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Alright, let’s just start with why I am making this thread to begin with, considering we already had some of them before, with the last one being just a month old. Well, to make a long story short, I just couldn’t stand the gross amount of misinformation being spread throughout that thread. It truly hurt. I personally don’t care if this gets accepted or not. I just want to clear things up.
First of all, before I go and talk about specific arguments I will explain freezing, heat based and storm feats and how they should work, compared to how we treat them.
Let's start with the feat that we all know and love:
First of all I need to clarify what a “system” is.
“A thermodynamic system is a body of matter and/or radiation, confined in space by walls, with defined permeabilities, which separate it from its surroundings. The surroundings may include other thermodynamic systems, or physical systems that are not thermodynamic systems. A wall of a thermodynamic system may be purely notional, when it is described as being 'permeable' to all matter, all radiation, and all forces”
A system is typically differentiated between being open, closed or isolated. In an open system matter and heat can be added and removed. In a closed system only heat can be added or removed. An isolated system can not be changed.
We are going to define the thing we want to heat as our system in question and it will be a closed system. Within this system we have many molecules. If we now add energy to our system, said molecules will start to increase their movement speed and the object will heat up. This energy typically comes from some type of fuel.
This is also more or less how we treat it on the wiki. The only difference is that there is the misconception that heating something up means something else has to cool down in its stead.
Yet again we have an object which we use as our closed system. This time however we can’t simply add energy into it. After all, that would simply heat it up. Technically we could try and use energy to force the molecules to stop, but the more we try to stop them, the hotter everything gets and the more they try to move, so this would result in needing infinite energy to cool something down. The more obvious solution is to pass on the energy to the environment or even better, a different system. Such a system could be the air that is being moved by a fan. The air passes by our initial system and the energy moves from one system to the other. However, in this case the energy that is needed to power our second system is not proportional to the energy removed from our initial system.
How do we treat it on the wiki? We claim that the energy is directly removed from the system, without the need of any other system or the environment. How? Your guess is as good as mine. The best explanation I could find is that we simply assume any cooling feat is inherently energy manipulation.
This one is very simple yet again. To quote NASA:
“Clouds are created when water vapor, an invisible gas, turns into liquid water droplets. These water droplets form on tiny particles, like dust, that are floating in the air.”
Said condensation releases the thermal energy stored within the water vapor due to the change in its state of aggregation, from gaseous to liquid. This is also what is responsible for the energy within a storm.
How do we treat it on the wiki? Well, we just assume that the latent heat of condensation is what determines the amount of energy required to create a cloud. To put this into simpler terms, it is like putting a lid on a pot with boiling hot water and thinking that the energy it takes to put on said lid is equal to the heat that comes from the water condensing on the lid.
Now this one is kind of a completely different issue all together, but since people kept throwing it around in the last threads, I’ll quickly pick it up.
First of all, before I talk about my stance on the issue, let me talk about “endothermic” and “exothermic” reactions. Let’s start with what an exothermic reaction is:
“Exothermic reactions are reactions or processes that release energy, usually in the form of heat or light. In an exothermic reaction, energy is released because the total energy of the products is less than the total energy of the reactants.”
Condensation falls into that category, as energy is released upon reaction. Now why is that important? It is important because the energy needed to create the reaction, assuming any energy is needed at all, is not proportional to the energy released. You can’t even compare two similar exothermic reactions, since the energy output depends on the energy stored within the reactant. This is why dropping Lithium (video) into water releases less energy than when you do the same with Rubidium (video).
Endothermic reactions are a bit different however.
“Endothermic reactions are chemical reactions in which the reactants absorb heat energy from the surroundings to form products. These reactions lower the temperature of their surrounding area, thereby creating a cooling effect.”
TL;DR Even under the assumption of shared energy, exothermic and exothermic reactions can’t be compared and endothermic and exothermic reactions can’t be compared. Endothermic and Endothermic however are mostly, at least somewhat comparable, since all the energy involved should come from the character.
The law I specifically want to talk about is the second law of thermodynamics. To give a quick and easy example, imagine dropping an ice cube into a glass filled with room temperature soda. The ice is going to melt and mix with the soda. If you now wanted to separate them into ice and soda, you’d have to go through quite a bit of trouble to do so. This type of irreversibility in thermodynamics is called “entropy”. The harder something is to reverse, the greater the entropy. Why does any of this matter? Well, cooling something has a far greater entropy than heating. I’ve seen the “Heating and cooling are two sides of a coin” argument many times, but that is incredibly false, due to entropy. To give an example, if heating/cooling were two sides of a coin, it would be like maneuvering a boat across a lake, with no currents or wind. In reality, heating is like moving with the currents of a river, while cooling is like trying to move up a waterfall, with a bunch of logs falling from it, which you have to maneuver through. Now one might be quick to ask: “but doesn’t that mean using the calculation for heating is a low ball?” and to that I say
Now, what do I mean by that? Well, every reaction that involves cooling is exothermic, meaning that the final product has less energy than the reactant, making them hard to compare. Even among exothermic reactions there are different types. On one hand we have things like condensation, which doesn’t require any type of additional energy, since the water is already at a point where it wants to switch aggregate states, but is lacking the initial impulse to do so. On the other hand we have things like refrigerators, which are exothermic as a whole, but use an endothermic reaction (vaporisation) to pull away the heat. The thing about this one however is still that the endothermic reaction to pull away the heat is still unrelated to the energy needed to keep the endothermic reaction going. What am I trying to say with all of this? To go back to the refrigerator, if you were to swap out the refrigerant for water for example, you’d have far less of an effect, even if the energy that the compressor exerts stays the same.
