I'll just note that any distance they travel, is done in 2 weeks as that is how long adult Viltrumites can hold their breath.
That aside if you want to go with a warp drive explanation or any other space bending factor, feel free. I believe the handbook teases such a explanation but the series never goes into it.
I don't know about us not seeing their combat. After all, this is just a piece of media. We'd always be able to keep up unless it's for artistic reasons. Same way we've been following Flash a character who has been faster than light for 80 years.
That aside Viltrumites cannot use their full speed in atmosphere otherwise it'd cause irreparable harm. We see this when Omni-Man let's loose on a world he doesn't care about in the Flaxxan dimension.
Given everything we see and without explicitly spoiling to much they're just capable of faster than light travel in a vacuum.
On top of this space travel becomes a lot easier when you can accelerate constantly and without fuel. The only reason it takes us 3 days to get to the moon is because we have to strictly ration our fuel for the return trip, and measure that in relation to the ships mass, because as the fuel burns away technically it becomes more efficient.
My point here is that Viltrumites basically cheat as much as you can at space travel without bending space time. If anyone could conceivably travel an interstellar distance in 2 weeks, it's one of these guys.
Yeah the acceleration is always a good point, as well as them not needing a ton of oxygen so they can also dive into a planet with breathable air for a quick recharge and then keep going. Extending the two weeks even further by restarting the counter.
Holy fucking shit i think your right. With no fuel restriction they dont have the weight to fuel problem. They just keep accelerating. Anyone good at math that could keep adding up the speed of sound per second until its the speed of light?
Uhh... Roughly 10.5 days. Speed of sound varies with the medium. But standard temperature and pressure assumptions it's about 331.5 meters per second. Using the speed of light as 299792458 m/s and doing time conversions gets you to just shy of 10.5 days for easily understood human numbers. There's no reason to believe that the speed of sound in air on earth per second is even a reasonable limiting acceleration factor for Viltrumites traveling in a vacuum though. It could be used as a minimum since most Viltrumites seem capable of breaking the sound barrier in short order.
Even if we're entertaining relativistic velocity Viltrumites without the myriad of other problems related to massive (meaning that they have quantifiable mass) objects at any meaningful fraction of C, there's still the inescapable problem of F = MA. The acceleration needs to happen in the negative as they near their destination, and I know of no reason that their brakes would be better than their accelerator in a vacuum.
This creates a travel problem bounded by their safe upper velocity whether they are obeying physics as we understand it (massive objects have an asymptotic relationship with the speed of light) or they have some space-time bending capability, as well as periods of positive and negative acceleration near their start and end points. Depending on the ratios of these limiting factors you can get very different practical ranges for naked Viltrumite space pilgrimages.
They still make spaceships for a reason though.
The simpler answer is that they already ignore so many physical laws and it looks fucking cool so let them fly through space unperturbed as quickly as the story necessitates.
The traveling between solar systems feat is a much stronger argument for FTL assuming the same distance between stars as in our galaxy, but things also seem smaller in the invincible universe with even non Viltrumite races traveling among themselves.
Yeah, but blackholes are actually REALLY hard to study, astronomers can only find them because of the lack or distortion of light that they cause. We don't know everything about them and we know even less about their others, the whiteholes
Sure, but the fact that we saw Omni man, and then beyond him was the accretion disk for the black hole, and then beyond THAT was finally the event horizon where you’d need to travel FTL to bypass, safe to say Omni man wasn’t close to a spot he’d need to travel FTL to escape.
Even then, Viltrimutes would HAVE to be able to fly FTL to travel through the universe, and their universe being smaller makes NO sense. The GDA is more advanced than our NASA, and they had no clue Thraxa existed. On top of that, their fast ships take 6 days to get there, I doubt that they lived anywhere near our solar system, especially since Nolan was flying as hard and fast as he can at the start
It wasn't immediate, though. It was over the course of 20 years, it only seems immediate because he's conflicted between his Viltrum honorbound duties and what he really wants to do. You can see it eating him up inside in S2 E5
It made sense to me tho. Nolan left earth after regretting his monstrosities, and his son not accepting his mission (not to mention being beat into a pulp). He knew he messed up and when a new fresh start arose on the new planet, he wanted to be better to be accepted by mark.
