Grrl Power #219 – Mach the knife
This page has two Patreon $50 supporter cameos. U. Kaya Yavuz submitted our speedster, Silent Shadow. Unlike Hex, who we haven’t seen the last of BTW, Silent Shadow is one of Kaya’s characters, repurposed temporarily for this appearance. I’m glad SS is a speedster, cause it’s not something that I had originally included in my supervillain mix. In my opinion, super speed is the single most overpowered superpower besides the obvious ones like reality control or time travel, and it’s a big part of why Maxima rates so high. It’s also why Silent Shadow had to use his first two attacks on people he had no real chance of hurting. Arc-SWAT will take their lumps, but I didn’t want one guy incapacitating half the team within seconds of his debut. Still, in one page he gets introduced, then gets three attacks with one good hit.
The other cameo is down in the bottom left of the page, courtesy of Shana Hills. She volunteered the fact she’s Australian so the first thing I thought of was “Where women glow and men thunder” so naturally she glows and has lighting powers… which isn’t to imply that Shana turns into a boy when you throw hot water on her or anything. Those are just the first superheroey powers that came to mind. She’s not out of the fight yet. It’ll take more than just getting hit with the Easy Bake beam to take out the mighty Glowbug.
Heatwave is one of those characters who is especially vulnerable in a fight. Normally she would wear kevlar or something, but right now she’s just floating and glowing. Yes, she has her heat aura, and that’s bad news for anyone trying to grab her, but it doesn’t do anything against lasers or bullets. Usually in comics, the guy with the heat aura can use it to vaporize anything trying to hit him, but bullets move really fast, and the amount of heat required to vaporize copper jacketed lead in the fraction of a second it’s passing through the foot or so of heat created by the aura just doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t know the math, but I’d guess it’d have to be millions of degrees. That sort of heat would radiate outwards like a nonstop bomb. Even if you say that the aura power contains the radiating heat, then essentially what you’ve set that character up with is a disintegration field. They’d be able to just walk or fly through any surface at up to the speed of a bullet, including a mountain of (copper jacketed) lead like it wasn’t there. So heat/fire powers in my universe can’t do that. It just breaks too much stuff. The best Heatwave can manage is extending her aura out and creating violent turbulence to throw bullets off course. That assumes whoever is shooting at her is on target. If someone is spraying all over the place, the turbulence can actually steer near misses into her. Hence the kevlar.
Oh and Dabbler isn’t summoning another sword in case that’s confusing. She can recall Soulreaver from where ever it is, I just didn’t have the room on this page for a panel showing it disappearing from where it hit the tree.
A-kon is this weekend! I’ll be doing a panel on Friday. Humor-Based Webcomics 1: Humor in Story. In case you can’t make it to the panel, I’ll wander by the Antarctic Press table quite a few times, and it would be cool to have a meetup for lunch or dinner one night with people. I’m not sure how to organize that. Best I can figure is to post updates to Twitter, and here on the page during the con.
My sixth (and final) Gynostar Guest strip is up! This doesn’t wrap up the story arc (which starts here) just my contribution to it. Come see Gynostar be bendy!
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Dabbler may be suitable to this opponent, but I’m willing to bet Syd will take him down someway somehow.
Actually, around 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s around 1100 degrees Centigrade) would do the job on the copper melting problem. The real problem is that you need to instantly raise the temperature from it’s internal temperature after leaving the barrel to the melting point. A 5.56mm(m16 ammo) bullet was measured at 513 degrees F (https://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_hot_is_a_bullet_when_fired?#slide=1). That means that you need to heat it (assuming it doesn’t cool very far, which is a big assumption) about 1500 degrees F. This is horribly difficult to do with Conduction, much less Radiation. THe best way would be Induction, but sped up via superpowers.
It’s melt at that temperature but not really insta-ment. I’m not even sure a bullet would insta-melt flying through a heated area of 4700 degrees. Even if it did it really wouldn’t help her much. Molten slag (or anything else) flying through you at supersonic speed tends to hurt.
