Following off of the thread on Cyclops' Heat Vision, on January 3, 2021 I continued
But really... WTF* are "concussive blasts"
26/Why am I doing this?
(respawning this set as its own separate thread)
* Any of my students coming across this, the "F" stands for "frell" as in Farscape.
Generally, concussive blasts are basically very intense soundwaves, pushing air (or other media) with loads of energy, and banging into other things along the way.
It's like the force from explosions or a 1980s Maxell cassette
But unlike light, sound requires a medium for transmission. So then... Cyclops shouldn't be able to use his optic blasts in the vacuum of space?
[Insert canonical counter example here]
So.. perhaps they bring their medium along? For a stretch, the canonical explanation for the optic blasts were that Scott's eyes were gateways to another dimension, and that they came from there.
So to send sound waves through a vacuum with that, he'd need to get the medium out at least at the blast speed - so imagine some weird gas or plasma being pushed out slightly ahead of the main blast, with a shockwave akin to a sonic boom at the end of the beam
Banshee would be jealous
For the now I'm going to sidestep the Newton's 3rd Law plus momentum conservation issues here - however hard Scott presses on his blast, the blast presses back on him.
Because it's not Scott - he's just the doorway.
So the momentum in the blasts are coming from the other dimension & they press back on that dimension, not him.
But that kinda fouls up the whole breaking his and Alex's fall.
So fine. Not another dimension. That's not early canon or current canon anyway. It's drawn from the environment such as the Sun, transformed and channeled out his eyes.
To break the Summers' brothers fall, that just needs to be more force than their weight to slow them down, but only their weight to keep them falling at terminal velocity.
I generally don't do pullups with my neck, but you know, some artists draw "Slim" with pretty significant neck muscles so maybe that's ok?
Except that blasts knocks all sorts of things down with apparently more force than just Cyclops's weight. So do we wave our hands and say it's partly magic?
Before we send off for Wanda Maximoff and Stephen Strange, there's another option
If we're just breaking stuff and not pushing it around, everything solid has a "yield" a limit akin to pressure at which it greater applied pressure will permanently deform or break it.
Pressure is force per unit area, P = F/A, and while Cyclops has some maximum force his body can work with to throw blasts out, he also has skilled control over the shape of the beam.
So if he shrunk the area of contact for the blast beam at the point of impact, then he could blast the thing apart at that point. Sweep the beam over an area rapidly like the cathode ray in a vacuum tube TV, and he covers a broad area.
Worth a No-Prize? 🙂
Excelsior!