Grrl Power #1076 – Obsidian crop circle
“Sydney! What did you do to the desert?!”
“As deserts are defined by the amount of rainfall they receive… technically I didn’t change anything?”
So, Sydney had a bold plan, and enacted it. There’s something to be said for decisive action, even if it’s likely that a much better plan could have been envisioned at a future date with ample time for planning.
I’m not sure if the scale quite comes across like I wanted it to. The bottom panel started off as a screenshot from Google Earth, and I think that obsidian disk is like… 10 kilometers across? I know it looks like a jagged purple mess, but I actually spent a lot of time cutting out little bits and bobs here and there for roads and patches of farmland from the original screenshot. Sydney didn’t want to actually fuck up any existing infrastructure, though she’s probably caused some headaches for future development and will have definitely will have thrown off some grazing habits.
Tourist attraction wise, I would suggest naming it “Lake Scoville,” or “The Scoville Cataclysm.”
The August Vote Incentive is up!
I’m a big fan of John Byrne’s run on “The Sensational She Hulk” and the imminent show looks very Sensational influenced. Therefore, I was inspired to draw some buff (pun intended) She Hulk, and threw in Red She Hulk for fun. Also, a wild Sydney for scale. Enjoy them posing in various outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Wouldnt that destroy the local environment and ecosystem though?
Assuming she didn’t glass the entire country side just a containment area. And as they say sometimes you have to break a few eggs to kill a living sandstorm, or something.
Wouldn’t that destroy people’s feet?
Imagine having to walk on shards of glass to go anywhere in Galytn… also, this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Go outside and touch Glass”…
It’s basically just igneous rock. Have you ever been to a lava flow?
Google: glass
I suppose a lava party would be hot.
Yes, but there’s a difference between basalt and the rock that cavemen used to make spears. So it’ll either be really, really sharp, or slippery as fuck, depending on how worn down it is.
Essentially it’s hero made obsidian. Not the exact same composition, but I suspect it’s a lot closer to that than what we have in our windows.
ObSydneyan glass will be a huge new revenue stream for Galytn.
At least, will change the immediate temperature rates as the reflection of that disk (amount of sunlight reflected in the immediate surroundings) will be…… I don’t know…. microwave level??
Even if it is dark…
BTW, how deep that “vitrification” goes?
I think a giant living sandstorm guy sandblasting everything into oblivion while rampaging there would have done that anyways. Might as well beat the bad guy if everything there was going to get walloped anyways.
Theoretically, the glass could be pounded into bits the size of sand particles. It would just be a different kind of sand. Might still be the wrong color, though. Refraction might help with that? (IDK, I’m spitballing here.)
it would be the special jagged sharp sort (glass shards) that you don’t want to walk anywhere near, or be downwind of ever.
An incredible amount of jagged sand? Sounds like Galytn just got a source of high quality construction grade sand. Expect purple concrete to be in vogue for a bit. Probably the architects can evoke thematically Maxima’s hair.
didn’t even occur to me that jagged sand would be great for its binding purposes in construction.
Middle East countries imported sand (as well as camels) from Australia because the local sand is all wind-swept and sand-blown and such, and they needed more grippy sand for construction and so on.
Though maybe melting the local sand in solar ovens then grinding it up might work too. I wonder if anyone looked at the feasibility and economics of that. Probably not, those guys have oil dollars up the yin-yang.
Speaking of purple, why is the glass purple in the first place? We saw maxima’s blasts could create purple crystals when they tested Sydney’s shield, but I figured that was just because of the exotic nature of her abilities. Is purple glass just the Kirby Krackle of this universe?
actually heavily irradiating glass or quartz with trace manganese impurities with ionizing radiation can make it purple, which makes me wonder what Sidney’s beam and Max’s blast actually shoots.
Fair enough. Still, something something tumbling action, a few thousand years…
IDK, still spitballing.
Thanks for replying.
