Grrl Power #1028 – Nope field
You would think that force fields would change warfare considerably, but honestly I think at most they would cause a fairly temporary disruption. The first ironclads and tanks probably had a few months of feeling pretty invincible, but really all they did was force someone to invent a better canon or landmine or armor piercing whatsit. A force field is the next step. They just raise the bar higher for anyone on offense, so instead of the lone insurgent being able to take down a blackhawk or whatever with a lucky RPG, now it takes three hits in rapid succession, or five, or two RPG’s followed by a TOW or whatever, depending entirely on the properties of the shield.
It’s got to be wildly demoralizing to score a direct hit on something and not even fuck up the paint job. A lot of people would probably jump straight to movies like War of the Worlds or Independence Day where the shields are effectively invincible. Eventually they’ll figure out how much damage a shield can take, and the problem won’t seem as insurmountable. They’ll be downright surmountable, or I dare say, mountable, especially once people get their hands on the inevitable next generation pew pews.
As many of you mentioned in the comments under the previous page, locks do in fact exist for raising and lowering ships. Thank you to the 270th person to point that out. I’m well aware, and so are Deus and Sydney, but Sydney was trying to picture something compatible with structures like the Hoover Dam. A single lock that could elevate a super shipping container that far in a single go would be a far more impressive engineering feat than the dam itself. It would be possible to do in a series of enormous yet shallower locks, but at a certain point, it’s probably more efficient to offload the ship, move the shipping containers up an elevator, and reload them on another ship that just travels between locks, or really, once you get to that point, just stick ’em on a train.
And yes, you can totally get power out of a river without having to build something as crazy as the Hoover. A series of smaller dams is probably geographically much more realistic for the Zambezi anyway. It’s just when you’re talking about dams around Sydney, the first and probably only thing she’s going to picture is the Hoover dam. She’s not especially worldly or well traveled, and the Hoover dam has been blown up and earthquaked in movies plenty of times, so that’s her mental image of a dam.
Man, it is so hard to type “dam” without typing “damn” and then having to erase the “n.” I guess I don’t have that much cause to talk about dams that much online.
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Okay, just to throw a wrench in things here: Who thinks this would have been funnier if Dues had to explain that a shield was ‘suppose to deploy’?
if this were a dark comedy like Solar Opposites, Rick and Morty, or Helluva Boss among others that would have been the go to joke. That said the joke here could have been the reflected blast somehow only burning their clothes off, or showing off a new weapon, the anti-clothing missile *granted that is a Love Ru staple sci-fi weapon*
Dabbler does have some anti clothing do dad
I believe they’re nanobots, although Dabbler did refer to it as a ‘declothesifying spell’ – AKA ‘a million microscopic pac-men’
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-890-on-brand/
Shield was installed with two wires the wrong way so the explosion was contained inside the shield.
The thing about that is the shield is designed to keep everything except the jet on the inside of the shield…
Dammit!
Just remembered something about the dam thing he was thinking about installing in all the new rivers he has access to
That is a monumentally large job, not for just building it. But the time it takes to actually get it working.
when you dam up a place. you gotta wait til the “reservoir” behind the dam fills up. and when you do that, you are basically slamming down the rivers power (depending on how hard to decide you wanna fill it)
it is a major problem especially when borders have rivers that cross over. Since one nation could say
“Welp time to make a dam here” the other nations on the receiving end of that river will suddenly get hammered in food production and trade up and down their river.
Plenty of tales of this having major consequences to places in Africa when one nation just decides to do this. only to get severe pushback for even thinking about it. it would take YEAAARS to handle setting up even 1 dam.
Being able to promise the affected countries downstream that you’d defend them from harmfull floods, and offering upstreams countries favourable trade agreements and cheap electricity, could go a long way to facilitate dam-building. Especially if one explained that one would make use of the military to assist in the building…and if one didn’t build the dam, one would instead give a couple of batallions of alien mosters R&R in neighbouring countries main cities. Of course with promises of giving them stern admonishment to play nice…but accidents do happen.
That’s happened to Iraq quite a few times.
Not merely, but also… How about we suss out the Mekong River, the world’s twelfth longest river with an estimated length of 4,909 km and discharging 475 km³ of water annually. This rises in China near the northeastern tip of Myanmar, and flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Kampuchea and Vietnam.
That’s an awful lot of stern admonishments.
Well, if he controls Mozambique, there’s already the Cahora Bassa dam, whose hydroelectric capacity is severely underutilised. The existing turbine hall basically needs to be totally rebuilt and it could support another turbine hall.
What does an Old D&D manual smell like?
paper. sweat. pencils. pizza. alcohol. with some plastic rolled in.
The first ironclads were pretty freaking invulnerable. And they wallowed like a wallowing thing, and couldn’t handle any kind of high seas at all. The fight between the Monitor and the Merrimack is a fairly famous example in US history. Of the two, the Monitor sank at sea. The Monitor was scuttled by Confederate forces when they fled the base where it was docked.
