I give this a plus one, just because i love super balls so much, and am glad they made it into SCP.
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Not only that, but the idea of a rubber polymer which amplifies its own kinetic energy by double is, frankly, really cool.
Yeah, you'd think they'd make a series of movies about it, and perhaps later on have a crappy remake.
One of the few instances where I actually like a SCP obviously inspired by a movie.
Isn't SCP-006 ultra-super top secret and only O5s know the real story on it? Why does this researcher know enough about it to casually suggest using some as a restorative?
Giving bearhugs to the unsuspecting since 1872.
Alright. I don't wanna field what's probably an obvious question here, but, uh… wouldn't a ball that goes twice as high every time it bounces shoot off into space and be lost forever after a couple of hours?
My impression is that it delivers 200% of the effort initially delivered, but it can still be slowed by friction and surfaces which are not perfectly hard. Thus, why it gets stopped by water and the gel.
I like the addenda in this one. It shows that there's plenty of crazy bastards in the foundation, just like us, going "Ooh, so much shiny stuff! Let's play with it!"
Oy, another slash class. Honestly, how can a single item be both Safe and Euclid? Either there's a significant chance of it breaching containment if you leave it alone, or there isn't. I wanna make this just Euclid, or just Safe, or hell just Embla if there's a persuasive argument for it— whatever, just not a dual-class. Just need some modly/adminly assent before I pull that trigger.
What's the recovery story for this?
"Sir, did you see that red blur a moment ago?"
"Yes, it was headed North-North-West at 349 degrees, and as its last bounce was a shallow angle, its trajectory resembled the quadratic curve of y=-1/11x2 +2.33x+2, assuming my perspective at x=-4, in meters."
"So towards the lake?"
"Yeah. Who did you say you were?"
"I'm with the Unusual Incident Unit of the FBI. Please file a report with them, err, us."
The requisition request and commentary at the end sold me.
Upvote.
I really don't like this article in its current form. I realize that it's one of the ancient ones, but it's showing its age a bit too well. I also realize that it's probably too high in its rating for these ideas to take hold/problems to be addressed. However, I feel that it could be improved if some alterations were made to it, nonetheless.
The first thing to bug me about this (and it's ultimately a small thing with an easy fix) was that I thought it could cause problems with the CCL if we used licensed/copyrighted products or logos in our skips or tales. Should we not blackbox out the Wham-O name?
Looking at the containment procedures, I'm a bit bothered by them. So we have it in a harness (made of undisclosed materials) inside a heavily padded, 1m^3 box. I feel it would be best, in the interest of containment, to state what kind of padding is necessary, for the in-universe maintenance crews to have a swift and easy guide.
Also, I'd be kind of interested in seeing what materials the author could come up with to counter the kinetic amplification abilities, since all this thing needs is a light poke to become THE BOUNCY BALL OF DOOM!!!!TM
Now, I can also understand why it needs to be stored in a highly-viscous material, because of its kinetic energy amplification attributes, but the use of the term 'goo' in an official document is kind of annoying. Further, this thing is submerged in molten plastic. I'm only going off of Wikipedia here, but that's somewhere in the 250 degrees Fahrenheit range, which would make it kind of difficult for any containment teams to access or restore the item to its containment box.
Nevermind the displacement issues with a ginormous pool of liquid plastic in a room with very specific measurements that doesn't appear to leave any room for error or someone else to get inside it. Also, how is the temperature maintained to keep the plastic molten? That's never addressed.
Further, though I have certainly been guilty of it, this is "one (1)" of my pet peeves, and it's used throughout the article inconsistently.
At first thought to be a pleasant child's toy,
This tonally bugs the crap out of me.
The ball soon became a dangerous projectile,
This just doesn't feel like how a scientific document would address that particular situation.
It came to a rest after several days in the nearby lake of ████████, and was retrieved by SCP personnel.
Okay, I'm only taking a basic physics course at the moment, but that just screams out to me as weird. Several days of uncontained bouncing around should have this thing going at Ludicrous Speed, if not, at the very least, escape velocity, as each bounce would double its speed.
