Cell a Solar System Buster ?

[LiamKav]

We don't even know where the cut-off point for Gohan, Cell and Vegeta's attacks were. It seemed to me that Gohan's Kamehameha just continued the direction he fired it at. And, to be honest, who wants to see see 4 or 5 panels of the attacks passing various planets in the solar system? A simple 1 panel shot of the energy beams leaving orbit and heading out into space is fine.

But even ignoring everything else, do you know the likelyhood of that beam hitting anything? It's literally (ha!) astronomical! If Cell aimed at hitting the sun with a kamehameha, even moving his hands a fraction of a percentage of an infintesimal amount of a degree would result in him missing it by thousands of miles. We've never seen anything in DragonBall to indicate character's have such great range or aim. And if he's aiming for Neptune the problem is a thousand times worse.

On the other hand, if we go back to the theory that he's going to fly around the solar system and blow up the planets one at a time, that's certainly more believable in terms of power. The problem there though would come from how he is going to find them. Planets are really tiny out in space, so unless he can somehow "sense" the location of a gas giant or lump of rock, he's got pretty much no hope of locating them, never mind how long it'd take him to actually fly to them.

[Kaboom]

Unless I'm mistaken, he says something like he has "enough Ki" to destroy the solar system. That doesn't necessarily mean he actually has the capability or precision to blow it all away in one shot. LiamKav already pointed out how that's pretty much impossible.

So can't we just assume that while it might take a power level of X to blow up a single average planet, Cell now has however many X's worth of power to blow up however many Earths' worth of combined mass the dragon world's solar system has.

Saiyan-arc Vegeta's power level is 18,000, and he was going to do blow up Earth with a charged attack that matched Goku's KK-fueled Kamehameha at 24,000. So let's assume the power level required to destroy the Earth is an average of like 20,000. The total mass of the solar system is something like 350,000 times that of Earth alone. Thus the power level of Super Perfect Cell is around 7 to 8 billion. (That actually works out pretty well from a powar levuls list-makin' perspective, IMO.)

There. I'm sure the real-world science of whatever amount of energy is required for blowing up whatever amount of mass doesn't line up anywhere near so cleanly, but in terms of "Dragon Ball science," it's good enough.

[Hellspawn28]

I personally think Vegeta was only going to destroy the surface of the Earth then it blow it up completely. He won't be that stupid to die along with the Earth since he would die in space and he would have no way to get back to Freeza's planet given that his space ship would be destroy as well. People think that destroy the planet can mean anything. Sometimes it means that it ends the life on the Planet but the Earth is still there.

[shonenhikada]

I personally think Vegeta was only going to destroy the surface of the Earth then it blow it up completely. He won't be that stupid to die along with the Earth since he would die in space and he would have no way to get back to Freeza's planet given that his space ship would be destroy as well. People think that destroy the planet can mean anything. Sometimes it means that it ends the life on the Planet but the Earth is still there.

Well one can make these following assumptions also

1. Vegeta went ape s. and wasn't thinkING straight.

2. He knew goku would challenged his attack to protect the earth.

Unless I'm mistaken, he says something like he has "enough Ki" to destroy the solar system. That doesn't necessarily mean he actually has the capability or precision to blow it all away in one shot. LiamKav already pointed out how that's pretty much impossible.

So can't we just assume that while it might take a power level of X to blow up a single average planet, Cell now has however many X's worth of power to blow up however many Earths' worth of combined mass the dragon world's solar system has.

Saiyan-arc Vegeta's power level is 18,000, and he was going to do blow up Earth with a charged attack that matched Goku's KK-fueled Kamehameha at 24,000. So let's assume the power level required to destroy the Earth is an average of like 20,000. The total mass of the solar system is something like 350,000 times that of Earth alone. Thus the power level of Super Perfect Cell is around 7 to 8 billion. (That actually works out pretty well from a powar levuls list-makin' perspective, IMO.)

There. I'm sure the real-world science of whatever amount of energy is required for blowing up whatever amount of mass doesn't line up anywhere near so cleanly, but in terms of "Dragon Ball science," it's good enough.

I actually have credible evidence that cell could very well be 25 x stronger than SSJ goku on Namek. Which then links up with a former poster idea of him needing that much to destroy the sun and set off a solar system. Would you like to here it ?

[LiamKav]

That only works if we're assuming a direct comparison between battle power and the maximum sized object the person can destroy. I see no evidence for that. There's no "at a power level of 1,000 you can blow up something with a mass of 1000 tonnes, and at a power level of 1 million you can blow up something with a mass of 1,000,000 tonnes". Unless that can be proved, then figuring out Cell's battle power does nothing more than, well, state what his battle power is.

