Cell a Solar System Buster ?

[Hitiro]

The anime shouldn't really be trusted in instances of this. As I brought up earlier, and if you check my posts on the page previous, you'll see that if it took 5 mins to hit the moon then Piccolo's move would be travelling at around mach 3,771. The speed of light is mach 881,000. That is still a hell of a lot slower than the speed of light.

Why should the anime not be trustworthy? Some people consider it canon and quite frankly I dont see any reason for Piccolo's attack to take 5 minutes. Especially when Gohan would attack him within those 5 minutes. 8 seconds seems fine to me. Hell the manga looks faster:
EDIT: Woah! Piccolo has 4 fingers in both scans o.0?

What are you talking about? Gohan isn't even registering Piccolo in this scene. He's just blowing everything up around him. In the anime he may attack Piccolo but that isn't what he's aiming for in the Manga, he is just rampaging. So no, I don't see any reason why Piccolo's attack couldn't take 5 minutes to hit the moon.

[TheMightyOzaru]

The anime shouldn't really be trusted in instances of this. As I brought up earlier, and if you check my posts on the page previous, you'll see that if it took 5 mins to hit the moon then Piccolo's move would be travelling at around mach 3,771. The speed of light is mach 881,000. That is still a hell of a lot slower than the speed of light.

Why should the anime not be trustworthy? Some people consider it canon and quite frankly I dont see any reason for Piccolo's attack to take 5 minutes. Especially when Gohan would attack him within those 5 minutes. 8 seconds seems fine to me. Hell the manga looks faster:
EDIT: Woah! Piccolo has 4 fingers in both scans o.0?

What are you talking about? Gohan isn't even registering Piccolo in this scene. He's just blowing everything up around him. In the anime he may attack Piccolo but that isn't what he's aiming for in the Manga, he is just rampaging. So no, I don't see any reason why Piccolo's attack couldn't take 5 minutes to hit the moon.

I'm sorry but I find this claim to be incredibly outlandish. Gohan would have registered him in 1 minute =/. Plus the manga seems to imply an incredibly fast destruction. You fail to explain why the anime isn't trustworthy. I don't see whats so hard to believe about Ki being FTL in a fiction created by a gag manga artist.

[Bando]

Anime isn't trustworthy because it wasn't intended to literally follow the timing.

And like I already pointed out it was just a convenience for the readers that the beam reached the moon. Raditz outran Goku's Kamehameha for a while and he's slower than Mach 30.

[Hitiro]

I'm sorry but I find this claim to be incredibly outlandish. Gohan would have registered him in 1 minute =/. Plus the manga seems to imply an incredibly fast destruction. You fail to explain why the anime isn't trustworthy. I don't see whats so hard to believe about Ki being FTL in a fiction created by a gag manga artist.

Why would Gohan register him in 1 minute? Are you saying Oozaru Gohan is capable of any reasonable detection skills, much more so than Gohan in his normal form who didn't even know Piccolo had been watching him the whole time? Piccolo was vastly higher up than Oozaru Gohan when he was on a rampage so Oozaru Gohan would have had to look straight up to even see Piccolo. He would not have spotted him and would have just kept rampaging around. You seem to be thinking Oozaru Gohan was capable of any sort of reasoning at this point for him to even check his surroundings before he started to blow things up. This isn't the case. He was just a rampaging monkey with no thought process apart from destroy. Now had Piccolo been in his line of sight or on the ground I can understand your reasoning. But Piccolo was up so high Oozaru Gohan from our perspective looked smaller than Piccolo. And of course the anime isn't trustworthy because it can't gauge what was going through Toriyama's head when he was creating these panels. For all we know Toriyama could have thought "5 or 10 mins seems enough of a gap between him firing and hitting the moon" yet the anime wouldn't accurately present this because as far as they are concerned they can make each panel last as long or as short as they need to get an episode out of it. While Toriyama is a gag manga artist the Z portion of his work is heavily more realistic (In terms of not having as many gags) than it is pre-Z.

Toriyama took the time to make the Z portion serious so it is possible things like "the blast won't reach the moon for a couple of minutes" were going through his head. If you really believe beams are travelling FTL then why are there panels which specifically show characters firing off ki based attacks and yet other characters still have time to say words before the attacks actually connect with anything. I refer you to the scene where Frieza had finally reached his final form and fires his death beam for the second time, trying to hit Gohan. Vegeta moves and kicks Gohan out of the way of the blast saying "Duck, you imbecile!" So is Vegeta speaking FTL? If so that would hardly matter. Sound can only travel at the speed of sound so even if you could say those words FTL, essentially it would come out in a garbled mess where only someone who could perceive each variation in the sound would be able to understand it. The sound wave would still be travelling at the speed of sound. Yet Vegeta said these words before Frieza's death beam could even hit anything. Seems to me that even though Frieza's death beam is the fastest thing up till this point its still can't be FTL, or even close.

