1 I think I just heard a couple catgirls crying in pain outside my window...

2 Wait, why are the catgirls outside your window? Let them in!

-j

3 Pixy Misa has had an attack of engineer's disease.

4 Regarding the first point, on several occassions Accelerator is shown to be standing in a room full of dead sisters, so I think your assumption that he kills one a day is way off.

The second point could be explained by saying that maybe they aren't 8092 unique locations. Maybe some areas need something like 500 on the same spot (to provide lift). It's a stretch, but it is plausible.

5

Wait, why are the catgirls outside your window? Let them in!

Perhaps he's allergic.  What a terrible fate... 

And I think "lots and lots of kills in a controlled environment" has to be part of the answer.  If it's not, how did he get away with spending even 2 or 3 years killing 1d6 people a day in a city like that one?  Someone would have seen it happening (or some precongnitive/clairvoyant/empathic power user would have noticed it), or someone would have seen the cleanup crews or some piece of evidence long before that...

The part I don't get is... how is he learning that much fighting 20,000 identical weaklings?  I can see a young Mike Tyson becoming a great boxer by deafeating hundreds of Mike Tyson equivalents.  He's not going to learn anything by defeating tens of thousands of Mikeski equivalents, even if we were a hivemind.

6 That, and the hivemind doesn't seem to help much.  Ten thousand fights in, and they're still carrying guns.  Hello...  

7

That, and the hivemind doesn't seem to help much. Ten thousand fights in, and they're still carrying guns. Hello...

They've become the ultimate example of "group think".  Using guns and night-vision goggles made sense to them when they first thought of it, and there is no one in the hive to offer a different viewpoint.  They make my bureaucracy at work seem agile and quick to respond...

8

You all misunderstand. They're not supposed to win, and they know they aren't. Their job is to go out there and get killed. And they accept that as their fate because it's what they were created for.

The sisters aren't normal humans, which shouldn't be necessary to point out. Their minds are programmed by the "testament" system and there isn't any part of that program which includes anything like a normal morality system or any significant will to survive. It took encounters with Mikoto and Touma for those concepts to be introduced into the group mind, and a lot longer for them to be assimilated.

As to how this helps him, I think the answer is that it drives him insane. Think about it: it's like the worst nightmare imaginable. He kills a girl, often horribly, and the next day that same girl comes back after him. No matter how many he kills, no matter how he does it, there's always another, and they all look exactly alike, and talk alike and behave in the same way.

By the time Mikoto and Touma took him on, it's hardly any wonder he was nearly delirious.

Being insane will release any normal limits on his power and how he uses it. That's my guess.

One reason the experiment was terminated was that being defeated by Touma brought him to his senses. But he was already trending that direction. Last Order made the comment that part of why he was using such bizarre ways of killing the sisters was that he was trying to drive them away to make them stop attacking him. It was a rather feeble cry for help. Which is why the group mind doesn't hold it against him that the killings got increasingly brutal as time went on.

9 But if slaughter and insanity were all that were necessary to break the five-level limit, why the two-orders-of-magnitude change in target quantity with the change in target level?  I think that implies he was supposed to be honing his skills as well, and repeatedly re-memorizing your multiplication tables won't teach you calculus.

Also, it was mentioned (not sure if in the anime or the manga) that Kuroko's teleportation requires her to do higher-dimension geometry problems in her head.  She's not teleporting things; she's moving them from here to there through higher-level space [/handwave].  She's unable to use her powers when she's in enough fear/pain (that does show up in the anime).

Insanity certainly didn't help Accelerator beat Touma, who he could have neutralized in seconds once he realized he had no defense against Accelerated projectiles, only against being Accelerated personally.  (Even if he was still sane enough at that point to not want to kill a non-Sister, he could have broken both his legs with a piece of rail from that trainyard.  Or just wrapped him up in one.)

That was my take on why his "loss" ended the experiment; not Touma's conjecture that "losing to a Level Zero would prove he's not good enough to be Level Six", but "losing to a Level Zero proves that being Level Six is meaningless if you're not smart/sane enough to use your powers correctly."