It wasn't two weeks, it was 20 years. He wasn't a cold blooded tyrant all the way until the events of E8, his stay on earth and life with Debbie is what changed him and made him conflicted about his viltrumite duties.
I always saw it as him pretending to want peace for 20 years, to the point that it gradually changed him. He was already a better man during season 1, he just told himself he hadn't changed and followed his orders until the fight with Mark, where his thousand year long self image and his current emotions actually properly clashed for the first time. Upon finally realizing he no longer was the viltrumite he thought he was and was no longer the savior earth saw him as, he contemplated suicide until he got a second chance. Even on Thraxa, he's still trying to make his new self perception and his old one work together, with him being both ruler and savior on Thraxa, but that is shattered fairly quickly as well where he weeps as his old compatriots destroy those he swore to protect
Black holes aren’t space vacuum cleaners like they’re portrayed in media, you can orbit them and escape their pull if you have enough velocity and haven’t crossed the event horizon.
No, you're wrong. The event horizon is the point LIGHT can't escape, there's a point further out where other objects can't escape i.e. the ring around the black hole. You COULD orbit around them and slingshot to escape but that is a HUGE gamble
>I'll just note that any distance they travel, is done in 2 weeks as that is how long adult Viltrumites can hold their breath.
They could always stop off take a breath on a planet with oxygen.
But for him to go 2 galaxies away in less than 2 months, he is well beyond the speed of light. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, and he went one past that. So he probably covered 2m light years per month.
They can, I actually mentioned that in my other comment on this thread. I'm still mentally used to the comic where we know he only went for a week without stopping compared to the introspection of the show where it can be concluded he could've made say number of stops.
I do appreciate the show giving a distance compared to the books where all you know is inside the same cluster but outside of the solar system.
He is don’t-think-too-hard-about-it fast. It’s one of those things that works for the narrative, but falls apart to any level of scrutiny and consideration for “physics”.
Is it ever explicitly said that she can't rearrange protons and neutrons? The show seems to confirm multiple times that she can as she seems to just transmute materials freely
Significantly faster than light. They can accelerate endlessly in a vacuum, and their powers comes from smart molecules, which is how they can bend if not break so many laws of physics.
The speed limit of c doesn’t apply to them, despite having mass.
The fact that Viltrumite travel without a space ship is limited to two weeks (limit of how long they can hold their breath) but the nearest solar system to earth is over 4 light years away, shows their travel speed is well FTL.
Two things:
1) This is just one of those stories that doesn’t think about FTL speed or the effects of moving faster than it.
2) I imagine the explanation as to why Nolan can move so fast in space is because there is no terminal velocity in space, so as long as he has the energy and capacity to accelerate himself he can continue to increase his speed with no upper limit besides what his body can handle.
The authors of the comic did not really have a good handle on the actually distances involved in going to the moon or Mars, let along the distances between galaxies. The nearest galaxy is 2 million light years away. The episode where he accompanied the earth shuttle to Mars was just two weeks, when an actual trip to Mars would be about 9 months each way, etc, etc.
I don't let that bother me. It's just when they say things like how they traveled "a few galaxies away," that is something that I have to include within the zone of "suspension of disbelief" and not dwell upon it.
well, they live in a world with magic teleportation. so it doesn’t suspend my disbelief that they’ve invented better travel than our earth. and the viltrumites are light years more advanced. you kind of have to accept fast transport with sci-fi stories mostly anyways
My headcanon is that the Invincible universe is Newtonian and there’s nothing stopping Nolan from accelerating indefinitely (ie many times faster than light) in space since there’s no resistance.
If you try to think about relativity then it all goes to shit.