[Kaboom]

Yeah, I figured that in most cases it would be more complicated than that. But in the fantasy-based realm of Dragon Ball, does it really need to be?

[shonenhikada]

That only works if we're assuming a direct comparison between battle power and the maximum sized object the person can destroy. I see no evidence for that. There's no "at a power level of 1,000 you can blow up something with a mass of 1000 tonnes, and at a power level of 1 million you can blow up something with a mass of 1,000,000 tonnes". Unless that can be proved, then figuring out Cell's battle power does nothing more than, well, state what his battle power is.

Actual we were using mass of objects for the calculation. Its quite a big jump from moon busting to earth busting

139 for moon busting

Using a direct correlation between mass and power level reached to the conclusion that one needs roughly

10,600

to earth bust.

But let's use it for fun for a hypothetical way to explain why cell might be able to do this claim he is making?

[Fox666]

Based on that, roughly 3.5 billions should be enough to destroy the solar system.

[LiamKav]

Vegeta was the first bad guy to threaten to blow up the Earth, correct? If we assume he meant actually blow it up the way the moon was, rather than just render the surface uninhabitable, then it requiring a power level of at least 10,000 to blow up the Earth works. Vegeta was 18,000 when he first arrived on Earth, and the first villian to be be over 10,000 so that makes perfect sense.

So, let's assume that Cell meant "blow up the sun". The Sun has a mass of 1.9891×1030 kg. The Earth has a mass of 5.9736 x 1024 kg. So the Sun is about 332,900 heavier than the Earth

That means that to blow up the Sun would require a power level of 3,528,740,000, or 3.5 billion. Which is possible. However, the makeup of the Sun is very different from that of a planet, so would he just wipe out the Sun, make it go nova, or something else? And would he have to actually fly to the sun in the first place, and if he did, could he survive the heat?

(now, personally, I think the ramping up of power levels in later Dragon Ball is ridiculous. I have no time for the theory that Power Levels are an absolute, and that Freeza's power level of one million could beat 40 Saiyan-arc Vegetas. I think it's more complicated than that. But if you do subscribe to the exponential increase in power theory, then you might go for this. I still think it's ridiculous and doesn't fit in with what we see later, but still.)

[Saiga]

I'm not really seeing how that's so ridiculous.

[Bussani]

I'm not going to say we should use real physics instead, but just deciding that mass is what counts to blow up planets and moons and stars in Dragon Ball seems pretty arbitrary to me. But I'm sure everyone here's okay with accepting that for the sake of fun.

[LiamKav]

I'm not going to say we should use real physics instead, but just deciding that mass is what counts to blow up planets and moons and stars in Dragon Ball seems pretty arbitrary to me. But I'm sure everyone here's okay with accepting that for the sake of fun.

It's as good as anything. Unless someone has done studies into actually blowing up the Sun in real life...

[Bussani]

It's as good as anything. Unless someone has done studies into actually blowing up the Sun in real life...

It's not much different from blowing up a planet, really. You just have to provide enough energy to accelerate every piece of the Sun away from every other piece of the Sun, which is equal to the body's gravitational binding energy. Of course, the gravitational binding energy is just the minimum required, which is enough to send the Sun flying apart at its own escape velocity. That would be really slow and boring from a distance. You have to ramp up the energy a bit to get all the Sun debris flying at some nice fraction of the speed of light for it to be anything like Namek or Alderaan exploding. In the case of the Sun, about 10^49 joules (which is more energy than you'd get out of a hypernova) ought to do the trick.

[caejones]

People don't really seem to understand the idea of big distances.
Would you want to run 100 miles?
Drive ten thousand?
It takes months to reach other planets with our technology.
Other planets. Not other stars.
It takes eight minutes for light--the fastest thing that we know of--to reach the Earth from the sun.
It takes 100,000 years, more than the whole of human civilization, for light to cross our galaxy.
The distance between galaxies is even bigger than that, and we have no idea how many galaxies there are in the universe.
Most people don't live to be 100 years old. Even in Dragonball, the only people more than a few centuries old that we meet are gods.

But, we're not talking about galaxies,we're talking about solar systems.

