Grrl Power #678 – Grrl Power SG-1
This thing looks a lot more like a Stargate than I’d intended. I mean, it’s a circle with some crap attached to it, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, I hadn’t finalized the dialog for this page until after I had all the pencils done, so I thought I would preempt the comparisons by having Vale bust on Deus about it.
This is one of those pages I wanted to compress this and the next one into a single page, but I recently spent two hours recently one night rereading a chunk of the comic, and while I generally enjoy reading my own comic, the two things I thought could be better, (besides the odd panel that desperately needs some new art) was honestly, I think the font is a little small. Part of that is the size and resolution of my monitor. It’s 27″, but the res is 2560 x 1440, so everything is a bit smaller than on most smaller but lower res monitors.
The other thing I noticed was that there are definitely a few places where I didn’t really visually show what’s going on as well as I could have. A paper comic has a bit more space to take the time to show the steps in a sequence. Mangas especially, because they’re trying to fill something like 10-12 pages a week. I’m usually trying to fit a… I don’t quite know what to call it. A complete thought on a single page because of the wait between pages. Not a whole scene, but I really want each page to be its own… clause?
Anyway, I thought instead of trying to cram this page and the next onto one, I’d take the time to space them out and have a few larger panels. Man, I really packed the panels in on those earlier pages. I think my record is 17. That’s just nutty.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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There is prior art of circular dimensional gates that precedes Stargate, Cowboy Bebop springs to mind.
Also virtually every dimensional portal and hyper space gate in sci-fi and fantasy that wanted to keep the design simple and whirlpool like; rather than the previous common (giant double doors).
Star Gate though had this specific look to it, even the off world gates typically had a ramp up to them. A few didn’t, but Star Gate command had the grid ramp, and devices holding the gate in place as well as turning the chevrons.
True, I’m struggling to think of one design that isn’t circular. That super-sophisticated one in YAT that ends up going haywire, maybe?
Land of the Lost was just a rectangular doorway.
Star Trek’s City on the Edge of Forever.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Cowboy Bebop does not predate Stargate… Cowboy Bebop was relesed in 1998 and Stargate was released in 1994… Yes, Stargate goes that far back… no, not SG1, but Stargate… It was a movie originally and SG1 was basically a tv based sequel to it in a similar vein to the MASH tv show being a sequel to the MASH movie.
But when did the TV show come out? 1997, a year before Cowboy Bebop…
You are correct, however, that there are dimensional circular dimensional portals. Time Tunnel for example featured a circular portal that starts out flat, gets set to a particular time and location, and becomes a circular tunnel with depth to it. When you walk through it, you wind up somewhere and somewhen else.
If you really want to stretch things, if you ever find mushrooms arranged in a ring, it’s a real world phenomenon known as a “fairy circle” and it supposedly a portal to the fairy realm.
Make sure you get Oberon’s permission before entering that fairy’s circle
Fairy Rings are more like snares that doorways, they are meant to trap mortals in the fae realm for the fae to play with.
It’s not the rings that trap mortals, butt the fact fae realm works differently than the mortal plane: time works differently, and most definitely should not eat or drink anything
A ground level, easy to miss, entrance that any drunk could stumble into or anyone not realizing what it is.
Once there the fae want you to dance, party with the, get married, be sacrificed to Hell (never cared for this version, contradicts traditional fairy lore), ect… sure feels like a trap. Its not like the Fae don’t also have hard to enter doorways like the sacred rocks you have to knock on, or wandering isles and the like…
although credit where credit is due, at least the mushroom fairy ring is better marked than the fricken branch archways.
Just wander through the woods, branches form an arch over the path or among the trees, walk under without ever even seeing that and BOOM, suddenly in the forests of the Fae and some hollow light is asking you to follow it back to its children so it can marry one off to you.
Ah, but Oberon is also the name of the entity creating the mysterious rings in GeneShaft. Granted, those rings tend to be weapons instead, but they can also mimic people and scan things.
LOL – I currently reside near the Naval Air Station in Millington TN (AKA NAVPERSCOM nowadays) and we have a LOT of fairy rings in the area. A few years back, I counted more than fifty on the north side of the base. I told a couple of the people that prepare the base paper, and I believe they came out and took pictures of them. Invasion of the fairies.
Deus turns toward a control room inset in the wall behind glass where a Very confused actor sits at a console. “Alright Walter, dial it up!” The actor thumbs on consol mic and states “It was just a TV role, I don’t actually know how to do anything in here!”
