Grrl Power #674 – Space cavalry
Psyche! I bet you thought that would be Sydney coming outta that wormhole, didn’t you?
Ag. So many double sized pages. Hand. Clawlike…
So this is Cora, a character I haven’t drawn for a very long time, probably since before I started the comic. She wasn’t a blue alien the last time. Actually a fair amount about her has changed, but she’s always been Dabbler’s friend.
The anti-mass driver is just a railgun that fires antimatter projectiles, in case you were wondering. I suppose it would be cool if it was a beam that disrupted the Higgs field. I have no idea what would happen if fundamental particles suddenly ceased to have mass. Probably it would be the same as disintegrating something, because everything would just fly off in random directions. Possibly accompanied by massive explosions and radiation? But no. Just antimatter projectiles. Still, that’s multiple levels of suck for whatever you’re targeting. Not only the Götterdämmerungian kinetic energy delivered by something going… let’s say 0.7 C, but also the mutual annihilation of everything in its path.
Okay, here’s a thought. What if you had an antimatter projectile that was multiple projectiles all matryoshkaed inside one another? Like each layer was sort of like a sabot round. The projectile hits something, apocalyptic explosion ensues, but the interior of the projectile continues forward until it hits the next significant piece of matter. Sort of like a 5 stage antimatter bunker buster?
Yeah. That’s what the anti-mass cannon shoots. Seems like bonkers overkill honestly, unless you’re bombarding the Emperor of Mankind in his bunker under the Himalayas.
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What ever species the First Officer slash Science Officer is, he ain’t got nothing to do with Maxi
Do you honestly believe word of Maxi would not have made it off world? Dabbles knows the captain personally (and highly likely intimately) so even on the offchance Cora has never actually made it to Terran in person, she would know all about the One Dabbles Can’t Get, which means FOSO would know
FOSO? I only know this to mean Full Of Shit, Obviously. Please elaborate.
Guesticus said it in the first line…he means FOSO to mean First Officer/Science Officer
Yes
Sometimes people do the stupidest things.
For Example:
Why did i open the comments under a page that involves Spaceships and talk of Anti-Matter weapons?
Bacause it was the most idiotic thing i could have done in this moment.
Although i read only snipplets there is one thing i could say with certainty.
I disagree with at least 99% of the comments.
Same here, had no intent on commenting on this page, until read all those posts suggestion there is a connection between Maxi and FOSO :rolleyes:
I tend to be pretty quiet myself unless there’s something about the law or I have a theory or guess about what’s going to happen, or a critique. Or if I really really really love the art style.
So I usually post a lot.
PS- I really really love the art style.
I can see it now.
Dabbler and Max on the space phone getting the bad news that they could not find Halo and she is presumed dead. But it looks like the kid went out with a bang by destroying several thousand fighter drones and two very large heavily armed thugs. One matching your description Dabbler.
While this is going Sydney casually strolls bye and says, “Hey guys sup? Man you will not believe the day I had.”
This is of course after she got home, had a bowl of atomic chili and some ghost pepper poppers took a 45 minute supper hot shower and slept for 9 hours. Not even thinking of radioing in that she was back.
Only one of the giant aliens is confirmed dead. While Sydney DID shoot all the way through the second one’s head, he was still standing and clutching his face when she was several miles away. Until we see a corpse, I am assuming he is still alive. Soundly defeated and certainly not a threat anymore, but technically still alive.
…and no longer known affectionately as “Cyclops.”
He now answers to “O Holey One”.
Nah… now it’ll be: “Hey Point Four Eyes!… come ‘ere… I got’s something to SHOW ya!,… (snicker, giggle chortle…)”
We don’t have any clue yet of where in time they both are. It could have taken them months to get there and Sydney may have time traveled when she went to the portal. As far as we know, Sydney may not have been there yet.
Also I must make the rude Raphaël remark. They are aliens from another galaxy so of course their primary language is fluent english, they use naval slang and use earth’s scientists names to refer to physic phenomenons.
