Grrl Power #655 – The Robotech
Given how powerful those orbs are, the screw ship aliens might actually have good cause to attack Sydney. Imagine them in the hands of someone who was out to actually cause a bunch of mayhem. And presumably had 4 or more hands.
For those of you unaware of Sydney’s reference, there was an amazing show called Robotech, which more or less introduced me to proper anime. I had seen G-Force and Speed Racer and Voltron, but that stuff was much more childish. Robotech had a serialized story, dialog spoken at a regular human pace *coughspeedracercough* and amazing music to boot. Hearing the opening theme to this day show gives me a serious nostalgia boner. Some of you will know it as Macross. Robotech was apparently three different anime series bought by Harmony Gold and then translated and dubbed to make them all one long story. Purists of course hate this but I didn’t know any better when I watched it and I thought it was incredible.
ANYWAY. One of the things Robotech was famous for, especially the first season (Macross) was these panoramic shots of distant explosions ripping across the sky, just like Sydney has managed to pull off here. Hence the reference. The last time I checked, Robotech was available on Netflix, and is worth checking out if you’ve never seen it. Imagine that you’re 12 and this is the first thing like it you’ve ever seen. It was pretty damned amazing.
A lot of people have questions about the physics behind Sydney’s flight capabilities. The short version is that she’s currently limited to Mach 4, which granted in most cases is like being limited to only having $4 million dollars in your bank account, but an important factor is that she is immune to gravity while using it, so things like escape velocity aren’t a factor for her. She can just fly straight up and doesn’t have to worry about slingshotting around stuff.
I say “immune to gravity” but of course, she’s only tested it out against 1G. (We can assume the Alari homeworld is within 10% of Earth’s gravity.) If I were her, I wouldn’t go buzzing any neutron stars quite yet.
Thinking about that more, I had originally thought that her speed was fixed once she tops out at mach 4, and it’ll definitely stay that way in the atmosphere, (unless she buys a speed upgrade, obviously) but in space… maybe it makes sense that she can accelerate indefinitely. 1G of acceleration is pretty fast, according to some math I found after a quick google, you could get to the moon in like 3.5 hours, half of it spent accelerating, and half spent decelerating. With 4 dots filled in on her flight tree, I’d actually give her 16Gs of acceleration, which would almost be like that scene in Futureama where Leela flies to the moon before Fry can finish counting down from 10. Ok, not actually that fast, but still pretty god damned fast. It makes me appreciate those Honor Harrington books with ships that could accelerate at 450-500 gravities.
Max never tested Sydney’s Extrosphere flight capabilities. That’s a word, right? It should be. Anyway, maybe Sydney’s speed does work like that, in which case it would probably make more sense for her to Mach 4 straight up till she hits space, then G-boost across and back down, if she ever has to make a cross country trip. Even with that kind of speed, I think the previous page holds up. Sydney wasn’t headed toward the moon long enough to close appreciable distance to it.
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The alien’s mass-produced fighter craft are shaped like HORNETS! They CAN’T be good people!
No, they look like croissants, evil deadly croissants!!
Croissant wasps… Cylon Croissant wasps…
Croissornettes?
+100
+10
Well, of course they’re evil. Croissant is French!
One thought is that the force field only moves when Sydney wants it to. So while she can’t fly off using the Forb she does have enough control to hover. She can move any of the orbs around at will –remember her knee smacking Math, the guy we never see anymore (hint hint)? If the Forb can do a hold speed and direction, she could steer by using the ball in hand to change direction.
As already mentioned the Pew fires from outside the force field. To me it also seems logical for it to signify strength of the shot by the size of the pipper circle.
Actually, Math is on standing orders to desensitise himself to bewbs if he ever wants to get out into the field again, and it was Sydney’s knee that got smacked by her own ball during her ‘fight’ with Math (that was when she tried to Mount Kenya :P )
Is she fighting the Ur Quan?
I’ll just be over here… refreshing the page…
I realize that I may be a little late but it just occurred to me that Sydney has forgotten a key element to space travel – Acceleration. In space, speed is important but acceleration can be just as important. Now, I don’t know her acceleration in an atmosphere but it’s obviously greater than 1 G as she left the planet’s atmosphere in less time than one of our current rockets. I also don’t know how far away that moon is. So, I took a look around the interwebs. At 1 G, it should take ~1.75 hours for her to reach the halfway point to our Moon and another ~1.75 hours to slow down.
