Courier 6 Vs V Addendum

 So, recently, cyberpunk: edgerunners came out, with an array of far more impressive feats than anything in the game itself, so I thought it would make sense to reassess my results based on this new evidence, assuming edgerunners is entirely canon.

Firstly, the courier's biggest advantage in the first run-through was strength, but in edgerunners characters are able to create giant craters, and given Adam smasher curb stomps the entire cast, it's reasonable to assume that V is at least similar to their level of strength. The biggest crater I saw was in a mesa, and based on the size of the truck wheels, which I assume are like, 30 inches in diameter, it was 140cm deep and 1050m wide and also perfectly circular. Therefore that's a volume of 121,000,000cm3. From what I understand from the VS battle wiki and forum users with racial slurs in their usernames, it's safe to treat compressive strength in MPA and joules/cm3 as the same value, at least for Vs calculations. I'm assuming the crater was made in sandstone given the fight took place in the desert, but "sandstone" as a material has a very wide range of strengths, ranging from 3.9MPA to 170MPA. I'm assuming that the sandstone can't have been bottom-of-the-barrel weak because it survived just fine with big heavy trucks moving around on it, but it also can't have been as strong as the strongest fine-grained sandstones because it's the top layer in a desert. I ended up looking at some study and according to it, sandstone without an interlayer, like the sandstone in the crater, has an average strength of about 30.17MPA, so the energy to make the crater would have been around 3.65 gigaojoules or 873kg of TNT. This is still considerably less than what I gave the courier but it's in the same weight class now, which is noteworthy. It is also noteworthy that the value I gave for the courier was evaporating a cow, and that there are considerably higher options, such as a super mutant behemoth, which is about 5x taller than a human, weighs around eight tons and has a yield of 8.97 tons of TNT, without counting the boosts the courier can get with psycho, bloody mess and confirmed bachelor. Additionally, the 8.97 ton stat can be achieved with a normal laser rifle, and the tri-beam laser rifle is literally 3x as strong, so going through hoops to get the highest number possible would give you 38.9 Tons of TNT, which is around 45 times more than V and brings the stat gap back to around where it was before, but being more realistic and discounting the 3x multiplier from the laser rifle you get about 12.95 Tons of TNT. While the courier definitely still has an advantage in attack potency and by extension, durability, it's closer, and close enough that if V is, say, thousands of times faster than him, the gap becomes almost completely irrelevant.

Speaking of speed, one of the things that took the Vs community by storm within Cyberpunk Edgerunners is the portrayal of time-slowing cyberware as a timestop, showing bullets as stationary while characters are able to move at seemingly normal speeds. Assuming the characters can move, say, a dozen meters in the time it takes a bullet to travel a single centimetre, that puts the edgerunners characters at 2400x faster than sound, and, coincidentally, 800x faster than a turbo-fuelled courier, as per my last calculations. There are two issues with this, as far as I am concerned. One is that, with the nature of the time stopping cyberware, the characters are not this fast normally, and there's no evidence to suggest that Adam Smasher was able to react to them or move comparably to them when they were that fast, and therefore no reason to scale V to their level because he doesn't have access to time-slowing tech as powerful as theirs. Another is that, it's possible to be far more generous to the courier in terms of speed. In VATS, the player can rotate a full 180 degrees while time is frozen, meaning the end of their arm is travelling around a meter. This wouldn't actually mean much, considering the cyberpunk characters are able to move much farther and faster during timestops, but the fastest thing that's frozen in edgerunners is a bullet, the fastest thing that's frozen in fallout is an emp grenade. Using the same 1cm movement assumption as I did with cyberpunk, that would mean the courier's arm moves 14560x the speed of sound during the VATS targeting phase, and given that, when using melee in VATS the player moves so fast towards their target it looks like they can teleport short distances, there's actual precedent to accept the idea that the courier can move in such a minuscule timeframe, albeit probably not consciously and only with the help of VATS. Additionally, move speed isn't actually a factor in VATS targeting success, so there's a case to be made that, so long as the users hand can move fast enough, which I believe it can, the system can hit anything within range. Personally, however, I think it is worth recognizing the fact that neither the massively hypersonic timestopping edgerunners feats nor the relativistic VATS calculations are actually representative of what the characters are like the vast majority of the time, and the top move speeds for each, in their games, tend to be Mach 4 and Mach 3 respectively, with all of their boosts in place, making speed much less of a factor than it may seem based on the admittedly very cool and flashy edgerunners feats.

So to conclude, I think that V's strength has increased quite drastically since the release of edgerunners, up to around 873kg of TNT. However, going to the effort of finding something closer to the maximum of fallout's verse keeps the courier squarely above V in terms of strength, at anywhere from 9 to 13 tons of TNT, scaling to other fallout protagonists being able to vaporise super mutant behemoths (a perfectly reasonable scaling chain considering the weapon being scaled is a laser rifle which is standard issue brotherhood equipment across Fallouts 3, 4 and New Vegas), and critically, I don't think V's speed can justifiably be increased to make up the difference, the timestops in edgerunners can effectively be treated as anomalously powerful upgrades that V simply never had access too. Therefore I stand by my previous conclusion, that while V is undeniably much faster and would be able to hit every shot and dodge most attacks with his cyberware, at base (i.e. most of the time) he's definitely fast enough for the courier to tag him, especially when using the time-slowing turbo, so his speed is a significant advantage but not a deciding factor.

So yeah, I'm correct and awesome, is the takeaway from this.

Edgerunners crater that I got from some reaction channel in really terrible quality but trust me its fine my calc will be within a reasonable enough margin of error for the difference to not really matter

Sandstone strength:

https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2019/62/e3sconf_icbte2019_04048.pdf