Just assuming that it was going from a starting speed of, say, ten meters a second, within ten bounces (that it likely surpassed within the first minute or so, so it was likely 20-30 times that, I'm just trying to illustrate my point) it would be going something like five or ten kilometers per second, and I have a hard time believing a lake would be enough to stop it.
Further, as I mentioned earlier, this thing could be sent on a rampage with a light poke. How in the hell did the Foundation remove it from the lake, much less transport it to a containment site?
Due to the speed of the object, and the total surprise by its victims, no cover-up story was required or initiated.
Bull. Shit. The Foundation wouldn't just leave a story out about a bouncy ball rampaging through a town for just shy of a week. They would find some plausible explanation and flaunt it everywhere they could.
The first letter I find laughable at best, and completely flying in the face of my headcanon on the Foundation. The Foundation would never authorize turning one of their agents into Speedball to contain objects/creatures, especially when, as the letters showed, having this thing on one boot by itself will just likely lead to the poor schmuck being dragged around by his leg and getting bashed on and through everything in between himself and the target. Doubly so when the guy's best defense of his proposal to, and I cannot stress this enough, AN O5 BOARD MEMBER is effectively saying "You know you can trust me, brah, we go way back."
The second letter bugs me for a few reasons. First, because the O5 didn't laugh as he read the letter, before giving a calm, measured, and professionally worded reply of "There is no way in hell I'm going to authorize that", and instead allows the researcher to go through with the idea, getting one of their best operatives if not outright killed, then certainly put on the early retirement list.
Then it outright states that the agent contained some beastie or another down in the amazon by dismembering it, which again flies against my headcanon. Further, it's quite difficult to believe that, even if this had been a test run, the O5 would be willing to allow testing/development to continue with the super-suit, considering the injuries obtained by the poor bastard getting launched into midair. I also find that (Highly armed/armored dude getting bitchslapped by a bouncy ball strapped to his boot a mile into the air) to be a situation the foundation would need to cover up, no mention of which was made.
Also, there is only one of these balls in containment mentioned, and if I remember the earlier part of the article correctly, there was no success in duplicating or deciphering how the ball worked in order to replicate its effects. How would this become common use, aside from the rather ridiculous image I have in my head of a strike team passing the ball back and forth in midair?
And finally, the last letter is the most annoying part of this. The Foundation would not allow mass-cross-contamination of different SCP items just to create a super soldier.
TL;DR version, this is woefully under-detailed and flies against my headcanon on how the Foundation operates, as well as my understanding of basic physics, and not in a good way. -1
This is necro, but for the record, it wasn't bouncing around for several days. It was only bouncing around for a few minutes, but when it fell into the lake it took a couple days for it to come to rest.
Well, yeah. It was bouncing inside the lake for several days. That hardly takes away from any other issue that I pointed out though.
So I was interested how fast can SCP-018 actually go. I whipped out a Python simulation assuming that the ball is 6 cm in diameter, and is made of solid rubber with a density of 1.2 kg/dm^3. I also used 0.47 drag coefficient taken from Wikipedia. The coefficient of restitution was 200% assuming that's what the article means. The ball was dropped from 1 meter assuming a perfectly vertical bounce which gives it the highest possible speed it can achieve.
The results are not nearly as crazy as is thought. The ball reaches a max velocity of around 250 km/h right after bouncing from the ground and reaches an altitude of about 120 meters. As far as the article goes it was written fairly realistic whether intentionally or not. The ball could very well be bouncing around for a few days before landing in a lake.
Speaking of the lake, water has almost 800 times the density of air and because it is incompressible it has a lot more drag for fast objects than if it was a gas as dense as water. Long story short, even at 250 km/h the ball stops almost instantly.
On another hand, the containment procedure seems to be a bit over the top. It doesn't take a gel or molten plastic to stop it and it would make a lot more sense to fill the tank with water which would be cheaper, more practical, and a lot safer for the containment crew.
Also, sorry for replying to a very old comment but I saw that no one seemed to take the time to actually find out what would happen and how dangerous actually is this SCP.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
