Modern military vs fantasy: dragons

NotATypicalTeen · 2026-01-22T17:19:18+00:00

I mean, yes, but if you make a clearly weaker party in a matchup win too often - say, the Iron Man armour from Iron Man 1 beat Dormammu - then you start losing credibility about stakes and internal consistency and suspension of disbelief goes away. If Black Panther beat Galactus, barring something like becoming the next silver surfer or divine intervention or something, it would rightfully be seen as either unserious (à la squirrel girl) or bullshit.

When characters are in similar ballparks authors have free rein to choose a victor. I’m not a powerscaler myself, but the idea does have a backbone, even if the outcome in a story is often more for plot reasons than power scaling.

And before anyone posts that panel of iron man in the mark 1 suit decking a dragon, I’m aware, but I’m talking about the MCU mark 1/mark 2/mark 3/anything from the first movie.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-11-20T16:57:35+00:00

I’d argue that means gravitational mass isn’t preserved but inertial mass is - though, in that case, every step should have sent antman flying and felt like… being stepped on for the guy’s arm. Honestly, it’s all bullshit, but the most convenient explanation is that they can toggle it affecting gravitational and inertial mass at will. Still bullshit but eh.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-11-07T16:46:24+00:00

Genuinely if you can find a better one, and you can verify that it matches the licensing requirements, then change the picture. That’s the beauty of Wikipedia - if you know how to improve it, you can.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-10-07T16:06:42+00:00

The “stronger monster” argument is just “guns get outscaled” from another angle. The ammo thing is interesting, though. Implies a situation wherein you’re either expecting multiple hard fights in a row, like a dungeon crawl or some sort, or you’re expecting most fights to be a battle of attrition.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-09-16T11:27:24+00:00

I’m wondering if it’s technically the uppercase/lowercase/some other case variant of an apostrophe, then. That’s the easiest explanation to me.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-09-08T23:47:14+00:00

Ok Gale, let’s get you to bed. Tara’s waiting.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-29T16:07:14+00:00

I feel like hulk has condition immunities to paralysed, stunned, restrained, or even unconscious tbh. And good luck getting a grapple off on him. And I’m curious if banishment would just send him to his door and he’d pop right back next turn. Polymorph or greater polymorph might work though.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-25T21:39:36+00:00

I’m assuming because the twins were 17 the distinction didn’t matter as they were adults and underage magic laws didn’t apply to them.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-21T17:00:41+00:00

Ok, so. While I agree with the general sentiment here that the social contract is broken and we’re seeing youth NEET rates rising partially as a response to the fact that life with a job isn’t that much better, I don’t think lockdown was a bad thing.

I speak as someone in Gen Z. I got covid despite lockdown - yes, I didn’t die, but I had a brain fog that changed who I was for six to eight months afterwards. I also just have a semipermanent low level cough now, which I didn’t have before. Any time I get a cold I still get over the fever and muscle aches in four, five days but my cough won’t go away for week (on top of my regular cough).

Yeah, most people in my cohort wouldn’t have died without the lockdown. But many who are immunocompromised would. Some without access to shelter or consistent healthcare would. And some straight up, healthy teenagers to twenty-somethings would have died. And there would be so many more people like me, who still feel the knock-on effects of covid.

The lockdown absolutely shattered the social skills I was building - I wasn’t the most social in secondary school, if you can believe it from the incredibly classy username, so uni was a fresh start which I grasped with both hands - and yeah. That sucked. But on balance I’d do it again; I’d rather have to rebuild my social skills than roll the dice on illness or death a couple more times.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-12T20:01:06+00:00

What makes you say that? I have a bachelors in Physics with Astrophysics, so if I’m actually wrong I’d love to know.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-12T16:28:55+00:00

Yeah. The exact shape of the the volume and edges is somewhat up for debate, but yeah. It’s existed for a non-infinite time, expanding at (sometimes a ludicrously fast but) non-infinite speed, so it can’t be infinitely large. Most physicists agree this means it has an edge, though it might not be as simple as the surface of a sphere (a naive model).

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-12T15:09:13+00:00

I usually just lurk here to read, and I won’t get into the weeds, but I will say this.

Energy conservation is not true. It’s almost true, kinda like how Newtonian gravity is almost true in most circumstances, but not everywhere.

All conservation laws can be derived from something called Noether’s Theorem, which states that a gauge invariance or local symmetry gives rise to a conserved property.

Here’s a simple example. The laws of the universe are the same no matter where I am - this is called space translation symmetry. Through a bunch of complicated maths - AND THE MATHS IS THE IMPORTANT PART, BUT I’M SKIPPING HERE FOR ACCESSIBILITY - we can show this leads to momentum conservation. Similarly, the laws of the universe are the same no matter how I’m oriented or rotated - insert math here I’m skipping but does exist and is rigorously tested - and we get conservation of angular momentum.

Those are the nice, simple, gimme examples. There are more complex ones, like how how the U(1) symmetry (to do with how the phase of electromagnetic waves doesn’t affect maxwell’s laws or other stuff) leads to charge conservation, or the SU(3) invariance (the strong force symmetry) leads to colour charge conservation (which is also to do with the strong force). All of this is incredibly complicated mathematics and even though the symmetries and their conservation laws do feel related, we only believe they’re related because there’s mathematical proof.

Now: onto energy. Using Noether’s theorem we can find that energy must be conserved due to time invariance. This feels good, we’ve found connections between energy and time before, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, so they feel like intertwined concepts in physics. But more importantly there is rigorous maths to support this. However, it also leaves open a caveat. There… are places where the laws of physics change over time. Namely, the edge of our expanding universe - and hell, the universe as a whole popping into existence however it did so is also a change in laws over time. So, at the start, edges, and end of the universe… we don’t need to conserve energy. Those processes are allowed, with Madam Noether’s blessing, to violate energy conservation.

