Random Musings: Inventors and their Powered Armor Suits

[tuftears]

I've been reading through The Legion of Nothing, a superhero fiction centered on Nick, who is an inventor without superpowers but the uncanny ability to understand and develop technology, and pondering why it is that inventors like Tony Stark seem to have had so little effect on their worlds.

Let's think about it this way. What amazing inventions exist in Iron Man's suit?

* Super-tiny power plant that is nevertheless capable of fueling flight for an extended period and powering tankbuster-class weapons
* Electrically powered exoskeleton that can give superstrength
* Lightweight armor that deflects and absorbs a wide variety of types of damage
* Miniaturized rockets for flight that can lift a grown man and his armor
* An on-board computer of amazing sophistication that can identify targets, manage flight and give perfect flight, and supervise all these components so they don't tear the armor (let alone the wearer) apart
* Various weapons like repulsors that practically fit into the wearer's palms

The main thing I find strange about it is that these things aren't being mass produced. The arc reactor alone could obsolete traditional coal-burning plants and vehicles and help move the Earth toward a cleaner environment. (in fact in the comic, Stark's new company, Resilient, is producing arc reactor cars) AI computer technology could be widespread; everyone could be using fancy holographic interfaces like Stark's. And don't forget, the 21st century has always promised us flying cars. They could become a reality!

Even if Stark is reluctant to share his inventions, it seems very likely many different agencies would be trying to duplicate and mass produce them: the military, rescue services, international companies, organized crime, et cetera.

...

And then it hit me, there actually is a fictional universe where all these things have already been done.

Heard of Bubblegum Crisis? It was an anime series released in the late 80s, featuring Genom, a powerful mega-conglomerate company that manufactured 'Boomers', humanoid robots that would perform a wide variety of tasks. These robots would sometimes go haywire, necessitating that they be eliminated by the 'Armored Defense Police', who were police equipped with armored suits.

Naturally, the heroines of the saga, the Knight Sabers, wore more powerful suits-- but they don't stand out as starkly against the more technological background of the series as Iron Man and his allies and foes do against the Earth of the early 21st century.

So-- yeah, I guess I don't have to write the story of the Sane Inventor. ;)

Comments

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that I think anime has possibly handled this better but I'm trying to think of something other than Bubblegum Crisis which did. Most of the examples I can think of (such as say Gasaraki or Sakura Wars) have the power armor/small-mecha as something that is significantly in advance of other technology and only just made public (and in Sakura Wars iirc will only function if the pilot has a good reserve of psychic power so even if you massed produced the suits you might well still only be able to put a handful into use). The only example I can think of off hand other than BGC is Patlabor in which the military and police mecha are also derived from industrial equipment.



Speaking of superhero settings, one of the things I like about the Whateley Universe stories is how it handles the, why haven't these marvelous inventions changed the world, question. In part with what in setting is the device/devise ('c' versus 's') split. Gadgeteers create devices, equipment that follows the laws of science but may be well in advance of current understanding (with one theory being the gadgeteering trade is a specialized form of precognition that allows the gadgeteer while working on an invention of tap into future knowledge that relates to what they are trying to do). On the other hand there is the much more traditional mad science devisor, who can essentially build anything so long as they can come up with an explanation for why it is working (which a controversial suggestion that devisors are in fact instinctive techno-magicians whose inventions are magical artifacts with the trappings of science -- a view which many of the gadgeteers at Whateley Academy see as nothing more than an attempt by the Mystic Arts department to take over some of their workshop space).

Gadgeteers make devices, which they or others can try and reverse engineer so as to allow production by others (or to make use of the new knowledge in other inventions). Devises on the other hand work because the inventor expected them to work -- open up a devise based on a tricorder and there may well be nothing more than a tangle of chips, tubes, and wires that don't even connect together in any way that makes sense -- many devises will only work for the person who invented them and even if they'll work for others there's nothing for others to reverse engineer so production is limited to what that specific devisor has the time and supplies for.

