Why didn't people study Calamity?

[king of nowhere]

good point, after epics started to manifest and it became clear they were all evil, nuking calamity seems a logical step.

 

hoowever, keep in mind that out space capability is limited. in partiicular, we have little manuevering capability in orbit. if calamity can dodge in advance, we cannot go close to it with a nuke.

[Thermophile]

I see what you're saying, but I'm not solely referring to nukes. What about railguns? An advanced homing missile attached to a rocket? I can't imagine nobody trying to attack Calamity through some, or all, of these methods.

 

Again, I can completely imagine him surviving, since he's basically a shard (I'm still kinda annoyed it isn't in the cosmere). I'm just saying we'd have heard about it.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles]

I see what you're saying, but I'm not solely referring to nukes. What about railguns? An advanced homing missile attached to a rocket? I can't imagine nobody trying to attack Calamity through some, or all, of these methods.

 

Again, I can completely imagine him surviving, since he's basically a shard (I'm still kinda annoyed it isn't in the cosmere). I'm just saying we'd have heard about it.

 

 

If astronomers didn't know how far Calamity was from the planet, they wouldn't have had any luck shooting it down. They wouldn't have known where to start. 

[Thermophile]

I don't see that being a problem. Calamity was close enough to be seen by a telescope as a person (although perhaps a very large one). A basic triangulation could easily determine it's distance. This was no doubt done before Epics started appearing. Unless Calamity was using some sort of massive psychic field to repress such an action, in which case that is likely how he avoided being attacked.

[natc]

But why would you even nuke it?

[king of nowhere]

I see what you're saying, but I'm not solely referring to nukes. What about railguns? An advanced homing missile attached to a rocket? I can't imagine nobody trying to attack Calamity through some, or all, of these methods.

 

Again, I can completely imagine him surviving, since he's basically a shard (I'm still kinda annoyed it isn't in the cosmere). I'm just saying we'd have heard about it.

always the same problem, lack of manuevering capability. you fire a railgun projectile, it moves in a straight line. even at a speed of several kilometers per second, it takes it a few minutes to reach low earth orbit. if, when you fire the projectile, your target changes its speed by 10 meters per second, you're gonna miss by several kilometers.

 

of course a homing missile is an attempt to fix the situation, but the problem is, with all the wheight contraints to putting something into orbit, there just isn't that much room for fuel to change trajectory. or for a big rocket to change trajectory fast. So you fire your missile, the target dodges when the missile is still several minutes away. the missile changes trajectory, the target dodges the opposite way. the missile against makes a correction, and the target again changes direction. up to the point where the missile runs out of fuel. Or, the target just dodges faster than the missile can follow.

 

Long story short, if something can sense incoming threats when they are launched from the ground, has good manueverability, and no fuel limitation, then we are utterly unable to hit it.

 

I'm not saying it went that way. It is also fully possible that calamity can survive being nuked in the face. I-don't-remember-his-name made explosions big enough to level cities, and prof made shields capable of stopping such an explosion. steelheart was immune to armor penetration shells, and there's no reason to assume he would have survived even a nuclear explosion if the person setting the explosion was afraid of him. Mitosis could survive a nuclear explosion just on account of some of his clones being somewhere else, and regalia could have probably pulled enough water around herself to shield the explosion. there's no guarantee nuking calamity would work any better.

[Voidus]

Well without a guarantee that it would stop Epics I don't know that a government would risk nuking calamity and definitely knocking out electronics for half the country as well as the radiation causing severe problems. Also there's the possibility that it would you know end the world if other countries thought it was the start of a nuclear war.

[Thermophile]

I'm pretty sure the governments could avoid the misunderstanding that nuking a hostile alien invasion was an attempt to start a global war.

[Voidus]

I'm pretty sure the governments could avoid the misunderstanding that nuking a hostile alien invasion was an attempt to start a global war.

How?

[Shardbearer]

Well, you have to remember that Epics break the laws of science (as far as we know). Calamity also breaks the laws of science, because he can be seen from everywhere, all the time. Day, night, northern hemisphere, southern, none of that matters. So you can look at him through a telescope but you probably couldn't pinpoint a location or distance with triangulation. Can't shoot at something that you can't properly locate. Also, the governments would have had their hands full trying to deal with all the Epics on the ground. Sure, they probably still would have devoted some attention to Calamity, but just how much did they have time for?

[Unodus]

Perhaps Calamity is using some sort of perception filter (kind of like the tardis)- as in people register it's there, but our brain doesn't let us think about it, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.

[Edgedancer]

Or maybe they did try to nuke Calamity (or something like that) he magicked the attack away and no one really talks about it, assuming they even know.

[king of nowhere]

wait, i didn't remember the part about calamity being visible at the same time from every part of the world. then clearly we can't study/attack it because we have no idea where to actually shoot.

[Thermophile]

Or perhaps what we see of Calamity is some sort of projection. Attacking a projection won't do much good.

[Dahak]

We landed a robot on Mars after fully understanding the physics of the situation. Calamity suddenly appeared in the sky...but I don't recall mentions of tidal shifts. If there were no tidal shifts, what is Calamity's actual mass? There would be a very large period of observation before any sort of probe or some such were rocketed off to find out what in Calamity Calamity is. My example of not knowing Calamity's mass introduced a slew of problems for astro-scientists to work out.

 

Now, as for why 3 years later nothing was done, a plausible explanation is that, with no serious detrimental effects of Calamity's presence, there was no rush to discover what was going on. 

 

If Calamity were in one of the Earth-Solar L4 or L5 zones, I'm not sure we could put design, build, launch and deliver a useful mission package to do a close observation in a mere 3 years.

 

Flight time would be of the order of 180-270ish days from Leo.