In other words, even with her attention span. I suspect that, by the time she got bored with her getaway, she would already be well past the moon she was aiming at. Unless, of course, the globes actually have a maximum velocity rather than a constant acceleration.
Ah, dang! You beat me to it!
my guess is, both.
if she has the power to resist a beam weapon capable of firing through a planetary atmosphere thats at least as thick as earths, and gouging a hole in the ground, then its safe to say the potential power output of the orbs is easily high enough to sustain hundreds of G’s worth of acceleration.
Okay, the thing I wonder about is that “halfway” point where deceleration is supposed to begin. How does Sydney know when she has reached that point and will she even be paying attention?
You know… with that comment… in retrospect… maybe the orbs WERE DESIGNED for someone with 7 hands…
This does beg the question though: how do the orbs work again? Any reason we haven’t just taped one to her bare legs or just to the body again?
Earlier strips showed Sydney trying her feet and other places.
Only the hands would work.
im now reminded of the shower curtain scene from one of the austin powers films.
It took me a bit to figure out WHY the reference to grinding was all about, but good golly I got it now.
stupid stupid space fighters.
they KNOW her shield can take a hit from the capital class weapons,, thus KNOW they are dealing with something capable of at least small capital class energy output.
yet lined up within unaugmented visual range, moving slow enough to be hit by… does the ppo actually have aim assist, or is syd literally just pointing?
all of the dumb. all of it.
Maybe they’re trying to draw fire away from the main ship?
Somewhere in the depths of the ship’s command center, a junior officer is screaming the Mecha-cthulu equivalent of “Inverse Ninja! Inverse Ninja!”.
Did anyone else hear “launch fighters” in the voice for an Ur-Quan dreadnaught from Starcon?
I haven’t gone through all of the comments, (so forgive me if someone else brought up these issues) but if you ignore acceleration for a minute, the math on how long it takes to get to a moon really isn’t complicated. time=distance/velocity. So for Sydney traveling at 4 x speed of sound to get to the moon it would take roughly 78 hours or 3.25 days.
This brings up some points about Sydney’s ability that I hope you can think about. (I’m not expecting answers to these questions.) Why is Sydney’s speed capped at mach4? She can obviously accelerate faster than ~1.2g-s (1 g to keep from falling, .2 g to counteract drag. note: these numbers aren’t precise, this is just a back of the envelope calculation to give some sense of the possibilities.) it would take to maintain that speed, at least in short bursts. Is it because her peak acceleration can only be sustained for short periods? Because if she travels faster that for long periods its uncomfortable for her? her shield can’t take the extra air resistance? Also, if she flies like a space ship and not an airplane, then can she maintain accelerations once in space? What happens to Sydney when she accelerates? Is she somehow shielded from the g forces? At some point a professor pointed out to me that if you accelerate at 1 gravity for 1 year you can reach speeds very close to the speed of light, which means Sydney could travel to the nearby stars in reasonable time if she cared to, and that she could travel hundreds of years into the future in a few years or so (time dilation is fun) if she cared to and someone mentioned it to her. What is the power source behind her orbs? Maybe limitations on her power source make this impossible or unrealistic? Or maybe her orb actually pushes off of the planet, and so far away from planets all she can do is coast?
Hope this gives you some interesting things to think about if you haven’t already, because constant velocity on earth can mean one thing, but it means something completely different in space, and if her orbs are a space ship then its worth thinking about what that means.
Sorry, I missed your comment on this page, and the previous comment is meant for the previous page. Hope this still gives some extra things to think about, though you did cover some :-)
Full on super hero mode. I approve.
I do hope that those are drone fighters. Or, if not, that Sydney never gets to meet an orphan created by her action here. That would cause her many a sleepless night.
Not that she is in the wrong mind. She is in a ‘fight or flight’ situation. Halo tried the flight option, and it was insufficient to get her to safety (a planet suffering from global genocide is not a place of safety). So a counter-attack is justifiable, under the circumstances.