Or, alternatively, the narrator is translating for our benefit.
Or, in this timeline, Earth founded a Federation of Planets (or a Terran Empire) and everyone had to learn a common language so they chose English. There’s at least two, possibly three, different species on the bridge.
Automatic translation performed by author is probably the best to go with. In the Star Trek genre most often, when speaking with aliens, they’re using Galactic Basic, even as the “script-writer” does the translating for the viewing audience. At other times (& in one episode in particular) they could use a device known as the Universal Translator.
…Never mind the fact that when the Enterprise crew had first contact with an otherwise unknown alien race (that supiciously seemed very humanoid), they somehow could speak flawless Galactic Basic during the first meeting, even when there was no Universal Translator in view or in reference…
…Ok then, when the language of the argument destroys itself, how the hell did they manage this?…
I think they ret-conned it so the badges linked to the ship’s universal communcator as of TNG and the writers just handwaved the fact that we had the aliens speaking universal instead of them saying something, and then the comm saying what they said in universal for time efficiency. There are 5 or 6 episodes where someone’s comm gets destroyed, or they are out of ship’s range, and the aliens get to have their own language for a bit. It pops up more in Voyager, cause the ship is pretty dang busted, on low resources, and translation protocols aren’t topping the list for CPU cycles until the crew actually bumps into someone new XD
As to the suspiciously human aliens, TNG also answered that one. at least for the alpha quadrant – most intelligent life in that locale (including humans) have a progenitor species that seeded gene codes all over the place. They also left a puzzle, expressing their hope that all the life they made should co-exist peacefully. The Klingon were annoyed by this XD
The giant “corkscrew” ship arrived in response to the drone’s signal, which was sent after it scanned Sydney. If Sydney hasn’t been there yet, then what ship is Cora telling her crew to avoid?
Maybe she’s talking about Sydney, whose power readings she saw in the radar. She did open a massive worm hole, after all.
because looking blankly at a screen with gibberish writer on the page so we have no clue what we’re looking at is an enjoyable experience and helps us understand whats going on….
I’ve heard of turtleneck sweaters, but turtlecheeks?
They’re very popular among races that have frequent trade interaction with succubi – sometimes wearing a turtleneck for covering ‘evidence’ just doesn’t go far enough.
Ha!
Turtleneck sweaters are pretty popular with the Ballchinians, as J had reminded K at one point (Men in Black 2 movie)…The best way to hit them where it hurts most is above-the-belt.
ᗒʖᗕ
It’s not a sweater, it’s a full-body prophylactic! (and probably comes in a variety of tasty flavors).
Anti-matter rail gun? That has got to smart!
That statement requires me to go the other way.
At the same time…
I think it would be cool, if they couldnt find Sydney, they could be like, “Huh, lets take the ship out a few light hours and watch what happened,” one of the rarely used advantages of an FTL ship is that you can litterally use it to go see the past, simply by moving away from what you want to see and focusing your telescopes on it.
Huh, I’ve never even considered that as a possibility. I mean, makes perfect sense, and who knows maybe they’ll use that to figure out where Sydney vanished to if they don’t find her.
The guys over at Schlock Mercernary once used that trick. See Book 5, Part IV: “Hand it Over”.
Use that in the novel Threshold by David Palmer.
That also figures prominently in the Lost Fleet books by Jack Campbell.
And in the “Into The Looking Glass ” series by John Ringo / Travis S. Taylor
Well I said, rarely used, not never used. Of the references mentioned, i have read Jack Campell, but they only used it indirectly, since they watched events unfold in the past by virtue of showing up really far away from events when they came out of Hyperspace, since they could only jump from system to system at specific points, they couldnt just say, take a short hop of a few light hours to see what happened in past.
…Also in Battlefield Earth by Hubbard
As far as I know, this idea was first used in Piers Anthony’s, Macroscope. And was the primary tech for the story itself.
I have to wonder, is she referring to the giant pile of death that Sydney was squaring off against, or is it Sydney’s “I’m my own spaceship” mode that’s giving off the concerning power readings?
