Yamcha was about as strong as Radditz by the time Nappa and Vegeta showed up. Piccolo was strong enough to blow up the moon when he was at that power level. In the afterlife, he went on to train with King Kai so he probably powered up a bit after that.
I've read enough Dragonball and argued with enough powerscalers to know the feats are entirely meaningless and change with the wind. Like as far as Z is concerned, (ignoring Super)
blowing up planets is a big deal, incomprehensible to everyone prior to the Frieza saga. When Goku meets Frieza and Frieza is mocking the Z fighters and says he could blow up the planet if he wants to, Goku turns to his friends and is like "Yeah I don't think I can win, guys".
This confusion among the fan base stems from two things: Toriyama not giving a shit, and the various dubs that make up dialogue for the anime. Roshi blew up the moon with a power level of like 120 or whatever because Toriyama thought it was cool and apparently has no idea how big or far away the moon is. King Piccolo nukes 2 cities and is exhausted, and this amount of power is enough to conquer the entire Earth and mop the floor with people who are stronger than moonbuster Roshi. Nappa blows a whole in the ground and astonishes Piccolo. Recoome blows up a hill on Namek and astonishes Krillin. None of the heroes can fathom blowing away a whole planet because you're not expected to believe everybody stronger than Roshi can pop planets like balloons using 1/4th of their power
This sounds like cope but I'm pretty sure Vegeta was just pissed off. He was using his signature technique of goading his opponent into taking his attack head on because he has to charge it for so long (just like using Final Flash on Cell). I have 2 reasons to think this.
spoiler
I don't think Vegeta is suicidal. He does not seem like the type who would easily decide to throw his life away to kill one low-class Saiyan warrior because he was humiliated. After he loses the fight and is thoroughly beaten, he opts to run away as fast as he can rather than die on Earth because his pride is still somehow unbroken. More than once we are shown that Goku and Vegeta would die if they were to remain on an exploding planet. On Namek, Goku as a Super Saiyan seems sure he will die if he doesn't escape, and Vegeta as a Super Saiyan Blue actually does die in Revival of F when Frieza blows up Earth without attacking Vegeta directly. Only Frieza can use techniques like this because his biology allows him to survive in outer space even after losing like 70% of his flesh and organs.
While I can easily accept that Vegeta COULD destroy the Earth if he tried, I believe his attack would not be capable of simply blowing the planet away with a wave of energy. I think that, like Frieza, his technique would punch through the surface of the planet to strike the core and cause a self destruction. While this is still impressive, it's not really the same as erasing the entire planet with a single blast which I'm pretty sure we never see happening on-panel at any point before DB Super. Even Buu at the end of the manga uses an attack to destroy the Earth that is described in the same way as Frieza's technique. It damages the inside of the planet enough to cause the planet to self destruct. And Buu's power level being at the end of DBZ would have you believe he should be able to wholly destroy a planet with an enormous energy ball, but he doesn't. Goku with access to Super Saiyan 3 and Vegeta with access to Super Saiyan 2 make the calculation that even combined, they cannot intercept Buu's attack that ONLY has enough power to damage the Earth, let alone destroy a solar system like we hear Cell boast. They have to run away from an attack which only has the power to do the same thing Saiyan Saga Vegeta can apparently accomplish?
This is why I think Dragonball characters are much, much weaker than the fanbase seems to believe they are. Despite Toriyama seemingly operating on rule of cool alone and barely cares about or understands the size of celestial bodies, he consistently demonstrates that nobody in the manga is above planet-busting power, and even then, only the most powerful of his characters are able or willing to go even that far. There is no reason whatsoever for Toriyama to hold back in the last few chapters as he has the characters use the Dragon Balls to undo all the damage caused by Buu. But still, Buu ONLY destroys the Earth with his most powerful attack. No other planet is destroyed, nor does the sun seem to be affected. Even with the damage being temporary considering the Dragon Balls, Toriyama opts to keep Buu below solar-system-busting. I don't think this is a conscious decision. I think from Toriyama's point of view, he didn't write himself into a corner. He doesn't look at his characters from the perspective of "Oh, Goku has 3 forms, they multiply his power by 50x, 2x, 4x, which means he can generate X-gigajoules and blow away Y-amount of solar systems." Like if you read the manga or watch the movies while accepting character statements as feats, the series makes zero sense, and the if the author intended you to read character statements as feats, he could not miss how nonsense the plot is either. People handwave it away by saying "ki control" but like Buu, a creature of chaos, unleashes a mere planet-busting power ball that the two supposedly solar system busting characters can't over power or deflect.
