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    Superman

    Character » Superman appears in 18940 issues.

    Sent to Earth as an infant from the dying planet Krypton, Kal-El was adopted by the loving Kent family and raised in America's heartland as Clark Kent. Using his immense solar-fueled powers, he became Superman to defend mankind against all manner of threats while championing truth, justice, and the American way!

    But seriously what is Superman's combat/reaction speed?

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    Jogga

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    @lvenger:

    If Superman couldn't have FTL reactions, then he should have no business flying to other solar systems at FTL speeds. He either should have crashed or hilariously miss his mark.

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    le0nhart

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    @jogga said:

    If Superman couldn't have FTL reactions, then he should have no business flying to other solar systems at FTL speeds. He either should have crashed or hilariously miss his mark.

    Reactions are part of combat speed imo, because you still need to actually accelerate your body at high rates after your brain reacts to something

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    ArticulateT

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    I always felt that FTL travel would require FTL reactions. Otherwise, by the time you realise you're at your destination, you've missed it by a few light years. This includes things such as being able to perceive things while you're faster than light, at which point the standard human would be blind and deaf at the very least.

    Mechanically, Combat Speed and Travel speed are different, but I don't see how far fetched it would be for Superman to fight at a faster than light pace, and the fact that, depending on the speed gap between yourself and your opponent, the Speed Blitz isn't easy to quantify. In game terms, the contextual reason for Speedsters not to simply win a game instantly is because the battlefield is wholly unpredictable. Performing mundane tasks and travelling from A to B are easy enough to do in a near instant, but combat requires careful thought and adaptation. Speedsters need to slow down due to the chaos of the battle field, unless they can perceive and act at such a speed that the combat they enter becomes mundane.

    Really, while finding a scan of Superman fighting at FTL speeds is the ultimate proof, you could probably get some substantial proof in any scan that provides Superman moving a limb at speeds faster than light. One thing that might possibly come to mind would be the time Superman read, understood and commit to memory 25 years of medical research and surgical know-how in a matter of minutes, or (pre-crisis, admittedly) Superman was given a replica of Kandor by Wonder Woman for his birthday, and before the sound of the word 'That's...' had finished reverberating through the air, he had flown down the hall, picked up the real Kandor, put it in a closet, and returned to the exact spot he was in, with no one else being the wiser.

    I don't doubt that there's multiple instances in all the continuities, besides Superman's original run and the current Truth arc, of him being able to react at FTL speeds, it might just be that we're not giving non-combat examples a chance, and I personally believe that if you can travel FTL, then you have to be able to react FTL. I mean, he has the durability to survive FTL travel, would it be so far-fetched?

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    segamarvel

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    XLR87T3

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    That's actually really slow for Superman, like mach 2000+ is nothing to guys on his level

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    TheKinfing

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    Faster-than-Light on both..

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    GucciBrick

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    #57  Edited By GucciBrick

    well above light speeds

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