Grrl Power #1080 – Nitrogenerator
Sydney’s reaction here is because her Trope Savvy brain is starting to realize the potential of the Atmorb<sup>TM</sup>. There’s still a shitload to learn about it. Can it create just gasses? Can it create any element on the periodic table? Can it create isotopes? It seems to be able to create a mix of gasses, because presumably when she’s used it for life support, it output an Earth Atmosphere mix; roughly 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 2% other stuff.
Even if it can only create… I almost typed in “Noble Gasses” then decided to double check, and realized that Nitrogen is not, in fact, a noble gas. It is extremely nonreactive though. I’d always assumed it was noble because of that. Apparently it’s just an “Other Nonmetal.” Honestly, the periodic table really tweaks my OCD. The column of Noble Gasses is nice, and next to it is the Halogens, but then there’s Hydrogen, which is an Other Nonmetal, but it’s hanging out way over on the other side of the chart from the regular wedge of Other Nonmetals. Next to that is sort of a diagonal line of Metalloids, but part of it is diagonal, and part of it is down one then over one, like a Bishop and Knight were taking turns leaving tracks for hunters to follow. If Aluminum and Polonium were Metalloids, it’d be a lot cleaner, but it’s like God got distracted halfway through organizing it. (Here’s a pic of the table so you don’t have to google it.)
I changed Sydney’s exclamation like six times while I was drawing the page. It started off as “Holy fuck tunnels” but while that’s about as funny sounding to me as the other things I came up with, I started to think that maybe it’s slightly too rude? Like, Sydney’s cursing is intended to be amusing, improbable and slightly non-sequitur, but “fuck tunnel” kind of sounds like something a dude would call a chick in a porno while he’s slapping her face. I dunno, I probably over thought it. But then, “fuck bubbles” sounds potentially a lot grosser, like, if you think about it too hard, and that makes it slightly funnier to me.
The August Vote Incentive is still up! As usual, the new one is technically finished, but I don’t have a clothed version yet. I should have it up with the Monday comic.
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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It turns out that Poul Anderson’s novel “Shield” had a guy on the run from the government because they wanted his weapon-proof alien force field generator. Small world.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2150533#shield — https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/192675/author-of-60s-70s-sci-fi-novel-called-sphere-about-a-clear-personal-transport-d?rq=1
Nitrogen compounds that are less than completely stable?
Sydney needs to meet the real world Professor Doktor Klapotke, a brilliant real-world German Chemist:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-azidoazide-azides-more-or-less
on the compound C2N14
and note
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/chlorine-trifluoride-some-empirical-findings on ClF3
Search “Things I won’t work with” for more of these.
C2N14? Azidoazideazide? “How much nitrogen?” “YES”
This australian guy made it in his shed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sz4d7RQB6Y
The obvious next test: If you can adjust the elemental composition of the gas you’re creating, can you adjust the temperature? A little bit of nitrogen at temperatures more suited to Uranus would extinguish those fires good and fast.
this is a good point, if its supposed to be a universal life support system adjustor, which isn’t just pure gases, but atmosphere mixtures, it also should have liquids (which count as breathable atmosphere as well), as well as adjustments of temperature and pressure/gas-liquid densities. After all you can have the right mixture but make it too thin or too thick or the temperature too high or low and its either too hard to breathe or too dangerous too breathe. So there could be some organism that lives in incredibly dense high gravity gas giants and the gas mixture and pressure for them would be downright destructive when released on Earth; granted it would quickly disperse and adjust, but not before the immediate area was hit by a pressure wave of dense gases.
Also worth testing is if she can only create nitrogyn and oxygen can or she create any gas cause if so time for syd to have a chemustry refresher
How many pages until she is making neon signs in the sky?
Probably not unless she teams up with Jiggawatt to energize the gas, and even then it’d look more like a Faux Borealis.
Aurora Halo-alis?
Halo’s Bored-realis
lol she already does that regularly with the light hook.
That said she could create an atmosphere of Neon within a shaped shield. That would be cool.
