Grrl Power #1083 – Glace pour te rencontrer
Galytn does have a lot of supers per capita, (Don’t worry, we’re not going to spend the next 300 pages meeting them all, hah hah.)so putting out a giant fire is going to be less of a challenge for them than it would be for a lot of countries. After all, most of them don’t have to bring a 600 gallon tank of water with them over potentially broken roads. Some of the ones that do can just carry it.
Hmm. That makes me wonder if a country that’s in the middle of building infrastructure would take supers into account. Like, instead of Superman having to rip a water tower out of the ground to upend it on a massive fire (thereby causing probably more expensive damage than just letting the local burrito stand burn down), maybe Galytn has water towers with giant handles on top and a big level that will close off all the pipes going in and out of the thing, and also detach it. Like the top of the water tower is actually just a big portable bucket.
Well, probably not. Stuff like that is definitely on Deus’s “nice to have” list, but the number of supers currently in the world who could actually make use of a system like that are incredibly rare. Yes, there are “S-Tier” supers like Maxima and Sydney, but overall, the average super in the Grrl-verse is closer to Spider-Man level and not Thor level. Crazy, bespoke infrastructure like transformer water towers is a real premium unless you can justify being able to actually use it.
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Thank you guys so much for your patience. I hope it was worth it. It took a lot of research online to find just the right references for this piece. Toil toil. :D
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I suspect the farmer dude is less freaked out by a super showing up at his farm than he is by her being a white blonde gal. Don’t see too many of them in Galytn.
PErsonally, I think he looks like someone who isn’t ruffled by anything anymore because “I’ve seen some sh*t…”.
After a while of being shocked every few minutes, yeah… Probably.
You either have a heart attack and perish or you learn to cope with madness happening. Survival of the fittest. Or at least the unruffled.
It is not JUST in Cthullu that you need sanity checks, right?
Madness happening used to be the daily event in the war torn region. Then they got a Deus to the leadership. And then a massive influx of supers followed by literal demons. I’d be sure their psychological groups are full and they’re more on the page of “Eh… another stupid thing happened… so what do I do next?”
This is probably the reverse Vulcan chat group day.
“So how many of us were near enough to see the giant fireball flinging girl burning the countryside today?”
*80 hands raise*
“Any of you have any questions?”
*80 hands lower*
Of coarse Syd doesn’t react to Cthillia. Not sure what could surprise her anyway.
“Private…you appear to be pregnant.”
*post-hypersonic screech that somehow tunnels through space and immediately reduces a certain Space Woof to a quiver ball of jelly*
I say the doctor wants to do that to Sydney. unfortunately ethics prevents such high level pranks. a shapeshifter could create plausible deniability…..
It means that Sydney can store her comics in a nitrogen atmosphere, preserving their value indefinitely!
that…. is most definitely a thing that didn’t come to mind immediately…
Have +10 Nerd Cred. ;)
-10 nerd card. They become ultra fire points where even tiny amounts of heat will burn your entire collection. She could instead carbon dioxide a room for storage. As long as the comics are stored in a proper plastic container they thus are as best protected as possible… though it’ll still only be 50-60 years…
Pure nitrogen isn’t flammable I don’t know why people seem to think it is. I went to school for fire prevention and controlling fire in both home and industrial situations it’s like oxygen, same thing, by itself neither are flammable it’s when it’s combined with a reactant that it can become a fire. Fertilizer is mainly nitrogen and phosphates with a few other chemicals and is quite safe to have laying around but add fuel oil/kerosene/gasoline and you get TNT.
People think nitrogen is flammable because it’s so incredibly unenthusiastic about being bonded to things that aren’t a single nitrogen atom that it can have a totally monogamous relationship with, though N2O is a much more favored configuration than anything else I can think of that’s not N2.
I was personally surprised to find that N2 was the most stable molecule and thus the best thing you can use for a fire retardant, and also why it works so well to preserve that comic book collection (or, for that matter, anything else that doesn’t need to breathe.) I’d have expected that a noble gas that’s not helium, radon, or oganesson would work better for that. (Helium won’t work, of course, because it’s just going to leave. Radon is radioactive, and oganesson is so radioactive if you’re human and had a large enough sample to try to preserve anything when you started reading this paragraph, you’d basically have none of it by the time you finished reading this paragraph.) But N2 is a lot easier to come by and noble gases aren’t quite as aloof as I’d once thought.