The first one is randomly turning the air into ice. That is most likely not a legit feat. Why am I saying this? Well, nitrogen is actually very volatile even at very low temperatures, meaning that it changes states of aggregation a lot, for seemingly no reason. If you were to put this “out in the open”, it would immediately turn gaseous again.
The second one is treating the “creation” of ice as more important than what the character does with it. If a character makes a huge chunk of ice above someone's head and drops it, we only care about the creation, even if it has no effect on how hard it actually hits, which is the actual attack. I get differentiating striking strength and AP, but we should also separate practical and non practical AP.
Edit: A third issue would be that cloud feats often happen over an extended period of time and should be reduced to the output over the course of 1 second.
Now I’d like to talk about pretty much all the arguments made in the previous thread. Before I get into that I’d like to clarify something. Reading through the old thread was like reading an argument about whether unicorns poop pink turds. Instead of “the opposition” trying to argue that unicorns don’t exist in the first place and asking everyone to prove them otherwise, they tried to argue that the turd isn’t actually pink. I won’t bother with that until I have proof that the “unicorn” or in our case, cooling calculations (or to be more exact, how we treat them and that they are "two sides of the same coin"), are a real thing to begin with. After all, every time it was brought up that they are based on nothing, the only answer they got was a simple “nu-uh”. Never once was there even the slightest bit of evidence supporting cooling calculations to be legit, outside of people making groundless claims.
Anyways, I went through the entire last thread and tried to tackle every single argument made there. I ordered them by names, so that people who participated in the last thread can find my answer to their arguments, so we won't have to go through all of that again. (I know Mr._Bambu doesn't want to participate here anymore, but i deided to adress what he said anyways)
“Gotta withdraw energy to freeze something, which is something you can measure in joules as an energy manip feat”
Only if the character actually has the ability to directly manipulate energy, which isn’t a given in a freezing feat.
“And calcs are just the best we can do, I mean if freezing calcs aren't valid, all calcs aren't valid for any reason, which kinda makes all of this pointless”
There is a difference between being inaccurate and being impossible. Freezing calcs are/should be as much of a no go as FTL KE calcs.
“But that's not gonna get removed. Ever. Because even that ED has its energy yield. But when it comes to Universal Power Sources, that's a different story altogether.”
ED, at least when it comes to storms, releases more energy than what is necessary to make them. We however go with the energy released, which is completely unrelated to how much energy the character in question can actually utilize. Especially the “shared energy” makes no sense here. A storm is an “exothermic reaction”. Just because reaction “X” released “Y” amounts of energy after inserting “Z” amounts of energy to start it, it doesn’t mean “Y” is related to “Z” in every single thing you do.
“Yes it absolutely does, it assumes more than the fact that there is some weird weakness that the character can't move that removed energy somewhere else via the power source. It's not that hard to grasp.”
That is an insane leap in logic. Sorry, but that truly makes no sense. Giving every character that has a freezing feat the ability to, well . . . what exactly? You kind of fail to mention what they’d even use all that energy for. Do they absorb the energy and become stronger? Create fireballs? I mean, if they don’t show they can harness or manipulate the released energy to their benefit, then they don’t have that power. Saying anything else is head canon based on false assumptions on how thermodynamics work and using those as a reason to argue it’s legit makes little to no sense.
“Except, you're still moving the removed energy away in a freezing scenario somewhere and focusing it into something else.”
It is only focused if the character is shown or stated to focus it. Otherwise it would be assumed to just immediately be absorbed as heat energy by the surroundings, which isn’t a feat at all. Especially since it is completely unrelated to what a character can actually output.
“FOR THE LAST TIME, JAKUUB, IT LITERALLY DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE ENERGY IS USED LATER FOR. AS LONG AS THE ENERGY GETS MOVED, IT COUNTS. FULL STOP.”
Yes, it does. It very much does matter. For the following reasons:
1. The energy the character used to create the feat is 100% unrelated to the amount of energy output
2. The energy output (typically) can not be controlled by the character that caused the feat
3. The energy literally dissipates right away, having no effect on anyone or anything. It might cause some winds due to pressure differences, but that’s about it.
Imagine this situation for a second. A character creates a storm. The storm causes rain. The rain cools down a hot surface. The hot surface cools down and the rain evaporates from it, rising into the air, forming another storm. This repeats a few times. Would you now say that every instance of “energy being released due to cooling” would be attributed to the character who made the storm? I mean, apparently it doesn’t matter whether the energy released is just an unrelated byproduct. And just to be clear (and so people won’t yell straw-man), the energy coming from the rain cooling down a surface is as much unrelated as the energy released from the character initially creating the storm. In both scenarios it is just an “unwanted” byproduct of the actual feat.