Harem nudges Gary Jones “Just hit the Big Red Button, then read off the teleprompter!”
Well, without chevrons to encode and lock, or an iris to open and close, there’s really nothing Walter would know how to do… That’s like… everything he was trained to do right there… And since he’s an officer, he even took a college course… probably majored in counting chevrons and placing his hand on a panel…
The iris was added for security. The only Star Gate to have one and since you can only operate one per world the one in Antarctica was disconnected and later moved to Area 51. Unless they moved it to Tyco Blue base on Luna…
@Night-Gaunt Actually, the Stargate on Atlantis had an iris, and since that one was created by the Ancients, we have proof that at least one other race used them.
It’s possible that all the gates have that built-in energy iris, but the technology to activate it didn’t survive in most places.
Idk, I think I wouldn’t mind seeing more triangle portals.
Treasure Planet, anyone?
Pentagram gates that appear in mid-air (well, mid-vacuum), as seen in Lost Universe.
I have to say that one of my favorite things about this page is Vale’s reaction to the lightning. Her eyes bug out but she otherwise doesn’t flinch at all, showing that she’s extra special yet not perfectly unflappable, and somehow to me it’s a lot funnier than a more standard reaction.
What does Deus want with a store-brand knockoff Stargate? Isn’t it a bit premature to set off into the heavens when he hasn’t actually conquered Earth yet? The best he could do is bring back powerful alien allies…who would then double-cross him in his moment of glory
Who cares about conquering Earth? It’s just not worth the trouble. Better to have a peaceful life enhanced by stuff you aren’t supposed to have!
“Store bought?” That is high tech gear. Though we were shown in one S G 1 that if you have the right information you could build a smaller one from off the shelf parts and materials. It is only a one shot but it worked.
Actually, I can see Deus buying the original set and wrapping the prop ‘gate around the actual working prototype, just for kicks.
Deus truly is the best supervillain ever. Only Hank Scorpio from the Simpsons even comes close.
So… I’m not sure why, but I think Deus is aware of Sydney and he’s on his way to either the Alari homeworld or the Fracture to rescue her. After all, he seems to be trying a few different tactics to keep Max as an ‘ally’, or barring that, keeping a thumb over Arc juuust enough to where he doesn’t need to fear them.
Clues to his knowledge falls solely on harm, due to her quantum entanglement leading to a potential self fulfilling paradox.
You seem to be presuming a bit here… At no point is it mentioned that he knows of Sydney’s predicament, nor that he intends on rescuing her. In fact, at no point does it imply he wants to do anything other than using a stolen reality ripping implement in a piece of machinery with a huge complex dedicated to it, that appears to have no purpose other than to use the reality ripping wand. Almost as if he knew that it exists and planned to get hold of it for years, as that’s how long a facility that size would take to construct.
He started all this before she was lost. Construction of this site, plan to break into vault, as soon as he knows about the Brane Ripper and Wyrmil sets on plan to get the item from Sciona, watches Archon waiting for chance, and brings it here all while construction had already started.
If he runs into Sydney by contacting the Fracture first with this gateway then it will be a surprise for him. After all she’s supposed to be on Alari Prime (or whatever its called).
They can’t let Archon know they have the brane ripper or else Archon will demand it back and ask a bunch of questions. If they’re going to help Sydney they have to send somebody she doesn’t know is working with them.
I say he build it to go shopping at the fracture… It would fit his character and it would be funny if he meets Sidney at that spot without planing it. Imagine how unlucky you must be to stumble onto someone that should not know that YOU stole the magical artifact in some very distant place in this insanly big universe we are in…
Crazy hypothesis… the previous owner of the orbs was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Being that long ago, he, she, or it is now a mere legend, known only for the orbs.
The aliens that wiped out the Alari homeworld were merely some kind of intergalactic super secret police that are larger and more authoritative than the Xevarchy or however it’s spelled. They saw the orbs and instantly went ape shit, like how if someone were to see a gorgon today, the snakes for hair might set them off into a “KILL IT! KILL IT BEFORE IT TURNS US ALL TO STONE!” kind of way.
Sydney will not be given a very good welcome on The Fracture.
Dabbler doesn’t recognize the orbs because despite her travels, she’s somewhat sheltered, dismissed the similarity as coincidence, or simply wrote it off because Sydney is a modern human being, not an ancient intergalactic murder machine.
While not a fan of the “we exterminated the dinosaurs” trope of old powerful aliens, I can see much of the rest of that.
