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Memfis

How do cacodemons fly?

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How do cacodemons fly if they have no wings? They need some way to gain momentum and stay up in the air.

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Eris Falling said:

Not silent at all! That's what the hissing noise is!

Ooooooh! Nasty! Good thing it doesn't poop on the marine's head.

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They're filled with a warm blue gas lighter than air, which keeps them in the air like an airship. Then can modulate the temperature of the gas to fly up and down. They release small amounts of the gas out of their butthole to move forward (notice that they always try to fly forward, even when you push them in another direction with your weapon) or rotate in place.

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How do fireballs fly? Why don't they get blown out by their movement? How come that when an imp is on a platform moving upward, and it throws a fireball at you, the fireball collides with the platform instead of sharing the platform's, and the imp's, upward momentum?

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scifista42 said:

They release small amounts of the gas out of their butthole to move forward


ButtHOLES.

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Ooh, speculation time!

Thinking about this, my first thought was that Cacodemons are kept aloft by some kind of lifting gas, like helium or more likely hydrogen.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it cannot account for the Cacodemon's ability to change altitude or move laterally. When combined with the observation that the Cacodemon collapses instead of bursting when killed, this makes me think that lifting gas is not the answer, even partially.

Instead, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Cacodemon's flying abilities are a result of fairly specific psychokinetic or magical powers. Due to these peculiar traits, including the ability to spit forth what looks and sounds like ball lightning as well as their unique anatomical structure (I don't think there is anything on Earth quite like it), I suspect that the Cacodemons are artificial organisms, perhaps even incapable of reproduction on their own and are thus made rather than being born. Perhaps whatever process that created the Cacodemons was the same one that produced the physiologically similar (aside from arms) Pain Elementals. A particular anatomical oddity I would point out in favour of their artificial nature would be their single eye - the vast majority of naturally evolved organisms on Earth have multiple eyes (the only exceptions I can think of are probably worms of some kind), because generally speaking organisms with redundant eyes get to reproduce better than organisms without them.

Whether this creation process was biotechnological or magical is a complete unknown, and given Hellish warping & appropriation of human technologies it is entirely possible that the process includes both magical and technological elements.

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Gez said:

How do fireballs fly? Why don't they get blown out by their movement? How come that when an imp is on a platform moving upward, and it throws a fireball at you, the fireball collides with the platform instead of sharing the platform's, and the imp's, upward momentum?


Imp fireballs I reckon are a temporarily self-contained spheroid of plasma enveloping a payload of burning gases, like a fiery variant of the Cacodemon's ball lightning.

As for the momentum issue, my suspicion is that the creation process imparts a Euclidean vector on the fireball with a fixed magnitude (momentum) but an arbitrary direction, rather than the fireball acting like a already-existing ball being thrown in a typical manner.

If I were to try and explain why such an object would move like that, I would look into how the fireball interacts with the surrounding atmosphere.

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NoXion said:

I suspect that the Cacodemons are artificial organisms, perhaps even incapable of reproduction on their own and are thus made rather than being born.


Baby cacodemons exist, so they reproduce, I think.

I created a one-room wad (ZDoom format) just to see one in action, in case anyone else is curious and wants to quickly test it out. I quickly ran into problems: the baby caco is so cute that I didn't want to shoot at it, so I just ran around occasionally taking damage.

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NoXion said:

Thinking about this, my first thought was that Cacodemons are kept aloft by some kind of lifting gas, like helium or more likely hydrogen.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it cannot account for the Cacodemon's ability to change altitude or move laterally. When combined with the observation that the Cacodemon collapses instead of bursting when killed, this makes me think that lifting gas is not the answer, even partially.

Why not? I've managed to explain both these problems in my post above. The lifting gas might be hot and cacodemon can modulate its temperature and therefore upthrust, and the gas quickly cools down (or leaks out) when the caco is killed, so that he falls to the ground. And lateral movement is also clear. :)

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NoXion said:

Imp fireballs I reckon are a temporarily self-contained spheroid of plasma enveloping a payload of burning gases, like a fiery variant of the Cacodemon's ball lightning.

As for the momentum issue, my suspicion is that the creation process imparts a Euclidean vector on the fireball with a fixed magnitude (momentum) but an arbitrary direction, rather than the fireball acting like a already-existing ball being thrown in a typical manner.

If I were to try and explain why such an object would move like that, I would look into how the fireball interacts with the surrounding atmosphere.


oh. magic. i understand

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The Cacodemon is similar to the Astral Dreadnoughts head so perhaps magic is an appropriate answer.

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Magnusblitz said:

Now, Lost Souls...

Lost Souls are obviously supernatural beings. I believe that conventional physics or biology cannot explain a species of flying skulls constantly on fire. At least not the physics or biology that applies in our world. However, the hell dimension might be ruled by different natural laws...

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scifista42 said:

Lost Souls are obviously supernatural beings. I believe that conventional physics or biology cannot explain a species of flying skulls constantly on fire. At least not the physics or biology that applies in our world. However, the hell dimension might be ruled by different natural laws...


I think perhaps Lost Souls are just spirits....spirits with a solid form so they can be shot and dissipated back into the nether realm, before coming back at you cus already dead.

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Thing is, saying things like "it works by magic" is as good as saying "I haven't the foggiest". Now, this is perfectly fine if you just want to get on and play the game, but for those of us with a tendency to think deeper in our escapism that's unsatisfying as an explanation, hence threads like this.