“Sorry but that's not how any of this works. The ice beams or the dude using the ice abilities is literally absorbing the heat into them, heat flows from hot to cold when something cools down, it doesn't just get removed and get wiped out of existence. We measure how much heat is absorbed by the ice thingy via the freezing formula (Or in simple terms since I know of no better way, how much energy it takes to freeze stuff).”
Sorry, but that’s just so wrong, I am not even sure where I should start. To keep it short and simple, hot air moving in from the surroundings because you cooled something doesn’t scale to AP. That’s like saying that if a wall collapses after someone punches a hole into it, that should scale. Also, yeah, obviously the energy doesn’t get EE-ed, so what? It simply dissipates within the surrounding air.
“Doesn't need to be that way pal. If said thermal energy has a calc'd value, it fits and it sits, even more so with a universal energy source. Plain and simple. Fiction doesn't sit around to follow what rules you say real-life physics has to follow, they have their own laws of physics to worry about.”
You can’t have it both ways. Either it follows IRL physics and we can calc it or it doesn’t. We can’t just make stuff up and pretend it’s legit.
“Energy is not created nor destroyed. Whether you're cooling something down or heating it up, you're just moving energy from one place to another. In that sense they're the same thing, and can be calculated accordingly.”
A lot to unpack in this one. To start it off, whether energy can or can’t be destroyed or created doesn’t matter in the slightest. I’ve seen this being brought up on several occasions in older threads and I have no idea why. Next up, the issue is not whether energy gets moved or not, but how it gets moved. Those processes are very much very different and require different amounts of energy. Heating is something that only requires one system to receive energy. Cooling (always) needs at least two or the environment. I suppose there is one exception to that rule, but that exception also requires infinite energy, so I doubt it’s even up for debate.
“We don't need to get to a point of complexity that any average user has no idea what on Earth we're talking about. First and foremost this is a hobby with a level of reasonable accuracy already established. Splitting hairs will, in my opinion, do very little other than annoy those dealing with the split hairs and confuse those witnessing the fallout.”
There is a difference between wanting to be super duper accurate with every single calc we do and using made up physics.
“Something something our system calculates changes in energy, which cooling provably is. For whatever reason people consistently ignore the fact that taking energy out is just as viable as putting it in.”
Because it isn’t. There are several things that require more energy in one direction than in the other. This is one of them. I have yet to see even the smallest bit of evidence supporting that they are even comparable in how they work. People just continuously claim they are.
“It's about as counter active as a leaf blower vs a vacuum”
That is just false. Nothing more to say here, really.
“When one heats an object, you are importing thermal energy into an object. And when you freeze or cool an object, you are extracting thermal energy from the object. The primary point is, both cases are still X tier levels of energy manipulation.”
And that is false as well or to be more exact, incredibly misleading. I mean yes, heating causes a system's energy to increase and cooling causes it to decrease, but the amount of energy that is actually required to move the energy out of a system is vastly different than the one required to get it into a system, since they require completely different processes. Now one might yell “but what about energy manipulation”. Well, that’s a completely different and unrelated power than freezing something and shouldn’t be granted based on head-canon of how a character's power works.
“And there's even more details to that. Details explained here how the concept of energy transferring works. Thermal energy is also defined in details here. It is described as the combined kinetic energy of atoms and/or molecules inside the object in motion. For example, the thermal energy of a glass of water is the combined kinetic energy of all water molecules in the glass. In order to heat up, the water molecules need to speed up, where as they need to slow down. But at the same time, the atoms and or molecules of other particles also need to speed up or slow down via laws of thermal dynamics theoretically speaking.”
And all of this . . . literally doesn’t matter at all.
“Now what happens when you heat an object, an object can only be heated if one or more object is cooled down.”
Supa dupa false. If you do sports for example, your body will heat up and in return . . . nothing cools down. Instead you burn through the fat and sugar stored in your body. It is important to remember that energy can’t be destroyed or created, but it can be converted and stored in forms other than kinetic energy.
“Speaking of change in temperature and, atoms, and molecules; there's something even more elaborate and complex than either one of those. That is the electrons, protons, and neutrons. Electrons are the main concept of electrical energy, with neutrons having a neutral charge, and protons having a positive charge. But that's where the main definitions of negative energy, neutral energy, and positive energy come from.”
Even more stuff that doesn’t matter :v
“We have a study on negative energy written by none other than Stephen Hawking. He further elaborates the definition of positive energy and negative energy. Positive energy is the energy required to separate two or more structures, typically on an atomic or molecular structure. Where as negative energy is the energy being used to fuse two or more objects together. Typically in the form of gravity or magnetism. But it's more importantly included when it comes to objects on an atomic or molecular level. Hence the 4 stages of matter. Atoms and molecules are much more separate in a gas or plasma, where as there is much more unity in that of a liquid or solid. Hence why various metals are most commonly seen as a form of solid where as things like oxygen or nitrogen are in typical gas forms. It's because some objects have a lot more negative energy compared to positive energy. And thus are much harder to heat up to the point of melting or vaporizing. This is for specific temperature and less about heat capacity, but that's a different story. But this is important to talk about regarding how the transfer of heat works too which I'll get to later but first.”