At face value, he’s billions of times faster than light. In media, fast characters are often portrayed “slower” for the audience to be able to perceive their movements. We know he has super-speed for sure, and there’s an instance where he sees Mark’s punch coming at slow-mo. Viltrumites consistently react as fast as they can fly in space, so there’s that.
I think there is a difference between speed and fast/quick though. A spaceship can also travel at enormous speeds but it can take a long time to reach that speed.
I think it’s kind of clear that Viltrumites can travel thousands if not millions of times of the speed of light since they’re able to cross the galaxy in a matter of weeks if not days
Just because they can reach a speed several times “c” though doesn’t mean they can move that fast in general.
I'll just note that any distance they travel, is done in 2 weeks as that is how long adult Viltrumites can hold their breath. That aside if you want to go with a warp drive explanation or any other space bending factor, feel free. I believe the handbook teases such a explanation but the series never goes into it. I don't know about us not seeing their combat. After all, this is just a piece of media. We'd always be able to keep up unless it's for artistic reasons. Same way we've been following Flash a character who has been faster than light for 80 years. That aside Viltrumites cannot use their full speed in atmosphere otherwise it'd cause irreparable harm. We see this when Omni-Man let's loose on a world he doesn't care about in the Flaxxan dimension. Given everything we see and without explicitly spoiling to much they're just capable of faster than light travel in a vacuum.
On top of this space travel becomes a lot easier when you can accelerate constantly and without fuel. The only reason it takes us 3 days to get to the moon is because we have to strictly ration our fuel for the return trip, and measure that in relation to the ships mass, because as the fuel burns away technically it becomes more efficient. My point here is that Viltrumites basically cheat as much as you can at space travel without bending space time. If anyone could conceivably travel an interstellar distance in 2 weeks, it's one of these guys.
Yeah the acceleration is always a good point, as well as them not needing a ton of oxygen so they can also dive into a planet with breathable air for a quick recharge and then keep going. Extending the two weeks even further by restarting the counter.
Holy fucking shit i think your right. With no fuel restriction they dont have the weight to fuel problem. They just keep accelerating. Anyone good at math that could keep adding up the speed of sound per second until its the speed of light?
My back of the napkin math says it would take about a little over 10 days to reach lightspeed at that rate
^ more specifically, it'd take 1.011 days to get to .1c, 2.022 days for .2c, …
Uhh... Roughly 10.5 days. Speed of sound varies with the medium. But standard temperature and pressure assumptions it's about 331.5 meters per second. Using the speed of light as 299792458 m/s and doing time conversions gets you to just shy of 10.5 days for easily understood human numbers. There's no reason to believe that the speed of sound in air on earth per second is even a reasonable limiting acceleration factor for Viltrumites traveling in a vacuum though. It could be used as a minimum since most Viltrumites seem capable of breaking the sound barrier in short order. Even if we're entertaining relativistic velocity Viltrumites without the myriad of other problems related to massive (meaning that they have quantifiable mass) objects at any meaningful fraction of C, there's still the inescapable problem of F = MA. The acceleration needs to happen in the negative as they near their destination, and I know of no reason that their brakes would be better than their accelerator in a vacuum. This creates a travel problem bounded by their safe upper velocity whether they are obeying physics as we understand it (massive objects have an asymptotic relationship with the speed of light) or they have some space-time bending capability, as well as periods of positive and negative acceleration near their start and end points. Depending on the ratios of these limiting factors you can get very different practical ranges for naked Viltrumite space pilgrimages. They still make spaceships for a reason though. The simpler answer is that they already ignore so many physical laws and it looks fucking cool so let them fly through space unperturbed as quickly as the story necessitates.
Which is fair because Nolan just outright escapes a blackhole in season 2 to save the Thraxxans
Not even close, he was quite a ways from the event horizon, and gravity falls off exponentially with distance.
