Question Clocking the Speed of Speedsters

So I wanted to discuss what the top speeds out there for people who qualify as "Speedsters."

I only know two off the top of my head... I think.

I remember that Blue Streak from Cincinnati had a top speed measured just over 200mph.

I remember somewhere (possibly incorrectly) that Razorback had a top speed around 40mph.

I know this puts Blue Streak near the very top of the top, as i believe mention is made that super speed tops out around 200mph.

I feel like I recall Charge being mentioned as running above 30mph and for some reason, I also feel like I remember her hitting 70mph but that seems fast for an Exemplar 1 Energizer 2.

Aries is definetly faster than Razorback. Exemplar 5, Energizer 3. He's mentioned as being about the top 5 speeds in school and the strongest of every "speedster" type mutation.

I'm curious if we can track down speeds enough to figure out what 100mph would rate as for a mutation.

I don't think what you're asking for is terribly feasible, considering how broad the speed-contributing ratings are. It would be hard to pin down - even more so with mutants who have multiple powers.

Razorback is particularly impressive because he's fast with pure exemplar. But the others? Most of their speed will be from an Energizer trait, but the physical enhancements from an exemplar trait will synergise in what would most likely be a multiplicative manner. Enhanced musculature and stamina, not to mention the more durable body to resist the strains and potential damage.

Ametros wrote: Razorback is particularly impressive because he's fast with pure exemplar. But the others? Most of their speed will be from an Energizer trait, but the physical enhancements from an exemplar trait will synergise in what would most likely be a multiplicative manner. Enhanced musculature and stamina, not to mention the more durable body to resist the strains and potential damage.

Razor's also a Class 3 Rager, so he gets a little faster when he loses it.

As to the rating on 100 mph?

Call the Thunder (Part 7) wrote: “It’s all in how they achieve the effect.” Jericho finally stopped watching the girls for signs of dangerous behavior. “Most speedsters are Energizers and they do it one way, Warpers compress space to achieve the speed effect, Razorback does it on pure muscle power. When he hits all four like that he can kiss over a hundred miles an hour for a couple minutes.”
...

“His whole body’s rigged like an animal, only he has dislocating joints in his hips and shoulders. His arms and legs pop out of one socket and into another when he’s on all fours. He’s strong, but he’s built for speed over power. Most of his strength comes from his sheer size and how he’s built.”

“How come his arms and legs don’t keep popping out of joint at random then?”

“The ball sockets are partitioned, so that when he relaxes the right muscles they come apart. When the joint resockets, the muscles that hold them in place are the strongest ones in his body, hands down.” Jericho shook his head. “Mechanically it should not work, but the Exemplar effect does some weird shit on occasion.”

Class 2 Speedster, but YMMV.

I am trying to find top speeds for some of the Speedsters, and others.

28.4 Phase - Ayla and the Tests
30 Miyet - Catgirl Madness...
31.08 Eldritch - Call the Thunder
35 Knockoff - Mama's Boy
35 Pejuta - Buffalo Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight
45 Invictus - Myriad Meetings: A Tale of Two Cottages
50 Lancer - Jade 8 - Exams
50 Counterpoint - The Second Book of Jobe
60 Jericho's Armor - So I'm a Freak Sue Me
60 Freighttrain - Diamonds are a Vamps Best Friend
60 Charger - Diamonds are a Vamps Best Friend
70 Sirrush - Reflections In An Evil Eye
80 Ultramax - Saks and Violence
89.7 Quickie/Go Go - Jade 2
90 Charge - The Big Idea
90 Unnamed Intern - Buffalo Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight
90 Quickdraw - The Riddle of Sappho
95 Sizzle - Saks and Violence
100 Accelerator’s speed boots - Silver Ghost Golden Angel
100+ Christine Manning - THE CHRISTMAS CRISIS
100+ Scrambler - Ayla and the Grinch
103 Razorback - Call the Thunder
107 Accelerator - The Turks or the Geek
120+ Aries - Triple Threat
150 Tennyo - Ayla and the Birthday Brawl
200+ Halcon Peregrino - I Don't Think We're In Kansas Anymore
230 Speed Queen - Boston Brawl II
250 Blue Streak - Silver Linings
300 Cozzare - The Final Trump
300 Ironhawk - Boston Brawl II
300 Chain Gang - First Day
400 Bomber - Yet Another Day as an Outcast


Everything is in MPH to annoy the non Americans. 'Murican miles, the only ones that count.