I mostly agree, I think, though I had to review the fight because, unlike DBZ powerscalers, I don't rewatch the Saiyan and Namek Sagas every weekend.
One thing that really stood out to me that I don't think I ever noted before is how much defeating Vegeta relied on collaboration, and not just a series of duels. Yeah, Yajirobi or whatever his name is cuts Vegeta's tail, and it's kind of cool how that happens after Gohan distracts Vegeta and then Krillin tries and fails, but the way that Goku "imparts" the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, then when Vegeta dodges it's actually Gohan deflecting it into him that most saliently beats him, it's way more involved than most of the later fights. idk, I just like little guys working together to beat a big guy, like I'm some kind of socialist ig.
Anyway, regarding the powerscaling bullshit
Yeah, if "planetbuster" means firing a beam of about Death Star level or greater, that immediately just reduces the whole planet to debris, I totally agree that Vegeta can't do that. At that point, the beam clash would logically make the planet uninhabitable (because a directed explosion of equal power would be occurring right on its surface) and I think Toriyama wouldn't pay attention to that, but would at least take the blowback a little more gravely than he does in the actual fight.
That said, I think Vegeta did mean it. His ship is still working and he still has the remote, since that's how he gets away later anyway. I can promise you his thinking is essentially "Fuck it, let's waste this asshole and blow up the planet. I don't care about possessing Earth, I want this stain on my pride erased." If the planet slowly collapses like we saw with Frieza, Vegeta would unquestionably have enough time to escape in his pod (assuming he actually defeated his opponents), and that's without factoring in that he seemed pretty confident in his psychological profiling of Goku and surely knew that letting the Earth die was not something Goku would view as an option in that scenario, meaning he didn't think the full force of the blast had even a chance of hitting the Earth anyway.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables. That's sort of a major part of his character and gets him nearly killed multiple times with Zarbon, the Android twins, and Cell, and some version of that hastiness literally does kill him against Buu. The Saiyan Saga is Vegeta at his most shallow and unreasonable -- as made obvious by him killing Nappa just because -- so him making a ramshackle plan that is likely to kill him even if he got relatively lucky because he didn't think it through properly is perfectly in character. In fact, we could consider the Saiyan Saga another instance of almost getting killed along the same lines because, if he had just not killed Nappa he probably would have won, since even an injured Nappa could fight the small fries well enough and also become a Great Ape. If Goku's fading consciousness failed and he wasn't able to notice Krillin at the end, Vegeta would have probably died right there from being stabbed in the back.
Hell, if he had just not been such an asshole and done things like threaten to destroy the planet out of spite, he might have had a chance of at least stalling Krillin enough to find some method of escape (like resting enough to bat Krillin away just a single time and then flying out of there.
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about. In one of the last few chapters, someone tosses a Senzu Bean to Gohan, he fumbles it, and the bean falls in a crack in the Earth, and everyone is just like "that's gone now". These fuckers literally move so much faster than sight that it's condescending to even say that! There is nothing in the world that can convince me that Gohan could not have recovered the bean before it hit the ground, bounced, and fell into the fissure, to say nothing of the fact that it should still be totally possible to retrieve from the ground anyway. Like, nevermind what dumbass powerscalers say about faster-than-light speech during the Frieza Saga, the base manga even without the weird pseudoscience "calculating" falls apart so quickly if you look even a little closely at it as far as consistency goes.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables.
Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I said I could accept Vegeta being capable of destroying a planet in the same way Frieza does because there's no feats to suggest he can wipe out a planet in one blast, and there's no way in my mind I could see Vegeta wanting to kill Goku so badly that he would intentionally explode the planet with his galick gun and kill himself in the process.
spoiler
I think that at that point in the series, reading it chronologically and witnessing Toriyama's escalation of events, his max power would only severely damage Earth. Before Nappa and Vegeta show up, the largest attack we witness (ignoring the Moon outliers that make no sense) is Piccolo Jr. nuking the World Tournament stage fighting Goku. We're not narratively supposed to believe that Toriyama's characters in this series are LITERALLY fast enough to outspeed light and LITERALLY powerful enough to erase planets and solar systems. Otherwise it would make no sense for Goku to tell his friends he doesn't think he can beat Frieza after hearing Frieza boast about blowing up Namek. If powerscalers were right and everybody 5x stronger than "moonbuster" Roshi or whatever can easily wipe a planet from existence, Goku should have laughed in Frieza's face when he said that because Goku should be well aware that he could annihilate Earth if he wanted to when he was 15 years old in that case. Whereas when Vegeta said he was going to turn Goku and his planet into space dust, Goku was well aware that he could at the very least match Vegeta's power output with Kaioken and didn't just give up hope after hearing him boast. But all of a sudden a couple weeks/months later he falters in the face of a planet-buster? Hmmmm
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about.
There's so many hilarious antifeats in the Buu Saga and in Super it's pretty funny hearing all the ways powerscalers try to cope by inventing an alternate reality. Like there's more antifeats than actual feats but they have to pretend that DBZ characters' abilities scale linearly upward infinitely because they can't bear the thought of Saitama or Superman or whatever having a feat that trounces them lol. Like when Piccolo is trying to reach them, Goten and Trunks fuse into Gotenks, and fly around the world for fun and then supposedly take a nap in the span of 30 minutes. This is used as evidence that DBZ characters are FTL or MFTL because the panel shows their ki-trails wrapping around the planet and they take that to mean they circumnavigated the Earth multiple times in a brief moment. Assuming they're correct and Gotenks did this very fast or nearly instantly and napped for 29 minutes or so, this is a Piccolo antifeat disguised as a Gotenks feat. You're telling me it took Piccolo more than 20 minutes to travel from his location to where Gotenks was napping and they were both on Earth?
Another funny one is after Buu absorbs Piccolo and Gotenks I believe, he fires a ki blast at Hercule. And Hercule, as a mundane human martial artist with no ki manipulation, is able to perceive Buu's ki blast and fire his M1911 three times in reaction before the blast reaches him. This same Hercule was both injured by a regular bullet, and also survived a fight with Tao Pai Pai. Makes no sense. Speaking of Tao, his power level is higher than moonbuster Roshi but was defeated by a hand grenade. Yajirobe has a higher power level than both Tao and Roshi lol.
Regarding Super, the funniest thing to me is the Tournament of Power where our heroes are at their strongest point yet in decades of Dragon Ball material, they get speedblitzed by somebody tracking them via soundwaves. Hit also gets speedblitzed by somebody else (Dyspo) intercepting his time skip technique by reacting to his sound.
Yeah, he did a bit of training because what else does he do besides chase tail and play baseball, but I don't think he was ever shown to make substantial progress, i.e. he didn't gain any new feats or even concrete statements by other characters testifying to being at least as strong as X.
I'm not convinced he could blow up the moon during the Saiyan Saga, but he surely can by Super just through sheer inflation. There is also the increasing aspect of the writers saying "fuck it" and giving characters power-ups that make literally no sense, with the recent Gohan one being the most absurdly egregious offender, so I'm sure that Yamcha could get to one-shotting-planets and well beyond in a single evening if it was more convenient for the plot (it just never will be because Yamcha is irrelevant), or just wish for it on the Dragon Balls and thereby get stronger than Golden Frieza, which apparently is a thing people can just do if the Dragon likes you enough to not have your wish kill you.
