Tesla is also stupid.
Yes but at least he's not the MGM Lion powered by the US Presidents wielding a 20th Century Fox logo that kills magic because reasons.
It's not very useful against modern-type servants, who aren't reliant on mystery.
Originally Posted by FSF 5, Chapter 14: Gold and Lions IThough abandoned, forgotten, and scorned as out-of-date dolls, they continue to carry out their mission, unchanged from the time they were designed.
Machines do not lose their worth when a newer model appears.
Their worth (life) ends when humans can no longer bear that purity.
Then Servants that are naturally strong should be more or less can still fight unaffected.
I'm thinking that strategically, it could at least be applied against enemy Masters who are reliant on Magecrafts, disrupting their communications, familiars, etc.
How I expected WFD to be portrayed: Conceptual NP imbuing clickbait distributed by Edison in a localized area with a conceptual effect that plunders the faith someone holds for a Servant or NP.
Eg. Arthurian myth never actually mentions Excalibur? OR Myth Busted! Hercules: Zero to Zero. Why the Greeks want you to think this junk was a hunk.
As the propaganda spreads, target of the faith domination takes rank-downs and efficiency penalties. Upon reaching a critical mass the target in question becomes unusable.
It takes longer to plunder the faith for an entire Servant than a low ranking NP or a personal skill.
How WFD was portrayed in America: WORLD FAITH DOMINATION!!!!!! Explosion ensues.
Last edited by You; November 14th, 2019 at 02:41 AM.
Originally Posted by FSF 5, Chapter 14: Gold and Lions IThough abandoned, forgotten, and scorned as out-of-date dolls, they continue to carry out their mission, unchanged from the time they were designed.
Machines do not lose their worth when a newer model appears.
Their worth (life) ends when humans can no longer bear that purity.
19th century HS were a mistake.
かん汗ぎゅう牛じゅう充とう棟
Expresses the exceeding size of one's library.
Books are extremely many, loaded on an oxcart the ox will sweat.
At home piled to the ridgepole of the house, from this meaning.
Read out as 「Ushi ni ase shi, munagi ni mitsu.」
Source: 柳宗元「其為書,處則充棟宇,出則汗牛馬。」— Tang Dynasty
I liked Edison's conceptual improvement at least. Most of his skills are fairly decent really.Though if WFD could completely negate mystery seemingly instantly, why couldn't it have been used to make Cu and Medb impotent in America again?
Edison vs Emiya
EMIYA I guess.
Edison really needs prep time to set something up good and EMIYA could just snipe him with a Broken phantasm.
EMIYA Kiritsugu could probably take him too.
If WFD functions similarly to Imagine Breaker, Cu Caster wouldn't be able to summon Wicker Man. But if it's already summoned before WFD actives, then hypothetically it wouldn't affect the Wicker Man that consists of woods and flames, though maybe can render it inanimate, causing it to collapse.
As far as Naruto is concerned, I'm aware that it's power-levels can be a mess, but the way I understand it, there are feats that even when low-balled, end up implying massively hyper-sonic movements of its characters.
While watching/reading the various Fates, there wasn't a moment where I felt that some feat of speed or strength was a big outlier, or something potentially inconsistent with the rest. Admittedly, I haven't seen all of Fate, so I may be missing some work which does exactly that. Whatever follows from here will be negligent about such cases.
Within what we've talked about and what you mentioned in your last post, there simply is no reason to surmise hypersonic movement for any Servant. At least not without going against the spirit of Occam's razor, which you invoked.
We *know* the limits of Servants' travel speed (and it's consistently subsonic). It's also explicitly mentioned when Servants move at supersonic speeds, or when a projectile does, which implies that the speed of sound is a meaningful benchmark. We also know that Servants can react to supersonic speeds even if they may not themselves be supersonic (i.e. dodging a supersonic projectile does not necessarily require supersonic movement).
So this is what the works tell us clearly: subsonic travel speed, supersonic combat speed (somewhat unusual, but still fair game), supersonic reaction times. Let's tentatively consider this a general picture of Fate speed.
