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[Andres]

Spoiler: My reaction to this entire thread. (click to show/hide)

*Bay12 *Dwarf Fortress

While it's Saiyan in English, it's Saiyajin in Japan.  Probably kept it abbreviated using the Japanese spelling, as someone on a censorship board was worried about it being linked to the German SS.

A censorship board? Does Bay12 have such a board?

Comic books superman: Superman sneezes and all the planets in the solar system that Goku is in disintegrate. Goku dies and takes the opportunity to catch up with the North Kaio, meets up with Piccolo and Bulma, summons the dragon and wishes all the planets back. Annoyed by this, Superman goes back in time and reverts the change. Unable to make the same wish a second time, but not very inconvenienced by being dead, Goku tracks down Superman and challenges him to a fair fight. Superman decides that Goku is so weak that for the fight to be fair, he can't fight Goku himself. So he conjures up a Super midget from his hand to fight on his behalf. That fight takes 15 episodes, but Superman gets bored watching and uses his Super Kiss ability to make Bulma fall in lust with him to prevent the Z-team from locating the dragonballs again. Bulma falls for Superman hard, and chases him to the end of the galaxy. At least until he gets annoyed and uses his Super Mind Control to make her go away. Meanwhile, Goku has finally defeatedthe Super midget, Krillan tosses him a senzu bean, leaving him replenished but his shirt is still torn. After tracking down Superman yet again. Superman conjures up another Super Midget but Goku, 3 times as strong as he was during the first encounter,is now able to effortlessly beat it. Superman, annoyed by this, Superman uses his Super Fast Thinking to realize that this will keep going on forever if he doesn't put a stop to it. So he uses his Super Domestic Skills power to cook up some delicious ramen, feeds it to Goku who then forgives him for destroying the solar system and killing billions of people and then promptly forgets about the whole thing. Not content with this, the writer for Superman makes up a Super Make Goku Lose ability, and therefore Goku loses.

+1. 10/10. One thing I'll argue with is that at the point where Superman uses his Super Kiss, Vegeta will appear, surpass EVERYONE EVER using just SS1/2, and beat the ever-loving crap out of Superman.

The Garlic Gun and Death Ball cannot "Burst" the planet through power. They use other methods to destroy planets.

The Gallick Gun would've straight-up blown up the planet. His Death Ball certainly used another method but his Supernova - the attack he used to destroy Vegeta in his first form - just straight-up blows up planets. The Bardock Special and Episode of Bardock show it happening, I think.

(In a nutshell, this means that "Goku is vulnerable ONLY to what the writers feel like saddling him with that episode, which they will magically fix in the next story arc."  This makes any and all rational evaluations of Goku's strengths/weaknesses a futile exercise-- and by extension, any kind of VS computation a farce. Goku has an umlimited number of McGuffins he can pull out, and is pretty much Godmode Sue, with only the thinnest of paper limitations imposed on him to make him not be boring.)

Nnnnnnope!
Saiyans: Had to sacrifice himself in order to give Piccolo his chance to kill Raditz. When he fought Vegeta, he would've lost if it weren't for Yajirobe (cut off Vegeta's tail while he was a Great Ape and preventing Goku from making the Spirit Bomb) and Gohan (if it weren't for him turning into a Great Ape and falling on Vegeta Vegeta would've just finished everyone else off).
Frieza: Curb-stomped Frieza but at full power Frieza did manage to get some good hits in.
Androids: Couldn't beat any of them until he went into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, at which point they were already second fiddle to Future Trunks, Vegeta, and Semi-Perfect Cell.
Cell: Managed to put up a very decent fight against him but ultimately would've lost if he hadn't surrendered. Gohan was the one to beat Cell, anyway.
Buu: Wouldn't have been able to beat Super Buu (after eating everyone) even in Super Saiyan 3. In the end he could only beat Kid Buu using a Spirit Bomb gathered with the help of Hercule of all people. Even then he needed the dragon balls to restore his strength, otherwise he would've lost.
Battle of Gods: Outright LOST to Beerus despite becoming a god, despite learning some of the forms power, and despite becoming a god AGAIN at the end! The only reason he and the rest of the Earth is alive is because he admitted defeat and Beerus decided to spare them.
So yeah, while he does tend to get powers as they are convenient his resources are not unlimited and to date the only major DBZ fight he managed to win on his own was against Frieza.

