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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:

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.

G5s3Hjo.png


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.

FtBP8Tu.png

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.


Rjdoz2N.png

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.”

1pt7yyl.png

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.”

3ALTcOb.png

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

TiDJait.jpeg


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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This actually makes sense to me. I've never quite understood how we extrapolate energy usable for AP from freezing feats but I just assumed that it was my poor understanding of the physics involved. For now, I agree with the premise.
 
Just some quick, additional info. A cooling effect can also be created by a change in pressure. I didn't bring that up in the op for the simple reason that 1. The energy within the system stays the same. It simply gets spread out. 2. It's quite the assumption to make.

To be clear, this type of cooling would also require a completely different calculation than what we currently do.
 
One more addition and one clarification.
Laser cooling also exists, but that one is so specific, I doubt even a single character on the wiki has something even resembling it.
I did say heat transfer is measured in intensity, but that isn't quite right. It is measured in intensity per K.

That should hopefully be it.

For clarification, I am adding these things for the sake of completionism, rather than them having any kind of importance.
 
Hoo boy, that was a read.

I think the obvious answer is that the unicorn's poop is in-fact rosé.



Jokes aside, yeah, don't make up physics to make up calcs. Unless someone can provide an actually correct calculation method, and prove that the calculated energy is relevant to what the character can achieve, it should be axed.
 
Medeus and Aubin are already aware of this thread, but I'll call some other calcers and those who were against this change in the last thread. I know Bambu wants nothing to do with these conversations anymore so I won't call him for it and IIRC DT is having to deal with IRL stuff.

@Damage3245
@KLOL506
 
I suggest we make a rule to not bring this up for the undecillions time if we reject this again in this thread. Unto the argument:


If you see an ice technique that actually transfers the heat to a different place in a realistic cooling mechanism style we can talk about applying things like actual cooling mechanisms to calc it. If such feats even exist.
In the 99.999% of feats where cooling magic just makes heat disappear into absolute nothingness doing it as we did makes the most sense.

Ask yourself this: If someone telekinetically stops a meteor mid-air, why is that an AP feat? After all, the character in question only reduced the total energy in the entire character-meteor-system by doing that. No energy was produced. So is this not an AP feat after all? It doesn't seem like the character would use up energy of itself here. Maybe we should assume they just moved the energy somewhere else? Maybe it absorbed it?

Let's instead look at KE feats in general. Character accelerates an object from v0 to v1 (v1 > v0). Now clearly the character transfers its own energy to the object to make it faster, right? But wait... there is no such thing as an absolute inertial frame. So we can also look at the process in the inertial frame, where new v1 = 0 and new v0 = v0-v1, i.e. where the object was moving before the character influences it and stands still afterwards.
So now suddenly the same acceleration feat is a deceleration feat, where the character seemingly absorbs energy from the object. So if removing energy from a system can't be addressed to AP, I guess all KE feats can't be calculated now?
Btw. in case you wonder why this is no problem in reality: That's because in reality laws like conservation of momentum, newtons laws of motion and conservation of energy apply. You can't accelerate an object without accelerating yourself into the opposite direction for example, meaning you can never remain in place when launching a 1 ton boulder fast. Sadly fiction never works like that.

And with that, we are at the crux of the matter. Obviously, we can't throw out every kinetic energy feat that breaks newton's laws of motion. But what people are demanding in the heat debate, without knowing it, is exactly that. Heat is nothing but kinetic energy in a chaotic microscopic fashion. The principle that a closed system can't simply cool down is nothing but the microscopic version of "you can't stop a meteor mid-air, without accelerating something else in the process". The atoms/molecules are just like countless tiny meteors that are getting slowed down.

So we basically have two options.
  1. We can say any feat that violates conservation of momentum and the like is unrealistic and hence can't be calculated. As a result, basically most of our profiles lose their stats.
  2. We can accept that if a character clearly uses their power in order to decrease the energy of something that feat is the same as the reverse of the process.
I know which option I would take.

TL;DR: Feats of magically slowing down molecules should be treated the same way as feats of magically slowing down large objects.
 