Loose nitrogen is fairly nonreactive. But it turns out that the more nitrogens you can get into a complex molecule the bangier that substance gets.
Pro Tip: If you are a shipping company, never accept a contract to move ANYTHING whose name starts with HexaNitro… because the delivery vehicle is almost guaranteed not to arrive in one piece.
A particularly egregious example is something called ‘hexanitropolyazaaisowurtzitane’ – It’s your classic example of stuff that blows up if a butterfly three miles away sneezes.
Anything with a leading number and ‘nitro-‘ is probably cause for concern. A long time ago now, in my A-Level chemistry class, we were doing a prepared lab experiment that created Nitro-toluene. Repeating the experiment three times would have created Tri-nitro-toluene (TNT). Needless to say, the teacher wouldn’t let us. :)
You’re fine as long as you don’t let the reaction add a 4th toluene group.
It’s inherently unstable.
That or Fluorine. Fluorine compounds are just nightmare fuel.
Fluorine is nightmare fuel in any form.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3100/fc03031.htm
You may want to read the next few strips, then set aside the weekend to read the rest of the archives…
Sydney needs to meet the real-world brilliant chemist Proessor Doktor Klapotke
Sydney needs to meet the real world Professor Doktor Klapotke
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-azidoazide-azides-more-or-less
starring C2N14
and note
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/chlorine-trifluoride-some-empirical-findings with ClF3
Search “Things I won’t work with”for more
My pet peeve with the periodic table is that it isn’t clear if scandium and yttrium are above lanthanum or lutetium, aka if in a “long form” table where the lanthanides and actinides were in line with the other elements in the sixth and seventh rows, would scandium and yttrium stay adjacent to calcium and strontium and continue the “stair” down the left side or would they be adjacent to titanium and zirconium and stick with the other transition metals?
Yea, that’s especially annoying because the point of the design is that the periods (columns) have similar properties; so if you can’t tell what column something is supposed to be in, it defeats the purpose. I was curious so I looked it up – Lanthanum should be a new step and yttrium and scandium share a column with lutetium and lawrencium. as best I can tell, the steps correspond to electron orbitals, and the Lanthanides and Actinides are the elements that start using the F orbitals of their outer shells.
My pet peeve with the periodic table is that they skipped zero and started with Hydrogen.
Although it’s not clear which valence column Neutronium belongs in, it ought to be on there shouldn’t it?
Gotta be a noble gas. Neutronium doesn’t even do chemistry.
Nah. Neutronium is another word for ‘matter compressed so much a teaspoon weighs a thousand tons’ or something. What element it is made of is superfluous.
Atmorb? Maybe Atmo-Sphere.
+1 for cleverness. You have earned one free, non-transferrable ‘get out of ninja hit squad bounty free’ card.
* stares sadly at own name on perma-ban list next to the GOONHSBF rules poster in the break room *
Everyone talking about the weaponizable and situationally practical aspects of this discovery, but what about making a atmosphere of liquid gold (some very weird extreme species lives in a molten environment), and then cools the outside. Or with platinum, or titanium, or a particular isotope of uranium or other radioactives, or particularly complicated molecules and enzymes.
That could help subsidize the budget a ton.
Bzzzzt.
Refer back to previous pages, where is was discussed that an influx of new “rare” substances would crash the market.
I’m curious as to how the economy in NYC reacted to the tourists paying for services with chunks of gold.
Why does that man look like Obama? Why do I think he looks like Obama!? Mister President! WHY ARE YOU IN THAT FIELD?!
Obama’s twin brother, cause he was born in Africa.
he’s just outstanding in his field
I’m looking at his facial expression and thinking…
here is the super-powered white girl who has changed the entire landscape and probably doomed my farm.
She thinks she’s trying to help now.
If I say a cross word to her, and she happens to be crazy, she can crush me like a bug.
But she’s a white girl. If she were crazy, how could anyone tell?
I wonder if she accidentally roasted my dog?
…..
Is this something Deus would help me with?
