Grrl Power #539 – And the winner of the cannonball contest is…
Woo, double sized page, and… well honestly not a whole lot happens on it, but if it had been a regular size page the art would have been tiny.
Maxima may be the only Lieutenant Colonel to allow her recruits to cannonball her. In the jumping in the pool and making a big splash sense, not shooting her with an actual cannonball, though she probably wouldn’t get too upset with that either. You’d probably wind up doing extra laps or get extra standing guard in the rain duty or whatever, but you’d definitely get in a lot more trouble if you shot nearly any other Lieutenant Colonel with a cannonball.
You think Max actually treads water, or would she just fly in place about shoulder deep? She probably switches back and forth. For that matter I bet she wouldn’t bother swimming underwater. I mean you could chose between all that flailing about or just propel yourself, how long would it take for you to give up on swimming? People can swim kind of gracefully like a dolphin, especially if they have flippers on, but without flippers, most people kind of look like they’re trying to climb a rope horizontally, or push bushes out of the way.
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Hey Max, stop complaining about the water splash.
Based on the scale in the overhead shot of the pool, it looks like the pool is about 40 feet wide by about twice that long. Depth is harder to guess, but I put it at about 15 feet. 80x40x15=48,000 cubic feet. There are 7.5 gallons per cubic feet. That makes 360,000 gallons in the pool. Sydney only splashed about 0.27% of the water out of the pool.
Plus, at 8.35 pounds per gallon, that comes out to about 3 million pounds of water in the pool. The lack of surrounding view leads me to think it is a roof pool. My compliments to the structural engineer who designed the supports.
At least it isn’t Olympic-sized (I don’t think so, anyway). Then I’d be even more impressed. That’d be about 5.5 million pounds. 660,000 U.S. gallons, assuming a consistent depth of 2 meters (~6’7″).
I think your depth figure might be wrong. Most of the pools (that I’ve ever seen) are seldom more than 8 to 10 feet at the deep end, unless it’s specifically a dive pool for practicing SCUBA. It’s still an impressive feat of engineering.
Edit: Looking at panel 10… in hindsight, you could be right. That pool looks a lot deeper than standard.
based on the fact they are using it to test superpowers, possibly water based I would assume a minimum of 12 feet if not 15, but likely no more than uniform 20.
The deep end of the community pol (it was a privately run company, you had to pay for a year’s access. But you always pay, even when pool access is rolled into your HOA fee it’s still there, just not as a line item.) was 12 feet.
Sadly, last time I visited my father it was out of business, and apparently no one wants to buy the place and give it a go. Which makes sense, the neighborhood has aged and I think there’s a lot less kids around then when I was a kid. The local Elementary school has rented out a wing to the local government as office space. And while adults can of course use a pool the place was always more kids than adults. The did always do a 10 minute ‘adults only’ period every hour. I think that had a lot more to do with not having exhausted kids in the pool (perhaps for insurance purposes) than it did with giving the adults some kid-free time, but I dunno.
It is a building designed specifically to withstand super attacks. I think we can take it that more than one super power was involved in reinforcing it. Likewise it was probably designed by a Reed-Richards level intellect.
I would not rate DaveB as being anything less.
It was also designed with a Reed Richards level budget as well. So basically parts of the two floors below are used to hold the pool. I guess it could get used/justified as earthquake damping, but I think I am stretching.
It is presently being used for an entirely justifiable reason. Archon’s principle resource is its super personnel. Who are literally irreplaceable (on a like-for-like basis). Keeping them happy, and on duty for periods well in excess of the usual 9 to 5 is a justifiable expense.
Maxima alone is worth more to the U.S.A. than an aircraft carrier, for example. Having greater capability than such. So even the expense was just to keep her working for the USA, it would be cost-effective to spend an aircraft-carrier type budget on doing that. Let alone all the other capabilities the combined team have!
all skyscrapers have the equivalent of a small “water tower” inside to provide correct water pressure. It’s really the only way to do it. the water tank can be (and is) designed to meet several non-conflicting needs – pressure, fire control, vibration and earthquake suppression, etc. really tall towers may have a secondary tank(s) at lower levels as well.
I would be happier visiting Sydney, in that building, knowing there was an Olympic sized Heatwave oops-suppression system.
Please. Maxima could most likely sink an aircraft carrier and not be harmed in return, but greater capability? She is one person, without super-vision or any super-senses at all. An aircraft carrier can see and engage foes across the horizon in a 360 degree arc, and detect foes underwater. And that’s just the carrier and its compliment of aircraft, but a carrier always travels with its escorts.