At the range that Sydney was fighting at, it may be below the resolution of their current sensor array right now, it may need a dedicated “high-precision” scan to get any better reading that separates the two.
Not really a complaint, but I always wonder why so many games, comics, and movies make aliens humans with a different skin done, plus a few random bits.
I get that live action stuff had a budget, but that drawn entertainment rarely explores what other lifeforms would actually look like.
Dabbler may have chosen this crew to retrieve Sydney/Halo as they closely resemble humans to prevent a hyper-Squeee and associated side effects of a Scoville Cheer.
Hopefully Dabbler also informed them to send a
“Don’t shoot, Dabbler sent us!”
message over her communicator choker and Pipboy.
What about trentacle? Definitely not humanoid.
Hmm Sydney dreamed about trentacle before she met him.. not sure thats the same reaction as if she met Cthulu(or squidward as she so nicely renamed him for the pew pew targeting) or the cylon ships she mass destroyed.
Oh, whew! Not massive explosions and radiation from esoteric localized universe failure, just massive explosions and radiation from matter/anti-matter annihilation. Glad we got that sorted out! :-P
Actually, some have posited that removing the mass could potentially be a method of FTL. Remove mass, and you can reach the speed of light.
How do you add the mass back?
I’d ask how you removed the mass in the first place, but I’m more interested in how you expect to get it back once you’ve converted yourself into (presumably) non-coherent light. :-P
It’s not so much a matter of removing or adding the principle of mass to an object as it is temporarily convincing the universe that the principle of mass does not apply to the object. I think it was the Lensman inertialess drive in Doc Smiths novels that worked like that, creating a field of space-time around the ship with different constants and principles so that mass, inertia and presumably momentum did not apply. Any force then applied to the ship made it fly off at light speed. How the force was applied from within the field I do not know. I read the Lensman series a long time ago though, so my recollection may be incorrect.
Basically they used normal rockets IIRC, the inertialess drive just made it so that the force of the rockets wasn’t taken up countering intertia, thus reducing the speed of the rocket.
Remove inertia, and remove the mass effect. Velocity and gravity are the same.
I read about a half dozen of those that had belonged to an Uncle and were left at a grangparent’s house when I was staying there over a summer and looking for something to read. As I remember they were written by a great many different authors. All with a fairly similar, campy style. Campy in a certain manner of being, though, because the battle scenes could be fairly intense and dramatic. Or tried to be. A lot of them seemed to feel as though a paragraph always needed to be ended by a sentence with an exclamation point in order to be meaningful.
Still, I enjoyed reading them at the time. I’m not sure they would bear re-reading, however. I stumbled across a free and legal (as far as I could tell) online archive of all of the John Carter novels and thought I’d binge them, but they just didn’t have the same magic that they had for me when I was a kid. Peter Pan had it right in a lot of ways.
The idea is that the Higgs Field is the source of what we call mass, and if you could turn it off for an object, you could achieve light speed, or possibly beyond.
Beyond is right, because if you manage to turn that field off for an object you’ve just managed to exit it from our universe, because that is what makes out universe our universe. It won’t be coming back, either, because if you’re there with it you’re also out of our universe and probably dead since all the constants you need to live won’t exist either. I’m not talking about there being a different gravitational constant or a different magnetic constant, I’m talking about those things not even existing in any meaningful way. And if you’re not there with it then good luck finding it or bringing it back into our universe without managing to similarly exist your searching device or yourself, with similar permanence.
It’d be sorta-kinda like the two dimensional universe people figuring out a way to make a circle into a sphere. Once it’s a sphere they can still only see a circle, so they pretty much think that the experiment was a failure. And any machinery that they thought they had invented to turn it back into a circle would have also no measurable effect on the sphere, which would just continue to look like a circle to them.
A gorgeous alien chick with a pair of 38 HHHs? Of course she is Dabbler’s friend!
Or at least a “close associate.”