Yamcha was about as strong as Radditz by the time Nappa and Vegeta showed up. Piccolo was strong enough to blow up the moon when he was at that power level. In the afterlife, he went on to train with King Kai so he probably powered up a bit after that.
I've read enough Dragonball and argued with enough powerscalers to know the feats are entirely meaningless and change with the wind. Like as far as Z is concerned, (ignoring Super) blowing up planets is a big deal, incomprehensible to everyone prior to the Frieza saga. When Goku meets Frieza and Frieza is mocking the Z fighters and says he could blow up the planet if he wants to, Goku turns to his friends and is like "Yeah I don't think I can win, guys".
This confusion among the fan base stems from two things: Toriyama not giving a shit, and the various dubs that make up dialogue for the anime. Roshi blew up the moon with a power level of like 120 or whatever because Toriyama thought it was cool and apparently has no idea how big or far away the moon is. King Piccolo nukes 2 cities and is exhausted, and this amount of power is enough to conquer the entire Earth and mop the floor with people who are stronger than moonbuster Roshi. Nappa blows a whole in the ground and astonishes Piccolo. Recoome blows up a hill on Namek and astonishes Krillin. None of the heroes can fathom blowing away a whole planet because you're not expected to believe everybody stronger than Roshi can pop planets like balloons using 1/4th of their power
Didn't Vegeta also almost blow up Earth prior?
This sounds like cope but I'm pretty sure Vegeta was just pissed off. He was using his signature technique of goading his opponent into taking his attack head on because he has to charge it for so long (just like using Final Flash on Cell). I have 2 reasons to think this.
spoiler
I don't think Vegeta is suicidal. He does not seem like the type who would easily decide to throw his life away to kill one low-class Saiyan warrior because he was humiliated. After he loses the fight and is thoroughly beaten, he opts to run away as fast as he can rather than die on Earth because his pride is still somehow unbroken. More than once we are shown that Goku and Vegeta would die if they were to remain on an exploding planet. On Namek, Goku as a Super Saiyan seems sure he will die if he doesn't escape, and Vegeta as a Super Saiyan Blue actually does die in Revival of F when Frieza blows up Earth without attacking Vegeta directly. Only Frieza can use techniques like this because his biology allows him to survive in outer space even after losing like 70% of his flesh and organs.
While I can easily accept that Vegeta COULD destroy the Earth if he tried, I believe his attack would not be capable of simply blowing the planet away with a wave of energy. I think that, like Frieza, his technique would punch through the surface of the planet to strike the core and cause a self destruction. While this is still impressive, it's not really the same as erasing the entire planet with a single blast which I'm pretty sure we never see happening on-panel at any point before DB Super. Even Buu at the end of the manga uses an attack to destroy the Earth that is described in the same way as Frieza's technique. It damages the inside of the planet enough to cause the planet to self destruct. And Buu's power level being at the end of DBZ would have you believe he should be able to wholly destroy a planet with an enormous energy ball, but he doesn't. Goku with access to Super Saiyan 3 and Vegeta with access to Super Saiyan 2 make the calculation that even combined, they cannot intercept Buu's attack that ONLY has enough power to damage the Earth, let alone destroy a solar system like we hear Cell boast. They have to run away from an attack which only has the power to do the same thing Saiyan Saga Vegeta can apparently accomplish?
This is why I think Dragonball characters are much, much weaker than the fanbase seems to believe they are. Despite Toriyama seemingly operating on rule of cool alone and barely cares about or understands the size of celestial bodies, he consistently demonstrates that nobody in the manga is above planet-busting power, and even then, only the most powerful of his characters are able or willing to go even that far. There is no reason whatsoever for Toriyama to hold back in the last few chapters as he has the characters use the Dragon Balls to undo all the damage caused by Buu. But still, Buu ONLY destroys the Earth with his most powerful attack. No other planet is destroyed, nor does the sun seem to be affected. Even with the damage being temporary considering the Dragon Balls, Toriyama opts to keep Buu below solar-system-busting. I don't think this is a conscious decision. I think from Toriyama's point of view, he didn't write himself into a corner. He doesn't look at his characters from the perspective of "Oh, Goku has 3 forms, they multiply his power by 50x, 2x, 4x, which means he can generate X-gigajoules and blow away Y-amount of solar systems." Like if you read the manga or watch the movies while accepting character statements as feats, the series makes zero sense, and the if the author intended you to read character statements as feats, he could not miss how nonsense the plot is either. People handwave it away by saying "ki control" but like Buu, a creature of chaos, unleashes a mere planet-busting power ball that the two supposedly solar system busting characters can't over power or deflect.