Hmmm. It might be, but if it is, then I would have to trust Deus to do something actually helpful.
Deus is definitely crazy. He’s a white guy, but I can tell anyway.
But to be fair he is usually helpful. At least if he understands what is actually wrong.
What’s actually wrong is pretty obvious here isn’t it?
…..
Damnit, I’m going to miss that dog.
Scale up the orb to mysterious precursor-tier tech, and we could be looking at a terraformorb. At the furthest stretches, spontaneous creation of life could be on the table.
Not for somebody with Sydney’s feeble mortal framework of a mind though, probably.
A very important note about this kind of situation -> the massive expulsion of basically pure nitrogen in an area. Since Nitrogen (GAS) is mostly inert, it can fill up your lungs with one breath… and kill you. Not because it is specifically dangerous, but because our lungs are designed to EQUALIZE the oxygen across the membrane. That means that in a 0% oxygen environment you will die from ONE BREATH.
Not quite. The 02 in your blood will be expelled from your lungs but not all at once.
The main reason Low/No O2 enviroments are so dangerous is that the strangling”I need to Breathe!” sensation that we associate with suffocation is NOT caused by a lack of Oxygen. It is caused by the build up of Carbon Dioxide.
In a low O2 environment you are still mechanically breathing, and so expelling CO2. So it never builds up in your blood. So what happens is you get light headed, pass out, and suffocate. Very Very quickly. But not one breath.
as Robin Says “holy Bat Shit Fat Man”
I just really hope she has made note of the original settings so she can revert back to human breathable atmo again.
“I almost typed in “Noble Gasses” then decided to double check, and realized that Nitrogen is not, in fact, a noble gas. It is extremely nonreactive though.”
Nitrogen exists in two common states:
– N2, which is so non-reactive it might as well be a Noble gas
– The core ingredient of every explosive on this planet:
Nitroglycerine? Check
TNT? Basically just rolled, Nitroglycerine soaked paper
C4? 91% Nitroamine
“Amonium Nitrate”, that famously volatile Fertilizer/Explosive? You make it by mixing 3 Nitrogen Compounds
“Azidoazide Azide”, the most volatile explosive ever invented? C2N14. The N14 is where the explosiveness comes from
However, note that without control over the Emission Temperature N2 would work just as good or bad as smothering it with the shield. N2 and other noble gasses work as fire supression, by displacing Oxygen. Same way smothering the flame in it’s own CO2 does. Or sand.
Just *READING* “azidoazide azide” made me pause for a second, and I’m not even a chemist!
Well, it is actually called “1-Diazidocarbamoyl-5-azidotetrazole”. But Chemists seem to love giving stuff funny names.
See “Dioxygen difluoride”, aka “FOOF”. It is solid at 110° Kelvin. And decomposing at anything beyond that.
A funny stuff is Chlorine Triflouride. It treats such burnable stuff as room temperature Humans, Asbestos, most Metals, Concrete, Sand and literal Ash as Fuel.
Above it is Chlorine Pentaflouride.
FOOF just sits above both.
Acetone Peroxide
Dynamite is Nitroglycerine absorbed in Diatomaceous earth, (or clay or any other type of absorbent material).
TNT is toluene with 3 nitro groups…totally different thang.\
I was confused about mercury fulminate (Mercury + alcohol) because when I tried it nuthin happened.
Fortunately they withheld that you first treat the mercury with NITRIC acid, otherwise I wouldn’t have made it to adulthood.
This brings to mind this exchange:
“Massey: Umm. . . With all due respect, Captain, are you going to listen, or are you going to try and contribute?
Captain Tagon: I’m here to supervise.
Captain Tagon: Put this much brainpower all in one place with no oversight, you’ll either get an explosion, or a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
Elf: None of us have any dice, sir.
Captain Tagon: You can see why it’s so important that I stay.”
Schlock Mercenary, November 11, 2007.
Has anyone claimed dry ice yet?
now that’s cold, man.
More nitrogen in a field might mean really green plants at the end of all this. Maybe?