You say this is important, but it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. From here on out I’ll just skip all your nothing-burger bits, since there is way more of that to come.
“Now actually the real form for thermal dynamics isn't energy per say, but rather power. Power has watts as its official measuring unit and we go by joules per second.”
If you want to get all sciency, do it right. It is not power or energy, but intensity.
“Attack potency for strikes are defined by the energy of a single attack, but thermal energy based attack potency is thermal energy conducted per second.”
That is just false. That is how we define them, not their definition. In reality, both fall under intensity. You can’t just say “this is how we define them and that’s why they are defined like that”
“However, even if someone hasn't absorbed energy into their body upon absorbing thermal energy, the fact that they're even moving thermal energy to begin with is more than enough proof to scale to AP since the watts of work is still there.”
Input is not always output. Not sure why everyone thinks so.
“A Chain reaction is defined as a giant wave of energy set up to it can be caused by little to no work.”
A chain reaction is and I quote “a chemical reaction or other process in which the products themselves promote or spread the reaction.” as well as “a series of events, each caused by the previous one.”. You could have just looked it up, you know. Anyways, clouds forming very much fall under this.
“However, in areas with little to no humidity, various mages can often cause storms. They are still causing everything to come in place; the positive energy and negative energy would still have to come from somewhere, even if there isn't humidity to form it all. They may also be using the wind to do it all.”
Or, hear me out, it is just magic being magical, rather than abiding science. After all, the very definition of magic is “the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”. But yeah, lets just make up science to tier scientifically impossible feats.
“But freezing feats don't violate them any more than heating feats do.”
Yes they do. They are as implausible as FTL KE calcs. At the very least how we do them they are.
“If one's argument is there's no proof they absorb thermal energy, I can counter that by saying there's no proof the person's body hotter than the center of the sun when they released their Tier 7 heat wave out of their hand. If fiction followed the laws of thermodynamics, there body would have had to be that hot in order to release all that energy.”
That’s not true though? The amount of energy something carries isn’t directly related to its heat. That’s number one. The other thing is that their methods of releasing their energy typically isn’t physical to begin with, so this entire “counter” is utterly mute. Not to mention that even if true, it wouldn’t have mattered anyways, since there is no contradiction to be found here anyways.
“Remember when all energy in the universe was stated to be a static number. Yes, all energy specifically, not kinetic energy, or thermal energy, or potential energy, or positive energy, or neutral energy, or negative energy. Just energy. Meaning it is possible to make all thermal energy in the universe lower but causing all the negative energy to skyrocket. Thus now it's a super dense planet or star; more like a giant black hole. Or it can all raise, then every planet and star would be much greater distance with much higher thermal energy and/or positive energy.”
Congratulations, you are contradicting one of your former arguments. That aside, it doesn’t even matter unless you are literally affecting the entire universe, due to how open/closed/isolated systems work.
“Only outer space, and black holes have such temperatures. If any physical object with volume greater than 0 is absolute zero, it would have infinite mass as well as an infinite amount of negative energy.”
Pain-Peko
“The air can slowly cool the fire producing smoke, but water of the same temperature puts it out faster. This is because water has much more negative energy than air does and thus puts out fire faster. And also more density and heat capacity. […] This is also what happens when you blow out a candle, the wind of your mother disperses the flames do to the pressure extracting thermal energy from the fire lit candles. It is still producing energy.”
False. There are two major ways to put out a fire. 1 is to cut off the oxygen supply and the other one is to separate flame and fuel. Water does both and blowing does the latter one. Yes, cooling something down also works and yes water does that, but alcohol for example has more than half the specific heat than water and we all know what would happen if we tried to use that to cool down a fire.
“That is not my claim at least. In fact, you can calculate the number of joules of Heat that can be withdrawn by doing 1 joule of work under the theoretical limit of Thermodynamic efficiency by this formula : Tc/Th-Tc (Th and Tc being the hot and cold Temperatures in K respectively). For example, for taking water at room temperature to 0 degree C the ratio is ~10”
Well, first of all the “theoretical limit of Thermodynamic efficiency” is about how much energy you can get from radiation, not how efficient cooling is. What you are talking about is the Carnot cycle. Now I have two things to say about that.
1. It’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, let's start by talking about the entire formula.
Cooling: Tc/(Th-Tc) Heating: Th/(Th-Tc)
COPc=Qc/Win COPh= Qh/Win
COPc =< Tc/(Th-Tc) COPh =< Th/(Th-Tc)
Qh = Qc + Win COPh - COPc = 1
This shows that COPc does not equal COPh, unless it was done with no initial energy. Issue with that is that we would just treat the feat as hax if that was the case.
2. It is specifically about the exchange of two heat reservoirs, when using some kind of heat pump/heat engine, which your typical “magic ice wall feat” or “cloud creation feat” isn’t. To KLOL and DDM, who liked this post, you do realize that it was actually refuting your previous points, right? It wasn’t in favor of what you were arguing at all.