Sidney thinking like a cosmic being, or just a gamer. Enemy has a field type advantage, so change the field type.
Also speaking of how she changed the field. When did she get this third setting for the PPO? Was it mentioned, or has yet to be mentioned as she got it off panel with some pips earned?
So far we know of two settings, the scatter shot fireballs,
and the original cutter beam (which also seeds explosive energy that goes off inside the cuts from the beam),
I don’t think we’ve seen her use an Inferno Blast or Heat Beam setting before now that I can remember.
Probably was just the cutting orb being waved around like crazy.
Then there should be explosions after the beam cuts. Just like with the tank, the alien ships, and the Kaiju robeast.
no? all of those were things which almost certainly contained fuel lines and other such things that explode when hit with extreme heat, which her laser appears to be. sand melts. I imagine there would be some low-level blasting things around from the heated air currents, but no explosions.
Everything explodes if you hit it with enough heat in a short enough period of time. For example, there are experimental laser rifle which cause flesh to explode when it hits flesh. Remember, if you can phase shift matter to a higher energy phase fast enough, it will explosively decompress as it literally vaporizes.
Kyle Hill has a couple of great videos on this. The first being about how light sabers wouldn’t cut someone’s arm off, it’d cause the person to explode. The second was about Star Trek’s hand phasers and how they’re even nastier than light sabers in that regard.
Naturally…phasers are FTL weapons, after all… ;)
Without having seen the videos yet: I always thought that the phasers don’t emit very much energy, it’s the *handwave* phasing that causes the desired effect.
I doubt they would have that tank fueled up for the demonstration, and it was the sand under the tank that exploded.
Actually during the tank test, you can see the air exploding along the beams path, and while the tank would have a gas tank, that assumes that the gas tank was filled with gas (there was a fairly big scandal a while back when it turned out that the US Army was testing the Bradley for explosiveness with a gas tank filled with water and ammunition filled with sand).
That being said, while it could be due to the evolution in art style, the tank beam and this beam look very different.
the page in question, we see the beam is thin, cutting, and is setting off what look to be seeded explosive energy points. The explosion is not centered on the tank but the line she cuts across the ground, thus both tank parts and the sand blasting into the air.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-168-a-harsh-lesson-in-orb-management/
the previous page demonstrating how thin the beam is, especially compared to the Inferno Blast looking larger beam of this page.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-167-sydney-beam-activate/
My guess is she is shooting condensed solar flairs. As in this page she describes the PPO is like touching the sun
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-192-touching-star/
the cutter beam would most likely be the tight aperture that the PPO started with, and the heat wave she is using here is a wide one. That is something she could have figured out “off camera” during her space escapades or as she was fighting the “Invid invasion” Heck she and her boyfriend may have figured it out verbally and this was the test run.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-511-rapid-fire-starter/
that upgrade gave her both the shotgun and the “barrel” adjustment powers
Yes because of the amount of heat things should have been exploding too but if you look on the last panel there are roads scratched into it and a lot of smoke coming off of it so things did blow up just not on the scale science would have it. She did several miles of glassed earth here not just a block or two.
Also, we saw that she has a reticle for the PPO. She probably just innovated and applied the “spread radius” to the cutting beam. Or she’s firing heat pellets so quickly that it’s simpler to just draw it as a cone.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be a new attack type, just the PPO’s standard laser beam but less focused. Her alternate firing mode changes the attack in a much more fundamental way.
The delayed explosions from the other times she’s used it could’ve just been dramatic effect of things she cut through themselves exploding? Like how delayed explosions/blood spurts in movies has become a trope. IDK
The explosions, especially in the tank demonstration looked to be an artifact of the beam it’s self, she cut through the ground and then moments later there was an explosion of the ground.
She gained an aperture control upgrade very early on. I imagine that instead of having it focused down into a razor laser, she instead has it set to wide area coverage (presumably the tradeoff is loss of penetrating power).