10 I've long been of the opinion that Touma is level 6.

11 I agree: he's certainly not actually 'level zero'.  Just canonically so. 

1 Helium kinda doesn't freeze.

2 Exactly so. It's physically impossible for helium to freeze.

3

Authors sometimes toss off things like this just because they sound good, without really thinking them through.

There was a short story by James Blish about the first flight of a starship with an experimental FTL drive. They were trying to reach Alpha Centauri, but ended up hell-and-gone a long way from either star.

At one point one of the characters tosses off the statement that Alpha Centauri was 100 light years closer than the Sun.

As long as no one parks a black hole between the two stars, then that statement is geometrically impossible.

There are not one, but two examples of that in Railgun S where the writer pulled a number out of his ear without really thinking about it, that I've been meaning to post about. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

4 Under enough pressure, helium will freeze into a solid. I'm not sure how you could actually look at it under those conditions....

5 It would have to be in a pressure chamber, but it probably couldn't form a spire.

6 Under enough pressure, helium will freeze into a solid.

Considering that you have to do Very Bad Things to it for it to freeze, and it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between solid and liquid helium, I'm okay with my original statement.

7

 I'm okay with my original statement.

You even said "kinda"
Of course when Smith wrote this, they probably thought that Helium HAD to freeze at some point...that they just hadn't discovered yet. 
Alternatively, all the examples are oxymorons. After all, if punch has a low enough PH to pierce armor, one can't really drink it. and ones party is going to suck. 

1 For a second there, I thought it was the latest installment of "Bachelor Chow"...

2

I learned that rhyme when I was a kid and I have no idea where it came from. Probably my grandmother, though. She also taught me this:

While the organ peeled potatoes
Lard was rendered by the choir.
And the sexton rang the dishrag.
Someone set the church on fire!

"Holy Smokes!" the preacher shouted
In his rush he lost his hair.
Now his head resembles Heaven,
For there is no parting there.

I might mention that my grandmother was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Also:

Mother, may I go out for a swim?
Yes, my darling daughter.
Hang your clothes on the hickory limb,
But don't go near the water.

1 "We are community... We are joined by our love of anime..."

BTW, did you hear of furries gassed in Chicago yesterday?

2 That was definitely strange. I like to laugh at furries, but I can't imagine anyone harboring that kind of animus towards them.

3 I wouldn't say the Japanese are contemptuous of it. One of the biggest groups of fans of yaoi are fujoshi (lit. rotten girl) schoolgirls.

4 There used to be a Canadian webcomic, the name of which I forgot. It had some weaboo themes, and looked like less successful Megatokyo at times, although it was colored. At one point, they had a strip about the local university where a security person (or a cop) bursts into the station and yells: "Furries are revolting!" The chief answers: "They sure are!". Cop: "No, I mean they are protesting." Chief: "Kent State those bastards!" Cop: "Umm, Chief, don't you think...?" Chief: "Oh, sorry. It's just that... Furries killed my family."

5

I wouldn't saythe Japanese are contemptuous of it.

Whoever created that acronym sure wasn't demonstrating respect!

6 Apparently it was used by Osamu Tezuka for low quality manga, and yaoi fans appropriated it like they did fujoshi. It can also mean that it's easier to understand than shonen-ai by avoiding complicated plots. I think it might also refer that the protagonists can't get married and raise a family, the traditional happy ending. 

7 Understand that the social difference between a "traditional" otaku and a fujoshi is slicin' damn thin from the perspective of a normal person, even in Japan. Yaoi is pretty far down the geek pecking order here mostly due to the usual religious "gay sex is teh bad" influence. In Japan it's... not accepted, no, but not specifically weirder than regular anime fandom.

Yaoi isn't a respectful acronym, but "otaku" itself was (and is) a degrading term, as well as "fujoshi", which I'm sure I don't need to explain. I'm sure that you can think of a certain racial epithet which is used primarily by the group whom it used to target here in the US; anime fan adoption of those terms in Japan is a parallel dynamic.

As for the rest of it, I may have lost about 20 pounds, but I'm still 60 or so too heavy to go callin' anyone fat. Certainly the proportion of "overweight yaoi fangirl" to "not-overweight yaoi fangirl" is probably smaller than the likewise ratio for us guy fans. (When I'd go to cons in the late '90s and the hotel had staff going around with backpack tanks of Febreze, it wasn't the girls that had caused the stank!)