Ehh, a carrier group vs a carrier group, one will win, the other will suffer damage. A carrier group vs Maxima, Max wins, and suffers no damage. Also there’s cost of projection. Maxima doesn’t cost anywhere near as much to project into another country as said carrier group costs to simply deploy out there. And then we have the question of beyond horizon engagement. Typically that just lets you be safe while engaging. Does Maxima need to engage beyond horizon? Is she at risk if she engages directly? If you fire your missile from beyond horizon at a building, you don’t really know the situation of the building when it hits. Max could just fly to said building and obliterate it. Hell, she could fly to the building, find the one person you actually wanted to kill, super speed fling them into space, and probably nobody really knows what happened.
All these reasons and more kinda suggest to me that a carrier group in a superhero world would be antiquated.
Sure, Maxima can probably wipe out the carrier group. But that’s not the point.
The carrier group can detect enemies and engage across hundreds of miles. Maxima can fly around and hope to see something. The carrier group can level multiple cities at once. Maxima is limited to doing the same one at a time.
Maxima has no super-senses, so she isn’t really that great at targeted assassinations. Unless someone tells her that her target is in that one building, she has no particular skills or abilities that involve finding people in order to fling them into space. A person could hide from her by moving into a crowd. And then unless she wants to kill a bunch of innocents she is limited to flying around and looking for one person, who could be moving the other direction, going into a building and being effectively invisible to Maxima, getting into a taxi and joining a traffic pattern, etc.
Maxima, high above the ground, could level multiple cities just by pointing at them. The speed at which max flies is probably as fast as the ordinance used by a carrier anyway, if not faster. Which kinda is a different issue; you wouldn’t use a carrier to level a city, you would use a destroyer equipped with many many tomahawks, or a nuclear sub, or a land based strategic bomber. But none of these have any super senses either, they aren’t going to be able to detect a dude any better than Max. Both would rely on some other form of spy power. Which brings us to the other issue: What prevents max from wearing a radar system to detect planes? Does she already? Do you even need to detect planes in the middle east if you have no need for a carrier group out there?
She doesn’t need to. She has comms. The guys on the other end just tell her where the target is by passing GPS coordinates. I assume her comm capabilities at least match data speeds from an Iridium.
Whether Maxima has greater offensive power than an aircraft carrier is one question, and fairly well covered already. But what a carrier group does provide by the bucketload is presence.
Maxima’s pistol cannot match her trigger finger in terms of sheer destruction, but it is far more effective as a psychological intimidation tool. Likewise, while it takes definite thought and knowledge to realise that you’re looking at a town-class threat rather than just a shiny Human, a squadron of F-18s needs no such interpretation.
To paraphrase slightly, “That is why we have conventional military hardware“.
I’l just bet it was built directly above the cargo elevator banks to utilize the reinforced concrete walls as a foundation. With a second smaller elevator off to the side for access to the roof,
My brother worked for the The Venetian casino a while back and was sent over to Macao China as a department head in logistics? i think? while they were building it. and he told us that they have THREE Olympic sized swimming pools ON THE THIRD FLOOR… and they are overlooked by five or six suites that have something like 15000 square feet EACH… and that is merely a HUMAN level building, not Superhuman level.. that pool on the roof, pfft, that’s easy
Not to mention all the different and exotic materials that could have been used with the whole magic & exosapient members who could have helped.
Since we dont who precisely how much effort Sydney was exerting (was that easy or hard to go that deep?) we can not make an reasonable assumptions about how much force was exerted here.
Maxima was just saying an “off the top of her head” kinda guess not a specific number.
Okay I was looking at a picture of the Archon building and there does seem to be a pool on it, but it’s not on the roof. It’s on one of the other roofs although it doesn’t look quite as big as this one looks. The top has two helicopter pads, the second ‘top’ has a bunch of tables and chairs, the third has nothing, and the fourth has a pool, and the fifth has nothing.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/comics/2012-01-16-GP0074.jpg
If you go back to our first shot of the pool, in this sequence, you will see that Dave points out that he has modified the original representation of the building. The old image has therefore been flagged in his ‘list of things to be corrected’. Once we get a billionaire reader, as a sponsor, hopefully he will get a chance to do that (or assign a trusted minion to the task).
I would offer a platoon of penguin minions, but they only have flippers, so their attempts at art have been… disappointing.
I am not quite a billionaire yet, alas.
Only shy that first billion of being a billionaire, speaking in relative terms about your current wealth level?
I think DaveB is just looking for reasons to be able to use phonetic Boston accent words where it would make sense :)
I think they should restrict use of photonics to outer space or, lacking a space shuttle, to the firing range.
I should chide you for misreading phonetics as photonics, but I am sure that it was on purpose and if it wasnt then its too hilarious to chide. Have a yorpy snack.
Yummy!
*gobbles down Yorpie Snax*
Panel 6, Maxima, I know that feeling.
LOL.
Comic too, of course. But that drole comment got me going again.
Droll.
That is what I said.
MAXIMA Weed Whacker Strings™
For the MAXIMAL brush cutting experience.
LOL
He he. Nice disclaimer.
