Opal

Audie Murphy
 
Joseph Greenstein, the Mighty Atom -- inspiration for the Golden Age DC comic hero.
 
Uri Geller
 
Esther Williams
 
Katie Sandwina
 
  
 
No coincidence that Tony's dad was named "Howard."
 
In the comic series and movie, The Rocketeer, the title character's jet pack was a prototype designed by Hughes.
 
 
Also a superb physical specimen in peak condition.

Howard Hughes - supposedly the inspiration for Tony Stark.
 
Elon Musk - first eccentric industrialist since Howard Hughes to fit the bill.
 
Which, of course, brings us to ... Tesla,  the quintessential mad scientist, reputed to control lightning with his bare hands, create force fields, interdimentional gates, intercontinental death rays, and an earthquake machine - his real inventions weren't a lot less fantastic.
(I guess he'd work as a villain, too.)
 
Oh, while nobody beats Uncle Al on the mystic side, Harry Houdini, either as a mystic or a super-skilled debunker (or both - shielding mankind from the supernatural terrors ...)

I've been missing the Cold War - never thought I'd say that - so, even at the risk of a bad Russian accent, Turncape sounds fun. You've got thriller potential, in escaping the iron curtain and proving themselves in the West, plus fish-out-of-water comic relief adapting to 70s consumer culture...
 
They all sound good, though. 

Real people whose counterparts would be supers in a supers world.  
 

 
Charles Lindbergh
    1.  Traumatized by a terrible crime, the kidnap and murder of his child.
    2.  Had the best cutting edge aviation technology of the time 
    3.  Had a flashy nickname "The Lone Eagle"
    4.  Eugenicist who allegedly also worked with Alexis Carrel a French surgeon who dreamed of improving humanity both through genetic improvement and cyborg replacement of body parts.  Helped him invented a mechanical heart valve.  
    5.  Denied the opportunity to join the military due to his Isolationist history, actually flew a few combat missions as a civilian.
 

 
Aleister Crowley
     1.  Notorious occultist.  
     2.  Sometimes called himself "Master Therion", identifying himself with the Beast of Revelation.
     3.  Allegedly tried to summon a god into himself.  
 

 
"Babe" Dedrikson
       1.  Fantastically versatile female athlete driven to prove herself the best at everything.
       2.  Capability almost as great as her ego.  
 

 
Unity Mitford
 
1.  Wealthy British socialite.
2.  Nazi sympathiser
3.  Inflicted severe brain injury on herself in failed suicide attempt after the outbreak of war, allowed to return to Britain.
 
 

 
Princess Lamia bint Majid AlSaud
 
1.  Wealthy philanthropist
2.  Her name is Princess Lamia
 
   

Warrior 
 
Carl Thomas grew up in the streets of Auckland, where he saw the worst of the interactions between Maori and pakeha culture. Drunkenness, drugs and violence were a part of his life, and he grew up with a continuing lack of respect for his own Maori people. He was fortunate enough to have a pair of sensible and sober parents, but so many around him did not.
But when he was 16, after a minor scuffle with a gang of local toughs, his parents sent Carl to live with his Aunt and Uncle in a small town on North Island. And there he saw a very different scene. Maori and pakeha lived together, in a shared culture. There were differences, but not terrible ones, and they could be worked out. There were problems, but those problems didn't look as insurmountable as they had back in the city.
And something else happened. A car accident occurred, and a woman was trapped in the vehicle. Carl literally ripped the car apart with his bare hands to get her out.
Since then, Carl has devoted himself to being a modern man, a modern hero, and a modern Maori. He wears comfortable, stylish clothes, but has had a full set of facial tattoos applied (which was difficult, with his steel-hard skin). He champions the traditions of his people, and also the requirements of the the modern era, and tries to stand as a symbol of what can be - a synthesis of all that is good in tradition and today.

Lady Marmalade 
 
Esteban Diaz is a mutant with healing abilities. They named their superhero and drag queen persona after the burnt orange glow that accompanies use of their powers. Singing and dancing acts as a focus for Esteban's power to have greater effect. Lady Marmalade in battle performing in full drag and glowing brightly while healing their teammates and citizens in need is quite a sight to see. 
 
New team: Southern Cross
 
Who makes up the team of the four top heroes of New Zealand?

Wisdom from The Sphinx:
 
"You must be like the wolf pack... not like the six-pack."
"You must lash out with every limb, like the octopus who plays the drums."
"Learn to hide your strikes from your opponent and you'll more easily strike his hide."
"When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack."
"He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions."
"Do not go there, my son! When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts."
"We are number one! All others are number two, or lower."
"Sometimes, the true hero is the one with the courage to run away."

For technology (software), there's also the cost of successfully migrating to a new system. Enterprise-class systems are often customized to a business' particular needs and competitive advantages (so they're not QUITE the same as everyone else), and that migration doesn't always succeed. Failed new systems mean companies extend the life of an old system, and department heads are loathe to spearhead ANOTHER costly attempt until it's necessary, or a few years have passed.

For example, a friend of mine from the Philippines worked for quite a number of years in the U.S. handling the payroll system of a certain Silicon Valley company because it was all done in FoxPro, at at time when relational databases were already standard...

Rainha da Amazonia
 
According to the authorities a radical student activist calling herself the Amazon Princess has attacked various American interests in Brazil in the major Brazilian cities and ports. The truth is that several American businessmen who were exploiting the Amazon and the people of Brazil drugged and assaulted a student before throwing her into the Amazon to be eaten by piranha or something else. To their dismay not only did she survive but somehow she came back with superpowers. Now she has bulletproof skin and can rip someone's arm off and beat them to death with it. She hunted down those who abused her and killed all of them. Then she went after the companies and now anything from America is up for grabs as far as she is concerned.
She serves as the team's brick and can quite cheerfully toss cars, lorries and military vehicles around.
She has vowed revenge on CSI Miami for the ill will that its programmes did to the country (at least in her view) 

Don't forget pieces of eight either, where coins were cut like a pie into halves, quarters, and eighths in order to make change.  There were also coins called a piece of eight that happened to be worth one-eighth of a more valuable coin, but the octal-base for money systems comes about from the fact it is easy to cut things in half, and an eighth of a coin is about as many cuts as you can reasonably make.
 
In my own games, I don't mind PC's getting large amounts of wealth, because there are always ways to make it disappear.  They might be robbed, taxed, lose their fortune when their ship sinks, or have to buy expensive equipment (often some rare magical spell components or a magical McGuffin, but also horses.  I can't tell you how many horses my players have gone through; they are the red shirts of my fantasy worlds).  My favorite though is donations to charity; what is the point of saving the town from the goblins if their crops were burned and they are all going to starve if they can't buy food?  How can you resist the puppy-dog eyes of that little orphan who tells the PC that they are going to be a hero too and just gave their last crust of bread to their little sister so she wouldn't starve?  To be fair, this only works because my players don't actually care that much about money.  Their characters might care, but the players themselves are ambivalent about it and would rather be noble and generous than rich.

There was a a gathering at a Steve Petersen’s house for the old Hero Games employees. He told the story of how Champions came the be, and the mad rush to hand collate 1500 copies of that first book, and of what a disaster con registration was for Pacific Origins, and how they turned it into an opportunity, but sending their booth babe, dressed as Wonder Woman down the the lines to hand out flyers. How the had Bruce Harlick squat on the only open gaming tables inside the hotel (the rest of the open gaming was in sweaty tents around behind the Hotel.) the game was a success People would play the demo, then get up from the table and walk into the dealers room and buy their copy for $10.  From there , the rest is history. The distributors that picked up whole boxes at Origins would start selling by August. And the Distrubutors asked, so when are the supplements coming out?”  So upon their return from the con, they wrote Enemies, and The Island of Dr. Destroyer. 
 
Here are some artifacts from that first weekend:
https://imgur.com/a/0E72NAX
 
40 years later it’s still going. 
 
Scott
 

La Araña
 
La Araña (the spider) hails from El Salvador. She was raised as Esmeralda Anna Mariana Perez, an orphan following the brutalities of the civil war there, managing to attain a good education despite her bereft status by winning a variety of scholarships and prizes, and wound up with doctorates in physics and chemistry, but was careful not to let people know how easy that was for her - her mutant capability is intellect. She could have gotten ten doctorates in the time she took to get two.
 
She settled into a comfortable position with the current government, and was soon running her own research establishment. She kept climbing the ranks...until one day she found that her newly acquired clearances had revealed something about herself.
 
Her parents had not been killed in a guerrilla ambush, as she had been told. Her father had not been a country doctor. He and her mother had been peace activists, seeking to find a peaceful solution to the country's woes. So the government of the time, in colludance with the CIA, had them murdered. She even found her real name.
 