I'll update this and include the story where I found it.

Phase mentions a bunch of other speeds, but the are guestimates.

I'm sure others are mentioned.

As an American, a Navy guy and a history nut, I got to ask... What kind of miles are you using?

Statute miles, Nautical miles, Roman miles, Irish miles, Scots miles, English miles, old English miles, Welsh miles, German miles, Austrian miles, Prussian miles, Saxon Post miles, International miles, Survey miles, Metric miles, Geographical miles or one of the other miles?

Country miles.

null0trooper wrote: Country miles.

Ah, so Norwegian miles.

Some of those are flyers. Keep in mind that high airspeeds are not usually enough for one to be considered a speedster.

I would think acceleration limits would matter too - top speed is great, but how long did it take to reach the max? Which then raises the physics question of who are the biggest 'jerks' on campus!

Erisian wrote: I would think acceleration limits would matter too - top speed is great, but how long did it take to reach the max? Which then raises the physics question of who are the biggest 'jerks' on campus!

Very few mentioned acceleration.

Thank you Valentine! This is awesome!

Valentine wrote:

Erisian wrote: I would think acceleration limits would matter too - top speed is great, but how long did it take to reach the max? Which then raises the physics question of who are the biggest 'jerks' on campus!

Very few mentioned acceleration.

In one of Kayda's stories, she was fighting a speedster (it's been a long 3 1/2 months and my brain is fried - I think it was Charge, and the SFL was coaching her); the point of the sparring match was for Kayda to learn about the physics and limitations of speedsters. I very specifically touched on Newtonian physics - acceleration and inertia and how those can actually hinder a speedster. Someone will no doubt cite chapter and verse, but right now, I'm not going to look it up.

Suffice to say that without massive acceleration - which I noted that damned few speedsters have - inertia becomes their enemy, because while their reactions may be quick, their ability to apply force to significantly and quickly change velocity is limited, so once they're in motion, they become a little predictable. It's then up to the non-speedster to recognize their initial application of force to their body, which sets their inertia, and then use that inertia against the speedster.

But yeah - knowing top speed does little if you don't know their acceleration, which is a more applicable measure of their combat ability.

I seem to recall reading a story where it was mentioned that one speedster had trouble maneuvering at speed. Their opponent ducked and did a low kick/sweep, the speedster was unable to avoid and suffered the consequences...

Remember folks, acceleration is not just how fast you can get up to a particular speed, it is also how fast you can slow down, stop or change direction. Acceleration would be even more important than top speed in most close combat situations. You can think of it like an aerial dogfight.

Fighter A has speed 2X. Fighter B has speed 3X. Clearly A cannot catch B in a straight flight. However, if B engages, you are now dealing with how maneuverable the two aircraft are. If A has half the turning radius of B (say a biplane vs. a monoplane), then in a twisting and turning fight A has the advantage, it can get into firing position more easily. If that happens, then B has to either try to outmaneuver A (which we already determined is not happening) or B has to hit the throttle and run. If B can turn the fight into a hit and run fight instead of a dogfight, B regains the advantage. Sort of like in WWII when the American fighters started using the Thach Weave and Shallow Dive tactics to beat the Zero's. In a one on one turning fight the Zero had the advantage, but in a shallow dive the heavier American fighters could do hit and tuns and get away (they were faster in a long dive than the Zero), while the weave allowed the less maneuverable American aircraft to bring their guns to bear on the Zero by using one of a pair of fighters as bait and then turning into each other giving the wingman an easy shot.

This is all everything I needed actually. Thank you all so much!

k, so acceleration is a key factor, and an Aries type speedster doesn't strictly have an advantage over another speedster unless, say, he was facing someone who merely had a smaller/weaker version of his own speedster package (exemplar + energizer but lower powered) who didn't have significantly more experience than him to bridge the power gap. At least, when comparing Aries against other Speedy types.

I can use everything being dished out here so well, thank you all.

JG touched on a very important point for hunting and combat: endurance.

Regardless of the velocity numbers, Jose Gonzalez can't recover or get a defendable position before Slowpoke Rodriguez catches up, it's no bueno for Jose.