Some of the inventions are having an effect on the setting. There's enough flights into orbit for an "orbital traffic control" extension of the air traffic control system. The military and the militarized potions of the police like SWAT teams make limited use of power armor (the major limitation being how to provide the power for power armor, batteries run dry annoyingly fast, petro-fuels are a fire risk, and no one's created an affordable and reproducible fission or fusion power supply that will fit in a reasonably sized suit). One Whateley Academy student is paying their tuition from royalty payments on a 'better than kevlar' fiber and another is getting financial backing to develop a specialized 'search and rescue' power armor both for digging victims out of rubble after natural disasters and to provide medics with the speed and protection needed to aid victims in the middle of super-powered battles.


(Insert here the usual shared universe setting disclaimers that writing skill varies between writers and level of participation varies as well. Also note that 'yikes, once you let even a tiny bit of Lovecraftian horror into a setting it will slowly start creeping further and further' which is brought up in the first author interview on their stories page. Many GLTBQ characters as it basically started with GLBTQ superhero comics fans wishing there were stories with characters like them.)

(Also, once again I demonstrate a great love for parenthesis and long comments on other peoples blogs.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Since it's a shared world setting, do you have any particular recommendations from the Whateley setting?

[centauress.livejournal.com]

I always thought there was a limited supply of the elements needed to create the super-science machines; and they took continual maintenance to function.

[centauress.livejournal.com]

Err, which gets you 'limited impact' and the trope of civilian stuff having armies of techs to keep it working.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That's certainly possible, but it's basically excusing keeping things the same. I'm more interested in what happens when things run amok. ;)

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Atomic Robo has an amusing take on this. Tesladyne's Japanese counterpart fields "Science Team Super Five", in ultra-advanced power rangers type armour. They make ends meet by having a large R&D division working on more boring but more profitable things to patent. When Robo asks the head of the company (a friend of his) why he doesn't put the technology of the suits on the market, he's informed that they "cost 900 million yen apiece [about $9 million] and require 50 hours of maintenance for every hour of use".

They also have a building-sized giant robot plagued by gyro problems. Despite being a superhero comic, the series is actually quite good about keeping the science plausible (-ish) (in addition to being a hilarious series).

As Robo frequently complains about, though, the giant _monsters_ usually just ignore the square/cube law. The series _antagonists_ get a free pass on lots of things due to Rule of Cool and/or Rule of Funny (which explains so much about Doctor Dino).

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read that comic! As I noted to Centauress above though, it's basically handwaving why the technology isn't more available, in order to keep the setting closer to the modern world.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

You can find the "free comic books day" short stories here. I was given a few of the trade paperbacks as a gift, and they were great (collections 3 and 4, I think; if memory serves, the friend who gave them to me said that the first two collections weren't quite as good as the later ones). Ping Jenora of FM for more information (they're the friend in question).

Regarding stories about exploring the consequences of advanced technology being mass-produced... isn't that the entire point of sci-fi? There would seem to be no shortage of examples. For "our world gets introduced to disruptive/world-changing technology", you'd either want something in the older near-future genre (if you don't mind the frontier-ish tone), or something from the newer transhumanism genre (if you don't mind the rapture-ish tone).

For "doing more with less" types of fics, anything recommended by the "rationalist" community stands a good chance of satisfying you. I've been reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which starts with the premise that everyone - good guys and bad guys alike - is intelligent and has common sense, and then tries to figure out what rationalist!harry can do when introduced to magic. For the superhero genre, I've heard good things about "Worm". It reportedly does a good job of thinking through all of the corollaries of any given power, and the impact of such powers on society.

Hopefully that'll be enough procrastination material to get you started =^.^=. Enjoy!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I've been reading those yes, and the follow-on to Worm, Pact. Have you read Harry Potter and the Natural 20? (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Natural-20)

I think what I want to see is somewhere between superheroes (static) and science fiction (extrapolation of current trends) -- superheroes (transformative), as it were.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it. the first scene got my interest, but at 250k words, I'll defer reading more of it for the time being.

