This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Mechalith: not 100% relevant, but something I find interesting: the RIFTS and Palladium Fantasy variants of Invisibility and Improved Invisibility work much differently. Invisibility doesn't go away if you attack someone, but only hides you from the visible light spectrum. The improved version stops if you attack but cloaks the user from infared cameras, motion sensors and the like, etc and doesn't last as long. [/nerdcore aside]
Fast Eddie: Sometimes I despair. Not sure how to make it more plain that things launched from YKTTW should use the launch button.
Malicious Illusion: Sorry about that. Here's where I'd do the whole "I'm new, getting used to the system" dance again, but I think gone through all my alloted uses of that excuse for the day.
Fast Eddie: Not directed at you. The "how to" should be plainly evident even for the newest of the new. Just haven't had much luck making it so.
Seven Seals: It's obvious; the code for creating a new page should check if the title is mentioned anywhere in YKTTW, and if so, pull that YKTTW as the starting discussion.
I'm kidding; this sounds like an awful lot of work for something that doesn't work (the trope might be referenced from an unrelated YKTTW, for example.)
Jack Hare: Do you figure this is related to the thing where an intangible fighter has to materialize, and thus become vulnerable, in order to attack? That might be a separate deal, since it's not much correlated with badassence.
Duneflower: Hm, I've seen a couple examples classifying high-speed-movement abilities as a variant of Badass Blink. If they do actually count, high-ranking Shinigami and Hollows in Bleach with their Flashstep/Sonido abilities should also be mentioned, I'd say.
- Tunod: I honestly don't think they should count — the trope description pretty explicitly states this is about a cloaking field flickering when someone's being badass. The Bleach and Kenshin examples are both rather clearly Flash Step examples. Unless anyone has any objections, I'll probably remove them soonish.
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Haven: I don't think the original example is actually an example of this trope, since decloaking before firing isn't mentioned. After that, the rest is just pure natter.
- Star Wars cloaking devices, at least the ones developed by Thrawn in the Expanded Universe, work somewhat differently—you can fly, fire, and use shields when cloaked, but while your opponent can't see you, you can't see anything outside the field. Of course, Thrawn being Thrawn, he figured out ways to use this to use advantage (use the cloaking field on the hold of an unmarked freighter carrying weapons into enemy space, not the freighter itself) or to get around the weakness (hiring on a Dark Jedi Master). From there he was able to use his workarounds to do things that appears to be impossible, such as syncing up lasers so that his ships appear to be firing through a planetary shield. In fact, it's a ship above the force field and a ship below it, cloaked, and with the Dark Jedi's help they fire with perfect timing to make it look like the lasers are punching through.
- Surprisingly for something in the Star Wars universe, this is actually pretty realistic. The way invisibility works (supposedly, scientists are experimenting with the technology now) is by bending light around the object that's invisible. Eyes work by detecting beams of light, so if the beams of light are bent around an object, to your eyes it's like the object isn't even there. But since the light is being bent around the object, any person that was invisible wouldn't be able to see either because none of the beams of light would make it to his/her eyes.
- Which leads to the question, if lasers are light, what would happen if a laser was shot by an invisible object? What would happen when it reaches the area around the object where light is being bent?
- It's a conceptual distinction between 'looking' and 'doing' that gets used for most cloaking and invisibility in fiction. Scanners count as looking, but lasers count as doing. Granted, you're throwing energy around any which way, but no author wants try to explain exactly where the line is and how it works, especially in Star Wars.
- Star Wars "lasers" clearly aren't lasers, and therefore wouldn't be bent away. A light bending metamaterial cloak in Real Life would be burned through by intense laser light for the same reason you can't protect yourself from weapons-grade lasers by having mirror-finished armour. The power levels involved are simply too great for anything that relies on molecular bonds to hold itself together.
- Though the Star Wars example makes you wonder, with the tiny cameras we have today, couldn't you cloak all of the ship except for an almost microscopic camera to allow light in? But then, for a universe that hasn't invented much new in 4,000 years, invention isn't their strong suit.
- Invisibility might also work by projecting exactly the same light in every direction that would travel that way if the invisible object weren't there.
- And through the ship's sensors in the process— and not only light, but also gravity. In the Star Trek episode The Enterprise Incident, Scotty speculated that the Romulan Cloaking Device would hook up to the Enterprise's deflector-shield control. Deflector-shields work like mirrors, i.e. they simply deflect light and gravity-particles away from the ship; so the cloaking-device simply deflects is around the ship to make it seem to disappear, just like magicians do with mirrors. The only difference is, that the field is active rather than passive, and so the ship's sensors also work.
- Surprisingly for something in the Star Wars universe, this is actually pretty realistic. The way invisibility works (supposedly, scientists are experimenting with the technology now) is by bending light around the object that's invisible. Eyes work by detecting beams of light, so if the beams of light are bent around an object, to your eyes it's like the object isn't even there. But since the light is being bent around the object, any person that was invisible wouldn't be able to see either because none of the beams of light would make it to his/her eyes.
