Power is best judged by what can reliably hurt, restrain, or survive a target, not by costume, fame, or raw spectacle. For a campaign set two years after Omni-Man’s betrayal, four practical tiers matter most: small arms, anti-super weapons, anti-Viltrumite counters, and orbital threats. The setting itself treats orbital defense as a distinct category; Allen’s original Coalition mission to Earth was specifically to determine whether the planet had anyone capable of dealing with “orbital threats.”
At the lowest benchmark, pistols, rifles, shotguns, and similar battlefield weapons remain fully lethal against ordinary humans, many criminal operatives, and unarmored non-bricks. They still matter in the setting because most people on Earth are not superhuman. Even in a superhero world, a handgun is a real threat to civilians, scientists, agents, and many support personnel. Once a target crosses into true bulletproof durability, however, small arms stop being a decisive measure of force and become mostly a distraction, suppression tool, or panic weapon.
The easiest benchmark is simple: if a target is in the Brit / Bulletproof / low-brick range, firearms are no longer a dependable answer. Brit is explicitly described as bulletproof and absolutely invulnerable, while Viltrumite bodily tissues are described as so durable that only beings of similar strength can reliably injure them. That places ordinary firearms firmly below the threshold needed for top-end superhuman combat.
The next tier is made up of weapons and systems designed not for ordinary people, but for enhanced bodies: powered armor, energy weapons, seismic gear, cyborg shock troops, specialized restraints, and other force multipliers. In this setting, anti-super arms are less about a single famous gun and more about crossing a threshold where walls, vehicles, riot lines, and lesser supers stop being reliable protection.
Two useful benchmarks sit here. The first is the ReAnimen: cybernetic creations built from human bodies and enhanced to a superhuman level. The second is the Tech Jacket, a Geldarian war-suit that grants immense strength, speed, flight, durability, protection, and energy projection; Zack Thompson’s human physiology even lets him outperform standard Geldarian users. Together they show what anti-super capability looks like in practice: not “better than a rifle,” but strong enough to fight metahumans, crash through infrastructure, and keep operating in hostile environments.
This is the tier where most government black-budget responses, villain tech, and serious hero-hunting equipment belong. It can threaten enhanced humans, armored heroes, monsters, and many rogue supers. It is dangerous, expensive, and often horrific—but it is still not the same thing as a true Viltrumite-killing solution.
The anti-Viltrumite category is extremely short. Viltrumites are not just strong fliers; they are a species whose durability is so extreme that ordinary anti-super measures usually serve only to slow, misdirect, or inconvenience them. If a weapon or creature can reliably kill a Viltrumite, it belongs in a rare class of strategic threats. Known examples include:
Other Viltrumite-level beings, because Viltrumites are most consistently harmed by opponents in their own physical class.
Space Racer’s gun, whose blasts are described as indestructible and lethal to Viltrumites.
Rognarr, one of the few species in the galaxy known to be able to injure and kill Viltrumites through raw physical force.
The Scourge Virus, the most important biological counter ever used against the species; it killed 99.9% of the Viltrumite population, leaving only about 50 survivors.
This creates a very clear benchmark. Most “anti-super” weapons are tactical threats. Anti-Viltrumite weapons are strategic threats. They are rare, usually alien, often difficult to deploy, and important enough to shape interstellar politics rather than just single battles.
An orbital threat is any attacker or weapon system that can engage Earth from space, survive the transition from orbit to atmosphere, and force a response before ordinary militaries can meaningfully react. The Coalition’s champion-evaluation program treats this as a separate defensive category, which implies that surviving in atmosphere is not enough; a world must also be able to answer danger arriving from above it.
Viltrumites are the clearest personal-scale orbital threat. Nolan explicitly tells Mark that he should be able to hold his breath for at least an hour in space, while later species summaries describe Viltrumites as able to survive in outer space without aid, hold their breath for up to two weeks, and protect themselves during reentry. That means a Viltrumite can move from orbit to surface without a ship, without air support, and without the normal constraints that define aircraft or missiles.
Tech Jacket-class armor belongs in this category as well. The suit grants flight, durability, protection, and ranged energy output, which makes it a model for the kind of technology that can participate in true space-to-surface combat rather than simple atmospheric heroics. Once a force can fight in vacuum and then strike a city minutes later, it has crossed out of ordinary super-crime and into orbital warfare.
For campaign use, the benchmark ladder can be read this way:
Small arms: enough for humans, vulnerable operatives, and many non-durable targets.
Anti-super arms: enough for enhanced humans, cyborgs, armored heroes, monsters, and many local or regional threats.
Anti-Viltrumite threats: rare counters that can actually kill or cripple top-tier imperial bodies.
Orbital threats: anything that can attack from space, survive vacuum and reentry, and force planetary-scale response.
In short, the setting’s real dividing line is not “superhuman versus non-superhuman.” It is whether a force is merely dangerous on Earth, dangerous to major supers, dangerous to Viltrumites, or dangerous from orbit. Those four thresholds define most meaningful escalation in the world two years after Omni-Man’s betrayal.