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Lord Raziere
2017-11-02, 11:22 PM
Hey everyone, I want to make a superhero who can manipulate friction and only friction as her superpower. This superhero will be named Friction Lass. This isn't for a specific game or system, I just want to have good idea of the capabilities of friction and what manipulation of it could do so that I can get a good idea the capabilities of friction control. the tricks I've come with are:

-ground-surfing at high speed by making the ground's friction zero for yourself and learning how to slide

-using a wall of air friction to tear projectiles coming toward you apart.

-making criminals weapons or bags of money slip out of their hands

-water and air walking (by the logic that more friction between molecules will make them stick together and make them more dense rather than sliding around each other)

-applying friction to a specially made sword's blade to make it catch on fire and use it as a weapon

-having a specially made device to apply high amounts of friction to generate static electricity to also use as a weapon

-making enemies slip and fall down to make them vulnerable

-making a solid "blade" of friction that if something runs into, the friction drags on certain parts of something while not affecting other parts, to produce a cutting effect on what runs into it. (this one I'm not so sure about)

Anything else? I've already checked the superpowers wiki to get these ideas, and I want to know if anyone has more knowledge of friction and what manipulating friction would do to like, get a better idea of how to exploit friction manipulation to its full potential.

Mr Beer
2017-11-02, 11:30 PM
Can she make it a permanent effect? Would lead to extremely efficient machines if there is no friction at all.

Talking of machines, anything with moving parts can be gummed up, because friction is now 100%. Watches, guns, cars, keyboards etc.

She's going to be horrendous to melee because people can't stand upright on a zero friction surface, let alone throw punches while doing so. Flying attackers can't move because air friction is 100%.

She can squeeze people unconscious (or to death) by making their chests fight against impossible friction. They can contract but not expand, like being crushed by a python.

Arbane
2017-11-03, 01:03 AM
Making moving things burn up from atmospheric friction.

Amplifying the friction of clothing or the ground to immobilize targets.

Make it impossible to swim by lowering the water's friction.

Xuc Xac
2017-11-03, 03:29 AM
Friction is what holds nails and screws in place. Anything held together by nails, screws, or threaded bolts would fall apart if friction was reduced to zero. Even clothing would fall apart at the seams because the threads would slide apart.

Rivets would still hold because they're too big to fit through their holes, and welds and glued joints would be fine, so you couldn't collapse a building with a steel skeleton. You'd ruin the interior decor, though. All the doors and mouldings would fall off. All the non-load-bearing interior walls with wooden frames would fall apart.

Lord Raziere
2017-11-03, 05:19 AM
Making moving things burn up from atmospheric friction.


Idea:
make ground have zero friction while making the atmosphere have so much friction you burn up from moving = instant kill zone. you slip and burn to death from the movement.

also I didn't know that was how nails and screws worked! You learn something new every day.

Durkoala
2017-11-03, 07:39 AM
Idea:
make ground have zero friction while making the atmosphere have so much friction you burn up from moving = instant kill zone. you slip and burn to death from the movement.

I feel like that would be more likely to suspend people in the air as they tripped rather than make them catch on fire. It would be very good for creating openings in a fight, though. The same principle could be used to have a kind of slowfall effect if you get thown off a buliding or out of a plane, although you'd need heat-resistant protective clothing for this to be practical.

Applying friction to door hinges would be an easy and cost-effective way to imprison something if it couldn't just break the door down.

Increasing the friction of a wall to climb like Spider-man would have a lot of uses, but it would be a good idea to have some gloves so you aren't trying to suspend your weight from the skin of your hands.

Satinavian
2017-11-03, 08:11 AM
-ground-surfing at high speed by making the ground's friction zero for yourself and learning how to slidesure

-using a wall of air friction to tear projectiles coming toward you apart.Probably not grinding apart, but stopping harmlessly

-making criminals weapons or bags of money slip out of their handssure, but keep in mind that many grips have the fingers around a weapon in such a way that it is still not automatically dropped without friction.

-water and air walking (by the logic that more friction between molecules will make them stick together and make them more dense rather than sliding around each other)Really not sure about that one. More friction will not result in more density. And to allow you to make solids out of every gas or fluid is a bit of a stretch of "friction".

-applying friction to a specially made sword's blade to make it catch on fire and use it as a weapon ??? Well, certainly no.

-having a specially made device to apply high amounts of friction to generate static electricity to also use as a weaponFriction doesn't produce electricity. There are electricity producing events that involve friction, but they don't generate more electricity if you can improve the friction somehow. So no.

-making enemies slip and fall down to make them vulnerablesure

-making a solid "blade" of friction that if something runs into, the friction drags on certain parts of something while not affecting other parts, to produce a cutting effect on what runs into it. (this one I'm not so sure about)Sorry, but that is even more stupid than swordswings propagated through air and cutting things far away. Friction is not a material to form a blade from. It doesn't cut things. It doesn't even carry momentum by itself, it only allows other materials to exchange momentum.


And Durkoala is right about the burning people thing. Friction does not create energy. It can transform kinetic energy into heat, but can't heat anything without having some kind of fast movement first.


Seriously, i would advise against this whole idea. Using a physical property as a superpower would require some deeper understanding of that property to arbitrate correctly.

Lord Torath
2017-11-03, 09:01 AM
First, a bit about how friction works. Friction is a resistive lateral force between two bodies that are pressed together by a different force. If there is no force pressing two objects together, there is no friction force resisting sliding between them.

Friction has pretty much no effect on the flow of gasses, and only minimal affect on liquids. It's all pressure-, density-, and viscosity-driven. You couldn't walk in air (or any other gas) by doing anything to their friction. Gasses are particles that are not in constant contact with each other. They bounce around a lot, and if you make them stick together, you end up with a dense solid that will quickly drop to the ground. You could play around a bit with boundary layers (the slower-speed region close to a wall), but only very close to the wall, which let's you play around with lift and drag of objects moving through a fluid. Make those bullets miss.

Heating up on re-entry is not due to friction with the air, but due to moving faster than the speed of sound in air (which only affected by temperature and density) creating a shock wave. Speed of sound in a gas is based on the density of particles, and doesn't have anything to do with friction.

You can't make people sink (buoyant forces are due to differences in density), nor could you prevent people from swimming.

You can make people fall down. You can make fasteners fail (but not welds). You can make people drop things. You can't disintegrate things, because things are mostly held together via electromagnetic attractions at the molecular level, not friction.

You couldn't climb shear walls unless something is pulling you toward the wall. If there's nothing you can grip to exert a horizontal force to pull yourself against the wall (a protrusion you can grip or a crack you can slip a finger into), you will just fall away, regardless of how high a friction factor you give the wall's surface.

Personification
2017-11-03, 03:36 PM
Basically, what you want is Lift, from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive (but without the healing, so maybe something closer to a Dustbringer). The advantage of this is that it means that your superhero is powered by Awesomeness :smallbiggrin: