Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #7
One more DSC to go then we’ll cut back to the story in progress. Things have settled down a bit but there’s still lots to do.
Max is being pretty unfair to Russia here. Infrastructure and upkeep is not a sexy thing to spend tax dollars on, but it is absolutely critical. I personally find it super embarrassing when a bridge collapses somewhere. I mean, as a citizen of my particular nation, which happens to have had the largest economy in the world since the late 1800’s, (I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I have to say I’m really surprised the UK’s GDP wasn’t WAY bigger around that time since they were big in the world conquering business at the time. Though I suppose you could arguably add the GDPs of all their vassal countries to theirs, depending on the extent to which they were conquered.) Anyway, my point is that the U.S. shouldn’t have collapsing bridges, but keeping them from collapsing is only important to a whole lot of people just after one has collapsed.
I don’t know a lot about Russia’s dedication to infrastructure, but I think the general sentiment is that any dictatorship swamped with oligarchs probably doesn’t have the general interest of the proletariat in mind. But you never know, I’m sure there are some dictatorships out there with their usual raft of horrific human rights violations, but not a single bridge collapse or train derailment or… I don’t know. Pothole? Well, maybe not within 5 miles of the dictatorial palace anyway. Still, as we saw… see with the Ukraine invasion – god, that’s still going on – it would seem Russian expenditures on upkeep can be very selective.
And a dungeon, once it exists is like an oil well that keeps building pressure. Farm it/pump it out every so often and you’re good, but it can get away from you if you don’t pay attention to it. Not usually in a decade, as Max suggests. Usually they grow down and become more intricate as they add chambers and floors, and eventually a certain level of monster power/magic density causes a sort of reflux that can cause a break. But dungeons can also encounter things that prevent their usual expansion, like pockets of low mana, or a lair of something that won’t be budged, like a dragon or something. Also another dungeon can limit their growth options, and if they don’t wind up fighting/absorbing/combining, that can cause a dungeon to break to the surface before expected. None of those things are likely on Earth, well, except the low mana pockets.
Oh, speaking of dungeons, there’s a three book series called simply “Blue Core” that I enjoyed. It’s kind of a weird isekai, as the person wakes up as a dungeon core and has seemingly little memory of his prior life. In fact it’s not really all that clear that it is an isekai until I think the middle of the second book when he starts thinking about what is clearly Earth tech. But I enjoyed it, even though there’s some kind of weird tentacle sex stuff which is passed off a a bonding thing… well it does factor into the story but it seems a little out of place. Not that I don’t mind weird sex stuff in books, it’s just kind of only a factor in the scenes where it happens. Anyway, if you like wildly OP MCs (and I do) and a good cast of supporting characters, then check it out. It was written by the same guy that did a book I really liked called Invading the System, and… holy shit, book 2 just came out! Thanks for not telling me Amazon. Dick. Welp, I’m going to go read that now.
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Russia under present management is horribly corrupt, and has a pattern of being unable to do *anything* without the result being junk due to the majority of the resources stolen by people at every level. As applied to Dungeon Containment Systems, that means you’d probably end up with one that was wood or cardboard with maybe a thin layer of concrete or metal slapped on to conceal the interior, like happened with some of their anti-tank Dragon’s Teeth and tank armor. It would be more surprising if there *wasn’t* a Russian Dungeon Break, to be honest.
No, maybe Grrl Power Russia is less corrupt, or they have some super who can slap on a layer of something indestructible that makes up the difference. But Maxima clearly doesn’t think that is what would happen. (I presume the purple box is Dabbler talking and the gold one Maxima)
The Russians would put a (probably, as you said, very cheap) dome over the dungeon, for “security purposes” – which to them would mean “so other powers can’t see how incredibly poorly it works”.
“3.6 roentgens, not great, not terrible”
They didn’t put a dome over Chernobyl, I think it’s worth noting. They did, however, turn a major lake into a salt flat.
I wonder what the dungeon administrator’s version of, “Hey, let’s see what happens if we do this?” is. Build a dungeon in Russia and you’d likely find out.
