Fictional Material Standards

[Firestorm808]

We should probably make site standards on how to deal with fictional materials based on their interactions with real-world material.

For example, a stick made of Fictional Material A strikes and Frags/Pulvs a block of Steel without any visible damage to the Fictional Material A stick.

Therefore, if someone Frags/Pulvs a block of Fictional Material A, the Fictional Material A Frag/Pulv values should be at least comparable to steel.

What do you guys think?

@DontTalkDT
@Antvasima
@DarkDragonMedeus

 

[Antvasima]

Well, DontTalk is our main go-to guy for these kinds of issues, but he is busy IRL at the moment, so we will likely have to wait a while.

 

[DontTalkDT]

The durability of real-world materials isn't really as easy as "if A can smash B, then A > B".
Like how you can break a metal knife with a stone, but a stone with a metal pick.
Of course, there would be ways to mathematically account for that (not that I necessarily know them), but then you are straight in calc stacking territory.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Well, real world materials should pretty much always be compared to their real world counterparts. But fictional materials such as Adamantium, I can pretty much get by a character who can break adamantium is stronger than a character who can't break adamantium and what not. Though, there are notable inconsistencies, destructive capacity vs Attack Potency argument, and the possibility of outliers, PIS, CIS, ect. But those are all different cans of worms.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you both for helping out.

 

[KLOL506]

Based on what DT and DDM said, looks like it would just become too inconsistent in the long run just by basing it on the variables alone and could potentially enter calc-stacking territory.

It's partly why we don't upscale LS for ripping off body parts of people more durable than ordinary humans (Ordinary humans already requiring insane amounts of forces to be ripped apart).

 

[EliminatorVenom]

DT's right. Real life materials are way too complex to merely "scale" things as being tougher to break meaning they are superior to one another. Heck, many things are easier to break in one specific way than in others.

Hardness, molecular structure, plasticity, density, and so many other factors need to be accounted for in real life when compared to fiction.

Really, I don't even know where to start when talking about that.

 

[Antvasima]

So what should we do here then?

 

[KLOL506]

So what should we do here then?

From where I'm standing, OP seems to have been rejected due to the following reasons...

1. Durability of IRL materials is a lot more complicated and difficult than just power-scaling them in fiction

2. There are also a lot of factors when it comes to smashing materials (Some things may be easier to smash in one specific way than others), like what DT and Venom said, which could lead to some serious inconsistency issues and could easily enter the realm of calc-stacking to an egregious degree, not to mention that the inconsistency issues are entirely separate beasts of their own.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. Thank you for the summary.

 

[Firestorm808]

I understand your concerns.

I was thinking of more case-by-case scenarios regarding blunt force impact energy.

If a Hammer/club of Material A impacts, w/o damage, thick solid steel, causing a significant Steel Fragmentation Crater.

Or if a Block of Material B is point blank of a City Explosion and doesn't get even a scratch.

If anything, this would only work for bare minimum fragmentation estimates.

 

[Firestorm808]

Based on what DT and DDM said, looks like it would just become too inconsistent in the long run just by basing it on the variables alone and could potentially enter calc-stacking territory.

It's partly why we don't upscale LS for ripping off body parts of people more durable than ordinary humans (Ordinary humans already requiring insane amounts of forces to be ripped apart).

I can't say I follow how calc-stacking occurs?

In that scenario, pulling off limbs involves Tensile Force rather than Compressive force like a punch. I'm just talking about compressive force of blunt force impacts.

 

[KLOL506]

In that scenario, pulling off limbs involves Tensile Force rather than Compressive force like a punch. I'm just talking about compressive force of blunt force impacts.

Same principle, you use the durability of the superhuman dude to upscale the ripping tensile force of the ordinary human dude, and that's what constitutes as calc stacking.

 

[Firestorm808]

Wait. In your example, you have a normal person ripping off a limb of a person with superhuman durability?

 

[Firestorm808]

Wait, so if a new villain popped up and ripped off Superman's arm or something, the villain wouldn't scale to Superman?

 

[KLOL506]

Wait. In your example, you have a normal person ripping off a limb of a person with superhuman durability?

Yep, suppose ther's an example like that. Like Sub-Zero ripping spines out.

 

[KLOL506]

Wait, so if a new villain popped up and ripped off Superman's arm or something, the villain wouldn't scale to Superman?

No, he'd scale above Superman but we couldn't factor that in into a calc for LS, we could only write (Stronger than Superman and that'd be the scaling chain).

 

[Firestorm808]

Yep, suppose ther's an example like that. Like Sub-Zero ripping spines out.

Sub-Zero is Superhuman.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Yeah, KLOL is right. In a "Character A ripped character B in half" scenario, we don't just take the fact that character B is x times more durable than an average human and then multiply the "Strength required to rip someone in half" by x. It's fine that character A is significantly stronger than B, but factoring an exact X number as a multiplier would be Calc Stacking. Same thing goes for vaporizing a character who happens to be X times more durable than an average human.

Though, it would be a different story for character B being many times larger than a human.

 

[Firestorm808]

You misunderstand. I am not proposing any kind of multipliers. Just bare minimums regarding fragmentation values.