I can't think of any "transformative superhero" type works off the top of my head. The one with the closest premise that I can think of is "Fine Structure", where at regular intervals a superhero a factor of X more powerful than the previous one appears. Everyone who knows what the word "exponential" means gets alarmed by this, and plot ensues.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I'll take a look at that one sometimes. I think the author is doing another series, 'Ra'.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Just read Fine Structure. Didn't like it. Too much transhumanist handwaving.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Glargh. Methods of Rationality started off as a fascinating enough concept, and it certainly had its moments (I haven't gotten an update notice in AGES, though), but it felt like ... TOO MUCH. The protagonist isn't merely "rational." He's an uber-kind at -- what, 10 years old or so? -- if all of this is going on in the VERY FIRST YEAR OF HIS TIME AT HOGWARTS. And some of the tone of the topics that come up feel more teen-aged than pre-adolescent. (But then, maybe I just had a very strange childhood, and I am Behind The Times.)

I think I would have respected it more if the author would have let time flow a bit more, especially where mastery of magic was concerned (even if the character was bound to use said magic in clever ways). Why should rationalist!harry also be accelerated in his mastery of all things magical -- many degrees faster than the Harry Potter of the original books?

As such, it just struck me as a bit too power-trippy and in need of a bit of polish.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yes, I liked some parts of HPMOR but other parts are disturbing. It's a bit preachy about things 'Rational'.

What I liked was that Harry wasn't then made into an over-powered character that no one would be able to face, but that he was given serious competition. Even the other children are able to compete with Harry.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I've heard similar things come up about Mr. Impossible from the Fantastic Four, etc.

Meta-wise, I think it's part of the phenomenon of the "World Outside Your Window" (phrase explicitly used to advertise Marvel's failed "New Universe" experiment in the '80s -- thank you Mega-Search-Engine Company for helping me figure out where I'd picked that up) -- that is, that in order for us to be able to "relate" to the stories happening in the comics, somehow, these stories feature superheroes and their adventures in something resembling OUR Earth, circa whatever the publication date is, even though the slow crawl of comics storylines may mean that years upon years will pass, world-shaking events will come and go, technology will progress, and still our hero is largely unchanged (and perhaps even a little bit behind the times thanks to stubborn tropes that cling to his collective "mythology"). Sure, the setting may have some super-powered secret police organizations (who, after certain major global events really shouldn't be so secret anymore), terrorist agencies, elite scientific institutions, etc., with access to superhero-level tech, but we have to pretend that it's still a place where Johnny Everyreader could go to school and live his ordinary life.

That, and it probably just takes more than a little THOUGHT to work out how much impact all that tech and magic should really have once let loose in the world at large. I'm reminded of the first superhero campaign I played in (Champions system) where I chose to play a superhero maxed out on healing powers (0 END because I hated bothering with tracking that sort of thing, handful of dice, to maximum, obvious effect -- surprisingly cheap, I thought). And then the implications came up of just what my superhero would be doing in his free time.

... Or that, is, "WHAT free time?" If he was as good and honorable as his Disadvantages demanded he should be, then he really ought to be spending as much time as possible hanging out in hospitals and tending to patients, occasionally diverting to disaster hot-spots to help out. If anyone would have bothered to bring it up, it could be argued that the time he spent hanging around with his fellow superheroes just to patch them up after their fights was detracting from the good he COULD be doing, unless they were involved in important stuff like, say, saving the world. ;)

That kind of drives me crazy when there's some superhero comic where some mega-hero with a Swiss army knife collection of superpowers just casually brings up some power or super-skill like "can instantly fix stuff" or "can perform surgery with his SUPER-VISION" or "can make time go backwards by flying around the Earth a few times, and CAN CHANGE OUTCOME OF EVENTS FOR THE BETTER" or whatever, and it's just this SIDE THING that he does when the plot demands, and hardly anyone brings it up again.

