Babidi's assessment of the base saiyans' "energy"

[RandomGuy96]

I see a lot of attention drawn to the scene where Babidi and Dabra determine that the base saiyans have much higher energy than Piccolo in the Buu arc. Different people have taken different conclusions from this scene over the years:
C1: the base saiyans are stronger than Piccolo
C2: the base saiyans were not suppressing themselves as much as Piccolo, who is stronger than them.
C3: everyone was supposed to their powers suppressed to the point of being unreadable in the first place, so it's a plot hole.
C4: Dabra clearly cannot sense battle powers later in the scene, so it's a plot hole.

I think I found the answer here (mostly from reading digressions on other forums): Dabra and Babidi only ever talk about energy, not power. This is something relevant to a whole lot more than just this one scene. Power = energy/time. It is essentially just the rate at which that energy is transferred. You could stick a steel bar into a campfire and keep it lit until the end of time, burning infinitely with infinite amounts of energy, but the steel will never melt. Turn up the heat a few thousand degrees and you can melt it in moments and not expend all that much at all.

This is a simple way to say that the actual powers fighters can use is nowhere near their raw energy. Therefore there's no problem with the base saiyans having more energy than Piccolo. This would also handily explain why Dabra thought that the three base saiyans would have enough energy to revive Buu (even though SS2 Gohan didn't even have half of what they needed) and why Pui Pui would beat them all. He knew they had massive energy, but just assumed they couldn't actually convert that to practical power, and thus one of the most powerful fighters in the universe would have no problem. The difference between raw energy and power that a fighter is actually utilizing for defense and offense is demonstrated countless times.

A good demonstration of a fighter having waaaaaay more "energy" than their "power" would imply is at the 23rd Budokai. Piccolo unleashes a massive omnidirectional attack covering a huge area, many kilometers in diameter. It hits harder than anything else that Piccolo does. The Daizenshuu guidebooks state that Dragon Ball characters can condense their attacks to only affect a small area, which would explain why his strongest attack didn't kill everything on the planet when he's demonstrably capable of erasing the moon. But that wouldn't change the fact that everything within that range of attack should be receiving the same condensed energy as Goku. Tiny little Goku gets hit and receives barely any of what happened due to his puny surface area. All of that energy hitting literally everything that wasn't Goku would account for millions of times more than what actually hits him and inflicts all that damage.

The same thing comes up again when Vegeta kills himself trying to kill Buu. That energy went everywhere other than Buu, but it was apparently the means by which he could do the most damage to a single target. It would have covered an area easily millions if times greater than his spear-like beam earlier in that fight, yet apparently did way more damage within the first attack's area.

Finally, there's Tenshinhan's Kikoho. It covers an enormous area compared to the much more precise Dodonpa, probably a contact area thousands if not millions of times greater. But it deals far more damage than the Dodonpa on whatever gets caught in its area. At the 22nd Budokai, that attack with an impact area larger than the entire arena was stated to be able to instantly mulch Goku if he was caught within the blast, which neither the Dodonpa nor Tenshinhan punching him like a machine gun did. If he's generating more work in a given area, or even comparable, and his flux is spread over an area thousands of times larger than his fist, then he's generating a huge amount more energy. That's because Tenshinhan always had that energy in him. It's not actually possible for Tenshinhan to unleash more energy than he actually has, he's just managing to release it all at once- which is probably exactly what Super Saiyan does as well, just slower and more permanent (and with a x50 difference in power output rather than millions). Anytime somebody runs themselves dry, they've essentially accomplished something similar.

This also ties directly into the fight between Piccolo and Gero. Gero explicitly had more energy from his own initially greater reserves and from absorbing most of Piccolo's, but Piccolo was still kicking his ass because as he said, they cause their power to "explode".

Chapter: 346 (DBZ 152), P14.3
Piccolo: “Commit this to memory: when we fight, we amplify what you guys call ‘energy’, causing it to explode. That’s why the energy you stole from me earlier doesn’t matter…”

[dbgtFO]

I usually go by C5:
Babidi and Dabra knew that only the Saiyans would provide enough energy, but they didn't know why (Super Saiyan) nor did they have an actual grasp on how much energy they had, just that it was enough to revive Buu, whose energy requirements they didn't know about either.