One of the noble gases are better, they literally don’t react (outside or ionization if you bothered), and the orb probably doesn’t care how rare the element is.
Nitrogen should reduce the risk of fire, not enhance it. And CO2 would probably acidify the paper, causing damage.
Nitrogen is a non-reactive gas. It will not allow flame, even in the presence of heat and fuel. Unlike oxygen which is the third leg of the fire triangle.
You mean “nitrogen, as a gas, is mostly inert”. It *will* react with things given enough energy (see e.g. nitrous oxides in car exhaust), but it won’t keep the reaction going.
Nitrogen isn’t a gas. It can exist as a gas, which is different.
-100 nerd cred, incorrect correction.
+1000000000 nerd cred because the fact that this has become an argument thread should be prove there is nerdiness for all involved.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from all my nerd training, formal and informal, it’s that no detail is too insignificant to argue about because sometimes it changes everything.
Hmmm… well true and it won’t cost her anything but it’s pointless I can’t see preserving something like “Veggie tales: the lost stories” (fake name, don’t start) or something lame like that. I’d do something like the rare copies or first prints in an air-tight vault that she could flood with nitrogen while closing it. I regret not taking better care of the one’s I had when I was a kid back in the ’60s but live and learn.
We also aren’t talking about a common comic nerd, we are talking about a woman who owns a well-advertised/government pseudo-sponsored comic-book store who also makes super-powered military pay. She can easily get the types of comics that would be worth protecting like that and would then likely include some of her favorites just because.
If she’s limited only to the components of air, sure. But if the orb can emit any gas, then she could just as easily use Neon, Argon, Krypton, or Xenon, so that she only needs to fill a basin shaped container, leaving the top open if she pleases, and not risk random air currents or the opening/closing of the vault/room from the N2 from mixing with the air around it (and therefore the oxygen mixing into the container). Helium if she wants to store the container upside down for some reason.
I’m a little surprised at Sydney’s choice of (normal, non-nude) outdoor swimwear, considering her propensity for spontaneous combustion in sunlight.
She’s had her tendency towards over the top histrionics drill sergeant’d out of her.
*riotous laughter*
…
Oh, you actually believe that? Allow me to laugh harder!
well her boyfriend… space boyfriend? is un the pool with her, think that had something to do with her mental calculations
And her maybe-timeshare boyfriend is getting the blowfish treatment :
Cthillia with a glowing eye is very striking.
I like her even more than I did before! She’s very cool ;)
I was poking around the archives, and that may have been what she did in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-565-thermal-shock-knock-knock/. There was mention of cold beams, and it’s got the same angular blue eye effect going on.
In the previous comic, isn’t the beam coming from the yellow eye? There isn’t a mention of it being a cold beam(but the laser drill was using both a normal laser and an ice laser, ice to freeze the metal on a pass and normal to cut on a following pass, so a cold eye beam to remove the remaining metal plug after a hot cutting pass makes sense).
I do love how she manages to pull off the raised eyebrow look while under wraps with ice crystals streaming forth in the last panel though
So like, two issues.
Wouldn’t using your power on another person be seen as both incredibly rude and dangerous, especially when they don’t know it’s extent and you didn’t get permission first?
Also, this is a guy basically coopting and abducting another nation’s military with an unclear destination. She just knows there’s some sort of coordination going thats meant to be happening. I wouldn’t see that going over well usually.
Presumably Anvil gave them permission to involve her in their fire suppression plans, but either she or Max should have been the one to communicate that to Sydney.
I would think that using your powers on someone else without their permission is equivalent to touching them without your permission. So, maybe a little rude, but it depends on the extent and the context.
Max ordered Anvil to coordinate with locals and specifically put Halo on suppression.:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1081-airspeed-velocity-of-an-unladen-maxima/
That is what I was referring to, yes. My point being that Max or Anvil should have been the one to communicate that to Sydney, not one of Deus’ people.
Once all the fires are out, she definitely needs new directions from Anvil, but Sydney was told to keep on fire suppression, and she is. The locals have the resources to assess, triage and direct the response across the entire affected area, she only has line of sight and is working at random. It’s perfectly reasonable (per Maxim 2) for Sydney to update her priorities on the fly when anyone on the same team with better intel says it’s needed.