What tags did you use to make that disclaimer?
a href test test3
abbr test test2
acronym test test2
blockquote test
del
test2q
Testing methodology: “test” was used for the first attribute, with a number appended for each additional attribute or component.
For example the a element was typed like so:
“test3“
Whoops, the link got converted.
＜a href=”test” title=”test2″＞test3＜/a＞
I think I get the idea
I half expected to get burned for misusing the abbr tag.
Which I, incidentally, now used correctly.
The acronym tag does the exact same, but will no longer be supported in HTML5.
The title attribute theoretically can be used on any tag. As long as the code maintaining this comment section is not too restrictive.
Jup. Filtered it out.
Oooh, i just had a thought….could dabbler use a spell to give Sydney extra arms and if so would she then be able to use more orbs.
Since the arms would be an extension of Dabbler’s magic rather than Sydney’s self, I doubt it.
She can use cloning science instead of magic. What about Zoidberg? Surely Dabbler is better at grafting limbs to bodies than Zoidberg right?
Sydney has tried other limbs, not hands obviously, but legs, feet, neck, butt, elbow, head, ect. While they could probably add some clone arms somehow, there is no reason to think any other limb could use the orbs except the 2 that are “setup” to use them.
My personal guess, since they move by Sydney’s mind, is its a kind of safety feature, to prevent accidental useage. (otherwise things like when Math had her smack herself with the orb, the orb could have panic shot off if any body part worked)
However, we have seen that Varia could almost certainly use 2 more of them, as long as she stays close enough to Sydney / Orbs
One of the problems with attaching extra arms is that our nervous system is just not set up to carry the information to/from the extra arms. Our brain might be adaptable enough to manage it, but all the connections in the spinal column are pretty set and grafting an extra set of nerves looks like it would be no end of trouble.
There have been experiments using VR (full suit in a room type things, not the goggles and controllers people have at home) and they were quite surprised that humans can quickly adapt to alternate physiognomies in a short time. Turns out the brain is rather plastic and under the right conditions will start growing new connections to control the new changes. There has been some correlation seen with the adding of new senses, but I haven’t seen anything about comparative mri or brain scans after adapting to a new sense having been done.
And despite all that fantastic adaptation to new stuff, most people that survive a stroke seem to recover very little of the lost functionality. (Haven’t seen anything that tracks the actually recovery percentages, but they all talk about what was lost, and make a bid deal over anyone that has any significant recover, so it’s heavily implied it’s not good.)
There is so much we still haven’t figured out how the brain works. (And that’s not even touching on the software hell of the mind.)
It’s possible that the brain recovers from very small strokes easily (at least in relatively young and healthy people), so much so that people don’t realise that they’ve been affected. If that’s the case, it is the larger events that are beyond the brain’s self-healing capabilities that are noticeable, and obviously recovery from them is very difficult since they’re defined by being beyond the self-heal ability. As I understand it though, the majority of the structural neuroplasticity (growing new synapses) and neurogenesis (growing new neurons) tends to be guided by existing electrical activity, making healing from gross injuries quite unlikely; the mechanisms are more tuned to creation of things like memories.
To have use of added limbs you would need the corresponding areas of the brain to be able to use them. So just attaching them wouldn’t be enough. (Maybe with brain implants it could be done.) One of my own characters foot-hands he was engineered to be born with. Just more work to get parts of the brain to be more acquainted with greater dexterity. And people who have no hands can use their normal feet with its stumpy digits. I saw one once in a Burger King Drive through I was manning. So imagine having full hands, larger, tougher ones to use.
On the “underwater flying” aspect… do you think she’d have to train to compensate for the difference in fluid dynamics? Like, her cornering and ability to stop, not to mention, if she went to fast how much cavitation would it cause and would that potentially cause heavy sonar ping and/or ecological damage?
And what would her senses even BE like moving at basic boat speeds underwater?
Super powers are weird, especially when you try to make them make sense.
Oh, and the cannonball thing: I almost imagine at some point Maxima and some cadets got a little nuts and tried something very similar to that. Do they still have any functional cannons at, like, Westpoint or wherever she did officer training?
How is the barrier even affected by outside physics in this case, when it isn’t in others? When something hits it with the force to level a building, it should fly away. Shouldn’t it? If not, then why would air stop it from sinking if she wants it to?
Besides, didn’t she have an air mask made for her suit? If so, then she should be able to form the barrier with water in it and use it to breathe.
When you’re shielded on the ground, you’re tethered to the ground, when you aren’t, you aren’t.
Typical magitech logic.
Apparently, the shield doesn’t make her neglect the general equivalence principle (gravity). Which isn’t surprising since it also doesn’t block (reasonable amounts of) light.
I’m sort of wondering what happens if she turns on her forcefield while in the water. Yes the water would be trapped in it, but what about the interface. The field is so thin that in the air it does not really matter, but in water you’re causing a very sudden sheer plane. Likely not the right word.
But I would think there would have to be some sort of physical effect from doing that.