[Bando]

That's also faulty reasoning. . . speaking at fast speeds is just a trope.

[Hitiro]

That's also faulty reasoning. . . speaking at fast speeds is just a trope.

I don't see why, Toriyama is pretty good at stopping the battle for a moment for the characters to speak. And that instance I provided would have had the same effect, possibly a greater one, if Vegeta just kicked Gohan out of the without saying anything and then say "Idiot, learn to dodge!" straight after the beam had blown up the background. Of course, looking at the distance it could very well be a trope. It depends on how fast we are willing to concede the Death Beam is. If you assume its travelling at 300 mach, 10x the speed of Goku in after Kaio's training, then Frieza would have had to be at around 102000 metres away from Gohan for Vegeta to say those words in 1 second. Probably an unrealistic thought. but its hard to tell how far Frieza is away.

[Bando]

That's also faulty reasoning. . . speaking at fast speeds is just a trope.

I don't see why, Toriyama is pretty good at stopping the battle for a moment for the characters to speak. And that instance I provided would have had the same effect, possibly a greater one, if Vegeta just kicked Gohan out of the without saying anything and then say "Idiot, learn to dodge!" straight after the beam had blown up the background. Of course, looking at the distance it could very well be a trope. It depends on how fast we are willing to concede the Death Beam is. If you assume its travelling at 300 mach, 10x the speed of Goku in after Kaio's training, then Freeza would have had to be at around 102000 metres away from Gohan to say those words in 1 second. Probably an unrealistic thought. but its hard to tell how far Freeza is away.

Yea I don't think Freeza was 60 miles away from Vegeta and co. xD

I didn't think they'd have it, but who was I trying to kid they have everything:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... FreeAction

[Fox666]

Freeza wasn't far away from Piccolo and the others. If I had to guess, I would estimate 20 or 30 meters at most.

[Bussani]

Well I guess we could use the anime for my example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIw9dWPl7zY
It takes about 8 seconds for the beam to hit and for the light to get back to the Earth. Still a good deal slower than light but its established that Ki gets faster in the Freeza saga.

Even if you go by the anime and take the time lapse literally, that's all just as vague as what you said before. I mean, I can see how you could form an opinion from it, for sure, but I think that's the best anyone can do.

EDIT: Woah! Piccolo has 4 fingers in both scans o.0?

...Namekians only have 3 fingers and a thumb in the manga (excluding a Tori-joke and any oversights).

You know what I mean.

I don't think he meant to correct you on the difference between fingers and thumbs. He's just saying that Namekians are always depicted as having four digits in the manga, but the anime changed it to five.

[Fox666]

Well I guess we could use the anime for my example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIw9dWPl7zY
It takes about 8 seconds for the beam to hit and for the light to get back to the Earth. Still a good deal slower than light but its established that Ki gets faster in the Freeza saga.

Even if you go by the anime and take the time lapse literally, that's all just as vague as what you said before. I mean, I can see how you could form an opinion from it, for sure, but I think that's the best anyone can do.

It took 11 episodes (about 4 hours) for the 5 minutes until Namek destruction.

[Bussani]

Well I guess we could use the anime for my example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIw9dWPl7zY
It takes about 8 seconds for the beam to hit and for the light to get back to the Earth. Still a good deal slower than light but its established that Ki gets faster in the Freeza saga.

Even if you go by the anime and take the time lapse literally, that's all just as vague as what you said before. I mean, I can see how you could form an opinion from it, for sure, but I think that's the best anyone can do.

It took 11 episodes (about 4 hours) for the 5 minutes until Namek destruction.

Yeah, I was thinking that myself. I ended up not mentioning it since someone could argue that Freeza estimated the time wrong, or that they were fighting so fast that they fit hours worth of combat into five minutes, or a mix of both. But yeah, time in television is a funny thing.

[Rocketman]

The big indication of FTL speeds for me is the scene where Piccolo destroys the moon.

The DB Moon is about ten times closer than ours. At roughly 24,000 miles away, light reaches it in a tenth of a second.