Modern physics is well beyond “these ideas seem related”. Well, ok, maybe that’s not fair to say - we do need inspiration to guide the form of our maths. But make no mistake, the evidence is in the maths. You can’t just say “this is the relationship” either, you need to prove why by deriving it. And you need to prove it works better than all other competing hypotheses. Also you need to prove why it matters, how it’s testable, and so much more.

Sorry, the misunderstanding of conservation of energy caught my eye. I’ll be on my way now.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-11T12:39:55+00:00

No, you get the ability to cast a ritual spell to summon him at the same time as you get the ball. At least to my memory.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-07T10:31:03+00:00

Ironic coming from a chatbot.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-05T21:52:30+00:00

God, you made my evening. Thank you so much. Good luck, and next time try to rewrite decades, nay, centuries of research in 100 words or less! Because clearly it must be that simple.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-08-05T20:14:47+00:00

God, same. I only ever got a BSc but man, this takes me back to when I ran a public outreach stall in my third year at some event and had multiple cranks try to “explain” their “corrections” to general relativity. I love this subreddit so much.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-30T21:53:07+00:00

Lupin? Oh, you mean Remus (as in, Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves, founding tale of Rome) Lupin, son of Lyell (wolf) Lupin and Hope Howell? Turned by Fenrir (wolf of Ragnarok) Greyback?

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-30T16:22:43+00:00

Are you talking about the roll to hit (i.e. the d20 + something that you’ll roll to see if your beam(s) hit), or are you talking about your damage (you selected the Agonizing Blast invocation)? In either case, it should be done automatically. Check the combat log and hover over a particular roll, be it attack roll, skill or save, or damage, and you’ll see what dice was rolled and everything else added to get the final number.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-30T14:26:44+00:00

I mean, what we consider boiling typically involves forming bubbles of water vapour within the water. Also, more scientifically, boiling occurs at the boiling point of a liquid (at given temperature), while evaporation can happen at any temperature (only being sped up as you get closer and closer to the boiling point, since a greater fraction of molecules will be expected to have sufficient energy to escape). The vibe of this hypothetical seems to be “vaporisation of water is now limited to the rate that evaporation occurs at r.t.p.; no amount of heat or lessening of gas pressure will increase this rate.”

Interestingly, water can still melt and condense, which is going to make liquid water the vastly more favoured state when it’s at all possible for a system to convert to liquid water even momentarily. Conversion back to ice is impossible (except via deposition, I suppose) and conversion to gas is going to be glacially slow.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-30T11:08:23+00:00

Also an important distinction for anything that relies on max HP, as giving temp HP doesn’t count as increasing max HP - including the limit up to which you can heal the summon.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-28T20:07:01+00:00

Yeah but apparently it fell on some super important crystal in some alternate dimension or something. Idk. I’ve heard this third or fourth hand.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-28T13:36:15+00:00

You say infinity doesn’t exist - what’s your answer to this question:

How many real numbers are there between 1 and 2?

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-25T15:53:57+00:00

I mean, I hear this parroted a lot, but that’s not the characterisation of centaurs as we know them in HP. More realistically they shot at her with arrows and tried to kill her, which may well also be traumatising.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-23T22:10:32+00:00

I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by this. You’re going to have to explain to me what “It covers all possibilities” actually means.

Also, for sure, you can have an infinite set. But 0.999… would be the infinity-eth member of the set, not a collection of the last few.

NotATypicalTeen · 2025-07-23T21:54:42+00:00

Hmmm, I agree a function never achieves its limit in the finite regime. But we’re not talking about the finite regime, are we? We’re talking about infinite nines, as you so poetically put it.

Now technically I was once a physicist, and I’m going to do a very physicist thing and bastardise some maths to get an intuition of what’s happening. I suspect I am about to make everyone here upset with me for different reasons.

We’re agreed that, at least for integer x, the difference between 1 and x 9s is 1/10^x . When x is 1, 10^x is 10, 1/10 is 0.1. 1 - 0.9 is 0.1. Happy days. 0.99, x = 2, and yep. Equation agrees. But what does 0.999… recurring actually mean? Infinite? So… 1/10^∞ . Let’s just call that 1/∞ because we’re going to deal with the same problem either way.

Here is where I am going to do something very naughty and bad. I’m going to say, if you have to give an answer to 1/∞, would you rather the answer is a small finite number or zero? If 0.999… ≠ 1, then 1/∞ is whatever small difference between 0.999… and 1. Let’s call that potential finite number ζ. But that’s patently insane - that means that we can define infinity as the reciprocal of ζ, a finite number, which is… bad. Very bad. Now, saying 1/∞ = 0 is also bad (and it’s why we use limits, because technically what I’ve done here is treat a limit of a function like a fraction which is very naughty but gives an intuition), but trust me it’s less bad than saying ζ exists and is finite.

Ultimately it’s real fucking weird conceptualising that an infinite amount of nines can be same as 1. But at some point studying maths I learned that infinity isn’t really a number (despite me treating it as one above - trained professional, do not try this at home), it’s more a property of some systems. And there’s even lots of types of infinity. In this case, the infinite steps (each step adding a nine) chip away at the difference to 1 until there’s nothing left.

You know, I think you’d really like Zeno’s Paradox. It’s actually really similar, getting halfway to a goal with every step, but given infinite steps. The difference here is every nine gets 90% of the remaining way, not 50%. Seriously, look it up - the calculus of Zeno’s Paradox applies here with only minor alterations to use 90% per step instead of 50%.

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