No, it does not-- but it DOES present a continuity problem with the series itself.
Prior to his "owie, it burns!" moment, he has withstood gamut gun bursts from Vegeta that have vaporized whole mountains. The amount of energy in such a blast makes the amount of thermal energy in the lava pale in comparison. This means that the writers of the series dont understand physics, not that goku can be one-shotted by falling into mount doom.

IIRC it was more of a comedic relief moment. Goku have a lot of those, especially involving guns. And needles. Can't forget about needles.

This.

Stop talking about lava. I don't want to get this thread locked.

Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Arc Gurren Lagann
Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

[BFEL]

Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Arc Gurren Lagann
Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

SSJ4 Gogeta beats Arc Gurren Lagann but gets curbstomped by TTGL.
Even if he DID manage to hold his own against it, they could just keep generating more Spiral Energy until the universe imploded and crushed em both.

As for the original debate, Superman "wins" by virtue of being even more Godmode Sue-ish then Goku.

[Andres]

SS4 Gogeta might be able to win using a combination of Instant Transmission and x100 Big Bang Kamehameha. Just teleport in front of the cockpit and fire away.

[Vector]

.

[Sergarr]

You assume that ki energy can be interchanged with a normal biological energy in the organism. That's like saying that our thermal energy can be replaced with an electical one and everything will work out the same as long as the amounts are equal. An absurd statement.

Hey, but the fact is that chi is a subset of biological energy just based on the Eastern mysticism the series is based on anyhow. It's basically "life force," though it's come to mean something more like "vibe" or "attitude" as well. In the series, Son Goku can ask for the "life energy" of other living things and turn it into the genkidama as we already know. "Genki" means "vital energy" or "vitality," with "energy" written in the same way that "ki" is in "ki blast." So, there's something to the claim.

Source: I'm making my living as a Chinese literary researcher. Also I slept 4.5 hours last night, hope this made sense.


Also--fak u Redking, I know you love this stuff >:[

Thing is, that Ki that we usually see in the form of blasts is much much bigger than the Ki that we saw in terms of their biological strength. Goku can bust planets easily but still cannot actually lift a mountain.

Also I haven't slept last night at all, so hope that I'm not making a horrible mistake.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

If I recall correctly, the general durability of Goku against attacks depends upon whether he is prepared for them to come in or not.  Example: When he is fighting the Majiin-enhanced Vegeta, he tanks quite a few hits just fine.  However, after the fight when he is planning with Vegeta to strike at Buu, Vegeta takes him down with a single hit.

It has been shown that ki shots do give of at least some heat, but only when unfocused, like when Kami/Piccolo faced off against cell (and a ton of other examples) the blast certainly made his (sweat?) on his hand evaporate, but not when they use something that's focused, like Piccolo's little finger beam or Krillens energy saw disc thing, it really seems more like this weird energy that can be freely controlled by whoever is projecting it.

So this would mean that focused Ki attacks are 100% efficient when control is maintained?

Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Arc Gurren Lagann
Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta vs Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Gogeta's opponents, as Super Saiyan 4 and Gogeta are non-canon.  I personally thought it would be inevitable that this would be said, so I said it to get it out of the way.[/url]

[wierd]

While clearly more thought out than what the writers of DBZ would be willing to invest:

If Ki energy did NOT have energy parity (at best!) with other kinds of energy, and yet still be tied to dietary/metabolic energy production (See the many instances where Goku eats buttloads of food, claiming he needs it for his martial arts training)-- then it would be possible for a being in the DBZ universe to utilize Ki energy to achieve infinite energy density.