[Master Turbo]

Well characters who have never done any attempts at certain feats before seem pretty confident about the action they're about to do. If you recall Kame Sennin seemed pretty confident he could destroy the moon. Piccolo was also confident in this feat as well as others he's done, like leveling a city. Characters who have tried feats they have never done before have not failed to do so throughout the story. Of course it may be an overestimation but we can't say it flat out is. Also with Cell misjudging his capability against other fighters its the same reason why all characters are off the mark with their opponents. An opponent might be fighting at 50% of their power and you can gauge that they still have power in reserve but to you you don't know they're at 50% you just see it as "They haven't used their full power yet." Goku also misjudges Freeza's power in the Namek saga. He believes there's no way Freeza could beat him with only 50% of his power so Goku launches a Kaioken x20 Kamehameha in hopes it will settle the battle. Of course what Freeza said was true and Goku realized this after Freeza was pushed to using 50% of his power.

This is true, but there are also been multiple times they misjudged there own capacity. Freeza when he destroyed Planet Vegeta which had 10Gs in his first form failed to outright destroy Namek which has similar gravity to earth when he was at half strength in one blast and he's the one that thought that initial attack would be enough to blow it up and is surprised by it even questioning if he had back too much so its not like its implausible for it to happen. As for your comment about mishandling opponents fighting ability makes little sense as its not as if Gohan was holding back his full power or had any reason to suppress the current level of ki he was radiating with.

The example with Goku is different because Goku initially thought Freeza was bluffing thinking he can't increase his power that much, not that his misjudged his currently display of power. As soon as he does Goku immediately says he's not bluffing before he even attacks. Even after fighting Freeza a little bit at that level he still has wishful thinking in hoping he's bluffing about being at half strength then there's nothing I can really do which Goku was definitely correct about. A better example would be if Goku fought an opponent that powered up to full strength and he was only half his fighting power and claimed "Yeah, I could wreck him in 2 seconds." fight the opponent and gets badly demolished from it.

That's essentially what Perfect Cell did, twice now that I think about it. Cell had to get beat up first before he finally realized, "Wow, this guy really is stronger than me." The second time was when he thought Gohan could finish Gohan off with a Kamehameha. not only Cell badly misjudged this, but so did the rest of the Z-sensi such as Vegeta thinking its all over and Goku freaking out. Why would everyone do this if Gohan just rearranged Cell's insides with a few punches? Wouldn't the fact that Gohan is much stronger mean he could also fire a Kamehameha by default stronger than Cell's Kamehameha which he in fact does. Why be surprised you lost that one when he was much stronger than you to begin with?

This is similar to everyone jumping to conclusions when they thought Cell killed Gohan with a kiai (I think it was that). Cell only misjudged Vegeta's SSJ second stage's power badly as well, it took a good bit of ass whooping before Cell realized he needed to power up to take Vegeta, yet still misjudged Vegeta's power as he shrugged off Cell's best punch like it was thrash which Cell is clearly surprised about. There are ton more examples, but this should be enough to show these characters aren't infallible and can't misjudged their own capabilities.

Goku wasn't at the other side of the planet. Freeza's spaceship was very close to the battlefield.

Here you can see the spaceship from where Porunga was summoned:



And near the end of the battle Porunga was still visible:

i know right, Goku even said before he took to the fight that they were very close by. Some fans of Dragon Ball are just too stubborn to listen to reason. Also, TheMightyOzaru , I can understand where you are coming from when there are scenes of ki blasts like Goku's Kamehameha carrying Cooler all the way to the sun faster than light would but keep in mind scenes like this should be taken with a grain of salt. Basically those attacks move at the speed of plot for lack of a better term. Its why there are scenes in the same movie where one of Cooler's henchmen out flies one of Piccolo's ki blast for a while before it eventually catches up to him despite the fact he's not flying a dozen times around the planet. Its why scenes like Piccolo's ki blast possibly moving at the speed of light to hit the moon wouldn't be taken into account when the equally powerful Goku fires a Kamehameha that Raditz is shown outrunning for a good bit of time slowly catching up until he decides to turn around and cancel it out. Raditz wasn't exactly running at the speed of the light across the globe multiple times was he?

Scenes like that are in abundance in the manga and even more so in the anime. Its one of those things you just ignore.

That's true. Cell wasn't exactly pointing his Kamehameha straight down, yet Goku still worried it would destroy the Earth and lead Cell to aim it upwards to avoid that.