Maneuverability, as MM2ss mentioned, is also important because the object with the greater turn radius for a change in course is having to go further, maybe significantly further, than the other. Starting positions are staggered on an oval running track for that reason.

Mobility, targeting, and effective range changes things up again. Speedy has to close to a range where he can hit someone with his fists; Slowpoke? he pack a gun. A broken-field run might make Slowpoke's targeting more difficult, but now Speedy has to run a whole lot more distance to close from point A to point B. His velocity may still be high, but his speed isn't.

Don't forget sensor ranges. You can't very easily hit - or avoid - what you can't perceive, or at least perceive before it hits you, although area of effect attacks/defenses can still work.

Then we get into any terrain, gear, powers, and tactics effects that haven't had to be addressed.

Even with straight (Ex + En) vs. (Ex + En), your higher speed may not be enough if your opponent's examplar rating is high enough that you can't deal more damage than they can ignore or heal up.

Slowpoke Rodriguez, the slowest mouse in all Mexico. Not only does he carry a gun, he is also not slow in the cabeza and he has hypnotic powers if I recall my Saturday mornings correctly. (I do miss decent cartoons)

OK, I wasn't looking for just speedsters, but everyone I could find with a top speed listed. There are a lot of "speeds" listed in the Ayla stories, but they are all Ayla commenting on someone going "50 to 60" or something else from his perspective, and as written he tends to overestimate others and underestimated himself. On the list, Quickie/Go Go is the first speedster that I am sure of, The Charger listed is Mal's flunky (not the Animan), and I am not sure about Freighttrain. The rest are mostly PK Superboys, and Exemplar types. Of the ones above it, Christine Manning is from a Delarose Origin Story, so she may not even exist, I don't think Tennyo counts as a Speedster, and neither do Ironhawk, or Chain Gang.

Diane must have misunderstood Bomber's maneuverability, because in the Sims, he always was about as maneuverable as a 747.

Boston Brawl II wrote: Speed Queen, one of the local white hats. She’d been one of the ‘heroes’ that Darrow had briefed them on. Top recorded speed: 230 MPH for about two minutes. Cruising speed: 90 mph. Able to go from a dead stop to 60 MPH in ten seconds flat, but had problems with inertia.

0-60 in 10 seconds is slow acceleration, that would get her run over by a lot of cars.

Jay Jay had trouble with turning too.

Training could also play a part in how they do. Recognizing what is going on faster. Less time needed to think of a response. Knowing when to use less than top speed.

The effects of both inertia and terrain are going to be very different for warpers or psychokinetics than for an exemplar-only speedster, or for internal-energizer speedsters (I'm not sure if there are any external-energizer speedsters, as that would be falling into a gray area between energy manipulation, psychokinesis, and warping - I imagine that the testers would have trouble pinning it down).

I mention PK speedsters mainly because that's how Sizzle's power works (in the wiki, she's listed as Ex3 PK3). Basically, she only seemed to be running; in actual fact, her power is pushing her along, though presumably her Exemplar trait helps with fine control. It is more closely related to flight than anything else, which can probably also be said of some kinds of warper speedsters - depending on what they are warping.

Back to my primary point, which was about warpers. Now, a warper speedster could be warping one of three things, though two of those things are sort of conjoined twins: time and space. We've seen time warpers such as Stopwatch accelerate themselves relative to their surroundings, but to their own frames of reference, they aren't moving any faster - rather, everything around them seems slowed down. We've seen space warpers such as Murphy make distances seem bigger or smaller, and she's used it to accelerate both herself and others relative to other objects.

For those two, it isn't seen as a speedster trait because they aren't limited to speed effects, and because they are clearly affecting the world around them, not just themselves (also, in Stopwatch's case, he has been hiding it, making it look like it is just a combination of cunning and excellent timing - he would have made an excellent OWoD mage, I think, always able to find the right effect to keep things coincidental). However, it is a fair guess that many time-warper speedsters are generally doing the same things, just unconsciously and only to themselves. It is likely that someone with that power is simply experiencing the rest of the world as 'slow' all the time, at least until they learn to control it. Space-warpers would have it even worse, as distance itself would seem inconsistent.

Which means that any Dylans with those powers would probably be looking for something to knock their power off-line entirely, whereas an internal energizer who can't turn off their power would be looking for something which calms them down. This could have interesting implications.

