Heroes are murderers

[Bill Z Bubba]

3 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The original, and an exact duplicate.

 

They're all duplicates. I don't buy other explanations. Teleportation, unless transiting through another dimension, means disintegration/reintegration.

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

Also, the penal system in the United States is a joke.  We've all become inured to the idea of criminals being back on the streets within months, weeks, even hours after committing felonies.  Of course we're not fretting the fact that a purse-snatcher in a video game is back on the streets three minutes after being arrested.  It's a barely exaggerated reflection of reality.

 

No clue what you're talking about here. The USA has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. you are more likely to be imprisoned for a crime and to have a longer sentence.

[PeregrineFalcon]

15 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

No clue what you're talking about here. The USA has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. you are more likely to be imprisoned for a crime and to have a longer sentence.

While not entirely wrong, the actually situation is far more complicated than this simple statement implies.

[Luminara]

9 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 

No clue what you're talking about here. The USA has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. you are more likely to be imprisoned for a crime and to have a longer sentence.

 

Due precisely to that excessive rate of incarceration, felons can be granted furloughs or paroled for "good behavior", or released on probation, despite their records or offenses, long, long before they've completed their sentences.  Also due to that excessive rate of incarceration and the extraordinary burden on the judicial system, plea bargaining has become commonplace, resulting in shorter sentences than would otherwise be mandated, and even earlier releases than would otherwise occur.

 

A sentence doesn't equal time served, or even reflect the true gravity of the crime in our current society.

[Luminara]

25 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

They're all duplicates. I don't buy other explanations. Teleportation, unless transiting through another dimension, means disintegration/reintegration.

 

Which other dimension would one travel through?  Spin?  Charge?  Amplitude?  Eigenvector?

[The_Warpact]

21 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 

No clue what you're talking about here. The USA has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. you are more likely to be imprisoned for a crime and to have a longer sentence.

 

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

 

Due precisely to that excessive rate of incarceration, felons can be granted furloughs or paroled for "good behavior", or released on probation, despite their records or offenses, long, long before they've completed their sentences.  Also due to that excessive rate of incarceration and the extraordinary burden on the judicial system, plea bargaining has become commonplace, resulting in shorter sentences than would otherwise be mandated, and even earlier releases than would otherwise occur.

 

A sentence doesn't equal time served, or even reflect the true gravity of the crime in our current society.

 Hey kids lets keep the rl shit on the down low plz. 

Not calling ya out, I'm just foaming at the mouth wanting to tell you my thoughts and I usually get banned lol.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

Which other dimension would one travel through?  Spin?  Charge?  Amplitude?  Eigenvector?

 

Hell.

 

But only if we're talking mythology.

 

In this here real world? It's ONLY disintegration/reintegration! Transporters ain't nuthin but suicide machines!

[Bill Z Bubba]

6 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:

I'm just foaming at the mouth wanting to tell you my thoughts and I usually get banned lol.

 

I know your pain. I've been itching so bad to go on a two page roleplay based rant from a devil's point of view on existence and the nature of good and evil. It'd be a fun read but the permaban would be swift and vicious.

[PeregrineFalcon]

11 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Which other dimension would one travel through?  Spin?  Charge?  Amplitude?  Eigenvector?

What they could have done is say that the Transporter creates a warp bubble around the away team and quickly moves them to the surface of the planet, matches velocity, and then dissipates, leaving the away team on the ground.

 

This would give the transporters the same basic parameters shown in the show, make them more reliable, and would require like .001% of the energy that dematerialization/rematerialization requires. And it would have the added benefit of not killing tranportees, it would simply move them.

[MTeague]

The long and short of it is, Eye of the Beholder. 

 

If you want to feel your heroes are noble and upright, and when they're teleported to jail, the teleportation process heals life-threatening wounds, nothing I see in game lore contradicts that. Can even keep conservation of matter intact by just reshaping some of the existing matter (body fat), harvesting those protons,electrons, and neutrons to make new matter in a different configuration to patch the grievous wounds.  I mean, yea, that's Magic Tech, but we're dealing with a world where Magic is REAL, so honestly, we don't even HAVE to concern ourselves with conservation of energy and matter. It just comes down to what flavor of handwaving you prefer. 