In Afghanistan, the enemy would put a block of Copper on the IED when they buried it. This was because, in the explosion, the Copper would liquefy becoming Armor Penetrating. (don’t ask me how, I am good at science but the explanation went well over my head)
Up-armored vehicles and even Tanks were destroyed using this method.
So unless she can vaporize the Copper and Lead instantly, it would be more harmful to just liquefy it.
Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow. Fucking foot wounds.
Appropriate Gravvy is Appropriate :D
Actually heat can effectively deflect (or at least defocus) laser beams. The hot air around heat wave would have a lower refractive index (closer to the vacuum value of 1) than the cooler air beyond it, so it would act like a diverging lens on laser beams that hit it, dramatically reducing how much damage they can cause (a diverged beam has it’s energy spread over a larger area). Beams that hit the layer of hot air at a steep angle would be reflected off, the same phenomenon that causes total internal reflection inside of transparent materials like glass or water. If Heatwave can heat up the air so much that it ionizes, the gas would become a plasma, which actually has a refractive index of less than 1 and would be even better at defocusing beams. This is called ‘plasma defocusing’ in laser-plasma interaction research and puts a limit on how focused a laser beam can be in gas or other materials.
Of course if Heatwave can withstand such high heat, she wouldn’t fear most lasers in the first place, since most of the damage they do is from heating. She’d probably still have to worry about beams of UV, X-rays or gamma rays though, but hot air and plasma should defocus those wavelengths as well.
Physicist checking in on the melting bullet problem.
The rate-limiting step is heat conduction. ie. how long it takes the centre of the bullet to reach temperature Xdeg when outside is Ydeg. For a lead bullet, 9mm diameter, moving at 340m/s, trying to get the core to a lead-melting 600K, the answers are (to my surprise) MASSIVELY higher than the author guessed.
-For a 1m heat layer, the temperature needed is a frankly ridiculous 10^41 Kelvin (hotter than the big bang).
-For a 10m heat layer, the temp is c.10million Kelvin (would render the air into plasma, bleed x-rays/gamma rays… probably a series of other *bad things*).
In conclusion, yes a heat layer cannot stop bullets.
Caveats apply to 1) Molten lead travelling at 300m/s would still have brutal impact 2) at super-high temps there would be other methods of heating that invalidate the conduction eqt I used (xrays and exotic particles smashing through the lead).
Technical details – I used a half space penetration of 5mm because screw Bessel functions.
I knew it’d be a lot, but that’s hilarious.
I was also surprised.
Goes to show how important the physical interpretation of a power is… Whilst it is the simplest interpretation of a “heating” power, it’s just as arbitrary for me to model this power as instantly making the SURFACE of the object the desired as is a power to heat a VOLUME of space instantly* – the latter of course would not run into this bullet issue.
Given this heat conduction business and the ice-conductivity discussed in today’s comment, I’d offer to act as a scientific safety net… However I suspect that google offers answers to the basics (most of the time) in a very time efficient manner. But hey, if it sounds helpful I could do it as my reader patronage ;p.
*Could perhaps say the power is cheating the statistical odds on vacuum/zero-point energy and dumping it into the volume. Although that would open a huge can of worms on 1) Conservation of energy totally broken 2) Practicalities on vacuum energy say that the particles used to embody the energy would be determined by the material surroundings anyway (see Casimir effect) so holy hell complications 3) if you had a power along the lines of waving 2-fingers at the odds in quantum mechanics there are a series of god-like exploits available that would make the “heating” look like a pathetic afterthought… Anyway, rambling aside over.
I can’t believe it took me this long to notice that “Mach the Knife” is a Captain Commando referenc
Or Bobby McFarin – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8iPUK0AGRo
That knife is getting stuck in everything…. er… everyone.
Would not be surprised if it came out of a time-gate and dropped into another battle later on.