I agree with DT, and I also have brought up a bunch of topics that have been ignored. I can elaborate further when I get back from my RL job hopefully, assuming PTSD doesn't overwhelm me again that is. But the statement that "It will always get hotter if we add more energy" is actually false. There is such a thing as chemical energy and fusion energy; for example, liquid nitrogen actually has like 10x more "Energy" than gas nitrogen; it just has a lot less thermal energy. But not all energy = thermal energy. Same with gasoline; it has a lot more energy than carbon monoxide if you include all the chemical energy in it.

Also, comparing cooling feats to FTL calculations only works for "Colder than Absolute Zero" calculations; freezing feats are more comparable to Relativistic KE, with AZ being more comparable to Lightspeed calculations; or an infinite energy. But similar to Black Hole feats, we consider that more hax if it goes that high. And scientifically, it actually requires a lot more energy to extract heat in a closed system through pressure than does to add heat. It's a lot harder to douse a fire with wind than it does to fan and strengthen it. Blowing out a country sized forest fire like as if someone blew out a candle is scientifically are far more impressive feat than just breathing out a country sized forest fire.

Also, I agree we should be making a discussion rule about this; I pretty much agreed we should have already done so last month.
 
TO: DT
If you see an ice technique that actually transfers the heat to a different place in a realistic cooling mechanism style we can talk about applying things like actual cooling mechanisms to calc it. If such feats even exist.
In the 99.999% of feats where cooling magic just makes heat disappear into absolute nothingness doing it as we did makes the most sense.
Previous threads: It is fine to do cooling calculations, because energy can neither be created nor destroyed and pulling out energy is just as good as shoving it into something.
You: Freezing calcs make perfect sense because they are magical and erase energy from existance.

I mean, I could somewhat follow the logic from previous threads, but I am not sure what this is all about. Anyways, all that is besides the point and not even an issue I have with freezing calcs or at least not a major one, but you'd know that if you had read the op.

Ask yourself this: If someone telekinetically stops a meteor mid-air, why is that an AP feat? After all, the character in question only reduced the total energy in the entire character-meteor-system by doing that. No energy was produced. So is this not an AP feat after all? It doesn't seem like the character would use up energy of itself here. Maybe we should assume they just moved the energy somewhere else? Maybe it absorbed it?
Urgh, how is a perfectly legit feat based on balanced forces comparable to EE-ing energy?

Let's instead look at KE feats in general. Character accelerates an object from v0 to v1 (v1 > v0). Now clearly the character transfers its own energy to the object to make it faster, right? But wait... there is no such thing as an absolute inertial frame. So we can also look at the process in the inertial frame, where new v1 = 0 and new v0 = v0-v1, i.e. where the object was moving before the character influences it and stands still afterwards.
So now suddenly the same acceleration feat is a deceleration feat, where the character seemingly absorbs energy from the object. So if removing energy from a system can't be addressed to AP, I guess all KE feats can't be calculated now?
That's the weirdest, urgh, strawman (?) ever. You do know what friction is, right? This is just one huge, unrelated nothingburger.

Btw. in case you wonder why this is no problem in reality:
I don't.

That's because in reality laws like conservation of momentum, newtons laws of motion and conservation of energy apply. You can't accelerate an object without accelerating yourself into the opposite direction for example, meaning you can never remain in place when launching a 1 ton boulder fast. Sadly fiction never works like that.
Um, what? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction when it comes to forces. Not every acceleration has an equal and opposite acceleration. Acceleration is defined as change in velocity. If I pick up a ball and throw it, then the ball accelerates and I don't. There might be forces pushing me in the opposite direction, but those are typically lost to things like friction.

And with that, we are at the crux of the matter.
No, no we aren't.

Obviously, we can't throw out every kinetic energy feat that breaks newton's laws of motion. But what people are demanding in the heat debate, without knowing it, is exactly that.
Nobody is asking for that, directly or indirectly. KE feats may not perfectly follow IRL physics, but at least it isn't just made up nonsense. Using 0.5*m*v^2 to get the KE of a moving object/the enrgy it takes to stop it is a real thing. On the other hand, using latent heat of condensation to figure out how much energy it takes to form a cloud makes no sense and isn't founded on anything.

Heat is nothing but kinetic energy in a chaotic microscopic fashion. The principle that a closed system can't simply cool down is nothing but the microscopic version of "you can't stop a meteor mid-air, without accelerating something else in the process".
Urgh, no? One case is two forces colliding and canceling each other out, which is a real thing called balanced forces. Under that principle we calculate these feats. Obviously there are still issues. For example, we don't consider things like friction or ablation. However, in this case the issue is that we only use the "basics", rather than being super accurate. The other one is based on nothing.

  1. We can say any feat that violates conservation of momentum and the like is unrealistic and hence can't be calculated. As a result, basically most of our profiles lose their stats.
  2. We can accept that if a character clearly uses their power in order to decrease the energy of something that feat is the same as the reverse of the process.
I choose option 3. Keep simplified and legit physics and yeet nonsense that isn't based on anything.

TL;DR: Feats of magically slowing down molecules should be treated the same way as feats of magically slowing down large objects.
If there is any reason to assume that the magic in question is actually matter manip/energy manip, sure... but that is still besides the point.

TO: DDM
I agree with DT
You literally disagreed with several of the points he made here, with many of those being the main reason as to why cooling feats are currently considered legit. So, which one is it?

and I also have brought up a bunch of topics that have been ignored
Because they were increadibly false, grossly misuesed or just utterly irrelevant to the overal discussion. For example, you grossly misused negative energy, which was also utterly besides the point of the discussion.

I can elaborate further when I get back from my RL job hopefully
please do.

"It will always get hotter if we add more energy" is actually false. There is such a thing as chemical energy and fusion energy; for example, liquid nitrogen actually has like 10x more "Energy" than gas nitrogen
Urgh, no? The enrgy density of liquid nitrogen (255.8KJ/L) is greater than gaseous nitrogen (11.31KJ). This is measured in KJ/L. Liter is a volume unit. If you actually solve for KJ/mol, which you should, you will see that Nitrogen gas carries more energy than liquid Nitrogen based on the amount of molecules. Liquid Nitrogen then has 4.45e-6 KJ/mol and gaseuos Nitrogen has 1.36e-4KJ/mol, which is 30 greater. So yeah. Also, fusion energy is about combining atoms to create a larger nucleus, which both possesses more energy and radeates more heat. Not sure how this is an argumenet in your favour. I actually talk about chemical energy, endothermic and exothermic reactions in the op and it isn't in your favour either. Now just to be clear, there might be some wonky exception or anomaly to this, but that would be exactly that, an exception (and a big one at that).

But not all energy = thermal energy. Same with gasoline; it has a lot more energy than carbon monoxide if you include all the chemical energy in it.
Now I am certain you didn't even bother to read the op.

Also, comparing cooling feats to FTL calculations only works for "Colder than Absolute Zero" calculations
Yeah, you are right, the comparision is a bit "meh, since FTL calculations make more sense than cooling calculations, since those would at least be based on something.

it actually requires a lot more energy to extract heat in a closed system through pressure than does to add heat. It's a lot harder to douse a fire with wind than it does to fan and strengthen it. Blowing out a country sized forest fire like as if someone blew out a candle is scientifically are far more impressive feat than just breathing out a country sized forest fire.
Yeah, ok... you clearly didn't read a thing in the op and think you can just run down the same old arguments.

Last but not least, let me repeat what I said in the op. You have to actually bring some evidence that what we do is even close to legit, since such evidence is nowhere to be found.
 
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I'm far from a math or physics buff but honestly, RatherClueless is making sense here. I have no idea how balancing forces of all things (the TK feats) got conflated with something based on nothing. That and the fact that these calcs assume everyone can channel this energy for some reason.
 
Urgh, how is a perfectly legit feat based on balanced forces comparable to EE-ing energy?
There is more energy in the system at the start than at the end. It's literally the same process, just applied on a large object than on a bunch of molecules.
I don't even know what you mean with "balanced forces".

That's the weirdest, urgh, strawman (?) ever. You do know what friction is, right? This is just one huge, unrelated nothingburger.
Friction literally doesn't relate to this argument in any relevant way.

Um, what? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction when it comes to forces. Not every acceleration has an equal and opposite acceleration. Acceleration is defined as change in velocity. If I pick up a ball and throw it, then the ball accelerates and I don't. There might be forces pushing me in the opposite direction, but those are typically lost to things like friction.
If a force is applied to something it accelerates F=m*a and all that. No, you are in fact accelerated backwards, just that friction with the ground quickly decelerates you again, by transfering your momentum to the ground. If you do that with a sufficiently heavy object at sufficient speed fiction wouldn't work anymore, though.

