Question Gateway / Molly Harrington

I don't think Heather ever described the gate itself.

Portal cutting tends to be averted in most cases of the trait being used in the WU. And even where it does occur on inanimate objects, it tends not to on living ones. Reasoning? Most living things have higher dimensional presence that holds them together. Same principle applies for teleporters... you either CAN take it with you or you cannot, you never take 'part' of something with you when you teleport.

so have fun with it. just because it is 'mostly' / 'usually' not the way the trait manifests doesn't mean you can't do it that way. It just means that most teleporters and spacial displacing warpers and so on aren't running around with the ability to generate a monomolecular thickness cutting edge whenever they want. Not that works on organics anyway. Most force field generation doesn't produce a cutting edge either. That's why Hank's skill with his PK shell and the paper swords is actually notable. It'd be a complete non-mention as a skill if everyone could do something similar.

The idea of catching bullets with teleport disks is like using them as swords... it might seem the natural genre savvy outcome of the creative use of abilities, but it tends to ignore subtle things like attempts to tie at least a little real science into things. Consider that, for example, most teleports and gateways are going to use one of the fairly likely scientific theories for how we'll travel really quickly in space - wormholes, transdimensional space, and so forth.

How likely is it that you're going to generate a fold between two locations... and then swing that bad boy around like a sword?

We've talked about the 'dodging bullets' thing too. Even if a human being were capable of moving fast enough... most handguns have a muzzle velocity of 900-1100 ft/sec (rifles are 2-3k ft/sec) and lose about 20% of that velocity in the first 100 yds. Let's use a hypothetical 800 ft/sec. That's lower than almost any handgun at muzzle exit but it'll compensate for those who want to point out that bullets do get slower after that due to friction/drag.

Say we're mixing it up on the steps outside a big city courthouse. The area is perhaps 100 ft across 50 ft deep (half of which is stairs and half is at entrance level). Your 'overwatch' teammate shouts 'Gun' the moment in which the handgun is held up (by an opponent 35 ft from you), giving you time to see it and see where the bullet will be coming from before the trigger is pulled... thus, the only thing you have to do is react as the trigger is pulled.

At 800 ft/sec, that bullet will cross the intervening 35 ft in: 43 milliseconds.

Now, a practical example of what 43 milliseconds means. A lot of classic rock and roll falls into the range of 140 (Michael Jackson's "Beat It") -180 beats (Don Henley's "Boys of Summer") per minute, tempo wise. That means, the rate at which you are cycling your head through the 'banging' motion or hitting your heel on the ground is about 2.5-3 times per second. Or once every 400 or 333 milliseconds. A bullet traveling at 800 ft/sec would cross 320 feet (the length of a football field) in the time it takes you tap out one count of Jackson. Given that the word BEAT of the title phrase is a 'quarter note' (the traditional 4/4 beat), you can't even get to IT before a bullet has traversed a football field.

In fact, human perceptual science shows that there's an even bigger hurdle. You see, no matter how amazing we are, it takes time for our senses to provide information to our brain, for the brain to consider its relevance, and for the brain to send a reaction through the nervous system to some part of the body for action to be taken. According to research/testing ( www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime ) the median time is 214 milliseconds. That's why I set up the conditions I did... because in the case above, if someone said "gun" the bullet could have traveled the distance between the gunman and you 5 times just in the time it took for your senses to hear "Gun" and process that you need to look for it. Let alone 'find it' and react to the bullet.

But trained martial artists can dodge bullets?! No. Trained martial artists take advantage of the fact that your senses are telling you old news while simultaneously using motion to avoid being in the places where you are going to pull a trigger on a gun. But not even an extremely well trained martial artist will get out of the way of a bullet that was accurately aimed at them from short range. Point blank is easier to avoid, because the shooter has to move the weapon a lot to aim it right... just as long ranges are harder, because it takes more careful moves not to cause extreme changes in targeting.


Do mutants have better perceptual reactions than baselines? Exemplar do, that's part of their ramped up evolutionary stuff... is it enough to turn a 214 millisec time into something that can effectively react within 43 msec? Hmm... probably not. Especially when you consider that the reaction testing is going for minimal perception based reaction - on color change, hit a button. That's a lot simpler than "generate a fold in spacetime to catch the bullet" or even worse "generate a fold in spacetime that redirects the bullet back into its shooter".

And putting up a 'wall' that pre-empts gunfire is a different story entirely. That's the difference between WU mutants and Marvel/DC. You can be creative, you just have to remember that even the Magick isn't 'magick'... you can't just ignore the rules of physics without causing 'some' issues somewhere.

Valentine wrote: Don't forget in the 43 milliseconds you also need to leave time for the body to move.

And unless there's muzzle flash sufficient that you can see the bullet fire, you've also got to account for the travel time of the sound of the gun firing... which is about 31 milliseconds. So you only have 12 milliseconds after you hear the gunshot before the bullet hits. Faster muzzle velocity weapons... you don't even get that (for example, rifles as I mentioned above with their 2-3k ft/sec muzzle velocity).

However...

World record sprint for 100 meters is 9.58 seconds. That's 34.238 feet/sec. Moving at that speed, you can cross 1.47 feet in a 43 millisec time frame. That's enough distance to turn a center mass shot into a hit on the arm or a complete miss. You could only cover 0.41 feet in the 12 millisecs between the sound of the gunshot and the arrival of the bullet. Likely to turn a kill shot into something else... but probably not enough movement to avoid a torso hit. Of course, these drop the involvement of perception delays. And require standstill to Olympic sprinter speeds instantaneously.

But evidence for Exemplar and Energizers being able to move quickly enough to dodge a bullet fired at where they were standing based on movement? Yes. If you can move quickly enough to cross 1.5 to 3 feet laterally and can vary which direction and how much lateral movement you take on each zig or zag... you can prevent a shooter from landing a shot with surety. They could still lead you and guess where you will be... but they will never put a bead on you and land a shot.

That's actively dodging a single shooter though. Not reacting from standstill to an unexpected one. Or multiple shooters.

null0trooper wrote: Remember: No matter where you go, geek the mage first.

I believe the Outcasts discussed this in Another Day as an Outcast since their tactic was to geek bunker, the little psychic hellstorm, and the Grunts counter-tactic was to gank Diamondback first whenever possible.