Over the next six months, the men who killed her family died horrible, lingering deaths from untraceable and exotic toxins. Then she did the same to the CIA agents involved - but a couple of top flight FBI investigators managed to trace the chemicals back to her, and she was forced to flee.
 
La Araña (She now uses no other name) took most of the budget for her research establishment with her when she left. A stay in Cuba got her access to old Soviet supertech, which she repurposed into her iconic battlesuit - four arms (the lower two run by AI servitors), capacities to spray a wide variety of entangles and swing lines, and several varieties of sprayable, injectable and contact poisons. Then she went looking for people who hated the USA as much as she did.

Yacumama
 
Nataya is a member of an indigenous Asháninka tribe in Peru. Her people's land has been exploited and ruined by logging and it's resources stolen for years. When she was 15 her mutant shape shifting abilities activated in a moment of anger and her mind chose the form of a legendary giant serpant Yacumama the "mother of water". She went on to attack loggers, rubber harvesters, cartel plantations and anyone else who she saw as perpetrators against her people's land. This led to her going against US interests and causing a conglomerate to call on the US government to okay an unsanctioned incursion using military contractors. Nataya fought hard against the group of super powered mercenaries the Kill Corps, but was nearly defeated until La Araña intervened. She was then recruited to the team. She is still very young, naive and full of anger and the other members of the team manipulate her somewhat to act as a weapon against their common enemies.

So you're saying that you'd advise people to take wooden nickels?   

I hate Transform, I'll say that outright, for this kind of thing.  You're not changing the target at all, so it makes no real sense to me.   
 
The straightforward approach is simply +X STR, only to lift;  the SFX is the gravity cancellation.  
 
BTW:  cancelling the gravity does NOT!!!! cancel the mass.  You can lift, yes...but not throw, for example.  Momentum = mass * velocity.  Just because you can puck up a 10 ton object, and if you throw it, it'll continue to move forward...when it hits something  it's with all the momentum you were able to impart.  So, increassed KB should NOT apply, IMO.  
 
And if you have to completely re-write the conditions, then the power doesn't form a very good basis.  WIth the Transform, it's wrong because its success or failure is based on something that doesn't per se apply.  Mass != BODY per se.  
 
By my lights:  keep it simple.  STR, only to lift.  Don't need to get into the complexities of UAA.  Don't need to worry about the properties of the target, because you're the target.  The object's mass and size matter...nice and simple.
 
steriaca:  I agree that Alter Density/alternate Desolid per APG has major issues, because its end-game is Desolid.  That doesn't represent a physical density reduction to me.  My basis has been to give it a bonus to Contortionist, so it's still valuable for escaping an Entangle or passing through narrow openings, and some defense bonus.  The rest can be Linked...Damage Negation or Damage Reduction, for example.  I don't add increased KB;  my notion is plastic deformation.
 
 

Whether it's Jung, von Däniken, or some blogger asking "why does every civilization have similar myths?" the boring, non-racist answer is probably just "human nature."  We're all humans, we have a whole lot in common, a lot of our vaunted differences are just made up.
 
Orcs, specifically, just at a glance, do seem to represent something in humans that humans instinctively hate & fear:  masculinity.   They're bigger, more muscular, more aggressive and violent, they take or destroy rather than nurture or create, they're hypersexual, prone to criminality, and inveterate rapists... and they're ugly & stupid.  As negative stereotypes go, it's kinda on the nose, really.
 
In contrast, BTW, elves are gracile, agile, intelligent, beautiful, creative, live in harmony with nature and wield magic.  You could say there's a mystique to them.
 
I guess we could say "Orcs are from Mars, Elves are from Venus."

Or maybe he got an endorsement deal with an off-brand roomba(tm) clone.

I'm going to put up a group that is in my universe and see how you all play with the concept.
 
 
The Nuclear Wing.
 
This 31st century mercenary unit has has something that puts the fear of God in every sentient lifeform in the known universe; its own private nuclear arsenal. The threat of using one of these devices is usually enough for the target to concede but for exceptionally stiff resistance, there is a 6 man unit to really get the point across. Each member has abilities that mimic certain aspects of nuclear warfare from straight-up WMD to its after effects and everything in between. 
 
 
Once the six spots are filled I will reveal my members of the Nuclear Wing and compare the two. 

Or maybe he got an endorsement deal with an off-brand roomba(tm) clone.