…A very close associate.
you might even say…a bosom buddy
So, you are saying ‘she’ is really Tom Hanks in drag? o_O
That’s not a sabot. A sabot is discarded during flight and doesn’t ever make contact with the target. I believe you’re thinking of a penetrator round (Cara and Dabbler are sure to approve!) which has a soft(er) exterior carrying a much more dense interior projectile with a smaller cross-section which is intended to better penetrate armor. There’s nothing that exists with more than the two stages I describe above, and I’m not sure if any more stages would be at all practical and/or useful in any case*, but this is science fiction so have fun with it.
* For example, why would you use a less dense second stage than the third and further stages? If the second stage fails to penetrate the armor, the third+ are not going to do anything for you anyway. So you’d just use the best penetrating option you had for the second stage, making it fairly well impossible to add a third stage without again limiting the chance for the second stage to do it’s job by making it less efficient due to the need for the second stage to carry all additional stages within it. And again if the second stage fails the third+ stages can’t do their jobs in turn. So you’d really just make a two stage round and fire more of them if you needed to penetrate successive layers of armor.
Also consider your targets: How many spacecraft or tanks ships or even immobile fortresses can afford the additional mass requirements and even just simple construction cost of multiple layers of armor? Some warships are double hulled but most just have an armored ‘belt’ around the waterline, if even that. Modern passenger craft such as cruise ships have a kind of double hull all along the bottom, but this is for protection against things like rocks and running aground, it is a safety feature, not armor, and the entire hull would be trivially penetrated by any modern warfare anti-ship shell or torpedo. You don’t spend R&D efforts on a shell that can defeat a target that doesn’t exist and will probably never exist.
There is also a weapon system in which the primary projectile is preceded by one or two other projectiles so that the first ones will mess with the targets defenses. It’s designed to defeat active armor in our world, but I’m sure there might be a similar thing in sci-fi settings ;)
Too bad no one ever told Sydney to stay in place if she’s lost so it’s easier for people to find her.
Admittedly, that advice is not good in every situation. Like if you’re getting shot at, you should probably ignore it.
That bridge layout is uncannily similar to the one in Space Quest V.
*gasp* by Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings!
Space Quest, not Galaxy Quest.
First thought I had too. XD Both good sci fi comedy.
Isn’t “Space Quest” a series of really old computer games?
Yes. The newest one is 23 years old (released in 1995). The first three (which were originally EGA) were remade in VGA. They’re worth playing at least once, though.
…Sydney is going to be so pissed when she realizes that she just missed carpooling in an alien spaceship.
It might still happen!
I’m imagining:
Portal opens, ship begins to emerge slowly (very impressively) like Jim Raynor did with his ship. Sydney stops, waits to see aggression but assumes its going to fight, so she will too.
Hot alien man from the ship beams (or flies out in a suit) to Sydney.
“Hi, are you The Mighty Halo? I came to pick you up.”
(nervous) “Um, by ‘pick me up’, you mean…” (drooling at his hotness)
(alien points to the ship)
“Xuriel sent us to bring you home…”
I think this applies, here. That “spaceship” they’re avoiding because of the power levels? Sydney. Shots will be exchanged. Then the Calamarians will start shooting, and Syd and the Rescuers Up Over will make short work of them… together.
You really believe, with their level of scanners, they can’t tell the difference between a giant corkscrew-ship, and a tiny bubble? o_O
Well, sir, that depends on several factors. The first is, what is the range? A flashlight and a supernova are both bright light sources, but they may appear identical to a visual scanner. A power level scanner might only indicate an unusual amount of power for the object in question.
Are they close enough to tell shapes? Sizes? Are their sensors FTL, or are they waiting for a Lidar/Radar pulse echo to put a range on things?
So, yes. I believe, whatever their level of scanners, they might not have an indication of size or shape yet, and “the power readings I’m getting are concerning” does nothing to resolve it either way. She is assuming it’s a ship because it is moving too fast for a human of Sydney’s previously known (and probably provided to them by Dabbler) abilities.