So, amusingly, you’re both right AND wrong:
RBMK Reactors were infamous for not having containment layers surrounding the reactor. This was because they were as much designed for plutonium manufacture as power plants, and so were designed to quickly cycle out hot fuel assemblies without shutting down and disassembling the reactor.
After the disaster, however, reactor #4 was buried in molten lead and concrete, and between 2010 and 2016, a literal steel containment dome was erected over the site.
Chernobyl is part of Ukraine so Russia definitely did not erect any domes there after 2010.
On the British Empire’s GDP, it turns out that empires aren’t very economically efficient. They make the ruling country feel good in other ways, but they aren’t the best way to get rich. Note that Russia didn’t start seriously trying to rebuild its empire (by invading Ukraine) until its dictatorship had pretty much abandoned industry and development as ways of getting rich, and settled for resource extraction.
Yeah, a colonial empire isn’t going to add _that_ much to the home country’s GNP, especially if your colonies remain pre-industrial so that locals can’t compete with the home country’s businesses. There’s really only so much you can get from resource extraction and selling Birmingham cloth to subsistence farmers, especially if you have to pay for a navy to keep other colonizers away and an army to discourage revolt.
The book “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012) presents the thesis that extractive economies will never advance, since the people doing the work have no incentive to advance the economy. The book expands on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) by linking economics and politics. Adam Smith also warned that if Britain didn’t allow the American colonies to invest in themselves, the colonies were going to cause problems, a warning that came a little too late, and probably would have been ignored even if made earlier.
Dictatorships generally only spend money on things the dictator sees or profits from. For example, that might be the capital, some mines/oil wells, a seaport, an airport, the roads connecting them, and enough military bases to defend them.
Very true, and unfortunately dictators generally don’t know/want to admit that they would profit a lot in the long term if they instead had a mindset similar to Deus, i.e. make life better for everyone for maximum profit and comfort.
A German engineer developed a computer based on electric relays in the 1930’s. He went to the German Nazi government for additional funding. The funding request went all the way to the top and Adolf Hitler could not see the advantage of the machine in the upcoming war effort, so denied the request. Unfortunately, the prototypes were destroyed during a bombing run in World War 2. Had Hitler been a little more visionary, that computer could have given the Nazis quite the edge, especially in developing a nuclear weapon.
Funding or not, the Z3 (Third model built by Konrad Zuse) was still the first programmable electromechanical computing machine. A replica, also built and maintained by Konrad Zuse until his death, can be seen in the “Deutsches Museum” in Munich.
Sounds like Dungeons and Dragons don’t mix in this universe. I’m surprised.
Also: Sydney’s question still remains: Dungeon delve when? Sounds like it’ll be years, maybe decades, so unless you time-skip at some point or do more time travel shenanigans like when Sydney was stranded on a remote planet, I don’t see it happening, sadly.
I think it’s gonna take a while. There are other plot threads to follow before they turn big enough to derail the story for months.
I disagree. Not knowing what environmental impacts there will be has NEVER stopped the government from doing an environmental impact study. Once you have the power to do something, never miss an opportunity to do it, or you’ll lose the power to do it. This is Bureaucracy 101.
I also disagree, but for a different reason. Not knowing what the environmental impacts will be is precisely why you absolutely must do an environmental study.
Well THAT would be a fun SCP crossover episode
SCP: *Secretly Capture Pokemon*
While there may, indeed, be Pokemon in one of their cells, the SCP Foundation is…not exactly kid friendly, shall we say?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBE1pFBoiTY
“There’s no environmental impact studies to do, since no one has any idea what the impact might be.”
That’s a really optimistic view of government. A more realistic view would be that they would need a study group to figure out possible impacts, and then you get to do the actual impact studies.
The way around that would be to make it military (which they have) and then just use force majeure to say “We’re not going to do those studies, since we’re not allowing the government to be sued for them.” The government can only be sued if they allow themselves to be, and civil suits cause most of the extra cost and delay.
The dome is a good idea as a defense against breakouts (at least until the dungeon expands out from under it), but more or less hopeless for keeping people from finding out that there’s something there. At most it will keep others from finding out via satellite what exactly is going on, which just means they will use other means (spies, reporters, other supers) to find out.