First of all, before I go and talk about specific arguments I will explain freezing, heat based and storm feats and how they should work, compared to how we treat them.
Let's start with the feat that we all know and love:
Heating
First of all I need to clarify what a “system” is.
“A thermodynamic system is a body of matter and/or radiation, confined in space by walls, with defined permeabilities, which separate it from its surroundings. The surroundings may include other thermodynamic systems, or physical systems that are not thermodynamic systems. A wall of a thermodynamic system may be purely notional, when it is described as being 'permeable' to all matter, all radiation, and all forces”
A system is typically differentiated between being open, closed or isolated. In an open system matter and heat can be added and removed. In a closed system only heat can be added or removed. An isolated system can not be changed.
We are going to define the thing we want to heat as our system in question and it will be a closed system. Within this system we have many molecules. If we now add energy to our system, said molecules will start to increase their movement speed and the object will heat up. This energy typically comes from some type of fuel.
This is also more or less how we treat it on the wiki. The only difference is that there is the misconception that heating something up means something else has to cool down in its stead.
Cooling
Yet again we have an object which we use as our closed system. This time however we can’t simply add energy into it. After all, that would simply heat it up. Technically we could try and use energy to force the molecules to stop, but the more we try to stop them, the hotter everything gets and the more they try to move, so this would result in needing infinite energy to cool something down. The more obvious solution is to pass on the energy to the environment or even better, a different system. Such a system could be the air that is being moved by a fan. The air passes by our initial system and the energy moves from one system to the other. However, in this case the energy that is needed to power our second system is not proportional to the energy removed from our initial system.
How do we treat it on the wiki? We claim that the energy is directly removed from the system, without the need of any other system or the environment. How? Your guess is as good as mine. The best explanation I could find is that we simply assume any cooling feat is inherently energy manipulation.
Cloud Creation
This one is very simple yet again. To quote NASA:
“Clouds are created when water vapor, an invisible gas, turns into liquid water droplets. These water droplets form on tiny particles, like dust, that are floating in the air.”
Said condensation releases the thermal energy stored within the water vapor due to the change in its state of aggregation, from gaseous to liquid. This is also what is responsible for the energy within a storm.
How do we treat it on the wiki? Well, we just assume that the latent heat of condensation is what determines the amount of energy required to create a cloud. To put this into simpler terms, it is like putting a lid on a pot with boiling hot water and thinking that the energy it takes to put on said lid is equal to the heat that comes from the water condensing on the lid.
Shared Energy System
Now this one is kind of a completely different issue all together, but since people kept throwing it around in the last threads, I’ll quickly pick it up.
First of all, before I talk about my stance on the issue, let me talk about “endothermic” and “exothermic” reactions. Let’s start with what an exothermic reaction is:
“Exothermic reactions are reactions or processes that release energy, usually in the form of heat or light. In an exothermic reaction, energy is released because the total energy of the products is less than the total energy of the reactants.”
Condensation falls into that category, as energy is released upon reaction. Now why is that important? It is important because the energy needed to create the reaction, assuming any energy is needed at all, is not proportional to the energy released. You can’t even compare two similar exothermic reactions, since the energy output depends on the energy stored within the reactant. This is why dropping Lithium (video) into water releases less energy than when you do the same with Rubidium (video).
Endothermic reactions are a bit different however.
“Endothermic reactions are chemical reactions in which the reactants absorb heat energy from the surroundings to form products. These reactions lower the temperature of their surrounding area, thereby creating a cooling effect.”
TL;DR Even under the assumption of shared energy, exothermic and exothermic reactions can’t be compared and endothermic and exothermic reactions can’t be compared. Endothermic and Endothermic however are mostly, at least somewhat comparable, since all the energy involved should come from the character.
Entropy and Laws of Thermodynamics
The law I specifically want to talk about is the second law of thermodynamics. To give a quick and easy example, imagine dropping an ice cube into a glass filled with room temperature soda. The ice is going to melt and mix with the soda. If you now wanted to separate them into ice and soda, you’d have to go through quite a bit of trouble to do so. This type of irreversibility in thermodynamics is called “entropy”. The harder something is to reverse, the greater the entropy. Why does any of this matter? Well, cooling something has a far greater entropy than heating. I’ve seen the “Heating and cooling are two sides of a coin” argument many times, but that is incredibly false, due to entropy. To give an example, if heating/cooling were two sides of a coin, it would be like maneuvering a boat across a lake, with no currents or wind. In reality, heating is like moving with the currents of a river, while cooling is like trying to move up a waterfall, with a bunch of logs falling from it, which you have to maneuver through. Now one might be quick to ask: “but doesn’t that mean using the calculation for heating is a low ball?” and to that I say
Now, what do I mean by that? Well, every reaction that involves cooling is exothermic, meaning that the final product has less energy than the reactant, making them hard to compare. Even among exothermic reactions there are different types. On one hand we have things like condensation, which doesn’t require any type of additional energy, since the water is already at a point where it wants to switch aggregate states, but is lacking the initial impulse to do so. On the other hand we have things like refrigerators, which are exothermic as a whole, but use an endothermic reaction (vaporisation) to pull away the heat. The thing about this one however is still that the endothermic reaction to pull away the heat is still unrelated to the energy needed to keep the endothermic reaction going. What am I trying to say with all of this? To go back to the refrigerator, if you were to swap out the refrigerant for water for example, you’d have far less of an effect, even if the energy that the compressor exerts stays the same.