Anyway, I can think of how Bubblegum Crisis was better at showing how the tech applied, but I think that's because it wasn't really a "superhero comic/cartoon," per se. It was a cross between a Sentei hero-team show with a cyberpunk setting (with the "AD Police" spin-off more focusing on the cyberpunk aspect). I suppose the main advantage of anime here is that it seems like anime is at least a LITTLE less prone to get pigeonholed into strictly-defined trends than Western animation series -- but that's just my superficial impression and I'm NOT prepared to back that up with any numbers.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is very true. Bubblegum Crisis is basically a science fiction story, and as such, concerns itself with inventing a setting that both resembles ours and is different. Part of why I like it, I want to see more science fiction, both in media and in our real lives. Stories that envision how the world can be different prepare the way for people making innovations in real life, I feel. I worry about our space program and about Earth becoming more inward-looking because that might herald a retreat from futurism.

Your hero would indeed be spending a lot of his time healing! I'd imagine that he should get a lot of perks from grateful patients and name recognition for his efforts too. But all work and no play would probably make Jack a burn-out wreck, so to speak.

I read a superheroes bit the other while about a hero named 'Portal' who had the ability to create two portals that worked like the ones in the computer game. I was prepared to like it... But the author made it so the guy would flip out and become an uber-powerful version of himself with amazing strength, invulnerability, and so forth, rather than exploring clever uses of the basic power. I really didn't go for that at all; similar to your complaint about the 'mega-hero', it just strikes me as 'hero pulls out OP tool, uses it, then forgets how to do it'.

I wanted to read something where the hero did more with fewer/weaker powers, not something where the hero occasionally 'monsters out'. Sigh!

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I wanted to read something where the hero did more with fewer/weaker powers...

I'm for that, too. While I've gotten plenty of enjoyment out of entertainment featuring Superman, et al., that's largely DESPITE the silly grab bag of powers he has. I prefer to have my superheroes at a much more modest level; the super power gives the hero a "foot in the door" toward the idea of being a lone protagonist able to take on things bigger than Joe Everyman might be able to -- but its limitations still require a bit of thought, not just "punch-evil-in-the-face" effortless fantasy.

Incidentally, I can imagine a power like "healing" getting really out of control. I've recalled certain story and game situations where being "the healer" was treated as if you're just the lightweight "support" member of the group -- pretty much harmless and with the least impressive tool of the bunch.

When it's just MAGIC granted by an outside force (i.e., "thou shalt restore hit points to maximum, and no further!"), and the hero has no real control over it save for point-and-heal, I suppose that's a simple enough starting point to consider the implications. But once you start getting into any pseudo-scientific explanation (nanotech?), then it might bring up all sorts of scary implications. For instance, if you're curing diseases, you're destroying infecting elements. If you're healing wounds, you're knitting tissue together. What if your power allowed you to deliberately do this WRONGLY? It could be like the old RPG notion of taking the "Cure Light Wounds" spell and inverting it to "CAUSE Light Wounds."

Or, if this power is treated like a sort of "super-surgeon" skill where the hero is actually having to make decisions in order to heal wounds and such the right way, that might imply that some sort of senses are part of the healing package in order to diagnose correctly. How could THOSE be abused?

And so forth. I could imagine it getting really out of hand -- either to the point of having a broken story (yet another protagonist power trip), or delving into horror ("harmless" superhero becomes downright SCARY supervillain).

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

The 'Worm' superhero comic takes this one step further. One superhero, Panacea, is supposed to have the power to heal, and is the best at this. The protagonist, Skitter, realizes that her power has a flip side-- to change bodies. Panacea actually can modify genes and change bodies, creating new organs or limbs or reshaping what's there, and despite her self-imposed limit, is capable of healing brains including altering how people think. This leads to problems, of course, since the Worm universe is very... dark.