In any case my point: In reality switching inertial frames doesn't change the amount of work performed. In fiction it does. A character can launch of 1 ton boulder at 100 m/s without being launched backwards, even though their 60kg body would gain a momentum of 6000 kg*m/s in the process, which the ground could of course never offset in that time. Gets even more clear if we assume the character is flying.
So yeah, characters ignore conservation of momentum and the like all the time.

We can in any case formulate any singular acceleration process, i.e. KE feat, as a deceleration process.

No, no we aren't.
It is the logical consequence of your claims.

Nobody is asking for that, directly or indirectly. KE feats may not perfectly follow IRL physics, but at least it isn't just made up nonsense. Using 0.5*m*v^2 to get the KE of a moving object/the enrgy it takes to stop it is a real thing. On the other hand, using latent heat of condensation to figure out how much energy it takes to form a cloud makes no sense and isn't founded on anything.
Applying the amount of energy a meteor loses when being stopped to the amount of energy a character has is in no way "more founded on reality" than applying the amount of energy a system loses in heat to the characters AP.
It is both "something is slowed down by a character applying a force to it".

You are trying to argue a difference where there is none. The case of heat is the case of KE, just smaller. If you enlarge molecules by a factor of 1000000000 you would find that it is just about slowing down a bunch of moving ball constructs.

Urgh, no? One case is two forces colliding and canceling each other out, which is a real thing called balanced forces. Under that principle we calculate these feats. Obviously there are still issues. For example, we don't consider things like friction or ablation. However, in this case the issue is that we only use the "basics", rather than being super accurate. The other one is based on nothing.
No, it isn't "two forces colliding". We don't say that to slow a meteor you have the same "force" than the meteor, which would be pretty much nonsense. The meteor doesn't even have a clear "force". Like, when it floats through vacuum it doesn't act with a force on anything. And different from the work the amount of force done varies.
We do in fact consider things like friction and ablation where it is relevant. Usually when we deal with meteors, they are just so massive that those things hardly matter.

And again, you try to argue a difference where there is none. If you want some weird "colliding forces" model, then cooling something down is "colliding" the "force" of the spell with the combined "force" of all the particles. You can't really wind out of the connection with that argument.

I choose option 3. Keep simplified and legit physics and yeet nonsense that isn't based on anything.
Then you have chosen self-contradiction, by applying one standard for large scale KE and another for small scale KE.

If there is any reason to assume that the magic in question is actually matter manip/energy manip, sure... but that is still besides the point.
This isn't more matter manip than more or less anything dealing with matter.

As said, the assumption of a usual cooling process is immediately eliminated since the heat isn't shifted (and by how fast it happens). And we don't assume hax where it isn't necessary. What I explained is the most natural option.
 
Regardless of everything else, what are freezing calcs based on? 0.5*kg*m/s^2 is something from the real world, I'd like to ask where the freezing calc's way of getting energy comes from.
 
There is more energy in the system at the start than at the end. It's literally the same process, just applied on a large object than on a bunch of molecules.
It is not the same thing tho. Applying force to a large object, canceling its momentum isn't the same as magically sucking energy from an object, which makes no sense, and then calculating it as if it was heated. Don't pretend it is.

I don't even know what you mean with "balanced forces".
Here you go

Friction literally doesn't relate to this argument in any relevant way.
Yes it does? I mean, either the object stops due to friction or the character slow it down themselves, which would just be balanced forces again.

If a force is applied to something it accelerates F=m*a and all that. No, you are in fact accelerated backwards, just that friction with the ground quickly decelerates you again, by transfering your momentum to the ground. If you do that with a sufficiently heavy object at sufficient speed fiction wouldn't work anymore, though.
Friction is a force that directly counteracts the force you exert on an object, which means the total force applied on you is lower than the force needed to push the object (this obviously assumes you have more friction than the object you need to push. For example, if you try to push something in socks on a flat surface, it'll be harder than using rubber sole shoes.)