But like you said Cell wasn't aiming at the ground, he was aiming specifically at Goku, but the act of just putting enough ki into his Kamehameha made everyone flipped out. Another example would be Vegeta telling 18 he can't go all out after firing a weak blast at here because if he did the Earth would be destroyed. He said going all out would destroy the planet, not if I went all out and pointed down at the planet.

[Fox666]

move at the speed of plot

This.

This is true, but there are also been multiple times they misjudged there own capacity. Freeza when he destroyed Planet Vegeta which had 10Gs in his first form failed to outright destroy Namek which has similar gravity to earth when he was at half strength in one blast and he's the one that thought that initial attack would be enough to blow it up and is surprised by it even questioning if he had back too much so its not like its implausible for it to happen.

Goku mentioned that Freeza didn't destroyed Namek in the very instant because he was afraid of being damaged by the explosion.

The big indication of FTL speeds for me is the scene where Piccolo destroys the moon.

The DB Moon is about ten times closer than ours. At roughly 24,000 miles away, light reaches it in a tenth of a second.

What is the source for that?

As far I am concerned, the only time the distance of the Moon in Dragon Ball world was ever mention was in an interview with Toriyama, which he provides the same as the real life Moon.

[Toriyama-sama]

It seems my previous posts went somewhat unnoticed

Since Bulma is able to phone home from Namek, light has to travel way faster in Dragon Ball than it does in reality, maybe even at infinite speed. If so, no one is faster than light

[Hitiro]

This is true, but there are also been multiple times they misjudged there own capacity. Freeza when he destroyed Planet Vegeta which had 10Gs in his first form failed to outright destroy Namek which has similar gravity to earth when he was at half strength in one blast and he's the one that thought that initial attack would be enough to blow it up and is surprised by it even questioning if he had back too much so its not like its implausible for it to happen. As for your comment about mishandling opponents fighting ability makes little sense as its not as if Gohan was holding back his full power or had any reason to suppress the current level of ki he was radiating with.

To be fair I think that its harder judge your own capacity when your trying to hold back power like Freeza did. As you'll see in the manga he says that he "held back too much" this concept is true to our own lives as it isn't easy to get what you want to do spot on by holding back. For instance, if you have quite a good kick then going all out in rugby to kick the ball over the posts is a fairly trivial thing if you get the angle right and just give the ball a good old boot. However if you were aiming for a particular area and have to hold back it is much more difficult. You can either hold back too much or hold back not enough whereas if you just need to try to the best of your ability to get an objective done then there is only one requirement. Try your best.

As for Cell not understanding Gohan's fighting ability Gohan was probably holding back. Gohan may not have been suppressed but his current level of ki would be indicative of what he was doing at that moment. He wasn't exerting himself to any degree and for most of the time he was just standing there. So Gohan wouldn't be outputting all of his power. This has been brought up before but Characters who can't suppress their ki have been surprised by somebodies power level increasing dramatically. However they have shown instances of increasing their powerlevel so why should they be surprised? Well I've always come to the conclusion that characters who can't suppress their ki have always had their ki fluctuate between some sort of resting powerlevel and a fighting powerlevel when they are actually exerting themselves. So in the case for when they first met Vegeta because he wasn't doing anything at the start his powerlevel may have only been indicated at 10,000. However when he was in the heat of battle with Goku it climbed to 18,000. Kind of like how we have a resting heartbeat but when we exercise our heartbeat gets a lot faster.

So what the characters who can't suppress their ki were surprised about wasn't the increase in the persons powerlevel as much as how much it increased by(because they were suppressing). So if Vegeta was against someone and their powerlevel was at 10,000 before they do anything then naturally Vegeta would assume they are around his level of strength. However they might be suppressing their normal resting powerlevel and it might actually be 20,000. So when that person gets down to battle he might be outputting 28,000 which would puzzle Vegeta(if he didn't know about suppressing your powerlevel) because he wouldn't understand why the person had such a dramatic difference between their resting and battle powerlevels. This can still be applied to later in the series as there are characters, like Majin Buu, who don't seem a threat at first because they're not doing anything but when they actually start trying you realise they are very strong. The only real way to know how strong a person is, is to watch them fight all out.

The example with Goku is different because Goku initially thought Freeza was bluffing thinking he can't increase his power that much, not that his misjudged his currently display of power. As soon as he does Goku immediately says he's not bluffing before he even attacks. Even after fighting Freeza a little bit at that level he still has wishful thinking in hoping he's bluffing about being at half strength then there's nothing I can really do which Goku was definitely correct about. A better example would be if Goku fought an opponent that powered up to full strength and he was only half his fighting power and claimed "Yeah, I could wreck him in 2 seconds." fight the opponent and gets badly demolished from it.