In the part, when she created the shield on solid ground it formed a dome that seems to stop at the ground level. MAybe it cannot pass through solid matter when being set up. Don’t know if liquid would be treated the same or if trying to bring up the shield underwater would just then create a skintight field, not being able to displace the water. More than likely though, she would just jet a big globe of water.
I wonder what the visual would be if she gathered a shield full of water, accelerated to max speed (currently about MACH 4) then dropped the shield briefly. What would that mass of water do suddenly subjected to aptmosphere at that speed?
At a guess, if she shields in a lake and flies out of it she takes the water with her. and if she shields herself while underwater that solves the buoyancy problem.
Could make her useful to fight small fires. Shield in a lake, Take on water, fly over the hot spot, bombs away. Literally rinse and repeat.
I really think that Sydney needs to have the shield orb velcroed into her other hand when flying at speed. Dropping the shield when moving at almost 3000 mph might be very bad. I mean how fast can air displace around you and not become a wall?
Hasn’t it been confirmed that the flight orb also protects from air to a degree, but not as well as the shield?
I have no idea. I don’t have time to carefully study the comic pages, let alone read all of the comments.
The flight orb offers limited protection for the lower speeds but halo would suffer at the least wind abrasion at higher speed without shielding so dropping shielding at high speed would suddenly find her hitting air not pushed aside safely by the shield to the effect of the short girl losing .5 to 2 feet in a second
I noticed that in some of the cases of taking damage that the shield fractures (for lack of a better term) and that could be why it moves in certain cases
I wonder where supers get their energy from… Food doesn’t explain it, solar doesn’t explain it, food plus solar doesn’t explain it. I mean, even just hovering means using an immense amount of energy. We’re talking about mass times acceleration here.
Just to counteract gravity and hover you’d need to spend the amount of energy required to move your mass 9.81 meters in a single second. If Sydney weighs, judging on her height and build, say about 110 pounds (50kilograms), you’re looking at 9.81 times 50 kilograms. This comes out to 490.5 joules of energy has to be expended every second, or basically 490.5 watts of power. That is assuming 100% efficiency, and that it’s JUST the act of hovering, and assuming that the hovering doesn’t require pushing against the air such as with wing flapping, etc.
When flying, we have to look at how fast she’s flying, how fast she’s getting up to that speed, and what the drag coefficient is. Basically with no air (or water, or any other medium) to push out of the way, energy would only be expended on acceleration, not to maintain speed. Anything that produces drag slows means energy must be expended to maintain velocity through constant acceleration.
This is why you spend more fuel for hard acceleration than to just maintain speed, but why you still need to expend fuel to maintain speed.
And those numbers are also assuming just Sydney. Maxima likely weighs a lot more, though I can’t begin to guess her weight since her physiology and composition is a complete unknown. Needless to say that if Sydney can shape her shield to produce present less surface area to the air, she could theoretically fly faster because less energy has to be expended to go faster.
Anyway, the point I’m getting at here is that supers expend energy at an alarming rate. That explosion Maxima did at the press conference, Sydney slicing the tank in half, Jiggawatt slinging electricity around…
I’m assuming that Jiggawatt’s teleporting consumes little energy because it’s just transforming matter to energy and back again. The amount of heat, sound, and light produced ends up being the extra energy needed to do the teleport. Of course then moving around as lightning would expend more energy because she has to cut through the air, which is one of the best electrical insulators known to man, but the conversion itself is probably pretty efficient.
Harem is another matter. She seems to teleport instantly, and with very little fanfare. So I’m going to assume she’s bypassing any drag by exploiting some what Einstein termed (and denied is possible) as “spooky action at a distance”. Since everything that vanishes is still there when she reappears, I’m going to guess that her teleporting is far more efficient in that the only energy expended is what’s lost as a bit of sound and light (the vorp effect). Her duplicate bodies however had to have taken a lot of energy to produce, with each duplicate having initial cost of E=MC^2 to get the joules required to produce the body at 100% efficiency.
This sounds like a job for Dabbler, probably.
Cant post much while on my smartphone but you’re possibly making a fundamental mistake by assuming there is some sort of force counteracting gravity when most supers fly, rather than a negation of or displacement of gravitational force directed elsewhere in the first place. Although in Maxima’s case she does seem to be ableto produce massive amounts of energy for many of her powers (energy blasts, brute kinetic force massively beyond what her physical form would suggest (second one would also be true for Hiro and Stalwart, first one also applies to jiggawatt and possibly Heatwave)
That said even if they are immune to gravity and friction you still have to generate the energy to accelerate when flying in motion.
As you yourself alluded to, a very small amount of mass will create a great deal of energy if it can be directly converted. Assuming 100% conversion of mass to energy, you could recreate the power of the GBU-43 MOAB with about 5 milligrams of matter.
It could be that supers are using their own body mass to power themselves.