I mostly agree, I think, though I had to review the fight because, unlike DBZ powerscalers, I don't rewatch the Saiyan and Namek Sagas every weekend.
One thing that really stood out to me that I don't think I ever noted before is how much defeating Vegeta relied on collaboration, and not just a series of duels. Yeah, Yajirobi or whatever his name is cuts Vegeta's tail, and it's kind of cool how that happens after Gohan distracts Vegeta and then Krillin tries and fails, but the way that Goku "imparts" the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, then when Vegeta dodges it's actually Gohan deflecting it into him that most saliently beats him, it's way more involved than most of the later fights. idk, I just like little guys working together to beat a big guy, like I'm some kind of socialist ig.
Anyway, regarding the powerscaling bullshit
Yeah, if "planetbuster" means firing a beam of about Death Star level or greater, that immediately just reduces the whole planet to debris, I totally agree that Vegeta can't do that. At that point, the beam clash would logically make the planet uninhabitable (because a directed explosion of equal power would be occurring right on its surface) and I think Toriyama wouldn't pay attention to that, but would at least take the blowback a little more gravely than he does in the actual fight.
That said, I think Vegeta did mean it. His ship is still working and he still has the remote, since that's how he gets away later anyway. I can promise you his thinking is essentially "Fuck it, let's waste this asshole and blow up the planet. I don't care about possessing Earth, I want this stain on my pride erased." If the planet slowly collapses like we saw with Frieza, Vegeta would unquestionably have enough time to escape in his pod (assuming he actually defeated his opponents), and that's without factoring in that he seemed pretty confident in his psychological profiling of Goku and surely knew that letting the Earth die was not something Goku would view as an option in that scenario, meaning he didn't think the full force of the blast had even a chance of hitting the Earth anyway.
He isn't suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I've mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables. That's sort of a major part of his character and gets him nearly killed multiple times with Zarbon, the Android twins, and Cell, and some version of that hastiness literally does kill him against Buu. The Saiyan Saga is Vegeta at his most shallow and unreasonable -- as made obvious by him killing Nappa just because -- so him making a ramshackle plan that is likely to kill him even if he got relatively lucky because he didn't think it through properly is perfectly in character. In fact, we could consider the Saiyan Saga another instance of almost getting killed along the same lines because, if he had just not killed Nappa he probably would have won, since even an injured Nappa could fight the small fries well enough and also become a Great Ape. If Goku's fading consciousness failed and he wasn't able to notice Krillin at the end, Vegeta would have probably died right there from being stabbed in the back.
Hell, if he had just not been such an asshole and done things like threaten to destroy the planet out of spite, he might have had a chance of at least stalling Krillin enough to find some method of escape (like resting enough to bat Krillin away just a single time and then flying out of there.
Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about. In one of the last few chapters, someone tosses a Senzu Bean to Gohan, he fumbles it, and the bean falls in a crack in the Earth, and everyone is just like "that's gone now". These fuckers literally move so much faster than sight that it's condescending to even say that! There is nothing in the world that can convince me that Gohan could not have recovered the bean before it hit the ground, bounced, and fell into the fissure, to say nothing of the fact that it should still be totally possible to retrieve from the ground anyway. Like, nevermind what dumbass powerscalers say about faster-than-light speech during the Frieza Saga, the base manga even without the weird pseudoscience "calculating" falls apart so quickly if you look even a little closely at it as far as consistency goes.
Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I said I could accept Vegeta being capable of destroying a planet in the same way Frieza does because there's no feats to suggest he can wipe out a planet in one blast, and there's no way in my mind I could see Vegeta wanting to kill Goku so badly that he would intentionally explode the planet with his galick gun and kill himself in the process.
spoiler
I think that at that point in the series, reading it chronologically and witnessing Toriyama's escalation of events, his max power would only severely damage Earth. Before Nappa and Vegeta show up, the largest attack we witness (ignoring the Moon outliers that make no sense) is Piccolo Jr. nuking the World Tournament stage fighting Goku. We're not narratively supposed to believe that Toriyama's characters in this series are LITERALLY fast enough to outspeed light and LITERALLY powerful enough to erase planets and solar systems. Otherwise it would make no sense for Goku to tell his friends he doesn't think he can beat Frieza after hearing Frieza boast about blowing up Namek. If powerscalers were right and everybody 5x stronger than "moonbuster" Roshi or whatever can easily wipe a planet from existence, Goku should have laughed in Frieza's face when he said that because Goku should be well aware that he could annihilate Earth if he wanted to when he was 15 years old in that case. Whereas when Vegeta said he was going to turn Goku and his planet into space dust, Goku was well aware that he could at the very least match Vegeta's power output with Kaioken and didn't just give up hope after hearing him boast. But all of a sudden a couple weeks/months later he falters in the face of a planet-buster? Hmmmm
There's so many hilarious antifeats in the Buu Saga and in Super it's pretty funny hearing all the ways powerscalers try to cope by inventing an alternate reality. Like there's more antifeats than actual feats but they have to pretend that DBZ characters' abilities scale linearly upward infinitely because they can't bear the thought of Saitama or Superman or whatever having a feat that trounces them lol. Like when Piccolo is trying to reach them, Goten and Trunks fuse into Gotenks, and fly around the world for fun and then supposedly take a nap in the span of 30 minutes. This is used as evidence that DBZ characters are FTL or MFTL because the panel shows their ki-trails wrapping around the planet and they take that to mean they circumnavigated the Earth multiple times in a brief moment. Assuming they're correct and Gotenks did this very fast or nearly instantly and napped for 29 minutes or so, this is a Piccolo antifeat disguised as a Gotenks feat. You're telling me it took Piccolo more than 20 minutes to travel from his location to where Gotenks was napping and they were both on Earth?
Another funny one is after Buu absorbs Piccolo and Gotenks I believe, he fires a ki blast at Hercule. And Hercule, as a mundane human martial artist with no ki manipulation, is able to perceive Buu's ki blast and fire his M1911 three times in reaction before the blast reaches him. This same Hercule was both injured by a regular bullet, and also survived a fight with Tao Pai Pai. Makes no sense. Speaking of Tao, his power level is higher than moonbuster Roshi but was defeated by a hand grenade. Yajirobe has a higher power level than both Tao and Roshi lol.
Regarding Super, the funniest thing to me is the Tournament of Power where our heroes are at their strongest point yet in decades of Dragon Ball material, they get speedblitzed by somebody tracking them via soundwaves. Hit also gets speedblitzed by somebody else (Dyspo) intercepting his time skip technique by reacting to his sound.
Yeah, he did a bit of training because what else does he do besides chase tail and play baseball, but I don't think he was ever shown to make substantial progress, i.e. he didn't gain any new feats or even concrete statements by other characters testifying to being at least as strong as X.
I'm not convinced he could blow up the moon during the Saiyan Saga, but he surely can by Super just through sheer inflation. There is also the increasing aspect of the writers saying "fuck it" and giving characters power-ups that make literally no sense, with the recent Gohan one being the most absurdly egregious offender, so I'm sure that Yamcha could get to one-shotting-planets and well beyond in a single evening if it was more convenient for the plot (it just never will be because Yamcha is irrelevant), or just wish for it on the Dragon Balls and thereby get stronger than Golden Frieza, which apparently is a thing people can just do if the Dragon likes you enough to not have your wish kill you.