Incidentally a character I'm playing in rowyn's campaign is a healer, a sphynx named Vivienne. Besides the obvious healing ability, she can 'sense life', drain energy from people to put them to sleep, and infuse energy into people to make them stronger. I didn't give her 'cause wounds' because that seemed superfluous when the player characters are all 'Demons' which are tremendously more powerful than mortals.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I feel like a lot of it is lazy writing. "We didn't want to think this all the way through" or "we don't want to deal with the implications of this power so we're just going to pretend nothing like that can happen". :/

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I remember how "Wild Cards" addressed the super-inventor thing and nicely captured just how the super-inventor's inventions never make a world-wide impact, because they CANNOT be mass-produced. In the Wild Cards (novel series) setting, all superpowers were some sort of manifestation of telekinesis, and a "super-inventor" was essentially just exercising his power with a physical FOCUS (that is, his "invention"). I think the example was a Metal Man who was a character created by a mad scientist who had a "sudden breakthrough" while on a high after taking a bunch of booze and drugs, and when he finally sobered up, he found the created robot, and a bunch of his written notes ... WHICH WERE ALL COMPLETE GIBBERISH, although they "made sense at the time." I think the implication was that the robot really was just a "psychic projection" of the inventor (even though he was not "conscious" of this), but it's honestly been so long I can't remember for sure.

A similar problem arose in the Deadlands setting. Even though there WERE a bunch of remarkable "steampunk" inventions entirely inappropriate for the time period, which could be ordered through such retailers as "Smith & Robards," individual inventors typically had their own MARVELOUS devices that could (depending upon the skill of the inventor, random die rolls, etc.) apparently break laws of physics. While technically-speaking, someone could pick up this inventor's device and use it, the device was more-or-less "powered" by the inventor -- he'd have to constantly make adjustments to it and maintain it to keep it working, and it simply WOULD NOT be readily replicated via mass-manufacture. The explanation was more-or-less that the devices only worked because "manitous" (evil spirits) were powering the "inventor's" devices, and generally doing it only as part of a master plan to make the world a worse place (even if the inventor was ostensibly using his devices to FIGHT evil), since almost all of those devices were powered by "ghost rock" -- an ore of supernatural origin that was basically poisoning the world with supernatural wickedness the more it was burned for fuel. (And then, when the Apocalypse struck, the manitous suddenly abandoned the inventors, and many of these devices no longer functioned, because "their work was done.")

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't need ideas for why superhero inventions in comics don't leak out and become used in the world. ;) That sort of stuff is just depressing.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think Scott McCloud's "Zot!" featured an alternate world with "superheroes" where technology did indeed "leak out" into the greater world. It ended up being sort of a retro-sci-fi setting. It was largely treated as a sort of amusing, not-quite serious thing, except for occasionally surprisingly dark turns.

Anyway, I suppose that deviating from the norm on this would give you one of a couple of things:

1) You could have a story following our brilliant inventor as he shakes up the world. I'm of the opinion, however, that if treated realistically, he might maintain a considerable amount of celebrity, and still churn out a number of impressive things as he gets more resources thanks to funding and/or profits drawn in as a result of his inventions ... but sufficiently world-shaking inventions should be spurring other inventors to be spring-boarding off of his designs, rather than EVERY new advance just coming from one place.

2) Or, you could just have a futuristic or alternate-timeline sci-fi setting, where it just so happens that you have a celebrity inventor who's credited with many of the amazing world-changing inventions that differentiate this world from our own.

The bottom line is, I think, that the typical "invention as incidental super-power and plot convenience" mechanic of comic books just doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well if you put much thought into it, especially when the sorts of technologies required to MacGyver together a device to defeat the Planetary Threat of the Week are almost certain to have remarkable alternative uses.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Zot!, though I've read his 'Understanding Comics' and 'Reinventing Comics' books.

I wonder if #1 would read like a superpowered version of Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs? That could be pretty funny, actually.