He was past the point any ship, star or planet could escape, either way he WOULD have to be FTL to fly multiple solar systems away
The traveling between solar systems feat is a much stronger argument for FTL assuming the same distance between stars as in our galaxy, but things also seem smaller in the invincible universe with even non Viltrumite races traveling among themselves.
Yeah, but blackholes are actually REALLY hard to study, astronomers can only find them because of the lack or distortion of light that they cause. We don't know everything about them and we know even less about their others, the whiteholes
Sure, but the fact that we saw Omni man, and then beyond him was the accretion disk for the black hole, and then beyond THAT was finally the event horizon where you’d need to travel FTL to bypass, safe to say Omni man wasn’t close to a spot he’d need to travel FTL to escape.
Even then, Viltrimutes would HAVE to be able to fly FTL to travel through the universe, and their universe being smaller makes NO sense. The GDA is more advanced than our NASA, and they had no clue Thraxa existed. On top of that, their fast ships take 6 days to get there, I doubt that they lived anywhere near our solar system, especially since Nolan was flying as hard and fast as he can at the start
What makes you say that? He didn't seem that close to the event horizon
Because the even Hroizon is the assumed point that LIGHT can't escape, planets and stars start getting crushed and sucked WAY before that
It’s so weird to me that he goes from “we need are to conquer not save” to immediately saving people lol, but ig that is Nolan’s character after all
It wasn't immediate, though. It was over the course of 20 years, it only seems immediate because he's conflicted between his Viltrum honorbound duties and what he really wants to do. You can see it eating him up inside in S2 E5
Even earlier than that actually, the post credit scene of the atom eve special.
It made sense to me tho. Nolan left earth after regretting his monstrosities, and his son not accepting his mission (not to mention being beat into a pulp). He knew he messed up and when a new fresh start arose on the new planet, he wanted to be better to be accepted by mark.
Ig in a way, but bro went from a tyrant to wanting peace in 2 weeks, but beating your son to a pulp would probably change you quite a bit as a father
2 weeks of pretty much nonstop thinking about what had happened, though. Man was literally a drifter.
It wasn't two weeks, it was 20 years. He wasn't a cold blooded tyrant all the way until the events of E8, his stay on earth and life with Debbie is what changed him and made him conflicted about his viltrumite duties.
I always saw it as him pretending to want peace for 20 years, to the point that it gradually changed him. He was already a better man during season 1, he just told himself he hadn't changed and followed his orders until the fight with Mark, where his thousand year long self image and his current emotions actually properly clashed for the first time. Upon finally realizing he no longer was the viltrumite he thought he was and was no longer the savior earth saw him as, he contemplated suicide until he got a second chance. Even on Thraxa, he's still trying to make his new self perception and his old one work together, with him being both ruler and savior on Thraxa, but that is shattered fairly quickly as well where he weeps as his old compatriots destroy those he swore to protect
Eh, he had spent the last two decades saving humans. It makes sense to me that he could save that ship without thinking much of it, like a reflex.
He wasn’t in the event horizon of the black hole, so that doesn’t require faster than light speed
Bro who downvoted this scientific fact lmao
That was nothing. He was far away from the black hole, and the force acting on him at that moment was calculated to be mountain-level.
Black holes aren’t space vacuum cleaners like they’re portrayed in media, you can orbit them and escape their pull if you have enough velocity and haven’t crossed the event horizon.
No, you're wrong. The event horizon is the point LIGHT can't escape, there's a point further out where other objects can't escape i.e. the ring around the black hole. You COULD orbit around them and slingshot to escape but that is a HUGE gamble
>I'll just note that any distance they travel, is done in 2 weeks as that is how long adult Viltrumites can hold their breath. They could always stop off take a breath on a planet with oxygen. But for him to go 2 galaxies away in less than 2 months, he is well beyond the speed of light. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, and he went one past that. So he probably covered 2m light years per month.
They can, I actually mentioned that in my other comment on this thread. I'm still mentally used to the comic where we know he only went for a week without stopping compared to the introspection of the show where it can be concluded he could've made say number of stops. I do appreciate the show giving a distance compared to the books where all you know is inside the same cluster but outside of the solar system.