 

If you want to believe that YOUR PERSONAL "hero" is in fact a ruthless killer who does leave bodies on the floor, with the coroner says "he's dead, jim", nothing I see in game lore contradicts that either.  Even if most OTHER heroes are linked into a teleportation system somehow to protect their targets, you can handwave something about your own characters powers that negate that and prevent it from working on your OWN targets. And no one can ever "Disprove" you on that, either. 

 

So let's all join hands, and remember to stab Crey in the face. Lethally or not, dealer's choice.

[Luminara]

21 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

What they could have done is say that the Transporter creates a warp bubble around the away team and quickly moves them to the surface of the planet, matches velocity, and then dissipates, leaving the away team on the ground.

 

This would give the transporters the same basic parameters shown in the show, make them more reliable, and would require like .001% of the energy that dematerialization/rematerialization requires. And it would have the added benefit of not killing tranportees, it would simply move them.

 

Wouldn't work from the show's perspective, though, given that they frequently transport through walls, ship hulls, etc.  Force = mass * acceleration.  Mass traveling at factors above the speed of light (warp speed) and striking a stationary mass would result in an energetic reaction which would make Tsar Bomba look like a firecracker.  A Black Cat, not an M80.  Fantastic potential for a weapon, terrible for an away team.  Unless your away team was intended to be an improvised explosive device, in which case, fantastic.  Maybe not for the away team...

 

Yes, they did something like that in Into Darkness, when the prototype ship flown by Robocop fired on the Enterprise while both were traveling at warp, but since they were both at warp, the relative velocity of the projectiles would've been much, much less than warp speed, no greater than it would have if fired from a stationary position.

[biostem]

Simple solution - walk up to enemy mobs, and when they initiate deadly force against you, you are justified in responding in kind.

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

Wouldn't work from the show's perspective, though, given that they frequently transport through walls, ship hulls, etc.

Yeah, but those are infrequent and usually portrayed as risky maneuvers. They can be explained by the usual technobabble.

 

Matter in a warp bubble doesn't move. The warp bubble moves space around it. So the warp bubble takes that bit of space and warps space until that bit of space (the air and the away team) is on the planet.

 

You can't move the away team faster than light anymore than you can move a ship faster than light. The ship doesn't move. The space around it does, much like the universe expanding does. This is why ships "accelerating" at warp speed don't squish the crew. The ship isn't actually accelerating in the Newtonian sense.

[Glacier Peak]

What a strange evolution of this thread since I was last here 😄 

[Placta]

Based on the ragdoll physics, they're slowly teleported bit-by-bit somewhere, starting with their skeletons.

[Techwright]

12 hours ago, The_Warpact said:

In another thread I had made mention of a hero jokingly shooting a fireball in a thugs bum and being ported away.

 

So for the "heroes " out there, we'll you're not. Mass murderers the lot of you.

I would never shoot a fireball into a thug's bum.  I only shoot fireballs directly into their face.  I'm too much of a gentleman to do otherwise.   Besides, a great many of them call out "Face Me!", and so I oblige.

[InvaderStych]

3 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

Aren't these messages planted in to the player's psyche by the aspect of Ruralru? Not their actual thoughts...?

 

Well, kind of yes in a manner of speaking, but also not necessarily.  I read it more as twisting memories, instilling or enhancing existing self-doubt, playing on weakness either real or imaginary, twisting perspective and the like.  What I like about them is that they carry the narrative nicely of someone wrestling with these very questions.  Winning over the corrupting influence of the Big R is certainly the main arc of them, but I don't think completely false/fabricated memories would be nearly as effective as twisting/distorting/calling into question real events would be, and R is pretty clever like that. 😉

 

IMO: Any Hero worthy of the term wrestles with these questions - even setting aside the act of killing outright - questioning/considering one's place in the larger social fabric is the difference between a Hero and a Sociopath with Good Intentions. 🙂

 

Yes, I will acknowledge in advance that those are two ends of the spectrum with lots of space between for all sorts of discussion, and I'll also admit that were I to be more diligent about personas and such I'd have at least 1 from all 4 branches, because not all toons are the same. 🙂

 

Fortunately/Unfortunately bouncing side to side for SG teams is frequently a thing, so most often Vig it is, which, if I am being honest, is where I'm most comfortable anyway. 😛

[battlewraith]

2 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

A sentence doesn't equal time served, or even reflect the true gravity of the crime in our current society.