No clue as to where the power for Harem comes from.
“Own body mass” … or food.
Well, food implies merely caloric energy, not M/E conversion.
You don’t need ANY energy unless you use force on some DISTANCE. If you just hover on place, you are using FORCE of 490.5 Newtons but NO ENERGY – assuming 100% effectivity of course. Rockets needs energy to hover because they are very ineffective at it. Hidden ropes are much more effective (note: they must be hidden, because if they are visible everyone sees it’s not hovering.)
The distance in question is nullification of the gravitational acceleration vector. Meaning, 9.8m/s². So unless the subject is resting on the ground (e.g. not hovering), your statement isn’t accurate.
Hidden ropes do actually satisfy the stated constraint.
But I think we all agree that’s not really “hovering.”
I glossed over this in my comment below, but the distance in question is resolved in the propellant, either moving the air (via wings propellers, or jet engines) or a contained propellant being ejected (like a rocket). The observed object is under no visible energy usage, but energy is still expended to keep the object there. Nullification of the gravitational acceleration vector doesn’t require energy, as many physicists will continually argue, citing situations such as physical suspension and buoyant floating.
None of this explains how much energy is expended by supers/magic users, or in what form the energy is consumed/generated.
Right, it doesn’t require energy, but the additional constraint of hovering does.
I don’t subscribe to the typical theoretical physics theories, such as string theory. The way my theory works, they could just use black holes via entanglement.
The idea some macro action is “therodynamically impossible” or whatever is based on the premise that no micro mechanism can precipitate a change of the magnitude required to substantiate a desired result. This is, of course, the folly of assumption when drawing from a limited data set.
You’re misunderstanding the problem… If you are not resting on something, you need to spend energy to hover. Take for instance a person sitting in a helicopter. They themselves are not spending energy to stay in one place, as they are at rest… in the helicopter, which is spending energy to remain there.
In order to hover, energy must be spent by something to avoid falling while under the influence of a gravitational pull, which is constant acceleration.
Remember, it’s all relative. It takes no energy to allow gravity to pull you downward, but it does take energy to disallow it from pulling you downward.
^ the reason it takes energy to disallow gravity from pulling you downward is because the act of disallowing it to pull you requires that you accelerate equal and opposite the gravitational pull.
This is why it takes no energy to remain in place by sitting on your ass, but why it a helicopter, hummingbird, etc must spend energy to remain in place without anything to rest on.
The atoms in the chair you are sitting on aren’t actually touching each other, the gaps are just to small for you to see. With superconducting magnets the effect can be replicated on a much larger scale, with one magnet simply sitting in the air above the other with no energy required.
Helicopters and hummingbirds only require constant energy usage because they are pushing down on the air, which keeps moving on them. Find a way to push against something solid like the ground, or the whole earth, and there is no need for energy usage.
The empty space between two superconducting magnets, or between Sydney and the ground is ultimately no more remarkable than the empty space between the atoms of any solid object.
Not in the physics sense, but hold your arm straight out to your side, hold it there for 5-10 minutes, and then tell me you aren’t using energy to do so. Yes, it fits your definition of imperfect relative immobility, but so does genuine hovering.
Satellites don’t hover, they’re in free fall, carefully recalculated (no typo) to make certain they constantly miss the earth, which is how they conserve their energy, also calculated to remain above the proper locations on the surface. The equivalent velocity to “hover” a couple (dozen?) feet above the earth similar to a rocket is far beyond supersonic, would require ignoring the immense amounts of air resistance encountered, and a perfect trajectory to not collide with anything on, entering, or leaving the surface of the earth. Hovering by rockets, helicopters, hovercrafts, birds, and other things is accomplished by applying force/acceleration on the surrounding air (or formerly internal propellant) to cancel out gravity’s acceleration. Yes, very inefficient, but required for the density of the objects mentioned. The main problem is “pushing” against a fluid moves the fluid more than the fluid pushes back, unlike ropes connected (by however many solid degrees of separation) to the source of gravitational pull.
On the other hand, submarines, divers, and hot air balloons fit your energy-neutral hovering by adjusting their buoyancy. Imitating this form of “flight” would require a very different sort of physics-breaking mass conversion, making said hovering super have the same amount of mass as their equivalent volume of air without converting the majority of their constituent atoms into energy or a different substance. Dealing with the repercussions of this is something I won’t get into right now (maybe never).
Not to mention that to adjust buoyancy requires adjusting one’s mass. For a human sized object to have the bouyancy required to float in air, one’s mass would have to be the same as the amount of air one displaces simply by existing. This means much reduced inertia and therefore much reduced ability to resist being accelerated. That is to say that when hovering, Maxima could be literally blown away by a hard sneeze.