I hope that it’s not something more generic than actual SAND control and our lovely villain wasn’t… ah… sandbagging.
Nah, he just got tea-bagged by the Salt Queen
I, uh, suppose Earth now has a new type of environment that some other planets already have? A… glass… flat…? Like a salt flat. But glass. Wonder what will adapt to live there assuming Sydney doesn’t accidentally destroy the planet.
“First glassing? Me too.” – Kat, driving terribly
Well, if Sydney’s stunt could destroy the Earth environment, then wouldn’t hundreds of active volcanoes spreading molten obsidian every year over large tracts of land for literally hundreds of millions of years have already done it? That’s not even considering that a younger Earth was far more volcanically active than it is today.
This… a relatively small area glassed like this is not going to harm the ecosystem of the planet, especially when it is in an already marginal area.
I didn’t say this stunt would, I was referencing how her orbs have an video game element and Sydney is a might bit impulsive. There also are some creatures adapted to lava fields one of which I can name of right now being a type of snail with minerals and metals in its shell from eating rocks.
As in a future stunt within her lifetime and thus long before anything could properly adapt to this new environment.
They do. That’s the whole deal with large igneous provrnces. They cause mass extinctions. See for example the formation of the Siberian traps
Great, now Darude is going to turn into a big purple glass monster instead.
That’s our Sydney, helping people understand and better use their powers!
It was already established he is a sandkinetic only not a silicakinetic so he can’t also control glass. Which is odd but if a papyrikinetic can control paper but not dried out logs. Some powers can be vague and wide and others really weirdly specific
…Aaaand hopefully not an ecological disaster…
I would think a desert really doesn’t HAVE any ecology to effect most of that would be around water and that’s it out side some roaming animals that would have noped out a while ago
Deserts are very much alive, be it low water plants, or insects and other gross’os, to lizards and mammals. I foresee Sydney getting in quite a bit of trouble. Like, possible criminal charges kind of trouble.
Though, thinking about it, that land IS under Deus’ control, and he seems rather fond of Sydney, so she might get away with it.
So Halo just pulled a Halo covenant move and glassed the desert.
At least she didn’t ‘comb’ it.
I AM waiting for Dark Helmet to make an appearance… And yes, I am guarding my best friends!
Mental note:
If I ever fight the Mighty Halo, and she does anything, stop her. First.
An accurate measure of how far to stay away from her (at center) when she has her spice game on.
But isn’t sand basically already glass that’s just very finely ground? So how oddly specific do Daruda’s powers have to be that he can use it when it’s in microscopic grains but not when it’s in assorted shards and pieces?
Also – the only sand in Galytn was inside that circle? Isn’t that kinda unlikely?
it’s probably a type or circumstances where darude MAY be able to if he trained but never had to so he can’t right now.
kind of like an earth bender can’t automatically bend steel, and i’m pretty sure not all of them can. nevermind the lava bending bullcrap lol!
No, not really. Setting aside the fact that sand can be made from any mineral or rock in theory, since it’s defined by grain size and not composition, most sand is quartz (SiO2), not glass. There are significant differences between sand and glass, due to one having a crystalline structure while the other doesn’t. Things like hardness: you can’t scratch quartz with glass, but you can scratch most forms of silica glass with quartz.
Maybe he controls sand by applying telekinetic pressure to the surface of each grain. Larger pieces might be too heavy for the relatively weak pressure that he can use. Small pieces like sand grains might be light enough that the weak pressure he can use is way more than enough to control their low mass.
Also, if there’s patches of infrastructure and grazing land in there (if I understand DaveB correctly) they’r definitely f*cked. Considering they’re now inside and area with a temperature of over 2800 degrees… Sydney might as well have torced them directly, because they’re gone anyway.
One final thought: isn’t Max leaving herself wide open to attack by taking off her breathing mask like that? Daruda’s
right behind her! He may not have that much sand left, but it doesn’t take that much to fill two human lungs after all.
NYEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOM!
And today on “How do superheroes kill everybody!” we introduce our friend ‘conservation of energy’. See, when you heat up sand to 3000C, the temperature at which it becomes molten enough to form glass, that energy doesn’t immediately, magically, go away after it’s done what it just did. No. It has to GO places. Places like ‘away from where you put it.’ In fact, that’s what energy excels at doing!
So let’s say that our dear sweet heroine just made a meter thick disk of obsidian. Dave says it’s supposed to be 10 km across. So 10,000x 5×3.14×3.14×1= 98,596 m of rock. Sand generally has a density of 2.65. 261,000 kg of rock… give or take a little. That gives us over six hundred thousand megajoules of energy. That’s the equivalent of a 150 kt nuke, So we’d be looking at 3rd degree burns over 10km (lacking the fireball and pressure wave. This is pure thermal energy, on top of however much heat she imparted on the interveining air.
Physics! Taking perfectly good hero ideas and ruining them by killing everyone! Brought to you by Gwen Stacy’s neck!
Yep. Crazy bad idea. Well, unless there’s someone nearby who has a power to soak up the heat. But I doubt she thought that far ahead.
This made me laugh. Somber isn’t wrong though.
Circle space formula is pi*r², so 3.1415*(5000*5000)= 78,537,500 m³.
And sand density is 1602 kg/m³, which gives us ~125 _millions_ of _tons_.
Can you please update your megaton calculations based on this slightly updated order of magnitude?
Circle space formula is pi*(r squared), so 3.1415*(5000*5000)= 78,537,500 m3.
And sand density is 1602 kg/m cubic, which gives us around 125 _millions_ of _tons_.
Can you please update your megaton calculations based in this slightly updated order of magnitude?
There’s a lot of problems with your calculation. The biggest of which, as Nonsens mentioned, is that you used the wrong formula for the area of a circle. And that sand is much less dense than solid silica due to the space between the grains.
I’d also take issue with saying that it’s a meter deep. I don’t really see any justification for that. With the amount of heat that would be radiating into the atmosphere rather than into the ground I wouldn’t expect it to penetrate very far. I personally would feel more comfortable with about 0.25m.
With those adjustments in mind, I’d put it at 19,635,000 m3, which would be about 31,455,000,000 kg. Melting that much silica simultaneously would take 42.5 petajoules, which is an equivalent of 10.1 megatons of TNT. For comparison, the largest currently-operational nuclear power plant in the world, the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Canada, on Lake Huron, at full capacity, outputs that amount of energy in 75 days.
For another comparison, the energy output per minute of a typical tropical cyclone is about 8.6 megatons of TNT, almost entirely from water condensation. So the Earth laughs at this kind of thing.
Do keep in mind, though, that this energy was delivered over many magnitudes longer a period of time than a nuclear weapon does, and there are other considerations that could increase or even decrease this energy requirement, such as how much more energy is applied than necessary (increasing it) or the energy that bleeds over from already-melted areas into the surroundings (which, if the orb only applies the amount of energy needed for the task, would decrease the energy requirements)
Aww, she’s started glassing planets now. Cute!
Probably going to change weather patterns and all kinds of things. If the locals don’t like it, they can probably sell the obsidian or break it up for use in industry. Gonna take a long time to do that, but hey, free resources!
Having that Sidney is a baby Nth vibe there.
like the Q with their baby blowing up stars, or some higher dimension being couple watching their offspring’s first attempt at creating a functional life bearing planet and ending up with something like Centaurworld (aww, their first garden, how cute).
“The Riftworker’s work is never done…”
Circle space formula is pi*r², so 3.1415*(5000*5000)= 78,537,500 m³.
And sand density is 1602 kg/m³, which gives us ~125 _millions_ of _tons_.
Can you please update your megaton calculations based in this slightly updated order of magnitude?