Seeing an opponent holding back its hard to understand their true limit though. Goku understood that Freeza wasn't giving his all but by how much he wasn't certain. The only way to know how strong an opponent truly is is to have them actually display their true strength.

That's essentially what Perfect Cell did, twice now that I think about it. Cell had to get beat up first before he finally realized, "Wow, this guy really is stronger than me." The second time was when he thought Gohan could finish Gohan off with a Kamehameha. not only Cell badly misjudged this, but so did the rest of the Z-sensi such as Vegeta thinking its all over and Goku freaking out. Why would everyone do this if Gohan just rearranged Cell's insides with a few punches? Wouldn't the fact that Gohan is much stronger mean he could also fire a Kamehameha by default stronger than Cell's Kamehameha which he in fact does. Why be surprised you lost that one when he was much stronger than you to begin with?

I think this was less about Gohan being stronger than Cell and more about how easily he duplicated a Kamehameha with even more power than Cell's in a shorter measure of time. The characters have proved possibly time and again that charging up a move is beneficial to produce a powerful attack. But the surprise was that Gohan managed to charge up his move faster than Cell's. That's how I see it anyway.

This is similar to everyone jumping to conclusions when they thought Cell killed Gohan with a kiai (I think it was that). Cell only misjudged Vegeta's SSJ second stage's power badly as well, it took a good bit of ass whooping before Cell realized he needed to power up to take Vegeta, yet still misjudged Vegeta's power as he shrugged off Cell's best punch like it was thrash which Cell is clearly surprised about. There are ton more examples, but this should be enough to show these characters aren't infallible and can't misjudged their own capabilities.

To be honest I can't really explain everyone's obvious disregard for Gohan when they thought he got killed, I guess they just left their expectations low because Gohan couldn't be that powerful in their minds. Of course it wasn't like Gohan was actually trying during this time so they probably didn't understand he was stronger than Goku. And as I'll explain a bit lower sensing lacks the accuracy of using scouters its just more reliable. As explained earlier characters who aren't exerting themselves will naturally seem weaker because their resting power will be as is. As I have explained in some posts elsewhere the dcouters are actually great devices for measuring the distance of power between two individuals. The only problem with them is that character can hide their powerlevel making it unreliable. However people who can sense ki can understand if someone his suppressing their full power. But when it comes gauging how much stronger an opponent is than you or how much weaker its pretty unreliable in this area. SSJ2G Vegeta with his resting powerlevel may have been pretty close to Semi-Perfect Cell's resting level but how close Cell or Vegeta wouldn't be able to gauge. When Vegeta starts fighting the difference would have become obvious but at the time Cell still thought he could manage something, if Vegeta was only a little bit stronger Cell would be able to fight on par with him and just try to outwit him or just fight better than him which is what Cell was probably thinking at the time.

But, yeah, as I said, all characters are off the mark in one instance or another, when it comes to people, as we go through the story. And I believe my reasons are why and you can choose whether to accept them or not that is up to you. But I have never seen a character misjudge their own capacity against things in the universe that are constant. Characters aren't constant and its hard to justify that because they are wrong about their capacity against other people, which is hard to gauge against, that their capacity for destroying things like planets, moons, suns, etc. should be the same. I have not seen a single character misjudge their ability to destroy things, people are inconsistent variables in this debate because as we've seen throughout sensing a persons power isn't flawless. But judging things like the moon which never gets any stronger or weaker, doesn't have things to hide its true capacity like people do, or any of the other things I've mentioned which makes it hard to judge a person, has always been judged correctly from what we've seen.

[Rocketman]

What is the source for that?

The real Earth viewed from the Moon:


DB's Earth viewed from its Moon:


A screenshot from a space simulator I modified to move the Moon to 25,000 miles from Earth.

[Bando]

Toriyama probably didn't care. The moon comes up pretty huge in a lot of comics, video games, movies, etc. It was also a gag scene and presumably retconned.

[Fox666]

DB's Earth viewed from its Moon:

Using the same logic I could argue that the Earth is also smaller based on this image:



There are plenty of examples of Toriyama's unrealistic perspective in the manga.

[Rocketman]

A panel shows the Moon very close to Earth: pff, just artistic license
A panel shows Piccolo destroying the Moon "instantly": THEY'RE FASTER THAN LIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT