Electricity, Electromagnetism, Bioelectric fields, Need realism

[comprex]

it doesn't state but that would make since i guess.

For realism's sake you really want both poles of your character's internal battery to make contact with the target, especially if you wish to pass large, killing or disabling currents through.     Ground return paths have quite large resistances and a lot* of parasitic capacitance as well.


*on the order of .75F

[Nickeris86]

When she whacked things with her weapon it wasn't eminently life threatening, but left a nasty burn, she had to whack the monster a lot and had help from her compatriot as well.

[comprex]

That's a pretty narrow window for a writer to dance around in.   

The plot seems to me  caught between the pedantic part of the audience that screams "if her weapon is only as good as a taser with one wire removed, how can it leave burns?" and the other, squee-starved part of the audience that's yelling "Why do I want to read about a character that can't even leave a -permanent- dueling scar, let alone kill something?"

Does that make sense?

[Electric MacButters]

I don't know enough biology to know if its possible, but from an electrical standpoint it would take less energy to build a killing blow if the hero had two seperate organs that held potential, one building negative potental while the other builds positive.  If each organ was 'wired' to only one hand then they would return to neutral every time one of these people touched their hands together (or touched both hands to something with low enough resistance to serve as a conductor.)  This would have the benifit of opening up certain culteral norms that could develop in response like:

Everyone shakes hands right to left so as to ground each other out.

Whenever one of these people is defeated, the victor cuts off one of the loser's hands so he can no longer arc.

It is considered polite fo a guest to bring his/her hands together (think Taoism/Buddism) before entering a dwelling as a demonstration that the person is grounded.

There is a thriving glove market that includes 'secret' conductive plates that don't match across the gloves so a person can arc through their gloves or that look like flesh so an assassin can put his/her hands together and still maintain a charge.

[comprex]

I don't know enough biology to know if its possible, but from an electrical standpoint it would take less energy to build a killing blow if the hero had two seperate organs that held potential, one building negative potental while the other builds positive.

There is no such thing as 'just negative' and 'just positive'.   Something is at a negative potential only in reference to some other potential.    Potential is just that:  the potential to accomplish work by transferring charge from one place to another.  One always has to specify a "from" and a "to", as in "negative with respect to" and "positive with respect to".

Put another way: every battery, every fuel cell has to have *two* terminals.  

Quantus had a pretty good explanation above of having multiple organs that can be biochemically charged in parallel

  + -||- -    
  + -||- -

and then discharged in series    ++ -||-||- --

 If each organ was 'wired' to only one hand and to the other organ then they would return to neutral every time one of these people touched their hands together

Yes.  With the above correction, this would happen.  It would waste the work done in creating the charges in the first place, but they would return to neutral.

[Electric MacButters]

Comprex,

You do realize that 'two seperate organs' compose the cathode and anode, right?  By physically seperating them you increase the isolation resistance, effectively increasing the capacitance and allowing for more powerfull attacks.

If the organs were wired together then they would be constantly discharging the potental, making them worthless.  They must be isolated until the circuit is closed, which would be done by connecting the 'loose' conductors in the hands (be it by clapping or grasping someone/thing to be arced through.)

[Quantus]

"wired" together may be too specific a term, as they would need to be connected but not necessarily by something electrically conductive.  The electric Eel accomplishes its build-up by having control of sodium and potassium ducts to create mini-batteries, more or less.  I imagine if this is being scaled up to an upright, non-aquatic creature, there would be some sort of adapted circulatory system facilitating this transfer. 

From Wikipedia:

Electrocytes, electroplaques or electroplaxes are cells used by rays, electric eels and other electric fish for electrogenesis and electroreception. They are flat disk-like cells that are positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other. Electric eels have several thousand of these cells stacked, each producing 0.15V. The cells function by pumping positive sodium and potassium ions out of the cell via transport proteins powered by ATP. Postsynaptically, electrocytes work much like muscle cells. They have nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. These cells are used in research because of their resemblance to nerve-muscle junctions.

The stack of electrocytes has long been compared to a voltaic pile, and may even have inspired the invention of the battery, since the analogy was already noted by Alessandro Volta.[3] While the electric organ is structurally similar to a battery, its cycle of operation is more like a Marx generator, in that the individual elements are slowly charged in parallel, then suddenly and nearly simultaneously discharged in series to produce a high voltage pulse.
[edit] Firing

To discharge the electrocytes at the correct time, the electric eel uses its pacemaker nucleus, a nucleus of pacemaker neurons. When an electric eel spots its prey, the pacemaker neurons fire and acetylcholine is subsequently released from electromotor neurons to the electrocytes, resulting in an electric organ discharge.

[comprex]

You do realize that 'two seperate organs' compose the cathode and anode, right?

There is no such thing as a cathode by itself.    There is no such thing as an anode by itself.    Until you connect them internally, each organ will have its own cathode and its anode both.           In order to have a meaningful outside cathode and  a meaningful outside anode , one at each hand, you have to connect the organs internally.        

As quantus explained, that connection can be parallel or series.

  By physically seperating them you increase the isolation resistance, effectively increasing the capacitance

FWIW, increasing physical separation _decreases_  capacitance.

If the organs were wired together then they would be constantly discharging the potental, making them worthless.

Sorry, no.   Series connection does not discharge the potential.   It allows the apparent potential viewed from outside to be greater than that available from just one cell or organ.

You can see this in 9V cells (which are just 6 1.5v cells connected end-to-end).   You can see this D-cell mag-lites.

  They must be isolated until the circuit is closed, which would be done by connecting the 'loose' conductors in the hands (be it by clapping or grasping someone/thing to be arced through.)

The -circuit- has to be closed.    Meaning you need to make a full loop.      Meaning that  having    Hand+-||-insulator-||--Hand will do absolutely -nothing- when you put the hands together because there is no circuit.

[Quantus]

I... I think I love you!  Checking out the war of the currents now.

For clarification's sake, the technology used to create these guys was advanced far beyond anything we can imagine today, Nanomachines on the subatomic scale for starters.  However, there had already been one apocolyptic-scale loss of information, so the uses they were putting this technology to was comparatively primitive.  If this were set in the Star Wars universe, it would be something akin to the sandpeople of tatooine somehow discovering the cloning facilities from the episode two we all wish had never existed.

Because of this, I'm not terribly concerned with energy generation or output.  I'm also figuring that the mechanisms behind his gauntlets is similarly advanced, allowing for much greater efficiency than we could produce today.

Just one other little thing, Nanomachines on the Subatomic Scale doesn't really work very well, because the line between matter and energy (and space and time, depending on the theory you believe) gets pretty blurry.  Subatomic scale is basically blurring into the quantum scale.  While it could be done in science fiction terms I guess, they would be operating on a completely different set of rules than normal physics, electricity, etc. 

Now, Atomic scale machines are perfectly possible, and is in fact a good description of what you find inside living cells.   Here is a great video to get a sense of the sale in a cell.  Theres a shorter one around edited to music instead of the lecture, but this one has more cool detail, IMO.

[Nicodemus Carpenter]

Just one other little thing, Nanomachines on the Subatomic Scale doesn't really work very well, because the line between matter and energy (and space and time, depending on the theory you believe) gets pretty blurry.  Subatomic scale is basically blurring into the quantum scale.  While it could be done in science fiction terms I guess, they would be operating on a completely different set of rules than normal physics, electricity, etc. 

This is not "hard" science fiction, by which I mean a future we can prognosticate using scientific advances we can foresee, but not yet accomplish.  I do believe that as humanity continues to expand the frontiers of scientific knowledge, many of the problems we currently see will be circumvented through unforseeable advances and discoveries, but I'm not trying to prognosticate, only to create an interesting backdrop.

This is all just background information, barely any of which will ever be explained in the story itself, and even then it will be seen only through legend and metaphor.  I merely want to have a better understanding of the forces involved for my own sake as a writer so that I can make the willing suspension of disbelief easier to maintain for my readers.

There is an anime called Darker than Black (Available on netflix if you have the streaming service) where the main character has the ability to kill with electric current.

This was actually what started me thinking about electricity as a potential power.  The more I think about it, the more I think the fighting style and abilities will be remarkably similar.

I also wanted to give a big thank you to everyone keeping this discussion alive.  You've all been a HUGE help for me already, and while I rarely understand all the terms you're throwing around, you definitely have given me a much more distinct starting point for my own research.  Thank you very much.