 

It may. It depends on the charge and state laws. There are a lot of permutations here you're glossing over. There also may be no gravity to the crime committed. It's fairly common for innocent people wrongly arrested, for example, to take a plea deal to a lesser crime and get out of jail rather than stay in custody, lose their jobs, and risk going to prison for a more serious offense.  Plea bargaining is regarded as coercion and prohibited in some other countries like the UK. Not to mention all the people serving ridiculously harsh mandated sentences for minor drug offenses. 

[battlewraith]

3 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

While not entirely wrong, the actually situation is far more complicated than this simple statement implies.

 The sky is generally blue and grass is generally green. While these observations are not entirely wrong, the actual situation is far more complicated than this simple statement implies. 

*nods sagely*

[Luminara]

2 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Yeah, but those are infrequent and usually portrayed as risky maneuvers. They can be explained by the usual technobabble.

 

It's only described as risky when the ship is at warp speed, or in Enterprise, when it was a "new" technology.  How many times have away teams, including the captain, transported right into the middle of a meeting room, a cavern, a star base, transported something ridiculous onto the ship (like a whale into a giant aquarium)?  I've lost count.  At least three to five times every season on TNG.  On DS9, O'Brien used the transporters (which were probably the least safe in the entire quadrant, as they were hybridized from Bajoran, Cardassian and Star Fleet systems) to beam all over the station at least twice; Sisko and others did it once; visitors to the station were frequently beamed directly to the command center; transport between Runabouts was depicted half a dozen times; Nerys and Dax transported into caverns on one of Bajor's moons (to pick up a sub-light fighter, which caught on fire while they were flying, demonstrating how much safer transporters were)...  In every series, they beamed to and from other ships without a thought (fortunately, or Scotty would've become a distant memory after decades of being trapped in that buffer).  It was so common they had personnel stationed in every transporter room.

 

It wasn't infrequent or risky, it was as normal as walking.  It was used more often than shuttlecraft.

 

Oh, they even dedicated an entire episode to transporter psychosis.  Lieutenant Barclay's fear of being transported, his phobia of having his molecules scrambled, the "aliens" stuck in the confinement beam, who they really were and how Barclay overcame his fears.  You remember that one.

 

When transporters failed them, it was always a loss of confinement, a pattern scrambling, a buffer failure, some odd chemical or compound or energy causing a malfunction... there was even an assassination on DS9 which was done by attaching a device which scrambled a woman's pattern mid-transport and left her a charred, smoking mass.  But those were never because they were transporting through matter, that was portrayed as the easiest way to go anywhere within transporter range, and almost always the safest (barring Enterprise, which was shown with nascent transporter technology that crew members typically didn't trust).

 

20 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Matter in a warp bubble doesn't move.

 

No, but the bubble does move relative to its surroundings, and carry its contents at its relative speed.  If you aim that bubble at a mass, it will carry its contents into that mass at that relative speed, and the mass is stationary relative to the contents.  The fact that the spacetime around the bubble is what's "moving" is irrelevant, the contents would still make contact with the stationary mass (stationary in relation to the bubble, even though the mass might be moving at a high speed, such as an orbiting planet or a ship traveling at impulse) at the bubble's speed.  When that bubble contacts the stationary mass, it isn't going to carry the stationary mass with it, it will either dissipate or continue forward, and in either case, the passengers inside the bubble would contact the stationary mass at the comparable relative velocity of the bubble's warp factor.

 

In other words, whether you're flinging people at a brick wall, or curving space to relocate the brick wall to where the people are at a comparable relative acceleration, there's still going to be a mess.

