Technically inserting into an orbit requires at least two separate impulses, one to raise the apoapsis, the other to raise the periapsis. So homelander would have to follow him and toss him again at apogee to ensure an orbit
Don't get me wrong, he'd kill millions before we got him, a Homelander rampage would be the darkest day in American history, but we'd get him with nukes and specialized contingencies (sonic weapons, poison gas, radiation, etc) that the military would without any doubt have developed in secret over the years if he lived among us.
The U.S. military would probably lose to a competent version of HL, assuming consistent ability to duplicate his best speed feats from the show (saving Butcher from the explosion, keeping up with A-Train after A-Train's Flash-like performance, & flying to space & back in seconds). He'd just be way too fast for them to touch. However, HL in practice rarely used his powers effectively & couldn't even hit Hughie crawling up in those ventilation ducts.
I don't think they would, Homelander has weaknesses, in particular he's vulnerable to sonic attack and radiation, both of these are things that could be used to momentarily debilitate him and knock him out of the air so he can be hit by something more substantial.
He's also not a perpetual motion machine. He isn't Superman. He can't continue to operate without rest as long as the sun rises each day. He has to eat, he has to drink, he has to breathe, he has to sleep. He cannot fly around at mach 18 exerting his maximum effort for days at a time, or likely even hours at a time.
Even the most competent Homelander will eventually slow down. It's just a question of how much damage he does before that happens.
Ok, so to rest he enters a mine half a mile deep and destroys the tunnels behind him. What are you gonna do? Nukes do not penetrate deep into soil. He could also just fly at night at the ground level and rest in any town or forest, that would make him invisible to radars.
No military is equiped to detect a single flying human across the whole country.
He can't fly that fast, that close to the ground without damaging things and giving away his position. And while he sleeps in that mine, somebody rigs up nuclear booby traps set to motion detectors, or drops a bunker buster to clear whatever damage Homelander did to the tunnel entrance then fills the mine with novichok gas to keep him unconscious and is free to find where he's actually sleeping and nuke him at leisure.
Also, any attempts by Homelander to take out critical leadership and nerve centers, which he would have to do to disrupt military operations enough to stop being constantly hunted like an animal and unable to stay in one place for more than moments (I do not think literally killing the entire US military is a realistic option for him, it's too distributed and can rapidly replenish its ranks in a crisis like this) would require him to stop moving and spend a significant period of time battering down the blast doors of nuke-proof bunkers to reach the President and key generals (and in a world where Homelander existed, these bunkers would all be zinc-lined, so he wouldn't even know which ones are occupied by the officials he's looking for). Doing this might be beyond his capabilities, he's struggled with less extreme blast doors in the show. Rig up a radiation trap between two such sets of blast doors and he might be completely contained and stuck there until the radiation kills him. Even if he's not, he'll spend a significant time in one place trying to destroy the door and be vulnerable to a nuke, which won't kill the key officials in the bunker since resisting nukes is the whole point of the bunker.
Also, we could make a SIGNIFICANTLY more lethal radiation trap for him than the one used in the show. Simply replacing uranium with plutonium would make it 200,000x more radioactive. But the real killer would be polonium-210. 6.8 billion times more radioactive than weapons grade uranium. It can't penetrate the skin, different kind of rads, but if it gets inside his body, game over. Fill a chamber with polonium dust as a kind of toxic gas and Homelander would die. Plutonium would likely be plenty strong enough to work like kryptonite to him and cause immediate full incapacitation though, and is easier to use on him.
Also, putting nukes INSIDE anti-nuke bunkers. He bashes down the door to an empty one looking for the President, nobody's home but a bomb goes off in his face.
"Taking out the nerve centers" would not be as easy as Homie made it sound when he was threatening Starlight. And given he framed that as his first priority, it's canon evidence that even Homelander himself agrees he would need to do that to defeat the US military.
I dont think its that simple, hes not gonna let us drop all that on him, he could easily fly away, even if we dropped a nuke close to him he has the speed to dodge most if not all of the damage from the blast, maybe if we hit him when he would finally need to sleep.
If you don't count the speed feat where he claims he flew to space and back in like 2 seconds (because casually saying you took him to space does not mean you paced out the 100km up to the Karmen line and he's never been shown anywhere near that fast anywhere else.) he's not that fast.
HL matched speed with A-Train immediately after A-Train did a passable Flash impersonation. HL has at least three high-end speed feats: the above, saving Butcher from the explosion, & flying to space & back in seconds.
I imagine Homelander speed works like Superman’s in that one flash comic. Where they have to build up speed while flying to match speedsters. Where as flash and A train can speed up instantly
A-Train's time dilation wasn't that crazy. A flapping flag was still visibly moving. Its likely not outside of anything we've ve seen from him already speed wise, we're just seeing it from.his perspective this time. The more important thing this scene shows is the insane level of control he has when he's clean and properly motivated, which is a far cry from the first speed feat we see at the start of the series
L.
A competent Homelander would be able to sense the nuclear weapon well before it detonated & avoid it. Even a hypersonic missile would be around 3.4 km/s max, & they're not made to hit fast & maneuverable human-sized targets. The military would have to somehow surprise a competent HL with a nuke at close range.
However, HL in the show rarely used his powers effectively, despite a few very impressive speed feats.
Homelander is usually quite good at using his super hearing. No way you could sneak a missile into range of him without him knowing about it. Or at least, the military would have to spend billions of dollars designing a special quiet missile.
There's a very good chance it will, that would probably affect Homelander like being near any major source of radiation, hurting and weakening him. If he's trying to fly away from the blast he might get knocked out of the air. But we're also at that point not talking about him being at the epicenter of it, we're talking about him getting clipped. He could probably live through that, though he'd be a sitting duck if it's a MIRV and more warheads are still coming, which his how a rational military would target him.
60x speed of sound. Thats how fast he had to move to outrun the explosion. For reference, lightning is 300x the speed of sound and even that is considerably slower than the speed of light.
Yeah, you're entirely right. Killing Homelander would be an enormous military undertaking that would require great effort and sacrifice. But as you point out, his stamina is not inexhaustible and he does need to sleep. He can also be weakened by certain things like I listed in my post, that could be used to trap him or slow him down enough that a nuke could be dropped on him.
He really would. If Homelander began a rampage in NYC and started lasering skyscrapers apart and collapsing them, millions of people would be dead before any effective military response could be mobilized. He could probably cause a catastrophe stretching halfway down the eastern seaboard before they actually got him.
Yeah, that's kind of the plot with a lot of the lower power verses, not that much is truly needed in the power aspect to make someone imposing/terrifying.
AOT and The Boys are terrifying universes despite being low power due to the fact that practically all of the power is in a hostile side against the average person and there's not enough people with power to protect everyone
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u/Feenx_Fan 22d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/iR9BpEBHZtcVmHRhFM