Grrl Power #642 – Screwed
I’ve never been good at drawing inorganic stuff. Cars, guns, spaceships – so when I came to this page, I just drew the first thing that came to me. Why the design is best described as a giant, fucked up screw is unclear. (Also if the actual layout of the ship changes slightly from panel to panel, don’t lose too much sleep over it. Like it, uh, deployed those tentacles between panels. Why a gigantic ship like that needs streamers like a little girl’s bike is equally unclear.)
Dabbler is a remarkably fast runner, between her digitigrade legs and strength to body weight ratio, she’s probably at least 50% faster than the fastest human once she gets up to full steam. Of course, we know that Max and Sydney can both go supersonic. Hiro is limited to roughly commercial airliner speeds. He can break the sound barrier with gravity assist (i.e. flying down) but even without that caveat, he’s still the team’s 3rd fastest flyer. With Harem on his shoulder, he’s probably limited to ~100-ish MPH. Maybe a bit faster if she was on his back and her head was tucked behind his. The 4th fastest is the V-22 Osprey at about 300 MPH. Heatwave is limited to “fast car” speeds.
Jiggawatt can move incredibly fast by turning into lightning, but she needs a cloud or something to bounce off if she’s not doing a line of sight hop, so her top speed is somewhat conditional. She’s never tried jumping into powerlines, she’s worried about blowing everything up between her and her destination, and also possibly getting scattered across the power grid and not being able to pull herself back together.
Harem is sort of the fastest mover on the team (when she isn’t discombobulated) but also technically not, depending on whether you measure speed as actual velocity or simply the interval of time it takes to get from one point to another. Like if a starship moves into hyperspace or the warp or whatever and isn’t physically in our dimension, then it pops out at another point, did it move quickly? In instances like this (and probably in proper science), there is a distinction between speed and velocity.
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The ships tentacles.
They might be for manipulating something like actual tentacles, but I’d bet they are more likely part of a versatile and reconfigurable sensor array. The fact that they look like a cluster of tentacles is sheer asthetics ;)
Tentacles? They’re dreadlocks man!
Space Rastafarians?
well that accounts for them suddenly “deploying” in the second shot of the ship.
All I can think of is that lamp. You know what lamp I’m talking about. The leg lamp.
OMG, someone’s gonna lose an eye.
So I know it makes perfect sense to have been overlooked cause of the panic. But Sydney should be carrying Harem since even if the extra mass did slow her she’d Still likely have a higher top speed than Even an unladen Hiro, so the whole team could accelerate to Hiro’s top unladen speed (since clearly the team is staying together.
Actually it just occurred to me that if her top speed was faster than Hiro’s even with extra mass Sydney should probably be carrying him too so they can move at Sydney’s top speed not Hiro’s
What about Harem?
She doesn’t have much in a ‘top speed’, and she can’t carry passengers, and that’s even if she wasn’t still affected by what ever happened to her when she ‘crossed over’
Well, from the point of view of being stationary here, to being stationary somewhere on the horizon, and not having travelled through the intervening distance, technically yes. At the moment though, being too disoriented to function normally, you certainly are correct about her lack of speed.
If she was feeling OK though she would already be at the destination (because it was in line of sight). As per the blog above:
Although if a bit of Earth blocked her view, prior to teleporting, then Harem would need to teleport to somewhere she thought would give direct line of sight, then complete her ‘port. But even that should be faster than everyone else.
Unless her time taken to re-orient herself turned out to be less than Maxima’s bullet-time movement. But Max is travelling with the unit, so they are moving at the speed of the slowest member (ignoring Harem, as she is already being carried). Hence why needing to give Dabbler a lift.
She should probably just unteleport but That will stop her from updating earth about what’s going on.
And that may be part of the problem, whatever that problem she has been having since they arrived
Yeah I’m guessing she can’t teleport..my theory is that she’s cut off from or has a weakened connection with the rest of herself entirely.
I know this might have been mentioned, but in the central frame, the ship is shooting a laser from the bottom tip, and the one to the right, it isn’t. Perhaps it’s two different ships, and that’s why the shape seems different?
Moreover, in a certain light, it seems both ships/views have a certain amount of battle damage. Maybe the tentacles on the second ship/view are flying free because they’re no longer anchored where they’re supposed to be? one of the damaged sections of the ship, perhaps?
It seems to me that this is a homing beacon being shot out by the scanner probe in the previous comic. As soon as the mother-ship gets here it isn’t required any longer.
Agreed. I had come to the same conclusion and was just looking through to see if anyone else had done likewise.
