What. Is the speed of an unladen Samurai?

[CadetNewb]

Ketsurui or another clan?

Definitely Ketsurui. It's not often at all we get them in RP, and with how much time has passed, as well as with the new bodies that have come out, I don't know what depiction of them is accurate at this point. Are they anime DBZ fighters from the early days, or were they downgraded like the rest of the Neko? Or something in between? I ask because we just had a pair of students in hand to hand combat, and the corrosive spit from one to the other was intercepted by a Ketsurui Samurai. Said Samurai having been floating up in the air to better referee. The Samurai had basically closed in to stop the spit with her body when the students themselves had maybe a foot or so between them.

In chat, it was joked that Ketsurui Samurai could 'Flash Step', but this pushes my suspension of disbelief past their limits. Because of that, I'd rather get it from the source, so I'm hoping you'd be able to enlighten me @Wes

 

[raz]

Whispered: "Bankai."

Might as well tag @Fred and @Doshii Jun for their input, since Wes leaves a lot of samurai stuff in their hands.

 

[Fred]

100 kph.
It's the flying speed of a neko.

Samurai commonly push the envelope and this can tie in to acceleration. Assuming full use of inertialessness, 100kph equals 27m/s.
Not saying it isn't a feat, but calling it flash stepping is pretty damn close.

Raz was correct in the OoC thread of the PvP fighting plot; well within means.

 

[Doshii Jun]

I saw the topic on this and was pulled between laughing, vomiting and wanting to know who to kill.

You people will be the death of my sanity, I swear.

+1 Fred. Samurai can go no more or less faster than other Neko. It is a strange organic governor that limits them so.

 

[CadetNewb]

So they're not bothered by the G forces involved with acceleration and deceleration like this, correct?

 

[Doshii Jun]

So they're not bothered by the G forces involved with acceleration and deceleration like this, correct?

Mmmmmmm, grey area.

Skill is a factor. Not all Samurai, let alone Neko, handle gravity with the same ability. They all can meet a baseline, but it's somewhat an athletic pursuit while also being a talent for some.

Put in an example: Not all Neko can perfectly turn on a figurative dime going full tilt, but they all know how to pull a J turn and not crash into a parked car.

 

[Doshii Jun]

Also, I cannot iterate strongly enough how triggered I am by that topic line. Kampfer-grade, I think.

You're all so wonderfully ridiculous.

 

[Navian]

In context, the intervention was convenient OOC because the character whose spit had been intercepted had taken an impossible amount of simultaneous and automatic actions without anyone else having a chance to intervene. So, it made as much for sense for someone to intervene without having one.

It's kind of like someone saying they knocked your toast off the counter with telekinesis, and then you replying that it landed butter-side up. There's no room to argue how unlikely it is for the toast to land that way, when the manner in which it was pushed made no sense to begin with.

 

[CadetNewb]

In martial arts, the key to mastery is learning how to do multiple things at once in as smooth and efficient manner possible. Something I note that Hollywood always screws up on when it comes to swords. You can block with a shield while simultaneously stabbing them in the gut for an example. But, that's getting off topic.

With the gray area though, is it best to assume Samurai would suffer varying degrees of disorientation if they pushed themselves like this?

 

[Navian]

My point was that this wasn't really 'an example of what Nekos can do' due to the context, so it doesn't need to be taken seriously. And yes, making two simultaneous attacks is not too extraordinary. Charging in, deflecting an attack, slipping through an opponent's guard to close into to said one-foot range before spitting in their face, grabbing, and throwing them, all at once, is well beyond that, to the point where it should only work against someone with combat paralysis... possibly not even one of Tolkein's Ents. That's what I meant by 'impossible', so we don't misunderstand it.

So, before we ask whether a samurai would be able to move so fast it strains belief, it would be good to ask whether they were actually moving that fast. In this case, I think both descriptions were hyperbolic, and I don't think that's uncommon. If we always took descriptions as fact, the destructiveness of weapons would be very inconsistent, too. It's not uncommon for weapons to be described as obliterating targets in one shot simply because it's more entertaining than writing an extended slug-fest, but that doesn't mean the targets are made of cardboard and nitroglycerine or that the weapons are necessarily capable of annihilating three feet of concrete in one shot.

What gets made canon is what actions are taken and the results of those actions, not the descriptions of how it happened. That gives us a lot more room for artistic license, and spares us from making tens of thousands of corrections that would diminish the fun without having a real effect on the consequences... At least, that's how I like to think about it, since I don't like to think we should actually do that much work.

 

[CadetNewb]

Sorry, but I gotta do it.

plugs ears to avoid off-topicness

 

[Edto Xar'Sivaree]

@Navian, you are totally misconstruing what Zoia did. She /took/ the attack to open up the defenses. She didn't block it. I was told Zoia was covered in armour, it says on the Vekimen page that the scales on their abdomen are hard enough to stop some small arms fire. So she took the hit. I didn't block it, I soaked it. Being hit is not an action, read the actual post. Furthermore, stop bringing ZFHS over to other threads. If they want to know the specifics of the situation they can go there. Cadet has already pointed people in the direction. This is about a Samurai's abilities which should be the only acceptable mentioning of ZFHS.

