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2020-11-03, 10:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2014
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Going beyond gaming and mentioning time travel, a united Xeelee universe would not only have a species that can hit you with galaxy-sized weaponry that travels back in time to make sure it doesn't miss, but also their mysterious foes who soundly beat that level of tech somehow, the Photino Birds, who eventually succeed in stopping all supernovas and causing multiple white dwarfs to form instead to make gravity wells they find more comfy. While reading the rest of this, keep in mind that it appears the Photino Birds were so overwhelmingly powerful that they weren't aware the Xeelee even existed.
The Xeelee used time travel to advance their own technology by trillions of years, then went back to the big bang with all of it and started again, and did this multiple times until they reached a technological bottleneck. Their time travel is error free, reliable, cheaply available, common, and something they've weaponized to the point that it's their basic armament. They shoot you with missiles that go back in time and hit you while you were relaxing in bed after school a few years before you even thought of becoming a pilot to fight them. They're also massively FTL, able to move about to any point in the universe pretty much at-will, since this FTL tech is exactly what allows for time travel in the first place.
Humans never managed to do anything but annoy them a little bit, but we do get to add something to the Xeelee arsenal- we found a way to create moving pocket universe outside of the causal universe where time couldn't be manipulated, all for the purpose of avoiding said time-based attacks. They also developed a time traveling tactical computer that analyzed maneuvers, then sent whatever information it processed back to itself in the past, allowing it to outthink superior opponents like the Xeelee. After three thousand years and the deaths of billions of human children, humanity finally succeeded in threatening to destroy the super massive black hole the Xeelee were working on (to save a species that lived there, not kill all humans as we thought) and so they shrugged and wholesale left the galaxy. Humanity in this universe is highly capable compared to a lot of other fictions, yet we could do little more than annoy the Xeelee a little bit. Who themselves could do nothing, not even with reliable time travel on their side, to stop the Photino Birds who never even knew they existed.
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2020-11-03, 11:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
Doctor Who has established that the reason that you don't try to do things like crossing your own timeline or unmaking your enemies before they were created or the like is that you're liable to create a planet-destroying paradox or shatter the fabric of a galaxy or something similar; misuse of time travel is very bad at solving problems, and very good at creating them. Since the Doctor does not, as a rule, want to break reality, they try to avoid doing that. (It has still happened a few times, mind you!)
However, we also know that it is possible to survive these things, because that's what happened in the Time War - the Time Lords and the Daleks both stopped playing by those rules and tried to retroactively destroy each other, except that they were both time travellers so they survived, and then things got bad. So bad that entire swathes of time were wiped out of existence, thrown into nightmarish repeating paradoxes, doubled-up on each other, and so on. The war only ended when the Doctor obliterated both species entirely from the timeline, undoing most of the damage that they did.
I think that's about as powerful as time travel can get before it moves into the "infinite capability" zone, honestly; you can make whatever changes you like, but if you make the wrong ones you blow up everyone you were trying to save. Of course, if your goal is the eradication of every other universe, blowing up their universe while making alterations to it isn't such a net problem.If you like my thoughts, you'll love my writing. Visit me at www.mishahandman.com.
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2020-11-03, 11:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Combined military might of the universe
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that there is little room between Dr Who and Infinite on the scale of Time utility (I may even create a separate thread about Time, senility willing); however, when you start talking about using temporal damage as a weapon rather than a negative side effect to be avoided, it certainly does change one's perspectives of what is "good" in the time-travel department.
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2020-11-03, 12:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
If we stick into the realm of western widely-consumed media, it usually comes down to Star Wars or Warhammer 40k or something like that where the writers like to add zeros to every number and don't really understand what it means.
If we expand the realm to the really crazy, there's a couple of animes were giant robots use galaxies as weapons, so I think that probably wins.
Basically, the less the writers pretend to understand reality, and thus the crazier the feats and more zeros are attached to every number, the more powerful the combined forces of the setting are. It doesn't really have anything to do with strategy, tactics, logistics, or technology.Last edited by LordCdrMilitant; 2020-11-03 at 12:30 PM.
