse 3

Boy, you have a penchant for extremely overpowered capes, and each one is stronger than the last.

This cape is unfathomably overpowered, and if you combined him with Clockblocker or another cape which can freeze an object in space, he could literally take out endbringers. Okay, I'll admit that was major hyperbole, but... the power levels here are insane.

I was just trying to figure out if he could make a simple projectile based weapon that he can fire using his power, but I accidentally ended up finding out that he can cause huge amounts of destruction. Literally potentially a blaster 5 at a bare minimum if he works in concert with another cape, like mentioned above.

Here's the gist of it: given that mass = volume times density, and provided we can limit volumetric growth to one axis, you can turn a 1cm cube of aluminum into a 1cmX1cmX3.704Km rod of aluminum. By adding one kilogram. Yes, a 3.704 kilometer rod of aluminum by adding one kilogram of mass to the starting cube.

The big problem is constraint: you have to constrain the volume to expansion along one axis. Depending on how the power works, there are a few ways it could try to expand things, and if it, during the expansion phase, decides on which directions it's going to grow and then keeps going that way, it's possible to snipe people with a rod of aluminum from miles away. If not, you might end up with a punching rod bag fist thing, which is still pretty badass.

Here's some pictures to explain:

http://puu.sh/nFUtW/66d50be0eb.png

The first one illustrates the possible ways the power could try to expand the material the power is used on, when the material is in a given situation. Top left, we see the starting positions. Possibility A is that the shard decides "okay, we can expand in this direction" and it expands completely in that direction. I find this least likely, although if it does work that way, the world is fucked. Possibility B is that the shard tries to expand into less dense materials (like air) without disturbing the surroundings, or perhaps only proportionally. For example, if it is 100 times easier to expand into air than the steel containment, the shard will expand 1/100 into the steel and 99/100 into the air. This could result in deforming the object - if it expands in a cube shape once leaving the barrel of containment, it will be deformed the next time it shrinks, unless the shard has "memory" of it's old form and it sort of deflates back into the original shape. Possibility C is that the shard expands the target in all directions, causing damage to containment. This would be unfortunate, and would be like dulling a knife. It would definitely make the power less bullshit though.

http://puu.sh/nFUpF/93fbf95148.png

This image details my thoughts and calculations for a projectile weapon. In this circumstance, I used general terms and accidentally discovered that 1kg added to a 2.7e-6 kg cube of aluminum would lead to a 3.704 kilometer long rod, which isn't very useful. However, if the distances and units were fine tuned...

http://puu.sh/nFV10/451ace3517.png

By this analysis, given 50kg/s growth rate, and assuming the cylinder the projectile and affected aluminum are stored in is impossible to change, the rectangular spring pin aluminum thing the power is used on would be compressed from 1E-4 to 1E-6. The bullet slides left closer to the rectangle. Adding the difference in mass back in at 50kg/s results in the volume changing back to the original size in the space of 5.346E-6 seconds, which means the projectile is now moving at 185,185 meters/second. I've ignored Strain and Stress, both of which would probably mean the bullet crumples into useless material rather than getting shot out at 0.06177% of the speed of light.

Note that I did not state "accelerated" at some rate, I said the projectile is moving at that speed. Experimentation would need to be done, but at such a small timescale (5 microseconds!) it hardly matters.

Now, I may have lost a unit somewhere, which may mean that my 185,185 meters/second is actually in meters/second/second, and is thus acceleration. In that event, given a 200gr (grain) 10mm round, a force of 2400. newtons is exerted on the bullet. Again, I don't know nor want to compute just what kind of strain that would exert on the bullet, and it may or may not crumple the thing... or it may crumple the aluminum bar used to propel the bullet, but either way it's a hell of a lot of power.

Apologies if that's incoherent. I'm certain a lot of this revolves around how volume is actually expanded, and if it expands in a useful fashion, how much strain and stress is applied to the projectiles used, but if both of those things align, your character is packing a weapon orders of magnitude stronger than a railgun in his pocket.

/r/Parahumans Thread