I think we should allow the lawyers that file suit into the dungeon to gather evidence…Whups bad idea! We’d get zombie lawyers. Probably double the number of zombie politicians we already have in government.
Does that mean approximately doubling the number of politicans?
The problem isn’t usually “the government”, it’s people using the government as a weapon to block projects they don’t like. Since no one knows about the project, no one can file lawsuits to use the government as a weapon to block it.
Max is probably assuming that there won’t be a continuity of government in Russia that will keep such a dungeon monitored since Putin is probably not going to last until it’s read to be delved.
That wouldn’t matter. Under Putin, even priorites like the military fall victim to corruption. If you’re a corrupt ruler, you don’t want underlings who *aren’t* corrupt because they’ll push back against you, but corrupt underlings will enrich themselves rather than do their jobs. This is why the Russian military in Ukraine is fighting with Mosin Nagant rifles.
They might also be fighting with those because they’re reliable, unlike most post-Imperial Russia weapons. (The Kalashnikov is built for no field maintenance, for conscripts with little to no training, and a centralized construction process. If one breaks, you hand them another, and the broken one goes into a truck to go back to the central factory. Russia’s entire military process has been based on _short_ wars, with time to repair and replace between conflicts. )
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Someone’s been mainlining Solo Leveling.
Eh, a bunch of fiction uses the same the basic concepts; the author just mentioned Blue Core for example, another Dungeon-themed work. No need to assume they got the idea from one specific story.
Which bridges have collapsed in the last 10 years that haven’t had barges/ships run into them?
In Germany for example just recently the Carola Bridge in Dresden. Not a proud moment for German engineering.
Wikipedia has 11 bridge collapses alone in 2024. Most of them due to flooding.
Hmm . . . doing a quick scan of Wikipedia for USA related bridge collapses seems like the most recent due to engineering issues was a pedestrian one back in 2000, the cause being listed as beam weakness.
However, I poked at one saying it was due to a train derailment, but the full page says it is under investigation and currently believed to be due to erosion. An adjacent bridge had actually been demolished a couple years earlier due to it being deemed in danger of collapse for a similar reason. So they realized the issue with the road bridge, but overlooked the rail bridge from the sounds of it.
So not sure how accurate a quick look at the list was, but that quick look did indicate most collapses were due to ships/fires or due to hurricanes or other such natural disasters. But the point is as bad as USA can be about such things we haven’t had too many issues with bridges ‘randomly’ collapsing. Assuming you are within the weight limit, there have been issues with ‘historical’ bridges that get damaged due to overweight vehicles trying to use them. One bridge collapsed because a truck weighing 180,000 lbs tried to use a bridge rated for 35,000 lbs. I don’t think we can blame that one on the government not maintaining the bridge.
Most recently in the US that was not caused by any particular accident or natural disaster: Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh in 2022.
Good catch, I completely overlooked that one somehow. Well I did say I did a quick scan Ha. Thanks for catching that one that is definitely an example of bad maintenance.
To add on to this… I live in Texas, and two bridges in the last 15 years within 20 miles of where I live have been shut down and redone because they started to crumble. No, they never completely ‘collapsed’ with or without vehicles on them, but I would say it counts when large chunks of rock begin falling on the cars driving below them. That being said, I doubt there’s a great way to count these up as no one wants to advertise that it happened, if they can get away with it. So I side with Dave on this…we should really care BEFORE they start falling down. They did shut down two bridges recently near my hometown in West Texas after an inspection, so it’s certainly not every bridge being allowed to run to failure, just to be fair.
Russia almost doomed Earth on multiple occasions after getting their hands on a Stargate, only to have to have SG-1 pull our collective asses out of the fire; you think they can be trusted with a DUNGEON?
This dungeon ecology thing is sounding more like 13th Age with every strip. They better hope they don’t accidentally spawn a mobile one like in Eyes of the Stone Thief. Damn thing will just giggle at the concept of being caged in with a dome – or worse, it’ll eat it and you’ll wind up having to deal with a giant murder-dome arena level in your free-roaming dungeon.