Let's go through your examples and see whether they break this mold:
- Iskandar crosses 50m in an "instant". Consider that if someone closed that difference in the blink of an eye, the movement would still be subsonic, but you could definitely characterize that as an "instant". So there's a realistic interpretation which isn't in contradiction with our suppositions. While you can interpret "instant" as an arbitrarily small amount of time, that's you bringing unfounded assumptions that don't seem to fit within the general picture the works paint. Especially when the word "instant" isn't precise and doesn't tell you anything other than "From our (human) perspective, this is so fast we cannot even perceive it well.".
- Gilgamesh swipes away a supersonic arrow. Well, in this situation, Gilgamesh is looking straight at his attacker through a magic scope, and is prepared for the arrow coming straight at him. Swiping away at an arrow whose trajectory you know shows that Gilgamesh can react to supersonic projectiles from a certain distance (which is rather large here, actually). This isn't any different from a Servant deflecting a bullet, and falls well within our "general picture". Looking up the passage, a few bolts actually did strike the bow, it managed to tank them and escape another few bolts (probably the ones which were far away - we know the orbs are spread out around the top of the building). So there's nothing here that implies that the arrow is even close to lightning speed. Consider that, depending on the geometry of the situation, a projectile can hit its target even if there exists a faster interceptor. Add onto that that we don't know the specifics of Gil's NP: How quickly do the orbs react? Do they "recharge" automatically? Will they avoid attacking a projectile if it's too close to Gil (so as not to hurt him)? Looking at what we've surely been told: Gilgamesh, aware of a supersonic arrow, swipes it away after it survives his automated speed-of-lightning defense. Nothing here's out of the ordinary.
- Saber rivals a jet fighter in speed. Jet fighters cap out at 2.5 Mach. It's reasonable to assume that no jet fighter will be fighting at its absolute maximum speed. This means Saber can keep up with a jet fighter somewhere in the 1-2 Mach range. This implies supersonic short-term movement (if Saber could keep up such a pace, there'd be no reason to use the much slower bike, so this implies either short-term movement or extremely mana-consumptive movement). Since Saber is one of the high-tier Servants which has Prana Burst and is elsewhere mentioned to be supersonic (through Invisible Air), there's no inconsistency here. Even a very charitable interpretation doesn't put Saber close to hypersonic movement speed.
- Saber can dodge/intercept bullets from Zerk's M61. This is again, not an outlier. The passage you quoted says that modern artillery doesn't hurt Servants (and contrasts it to the NP'd M61 which is lethal), then goes on to say that for Artoria this is even more so since she can dodge and even intercept the bullets with her great agility. This means that only the more agile Servants would find dodging bullets truly effortless, but generally dodging bullets is fair game. Bullet velocity has a large range, from subsonic to a few hypersonic outliers. M61 shoots at around Mach 3. If you can perceive bullets at such speeds and can move at around Mach 1, you can already dodge such a bullet at a relatively short distance (you need to move a distance that's orders of magnitude smaller than the distance the bullet has to pass). Even if you say Lancelot's NP doubles the speed of the bullets (which is completely baseless), this would still hold. This is valid even more so for Saber who has Instinct, which would function to optimize her movements. So again, some supersonic reaction times, around supersonic short-burst movement, nothing special here.
- Gilgamesh can potentially dodge Excalibur. I may be missing something here, since there's absolutely nothing that implies Excalibur is light-speed. It doesn't look like a laser, obviously seems to have some "physicality" to it, and is able to clash with other NPs (light doesn't clash with itself or really with anything in the manner Excalibur does). Just because it's spoken of as a beautiful light, doesn't mean it's made of light and travels at light speed (hell, even Enuma Elish is spoken of as a light of the same magnitude in the VN excerpt you linked). It's even spoken of as crystalized light, which implies some "solidity" to it. So this interpretation is at clash with the work itself, I don't see why it should be taken seriously.
At this point, your "inconsistencies" don't come from the work itself, but from the unwillingness to find out the unifying logic that the work doesn't explicitly state.
I know, I just didn't want to miss the opportunity.