In any case my point: In reality switching inertial frames doesn't change the amount of work performed. In fiction it does. A character can launch of 1 ton boulder at 100 m/s without being launched backwards, even though their 60kg body would gain a momentum of 6000 kg*m/s in the process, which the ground could of course never offset in that time. Gets even more clear if we assume the character is flying.
So yeah, characters ignore conservation of momentum and the like all the time.
None of this was ever an issue to me.

It is the logical consequence of your claims.
It is not. My issue is that the energy to cool something/cause a phase transition is not directly linked to the energy released when something cools down/phase transitions. Ever. Unless you want to give every character with a feat like that energy manipulation and by default heat manipulation, since if they can use it to heat up the air, they can use it to heat up everything else. That obviously is headcanon though and I highly doubt that'd ever go through. If you want to argue the energy gets EE-ed, well, in that case all the previous threads made on this are mute, since the very reason for why we consider it legit is because energy can neither be made nor destroyed and heating is just opposite to cooling, which wouldnt be true under that assumption.

Applying the amount of energy a meteor loses when being stopped to the amount of energy a character has is in no way "more founded on reality" than applying the amount of energy a system loses in heat to the characters AP.
Yes it is. A metiorite doesn't accelerate if you heat it up. A metiorite doesn't want to accelerate when surrounding metiorites get cooled down. Also, this assumes the character can telekinetically manipulate molecules and last time I checked heating/freezing calcs dont give a character telekinesis or matter manipulation. Also, yet again, this would mean the character in question also has heat manipulation by default.

It is both "something is slowed down by a character applying a force to it".
Only that the second one is not legit. You can slow something down by applying force, but you can't cool something down by applying force. The molecules you try to slow down would just try to move even faster due to the energy used to slow them down just heating them up. To get back to the metiorite, if you apply a force to it, that would slow it down, it would also heat up. That is why a metiorite that enters the atmosphere starts to ablate. This is why you'd need infinite energy to forcefully stop a molecules movements.

You are trying to argue a difference where there is none. The case of heat is the case of KE, just smaller. If you enlarge molecules by a factor of 1000000000 you would find that it is just about slowing down a bunch of moving ball constructs.
Yes, heat is just KE on a small scale, but that doesn't mean you can compare it to any KE feat on any scale and claim it's the same. There are several things in physics that work completely different, depending on their scale.

No, it isn't "two forces colliding". We don't say that to slow a meteor you have the same "force" than the meteor, which would be pretty much nonsense. The meteor doesn't even have a clear "force". Like, when it floats through vacuum it doesn't act with a force on anything.
First of all, uless the metiorite is the only object in the universe, there is a force applied to it and it applies a force. What do you think gravity is? Second of all, the moment you stopped it, there was a force, based on its deceleration, which is opposite to the force you had to apply to stop it. If you don't apply a force, it won't decelerate. Not too hard. Now if you want to, you can swap out force for energy. In that case a good example would be destructive interference. Actually, this might be an even better example, since it clearly shows that a system doesn't just "lose" energy, just because they "cancel each other out".

And again, you try to argue a difference where there is none. If you want some weird "colliding forces" model, then cooling something down is "colliding" the "force" of the spell with the combined "force" of all the particles. You can't really wind out of the connection with that argument.
But that is where the issue lies. You can't just force something to cool down by inserting more energy into the system, since it'll always cause it to heat up. The more energy you use to stop the molecules, the more the system heats up. The more the system heats up, the faster the molecules move. The faster they move, the more energy you need to stop them. This is why the metiorite example is not comparable, since it wont get faster, just because it is heated up by a few degrees.

Then you have chosen self-contradiction, by applying one standard for large scale KE and another for small scale KE.
No, I didn't.

This isn't more matter manip than more or less anything dealing with matter.
Wait, so being able to change the speed of specific molecules within an object is not mattermanip? Even though this is the definition: "Matter Manipulation is the ability to manipulate the particles that make up matter and the bonds between them." and specifically mentions "[...] polar covalent (Electrons are shared unequally) [...]" which would literally fall under the change of aggregation of water from liquid to gaseous (it literally even shows water as an example of that). So yeah, this is about as blatantly matter manip as it gets.