Guardsmen, hear me! Cadia may lie in ruin, but her proud people do not! For each brother and sister who gave their lives to Him as martyrs, we will reap a vengeance fiftyfold! Cadia may be no more, but will never be forgotten; our foes shall tremble in fear at the name, for their doom shall come from the barrels of Cadian guns, fired by Cadian hands! Forward, for vengeance and retribution, in His name and the names of our fallen comrades!
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2020-11-03, 12:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
And, for a while, a significant portion of the galaxy* was clones of a single human. There were 950 million of him.
*Small, but significant. With 10 trillion sophonts, 950m is a tiny fraction... but bigger than the other tiny fractions.The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
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2020-11-03, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2013
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Plus the whole Time Lord-Dalek time war which almost destroyed the universe.
I'm going to throw in an odd one - The Long Earth series (Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter). There's really not much you can do if your opponents can just step into the reality next door to dodge around your weapons or defences, although they're limited to non-iron items when they do so.
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2020-11-03, 03:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2019
Re: Combined military might of the universe
It's an interesting choice (and I like that series a lot) but I feel like they would lose on account of having negligible offensive capabilities compared to a lot of the alternatives. Though I suppose those silver bug aliens would perform better in that regard but as impressive as tearing a planet to pieces for spare parts is, their method of doing so is very slow and inefficent compared to something like the Death Star.
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2020-11-03, 03:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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2020-11-03, 04:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2007
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
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2020-11-03, 04:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Going back to tabletop, I bring two artifacts from Lamentations of the Flame Princess:
First is the Monolith (from The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time). It allows travel across times and universes. It can be made to not exist, but given a co-operative character, this is a defensive feature more than a weakness. Pretty hard for other universes to destroy something that doesn't exist.
Second is the Book (from The God That Crawls). It is a spellbook that, once assembled, destroys all information other than itself. All. Information. Starting with other writing, ending with natural constants. The Monolith would allow a relatively safe and easy way to take its pages, one by one, to a target universe. Once assembled, it would make a potent weapon against them. Notably, nearly all sci-fi universes would be suspectible, because if they can't neutralize it near-instantly, all high-tech solutions for locating it are ruined. Sadly, the Book is destructible, though it renews itself (on the pages of other books, which must be recollected and reassembled).
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2020-11-03, 04:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
Lensmen would win.
There was a GURPS sourcebook during 3rd edition.
The only thing they don't have in that universe is time travel, and the Arisians are able to perfectly forecast the future, so they almost have that. Aside from tossing antimatter planets at each other through dimensional portals by the end of the war, the children of the lens who ended the billions-year-long war between Eddore and the Arisians were basically psionic gods capable of anything. No other universe could compete.
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2020-11-03, 04:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Having a force already in place to fight a proper time war is, of course, an advantage, of the same type as having a military already in place to fight a ground / air / space war; however, what exactly are these groups capabilities?
Effects? Timeframe? Reasons sci-fi would be more vulnerable?
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2020-11-03, 05:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2019
Re: Combined military might of the universe
I don't really remember everything, was that what First Person Singularis was part of?
Not having time travel seems like it would be a brutal handicap, though. No matter how impressive their tech is, a universe with time travel could just go back to before they developed it and wipe it out (and that's without going into the reality destroying time travel shenanigans discussed earlier).
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2020-11-03, 05:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
Well if time travel is allowed then the winner is Q, from Star Trek. He can do stuff with a wave of his hand that it takes the Doctor a whole episode to do.
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2020-11-03, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Anything resembling science requires exacting measurements, which become increasingly difficult in a rapidly progressing yet hard to quantify timeframe, because the very existence of the Book makes quantifying things increasingly impossible. To be exact, starting immediately from the Book being completed, all written and electronic memory storages, mundane or magical, in an universe fail. In 24 hours, mathematics fail. In 48 hours, which no-one can reliably count at this point, last vestiges of living memory fail. Immeasurable time after that, immeasurable both because measuring it is impossible and because no-one can be around to measure it, everything that is not the Book collapses into Nothing.
For example, Planet Mercenary (Schlock Mercenary RPG) universe is relatively hard sci-fi. All of those amazing things they can do depend on natural constants being, well, constant. Immediately upon completion of the book, all electronic memories of all the AIs, no matter how advanced, are wiped out. In 24 hours, all the math they require to function ceases to apply. There are and can be no AIs, no Allstars, no Teraport and no Long Guns after that period until the Book is destroyed. In 48 hours, even the sharpest biological minds of the setting and their nanobiological failsafe back-ups are completely gone.