A willful suspension of disbelief is required in reading a work of fiction. If you went to the theater would you say to the persons on stage “Hey, that tree is made of cardboard and that horse is really two guys in a costume!” One of the core principles behind comics is the motto “Physics? We don’t need no steenking physics!” (Kind of like in fantasy stories where a fifty foot long multi-ton dragon is able to fly using a set of wings that would be hard pressed to keep a human aloft.)
When Matt Groening was interviewed about his time on the show Futurama he said that one of his rules for the writers was “Never let science get in the way of a good joke.”
I agree that it is fun to try to work out the details behind the action and I do it myself often enough. It is a compliment to the author that his story is so real that you are drawn in enough to try to find out how the world works.
(Rereading the above has me thinking it sounds really pedantic. That was not my intent. I’m sure Dave likes these kinds of discussions. It gives him ideas for his story.)
If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts, repeat to yourself “this is just a show, I should really just relax”.
+1
Can you imagine what the world would be like if the inventor of the cellular phone had watched Star Trek and thought “Hmm, the communicator is a nifty plot device. There’s no need at all to think about how this might work in the real world” instead of what they really thought which is “How can this work in the real world?”
Imagine if people had read Jules Verne and thought “submarines are a cool idea, there’s no need to investigate the plausibility of making it real”.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that superpowers can be invented, but the way you don’t like the intellectual exercise of investigating how an implausible fictional concept might be made plausible, there’s no need to get condescending about it.
Yeah, this is why I added that comment about sounding pedantic. I am personally an amateur astronomer, avid Sci-Fi fan, have read everything from Asimov to Zelazny, have all the Star Fleet technical manuals, and have models of all NASA spacecraft from Mercury through the shuttle (including Skylab).
I was debating whether to rewrite my post to sound less snarky. Sorry if it sounded like I was stepping on anyone’s imagination. That is the one thing that has gotten us from banging on rocks to having robots on Mars (that we sent there to bang on rocks).
I think Marvel hand waves it away by saying extra dimensional energy, but E=mc^2 is plenty. Maybe that’s why the supers have so little body fat.
I heard Colossus has abs of steel. (rimshot)
You’re missing the point entirely. Rule of Cool trumps Law of Relativity, any time. Add in a dash of Rule of Funny and what more need be said?
You’re missing the point entirely. My post is about an intellectual exercise, not demanding that a question be answered before I can enjoy enjoy the comic.
Short version, Supers operate outside what we consider normal physics. They probably have some extra set of rules for them, but it’s not like anyone has figured them out yet that we know of. After all, they routinely violate all the major laws of physics on a regular basis, so it’s not worth freaking out over just one little energy violation.
For that matter, Harem creating her duplicates is a heck of an entirely different scale of energy mass violation! Do you know how much energy an adult human is worth?!?!?! Ever hear of E=MC^2 ?
Of course you can talk about her just shuttling them through some kind of subspace, but that’s only if you ignore that she wasn’t born with those extra bodies, and she didn’t bud them or otherwise grow them. One day she just started manifesting them.
Space Whale Magic Bullshit.
Oh wait that’s Worm, nevermind.
Sydney needs to learn how to open small holes in her shield. She keeps getting crap collecting in the bottom.
I’ve said it before, but this page just re-reminded me in an amplified way for some reason:
I really, really like Jiggawatt better with the white hair/brows/lips.
Like a ton better. And beyond liking the white, I actively dislike the insanely yellow hair/brows/andespecialylips. They don’t even look like normal black hair bleached yellow, they just look like a bold yellow painted over reality. (Yes I know comic book, but enough other stuff looks authentic enough. Max’s hair and skin looks more realistic than Jigga’s hair and lips.)
I said it before (no I didn’t cause it might come off as kinda sexist) but certain women + hair colour is as changeable as the weather, my daughter had 4 different colours in one day and her mother’s done much the same. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Jiggawatt changed her hair colour in every appearance… even if said appearances were just over an hour apart.
Except Jiggawatt’s haircolor changed in the middle of the restaurant brawl and was not the result of an in-character choice but an out of character (the artist’s) decision.
Here it is white and two pages later it is suddenly yellow. It is also mentioned in the author comment on the second linked page why this was done.
That said, I didn’t mind the change back then, liked it a bit even. Less so know though, possibly due to the character looking very different with the art evolution and other outfit.
I just realized that sydneys swimsuit looks similar to a star trek uniform. early deep space nine if i’m not mistaken, minus the colored sleeves.
I thought the same once I realised it was pinkish and not cropped short. And she has a badge where the communicator goes.
With the way she is built can Maxima actually even float?
The obvious answer would be her boyant chest but it’s also worth noting that her metallic skin doesn’t seem to be any heavier than normal.
Can someone pls translate Varia into general english?
My knowlege of english is limited, so i have literally no idea what does “dahty” and “drahs” mean.
From what I understand of it it “dahty” is ‘dirty’ (like naughty or perverted) and “drahs” is ‘draws’ which is another word for underwear.
Hey, where did Math, Stalwart, etc. go? Standing where they were, they should have acted as a pretty good shield for the splash.