As for what a Samurai can do, they cleared this distance within milliseconds, and got out of the way just as fast without "No one knowing they were there"

Do Samurai not follow the laws of physics? Do they not have mass that pushes the air? Would moving such a short distance that fast not put a hilarious amount of strain on the persons body, regardless what they are. The amount of G's the samurai would have went through is through the roof for such an action. Yeah, they have gravity manipulation but that has a set amount of G's it can manipulate. That being as I understand +/- 3G's, which means the Neko wouldn't be able to fully negate at 9G turn, just turn it into a 6G turn. This is how I interpret the ability. How is this possible? What players do should TRY and be within the laws of physics, even when you take into account the things they ca do to defy physics.

From what I am gathering from this, Samurai are just Neko's that are eve stronger than regular Neko in certain ways. They were written as deliberate Mary Sue's, able to negate advantages and disadvantages and ignore whatever they want to be badass.

 

[CadetNewb]

I'm willing to accept what @Fred and @Doshii Jun say, but please answer for Edto why a Samurai is capable of pulling these moves off. Though other relatively new players may simply accept and even relish it, they may not understand why themselves.

 

[Navian]

Is a post only on topic if it's based the misconception that the original example was representative..?

I already explained this. Whether a samurai is 'capable of pulling these moves off' is beside the point, because even if it was impossible, the move it was pulled off in response to was also impossible. Both descriptions were hyperbolic, the second countered the first. If it's not possible for a samurai to move that fast, it's still fine to describe it as a counter to something else, because that helps prevent a scene where an unarmed fighter manages to utterly dominate a trained swordsman in a single clean sweep by virtue of superhuman speed, strength, coordination, and reflexes.

If Vekimen really are capable of such feats, and samurai aren't capable of sticking a foot in them, then why are Vekimen in the RP, if not just to aggravate everyone?

 

[CadetNewb]

Navian. Edto. Enough. I want this thread be useful for future reference rather than getting derailed and locked.

Staying on topic though, I believe I know why the Ketsurui Samurai are capable of pulling off moves like this, but I would rather not make any assumptions, which is why I'd like to hear what Fred and Doshii have to say.

 

[Wes]

Nekovalkryja can move around at speeds up to 100 kph but I don't think that is so fast that you physically can't see them (unless you mean like Bruce Lee style arm movements or something). And I think they're affected by at least some inertia. There's a mass-fudging factor they have where they can use their gravity field to get lighter or heavier, so they move like hummingbirds and hit like rhinos. And the samurai are probably the best experts at doing it.

 

[CadetNewb]

Well, in all fairness, from further away, they'd be fast but visible, but close up, the move would probably just a blink I think. The thing that has me most curious though, is how they handle sudden acceleration and deceleration. If a normal person goes from 0-100 over a period of time, they're fine, but if done in a very short span of time, they'll experience intense g-forces from starting up or slowing down. Depending on how fast the acceleration or deceleration is, they'll die due to the sudden force. The amount that a Samurai would experience when doing a short 'flash step', for lack of a better word, could very well kill a person.

Given that what we've seen in RP is now verified, we can at least guess that they can accelerate and decelerate very quickly. Next, I believe the articles only state their max speed, but nothing about g-force or acceleration/deceleration to put that into perspective. Because of that, I'd like to have a better idea of what that g-limit is, whether its with some mitigation ability, or without.

 

[Wes]

The old NH-7 manual, which I'll grant is outdated and kind of overpowered, says Nekovalkyrja could take up to 29 g.

So I'm thinking that modern Nekovalkyrja are probably able to withstand about 10 without using their gravity skills, and 20 with them, before it gets to be so much they pass out. Does that sound okay?

 

[CadetNewb]

At first, that sounded ok, but the more I think about this, the more something doesn't seem right. That, or I need to go to sleep. Bear with me, let me think this through as best I can.

From what I understand, g-forces can be either actual gravitational forces such as a planet's pull or an artificial field, but mainly refers to force in general, whether that be graviton fields or inertia, the inertia being the main thing that causes g-forces during acceleration and deceleration. We know that force = mass X acceleration, so in order to reduce the force, a Neko has to either reduce acceleration, or reduce mass. A Neko can reduce their mass?

I'm just going to go to sleep and see what's here when I wake up.

 

[Navian]

A quick Google search tells me that it's possible for a human to survive around 45 Gs, at least briefly, and over 25 Gs for a little over a second. The duration and direction are very important. A full minute at 10 Gs is probably lethal for a human, but that's more relevant to performing tight turns and aerobatics.

I remember reading somewhere else that someone getting punched in the head can experience more than a hundred Gs, but it's so brief and localized that, well, the effect is just that of getting punched in the head. The figures on how many Gs a human can take are often quoted, but they're mostly based on people trying to handle high-performance aircraft, not sudden stops.

I don't think Nekos would have any problem with throwing themselves a few meters in a split second, even without inertial compensation. It's not that much faster than someone using a trampoline... 5 Gs seems typical for those. The best Olympic sprinters accelerate out of the starting blocks at less than 1G, so this is already startlingly fast, compared to someone moving normally.