synthozoic

I think it depends on:

1. How resistant to radiation damage the superhuman is.
2. How far away from the center of the detonation the super is.
3. How much physical punishment can the super take?

At the center of a nuclear detonation the temperatures are so high that anything made of ordinary matter vaporizes into plasma. It get hotter than the sun in the middle of a exploding nuke. Depending how powerful the weapon is, these temperatures persist X number of meters away from the center of the explosion.

Think about that a minute. Is your superhuman made of something something so tough that it won't be vaporized to plasma? The material white dwarf stars are made of would be tough enough. The same is true of matter that composes neutron stars. Anything made of ordinary molecular bonds definitely isn't.

But let's assume it isn't a direct hit.

Farther from the center the temperatures decline rapidly and steel and concrete no longer melt or vaporize. Out here the super could survive provided he or she isn't crushed by the hurtling debris of buildings being torn to pieces. This isn't as much of a problem if the explosion happens out in space or high in the air--no buildings to be torn to pieces.

So at that point the hero just needs to be tough enough to withstand being badly burned and the intense but only momentary radiation flux (There may be fallout to contend with later but that's a separate issue.).

So if the super is not near enough to the center of the explosion, where pretty much anything you can think of will be reduced to rarefied ions, and there is no flying debris to contend with and if they can take a little momentary heat and gamma ray flux, they could probably survive.

((Mostly because I like the sudden bang of a plot idea and the fact that this thread is just starting out with no legacy history that I'm aware of, I'm posting to this thread.))

The roar from the impact, secondary explosions and collapsing buildings reverberated over and again off the walls of the skyscrapers and it took a long time for the sound to die. A huge, choking cloud of dust, composed of pulverized concrete, glass, burnt wood and plastic and maybe worse, billowed and churned out along the streets from the impact site. People were scrambling and screaming madly from the huge wall of dust and smoke that swelled up the streets of the Copper District. The roar, traveling at the speed of sound, took a few seconds to finally reach the small park in the Fools Gold District where a newly registered hero sat contemplating his next move in a chess game with an old hippy.

At the roar they both jumped up from sitting at the chess table, knocking a few pieces over, and stared in horror at the gigantic cloud rising from the below and to the west of them. The hippy turned to look at the hero, an android dressed in a navy blue business suit and light brown fedora, even as the android continued to stare at the rising cloud. The roar was slowly fading into the growing wail of sirens and car alarms and the old man said, "I think you're needed down there. I think everyone is needed down there now."

The android glanced at the old man for less than a second, the single, glowing blue aperture that marked where his eyes would have been was unreadable. Then without a word the android dashed off, easily leaping over hedges, shocked pedestrians and speeding cars. This would be his biggest and worst day ever in his new life as a hero.

Yevgeny Zalmanovich Lefkov, although he shared that name with no one yet, saw a speeding squad car approaching and had the presence of mind to yank his hero ID out to try to flag the car down down. He could run and leap at superhuman speed but that would tire him before he got down there and wheels were faster. Lucky for him, the cops pulled over.

"Galvanic Gangster, hah?" the older cop, leaning out on the passenger side, barked at his ID with plain suspicion, "How do I know, you ain't responsible for that [...]storm down there? Hah?!"

"Let him in Thom, we don't have time for this and he wants to help! Just let him in and let's go!" The younger cop, the driver, kept jerking his head at the fire trucks speeding past and down at the still growing cloud of dust.

The older cop passed his smartphone over over the ID. It beeped its approval. Thom, the older cop shook Yevgeny's ID at him in open contempt, "Yeah, so this says this ain't fake. I don't like it at all but, get in, now! I ain't got time for this!"

Yevgeny, the Galvanic Gangster, scrambled into the backseat. The cops didn't even give him time shut the door before burning a patch down the street towards the disaster. The older cop gave only one hard glare at him before forgetting about him completely. The police bands were filled with terse commands and descriptions as they raced down to ground zero.

((So where does this go from here?))

Oh yeah, I definitely agree, doing games like CoH on a tablet would suck!

Sorry, I should have made it clear. I should have differentiated between your internal home network and the actual Internet itself. Of course, for efficiency, the game client must still within your subnet, not on the Internet itself.

Sorry for being sloppy. Otherwise, I think much of what I said is still valid.

In a game like this, the way its interface is designed, you'd pretty much have to have a decent sized screen, mouse and full keyboard to play it. I know there are people who play this game on laptops with reduced keyboards and trackpads and I can only wince in pain. It's doable but not comfortable.

But it this 4G superduper wireless Internet world, pretty much any big screen and decent table top can support this game and a reasonable keyboard and mouse. Who cares where the CPU and storage is?