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2020-11-03, 06:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2007
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
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2020-11-03, 06:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Q would need to be demonstrably finite in capabilities. At which point, yes, Star Trek gets a lot more muscle (since there's a whole Q Continuum).
That said, the Federation has Time Travel ability (usable intentionally in the future, at least); other species seem to be better at it (maybe?), just like other species are better at almost everything than the pathetic Federation (which is also seemingly incapable of learning from its betters).
Time necessary to get the book operational? Presumably, the book is the tool of the module's antagonists, and the expected end state of the module is "the PCs destroyed the book". How long would it take the denizens of the universe to put the book back together again / how long did it take the antagonists in the module? Is the (sentient, book-wielding) source universe just one world?
All written, electronic, and magical memory storage failing is... pretty horrific: no navigational computers, no spell books, no phone contacts. Is the scope of the book's effects "one planet", "one galaxy", "one universe", "one set of dimensions (ie, if opened on the Prime, Boccob wouldn't care)", or "all connected dimensions"?
I don't think that there's many universes that couldn't deal with the book in 24 hours that somehow could if given 48, so I won't worry about trying to parse the whole "math stops working" insanity, and just pretend that they just lose after 24 hours.
D&D could respond to the Book with divinations/wishes to know what is going on, where the source is, Teleport there, destroy it, and be sad that Spellbooks are gone - assuming that they don't just come back, right? Um... speaking of: if all the books are destroyed, and *remain* destroyed, then just *where* does the Book reappear when destroyed? Inside otherwise empty books?
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2020-11-03, 06:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
It should be noted that these 950 million clones in the Shclockverse were made with F'sherl Gaani gate tech, from a buuthandi that was already partially destroyed. In other words, with five surviving buuthandi, the F'sherl Gaani can instantly make about 5 billion of anything they happen to feel like, as often as they like until their stars have been completely converted into whatever they're making (the gates can handle up to about city bus size, roughly, if we stay strictly with what's been shown on panel). If you send a pallet of terapedoes through, you could be slinging 60 billion gigatons of 'boom' wherever you happened to feel like as often as you could shove the pallet through the gate.
... this sounds like a rather good episode of Doctor Who, honestly.
If we split things off into time-travel and non-time-travel universes, for non-time-travel, I think that Schlock Mercenary and the Lensmen are our two top contenders..?
Lensmen for obvious reasons, and Schlock Mercenary wins out over Star Wars, for example, because Death Star-level firepower is commonplace enough to be done by accident (three total-conversion bombs temporarily contained in a small warship's inverted shield bubble).
Oddly enough, because of their widespread wormhole-based tech, the Schlockverse is one of the few in a position to deal with the Lensmen's FTL planet outta nowhere, since that's also wormhole-based. And their gravity weaponry is one of the very, very few things I'm aware of that could get through the Lensmen's inertialess absolute defense. Not gonna say that the Schlockverse is going to win, given how nuts the Lensmen 'verse gets, but the first few battles are going to be some very harsh lessons for the Lensmen.
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2020-11-03, 06:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
With full co-operation of the Monolith? Holders of the pages can be slotted into any era, after which the Monolith can be closed from the inside and made non-existent. All that's left is assembly, which may be measured in minutes. I'll recheck later to see if there's a specific rule, but for now, assume "operational in10 minutes at arbitrary point of history" .
Originally Posted by Quertus
The real threat is, again, combining it with the Monolith, because the inhabitants of the Monolith, if co-operating with humans, can abuse the Monolith's time travelling and universe travelling powers to gather the pages in no time - literal no time, in eyes of outside observers.
Originally Posted by Quertus
Originally Posted by Quertus
Originally Posted by Quertus
And yes, the Book can reproduce parts of itself inside empty books. Or new books made after its destruction. It's not picky. Information destroyed by the Book doesn't come back upon its destruction.
Remember: LotFP is what D&D would be if it was played for full horror. The only reason why LotFP settings are only potentially doomed instead of absolutely certainly doomed, is because these horrifying things do-not co-operate and the players will have to purposefully and royally screw up to bring all these deletorious artefacts together.