A bit of Pure Nitrogen Gas on the fields will do nothing. I mean the atmosphere is like 78% N2. And it is as close to inert as any non-noble gas can be.
Actually converting N2 into anything useful is energetically expensive as heck.
This reminded me of xkcd’s “Periodic Table Changes,” I wonder if you would like it.
When I see “fuck bubbles” I imagine an application of the force-field orb, high in the sky, to create a shared space for Syd and some as-yet-unseen boyfriend.
In a non-sequitur, if Syd can create some tons of liquid ammonia once the fire’s well and completely out, it might be a good thing for the arability of the land.
I can’t think of a thing that both dissolves glass and isn’t insanely poisonous or explosive or both.
maybe her wolf boyfriend? “now whatever you do, don’t let go of the flight and shield orbs”
All she’d have to do is use duct tape…. And as a bonus she’s never have to worry about hairy knuckles again :D
Straight ammonia tends to be really bad for every living thing I can think of.
Look, Sydney, Nitrogen’s a decent fire-suppressant, but it isn’t really chemically inert and that makes it unsafe. Pick a noble gas and flood the area with it. Not helium, though, that stuff’s lighter than air and it won’t smother the fire for long. Go with the heaviest option that will stick around for a while, and flood the whole area with radon. That’s definitely the safest option.
(Wait, can you pick which isotope you get? Go with Radon-224, because that’s the heaviest and thus should be best at smothering the fire. Better safe than sorry, right?)
More seriously, Archon needs to give Sydney a crash course in chemistry and chemistry hazards ASAP.
Radon? Seriously?
About the radon? No. About Sydney suddenly needing a crash course in chemistry safety? Yes.
In accordance with Poe’s Law 2: Electric Boogaloo I am required to consider your comment to be sarcasm.
That really would be the only reason to suggest Radon.
Sydney: the foul-mouthed version of Burt Ward’s Robin
I’m reminded of many a magic user who essentially can “delete” oxygen and atmosphere in an extremely localized fashion. Or add other stuff in. Can’t remember where it was, but a building was on fire and the mage removed all the atmosphere directly above the building creating a vacuum which flash-extinguished the very out of control blaze. One of his teammates asked why he didn’t do it in another situation and he was like, “you have human lungs, but there’s nobody in that building.”
“[Nitrogen] is extremely nonreactive though.”
This is definitely a “careful what you ask for” situation! If Sydney is thinking about atomic Nitrogen straight out of the periodic table, that is extremely explosive! The non-reactive stuff we have in our atmosphere is N2. Two Nitrogen atoms together in a molecule.
Any item on the table can be made unstable with the right mixtures and/or catalyst, the trick is in the ratios of each chemical. Take oxygen, by it’s self it’s not flammable, but add in anything that is and boom! I watched a demonstration using a candle in an air-tight container with normal air it was a small flame, but add in oxy to 40% instead of the normal 20% apx. and the flame triples in size and temperature. It only lasted a few seconds then and the wick fell over in the melted wax.
Everyone talking about weaponization, FOOF and C2N14. Give me ten liters of radon-219 under 10 atmospheres, please.
Slow down there, Satan.
If we are going to things whose issues are not chemical, anti-matter air sounds adequate for most purposes.
Funny concept. Not only is this putting out the fire, but nitrogen-rich fertilizer is apparently a thing for farming. Just watch – these fields are going to produce unusually rich crops, and she will be asked to come back and burn everything again.
Which reminds me that char makes a great fertilizer.
You get all you nontoxic waste – food leaving & scrap wood, say – then start a slow burn. You don’t want to ash it, as that gasses all that lovely carbon. But if you break it all down to char, then mix in nightsoil & just enough water to make it easily distributable, you can very neat return that carbon to the fields, where it can be turned into carbohydrates again.
Primitive agro-chemistry is truly marvelous.
Terra Preta ftw
So she can just create some gold maybe. That will be a good compensation for the lost crops.
