MY TRUE POWER IS A BLOG WHERE I DISCUSS MANY INCONSISTENT CHARACTERS AND TRY TO FIND THEIR TRUE STRENGTH/SPEED/DURABILITY.
And I'm going to start with the easiest, and possibly the most used fanboy character on this site (Or at least before the DBZ battle ban) : Goku! To break it up and not make it so long, I'm going to break it into strength, speed, and durability (And possibly energy output, depending on the character.) H'el and Hancock, you're next.
Okay, folks. Here's the big one! It's been debated many times over the years whether DBZ characters are FTL, or just Mach 1000 or whatever! This is mainly confusing because of the anime and it's slow pace time. Well for this I will go by the manga and discuss GT as well.
So many people, when they want to discuss Goku's speed, naturally they use Snake Way because of it's actual time frame and length. So naturally we should use this right? Wrong.
- Traverse Times are irrelevant in the Dragonball World and only used to further the plot: as stated by Akira Toriyama, discussed in the Daizenshuu, and Common Sense
- It's also incalculable mainly because of all the loops and no spike is drawn the same, and to add to that, Snake Way wasn't drawn to scale in the first place.
So you might say I'm bluffing because of my claim that traverse speed is irrelevant in Dragon Ball, right? BUT:
- If Kami could teleport Goku, why didn't he use this to get to the Saiyan fight earlier?
Master Roshi, is fast enough to see machine gun bullets and catch them all with one hand:
Goku by the 2nd World Martial Arts Tournament he enters, moves so fast that Roshi (looking head on like the bullet) and everyone else looking from every perspective (360°) and varying distances (because it is not a proximity issue) cannot see him! He is moving so fast that he is invisible and only an echo of his movements can be detected.
To give you an idea of how fast Master Roshi must have been, an AK-47 bullet moves at a speed of 715 m/s, going by Death Battle's analysis, Goku would only be moving at 63 m/s... What...?
In the manga, it takes 6 months to get to King Kai's planet:
Dragon Ball is a story based on progression! The whole point of it is that he gets more powerful over time in the story:
Besides, Toriyama shows Snake Way as a quarter of the universe in his DB Universe drawing:
Toriyama wasn't concerned with how long 1,000,000 km is because he never draws anything to scale.
So the question is... Is there an actual figure we can go by to prove his actual speed as an adult in his prime?
Actually yes.
We're going back to Namek again!
In a V-Jump article, it states that Namek is the same size as Earth, or maybe more. I can't find this article, however, here's a good blog to prove it: Namek Map
Goku can travel half the distance of Namek in a max of a single second.
How did I reach this conclusion?
This was written by the manga's publi
sher, Shonen Jump. Thus, it is irrefutable canon.
The reason I reached the max of a second conclusion, is because Frieza said he was going to end it, meaning he was going to finish off Vegeta with one blow. He has his hand up, so that's actually generous considering the speed we see Frieza's strikes move.
The radius of Earth is about 12,726.2 km
So if we add the SSJ multipliers.
Base form: 12,756.2km/s^2
At SS1: 637,810km/s^2
At SS2: 1,275,620km/s^2
At SS3: 5,102,480 km/s^2
At SS4: 51,024,800km/s^2
At SSJ4, Goku is about 170x faster than the speed of light.
But there is proof that Goku could be much faster. If you discount all the above, read this article:
Science of Speed and Invisibility
“How fast would an object have to move to be invisible to the naked eye?
Could Dash from “The Incredibles” really run so fast that we could not see him?
The short answer is yes, Dash could run fast enough to be invisible. Exactly how fast he would have to run depends on many factors. For an object to be visible, light particles (photons) must bounce off the object and into your eye. There must be enough light that specialized neurons in the eye—the rod and cone cells that form the photosensitive pixels of the retina—are activated to a level that triggers awareness. If Dash zipped through your field of view so quickly that too little light from him reached your retina, you would not see him. What is the minimum amount of light required? In a classic experiment, people in complete darkness were exposed to flashes of light. Only the rod photoreceptors were sensitive enough to detect the light intensities used in this experiment. At the minimum flash brightness required to trigger visual awareness, only a handful of rods each absorbed just one photon. The implication is striking: single cells, capturing single particles of light, can trigger perception. However, at best, the rods can provide only a low-resolution image. To see and recognize Dash requires cone photoreceptors. Cones allow high-resolution color vision in brighter light. Unlike rods, individual cones must absorb many photons to generate a sizeable response.
And since each cone contributes a single pixel to the final image, many cones are required to “draw” Dash on the retina. If Dash were moving fast, photons bouncing off him would be scattered across many cones, and each of these cones might be insufficiently activated, so Dash would be invisible. If there were just a little more activation, he would appear as a blur. The less light there is, the more Dash can afford to take it easy. At noon when there is a surplus of photons, he has to be at his speediest to be invisible. Other factors are at play. One is eye movement. We never look steadily at a single point in space. We are not aware of it, but our eyes constantly dart from one location in the visual scene to another. They make small jumps that last about a fifth of a second. These jumps are called “saccades,” during which our visual system is suppressed. If Dash shot past during a saccade, you would not see him. If he ran past a crowd, chances are that at least some people would be in mid saccade and would miss him. The bottom line is, a complete answer to your question does not exist. How much light is required for a good cone signal, how activity across the array of cones is assembled into an image, how the visual system shuts down during a saccade, and other factors such as attention are active research areas. Answered by Michael Tri Do,_ an assistant professor at Children’s Hospital Boston,Harvard Medical School.”
In sum: photons move at light speed, it is photons bouncing of the object that allow us to see it, if the object were moving faster than light it would be moving faster than the photons can bounce off and therefore would be "invisible" to a human eye.
All of the above are proof Goku can fight and dodge at MFTL speeds!
Proof on How Speed in the Dragonball Universe is Depicted:
n Dragonball in the manga and the show the fight panels and scenes are slowed down so that we, the audience, can see it rather than doing it real time, every time.
Akira Toriyama made this clear with Krillen vs. Master Roshi fight in dragon ball: They have a full fight and conversation in less that a full second! And that was just in Dragon Ball
I'd post the rest of the fight, but it'd take too long to post.
I'm not saying that Dragon Ball characters always move at light speed, as there are certain parts in a fight that the audience in the crowd can see it. But when they disappear to the audience and in the manga, they are going much FTL.
Another thing about Dragon Ball character's speeds: Unlike other characters like Superman, or Silver Surfer, Dragon Ball characters have no need to accelerate in a fight. Superman, over time as he flies, gets faster! But, Dragon Ball characters can reach their max speed in combat, or when they are speeding toward their max, (Like with Goku when he realized his friends were in trouble and he raced to get to them.) In some ways, that makes their combat speed very OP. They would be akin to the Flash, as he can reach his max speed at any time, but he chooses to hold back. Dragon Ball characters hold back to conserve energy in fights (In theory)
I hope you enjoyed this analysis on Goku's speed! Next will be durability and energy output. Here's a link to my blog about Goku's strength: Strength
BUT THIS IS NOT MY FINAL FORM!!
I will also be working on other characters, including Hancock, and H'el!
If you feel I missed something, please leave a comment below, and I'll be sure to work it in the blog somehow. Blogs are made for editing anyway :)
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