[Desassina]

If you think of energy as being fuel in the tank, then when their engines are turned off, you won't be able to feel its power. If Babidi and Dabura's energy assessment mattered on a power basis, then they wouldn't be surprised by their transformations, because it could have been predicted. However, why did Saiyans have more energy than Piccolo, when the latter could have been stronger than a base one? The Saiyan's full power is a transformation, which requires energy, so they had more to spend. Piccolo's full power is a new state (of fusion with Kami, for example), so he doesn't need to spend more than he has. Dabura and Babidi could probably sense their energy in spite of everyone's attempt at hiding power.

[Kaboom]

I'm more or less in the same boat as dbgtFO on this particular topic... it seems like the whole point of that scene was "Bobbidi and Dabra are magic, so they can detect the heroes even when they're suppressing their power."

That also apparently included divining which of the heroes had the most energy below the surface to harvest for Boo, and they were right — the SS2-level power they took from Gohan and Goku released Boo in no time flat. But Bobbidi and Dabra's shortcoming was simply that they didn't or couldn't accurately measure that "marvelous energy" against the power of their own forces or Dabra himself.

[GreatSaiyaman123]

Pretty good job here, RandomGuy. But i noticed a error:

This is a simple way to say that the actual powers fighters can use is nowhere near their raw energy. Therefore there's no problem with the base saiyans having more energy than Piccolo. This would also handily explain why Dabra thought that the three base saiyans would have enough energy to revive Buu (even though SS2 Gohan didn't even have half of what they needed) and why Pui Pui would beat them all. He knew they had massive energy, but just assumed they couldn't actually convert that to practical power, and thus one of the most powerful fighters in the universe would have no problem. The difference between raw energy and power that a fighter is actually utilizing for defense and offense is demonstrated countless times.

Babidi thought it was energy from random people that filled half of Buu's energy. And if random people's energy can fill half of Buu's energy, the energy of the 3 strongest warriors would defintely be more than enough to revive Buu.

[RandomGuy96]

Pretty good job here, RandomGuy. But i noticed a error:

This is a simple way to say that the actual powers fighters can use is nowhere near their raw energy. Therefore there's no problem with the base saiyans having more energy than Piccolo. This would also handily explain why Dabra thought that the three base saiyans would have enough energy to revive Buu (even though SS2 Gohan didn't even have half of what they needed) and why Pui Pui would beat them all. He knew they had massive energy, but just assumed they couldn't actually convert that to practical power, and thus one of the most powerful fighters in the universe would have no problem. The difference between raw energy and power that a fighter is actually utilizing for defense and offense is demonstrated countless times.

Babidi thought it was energy from random people that filled half of Buu's energy. And if random people's energy can fill half of Buu's energy, the energy of the 3 strongest warriors would defintely be more than enough to revive Buu.

Babidi most likely thought they got that number from a bunch of warriors, not just regular people. His use of the kili system later and some of his comments on it in the anime seem to indicate he knows roughly how much energy he needs and what the energy actually represents in real terms. I don't think he thinks that the average Earthling has enough energy to destroy a large planet. Anyway, my comment didn't depend on Babidi knowing where the energy came from; rather, I was saying that Babidi knows how much energy they need and assessed the three base saiyans to have sufficient energy to fill the meter for the other ~55%. While we, the audience, know that the amount of energy he's thinking of must be in excess of the energy possessed by SS2 Gohan.

I'm more or less in the same boat as dbgtFO on this particular topic... it seems like the whole point of that scene was "Bobbidi and Dabra are magic, so they can detect the heroes even when they're suppressing their power."

That also apparently included divining which of the heroes had the most energy below the surface to harvest for Boo, and they were right — the SS2-level power they took from Gohan and Goku released Boo in no time flat. But Bobbidi and Dabra's shortcoming was simply that they didn't or couldn't accurately measure that "marvelous energy" against the power of their own forces or Dabra himself.

This would come around to what I said earlier about the difference between energy and power. They probably assessed the energy the saiyans had 100% accurately. But they didn't accurately assess their power. They're different things altogether; it doesn't matter how much raw energy you have if you can't convert it to usable power in a timely manner. See the earlier metal bar metaphor.