Power Level 9000!

Okay, so the Dragonball reference I referred to in my last post was:

‘Uh, I’m not really sure. Haven’t had it measured in a while, you know. It’s got to be over nine thousand by now.’

And here’s the scene on YouTube for those who haven’t a clue why it’s a Dragonball reference.

But, I was thinking about this over the last couple of days, and I thought, ‘What would a nine-thousand capacity get you?’ Is it really god-like? (Plus, doing a whole post to reply to myself seems silly.)

Answer: no. Well, a bit.

Believe it or not, I don’t make this stuff up. Obviously, it’s all made up, but there are rules. I know exactly how many Tammys (that’s the correct spelling) every spell takes, and so I can say with certainty which spells any of the characters can handle. And I can give you an idea of what capacity 9000 actually gets you.

Fire Blast rank 1,200. Sounds really awesome, but it’s not exactly nuclear. It works out very nicely to a blast equivalent to 5 one of TNT. That’s a bit less than half the nominal yield of the GBU-43B (aka MOAB, Mother Of All Bombs), the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal (11 tons of TNT).Armageddon rank 351. This works out as rather more impressive due to the scaling factor. Rank 24 could rain lasery death down on the entire surface of the Shinden. You’d need rank 25 to cover the Earth. Rank 351 covers an area with a radius of about 5×10105 metres. That’s larger than the observable universe…Weather Control rank 96. Weather Control has different area scaling (because reasons). As such, this only gives you a 9.6 mile (15.4 km) radius; barely even a big storm.Magic Burst rank 289. That’s Nava’s current Magic Burst, not the original one. That works out about 576 lbs of TNT, but the damage dispersion from Magic Burst isn’t the same as Fire Blast, making this a little more effective as you get further from the blast centre.Armour rank 817. Sounds a lot. It’ll stop a shell from a Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle or an M72A2 LAW without trouble, and no small arms round will touch it. A Javelin anti-tank missile, however, will rip through it 99% of the time and almost certainly kill whoever it’s protecting.

For the record, the lowest complexity spell seen in the books is the Umbrella cantrip (1 Tammy; anyone able to work magic can use it). The most complex spell is hard to define since the rank concept is open-ended. Active Recovery rank 3 is 243 Tammys (and rank 5 is 438; to be featured at a later date). The ‘base’ cost of Force Dome is kind of high; Class 3, Rank 1 Force Dome is 338 Tammys, and that’s what Nava used in The Aquaria Incident. There’s a spell coming up which will take the record for highest complexity by a mile at 2,242 Tammys. That’s the flat complexity, no ranks or anything. However, if I reveal much about it, it’ll spoil things, so you’ll just have to wait and find out what needs all that oomph.

Hope this has been informative. Back to getting Nava & Co. in trouble.