↑ Sorry for triple posting, the first one was not appearing for just a little too long
Depending on how smooth it is, and how deep the glass goes… The Scoville Roller Derby field would be a good name…
Sydney may have just redefined “Drastic” to Maxima.
She just altered the topography of the planet.
…
I expect Max is actually a bit frightened/jealous.
The heat burden of square kilometers of molten glass would create a huge updraft with 200kph+ winds flowing into it, and ironically be almost certain to cause a sandstorm.
HALOGLASS.COM order a piece of magic glass made by the Mighty Halo! own a piece of super hero history!
*haloglass is not guaranteed to posses any actual magical properties.
watch it end up having some special radiation signature and properties that could pass for starship fuel or something.
“Don’t worry, Maxima. You don’t need to do anything drastic. I already did.”
If I was that sand dude…I would seriously be like…right. done. Sorry, Max. I’m out. Give Deus my regrets, apologies and please keep that nut away from my sandy bod.
Maxima in this scene: well, maybe Sidney is somehow responsible for the mass extinction event 65 million years ago.
More likely, she’s trying to figure out how to force Darude into the center of the field Sydles just created, hopefully denying him his power medium.
She game the Earth a new nipple. Made of Obsidian. Purple Obsidian. She gave the Earth a purple nurple!
I would go NYEEEOOM too
Maxima didn’t realise how much power her pew pew orb has, did she?
Where did Sydney’s goggles go in that last panel?
Probably the same place they came from
I gave specific trope examples that clearly refer to something that bonded with the person, Venom, Guyver, Witchblade, in order to get the concept across. Which clearly does not include mutate factors.like radiation. That would give some of us the impression the geode water might be a symbiote. Not saying it is, only until stated otherwise it has been the go to way to refer to it in the comments.
This detached from its comment thread. Response to Pander. Follow up anyway. If I feel there is a chance I am not articulating a concept clearly I will list examples of what I specifically mean…these were ignored and the core concept clearly not understood. And it was just an explanation for using a term and not the focus of the discussion.
Ah okay. I just didn’t see the geode water as being similar to actual symbiotes, which the venom symbiote, the guyver symbiote, and the witchblade definitely are.
The geode water seemed more like a ‘cosmic radiation’/spider bite sort of thing.
DaveB suggested that it was a symbiote in his post on page 415. It’s not clear whether he has made a firm decision on the specifics and has just chosen not to disclose them, or if he’s undecided on the matter.
oh yeah, I thought there was another reason beyond the trope so many on here were just going with it, been a few years LoL.
Also, heck, the delivery system is something you see with symbiote super powers, ancient relic, rock, meteor, whatever, open up, and this thing comes out. I remember an episode of Babylon 5 that even did it, an alien found something dormant inside stone on a dead world that turned out to be a living super weapon that bonds to a xenoarcheologist.
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Infection
Readers are assuming that after Halo melts the sand to glass the orb does not withdraw the heat so it can be reused. It it does, the glass is now cold. Conservation, you know.
That never happened to the tank, or the blood golem. And it’s smoking. (But not glowing?)
This is clearly a different firing mode than those, though.
Next up, Darude GlassStorm
Should’ve just flown above the Sand guy and area-glassed HIM.
My first thought: If Halo kept that down to 2-3mm or so (which she should have if trying to cover a lot of ground with it), you can just plow that back into a more reasonable type of soil. The plow mixes it up with the rest of the top 30cm or thereabouts, and now you only have a sharp-slivers problem, which will steadily diminish in subsequent years. It’d be a good place for kids to not play in for at least a decade. Several decades if nobody’s plowing and harrowing etc. You better make sure that tractor has good tires (or treads) but there’s no particularly difficult problem in setting it right.
My second thought was ‘wonder how much energy that reflects back into space and whether it’s more than the land otherwise would?’ As far as I can make out the answers are fairly disappointing and complicated. Net energy flow in the area is hard to predict. Glass is opaque to infrared, but transmits other colors easily to the soil under it which is warmed and emits infrared… meaning the ground under it is going to get really really hot.