Technical issues in applying Cooling/Cloud Feats
Just some issues I have with how we apply these feats and what we consider as “legit”.The first one is randomly turning the air into ice. That is most likely not a legit feat. Why am I saying this? Well, nitrogen is actually very volatile even at very low temperatures, meaning that it changes states of aggregation a lot, for seemingly no reason. If you were to put this “out in the open”, it would immediately turn gaseous again.
The second one is treating the “creation” of ice as more important than what the character does with it. If a character makes a huge chunk of ice above someone's head and drops it, we only care about the creation, even if it has no effect on how hard it actually hits, which is the actual attack. I get differentiating striking strength and AP, but we should also separate practical and non practical AP.
Edit: A third issue would be that cloud feats often happen over an extended period of time and should be reduced to the output over the course of 1 second.
Arguments made
Now I’d like to talk about pretty much all the arguments made in the previous thread. Before I get into that I’d like to clarify something. Reading through the old thread was like reading an argument about whether unicorns poop pink turds. Instead of “the opposition” trying to argue that unicorns don’t exist in the first place and asking everyone to prove them otherwise, they tried to argue that the turd isn’t actually pink. I won’t bother with that until I have proof that the “unicorn” or in our case, cooling calculations (or to be more exact, how we treat them and that they are "two sides of the same coin"), are a real thing to begin with. After all, every time it was brought up that they are based on nothing, the only answer they got was a simple “nu-uh”. Never once was there even the slightest bit of evidence supporting cooling calculations to be legit, outside of people making groundless claims.
Anyways, I went through the entire last thread and tried to tackle every single argument made there. I ordered them by names, so that people who participated in the last thread can find my answer to their arguments, so we won't have to go through all of that again. (I know Mr._Bambu doesn't want to participate here anymore, but i deided to adress what he said anyways)
Wokistan
“Gotta withdraw energy to freeze something, which is something you can measure in joules as an energy manip feat”
Only if the character actually has the ability to directly manipulate energy, which isn’t a given in a freezing feat.
DemonGodMitchAubin
“And calcs are just the best we can do, I mean if freezing calcs aren't valid, all calcs aren't valid for any reason, which kinda makes all of this pointless”
There is a difference between being inaccurate and being impossible. Freezing calcs are/should be as much of a no go as FTL KE calcs.
KLOL506
“But that's not gonna get removed. Ever. Because even that ED has its energy yield. But when it comes to Universal Power Sources, that's a different story altogether.”
ED, at least when it comes to storms, releases more energy than what is necessary to make them. We however go with the energy released, which is completely unrelated to how much energy the character in question can actually utilize. Especially the “shared energy” makes no sense here. A storm is an “exothermic reaction”. Just because reaction “X” released “Y” amounts of energy after inserting “Z” amounts of energy to start it, it doesn’t mean “Y” is related to “Z” in every single thing you do.
“Yes it absolutely does, it assumes more than the fact that there is some weird weakness that the character can't move that removed energy somewhere else via the power source. It's not that hard to grasp.”
That is an insane leap in logic. Sorry, but that truly makes no sense. Giving every character that has a freezing feat the ability to, well . . . what exactly? You kind of fail to mention what they’d even use all that energy for. Do they absorb the energy and become stronger? Create fireballs? I mean, if they don’t show they can harness or manipulate the released energy to their benefit, then they don’t have that power. Saying anything else is head canon based on false assumptions on how thermodynamics work and using those as a reason to argue it’s legit makes little to no sense.
“Except, you're still moving the removed energy away in a freezing scenario somewhere and focusing it into something else.”
It is only focused if the character is shown or stated to focus it. Otherwise it would be assumed to just immediately be absorbed as heat energy by the surroundings, which isn’t a feat at all. Especially since it is completely unrelated to what a character can actually output.
“FOR THE LAST TIME, JAKUUB, IT LITERALLY DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE ENERGY IS USED LATER FOR. AS LONG AS THE ENERGY GETS MOVED, IT COUNTS. FULL STOP.”
Yes, it does. It very much does matter. For the following reasons:
1. The energy the character used to create the feat is 100% unrelated to the amount of energy output
2. The energy output (typically) can not be controlled by the character that caused the feat
3. The energy literally dissipates right away, having no effect on anyone or anything. It might cause some winds due to pressure differences, but that’s about it.
Imagine this situation for a second. A character creates a storm. The storm causes rain. The rain cools down a hot surface. The hot surface cools down and the rain evaporates from it, rising into the air, forming another storm. This repeats a few times. Would you now say that every instance of “energy being released due to cooling” would be attributed to the character who made the storm? I mean, apparently it doesn’t matter whether the energy released is just an unrelated byproduct. And just to be clear (and so people won’t yell straw-man), the energy coming from the rain cooling down a surface is as much unrelated as the energy released from the character initially creating the storm. In both scenarios it is just an “unwanted” byproduct of the actual feat.