Math has super-speed almost up to Maxima’s level, and is no gentleman. He will have vacated the area quicker than the wave could hit him.
As the other guys were there at his request, he will probably have dragged them along with him. Stalwart was already suspicious of Math’s excuse over the ‘orders’, so avoiding antagonising him, by leaving him behind, would be simple logic for someone who plans more than three steps ahead.
Math does not have super-speed. That was just our speculation when he showed up unexpectedly to make inappropriate comments. While he is faster than most of us, his speed is still well within the realms of non-super humans.
You will just have to take my word on it, for now, as the Cast List is under repair, whilst updating it to the current version of HTML. However once that is fixed you will be able to see that the symbol that Maxima has to indicate her super speed (with five stars next to it) is the same as appears next to Math (but with four stars next to it).
Calling it ‘super speed’ is a liberty on my part mind, as we know that Math has no literal super powers. However if his reflexes are so well trained that he is able to dodge bullets (something we would expect a top level cinematic* martial artist to be able to do) then he certainly can dodge a mere wave.
* I.e. the type of martial arts that can only appear in cinema because it is impossible in the real world. The Karate Kid did things which would be possible in the real world (even if portrayed in a dramatic manner that would be unlikely to happen in the real world). Hence is (relatively) realistic.
Whereas the martial arts in Big Trouble in Little China included the ability to fire lightning bolts. Thus matches this definition of ‘cinematic martial arts’.
It really bothers me that DaveB tries to pretend that Math has no superpowers. If you look at some of the stuff he does in the fight at the restaurant, using body parts from a normal human, no matter how well trained, to convey those levels of force would result in pulping the entire limb. His speed, and required secondary superpower of being tough enough to survive hitting things at those speeds are obviously well beyond anything allowed by the laws of physics for people without superpowers.
Much more likely that enough time has passed since the ‘staring contest’ that Varia has shooed the guys away after getting sufficient eyefuls of her own.
Agreed, with pleasure at a much simpler explanation being offered.
*wags tail happily*
I heard from my girlfriend in high school about one of our English teachers. When it was time to do a book report from a book the student would select, she would take the book and drop it a couple of inches onto its spine. If it fell open in one place, she would read a bit of that section to see why the book had been open in that location more than others. Often this would mean that the book would be rejected for a book report.
Is Maxima flying in the water? How much does she WEIGH? I’m practically human, but my dense molecular structure makes me sink like the proverbial rock. Maxima, in order to resist the levels of force that she can, must have a skin density far in excess of human bone, not to mention the tissues and bones underneath. Maxima may have to apply a flying maneuver just to keep from breaking a normal elevator, or fall through a normally reinforced floor, much less “float on” water. That said, when are you going to get someone into the mix who notices how attractive Sydney is? The self-consciousness is cute, but she has her own virtues and lots of men and women get into super-slim as an attractant. Just look at any super-model.
Maybe there’s someone in admin or tech support who considers himself a 5 – 6 and knows he’d have no chance with superpowered supermodels.
Wearing a Dr. Who Tshirt might get Sydney’s attention.
A Capoldi vs Tennent discussion is all that’s needed…
Who was that in an earlier page that was Sydney’s nerd equal?
In the few SheHulk comics I’ve seen the writers hardly ever address her weight.
600 pounds or so.
However….
For the cover with SheHulk dressed as a cowgirl sitting the wooden fence she was sitting on was beginning to break.
Nice detail showing the water dripping off Sydney being caught in the bottom of her force field.
I guess exposure therapy is over because in the overhead shot Math and all the other guys are gone.
Yeah, I ran out of time to add them. They’ve moved on to other… exposures I guess.
Im sure Math needs quite a bit of therapy so its understandable.
After reading all the comments, luckily my thought wasn’t said, so I get to say it!
How Maxima is accounting for buoyancy: She’ll fly up to Sydney, grab a hold of her. Syd will turn on the shield, then fly down underwater. Maxima will keep her in place, while Sydney switches between the unknown orbs.
Assuming the shield forms a sphere, and has a diameter of 5 foot 10 inches (to allow room for Sydney to move freely within it), a quick calculation shows she’ll need an extra mass of 103,960.5Kg just to counteract the buoyancy of the sphere in water. That’s 114.6 tons in US measures.
This may be beyond even Maxima’s capability, but the fact the flight orb can overcome such buoyancy without the shield collapsing could indicate that the shield and forb have a far greater weight limit than the
molestorblighthook (assuming physics as we know it). But of course, if Mr Newton was to see Sydneys orbs in action, I imagine the displacement question would be very low on the physics issues he would have issue with. :-)Stalwart would have no trouble weighing her down, though. Space shuttle weighs 2000 tons.
Good point. The shields load bearing capability could be tested by Stalwart increasing his mass until the shield either failed or Sydney was unable to lift him. Lots of useful data there!