Or, they are in close range, possibly even LEO (or, technically, LAO {Low Alari Orbit})
The only time Sydney would have been seen to be moving too fast for a human was when she was attempting to reach the moon or when escaping from Larry Moe and Squirly, which means they would have shown up in time to assist Sydney
If they showed up after last page, then all they would have seen was a closing warpal (warp portal) at best, or, more likely, only the corkscrew-ship
I think we’re going to catch up to current timeline pretty soon.
Because of that, I ask this: Are we Sydney’s psychologist?
Who is she telling this story to?
She could be breaking the fourth wall to a wall that she only thinks is there because she’s a metanerd (Deadpool knows its there, Sydney imitates Deadpool but can’t actually figure out where the camera is). It’s a thing I actually do- talk out loud, recounting a story to… just in case someone is listening. Maybe that’s what Halo is doing too. Or she’s telling her shrink, which we’re audience to.
I figure the D&D session she has going on (maybe it’s a homebrew pathfinder?) is a relaxation point. She does leave the break room (at Event Horizon) to go to work (Archon) but I don’t think it was FOR work. More like to hang out with the other supers, demons, and aliens. By which I mean Dabbler.
Or by the moment she knows where the 4th wall is. Oddly enough she knows every little detail of the story – she could be “godlike” by the point her “story ends” – and the “real” story begins.
Pretty sure Dave said Sydney wouldn’t be brought to the present.
She’ll be back with her team in a few “weeks”.
The D&D game after which Sydney is telling her story happens a few months [3 to 8 months] before the story catches up to the beginning of the comic.
Day 1 24 Hours was everything previous to 294
Day 2 48 hours 294 – 385
Day 3 72 hours 396 – 528
Day 4 96 hours 529 – 587
Day 5 120 hours 587 – 666
Day 6 144 hours 667 – 674 current
Sydney is having a really exciting week and it’s only day 6 for her.
it’s going to take forever to catch up the time line, especially since it has taken 674 pages just to tell six days of that story.
I’d have to re-read all of Dave’s comments after the chapters, but there is a timeskip of a few days somewhere in there.
A time-skip of `several nights ago` was mentioned in #533
So between 529 and 533 several nights passed.
not a couple [2 days], not a few [3-4] not a week [7 days] not over a week [8+]
but several so 6 nights 5 days can be added
Day 1 24 Hours was everything previous to 294
Day 2 48 hours 294 – 385
Day 3 72 hours 396 – 528
Day 4 to 8, 6 nights 5 days 529 – 532
Day 9 216 hours 533 – 586
Day 10 240 hours 587 – 666
Day 11 264 hours 667 – 675 current
okay so at current count it’s been over a week
but she hasn’t hit week two yet. 3 more days till week two starts.
still the last 11 days have very exciting for Sydney.
There is also a `one sunset later` timeskip mentioned in #549
that time skip is only a few hours not long enough to add to the score.
I had some thoughts: Storytellingwise these guys aren’t here for no good reason, they’re here to interact with Sydney. They’re going to have to interact with Sydney so she is not going to be getting to Earth through that wormhole.
She’s going to a planet with a circle around the top (aurora borealis maybe?) and another circle on/near its equator. That’s not Earth. Now it could be an alien planet she’s never seen but what if that planet is Jupiter and that other circle is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? She’d be closer to home but not close enough to fly to Earth. When she figures that out she knows her best bet is go back and grind some more.
And when she does she finds her rescue ship in a fight with the world killers and now she has to come to THEIR rescue!
+1
Does Cora’s species have differently shaped feet? Otherwise, ballet dancers got nothing on her; the angle those shoes are pushing on the ball of her foot would be excruciating.
Have you ever seen someone wearing 6″ High Heels? That, is exactly the angle your feet are in.
