Waspinator

Well, being an immortal that can at will vanish to another plane of existence is the kind of thing that probably makes you pretty brave.

That is a very good question.

The real question is why people voluntarily wear headgear that could explode.

Well, as I was saying in the previous comic's thread, there's no way that fixing this problem is going to be as easy as this one conversation. With what Pandora said today, it's probably safe to predict that whoever she is going to get to fix it probably won't want to cooperate.

Yeah, I would be shocked if such a long-running plot point is solved by a single conversation and then what Pandora does next. There's going to be some kind of problem.

We don't know yet if Adrian was ever told how his father died, do we? Without knowing what killed him, it would be very difficult for him to figure out any possible connection to the diamond and Abraham. And I'm getting the suspicion that Pandora might have tried to protect him by not telling him anything.

Yeah, it's entirely possible that an undiagnosed medical problem could be discovered the hard way during the stress caused by a knockout. There's probably all kinds of circulatory issues that could be made worse by being choked. And it's not like people have power switches, no matter how you knock someone out it’s a process that is way outside of normal functioning and IS going to put a lot of stress on whatever body system you target.

Yeah, the concept of safe knockouts is basically Hollywood lies. There's no entirely safe way to force people unconscious. Even really controlled methods like surgical anesthesia have risks and usually only done when really needed.

About half-immortals not being able to have kids: it could just be a thing where, like mules, a chromosome count mismatch interferes with the type of cell division needed for reproduction.

Right, photon propulsion becomes a little more practical when they're being reflected both because that increases the momentum gain on the target and means that you don't have to absorb stupid amounts of energy. I assumed absorption instead of reflectivity to make the math easier. I don't claim to be a physics expert, but if my math was off even majorly we're still talking about stupid amounts of energy coming at something to push it. The lightsail spaceship concept is also helped by being in space, so friction is extremely low and you can accelerate slowly without losing much speed to friction. It also relies on “free” energy sources like the sun, which is good since this is NOT a very energy efficient way to accelerate something. For the TF beam though, we're not talking about slow acceleration over months or years. It's hitting a target hard enough to knock them back instantly, so it's delivering an absurdly high amount of momentum by photon standards. Easiest explanation: magic particles (for lack of a better term) behave like photons in many ways but have significantly higher momentum.

Let's do some math. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, photons do have momentum, but this is a subject that does not come up in classical physics and is in the realm of the theory of special relativity. Most high school physics classes probably don't cover it and its therefore not common knowledge. But anyway, that means they push things. The momentum of photons is equal to planck's constant (6.6*10^-34) divided by their wavelength. Lets assume green light, which has a wavelength of 5*10^-7 meters. That's 1.3*10^-27 kg*m/s. Let's say that we want to fire enough green light at an adult human (65 kg) so that if they absorbed it all they would get a 1 m/s push. We need 5*10^28 green photons for this. If I'm doing my math right, those would have an energy of 1.9*10^10 joules (19,000,000,000 joules). For reference, the energy of the bullets from a browning machine gun is apparently about 15,000 joules. So this hypothetical green light bright enough to give you a 1 m/s push? Has as much energy as 1.3 million machine gun shells. Yeah, you'd be a cloud of paste.