Whilst hiding amongst the ruins, and scavenging, is an alternative route that Sydney could take, if she thought of it, it is not exactly a safe option. There clearly are patrols of forces seeking out survivors and intruders. There is a serious risk that Halo might be discovered whilst asleep, or in some other vulnerable position.
Even if she tapes the Shield orb, to her hand, when sleeping, it would still allow them to spot her, without Sydney knowing about their presence. So they could position sufficiently destructive forces to strike her, with no chance to dodge them. We already know a single salvo almost brought down her shield. Killing Halo, in her sleep, would be a simple matter for them.
As they have already engaged Sydney with lethal force, she is justified in using the same, in her counter-attack.
I actually have a problem with mach 4 being a measure of her speed. Mach is the speed of sound relative to the medium the object is in. So in space, where there is no sound, Sydney shouldn’t be able to reach a mach number. In fact I’d say, based on my limited understanding of mach and space, mach 4 might be 0mph because sound can’t travel at all.
So really the fault is a bad choice of explaining Sydney’s overall speed and velocity. But knowing Syndey’s mach number on earth, depending on altimeter reading, you could calculate her uh, velocity perimeters and mathimagically figure out her unhindered acceleration (as mentioned by the author that gravity doesn’t effect her shield).
Dammit why did I have to make this so complicated hahaha
Sydney’s top speed is not Mach 4. That just happened to be what it was when Maxima was measuring it, under the conditions they were flying, at that time. Clearly, from his blog, Dave has not quite made up his mind how it works for interplanetary/non-atmospheric travel, but it was more than zero.
Although you are perfectly correct that it would work out at that if her maximum speed was literally Mach 4, as a fundamental power limitation.
Luckily, there’s very good news on the Robotech front: Harmony Gold’s licenses on the properties (Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada) are expiring soon and it doesn’t look like they’re going to be renewed. Being such beloved classics, odds are good that another company will pick them up (Funimation, I’m looking in your direction) and we’ll finally see something being done with them, instead of the company just sitting on the rights so that nobody else can touch them like Harmony Gold has been for the last few decades.
wait, you grew up on ROBOTECH???
so, you are old like me?
I’m mid-tier old. Not “needs assistance to poop” tier, thankfully.
You made me so happy with that story. Robotech was my first exposure to proper anime as well. It was amazing.
Wow. Sydney did what I would’ve done. I thought the most prudent course of action would be blast toward any identifiable direction and then play with your balls until a destination that you wanted to actually arrive at presented itself.
But space is big. Really big. And who could get that drilly floaty monolith out of their mind? Scanning for new signatures of civilization, fun, nice baths, sufficiently spicy food, all that could take some time, and I don’t even know whether they’ll have drilly floaty monoliths I could smack around there.
To those of you who logged flight plans to “who the fuck would want to be here?” last page, well done.
Honor Harrington! SO MUCH YES! It’s like one of the best non-mainstream (at least here in France) SF book series I’ve read in the last 5 years. I actually would love it if you people have some series of the same caliber I could read, haven’t found any good reads recently.
I haven’t read the Harrington series to compare, but I would recommend Christopher Nuttall‘s Ark Royal series if you like space-combat SF. It has the fast-paced starfighter and missile-madness elements, as well as in-universe justifications for using those tropes despite their questionable effectiveness in the ‘real world’. And it also does a good job of conveying the cat-and-mouse aspect of locating an opposing force and choosing the terms of the engagement or evasion thereof. (I would question the choice of ‘Ark Royal’ for the whole series title, however: for me that’s a better fit to just the first three-book arc focusing on the Ark herself, and the wider universe-series deserves a wider name.)
I was 13 when Robotech first aired in the US. It unquestionably was a “holy shit this is amazing” moment! Just one more thing to love about Sydney, that she’s able to make that reference so perfectly!
Well, off the top of my head I know that C is speed so it should have units of m * s^-1, M is mass so it should have units of grams, and E is energy so it should have units of joules. the units on both sides need to be equal to some constant times g * m^2 * s^-2.
I also know that E=MC^2 is what you use to calculate conversions between matter and energy AKA nuclear and matter antimatter recactions, so if it comes up in the railgun example everyone on the ship is royaly fucked. Like the bolt got fired with so much force it compressed the air enough to start a fusion reaction and the ship is about to turn into a mini star fucked.