As said, the assumption of a usual cooling process is immediately eliminated since the heat isn't shifted (and by how fast it happens). And we don't assume hax where it isn't necessary. What I explained is the most natural option.
First of all, if the heat isn't shifted, this entire debate is null and void, since that was the no.1 as to why we even accept cooling feats at all. You are literally contradicting all previous threads (not that it matters). Secondly, I never advocated for "legit cooling calcs", but for the complete "yeeting" of those calcs, unless the process is actually specified. I know that most feats don't follow legit cooling processes, (and you'd know that if you had read the op), but this is exactly the issue. They don't follow legit cooling processes and we can't just slap some pseudo science on it and say it's fine when it's not.

Real-life formulas for the change of energy corresponding to a change of heat.
The issue isn't that the formula isn't based on anything, but our usage of it. Like I said in the op, the only way you could argue it to be viable is if you say the character can directly manipulate the energy of the object or its state. Now obviously that would give all the characters with cooling feats also several other abilities by default or at least that's what should happen (which would be a different issue all together). What actually happens is that we simply pretend that a character has an ability, which they don't have, just to justify using this formula. Then there is the "scaling issue" beyond the "legitimacy" issue. This issue revolves around the issue that we scale the energy a character pulled out from an object to their AP. After all, if the energy just "vanishes" into nothingness, then that can hardly be considered a feat worth anything, so we must assume that the character can actually use the energy they removed from the object, which yet again means we have to assume they have an ability they haven't shown, which we don't actually end up giving them, all for the sake of making them scale.

Also, to go by how you explained it in your original post: "In the 99.999% of feats where cooling magic just makes heat disappear into absolute nothingness doing it as we did makes the most sense.", the entire calculation would be pointless anyways, since it is based around tiering the amount of enrgy released and saying that the chracter scales to that, coz, urgh, energy manip or sth. WIth your rexplanation on the other hand, they'd just EE the enrgy they are supposed to scale to, which obviously isn't an AP feat. Unless of corse EE has become something we scale AP to, which I'd be unaware of.

Quick side note, our formula for clouds is even worse, since that one is the latent heat of condensation. That means that we take the energy that the substance loses during its phase change as the energy a character scales to. Just to be clear, it takes literally no energy to cause water vapor in the atmosphere to condense. Just a small impulse. Just something the water vapor can condense on, which isn't so warm as to cause the water to stay vaporized.
 
Friction is a force that directly counteracts the force you exert on an object, which means the total force applied on you is lower than the force needed to push the object (this obviously assumes you have more friction than the object you need to push. For example, if you try to push something in socks on a flat surface, it'll be harder than using rubber sole shoes.)
Looking back at this, this was worded quite badly by me. The point is that if other forces like friction are capable of pushing back on the chracater with the same amount of force as the character applies to them, they wont accelerate, since unbalanced forces cancel each other.

Just one more thing I'd like to say. Please decide on what nonsense you'd like to argue. All the previous threads argued that energy can't be created nor destroyed, that cooling is just heating but in the opposite direction and that every character that has cooling feat is simply assumed to be able to shift energy as they please, but without that and its logical consequences ever being acknowledged in their verse or their profiles, meaning we only assumed it to legitimize our use of that formula.

Now however the argument is about energy just . . . going missing? This completely contradicts previous threads and the reason presented as to why we can use the formula in the first place. Actually, this argument contradicts the usage of the formula completely, since trying to calculate the energy a character can control/move, without there being any energy makes no sense. It's like trying to calculate how long it took a character to travel from A to B in a timeless void and saying because there is no time, it makes perfect sense to use t=d/V. At least the old arguments made kind of sense, since under very specific, hypothetical scenarios, the formula was kind of usable (although even then, there are still many issues with it). This on the other hand makes no sense whatsoever.

So for me to be able to properly debate in here, I'd like to know which version you want to debate here. Oh and obviously you can't have both, since they are directly contradictory.
 
Now just to be clear, there might be some wonky exception or anomaly to this, but that would be exactly that, an exception (and a big one at that).
Thinking about it, I suppose laser cooling would be this exception, but that one is really, urgh, special to say the least. It basically works by tuning a laser to a specific frequency at which an atom will absorb a photon moving in the opposite direction, while also losing momentum, based on the photons momentum. The energy absorbed will go directly into changing that atoms energy level, instead of its temperature (basically like latent heat and phase transitioning, but for atoms).
TL;DR Quantum mechanics do be weird sometimes, but not that it matters, since this wasn't even the main argumenet anyways.
 
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