This is because a tiny amount of Ki energy could catalyze/replace a biological function requiring normal energy, which would then produce even more ki energy than was initially invested.  Since this results in godmode sue, without restraint of any kind, and is such a simple exploit given the nature of the DBZ universe-- We can draw something similar to the fermi paradox with it.  Where are all the godmode sues that have unlimited power?

Such beings would be very bad for the plot (the show has a plot?! It's not just grunting noises!?) and the implications are very disastrous for that universe (byebye second law of thermodynamics!) I think we can pretty much get away with saying that Ki Energy doesnt get a handwave on that.

You assume that ki energy can be interchanged with a normal biological energy in the organism. That's like saying that our thermal energy can be replaced with an electical one and everything will work out the same as long as the amounts are equal. An absurd statement.

Biological energy *IS* electrical energy.  Chemistry is the exchange of electrons between atoms, and how those exchanges alter the charge configuration of valence electron clouds of atoms and molecules.

Your notion is the one that is absurd-- even with your exact statement-- thermal energy-- there is interchangability, in both directions, just limited by the second law.  Thermocouples turn thermal energy into electrical-- and resistive heating coils turn electrical into thermal. 

[Neonivek]

Well plus the law of diminishing returns because ultimately it takes energy to store energy.

It is why the characters don't become more mobile after powering up their attacks.

[wierd]

That's the second law.  In a closed system, entropy must always increase, and not dissipate.

Thermal energy is diffuse energy, and thus has more entropy than does more focused electrical or kinetic energies. Getting electrical energy out of thermal energy is "hard", and requires tricks like a thermocoupling, or a very precisely tuned semiconductor junction to pull off-- but it can be pulled off. Just that entropy will always win in the end.

With the ki energy demonstrated in the series however, we have Goku packing away calories like a professional eating contest winner, but the caloric energy in all that food is simply not sufficient to power his abilities.  Unless he has some kind of nuclear furnace inside is GI tract, the caloric energy of one of his table sittings would be about what's needed to boil a large stockpot full of water, not to destroy a mountain.

This energy disparity indicates that Ki energy violates the second law, or at least violates the energy conservation law.  As a consequence, even with horribly inefficient mechanisms in action, a well-trained user of ki energy could become all-powerful by learning to control their own metabolic processes using their own ki energy in a regenerative fashion.  Given that release of thermal energy is not observed with well focused attacks, it looks like a dead ringer for second law violation, and that you can get much bigger energy events than what you put in, indicates energy conservation violation. BOTH appear to be present in order for the observed phenomena to be seen.

Ki energy assisted manipulation of biological processes is also directly observed in the series, such as the shapeshifting powers of oolong and pals. 

[Vector]

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[wierd]

Goku caused a global food shortage after initiating an out of control eating contest, on a planet full of pro-series professional eaters?

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

With the ki energy demonstrated in the series however, we have Goku packing away calories like a professional eating contest winner, but the caloric energy in all that food is simply not sufficient to power his abilities.  Unless he has some kind of nuclear furnace inside is GI tract, the caloric energy of one of his table sittings would be about what's needed to boil a large stockpot full of water, not to destroy a mountain.

There could be a mix of a biological version of a Step-Up transformer multiplying his power, or Ki energy is only partially biological and mostly spiritual.

[NullForceOmega]

Considering that Freiza was able to maintain his own vital processes with (lent by Goku) ki energy, I see no reason to assume that the stupidly OP nature of the majority of DB/Z inhabitants isn't due to replacing their normal vital energy with pure ki.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Just recalled something.  A single Senzu Bean provide an equivalent of 10 days of food.  There seem to typically be only a few in fights, so what if, rather than them growing slowly, the Z-fighters subsist off a few of them a week (using them as supplements and using other food to fill their stomachs completely), leaving few remaining to heal from fights?  Notably, Frieza and Cold are one of a few combatants outside of earth that were as strong as they were, and they controlled a massive amount of planets.  Not out of reason that it would take a massive empire to maintain beings of that strength without their power being Mystic in nature.

[Antioch]

The first rule of anime is that the underdog always wins. Superman (depicted at his strongest) is shown to be vastly stronger than Goku.

Thus Goku wins.