The paddles are a marketing gimmick by one particular vendor, who has the habit of calling out "YAOOOOOOIIIIIII, GET YER RED HOT YAOOOOOOIIIIII" in the middle of the dealer's room. The guy's practically an institution at this point.

Funny enough, Stacy McCain has been doing a series of blog posts on the proportion of homosexuals (and the mentally ill) among radical feminist theorists...

8 I stopped watching CSI after their episode on 'furries'. I was already leaning away after the episode with the guy in the diaper. 

1 Not sure I buy it, I'm afraid.

The biggest weak link here is Brioche and Yuki. Knowing about the swords, and going out and doing something about them covertly, is their job, and furthermore one they're pretty well-qualified for. Certainly everything we've seen about Brioche indicates that she's a match for anything any of the other kingdoms can throw at her, without taking things even remotely seriously. For the previous royal of Biscotti to go do something cursed-sword-related and NOT bring her along, he/she would have to be in the same weight class when it comes to kicking ass, and I don't think we can square that with Biscotti as we see it at the beginning of the show. (I'd expect that if Biscotti had been run by a powerhouse, Milhi would spend more time being angsty about not being as good of a ruler... and, frankly, I'd expect a few comments from the old farts in the advisor's chairs.)

But Brioche is often away for quite a while on demon duty. So something could have come up while she was gone! Except... she's kind of in slacker mode once she gets back. For a third season to have her say, "Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to be questing to recover the missing royals, let's get on that," would be tough to reconcile.

So they're not missing, in the sense that clearly Brioche is not worried about where they are. So... maybe they did have a quest of that type, but didn't survive it. Or maybe they did, but ended up sealed instead (some kind of "only if you three sacrifice yourselves can the big bad be sealed away!" thing?) That way, you could square their absence and Brioche and Yuki's seeming indifference - if you know they're sealed in the mysterious ancient sealing thingy, there's no need to go looking for them, and you don't really want to bust the seal to get them back.

Which would actually open up a plausible scenario, where the three Earth heroes, led by Cinque the endless optimist, bust the seal and kick the bad guy's butt.

There's even a precedent - Calvados was sealed away in a similar fashion, also by a royal... though that's kind of a weak link too. The show already subverted that trope, so running it again as a straight plot point would be a little off.

2 Leo is maybe 17. Milhi is about 14. Couverte is 12. How'd they all end up in charge of their kingdoms?

Maybe that's in dog years?

3 Leo is a lion. Couverte is a chipmunk.

4 The implication in S1 was that Millefiore's parents were passed.  S2 implicated the Couverte's parents are alive, but Couverte is ruler over a smaller domain within their territory.

Not sure on Leo & Gaul's parents.  Maybe they took up a position within the Kingdom's main domain?  It's not historically uncommon for sub-rulers to get moved around, especially to the historic Japanese thinking on the subject.  Being a daimyo was actually pretty terrible during a lot of periods.

5 Perhaps I just wasn't watching too attentively, but I'd been thinking, "These aren't the real kingdoms, these are <i>training</i> kingdoms." Slap-stick violence rules are in place, the most devastating attack is the MCSA. (And it's even PG, stops at the underwear!) Hardly any adults around.
They're training kingdoms, and nobody asks where the parents are, because, who asks where your parents are when you're at summer camp?

6 In other words, they're principalities, not the whole kingdoms, which is why the rulers are princesses.

1 I'm not certain what the light novels say, but if they agree there is a cheap retcon in universe.  I suspect the novels say otherwise.

The more expensive one is that the computer did the scheduling, and for most of the experiment, they killed about 30 a day. After the various bits of sabotage, they slowed the experiment down to one a day. Or the computer wanted to have a period with that spacing for some reason.

2
That had bugged me too, so I concluded that he couldn't have been limited to one per day, at the beginning at the very least. The first experiments were conducted in a closed indoor environment that would have taken Accelerator less than 5 minutes to kill a Misaka, so it's conceivable that they could run multiple experiments in one day.  Plus, the first Misakas hadn't learned much yet from their network on fighting Accelerator, so they would be easy fodder (even though later Misakas are still relatively easy fodder.)