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2020-11-03, 07:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2009
Re: Combined military might of the universe
on the other hand even though the book could destroy the scifi universe the serious contenders can destroy whole planets with ease so at best you have mutually assured destruction.
Though the Pa'anuri of schlock mercenary are a space capable species that could destroy all life on a planet with ease just by virtue of their size without requiring any technology at all. They are also invisible, and invulnerable to conventional weapons. Gravity weapons of extreme power and wormholes are the only things that can harm them.
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-03-28Last edited by awa; 2020-11-03 at 07:42 PM.
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2020-11-03, 07:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
I know, I've read the entire comic, some parts of it multiple times.
The issue for Pa'anuri, specifically, is that they are very big and the Book is (for them) very, very small. Without extensive help from baryonic matter creatures, Pa'anuri would have no way to actually tell where the Book is, what the Book is, nevermind why the Book does anything. So while they could trivially destroy it, it would be near-impossible for them to detect and pin-point, before it would annihilate them too.
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2020-11-03, 08:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2009
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Feel like a universe destroying book would trigger that no infinite clause but even if it doesn't
then we're back to MAD you can destroy their universe but you cant stop a Pa'anuri that gets into yours.
Except its not quite an even MAD, it takes longer to assemble the book then to fire a long gun, so if they know where you are before you do you just lose. If you do assemble the book you destroy their universe but you cant stop any of them that crosses over, so I guess they just steal your universe?
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2020-11-03, 08:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: Combined military might of the universe
The Whoniverse's power level is highly erratic, but it's potential is pretty much insane.
If the Time Lords were still at their height they'd be able to mass produce demat weaponry, which IIRC unmakes and then remakes the universe exactly how it was, except that the matter that composed you doesn't exist anymore (which is probably one of the things the Moment can do). That's not getting into Gallifrey's timeback buffers (I think that's the name) nullifying any attempt to change the Time Lord's history, Null Zones to turn off time travel in areas measured by galactic features, or whatever the Celestial Integration Agency has cooked up. Or that slow time thing from The War Games
And of course the Time Lords have the ability to set up their technology so that their support kicks in at exactly t=0. Even without Daleks piloting battle TARDISes suddenly the parts of time you wish to change aren't accessible, until the timeline of Gallifrey advances to the point that they want to mess around in that place and time.
The Whoniverse isn't unbeatable, but it's pretty hard even if we throw out beings beyond the Time Lords (*cough* new series *cough*). It benefits from poor understanding of science in the early days caused it to feature galaxies when it meant to feature solar systems, and the new series is sometoimes legitimately universal in scope.
Bah, if we're allowing the Qs we're allowing both the Eternals (beings who are to the Time Lords as the Tine Lords are to us), as well as the Guardians.
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2020-11-04, 04:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
If you presume the Cosmos (as in, the one you inhabit right now) is infinite, then yes, the Book is infinite and shouldn't be considered. I'm treating it as finite in the sense of "only affects one of the warring universes at a time". If you ban the Book, you ought to ban the Monolith too.
As for whether LotFP would be able to combat Pa'anuri, the Monolith is not baryonic matter, but neither is it dark matter. It, and everything in it, would likely be able to survive a Pa'anuri. And if a Pa'anuri was able to enter the Monolith (by strict reading of game rules, they can't) , it would have to play by the same rules of fabricated mental space as others. At best, it would be like those scenes in Schlock Mercenary where two AIs duke it out in a virtual space. Who would win is an open question.
Originally Posted by awa
Just stealing the LotFP universe is possible after they destroy yours. I'm not going to discuss how well LotFP could resist, because that would require invoking additional LotFP nonsense. Talking about just the Book and the Monolith is nonsense enough.Last edited by Vahnavoi; 2020-11-04 at 04:58 AM.
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2020-11-04, 06:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Combined military might of the universe
As the comments about "at the height of Time Lord power" might hint, *when* you pick for your universe can certainly matter. Choose wisely
The Book from Lot… wherever… would, IMO, defeat many contenders, but suffers from several problems:
Someone with a more consistent definition of "infinite" than mine would probably say that it should be banned.