My third thought was, if a bunch of supers ganged up on climate change, I bet they could do a hell of a lot. Think about it:
Cora and her crew could easily put a 300 kilometer ‘black spot’ between Earth and the sun. Work it right and its whole shadow can fall on earth without blocking more than a tiny fraction of sunlight to any one place.
There’s various ice-themed or heat-sinking powers that could be deployed on a potentially grand scale or in a highly leveraged way. To say nothing of the various people who have weather-control or ecological powers.
Syd, doing something like this in a way that’s more precise and directed at getting rid of heat, could change things a lot.
Deus with his solar power towers can absorb a whole lot of solar energy that would otherwise heat the ground and disperse it in the stratosphere where probably half of it will radiate away instead, at the same time meeting demands for electricity which would otherwise result in more CO2 production.
Describe the problem to Dabbler and see what she comes up with.
Describe the problem to Digit and … uh, you know what, that’s probably a bad idea…..
Wanna take bets on whether Krona could just put an adjustable filter on planetary sunlight?
I see several people beat me to it, but ya, the radiant heat from that much sand turned into glass? If its just a thin shell its worthless to stop Darude, if its deep and you delivered enough energy to melt that much glass, I know Dave said he took the time to cut out sections for infrastructure etc, but that much radiant heat will destroy anything around it, roads, buildings, farmland all up in flames. 1700c minimum, realistically likely much higher to melt it quickly enough to do anything. All of this of course aside from the point of how can archon justify intervening in a conflict in another country that their not allied or even friendly with…. That by itself is a big no no, and before you say super heroes have to save the day……. Deus isnt too shabby himself, I’m sure his crew could’ve handled it.
Bad vibes, as a Siberian native. She comes here from a Western power and thinks, “Oh, this is just desert. It can’t matter all that much to anyone, right? It is okay to destroy it if it’s convenient.” But this is someone’s desert. They have lived here for thousands of years. Every square meter of that desert has history and stories stretching back into the age of myths. Like the British testing their nuclear weapons on the Australian interior, to the dismay of Australian natives whose memory about it stretches back 7,000 years ago or more (https://doi.org/10.1080/00046182.2015.1077539).
Sydney has a lot to answer for. Nobody in Galytn will speak anything but curses to her from now on, if this comic is realistic.
I think she was more thinking… this thing is a sand-controlling Kaiju, and if I deprive it of sand, it becomes SIGNIFICANTLY less dangerous, and she’s impulsive as hell, so not really thinking of the longterm ramifications. Doesn’t make it OK, but it’s the difference between disregard and malice, vs. ‘impulsive idiot who would actually understand and side with the locals if you got her to stop moving for a second and THINK about it.’
Sure, it wasn’t conscious. But she would not have done this to the land around where she grew up. If I were from Galytn, and this happened, I would consider this an act of war.
The alternative was that Darude rips it all up. Would that really be better?
Yes. Deserts have sandstorms. They survive them. This is apocalypse. It is a massive volcanic eruption, just with less ash and more molten silica.
Agreed.
Also, deserts are full of life, just not large, abundant, and visible in the daytime like in forests. I’m from a desert.
Clutching space-balls and flying through the air while turning an entire 10km area of sand into glass, to assist the flying golden woman in her fight against the Living-Sandstorm-Guy…
Could be wrong, but I think we passed ‘Realistic’ a few miles back.
Obsidian is volcanic glass. She simply glassed it. Not obsidian- totally different mineral content.
What with the exotic Nth tech radiations from the PPO, I wouldn’t be surprised that Sydney just gifted Deus with several thousand acres of Dylithium Crystals, or something equally powerful.
Clever little devil, Sydney has got quite the ingenious idea of taking the sand out of the fight to make that guy weaker.
The Mighty Halo is living up to her name, and glassing the planet!
You can almost hear Leander’s jaw falling. X-D