 

That's why starships require computers so complex and fast that they can create self-aware holodeck characters.  The navigational requirements of traveling at warp speed aren't limited to plotting out a line between two points, they include avoiding large masses, such as stars, black holes, planets, nebulae.  The shape and waveform of the warp bubble could move small masses, such as interstellar dust and primordial hydrogen, but a sufficiently large mass wouldn't react to the warp bubble, due to the bubble's size relative to the larger mass, and the ship would collide with catastrophic results (unless it had a phasing cloak).

 

Also, warp drives in Trek aren't (quite) Alcubierre drives.  They don't bend spacetime, they envelop the contents in a warp field which bends "subspace", not real spacetime, consequently reducing the inertial mass of the whatever is contained within the field.  For example, in the episode in which Q is made mortal, a moon is falling out of its orbit and into a trajectory which threatens to decimate a significant portion of life on the planet below.  When Q is asked to help find a way to stop it, he suggests changing the gravitational constant of the universe.  Everyone else expresses disgust with Q, but it gives Geordi the idea of using the Enterprise's warp drive to change the gravitational constant of the moon by wrapping the ship's warp field around part of the moon, thus reducing the mass of the moon enough for them to (attempt to) stabilize it with a tractor beam.

 

An Alcubierre drive would've been a much better approach, considering that the effect of traveling at, or even approaching, light speed causes the mass of the object in motion to increase infinitely, and as such, even an infinite reduction in mass would result in a need for infinitely increasing energy to continue accelerating.  Even in the pseudo-science of Star Trek, dilithium-moderated matter-antimatter reactions don't provide infinite energy, nor would any amount of energy be sufficient to counteract the effects of infinitely increasing mass.  But the concept of Alcubierre drives wasn't conceived until 1994, so that idea wasn't available for use when Star Trek first aired in 1966, or even in 1990 when the above-mentioned episode aired.

 

Lastly, being beamed through space in a warp field traveling at a factor of light speed would still take time, during which the passengers would be unprotected.  They'd suffer the effects of decompression, radiation exposure and worse.  Even if the journey seemed instantaneous, there would be adverse effects to their health.  They'd have to make every trip in a protected environment, such as a shuttlecraft, or in space suits.  There would also be no inertial dampers in a naked warp field, so when that bubble dissipated or continued forward upon contact with the stationary mass, the people, even if they weren't instantly turned into an energy release likely to destroy whatever they hit, would, at the very least, be paste.  They'd absolutely need an encapsulating environment in order to survive.  In an incident like what occurs in The Search for Spock, trying to beam down to the planet would result in the entire crew perishing, either when they collided with the surface at greater than light speed, or when they crashed with the ship because they were busy suiting up/loading into a shuttle.

 

And a dead crew wouldn't have been able to travel back in time to Earth's past to find whales to take to the future, and say things like, "Double dumbass on you!", or "A keyboard.  How quaint."  That would've been your fault.  Yours.

[gamingglen]

wow... TNG technobabble all over again... zzzz   

[Clave Dark 5]

18 minutes ago, gamingglen said:

wow... TNG technobabble all over again... zzzz   

Now let's make two more series of that stuff!

[MTeague]

44 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Now let's make two more series of that stuff!

 

TNG was great.  I loved it. 

 

But Babylon 5 had me forever after S1E13. I still await the reboot with a mix of giddy anticipation (JMS is in charge) and complete dread (HOW can you reboot? How in the world could you ever cast anyone else for well over 60% of the roles? They were too perfect as-was!).

[Sovera]

Some do, and it's literally handwaved. The first arcs where we have the option to arrest someone or kill them while they wait at our pleasure with their hands in the air? always felt wrong to even have the option and then not even have consequences when do it.

 

Really dislike it.

 

Now if people want to headcanon being the Punisher go for it, but I'd rather go by his own words and have Captain America as a role model. None of my heroes kill even if they are fire users. If the multitude of comic book fire users have gone for years of existing and be able to arrest people without killing or inflicting horrible burns then so can I. If the number of bow and arrow, sword users, radiation users, have done the same for years then so can mine.

[Marshal_General]

If you lock someone in jail knowing they are only going to get out and kill multiple people like the Joker repeatedly does, then who is really responsible for those deaths?