Would fit into the orbs are the toys of some cosmic being trope theory and a previous owner once “played” with these squids. It is a reasonable expectation of a species, individual, or group that has encountered something with the same appearance, same scan reading, or other similarity to overreact. Heck I’ve written stuff like that, the Dimension Police of my own series will drop all their non-interference protocols if they detect S-class or Omega-class criminals or celestial beings on a “protected planet” and go all out to drive them off or arrest them.
-Sir the locals are waging holy wars against one another,
-We cannot interfere with the planet’s natural cultural evolution.
-Sir…there is an Amana down there intervening in the conflict
-Amana?!, send the FLEET!
Back on track, we’ll know soon how she is greeted. I mean four main options
1: What a weird way to travel.
2: an Aetherium Causeway? You must be a wealthy and/or powerful visitor, allow us to show you around miss.
3: Lack of communication leads to questioning as she improperly lands without alerting the control tower (or equivalent)
-all the above there either because the Fracture is ancient and the current residents just run it, or they just work there and wouldn’t know about any visitor out of billions with a similar head ornament that showed up who knows how long ago.
4: Greeted by strange celestial beings, “Greetings I am the soul of the Fracture, it has been so long since last we spoke” *talking directly to the orbs and treating Sydney like how White/Yellow/Blue Diamond address Steven not differentiating between the current “host” and the past incarnation.
Alien hands Halo a plastic rectangle.
Halo: What’s this?
Alien: A citation for docking without a flight plan.
Halo: But I don’t have a ship!
Alien: A stowaway, eh? OK, here’s a citation for trespassing.
It would just get worse from there. Imagine Sydney being booked into an alien jail: “What does this button do?” “Oooh! Shiny!” and so on.
Same. If whatever those things were driving something through spacewith enough force to cause an ELE, or the Chicxulub crater, they’d be so far into the crust that they would never come up, not sitting in some coral waiting for a lucky diver to happen by. Hell, how didn’t someone else find them decades before Sydney if they were just sitting there on the surface, glinting in the tropical sun? XD I imagine they were just abandoned there when whoever was using them settled down/passed away. Would be funny to think that it was just a base consumer level product from a civilization that was so advanced that they’d abandon it like we would a used pack of matches.
Thinking about things like that scares me a little.
Like some Celestial’s version of a Tiger Electronic’s Game.
-oh drat, little Sahralia dropped her favorite game on that planet during vacation.
*no worries, we’ll just drop by the toy store on the way home and get her a new one, she won’t know the difference.
-meanwhile on Earth-
I have uncovered an artifact of ultimate power! A weapon that even the monsters shall fear and no nation on this or any other world shall stand in my way!
One of my favorite episodes (concept wise) from Ben Ten was when they were fighting this duplicating and self repairing ultra tech robot that turned out to actually be a higher dimensional being’s baby toy that fell out of the pram.
Me and Yorp have similar theories. Though we were more in the camp of “Orb User crashes at Ludicrous Speed into planet while attempting to escape, dying in process and the orbs being blasted out of the impact zone giving the impression they were annihilated in the explosion… which just happened to be powerful enough to trigger an ELE on the world, killing off about 75% of all life presently there.” rather than deliberate annihilation.
After all, Aliens know of Terra, and visit. Sex tourism notwithstanding.
It wasn’t 66 million years ago. And since it is alien tech? Or is it from say the last of the Rama-Chandra civilization where they got further than we did before the explosion of mount Toba smashed them while they had their inter-empire civil war. (Normally they could have stopped the explosion but just too busy fighting.)
Which is a hypothesis as so many have here. Waiting to see if DaveB will ever let us know or not. What the orbs are for is survival if you need them. And if you can’t take an escape pod from your damaged vimana(a) they let you leave anyway. And you may need more than 1 set of arms. (In the Rama-Chandra empire they did much cosmetic and body work including multiple appendages. Their castes were biological.)
They work best as survival gear. Though Sydney would have an easier time if she an extra set of arms and hands like some Naga and of course the resident alien does.
I had considered the theory that the orbs have been leaking power for a very long time and that explains both why humans have super powers and why the skill tree isn’t complete but now that we know the orbs have probably been to the Fracture before any timeline theories need to account for how old the Fracture is.
Can I say that I love the fact that Sciona made a can-opener to traverse the universe, and Deus took it and made an electric can opener with it.