Oh hey man! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my work, I love your strip!
… Look into zombie wells sometime–they’re all over TX and the gulf, and there’s even more of them scattered across the US. Rather disturbing that we’re basically on Russia’s level with them, since the funding to fix them isn’t there.
The mention of worlds overrun by their dungeons makes me wonder if Earth might eventually put together teams of supers to send to other planets for dungeon clean-up and containment. Not anyone in Archon, since it’s not in their charter, of course, but that would be anninteresting way fornsome countries to earn money–rent out their supers.
I guess it would be another tool for containment/cleanup. But Earth’s supers are currently one in a million, so we might have somewhere between seven and eight thousand or so if you believe population estimates.
How many worlds out there have dungeons that are out of control? One per super? More?
How many of Earth’s supers are suited to the job? I’m not sure how well e.g. Harem would do on dungeon containment as opposed to say riot control. Yeah she outnumbers normals, but I doubt that does much against a turbo-plutonium dragon or whatever. Maybe if you fit her bodies with power armor…
That we have to estimate our population and the error bars involved tells you how likely we are to be able to contact all or most of Earth’s supers anyway. Let alone getting them to do a years-long off-world contract as opposed to being a big deal in their local area.
Blue Core’s good stuff. The tentacle thing’s there for I think 3 reasons- 1 is Author’s Choice, 2 is as a worldbuilding method (as you see what OTHER dungeons do with THEIRs) and 3 is as a method of more direct interaction between what is essentially a non-moving crystalline object and a bunch of flesh-and-blood people who wind up building relationships with it, without going the “The dungeon builds an avatar and this isn’t a story about a nonhuman protagonist anymore”.
They’re somewhat separated out specifically so people can skip over them if they want, which I always think is a solid choice on an author’s part.
Blue Core is still available on ScribbleHub.
So, only Grrlverse Baba Yaga has huts with arms for legs, instead of chicken legs?
None of the commenters above seem to actually have any idea of what Russia actually is at the moment, so.. Dave, if you are honestly interested — I can give you a quick overview, just ask (though I would probably prefer to voice it over on a call rather than writing an essay there in the comments). There is also a trend on youtube for tourists from the U.S and other ‘civilised’ countries to post videos of how unexpectedly nice, clean, cheap and vary average Russian supermarkets are, even in small cities. Just look it up!
If I had to fit it into just a few sentences:
It’s slightly tougher than in 2021, but we’re doing really good, and it’s certainly getting better. Infrastructure is not being as quick to renovate, but the trend is still positive.
The war does take a significant amount of resources, but average Ivan doesn’t really need to worry about it, unless he happen to live only a few kilometers away from the frontlines.
Vast majority of Russians (me included) would not call it a dictatorship, and would not expect anything to become worse in the foreseeable future. Unless somebody will provoke an all-out nuclear bombardment, of cause.
Sincerely yours, Nonsens, a reader who no longer has any technical way of paying for the Patreon.
TOTAL BULLSHIT but nice that Kremlins bot factory even reached comics.
Nothing you said is true not even if you live in Moscow or ST:peterburg.
20% interest, 12% normal inflation 30% inflation on most food,, 3056 of gdp going towards the war,
*
But i guess you are proud of you fascist army and their daily slaughtering of civilians in the name of the russian empire and their planned genocide of ukraine
That’s exactly what I meant. No freaking clue.
I mean, I won’t deny the central bank’s brutal interest rate, but the situation is very far from being horrible, especially for “most food” (it’s not 30% at all, closer to 10-15).
And yes, I’m fairly close to Moscow, but not in it. And I do have first-hand information from those who live far away from it.
And that, Dave, is why I would prefer to avoid public comments on that matter.
Oh, and yes, the war goes on, and will most likely go on for many more months, irrespectively of who will win the U.S. elections.
Are we going to get back to how Peggy lost her leg? Eventually? Do we need this much exposition to understand how Peggy lost her leg?
It’s not exposition, it’s Dave having a break from exhaustive fulltime comic drawing. You may read about the reasons just a few pages earlier.
Chill, dude. The artist has recently suffered a family tragedy (see his comments here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-3/).