Emergency and cause of the emergency…
This is the super equivalent of being frogmarched to wherever’s needed to clean up your own damn mess..
Rather appropriate , innit?
dont forget that her shield seems to block everything from getting in or out
its blocked magic, energy blast equivalent to… a couple megatons probably, air, … other stuff i cant remember
Most relevant here is probably that it didn’t stop her from getting caught in one of Squidward’s brother’s tractor beam. So this guy might still be able to take her away even with it on. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-668-alls-fair-in-love-and-kaiju-battle-royale/
i feel like those things were around the same tech level as the orbs themselves so that might also be a factor in that situation
True, but by the theory Deus posed, and Dabbler didn’t contradict, so are supers in general.
I often thought that with the amount of large scale disasters that happen in most super-powered settings, it would make sense for governments to hire supers, or even teams of supers specifically for disaster response. Because, realistically, not everyone gifted with powers is going to want to go fighting villains; some might be keen to just help people instead.
Would be difficult to draw an entertaining comic book about that, though. Would likely need a twist or two, e.g. some on the team being villains forced to do community service etc.
Isn’t that kinda the “damage control” line of marvel? I mean I guess they’re more “rebuild” than disaster relief but still
There’s actually a book about just this type of thing. It’s called Corpies by Drew Hayes. Supers going in to help clean up after super-hero fights, help out at building fires, etc. It’s an extension of one of my favorite series by him called Super Powereds. Reading the first couple books of the SP series can give context to some of the stuff in Corpies, but it’s a stand-alone book.
If you check way back at the start of the comic you’ll see that actually happens frequently with supers who aren’t VERY super – using someone with flight in place of helicopters in case of an avalanche and the like.
The ability to create any atmosphere… Jupiter has a’lovely’ one that would most likely vaporize anything in front of her as it enters a far less dense atmosphere.
Venus is a toasty 800-900 degrees during the day.
And what would 100% carbon dioxide do to enemy breathing?
she’s not making the same conditions of the planet just what makes up the atmosphere of any planet
Jupiter for example would just be a mixture of hydrogen(90%), helium(9.9%) and much smaller amounts of methane and ammonia. potentially dangerous? yes most of that is flammable, but its not that dangerous without the couple hundred kilometre wind speeds to go along with it
You’re forgetting the talent points. She could also not be using it to the full ‘unspecced’ capabilities. Because breathing in an atmosphere requires a lot more than just specific chemicals. If it’s the life support, it will have gravity, atmospheric pressure, etc. So it could very well be able to reproduce the atmosphere of another world. Something meant to be used inside the shield for the owner, perhaps. But could easily be abused into a weapon.
Did you see Total Recall?
both versions. The first one was better.
The first one was mostly better – there’s some pretty awful moments / effects, and the new one has a couple redeeming scenes.
She should be very happy the nitrogen was diatomic and not monoatomic. Someone may wish to explain the dangers of chemistry if she can create gasses freely.
chemistry in general is weird, chlorine is highly toxic and if you drink even a little bit of it you need to go to the hospital inmediately and sodium, pure sodium is highly reactive and would kill you if you tried to ingest it, it would literaly burn you down
combine them both and you get table salt
I appreciate the intent to translate the pun into French.
“Crazy, bespoke infrastructure like transformer water towers is a real premium unless you can justify being able to actually use it.”
It’s only a real premium if you have to invest heavily to have it. If your building & resource tech is good enough (as say, potential massively advanced alien construction tech that Galtyn may have mysteriously acquired through independent-cough-research), then the cost goes right back down to perfectly manageable, and perhaps even neglible.
Many modern cities and countries contain as standard buildings and infrastructure that would have bankrupted our forebears many times over, even assuming they could work out a way to do it with their abilities at that time. How long would the Burj Khalifa and the Shard have taken if you had the tech that built the pyramids as your go-to? Let alone the rest of the surrounding city. Probably a lot, lot longer than they took in the modern age. They also would not have included plumbing, electricity or instant global communications, to name a few things.
Clarke’s third law applies to less flashy things like municpal construction just as much as very cool ships and Sydney’s portable terraformer.