‘brane-opener’
Fixed it for yah. ;)
Did we just have a time skip? The last time we saw the solar updraft tower (#663), the second one looked like it was in the first stages of construction, and now it is finished. Either we have a different time continuity going on with Sydney, or Deus’ crew can construct a giant tower in a day, or Sydney has figured out a way to not need to eat or drink in the last month(s).
They have discussed the time skip that occurred when they jumped forward for at least a period of days (and maybe longer) when they went through the unstable portal. Admittedly I wasn’t under the impression it was of a long enough period to complete that tower, but the time skip was specifically mentioned.
Actually Slythe, it was never directly discussed in the comic. WE discussed it in the comments. All we got from the comic was that something was weird with Harem, the Alari homeworld had been fine when communicated to recently, and Dabbler said that they needed to wait for a response from her friends. But Dabbler also implied that time would be passing for Sydney when she told Max, “It’s not like she’s going to try and fight that thing.” This page and the next pretty much solidifies that it was a jump forward, but it still has not been stated in the comic.
Circles are likely the most efficient shape for gateways of any sort, especially tesseracts.
As for the chevrons, you’ve got to have some sort of address system to know where you’re going. The minimum number of reference points for the destination you’d want would be 6. Thus; x1,y1,z1, x2, y2, z2. Though personally, I’d rather have a more specific address with more points on the x, y, and z planes. So something likely resembling a d8, d10, or a d12.
You want something more specific than X,Y,Z.
Space isn’t fixed locations, especially not fixed relative locations. So your axis point of reference can’t be fixed either. This is why Star Gates had to be put on a planet first and had adjustments in their system for movement (Asgard explained this), that were based on the gates themselves not the location of the planet necessarily and adjusted internally for the gate being moved. (in other words Star Gates operate like cellphones not landlines).
in other words have a device at the other point that give a return signal and link up is your best bet for a portal system across space. Also why the idea of a general wormhole travel like Sciona or Halo did are the least believable. Although Sydney there at least seemed to use some rather fancy ultra tech portal so relative space could be moot and pings off the dimensional imprint signature of the planet (or relatively large body in space like the Fracture) rather than a return device signal.
basically long short, dividing space into a cube and using X,Y,Z, points won’t even apply from minute to minute and would need to constantly change, planets orbit stars, moons orbit planets, suns orbit galactic center, ect…so no 0,0,0 point can really exist as a frame of reference without requiring constant changes.
It’s been ages since I’ve watched SG-1.
I should clarify.
I remembered the bit about the stargates themselves being the reference coordinates, I forgot about the test signal. It’s just always bugged me that they only use 7 reference points.
I saw these and it made me think of the artifact. https://wearepaladin.tumblr.com/post/179956125603/coolthingoftheday-solid-bronze-sickles-of-luna
If nobody else thought of it already, I have coined a word for when Dave uses something like “WORMHOLE” to describe the sound of a wormhole opening…. NON-OMOTAPOEIA
What you’re seeing in panel 1 are 2 solar updraft towers. It’s a real thing. So far, there has been only one long-term test of the technology. Back in 1982, with German government funding, SBP built and ran a small, experimental 50-kilowatt solar updraft plant in the south of Spain. It consisted of a 195-meter (640-foot) tower, fashioned from corrugated steel, and a canopy 244 meters (800 feet) in diameter.
And it worked like a charm. The pilot plant was designed as a temporary structure that would last just three years, but it kept running until 1989. By then, however, its steel guy cables had rusted, and it finally toppled in a strong windstorm.
Power output depends primarily on two factors: collector area and chimney height. A larger area collects and warms a greater volume of air to flow up the chimney; collector areas as large as 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) in diameter have been discussed. A larger chimney height increases the pressure difference via the stack effect; chimneys as tall as 1,000 metres (3,281 ft) have been discussed.
Heat is stored inside the collector area allowing SUTs to operate *24 hours a day.* The ground beneath the solar collector, water in bags or tubes, or a saltwater thermal sink in the collector could add thermal capacity and inertia to the collector. Humidity of the updraft and condensation in the chimney could increase the energy flux of the system.
Why a vertical circle? Not that it’s a bad design, and since we know nothing about the technology required we can’t determine whether it’s the most effective/efficient design for its purpose. Because of Stargate’s popularity, readers can make a quick visual association. But a little more oblong shape would be clear to the reader while distancing it from Stargate and its lawyers.
Doing an archive crawl now and I’ve just noticed: The last time we saw these one of the towers was only a third built, now it’s finished. Time has passed.