Since you mentioned sound in space (Hard Vacume” I thought I’d leave you a note on that. Sure vibrations can’t be heard so speakers, bells, etc… are silent. But explosions can be heard, because they expel matter, thus they carry their own sound wave with them. (Though I would not expect them to sound the same, and volume would tapper off with the shape of the explosion, typically a sphere) Not only that sound can travel through connected items, like the hull of your ship. (This is why the Appolo 13 explosion was heard.) Also note space is not a perfect vacume so some sound does get out, not much but some. This is why the ISS needs a boost every so often to maintain its orbit, as it is slowed down by particles in space. (Mostly from our atmosphere.)
I agree with almost everything you said except the part with the vacuum. Space is damm good vacuum if you aren´t close to some stuff… The ISS is still inside the earth upper atmosphere (ISS: approx 330 – 410 km – Thermosphere extends to 500-1000 km and the outer atmosphere Exosphere extends to approx 100000).
If you take an atoms and shoot them straight it will take a mean path of 10000 km to hit another atom if the pressure is at about 10^-9 Pa (moon). The pressure of space is below that. Literature says in the range of 10^-11 to 10^-20 Pa -> the atoms would need to travel 10^6 to 10^15 km at avarage to hit another atom…
Below a certain threshold of density, sound can’t really propagate. But yes, the atomized wavefront would manifest more or less as a sound within certain distance ranges.
Assuming the vibrating molecules hit you directly in the eardrum without destroying it.
“Sound” is just particles that got bumped into, bumping into your eardrum. Add however many intermediate bumps as you want.
That can happen a lot easier and at much lower forces in a gassy atmosphere at 1 bar then in a nearly perfect vaccum with like 10 Atomes/cubic kilometer.
Well, this seems to answer the time travel, parallel universe question. Sure, maybe that ship traveled thru time/universes, but it sure reads like it just got the call, and showed up right away.
In that case, Harem was probably getting a double signal, one thru the normal universe, and one thru the portal.
I don’t think your logic quite works.
First: Sydney only went through the glitched portal one-way, but everyone else used it for the return trip, too. So it seems reasonable that everyone else would be sent back to where/when they started, while Sydney is left on blown-up-Alari-homeworld (whenever and wherever that may be).
Second: in panel 5, the first officer malien mentions they’re a little late due to getting held up by the whatsit.
Add these together, and you get a definite possibility the cavalry was delayed for an unknown amount of time between Dabbler’s call and their arrival to rescue Sydney.
So I still think the “Harem was confused because she had more bodies extant than she expected, including 2 copies of one body due to one body traveling forward in time” thing is a viable explanation. And that Harem will eventually be able to tell everyone else how much of a time-jump there was.
Yeah, but a ‘bit late’ does not sound like a month, 6 months etc. I mean, sure, who knows what scale the ‘bit’ refers too, but it sounds like they expected to come and find her, proximate to the battle dabbler reported.
I guess we will find out…eventually.
Ok, so, relativistic projectiles are a bit funny. At that speed, the idea of “armor” is a little weird; the atmosphere counts. Have a link. https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ …. they wouldn’t really NEED antimatter for most targets. Tossing little balls of tinfoil at 0.7c would be enough to ruin your day in all kinds of exotic physics ways.
And that is why ship warfare is not a indoor sport!
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-05-22
Panel 6:
So, are those guns also properly Calibrated? Because he looks like someone that would say “calibrate” a lot.
Why aliens ALWAYS know human language like their are native. I know cuz is made for us to understand, but at least create signs and then translate. Or create a whole new alphabet and let people try to translate what they are saying (check Ennui Go), it’s interesting to say at least.
If I recall correctly, the Klingon Captain was ticked off that there weren’t weapon schematics, only a “useless” message. The Cardassian Gul was physically nauseated at the idea of being genetically related to humans, Romulans, and/or Klingons. The Romulans seemed to just leave without a reaction, but later their Commander privately messaged Picard to express a reserved hope that their might be some potential for common ground . . . someday. Which, for a Romulan, is pretty close to busting out with “When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars!”
I sways wonder how the orbs can generate so much energy… and from where they get this energy… Guess is just complicated tech…. Or is a Eye of Harmony, getting energy of a supernova frozen in time, perpetually dying and giving ludicrous amounts of energy.