Instead of taking a full hiatus and halting the strip he’s temporarily dropped back to “filler” episodes with lower art quality.
And literally the first sentence in his comments today he said only one more of these to go then back to the regular storyline.
Sorry, didn’t read those posts and i usually avoid the comment section all together.
Peggy has three legs now. You don’t want to be kicked by any of them.
I wonder what Baba Yaga’s foreign policy would look like if she took control of the Kremlin?
Baba can quite reasonable in some stories right? So she might become a valuable and popular ally for much of the world.
*giggling* imagining a re-hash of ‘Gremlins’ as ‘Kremlins’
Okay, for me this is the first time encountering this idea of DELIBERATELY building dungeons, just to farm them, because they somehow magically create valuables but as a side effect also create things that will fight.
That’s such a completely BONKERS idea that it deserves applause. That’s like ‘how do you take advantage of the fact that all children between three and six years old can levitate’ sort of bonkers.
That said? It’s hard to fathom the idea of, say, kobolds or orcs (to use a D&D trope) ‘created’ by this contraption, looking around themselves in this world and not wanting to install internet access, set up amazon accounts, establish trade, and hire civil rights attorneys.
If the orc and goblins do valuable work in the dungeon they deserve a fair share of the profits. Perhaps they should start a union.
I can’t be sure, but I think John Wick just got confirmed as existing in the Grrlverse. How else would you fix a Baba Yaga dungeon break?
You know… I’d play a rogue-like featuring ARC members.
Dave, Baba Yaga is a character in Russian mythology, like saying Hercules or Zeus. So, swimming in Hercules and Zeuses is about what you said there.
I’d probably use ‘hag-witches’ or ‘daughters of Baba Yaga’ or ‘Annises’ or something like that. Or just huts with chicken legs.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen the idea that there are many Baba Yagas instead of one. It’s mentioned that there are something like 14-15 in Mercedes Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms Series, for example.
There is famous (over here) russian musical animation “Flying ship” where are lots of “babki yozhki” so sometimes there is more then one singular “baba yaga”.
Now I’m curious. What would a French dungeon look like? An Indian one? A Japanese one?
I wonder if Max’s suggestion of Baba Yagas in a Russian dungeon is purely fanciful or if there’s something about the beliefs of the surrounding, intelligent inhabitants that influence a dungeon’s creature spawning.
Dabbler was wondering why a Dungeon Core specifically summons monsters and creatures generally thought of as evil or bad and we know from her that there’s a general sort of mana or etherial essence to a planet (I can’t remember the terms she used). So maybe a part of it really is in the name and to a good extend its the dungeon forming that way because of the planet’s perceptions of a dungeon and summoning creatures associated to that.
On another note: Who wants to see them go on an interstellar trip to a “dungeon-broken” world?
“Neck Deep in Baba Yagas” sounds like a New Wave band or the title of a Bureau 13 Book by Nick Polatta.
The military is the wrong place to do those intentional mispronunciations, Syd. Either everyone uses a slang term unrelated to the brand anyway, or you piss off your superior officers (like RIGHT NOW) and get to run a few laps.
Not to “um akshually”, but I feel like it’d be Babas Yaga.
The broader world is just *super* keen at the 50/50 gonna elect Trump a second time country being responsible for the dutiful management of the apocalypse hole. On the sum… I would only trust Denmark. They’re the only nation with a track record for setting up infrastructure whose failure would wipe them off the map and then maintaining it for centuries (70% below sea level ftw!).
Comment from Russia – I think, government would try to implement Dungeon into some old and extremely secret Soviet bunker structure, that is already extremely secure… Or were deemed like that at some more paranoid times. But if there’s a breach… Well, swarms of conscripts against swarms of orcs. Or Rosguardia – suppression units with biiiiig funding. Possible place for Russian supers.
And if we’re extremely optimistic… There can be remains of something like the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy (NITWITT, original Russian acronym is still funnier). Fictional structure from somehow scientific and partly satiric fantasy from Arcady and Boris Strugatsky “Monday begins on Saturday”. Wholeheartedly recommend it.