But still, killing 50 Misakas per day every 5 minutes would take 4 or 5 hours per day, even without allowing for experiment prep time. You'd have to do about 50 or so per day to get anywhere near 10,000 Misakas in one or two years. I don't remember if they actually said it was one Misaka per day, or if I'd just assumed that.

3 If you know your history, you know that 250 a day is feasible for one man with a support organization.

4 The most prolific executioner in history, Vasili Blokhin, personally executed 7,000 prisoners over 28 days during the Katyn Forest Massacre. He started out with a quota of 300 per day.

5 You know, now that you pointed that out, I feel kind of silly not to have realized it. And this is from an author who goes to decent lengths to match the time lines between the two series.

6 Somewhere in the background of the LN, it's explained that the first 9000 or so of the Misaka Sisters were killed in very, very large combat rooms.  We see one of these when 9982 is introduced.    It's how they got up to that number so quickly.

They still managed to go from 9982 to 10032 in 20ish days?  There's some scheduling issues to work out, obviously.

1 Obviously they were born twins. The last expedition to the GGS was terribly difficult and damaged several of the ships.
As a precaution they were placed on separate ships to lessen the possibility of loosing both of them. With the GGS warping in and out they managed to leave at the worst possible moment and the two remaining ships blew up their hyperdrives in the process, being deposited 3 light years apart. Due to the gravity of the situation and the secrecy surrounding the GGC they proceded home via STL drives arriving  a bit less than two and 5 years later respectively with a negligible passage of time aboars ship due to time dilation effects. This fans the "younger"princess's resentment as she is told that she was in fact born first but for all intents and purposes her thronal seniority has been knocked down by circumstances.

2 Uh-huh.

3 The garden folks aren't quite human, and may not grow at the same rate?  It took them 2 and 5 years, respectively, for their hormones to kickstart them out of infancy, and they were only officially acknowledged when they first started to grow, because otherwise they'd have to explain six-year-old toddlers to the world?

I've only watched it all the way through once (right when the discs came out), so I don't recall the exact details of the garden.  Could they have collected "buds"/embryos from there that were self-sustaining mini-rose-gardens?  But [handwave] not reverse-engineerable biotechnology, due to the high probability of killing a member of the royal family within. [/handwave]

1 Koi to eat the bugs, herons to eat the koi.

Or just fill the moat with gin.

2 5,000 koi sound like a perfectly good solution here.  Or at least, perfectly good given the amount of resources otherwise being thrown at the palace.  I suspect it would take fiddling to keep the lake's "ecosystem" from going into some undesirable talespin, though.  And probably the first thing to go?  The transparent water.

3 The usual trick is to put fountains in; this supposedly disturbs the water just enough that mosquito larvae can't survive.  At least, every artificial body I've seen in places like Florida and Texas does that.

1 Early on, I thought they'd made it pretty clear that during the accident, Akane fell in, more or less bathing her in cosmic energy. They never really said anything about it, though.

-j

2 Makes pretty solid sense and fills in the general problem (of a lot of series) for the question "why is this character so special?".   At least the answer isn't "because she's a Jedi".  (I'm looking at you, Gundam universes)

3

J, I thought about mentioning that. The fact that she falls such a long distance without being harmed is also notable. It also raises the question about her mother, who also fell into the energy; was she affected? Possibly not; Mom was already an adult, while Akane was about 6 and obviously not grown up.

Another question I can't answer: Does Kenjirou have some inkling about this, and maybe that's why he designed the key with Akane in mind as the user? If so, he obviously never fully understood the scope of Akane's power, as the ending clearly shows.

4 What J said.  It's what I assumed while I was watching and reviewing the series.

As far as Gendo Plushyferret goes, he barely understands how to walk and chew gum at the same time, unless it has something to do with creation of technology.  Usage?  Out of his league.

5 "Gendo Plushyferret" was awesome.  And that's an awesome name for him, haha.