It takes hours for light to get from the sun to the outer planets. (Well, most of them. I don't remember the exact numbers. Is it only like 45 minutes to Jupiter?)
Now, we don't really know how ki blasts work in terms of real-world physics, but odds are that it's one of these:
A. Once a projectile leaves the atmosphere, there is little to slow it down, so Newton's first law of motion applies. Gravity pending.
B. Ki projectiles follow the inverse square law even in vacuum, which would imply some kind of range limitations, but meh.
C. Ki projectiles require sustenance from their creators, so the range is based on the abilities of the creator even outside the atmosphere.

Something else on our friendly neighborhood hypernovae:
They originally confused the hell out of scientists, because the original assumption was that they were omnidirectional, just big ol' explosions. The reason this was confusing is because it implied levels of energy that would probably break the universe. When they realized that the bursts we were detecting were more like giant space-lasers, everyone calmed down.... umm... so to speak.
Now, having said that, there are, as I see it, three ways to destroy a solar system in one attack:
A. With a beam bigger than the diameter of the solar system (or at least the part to be affected), fired from beyond it.
B. A big explosion radiating out from a central point. It wouldn't necessarily tneed to engulf and destroy every planet if the effects were enough to significantly disrupt the outskirts.
C. Multiple bursts of energy aimed at all objects of interest.

Cell's last kamehameha is none of these.

Buu's Genocide attack and reality-warping nature make it easy for me to believe he could pull off C. Especially if Cell was not bluffing about his power, and just left out the part about geometry.

So, I'm going with Cell was telling the truth, with a geometric disclaimer.

[Rocketman]

It takes hours for light to get from the sun to the outer planets. (Well, most of them. I don't remember the exact numbers. Is it only like 45 minutes to Jupiter?)

Mercury - 3.5 minutes
Venus - 6 minutes
Earth - 8.3 minutes
Mars - 12.5 minutes
Jupiter - 43 minutes
Saturn - 1.3 hours
Uranus - 2.6 hours
Neptune - 4.1 hours

Then of course there's the outer dwarf planets, with Pluto being the nearest at 5.4 lighthours.



And then, the farthest object in the solar system, the dwarf planet Sedna, which takes 12,000 years to orbit the Sun and at its farthest is 129 lighthours from the Sun (aka, 937 times farther than the Earth is).



spaaaaaaaaace

[Hitiro]

Something else on our friendly neighborhood hypernovae:
They originally confused the hell out of scientists, because the original assumption was that they were omnidirectional, just big ol' explosions. The reason this was confusing is because it implied levels of energy that would probably break the universe. When they realized that the bursts we were detecting were more like giant space-lasers, everyone calmed down.... umm... so to speak.
Now, having said that, there are, as I see it, three ways to destroy a solar system in one attack:
A. With a beam bigger than the diameter of the solar system (or at least the part to be affected), fired from beyond it.
B. A big explosion radiating out from a central point. It wouldn't necessarily tneed to engulf and destroy every planet if the effects were enough to significantly disrupt the outskirts.
C. Multiple bursts of energy aimed at all objects of interest.

Cell's last kamehameha is none of these.

Buu's Genocide attack and reality-warping nature make it easy for me to believe he could pull off C. Especially if Cell was not bluffing about his power, and just left out the part about geometry.

So, I'm going with Cell was telling the truth, with a geometric disclaimer.

There is also another option for it and that is to manipulate the Kamehameha after it releases it, then it can just guide it through all of the planets.

[Bussani]

There is also another option for it and that is to manipulate the Kamehameha after it releases it, then it can just guide it through all of the planets.

I want to play a Dragon Ball game that has this as a mini-game.

[Blackstripe]

There is also another option for it and that is to manipulate the Kamehameha after it releases it, then it can just guide it through all of the planets.

I want to play a Dragon Ball game that has this as a mini-game.

Indeed, I think we found the next loading screen mini.

[LiamKav]

There is also another option for it and that is to manipulate the Kamehameha after it releases it, then it can just guide it through all of the planets.

I want to play a Dragon Ball game that has this as a mini-game.

Indeed, I think we found the next loading screen mini.

Unfortunately, that would require the loading screen to be at least 8 minutes long...

One other thing. You could make arguments for the characters being able to move faster than light speed. They do disappear and reappear when they are just supposed to be moving "really fast". Granted, physics, but we can ignore that. However, the various Ki attacks have to be moving slower than light speed, because we can see them. So, even if Cell could blow up the sun while standing on the Earth, he'd have to stand still and keep that Kamehameha up for at least 8 minutes without his aim wavering.

Oh god, I can totally see DBZ filler doing that...

[Rocketman]

Except the Earth is moving too, both spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun.