Wapsi Square Forum

NOTDilbert wrote:

ActionKermit wrote:

Sidhekin wrote: Does that mean that before the Forest, she was mortal? Or would Shelly's "human side" have been removed in time or travail in either case?

In my headcanon, Shelly's human side was burned away when she got irradiated by the V-cell. Anything that could die in her, died.

That was first-time-loop Shelly that died from the plutonium. 57th-time-loop Shelly was the Sphinx, The Sage of the Time Forest.

As I read ActionKermit, while 100% of Shelly-1 died then, so did 25% of Shelly-57. What remains of Shelly-57 thereafter, is immortal.

NOTDilbert wrote:

ActionKermit wrote:

Sidhekin wrote: Does that mean that before the Forest, she was mortal? Or would Shelly's "human side" have been removed in time or travail in either case?

In my headcanon, Shelly's human side was burned away when she got irradiated by the V-cell. Anything that could die in her, died.

That was first-time-loop Shelly that died from the plutonium. 57th-time-loop Shelly was the Sphinx, The Sage of the Time Forest.

But all of the other Shellys died there. Of what?

(In best Monty Python voice): "I don't know that -AAAAaaahhhhhh!"

Or, not.

Fairportfan wrote: But all of the other Shellys died there. Of what?

A great many things I would guess. Some of it may have been old age or other Apos.

Mark N wrote:

Fairportfan wrote: But all of the other Shellys died there. Of what?

A great many things I would guess. Some of it may have been old age or other Apos.

...not surviving quests to get bits of the Vimana Cell...
(and knowing Shelly one or two must have cut their own heads off with the sword-blade)

Fairportfan wrote: But all of the other Shellys died there. Of what?

Since Sphinx Shelly knew Shelly-1 was going to die in seconds of intense radiation poisoning, and expressed no surprise at the symptoms, that suggests she'd seen this before and at least some of the other Shellys died the same way. The tree may not have been a perfect containment unit and enough radiation leaked out that staying near it too long for anything but a Sphinx would be fatal.

(Shelly-1's death was STRANGE. Radiation poisoning that kills that fast doesn't cause decay and withering, you die because your cells stop working. I suspect that over the thousands of years the V-cell mutated from simple radiation into something more mystical...)

(I also still hold onto the idea that no Shellys were actually killed in the production of this V-cell. That the only way to leave the Time Forest except for Shelly-57 was for the Shelly avatar there to die, but that that didn't kill real life Shelly. I base this on Jin. Consider: Prior to cycle 57, this business with the Artifact apparently took place BEFORE the effort to fix the Calendar Machine, when Jin and all were trying to figure out how to do it. So, in the course of the first cycle, Shelly-1 touches the Artifact, dies. Jin thinks "What the heck?" Next cycle Shelly-2 touches the Artifact, dies. Jin thinks "OK, this is not a coincidence. I need Shelly to fix the Calendar Machine, so from now on, no more artifact touching for her". So no further Shellys touch the Artifact and no more of them show up in the Forest until 57 after the CM is prematurely fixed and Jin's sanity fails.

Now consider what happens if the Shellys DON'T die in real life. Shelly-1 touches the Artifact, suddenly starts babbling about dying, and a forest, and a Sphinx that looks like her, and a radioactive cell. Jin thinks "What the heck?" Next cycle Shelly-2 does the same thing. Jin thinks "OK, someone is building a V-cell in some other dimension. That's interesting. Maybe it will help fix the Calendar Machine. I need to know more, so from now on, Shelly ALWAYS touches the Artifact". Which appears to be what happened...)

Shelly1 didn't really wither. She was hit with a dose of radiation far more intense than 30 Gy. Around that level, victims have nausea, diarrhea, fever, headache, and Central Nervous System failure.

...Shelly1 died before she could even barf. From what I can tell, Shelly1 suffered so much radiation the actual chemical and physical bonds holding her cells and tissues together were demolished, causing legions and internal and external bleeding... Turning her insides to the constancy of tomato soup mixed with a bit of flour.

Intense radiation can do this sort of thing, but the events that are capable of producing such massive amounts of radiation are usually large, energetic, and very, very hot.

But, as I have said before, the laws of physics as we know them only partially apply in the Wapsiverse. So let's just chalk this up to the "A Wizard Did It" trope and move on.

GlytchMeister wrote:Shelly1 didn't really wither. She was hit with a dose of radiation far more intense than 30 Gy. Around that level, victims have nausea, diarrhea, fever, headache, and Central Nervous System failure.

...Shelly1 died before she could even barf. From what I can tell, Shelly1 suffered so much radiation the actual chemical and physical bonds holding her cells and tissues together were demolished, causing legions and internal and external bleeding... Turning her insides to the constancy of tomato soup mixed with a bit of flour.

Intense radiation can do this sort of thing, but the events that are capable of producing such massive amounts of radiation are usually large, energetic, and very, very hot.

But, as I have said before, the laws of physics as we know them only partially apply in the Wapsiverse. So let's just chalk this up to the "A Wizard Did It" trope and move on.

A wizard in an unknown environment with different quantum effects (remember, time flows in the opposite direction to our universe)

GlytchMeister wrote: But, as I have said before, the laws of physics as we know them only partially apply in the Wapsiverse. So let's just chalk this up to the "A Wizard Did It" trope and move on.

On that note, I once calculated that when Bud threw the remnants of the calendar machine into the sun, she threw it with about 1,275,000 Newtons of force -- half again as much thrust as a Boeing 747 with all its engines at maximum output. (Assumptions: it took two seconds for Bud to wind up from zero to full speed, the remnants of the calendar weighted 1 ounce.)

ActionKermit wrote:On that note, I once calculated that when Bud threw the remnants of the calendar machine into the sun, she threw it with about 1,275,000 Newtons of force -- half again as much thrust as a Boeing 747 with all its engines at maximum output. (Assumptions: it took two seconds for Bud to wind up from zero to full speed, the remnants of the calendar weighted 1 ounce.)

Your second assumption is incorrect... it still has the total weight / mass of the original Calendar... remember, all Bud did was to CRUSH it down to that size... she didn't REMOVE anything, just made it so there was no empty space between the bits and pieces and moving parts anymore... so unless that HUGE machine only weighed one ounce BEFORE the crushing... (and IMHO, i don't think even the Atlantian's had gotten their material sciences down good enough, in order to do that much weight-reduction of items,) so I'm pretty sure your mass estimate is WAAAYYY, WAY underestimated... which makes her energy output even that much more impressive! I'm not certain of the ACTUAL weight of a GOLF BALL, but i could agree with those numbers if she were to have thrown one of those into the sun, but not the The Calender Machine...

If we increase the mass of the calendar wreckage to be comparable with the low-end estimate for an average schoolbus (11 short tons), then the amount of thrust necessary to accelerate it to 0.3465c (the minimum necessary speed to make an object travel 1 AU in 24 minutes) is 5.183×10^8 kN, or 406510 times higher than my first estimate (for a total thrust equivalent to 609765 Boeing 747s). I'm idly curious as to whether Bud's throw would have ignited the atmosphere and leveled a significant portion of the city.

Which reminds me, I still haven't accounted for wind resistance...

ActionKermit wrote:If we increase the mass of the calendar wreckage to be comparable with the low-end estimate for an average schoolbus (11 short tons), then the amount of thrust necessary to accelerate it to 0.3465c (the minimum necessary speed to make an object travel 1 AU in 24 minutes) is 5.183×10^8 kN, or 406510 times higher than my first estimate (for a total thrust equivalent to 609765 Boeing 747s). I'm idly curious as to whether Bud's throw would have ignited the atmosphere and leveled a significant portion of the city.

Which reminds me, I still haven't accounted for wind resistance...

as seen here, i don't think that any difference would be really noticeable for anyone nearby... sure, speed-wise, a few micro-seconds, but that's about it, the same thing would happen, though you would have to take into account the density of the object preventing its total vaporization like the baseball does...

ActionKermit wrote:Which reminds me, I still haven't accounted for wind resistance...

Pretty sure that would be pretty much irrelevant to that much mass in that dense a package moving that fast...

Yep... According to Bud, the chunk left over from the calendar machine traveled 1 AU in 24 minutes or so. Doing some quick math in my head...
(Light takes 8 minutes to travel 1AU so something going that distance in 24 minutes... 24/3=8 ...)

The chunk was thrown at approximately 1/3 c. I think that's about 90,000 km/s. That's over Mach 300,000.

Referring to this: http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/ ... The chunk would be going fast enough to induce some nuclear fusion in front of it. I'd guess the chunk, depending on how magical and weird it is, would likely be reduced to a small bullet-shaped cloud of plasma by the time it exits our atmosphere. It would then disperse and would either be caught in the Earth's geomagnetic field and become a tiny Aurora Borealis or it would escape the geomagnetic field and be swept away by the solar winds, like the plasma tail of a comet.

It probably never reached the sun. But it was still very, very thoroughly destroyed.

This wouldn't cause the kind of devastation that relativistic baseball can, but the acceleration bud imparted on the chunk likely would have pushed her down into the ground. (Newton's 3rd Law) I don't know how deep, because I don't know how to calculate the viscosity or whatever of rock, soil, and concrete. But Bud's feet would hit the ground with around, as ActionkKermit calculated, 5e11 Newtons, which translates to about 116,518,475,000 pounds of force.

...so Bud's feet would exert about 1,618,312,153 psi on the ground. (Fascinatingly, this is close to 1,000,000,000 times the Golden Ratio... #Fun fact)

For comparison, an elephant standing on the tip of a ball point pen would exert around 100,000 psi... About 1/16,000th the pressure of Bud's feet on the ground.

I'm pretty sure I remember Paul saying Bud pulled that time estimate out of her ass so any calculation based off what she said is pointless.

shadowinthelight wrote:I'm pretty sure I remember Paul saying Bud pulled that time estimate out of her ass so any calculation based off what she said is pointless.

I thought her hatch was on the front...

shadowinthelight wrote:I'm pretty sure I remember Paul saying Bud pulled that time estimate out of her ass so any calculation based off what she said is pointless.

Aw, man... Really? Crap. I was actually kind of impressed with myself with that calculation.

...well, at least the math holds up (so far as I can tell) as long as Bud's assumption is true. And considering Bud's hands alone are capable of crushing fruits into diamonds, and was capable of crushing the calendar machine (essentially a big engine block, transmission, and "sufficiently advanced technology") into something the size of a pebble... Creating a kind of material approaching the densities of white dwarf stars. Hey, I just figured out how to calculate Bud's strength in a different way... Except I need to find how much force is required to crush the inert carbon core of a dying star to produce the density found in white dwarves.

Judging from the simple fact that I'm comparing Bud's strength to the forces involved in stellar evolution and the death of stars... I'd bet Bud could throw that chunk at 0.3c.

Yeah, Pablo called Bellisario's Maxim on that one.

(So you don't have to TV Trope it: "Don't look at this too closely.")

jwhouk wrote:Yeah, Pablo called Bellisario's Maxim on that one.

(So you don't have to TV Trope it: "Don't look at this too closely.")

That's what I figured, but it doesn't stop the hypothetical situation from turning into a fun Fermi problem.

So a couple people saw me doing my calculations on this whole thing, including the elephant on a ballpoint pen... I think I just solidified my position as head goof at my school.

As far as Bellisario's Maxim... Oh well. If anything, our mathematical misadventures may just get Paul to give us a definitive display of the Golem Girls' strength. That would be fun. Maybe have them go toe-to-toe with Bia. Preferably somewhere out in interstellar space. Or at least on one of Saturn's moons... If they blow it up, Saturn just gets more rings!