You can probably connect water tanks with quick release fittings, and a handle on top without a huge budget. No need for complicated interlocks if it’s the weight of the tank that makes the connection open, or if you use the ones for garden hoses just scaled up.
So the key would be building with them in mind, but doing it on a budget. Elevators that are programed to go down PAST the basement into a “repair dock” at the bottom, emptying the shaft for flight.
iPads designed with a MUCH wider range of facial recognition in the software for taking pictures and unlocking.
yhaknow, small things.
I suspect facial recognition will become obsolete for authorisation, much like signatures. Too easy to fake with technology. But yes, that is my point – as the systems you use to create this infrastructure become more capable, the things you can feasibly do with them increase. For example, an intelligent architectural design system that will model your building on the fly to meet pre-defined requirements, work out intervening steps and requisites for you & then implement them. Such as the elevator, the tank being able to handle the stress of lifting, and maybe a delivery system for the contents beyond dumping it all in one big, damaging, splash.
Civil engineer here – no go on just welding some handles on top, with a full tank they would just rip out the top.
But! All you need is a couple tweaks to make this giant bucket proposal perfectly viable, for only a small additional cost above the cost of a normal tower. The full tanks do just fine being supported from the base, as seen sitting on their existing towers, so you just need to weld some big reinforcing straps around the bottom and up to the pickup point on top. Maybe a couple around the sides too, to help with dramatic acceleration and changes in direction, or just thicken the entire wall. Maybe add some internal bracing.
Then on the waterline running down from the tank, slap in a big breakaway flange (like those used to allow dry-barrell fire hydrants to be run over without damaging or opening the mainline) with self-closing flaps, to keep the water inside until repositioned, and to cover the pipeline below and keep it clean of contaminants.
Finally, use some slide-in tube connections near the top of the tower legs (no disconnect needed, just lift), and you can even set it down safely anywhere (on any sufficiently hard, level surface) in the middle of the operation. Presto, a safely disconnectable and reusable system even in hurricane and earthquake country. You could even add a couple dozen additional spigots underneath (operated by handles adjacent to the pickup point), and turn it into a giant watering can to improve flow and distribution.
And when the incident is over, just fly (or crane) it back to the site, have it inspected and patched as needed, and set it back in place. Probably a few thousand dollars tops for parts and civilian labor to inspect and flush the tank, reconnect the breakaway flange, and flip the fill pump back on.
Plus, your modified tank has the advantage of being usable by conventional airlift (IE, big cargo choppers). Supers may be faster but they are a limited resource.
I have no idea what Sydney just realized she can do, but I’m excited!
Its cool!
Just breathtaking.
Water towers are not made to be easily moved. making them that way would probably compromise their actual function.
Storing water for emergency usage? Or do you mean some other function?
That… looks suspiciously like a Stahlhelm. I always thought they were a cut above the English and US battle-hats. And the French.
A lot of modern helmets have that Stahlhelm shape. It’s a pretty effective shape. Modern versions tend toward composite construction. It doesn’t cost much more to have an effective shape. The original Stahlhelm was more expensive to make in that it required multiple pressings to manufacture.
For all of the Stahlhelm’s negative history, it IS an efficient design for protecting more than just the top of the head.
From what I understand, the initial design for that helmet was based off the Galea, the standard issue Roman legion helmet. That is, if I am not mistaken. I might be, I am not an armor buff. That said? Both were designed to protect more than just the top of the head and give excellent protection to the neck.
“but overall, the average super in the Grrl-verse is closer to Spider-Man level and not Thor level.”
Actually, Spider-Man was a top tier super who actually got invited to join the Avengers after beating a herald of Galactus one on one, and used to sub in the Fantastic Four when they needed help. (I say “was” because I haven’t read Marvel titles in years.) Sure, not quite on Thor level, but his power package is pretty impressive; Not just super strength, also moderate super speed and precognitive reflexes that let’s him start dodging before you pull the trigger, and throw a punch you’ll walk into.
He just comes off as lower level because he’s committed to fighting street crime rather than cosmic threats, and has rigorously trained himself to pull his punches to avoid killing squishy human muggers. Which handicaps him a bit when he goes up against somebody who’s tougher than human until he manages to overcome that training.