Early tanks had the same advantages and disadvantages: Pretty much immune to enemy fire, but prone to getting stuck in the mud, or suffering mechanical failure, or not being able to cross a bridge due to their weight.
And yeah, the arms race between weapons and armor is a never ending one.
wellllll, Max has the “firepower” of the arms race clearly set ….. the best shield is not being there ……
I see that Deus has invented the RPG-in-a-box. A spring loaded surface to air missile seems like a waste of effort, especially since we were denied the view of Lorlara bending over to pick it up.
Wasn’t Lorlara given a stern admonishment some time back? About dress propriety?
I do not recall that, personally. I do recall she was admonished about using indoor voices and not threatening to scourge waiters. Otherwise Deus has been pretty chill about things, including her using a belt knife to eat bacon wrapped… everything. “You will bring me ALL the bacon!”
Unless Deus gets bored really fast, he is almost certainly nailing Lorelara on the regular. Remember that he “always wanted to nail and Alari.” It’s difficult to imagine that his one romp in the sheets with Sciona fully scratched that itch. Yeah, there’s a bunch of other Alari that he could be selecting from, but Deus doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who worries at all about office romances or power imbalances in same. Or HR. Especially since he owns the companies, and is filthy rich, and Lorelara probably has it written into her contract anyway…
It tickles my fancy to imagine that Lorlara might actually understands how to act like a normal PA but deliberately acts like how she is because she can.
Realizing this is about the longest we’ve seen Deus without Vale around. She is suspiciously absent during all this.
Half of good security is learning how to be present but not seen…
Lorlara loves her job and will be damned if you think you can shame her for it.
I have to admit that Lorlara displays an uncanny level of skill with that rocket launcher but the way she “picked it up” also displays a rare level of style with the skill. That’s the difference between between people who show merely competent expertise from consummate mastery.
After a certain level of master, it’s all about presentation.
Actually Container Ships are regularly raised or lowered during transit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_locks
The Panama Canal is one of the largest canals in the world, second only to the Seuz Canal in terms of traffic.
Ships, including US aircraft carriers are actually specifically designed around being able to fit through the Panama Canal (New Panamax).
Dams are potentially quite environmentally damaging if they require a sizeable catchment. This is because a large valley needs to be flooded with water, permanently, in order to create a catchment area behind the dam. Solar and wind would be far less disruptive for power generation. Also, I’m surprised the Alari didn’t have fusion power, which would be an even better solution?
Deus’ group of Alari were refugees, so a mixed bag and not necessarily physicists and the like. There is their ship to consider, as it should have both an engine and if the engine doesn’t provide the power for systems such as life support, lights, etc then whatever does provide that.
But I think Deus’ tech is coming from his ‘shopping trip’ to the Fracture, and not from the Alari.
But maybe it’s both.
Sydney (shouting): ‘Hey Major! Did you really just sit there and smile all relaxed while a rocket launcher flew straight towards your face?”
Major: “Yup!”
Sydney: “How do you keep your balls from clanking when you walk?”
Maxima: “SYDNEY! This is a diplomatic mission!”
Sydney has her own supershield, has watched teammates block explosions with their powers or faces, and even used one of those teammates as a mine-probing device. I don’t think she’s nearly as impressed as she would’ve been a few months ago.
I submit as my counter-argument, Maxima’s lecture on “why we carry guns”.
That major has probably had far fewer aliens and Maxima’s hurling massive explosions of energy at him than Sydney by this point, and he doesn’t have a mysterious Nth-level tech shield that’s supposedly beyond even the conceptual tech level of the entire known galactic community. He’s got one mass-produced Alari-tech shield that’s been ad-hoc wired into a Terran design aircraft prototype to see if it works. Total confidence in it is… frankly surprising.
Mainly I’m just noting how bizarrely calm and laid back he looks, sitting there with his leg crossed while a missile streaks towards his face! Shield or no shield, he’s a pretty cool customer! I stand by my implication as to the metallic armored nature of his metaphorical testicles!
Fair point, this is a much bigger thing for him. Although it’s pretty clear he’s done this a few times, probably including Lorlara being the one to take the shot, but the first couple times still had to be pretty nerve-wracking. I wouldn’t be anxious to try it even after a couple successful demonstrations.
Lorlara amuses me tremendously.
I think I would even read a Lorlara spin-off.
The name of the spinoff would be “That’s Lorlana!” And the punchline at the end of every comic would be someone saying, “That’s Lorlana!” and everyone starting to laugh at her crazy antics.
There’s a lot of talk about how the forcefield couldn’t work because physics or real life or materials sciens or aerodynamics or something. Yeah, you can have fun talking about all of that, it is fun. But:
Dave’s world includes magic.
LOL, some guys want to take advantage of others. However, the plot is so attractive.