But I said three types of warper speedster. What would the third be? Inertia warping. If you can reduce the effect of inertia, you would be able to accelerate rapidly for very little expenditure of energy, but if it somehow effects only inertia and not gravitational attraction (which seems... unlikely, but not entirely impossible, given how little we know about inertia), then you would still need some kind of propulsion - friction contact with the ground, a jet or rocket effect of some kind, something like that. Inertia warping would be very weird, in that you would not have a very high top speed without some additional boost, but you would get incredible local acceleration and potentially have very fine control - though until you learned such control it is likely that it would be extremely problematic, again, especially if you can't turn it off. Unless they had a fair amount of control from the start, they would be in as bad a place as the space-warper speedsters.

If I recall my training correctly, the "rule of thumb" is that it takes about 1/4 of a second to perceive something visually and then another 1/4 second to react, for a 1/2 second total reaction time to visual stimuli. Which is sort of the standard stimulus for most direct combat situations.

There are ways to speed up reaction times. Training is an obvious one. The second is one many people do not seem to consider, and that is how you decide what action to take.

I will use a football example. On an "Option play" the quarterback can get rid of the ball or keep the ball. How he thinks when making that decision impacts the time it takes. If the QB thinks about give OR keep (or pitch or keep) then his reaction time is slowed down. Which is bad. However, if the QB uses a one choice thought process the decision is made faster. The rule Navy (and most triple option teams) use is to always get rid of the ball. The decision is not "keep or give" it is "give unless", by thinking of only one thing the reaction time is improved.

Same goes for close combat situations. A person with a firearm that is in a "shoot unless" mode of though will fire UNLESS they get a certain signal (shoot unless the suspect shows hands means you fire as soon as you don't see hands) will be faster on the trigger than someone that is using a "Shoot or don't shoot" thought process as the first is thinking of only one trigger while the latter is thinking of two or more triggers.

Think of it in terms of defending yourself against a home intruder even. If you barricade yourself in a room and say, "I will shoot if the door opens" you will fire faster than someone that says "I will shoot after identifying the target when the door opens". All because you are checking for just one thing instead of two (or more).

That does not mean that a single key is the best way to make choices, just the fastest... Obviously if you have other "friendlies" in your house you will want to ID before shooting for example, but if it is just you and a hostile, the "one thought" method is faster.

Training is another part of the matter. Muscle memory and training actions and reactions to be as close to reflexive as possible also improves reaction time, because you just think "do this", instead of thinking "do this by completing these movements". When you first learn to perform say a hip throw, you have to go slow and think about every part of the move. Once you practice it enough, you "just do it" and it is performed faster and smoother.

A third thing that can boost reaction time is one many people don't seem to use... Chewing things like gum can provide short term boost in reaction speed. About 20 seconds of chewing provides about a 15 minute boost to thought processing speed. It is a small boost and very temporary, but it is there. So just before you take the mat in Sensei Ito's class a stick of gum might be the edge you need...(if you can get it past him) or that secret weapon for your combat final.

Also, a mutant with a 'danger sense' or other ESP will have an edge on reacting to things.

True, the real world and Whateley world factors that impact reaction time are many.

Danger sense/ESP
Situational awareness (if you are paying attention or expecting something you react faster than if you are in la-la land having a nice day dream)
Physical training
Mental training
Sleep deprivation vs. well rested
Age (all other factors being equal an older person reacts more slowly than a younger person as far as adults are concerned)
Focus (multi-tasking slows you down)
Drugs/chemicals (some speed you up, some slow you down)
Physical health and condition (sickness tends to slow you down, so do bad knees and stiff joints)

I am sure there are others as well, but those would, to me, seem to be at the top of the list for things that mess with reaction speeds.

Aquerna talking about sparring with Jay Jay.

Straight from the squirrels mouth wrote: Anna said, “She’s like that in aikido too. She can run up to you and hit you like twenty times before you can blink. Phase would just go super-dense and let her hit and kick until Jay Jay had to go put ice on her hands and feet. I had to try to jump out of her way. Sometimes that worked. Mostly, not. ‘Specially after she got better at changing directions when she was going real fast. It was really crummy making a big jump and having her already over there waiting for you to land.”

So part of it is training.