A better way to attack the problem, I think, is to try and put oneself into the shoes of a scientist who's actually studying these things in real life, as it were. Imagine if Doom was not just a game, but also an abstraction of the real-life behaviour of physical and biological entities. Things like infinitely tall actors can be ignored as being merely the limitations of the vanilla Doom engine, but other in-game phenomena like monster infighting can be taken as reflecting an actual property of the "real" demonic beings.

It therefore follows that, if one adopts the role of a scientist, one must advance hypotheses in order to explain certain observed behaviours and properties in a consistent manner.

Why go through this kind of charade? Well, firstly because it's fun. Or at least I think it is. Secondly because in checking the validity of these fictional scientific hypotheses, one can incidentally learn about how real-life phenomena work.

scifista42 said:

Why not? I've managed to explain both these problems in my post above. The lifting gas might be hot and cacodemon can modulate its temperature and therefore upthrust, and the gas quickly cools down (or leaks out) when the caco is killed, so that he falls to the ground. And lateral movement is also clear. :)


Unless Hell has a potential source of Helium, then the lifting gas most commonly available in a such an environment would be Hydrogen. But it can't be that either, since Cacodemons crumple rather than going up like the Hindenburg, even when hit with rockets or plasma fire.

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scifista42 said:

However, the hell dimension might be ruled by different natural laws...

But if so then shouldn't they instantly die when they were on Earth and Mars's moons?

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With regards to the physical nature of Hell itself as a dimension, there clearly must be some things in common - for example, matter is made out of atoms and molecules and the same physical forces like gravity and electromagnetism are present. Although that does not preclude additional physical forces being present in Hell, although explaining how they could manifest in "our" reality is a mite trickier.

But despite the physical similarities on the human scale, I'm inclined to think the cosmology of the Hell dimension is radically different to that of our own. I tend to imagine it as being an infinite plane, with gravity (or a force close enough to it that it makes no real difference on the personal level) having a universal directionality, so that unlike in our universe there is a common "down" direction that all observers can agree on. I'm not a physicist but that seems like it could have some very wild implications, and it is perhaps those implications that drew the UAC's interest - perhaps they thought that Hell's dimensional properties made it a candidate for faster-than-light travel, but they didn't realise until it was too late just exactly what it was they were dealing with.

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Cacodemons are filled with with a noxious gas to majestically float across terrain, to change altitude they simply release gas from their cloaca. They also use their tentacles to open doors...

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NoXion said:

Thing is, saying things like "it works by magic" is as good as saying "I haven't the foggiest".

...

Unless Hell has a potential source of Helium, then the lifting gas most commonly available in a such an environment would be Hydrogen. But it can't be that either, since Cacodemons crumple rather than going up like the Hindenburg, even when hit with rockets or plasma fire.

That's why I propose the idea of different physical and biochemical laws in the hell dimension, instead of magic. These laws are unexplored, but they exist and they're firm. They might allow a non-Helium non-Hydrogen gas lighter than air, burning living beings, telekinesis etc.

EDIT: I wrote this before seeing your last post.

EDIT2: Infinite plane? Dunno how did you come up with the assumption, I'm doubtful about it, but principially I have nothing against the idea. :)

Avoozl said:

But if so then shouldn't they instantly die when they were on Earth and Mars's moons?

They partially bring their own reality (and natural laws) with them. Each demonic being is protected by an aura of their hellish reality that allows them to survive and keep their powers, until they're killed by Doomguy.

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scifista42 said:

That's why I propose the idea of different physical and biochemical laws in the hell dimension, instead of magic. These laws are unexplored, but they exist and they're firm. They might allow a non-Helium non-Hydrogen gas lighter than air, burning living beings, telekinesis etc.

EDIT: I wrote this before seeing your last post.


Here's a compromise hypothesis; magic in Hell consists of specific patterns (rituals, spells, etc) that convert Hellish energy (analogous to dark energy in our universe) into matter and other kinds of energy. This is the means through which Imps throw fireballs, Cacodemons launch their ball lightning, and so on. In the case of Cacodemons in particular, they have been engineered (or have evolved) to convert this Hellish magical-energy into an ideal gas that is lifting and non-reactive, explaining it's observed properties.

How do the forces of Hell use their abilities when in our universe? Simple, they use the copious amounts of Hellish energy that leak through the same conduit that enables the forces of Hell to teleport from Hell to Mars/Earth.

They partially bring their own reality (and natural laws) with them. Each demonic being is protected by an aura of their hellish reality that allows them to survive and keep their powers, until they're killed by Doomguy.


What's you explanation for why Earthly guns can be brought into Hell and successfully used against Demonspawn? Do you agree that matter in Hell is made of the same basic components (atoms, molecules, etc)?

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cacodemons have two forms in their life. They enter their life a sack of skin with teeth and an eye, And when war is near the other monsters inflate them with demonium. Demonium is something like Helium. This concludes the DooM weirdness one can imagine in a second. XD

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Cacodemons are so horrible that the ground wants nothing to do with them. Note that their name is "awful demons", they are terrible even by demon standards. It's not that they float, it's that they are repelled by the floor. When a cacodemon wants to climb further up, it thinks even worse thoughts, to be more repellent. When a cacodemon dies, it falls to the ground, because dead cacodemons are nearly tolerable.

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