Also that calculation is WILDLY off. Sphere is 4/3 pi r^3. With a radius of 3 feet (rounding) that’s 84 cubic feet. Cubic foot of water is 62 pounds, which makes that 5300 pounds of water displaced, thus that much buoyant force.
I make one comment about Sydney’s wetsuit resembling ST:TNG uniforms, and now panels 2 and 3 of today’s comic feature what looks like an appropriately positioned combadge on her wetsuit. I feel oddly gratified.
Way late, but I could see Maxima treading and swimming to keep in practice, but probably she would mostly fly underwater if she wasn’t simply staying practice. She doesn’t need to worry about it, but flying would be more efficient in so far as she could keep the most aquadynamic form. Actual swimming always involves sacrificing such a form to actually provide propulsion, even if you use the most efficient stroke form.
Nice coloring. Also Maxima’s eyes in the water bloosh.
Silly DaveB. She can only use Flight underwater if she bought it with ‘Useable as Swimming (+1/4)’.
Between how she looks when she lets her hair down and how she looks in a wet, skintight wetsuit, our protagonist has a lot more going for her than just being a nerd with superpowers. She’s focusing way too much on boobs as a major area of appeal.
…Varia can touch the unknown orbs (sounds dirty) one by one (sounds dirtier) and get a feel (ouch) for what they do.
If she doesn’t already know she has orb powers, can we really be sure she’ll pick up any more info than Sydney.
Interesting thought, however it probably doesn’t work like that. Her power seems more along the lines of ‘gain an ability by making skin contact with a person’. (I wonder if her powers work on aliens and super-naturals as well?)
Touching Sydney gives her the ability to use the orbs as well (or so we speculate, maybe she can only steer the orbs but not use them) but Sydney doesn’t get any info like that either.
If you meant just grabbing the orbs themselves, without touching Sydney, nothing would happen. Her power works on humans(?) not on inanimate objects.
Oh my… your right. They would be willing to spend an unreasonable amount of money on a pool for super humans. Aside from the useful applications, (training and so forth) they would do so because super humans are an irreplaceable “national resource.”
They can command any price, must be kowtowed to in order to keep them on your side. What then, is the single, highest priority for any and every national government? To make them not irreplaceable. The manufacturing of super-humans is the new arms race. The superpowers are now defined by the number and power of their super-humans. Oh Sydney, they got you on a leash. The reason you didn’t get “whisked away” is because the establishment doesn’t think there is a good chance of replicating you. But I promise, they thought about it. (If she dies will the orbs bond with someone else? Could we split them up, two to a user? We could create 3 or 4 supers from her.) But they’re not sure what will happen. So you’re more valuable in one piece. (But we will try to get someone(s) else if you happen to buy a farm. And you will buy that real estate the moment you become inconvenient, or we think we’re going to lose you to some other group. But for now, you’re mostly safe, because it might not be possible to duplicate you. But what if a duplicatable super exists?
In fact, they do. We’ve already established that Vampires and Werewolves exist, and are kept out of the public eye by magic. But the Government knows they exist. These creatures can be spawned (and quickly!) So it is reasonable to assume that Uncle Sam is currently (or has tried) to use them as a covert/substitute superhuman force.
They would have to. Because if the US doesn’t and China rolls up with a vampire and/or werewolf army, even Maxima will be brought low, simply by sheer numbers. There’s probably a reason why they can’t/won’t do that, but that doesn’t change anything. The quest for a mass producible super is now the holy grail of arms development.
But they didn’t lie, Sydney. The government doesn’t have vivisectionists. Those are corporate.
In honor of the (now deceased) restaurant, and the newspaper seen in the hallway (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1223) today is the day in 1914 that Archduke Ferdinand was shot, starting WWI. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Headline_of_the_New_York_Times_June-29-1914.jpg)
So Sydney, in case one of those orbs is set up for time travel there is a place you might want to go.
*skips Yorpie Snacks off the water across the pool* Go get ’em Yorp!
*doggy paddles at motor-boat speeds, to catch them before then sink!*
I have no idea what Varia said there.
A personal and not super relevant bugbear: it’s only flippers if it’s on a pinball machine, it’s fine if you’re propelling yourself through the water.
Ok but what was the title of the book?
“Jack the Bodice Ripper“, apparently. You can even read a few paragraphs, if you want.
Sorry, tried to include a direct link to a comment in which bobsico linked the paragraphs in question, but it evidently didn’t take. It’s on the same page in which we see the title, on Page 2 of the comments.
Damnit, I don’t care how many millions a week you’re pulling in, destroying someone’s book is haram. Even if it’s a trashy romance. Better give her a large gift card to Subterranean Press or something cool for an apology.
On second thought Heatwave can almost definitely save it. Something something 451° Fahrenheit is not actually hot enough to burn paper joke.
Max has Jessie Syndrome. She looks great with her hair wet.