“Sorry but that's not how any of this works. The ice beams or the dude using the ice abilities is literally absorbing the heat into them, heat flows from hot to cold when something cools down, it doesn't just get removed and get wiped out of existence. We measure how much heat is absorbed by the ice thingy via the freezing formula (Or in simple terms since I know of no better way, how much energy it takes to freeze stuff).”
Sorry, but that’s just so wrong, I am not even sure where I should start. To keep it short and simple, hot air moving in from the surroundings because you cooled something doesn’t scale to AP. That’s like saying that if a wall collapses after someone punches a hole into it, that should scale. Also, yeah, obviously the energy doesn’t get EE-ed, so what? It simply dissipates within the surrounding air.
“Doesn't need to be that way pal. If said thermal energy has a calc'd value, it fits and it sits, even more so with a universal energy source. Plain and simple. Fiction doesn't sit around to follow what rules you say real-life physics has to follow, they have their own laws of physics to worry about.”
You can’t have it both ways. Either it follows IRL physics and we can calc it or it doesn’t. We can’t just make stuff up and pretend it’s legit.
FinePoint
“Energy is not created nor destroyed. Whether you're cooling something down or heating it up, you're just moving energy from one place to another. In that sense they're the same thing, and can be calculated accordingly.”
A lot to unpack in this one. To start it off, whether energy can or can’t be destroyed or created doesn’t matter in the slightest. I’ve seen this being brought up on several occasions in older threads and I have no idea why. Next up, the issue is not whether energy gets moved or not, but how it gets moved. Those processes are very much very different and require different amounts of energy. Heating is something that only requires one system to receive energy. Cooling (always) needs at least two or the environment. I suppose there is one exception to that rule, but that exception also requires infinite energy, so I doubt it’s even up for debate.
Mr._Bambu
“We don't need to get to a point of complexity that any average user has no idea what on Earth we're talking about. First and foremost this is a hobby with a level of reasonable accuracy already established. Splitting hairs will, in my opinion, do very little other than annoy those dealing with the split hairs and confuse those witnessing the fallout.”
There is a difference between wanting to be super duper accurate with every single calc we do and using made up physics.
“Something something our system calculates changes in energy, which cooling provably is. For whatever reason people consistently ignore the fact that taking energy out is just as viable as putting it in.”
Because it isn’t. There are several things that require more energy in one direction than in the other. This is one of them. I have yet to see even the smallest bit of evidence supporting that they are even comparable in how they work. People just continuously claim they are.
DarkDragonMedius
“It's about as counter active as a leaf blower vs a vacuum”
That is just false. Nothing more to say here, really.
“When one heats an object, you are importing thermal energy into an object. And when you freeze or cool an object, you are extracting thermal energy from the object. The primary point is, both cases are still X tier levels of energy manipulation.”
And that is false as well or to be more exact, incredibly misleading. I mean yes, heating causes a system's energy to increase and cooling causes it to decrease, but the amount of energy that is actually required to move the energy out of a system is vastly different than the one required to get it into a system, since they require completely different processes. Now one might yell “but what about energy manipulation”. Well, that’s a completely different and unrelated power than freezing something and shouldn’t be granted based on head-canon of how a character's power works.
“And there's even more details to that. Details explained here how the concept of energy transferring works. Thermal energy is also defined in details here. It is described as the combined kinetic energy of atoms and/or molecules inside the object in motion. For example, the thermal energy of a glass of water is the combined kinetic energy of all water molecules in the glass. In order to heat up, the water molecules need to speed up, where as they need to slow down. But at the same time, the atoms and or molecules of other particles also need to speed up or slow down via laws of thermal dynamics theoretically speaking.”
And all of this . . . literally doesn’t matter at all.
“Now what happens when you heat an object, an object can only be heated if one or more object is cooled down.”
Supa dupa false. If you do sports for example, your body will heat up and in return . . . nothing cools down. Instead you burn through the fat and sugar stored in your body. It is important to remember that energy can’t be destroyed or created, but it can be converted and stored in forms other than kinetic energy.
“Speaking of change in temperature and, atoms, and molecules; there's something even more elaborate and complex than either one of those. That is the electrons, protons, and neutrons. Electrons are the main concept of electrical energy, with neutrons having a neutral charge, and protons having a positive charge. But that's where the main definitions of negative energy, neutral energy, and positive energy come from.”
Even more stuff that doesn’t matter :v
“We have a study on negative energy written by none other than Stephen Hawking. He further elaborates the definition of positive energy and negative energy. Positive energy is the energy required to separate two or more structures, typically on an atomic or molecular structure. Where as negative energy is the energy being used to fuse two or more objects together. Typically in the form of gravity or magnetism. But it's more importantly included when it comes to objects on an atomic or molecular level. Hence the 4 stages of matter. Atoms and molecules are much more separate in a gas or plasma, where as there is much more unity in that of a liquid or solid. Hence why various metals are most commonly seen as a form of solid where as things like oxygen or nitrogen are in typical gas forms. It's because some objects have a lot more negative energy compared to positive energy. And thus are much harder to heat up to the point of melting or vaporizing. This is for specific temperature and less about heat capacity, but that's a different story. But this is important to talk about regarding how the transfer of heat works too which I'll get to later but first.”
You say this is important, but it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. From here on out I’ll just skip all your nothing-burger bits, since there is way more of that to come.
“Now actually the real form for thermal dynamics isn't energy per say, but rather power. Power has watts as its official measuring unit and we go by joules per second.”
If you want to get all sciency, do it right. It is not power or energy, but intensity.
“Attack potency for strikes are defined by the energy of a single attack, but thermal energy based attack potency is thermal energy conducted per second.”
That is just false. That is how we define them, not their definition. In reality, both fall under intensity. You can’t just say “this is how we define them and that’s why they are defined like that”
“However, even if someone hasn't absorbed energy into their body upon absorbing thermal energy, the fact that they're even moving thermal energy to begin with is more than enough proof to scale to AP since the watts of work is still there.”
Input is not always output. Not sure why everyone thinks so.
“A Chain reaction is defined as a giant wave of energy set up to it can be caused by little to no work.”
A chain reaction is and I quote “a chemical reaction or other process in which the products themselves promote or spread the reaction.” as well as “a series of events, each caused by the previous one.”. You could have just looked it up, you know. Anyways, clouds forming very much fall under this.
“However, in areas with little to no humidity, various mages can often cause storms. They are still causing everything to come in place; the positive energy and negative energy would still have to come from somewhere, even if there isn't humidity to form it all. They may also be using the wind to do it all.”
Or, hear me out, it is just magic being magical, rather than abiding science. After all, the very definition of magic is “the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”. But yeah, lets just make up science to tier scientifically impossible feats.
“But freezing feats don't violate them any more than heating feats do.”
Yes they do. They are as implausible as FTL KE calcs. At the very least how we do them they are.
“If one's argument is there's no proof they absorb thermal energy, I can counter that by saying there's no proof the person's body hotter than the center of the sun when they released their Tier 7 heat wave out of their hand. If fiction followed the laws of thermodynamics, there body would have had to be that hot in order to release all that energy.”
That’s not true though? The amount of energy something carries isn’t directly related to its heat. That’s number one. The other thing is that their methods of releasing their energy typically isn’t physical to begin with, so this entire “counter” is utterly mute. Not to mention that even if true, it wouldn’t have mattered anyways, since there is no contradiction to be found here anyways.
“Remember when all energy in the universe was stated to be a static number. Yes, all energy specifically, not kinetic energy, or thermal energy, or potential energy, or positive energy, or neutral energy, or negative energy. Just energy. Meaning it is possible to make all thermal energy in the universe lower but causing all the negative energy to skyrocket. Thus now it's a super dense planet or star; more like a giant black hole. Or it can all raise, then every planet and star would be much greater distance with much higher thermal energy and/or positive energy.”
Congratulations, you are contradicting one of your former arguments. That aside, it doesn’t even matter unless you are literally affecting the entire universe, due to how open/closed/isolated systems work.
“Only outer space, and black holes have such temperatures. If any physical object with volume greater than 0 is absolute zero, it would have infinite mass as well as an infinite amount of negative energy.”
Pain-Peko
“The air can slowly cool the fire producing smoke, but water of the same temperature puts it out faster. This is because water has much more negative energy than air does and thus puts out fire faster. And also more density and heat capacity. […] This is also what happens when you blow out a candle, the wind of your mother disperses the flames do to the pressure extracting thermal energy from the fire lit candles. It is still producing energy.”
False. There are two major ways to put out a fire. 1 is to cut off the oxygen supply and the other one is to separate flame and fuel. Water does both and blowing does the latter one. Yes, cooling something down also works and yes water does that, but alcohol for example has more than half the specific heat than water and we all know what would happen if we tried to use that to cool down a fire.
RoyGundman
“That is not my claim at least. In fact, you can calculate the number of joules of Heat that can be withdrawn by doing 1 joule of work under the theoretical limit of Thermodynamic efficiency by this formula : Tc/Th-Tc (Th and Tc being the hot and cold Temperatures in K respectively). For example, for taking water at room temperature to 0 degree C the ratio is ~10”
Well, first of all the “theoretical limit of Thermodynamic efficiency” is about how much energy you can get from radiation, not how efficient cooling is. What you are talking about is the Carnot cycle. Now I have two things to say about that.
1. It’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, let's start by talking about the entire formula.
Cooling: Tc/(Th-Tc) Heating: Th/(Th-Tc)
COPc=Qc/Win COPh= Qh/Win
COPc =< Tc/(Th-Tc) COPh =< Th/(Th-Tc)
Qh = Qc + Win COPh - COPc = 1
This shows that COPc does not equal COPh, unless it was done with no initial energy. Issue with that is that we would just treat the feat as hax if that was the case.
2. It is specifically about the exchange of two heat reservoirs, when using some kind of heat pump/heat engine, which your typical “magic ice wall feat” or “cloud creation feat” isn’t. To KLOL and DDM, who liked this post, you do realize that it was actually refuting your previous points, right? It wasn’t in favor of what you were arguing at all.
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