And if the interface can be adapted to use with something as cryptoclumsy as a console controller, that breaks the chain of the keyboard and mouse. And again who cares where CPU and storage is?

But touch screen?! Ew! No thanks!

One of the things that is being overlooked in the comments here is that being able to trap antimatter like this will finally let us accumulate enough to actually weigh it.

This might seem trivial, and the vast consensus in physics is that antimatter has mass just as ordinary matter does, but we don't really know that antimatter behaves in a gravitational field in the same way matter does because the amounts we've worked with so far have been far too tiny to weigh accurately. Gravity is a staggeringly weak force in comparison to the electromagnetic forces we use to steer antiparticles around in accelerators and so on.

But with this trap and enough stable antihydrogen, our most sensitive instruments will at last be able to confirm or deny this assumption.

Well probably not at that ratio, but sometime reality doesn't let us chose. Historically military commanders often forced to think this way all the time.

For example, during World War II, after we'd broken Axis Enigma encryption system, we had to be very careful not reveal this for fear that the Axis would change all their codes, leading to even more death. This horrific truth meant that sometimes we had to let a small number of people die (For example merchant shipping from U-Boat attacks which we could had saved but not without revealing that we'd broken the Nazi encryption system.) so that a larger number of others could live (The Invasion of Normandy.).

Sometimes reality doesn't cut you a break.

That wasn't the way I read Watchmen. I don't think Ozy created the situation, the nuclear stalemate. He--and the Comedian--just foresaw that eventually it would end in the death of civilization. To the both of them it seemed inevitable. Ozymandias, instead of giving up, did something about it. It is true that Ozymandias did engineer many plots and schemes but this was all in service to trying to do something about a situation that he saw is otherwise hopeless.

But of course the ambiguity is, the others really only had his word that all of this was all true. As you say, a very well written villain.

But this is very tangential.

Well, that will probably happen but, I, for one, am thinking how to use these parts, auras and gadgets for characters of a decidedly un-steampunk nature. Don't know how yet but, once in the editor, I'm sure something will come to me.

I tried something similar on Virtue with my silly Python tribute, Mister Henry Semprini Gumby, as a way of dealing with the flurry of disconnected utterances that is chat. It was funny and very Dada but it wasn't like I was really interacting other people's plots at all. Gumby was mostly just goggling vapidly at things and thinking about Spam and Wheatabix. And I've got other characters that are just total no-hopers for chat role-playing.

What stuns me in this game is the people who type so fast that they can chat and fight at the same time! Me, my stubby digits just don't have that kind of juice! When a fight starts, I'm too busy targeting and launching attacks.

Anyway, yeah, here I can actually write.

Well what I've noticed is that when I log in, the server list is almost ranked in order of current user population. The ranking is violated only by putting the server you most recently logged out of the top of the list.

I've noticed this logging in and out over time. It seems that the middle of the list does change in order from hour to hour even though I do nothing to interact with any of those servers in the middle of this. So, I think, what determines the ranking order is usage. The ranking starts at the top, excluding the one you've just interacted with most recently, and goes from least used to most heavily used. And over time you see that the least used servers occasionally shuffle a bit but remain close to the top of the list over time. And the most heavily used ones tend to stay towards the bottom.

That's how I assume the ranking logic works behind the scenes.

Yes, I understand but, I was just being funny or ironic. People use the words "rant" or "diatribe" on the Internet in a way that diverges from their original meaning all the time.

I think the sense in which I meant "pontification" was to verbally meander incoherently all over the place and pretend like it's deep or important. Which is kind of pompous actually, if not really actually dogmatic. Anyway I meant pontificating in the sense that Zaphod used the word when speaking with the ghost of his father in the Hitchhiker's radio series.

But getting back on the subject.

Like some others in this thread, I came into this game by way of inheritance of another person's account. He'd signed up just after City of Villains rolled out and, being an avid player of all kinds of computer games, he just didn't have the time or interest to keep it up. Around this point he introduced me to it and let me build a few characters in the editor. I was hooked. Afterwards I just signed his account over to my credit card. I've been a subscriber ever since.

So despite having all these badges that date back to 2006, I really only started playing steadily myself since 2008. People in game probably wonder at all the vet badges I have but also wonder at how little I'd done or know about all the details.

But yeah, like others in this thread have been saying, it's all about the software giving you the freedom to make the character your own! I've really only had two suggestions I'd really want added to some future issue.

1. A guitar emote, where the toon actually pulls out a guitar and strums a bit.
2. That the buffer for the text bio be doubled in size.

Anyway, I haven't lost interest yet. I don't think I will.