1 Inertial dampers and artificial gravity often seem to get used as the magic wand of "mushy" sci-fi (everything from B5 to SG-1); but, it does make sense.  If you can somehow control those two forces, even in a small way, the game changes.  If you follow them to their logical conclusion, though, every engine becomes a WMD (Schlock in particular has covered this).

Have you seen the recent stories on the theoretical warp drive?  The Puppyblender just posted one today--the mathematical estimate for the required mass just dropped from Jupiter to a subcompact car.  I particularly liked the scientist's approach--the math says it's theoretically possible, but he makes no promises that it will actually work in the real world, and is building small-scale tests to find out.

2

Have you seen the recent stories on the theoretical warp drive?

Yes, but I don't want to talk about it here. Please avoid topic drift.

3 The other problem with reaction drives is bulky, dangerous reactants, that frankly, don't have a lot of density. But if what you're spitting out of your thrusters isn't part of the reaction, it could be anything, and why not Lead, or waste material from your reactors (Although the environmentalists would pitch a fit)? It's gotta be better than being in the same ship with bottles of Hydrazine and Hydrogen Peroxide.

(I have some personal theories about the relationship between time and gravity that are irrelevant to the discussion of thrusters, but might come into play with Warp technology).

4

I figure they're using water. There's no reason to use anything else. The density is reasonable, and it's easy to pump around, and it isn't very corrosive, and it isn't poisonous. And, of course, it's plentiful down on the planet.

Certainly they could be using something like lead, but why bother? Anything they could get by using something truly dense, they can also get by increasing the exhaust velocity. Assuming easy energy and gravity control, they don't have a problem doing that.

5 It needs to be noted that contemporary rockets can be made 100 or 1000 times cheaper just by engineering them differently, most importantly by making them truly reusable. Engineering for the economic efficiency in general would help too. By a point of comparison, the cost of fuel for an airliner is about half of the price of ticket nowadays (it varies; in some cases taxes and government fees come close to 1/2 (was way more 1/3 last time I flew to Australia), so fuel share falls to 1/3). The cost of fuel for a rocket, however, is only 0.2% of the price of the flight -- for the cheapest American rocket. It's even smaller for, e.g. Atlas V: probably less than 0.08%. If rockets were made just 10 times WORSE than airliners, their price would decreas 100-fold. Put it another way, if airlines purchased a Boeing 747 and threw it away after each flight, an economy ticket from San Francisco to Tokyo would cost $500,000. In actual fact it's 500 times cheaper than that, simply because airplane is not thrown away like a rocket. Note that in this second case like is compared to like, so the talk of rockets being "harder" does not apply (it's rubbish anyway -- a subject for another rant). Steven's second sentence is so wrong-headed that it always sets my teeth on edge when I see it repeated uncritically.

6 Water is kind of valuable in space. but say, a nickel-iron asteroid, that's a ton of reaction mass in a fraction of the volume, and common as dirt.  It may also work better in some kind of linear accelerator type engine.

As for not throwing away rockets, one should take a good long look at what SpaceX is doing with their booster, once they're ready to re-ignite and stabilize on re-entry, they might be touching down on its tail at the launchpad the way God and Robert Heinlein intended.  Kerosene is cheap, they say.

7

You're still thinking in terms of expensive lift. When you have the technology to lift material in thousand-ton lots, water isn't particularly any more valuable than anything else.

But water can be held in tanks, and run through pipes, which is a bit difficult for nickle-iron.

8 Depending on how they do matter/energy conversion, wouldn't one possibility be "do the m/e conversion in the rocket chamber"?  Convert, say, 1/100th the mass in the chamber to energy, which turns the rest of the mass in the chamber to extremely high energy exhaust.  No need to use any intermediary steps.

Granted, this depends on being able to do the m/e conversion in a rocket chamber.

9

Well, probably not. The system seems to be set up like a diesel-electric engine is set up, with power being produced by the matter converters Ago and Ungo, and power then being fed to the thrusters.

10 Is that a cat-girl I hear crying in the distance? 

11 We haven't reached that level of nerdity yet. Wait until I start listing continuity errors in the show.

12 As long as Marika doesn't pull out a light saber, the cat-girls are safe.