I think the orb is currently at a level where it can only generate gasses, not liquids or solid matter, though who knows what a few formula tweaks could produce
Oh gaseous gold will be just fine, its boiling point is something like 2800 °C so it should instantly cool and mist out of the air into a pile of gold dust. Just gotta wear a good respirator. Given some planning, she could shoot a stream of gold gas into a cooling chamber and filter it out of the runoff to melt into bars, or gold-plate metal objects, etc etc. Really she could do any element still if “gas” is the only requirement. :)
make sydney a real space cadet find the causeway coordinates for mar’s, send her off to mars and given a few trips etc she could probably have terraformation of mars pretty well underway get a few American colonists to go along to set stuff up and help with the chemistry and other things and welcome to mars a colony of america
Mars lacks sufficient gravity to hold enough atmospheric density for human life.
Also, I don’t think anyone outside of the oligarchy wants American expansion, and possibly not enough them, given their reliance on exploitable foreign nations.
also the lack of a magnetosphere means solar winds just blast off the atmosphere that does build up into space.
that said, I doubt Sidney’s orb has the capacity to release enough atmosphere to coat a planet anyway, at least not in a suffienct amount of time.
its like the math experiment *paraphrased* it you have a bottomless jar of water that pours out at a constant rate, how long would it take for it produce enough water to equal the world’s oceans or enough water to flood all the land etc…
All rocky planets lack sufficient gravity to hold atmosphere for long, the trick is that “long” means something completely different to planets than it does to a biosphere. It took billions of years for Mars to lose its atmosphere. I get the desire to build for the long run, but you’re being silly about it. When our species goes extinct on a planet, it won’t be because we were there for billions of years and just forgot to replenish the atmosphere.
@Rhuen you and Bharda are talking about the same thing, the solar wind is how Mars lost its atmosphere over those billions of years.
I was also talking about how implausible it is for Sidney to fill a planet’s atmosphere by herself within her own lifetime.
ooooooh, boy, if it can create Chlorine Trifluride….
you know thinking about it we haven’t seen and Superpowers that cause a large scale permeant change, and are naturally born that way. Max was a normal human and was exposed to something that cause it so she does not count. and being buff as all hell does not count I more mean a change that could lead to hiding like from MHA
Instead of Atmorb, Why not just call it an Atmo-sphere?
because she is using (orb) as the base for naming them, as she has already made it a point to publicly refer to them as her power orbs.
Liquid nitrogen, anyone?
She’s trying to put out the fire, not sterilize the top foot of soil and create a river of liquid death. o_0
I kinda feel like Sydney missed the obvious naming pun for the atmorb. I mean, after all, what is an orb but a small sphere. Atmo…sphere….
I’ll… see myself out. :P
Stability is a function of chemical reactivity.
Noble gases and nitrogen gas (clarification: non ionized N2) are stable because they are relatively unreactive and require greater activation energy to induce reactions).
If there is a God, I’d like to think it’s not that He got distracted, but that He made His Creation. It only looks weird because we’re trying to simplify and categorize His Work into easy -for-us-to-understand configuration (the periodic table and “metalloid” or “nonmetal” classification.
Hydrogen is off by itself because it’s a real ass to classify. We normally describe it as a non-metal because it shares electrons with carbon to make hydrocarbons and other organic compounds. But it forms positive ions with elements like chlorine, which makes it more like a metal. Then it forms negative ions in compounds such as sodium hydride, bringing it back to the non-metal side of the argument. And finally, if you apply enough pressure to pure hydrogen, it forms metallic hydrogen.
If she can adjust the material composition of the matter she creates, I wonder if she could shift the charge of the particles to create Antimatter Air.
…On second thought, maybe it’s best to leave that test as a hypothetical, rather than giving Sydney that power.
You know, something I realized. If the orbs are meant for a spaceship, and forming its core systems…
She has weapons (pew pew orb), sensors/ECM (yellow), shields (blue orb), propulsions (darker blue orb), atmospherics (green) and manipulation/general utility (purple orb), think tractor beams. The only thing she’s really missing for a functional warship is communications.