I ran the numbers on that a while ago, and it's kind of ridiculous. ( For reference for anybody else, this takes place at ~17:00 in Episode 6 Volume 8 of RWBY. ) It takes ~5 frames for the liquid to cross the distance between the ground and Atlas, and RWBY is animated at 24fps, so it takes...
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Another example for how and why SB is absolutely godawful when it comes to calcs...
Ok I'm looking at this now and woooooooooooooooooow where even to begin here?
If you look at Atlas, it's ~12km off the ground or so in most shots:
Based on what? I dunno about you but when I make a calc I try to show the ACTUAL SCALING.
( The Atlesian Airships in this picture are
~1.4km long, and are ~54 pixels long in this image. Atlas itself is flying ~476 pixels off the ground in this image. )
WHAT ARE YOU EVEN SCALING OFF? WHICH SHIPS DO YOU MEAN?
Also Atlas is only about 196 pixels off the ground, I had a look and-
Wait. Wait wait wait wait.
476 pixels off the ground?
Please don't tell me that-
No no no no no no no no no no no no no.
We see the pillar of liquid is about as thick as one of the shield generator towers on the sides of Atlas. Those towers are about 300 meters wide.
Then scale it. You are making a FUCKING CALC.
So you have a 300 meter diameter cylindrical pillar of liquid, travelling at 60km / second. That's a lot of energy. Let's approximate the energy of the liquid pillar as if it were a cylinder of material hitting a target, which is what it basically is.
Let's say that the pillar of liquid has a density of 1/10th water or just 100kg/m^3 - that would be a mass of 42,400,000,000 or 42 million metric tons. Or you know, 18 gigatons of TNT equivalent when moving at 60km/second.
This is just kind of inherent to the scene. We know roughly how large the pillar is (multiple kilometers), and how quickly it crossed that distance (0.2 seconds). The only thing we don't know is density. But even if you assumed it was as light as the lightest aerogels - i.e. a ridiculously low 1 kg/m^3, a solid 20% less dense than air - it would still be roughly 182 megatons of TNT equivalent.
Yeah but there's not a single sonic boom or mach cone and Team RWBY isn't vaporized and the city below is totally unscathed so it's obviously some kind of esoteric effect.
Oh wait that's only the case with TES and Star Wars and Borderlands.
Derpiscore is a disingenous hypocrite. News at 11.
This is kind of consistent with the earthquakes the geyser created - just before Salem fires the beam there's several tremors that extend out for multiple kilometers around the city - which when you consider the level of energy Salem was manipulating, isnt too surprising.
Wait wait wait, so earthquakes are
energy for RWBY but not TES. I sure expect that these geysers ought to have exploded at the exact same time as the earthquakes.
Also no fireball going boom boom woosh so feat is invalid.
Now remember that Salem's geyser stopped because it hit Atlas shields, which rather impressively, actually stopped the geyser for a couple of seconds. But those sci-fi shields of ridiculous strength don't exist in New York, and to thousands of tons of liquid moving at dozens of kilometers a second, conventional structures are just going to cease to exist.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that the Grimm liquid seemingly dissolves stuff that touches it - see the end of Volume 8 Episode 5 where a small boulder and tree just immediately decay into black flakes upon touching the liquid.
Maybe that just makes Atlas shields weak or esoteric instead of strong