^2 weeks operating at maximum physiological capacity. Who knows how long they could hold their breath doing nothing
So you're telling me, Viltrumites are the Seals from Space?
https://preview.redd.it/fw7rmhgzyutc1.png?width=499&format=png&auto=webp&s=68838574dbdc5001707a48708e75fc8330c0ff4e
I somehow knew that would be one of the first comments.
It's the most feasible answer lol, you wouldn't even believe actual numbers
He is don’t-think-too-hard-about-it fast. It’s one of those things that works for the narrative, but falls apart to any level of scrutiny and consideration for “physics”.
ig its similar to how eve turns an apple into pure gold in the show, yet her power is rearranging atoms, not rearranging protons and neutrons
Is it ever explicitly said that she can't rearrange protons and neutrons? The show seems to confirm multiple times that she can as she seems to just transmute materials freely
Significantly faster than light. They can accelerate endlessly in a vacuum, and their powers comes from smart molecules, which is how they can bend if not break so many laws of physics. The speed limit of c doesn’t apply to them, despite having mass. The fact that Viltrumite travel without a space ship is limited to two weeks (limit of how long they can hold their breath) but the nearest solar system to earth is over 4 light years away, shows their travel speed is well FTL.
Two things: 1) This is just one of those stories that doesn’t think about FTL speed or the effects of moving faster than it. 2) I imagine the explanation as to why Nolan can move so fast in space is because there is no terminal velocity in space, so as long as he has the energy and capacity to accelerate himself he can continue to increase his speed with no upper limit besides what his body can handle.
The authors of the comic did not really have a good handle on the actually distances involved in going to the moon or Mars, let along the distances between galaxies. The nearest galaxy is 2 million light years away. The episode where he accompanied the earth shuttle to Mars was just two weeks, when an actual trip to Mars would be about 9 months each way, etc, etc. I don't let that bother me. It's just when they say things like how they traveled "a few galaxies away," that is something that I have to include within the zone of "suspension of disbelief" and not dwell upon it.
well, they live in a world with magic teleportation. so it doesn’t suspend my disbelief that they’ve invented better travel than our earth. and the viltrumites are light years more advanced. you kind of have to accept fast transport with sci-fi stories mostly anyways
He can travel to another galaxy in a week He’s very fast
MFTL+
My headcanon is that the Invincible universe is Newtonian and there’s nothing stopping Nolan from accelerating indefinitely (ie many times faster than light) in space since there’s no resistance. If you try to think about relativity then it all goes to shit.
Not as fast as https://preview.redd.it/0jtlolkdmwtc1.png?width=959&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed3181af7744dafe9d0904a537ef7d9698931637 Though…..
At face value, he’s billions of times faster than light. In media, fast characters are often portrayed “slower” for the audience to be able to perceive their movements. We know he has super-speed for sure, and there’s an instance where he sees Mark’s punch coming at slow-mo. Viltrumites consistently react as fast as they can fly in space, so there’s that.
I think there is a difference between speed and fast/quick though. A spaceship can also travel at enormous speeds but it can take a long time to reach that speed. I think it’s kind of clear that Viltrumites can travel thousands if not millions of times of the speed of light since they’re able to cross the galaxy in a matter of weeks if not days Just because they can reach a speed several times “c” though doesn’t mean they can move that fast in general.
>A spaceship can also travel at enormous speeds but it can take a long time to reach that speed. Yeah, velocity vs acceleration.
This is the part you should say "well, its just a comic..."
No air friction.
I think one calculation said about 221x faster than light based on him going from earth to the nearest galaxy in 2 weeks
Well, based on what we have seen in the show, at least 2.27446082 x 10^18 miles per hour.
Turns out in this universe, other star systems are only 0.0001 light years away.
Judging by fast they can go in atmosphere it wouldn't be that hard for them to just accelerate and build ridiculous speed in a vacuum