As regards the different appearances:
Which confirms that it is one and the same vessel. It is very likely by the way that all advanced vehicles will optimise their shape when travelling in an atmosphere. We already had a notable one, namely Concorde, which altered its nose between supersonic and subsonic fight/landing. The improvement in performance was significant enough that the engineering effort and added complexity/cost/weight was worthwhile.
There are others too, usually high-end performance vehicles of various sorts. Even multi-stage rockets do this, but from the point of view of optimising the thrust. Different shapes (for the thrust outlet) are better at different altitudes, when heading into space. NASA even got close to finishing a prototype which varied the shape at various stages (thus not requiring the expense of separate engines for each stage). Only costs, for other aspects of the design, caused the project to be stopped.
As we get more advanced materials that make such alterations cheaper and easier we will find them happening routinely, even in lower end ground vehicles. When travelling at higher speeds, optimised aerodynamics will help to reduce drag. At lower speeds some manufacturers may choose to make the vehicle more compact, for easier parking and maneuvering in slow moving city traffic.
In an emergency all material possible could be shifted to create a maximised crumple zone. Be that in front, side or rear, depending on where the impact is being anticipated.
In the vessel above it was initially in a mode optimised for instantaneous flight, from wherever it was previously (be that in orbit or on the other side of the galaxy). Then it started horizontal atmospheric flight. The ‘tentacles’ could be part of a sophisticated sensor array, such as being able to detect every subtle smell from every creature in a thousand miles!
*pauses to admire the pinnacle of sensory technology*
Likewise it would continue to alter its form as different priorities arose. If it concluded one type of scan, it might reconfigure to optimise another. Or it may arm weapons or strengthen armour in the direction of any potential threats detected, and so on.
I put the change in ship design to being the same as the ship from Flight of the Navigator’s morphing.
Or Hawk’s ship from “Buck Rogers”, it had retractable wings allowing it to fit into narrow spaces and claws (tried finding a clip of it in action… butt gave up :()
To rephrase the authors notes in proper science: i would replace velocity by kinetic Energy. Speed is defined as distance per time, and jumping would be just fine with that definition. In the real world things are a bit less disruptive, but speed still can change, sometimes quite disruptive as well.
Now, kinetic Energy contains speed as a variable (E = 1/2*m*v^2), but it makes only sense when an object moves (which is a continuous translation of one inertial system against another).
In terms of science, a jump wouldn’t simply be expressed with speed, because he math wouldn’t work out.any distance traveled in no time at all would make the speed always infinite. So jumpers cannot really be measured like flyers.
Fun fact: assuming supersonic speed, Maxima would need to burn roughly 3 million joules to reach that speed, which is the energy equivalent of roughly one year of food. That would make hell of a breakfast!
Karak is burning…. Sorry all I can see is the Homeworld series mothership. or the Myrmidon from eve online.
when you see a ship like that, you just know you’re screwed
I would recommend Sydney put her bubble around everyone and fly. She’s the Osprey mk2 afterall.
Mmm, my first thought, in response to that was “everybody but Maxima, because she is faster and tough enough to survive on her own”.
Then I was going to add “Harem and Dabbler clearly would be better in the Halomobile”.
But when mentally detailing why, I realised a flaw. Dabbler is their expert on wormholes and alien ships and has tons of different options that she may be able to deploy for either.
For example she does have a weapon designed to shoot down satellites, and which we have seen shoot through a mountain. The problem being that, if she knows a weak spot on a ship of that design, she would need to be outside of the shield to exploit that.
Meanwhile although Harem is disoriented, at the moment, she was capable of speech. So is not totally incapacitated, and may be able to act, if there was an urgent need. However as soon as she is inside Halo’s shield she becomes unable to use her primary super power.
One possible side-effect though is going into the shield might protect her from whatever is causing the echo. However I don’t think it interfered with Harem’s ability to communicate with her other selves.* In which case odds are that the echo probably would not be affected either.
* But can’t be bothered to check the point. Although, if anyone wants to, it was discussed when Sydney gave her a lift from her shop
Just realised the shape of the ship explains the fires. When it lands it drills deep into the crust of the planet.
Obvious really. Doh!
Heh. Clever observation and deduction.
Or it could emit an energy beam out the bottom. Like those flying saucers did, when attacking cities, in the Independence Day documentary. Or it might be unrelated to the invasion fleet. Albeit that is an outlier possibility.
However, taking a peek at the craters in question, they do have a thread-like effect. Which strengthens your argument nicely.
Can speculate a lot of possibilities with that ship design. The irregularities of design can be hinting of organic base in the ship design. The deploying tentacles could be part of the sensor array. The extremely long shape hints at something that is designed for mostly orbital parking (lengthy design helps stabilize with gravity differentiation between top and bottom relative to planet) so possibly a siege ship. All these just speculations until all the screaming stops….
Had a realization about the beacon/laser being a guide or tether, after mulling over the other speculation on the topic. It reminds me an awful lot of this research technique on directing lightning, where a thin strand of wire is fired into a storm on a rocket, creating a conductive path to direct the energy discharge.
A ship within reasonable range – a handful of light minutes or even light-hours? * – could use a space-warping drive (pick your favorite type) that absorbed/followed the photon charges of the tether beam to auto-techno-magically bend the warp bubble in the right direction.
*I was thinking the limiting factor on range would probably be the rotational speed of the planet – if the origin has moved over the horizon from the ship’s original position, the bubble might not be able to curve enough. Although when I try to visual the path, I think the rotational speed is likely so small relative to ‘c’ that even multiple full rotations of the planet would just result in a long gentle spiral rather than the sharp hook I was originally envisioning. So now I think range would more likely be limited by either a) how long you can maintain the beam, or b) how much you trust the return path to still be obstacle free by the time you travel it. Either way, likely not useful on the scale of light-months or -years.
Panel 4 looks like a witch eating a donut.
Oh, no! A giant air/spaceship that looks like a man-o-war jellyfish with dreadlocks and a nice balcony is chasing us!
LOL!
Nice, nice? It is a death-trap, without a hand-rail!
Reminds me of Kelethin in EQ1: it was a tree village with no hand rails, many a new (or drunk) player would leave a corpse scattered underneath, and that’s not counting the mound of bodies under the lifts that periodically ‘glitched’ just as it reached the top causing the passenger(s) to fall to their death, ahhh, fun times :D
Placing the text within the ‘title’ and no other text lead to an empty link… Allow me to try that again.
It’s a common architectural motif.
It’s a common architectural motif.
Given the layout of that ship, I have determined that the Alari’s antagonists are, in fact.
Quintessons.
Why do I get the feeling that scanner recognized Sydney’s orbs?
Because she is shapely, and aliens like to go to Earth for sex tourism?
Recognizing the orbs could mean anything from “there’s my old toolkit” to “OMG, the seven gems of the elder gods! WORSHIP THE CHOSEN ONE!”.
OFC, the most amusing one is “that rental is 57 galactic cycles overdue”.
“Wait, are those antique ioun stones? Guys! Come check this out! I think I just won this round of our intergalactic bingo tournament!”
I’m actually hoping for this situation to be something along the lines of…
*MOVEMENT DETECTED*
Alari Extermination Drone-1692: Active
Scanning for Alari presence…
Scanning…
Non-Alari life form detected
Unknown life form possesses highly developed nervous system. Possibly sentient.
*ERROR*
ALERT: Several unidentified objects detected. Objects displaying anomalous properties.
Specimen interacting with anomalous objects.
Signaling Research Vessel Epsilon for immediate retrieval and containment of specimen.
Indeed.
Or it could be “OMG, I don’t have my selfie stick, come quick, and hold the camera!”
This is the curse of bingeing… In a couple weeks I’ve consumed all 8-9 years of this amazing comic…
Now I’ve gotta mope around aimlessly til the next comic comes out… time to learn how to use an RSS feed…
Read the comments, they can be just as entertaining (on good days)
Welcome to the community. The next comic is due out tomorrow, so life is still worth living.
In fact Mondays and Thursdays, without fail. 52 weeks a year.
And in those 23 years about 2 weeks have passed in-comic.
Hiya! Welcome!
Welcome!
This just hit me – they shouldn’t be able to hear that VOOM sound until like minute later (when it’s too late to be alerted by it). But the last panel still totally worth it… :D
Sound, on Earth and under ‘average’ conditions travels at 343 m / s. So if it took a minute for the sound to reach them the ship would be:
343 x 60 = 20580 meters away. So over 20 kilometres, or almost 13 miles.
To put that in context, something at ground height would be well over the horizon, if it was that far away!
Whereas we can actually see that there are hills or mountains beyond it, as the tail & beam is this side of them.
You are right thought that there would be a delay of a number of seconds, but not so many as to change the dynamics of the scene.
Of course the Alari planet might be smaller, their air might be thinner, even the temperature can change how fast sound travels. But if any of those factors was significantly different to Earth’s then we would likely have had other clues before now. In particular the city panorama did not feel off, which it would do if the horizon was much closer or further away than we would expect. Likewise with where the horizon line falls in relevant panels.
Heh.
Only just spotted this. But surprised that it has not featured heavily in the comments (or possibly I just missed any allusion to it, not having read that).
I wonder if it is fuelled by crackers?
Where did Achilles go?