 

[Firestorm808]

I'm not sure why body parts were brought up. We're only talking about materials.

 

[EliminatorVenom]

I understand your concerns.

I was thinking of more case-by-case scenarios regarding blunt force impact energy.

If a Hammer/club of Material A impacts, w/o damage, thick solid steel, causing a significant Steel Fragmentation Crater.

Or if a Block of Material B is point blank of a City Explosion and doesn't get even a scratch.

If anything, this would only work for bare minimum fragmentation estimates.

I see the idea that's proposed here and I even like the idea of someone doing analysis and pages about fictional materials, maybe making some very rough measurements. I see a few issues though, some that are only in a fictional trope sense, and some that have some interplay between that and actual science.

Issue 1: I haven't ever seen, and I doubt I'll see, in fiction any material that is consistently at a given level, with fragmentation values and all that. I can guarantee you, that for every feat you manage to calc consistently for a given block of material of such and such measurements taking such and such amounts of energy, even if only as a "at least" thing and not having any upper limit, I will give you ten other feats that completely contradict that, showing much thinner pieces of material that isn't reinforced in any way and has no special properties that manages to take more damage than said block does, showing said blocks being destroyed by much smaller amounts of energy, and many, many other examples.

I wrote this thinking about Marvel's adamantium and WH40K's various materials, that I've seen every single example I listed here happen to. Of note is that our own fragmentation and calc rules regarding material science are very simplified, since we tend to take scenarios so extreme that material properties and all that wouldn't change the end result by a significant enough margin. Attempting to do so to fictional materials, who are supremely inconsistent at best doesn't bode well.

Issue 2: One thing we need to think about is why we assign joules to materials as a form of calcing their destructive values. The very, very shortened and oversimplified answer, is that it is closely tied to how energy binds together specific molecular compositions, but also to other things such as density, proximity of said molecules and all that. And all that arrangement is perfectly in line to grant said materials other properties: Weight, density, conductivity, if it rusts, corrosion resistance, etc.. Fictional materials, most of the time, do not obey the things their hardness, toughness and anything else would imply.

I do not presume to be a scientist, engineer, chemist or anything like that, so far from me to presume what a given material would be like in utter specifics. What I do know from studying and practice in material science concerning sword and tool making, is that most fictional materials are utterly bogus on what they should be like. Mythril from many fictional pieces can be harder than steel, but at the same time flex as cloth under duress. (Two material properties that are - again, simplifying a bit - opposite to each other) I've seen comics from Marvel where adamantium has been used to justify resistance at times, weakness at times, to different elements and things all the time. I could go on, trashing all sorts of materials, but the point is that most fictional materials make no logical material sense, they run in awesome and convenience juice. They work as conveniently as they need to be. This seems fairly minor, but all that screw up massively any reasonable way to judge how to measure energy to break said material. Again, if the focus is just grabbing feats that materials "tank" attacks and scale to them, by all means, do so. But from a scientific standpoint, it just seems that most of the time, they tank arbitrary amounts of energy with no rhyme or reason, and that scaling them is a futile effort at best. As in, said block of material, somehow, isn't that much better than a very thin sheet of said material at blocking strikes. (Again, I'm thinking about Marvel's adamantium in here)

Issue 3: Lastly, another fictional concern is that materials are frankly almost irrelevant in fiction. We can repeatedly see characters use ordinary steel, wood and iron objects to inflict waaaay more than 9-B levels of damage, without said thing receiving any damage at all, and while other characters in the same level use the exact same weapons (At least in materials, but I've seen examples of characters using the same exact weaponry too) managing much smaller amounts of destruction, and their own armours easily getting sliced apart while the stronger character's own tanks it.

Just to make it clear: I am not talking about custom-made gear, that would allow for some magical form of "better smithing" that would make a thin iron cuirass from a protagonist tank a nuclear bomb that would incinerate a lesser character's full plate armour. I am talking about characters using the exact same pieces of gear, or just grabbing normal weapons/objects and inflicting absolute massive damage with them, and said weapons receiving no damage at all, with no explanations or nothing in that sense. That further ties in with Issues 1 and 2, because it can easily promote materials such as steel and wood having much higher yields than their real world counterparts, which leads to contradictions at best, and at worst, infinite circular calc-stacking. (Character A manages to cause 8-B damage with an ordinary, random wood sword cut from a log. Character B easily explodes a tree with a swing from his iron sword, which is way thicker and tougher than the wood, so he is at least 8-B from scaling as way above the wood sword. However, his own sword is easily broken by Character C using a wood sword, or his defense is simply blown through. And so it goes circularly)

However, those aren't qualitative refutations, which I believe are necessary, just circumstantial ones. Still valid, I think, but it doesn't justify exactly why that'd be wrong, from an argument sense, as there almost certainly is, out there, a specific author who manages to be utterly consistent in that.

I'll answer to that later, but these three issues basically make the notion impossible.

 

[KLOL506]

I'm not sure why body parts were brought up. We're only talking about materials.

Body parts have materials and someone could easily use that argument to upscale a fictional verse's superhuman character's body materials. Which can easily enter calc-stacking territory.