---or---
Its source universe is finite, and it only affects a finite area (leading to the hilarious fight where it gets chucked into, say, the Star Wars universe, but only affects *our* galaxy - and its side doesn't even consider the possibility of this type of failure, and are baffled at the opposing universe's "immunity").
Also, it's kinda a one-shot - if the trick fails, it's unlikely to succeed on subsequent attempts; if it succeeds, it cannot really be recovered to be used again (important against infinite-sized universes, and multiple engagements).
And, hilariously, if the other side jumps entirely into the Book source universe, it could technically fully work, yet ultimately cause zero casualties.
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Reading comprehension has never been my strong suit, but here's the factors I remember hearing that it sounds like people think would be important in determining who would likely win:
Time Travel
(Temporal defenses)
If the enemy can go back in time to destroy you before you know that you're fighting, or just break your universe's concept of time, are there any universes that can defend against this kind of attack without Time Travel of their own?
FTL Travel
(FTL attacks, attack while FTL, FTL defenses, FTL senses)
If your foe is moving and attacking at relativistic speeds, can you win if you are not?
WMD
(Divinations, defenses, size does matter)
If your foe is destroying things at the planetary scale, can you win if you are not? How many worlds does each side have, and how fast can they destroy them?
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Personally, I hope that the final answer isn't so boring as to obviously fall along such lines (plus things like universe size vs movement rates or range of senses / attack range).
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2020-11-04, 07:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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Re: Combined military might of the universe
Really depends on the universe, but we can theorise that time travel defences work on the same principles as time travel, so you probably have to be theoretically capable of it to actively defend against it (but universes with splitting timelines have pretty good inbuilt defences).
FTL Travel
(FTL attacks, attack while FTL, FTL defenses, FTL senses)
If your foe is moving and attacking at relativistic speeds, can you win if you are not?
But as any ship moving relativistic relative to you experiences you moving at a relativistic velocity the increased speeds mainly makes engagements much shorter with more energyn being delivered. Assuming ships aren't accelerating, then we might have to factor in time dilation.
For FTL stuff it really depends on the system being used, it can be anywhere from totally meaningless to requiring us to deal with infinite or negative energy.
WMD
(Divinations, defenses, size does matter)
If your foe is destroying things at the planetary scale, can you win if you are not? How many worlds does each side have, and how fast can they destroy them?
Well, kind of. The Death Star is impractical and beatable, exterminatus probably isn't in the long term. The real problem is closing of the possibly quite broad technological gap, and destroying things is anywhere from glassing them, to taking them apart for resources, to just blowing them up.
Personally, I hope that the final answer isn't so boring as to obviously fall along such lines (plus things like universe size vs movement rates or range of senses / attack range).
The first qualifier might as well be 'can they control orbitals', to get rid of rods from orbit being a problem. Time travel defences are a good second qualifier. Once that's done it's mainly going to come down to who can keep their man on the objective the longest.
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2020-11-04, 09:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Point - Marvel is completely immune to Time Travel attacks, as such "attacks" just generate a new universe. if one rules the order of precedence that way…
Agreed. Copy pasta error (wanted to include both in this section, as I figured that they would pose similar problems).
Hmmm… processing…
I guess "number of planets" is technically "numbers"… and Marvel immunity to Time Travel attacks is… "armor" for that attack vector?
I think that the *number*, *type*, and *repeatability* of attack vectors is gonna be big. Followed/paralleled by the ability to *detect* and *defend against* each vector.Last edited by Quertus; 2020-11-04 at 10:03 PM.
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2020-11-04, 09:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: Combined military might of the universe
Doomguy, from Doom.
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2020-11-05, 03:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2019
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2020-11-05, 03:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2020
Re: Combined military might of the universe
@Quertus: see, the funny thing about the Book is that if you rule it as non-infinite and less than universe-sized, that generates the possibility of destroying it and recovering it from beyond its range of effect! And since it is explicitly at least planetary in effect and stated to effect the world it is on, this turns it from a single-use universal WMD to multi-use planetary+ WMD. (It is also a D&D style spellbook with 9 9th level spells in it, so...)
Same applies to the Monolith. You can rule it as conceptually non-infinite... it still remains a setting-hopping time-hopping piece of crap, equivalent to TARDIS from Doctor Who. (Not a comparison invented by me; I've seen it in multiple third party reviews.)