Special thanks to Quackhell for posting the color interpretations of the original pride flag, and for throwing down Pink.  It looks like we should be able to do all 8!   I'm going to take the always idiosyncratic indigo (which we can all thank Isaac Newton's mystic bent for).    Why, not, I played The Indigo Incantantrix back in the day.
 
Selene
 
Named after the titan of ancient Greek mythology, so the final 'e' is pronounced, Selene is a very tall (6'6"), willowy, sublimely beautiful transwoman.  She wears a deep purplish-blue costume seemingly studded with silvery sequins giving the 'illusion' of stars in a night sky.  Her hair is long, straight, and so dark a black as to appear blue in the right light, while her face is luminously pale.  In total darkness she actually glows enough to dimly light a modest area around her, in full  sunlight, she is surrounded by shadow, not deep shadow, just cool, comfortable shade.  Aside from that, she has few obvious superpowers.  In combat, she evades attacks with smooth, sinuous movements that seem languid yet make her almost untouchable, like an Aki-do master, similarly, enemies sometimes find themselves over-committing and losing their balance when attacking her, even if she doesn't actually touch them.   She can deflect energy and ranged killing attacks in a small area around her, or neutralize such attacks in a larger area if her power is enhanced...
 

Captain Apollo
 
He looks gorgeous and is attractive to men and women alike. He flies and blasts sunlight, even giving out a terrific sunburst which can dispell darkness. He is immune to evil i.e. demonic and devilish powers. He is also immune to poisons and germs which he burns off. His quasi angel like appearance has lead to him being equally reviled and adored. He could use his position to exploit people but he does not which upsets his opponents.

Afrodisia
 
A social media LGBTQ+ advocate and influencer,  the loud and proud pansexual princess stands out with her large cotton candy pink afro and flashy and fabulously outrageous fashions. This unfortunately made her a perfect target for Pastor Purejoy and his followers. She was abducted and subjected to Purejoy's sadistic conversion therapy. However this treatment backfired and seemed to unlock the hidden mutant potential in Afrodisia. Instead of repressing her sexual drive and desires it intensified them and gave her the ability to project those feelings into others. Freed from Purejoy's clutches by Captain Apollo she was happy to join the Rainbow Warriors. Her abilities allow her to calm enemies and fill them with joy and sexual urges that tend to make them no longer a threat. She is excellent in riot control situations...although sometimes the results can be a bit shocking for the more prudish.

Carl Smith is African American and gay. He also has an unusual power in that he can sense someone's life force. He can determine if someone is ill, in pain or at risk. He cannot cure but he can determine if someone needs a cure. Carl fled to San Francisco as the forces of evil launched a war to grab him. Of these only Dr Carl Blatchford has revealed his been positively identified. A mystery figure has aided Carl and trained him in the use of his powers. He can now hide himself by masking his own life force; detect other people (very useful in building collapses, earthquakes and wilderness searches), detect a specific person (this requires some work); drain the energy of a target making them sleep or knock them out. He could cause a target pain but resolutely refuses to do so.
He looks up to The Green Woman and Captain Apollo who provide maternal and paternal support.
He calls himself Cinnabar which is a shade of red

Miki James  is a small woman, with a happy, smiling demeanour. Most of the time she works in a small tax firm as an agent, a job she enjoys, helping people travel the labyrinthine paths of the tax code. She lives a quiet life, looking after her elderly Japanese grandmother alongside her wife of five years.
 
She doesn't like trouble. Avoids it when she can. But if she decides you're the problem, you get removed. Most of the time, Miki has no superpowers. But when she decides to act, she's unstoppable - and that's fairly literal. If all she's up against is guys with guns, her skin gets as hard as steel, and she gets the strength to break those guns. When superbeings are involved, she simply becomes powerful enough to defeat them. ALL OF THEM. Not that she hurts anyone - she just rounds them up and puts them in jail. They say that the humiliation of being a powerful brick and still getting picked up and carried to a cell by a tiny Asian woman is as much of a counter to recidivism as any program in Stronghold.
 
Miki wears a purple scarf over her face when she acts, but everyone knows who she is.

Shadowmind
 
This is one of the older members of the group. They have a helmet which has a visor which is opaque to people so people are not sure if it is a man or woman they are facing. Due to their extensive experience they serve as leader. Shadowmind can dampen mental powers and produce dark fields which obscure where his colleagues are. They use hand signals and mindlnks o that the others know what to do and when. They have martial arts ability and a padded costume to absorb physical and energy damage. It is commonly believed that this villain has been ripped off several times and so must continue to work to get money to retire.