Parker has credibly humbled quite a few “higher end” supers in his career. It’s worth remembering that his isn’t just a super powered badass, he’s also a polymath.
Invites to the Avengers hardly counts much anymore when practically everyone’s been one or been invited, plus there are plenty of them (starting from the first team roster shake-up) down at Hawkeye and Black Widow’s level, most aren’t Thor or Hercules level. Heck Hank Pym and Wasp aren’t even that high tier really yet were there at the start and Spider-man’s not top tier (his defeating Firelord being about if not more absurd than Batman successfully forcing Hulk to breathe knock-out gas by kicking him in the solar plexus).
Marvel’s official scale has him at about fours across the board, but, uh, Pete’s done a lot of things that don’t fit with that. Whipping up an Anti-Magnetic Inverter on the fly after ducking into a room to avoid the Vulture is not just “gifted”, and he’s lifted way, way more than twenty-five tons. And that’s not even counting the bad guys he’s defeated. Spider-Man might not not Thor strong or fast, but he’s definitely Thor-levels of crazy.
Exactly! Just in the movies that don’t have the comic feats, his strength level is 3000 ton range and that’s just the films.
Spider-Man holds back and they’ve shown that multiple times. The reason some villains have even beaten him, is because he holds back.
Whose strength is the 3000 ton range? It sure isn’t Spider-man, who is in the 10 ton range, 20 tops after his rebirth. At his most powerful when he was merged with Captain Universe he was only in the 500 ton range. Marvel’s idea of a top tier strength level is 100+ tons for people like Thor, Hercules and Hulk. 3000 ton range is getting into insanely strong levels way above the super-heavy weight range.
You seem to forget the most likely answer.
The persons that determine what spiderman can do (writers) as a group are not known for paying attention to the little things like consistency with other storylines (that is what editors are for) and especially maths when the rule of cool is what is most important.
Which is why things like Deathbattle (https://www.youtube.com/c/deathbattle) get absolutely bonkers when they try to apply physics to various feats that were dreamnt up by individuals that likely took consumer Math instead of algebra in school.
A perfect example of this is found in Warhammer 40k.
One event described as a cataclysmic battle that takes place across an entire world (named Armageddon. Because rule of cool) using the logistical support of dozens more worlds from a galaxy spanning empire that was throwing everything it had in the region into the fight including stripping other worlds of their defenses. to defeat an invasion of countless space orcs.
Walking cathedrals with guns that would crack mountains in half. Space ships that were kilometers long. THe largest tank battle the Imperium had ever seen … etc etc rule of cool.
When they actually attempt to use numbers to describe what is happening … they wind up describing a series of battles that were smaller than and had less combatants involved than the goings on in just the Eastern Front of World War 2 over the same period of time.
Which is another reason to handwave death battle as just entertainment and not how the fights would go down in an actual comic or anime. They will among things like nitpick between speed, experience, or variety of attacks as important or not depending on how they want the fight to go, as well as more recently no longer using amalgam versions of a character and leaving out their stronger feats from an anime, game, comic, or manga claiming to use just the specific version as canon. They will also look at a weakness displayed in one issue or game that may even be contradicted by other issues and games and focus in on it as the reason for a character to lose a fight. Also on your point they ignore what even these writers admit,.rule of cool. Like the cloud blast, it just looks cool and death battle just ignores if they really were using a blast as strong as they say then the shock wave would hit the ground not just part the clouds.
‘Coordinate’ would make more sense than ‘prioritize’ in this case.
Give the poor guy a break. This super obviously has English as a Second (or maybe third) Language, and works for Deus, so his word choices may be a bit skewed towards corporatespeak.
Why is Syndey saying “Whoa” as she takes off in panel 7? It thought at first it’s because she was being pulled upwards, but I think it’s using the orb? Also since when can Cthillia fly, or is it the other guy doing that? There’s no obvious indication he’s levitating Cthillia.
On a different topic, Sydney probably fist-pumped the first time she was referred to as “S-tier”.
I think it was when she looked down and saw the frost, and realized this dude could handle the cold end of things, if she extinguished the flames.
This is why you should use your inside voice when talking about your powers … because you never know who is listening.
You would think that Sydney would know not to do this because she has given away what her abilities are on more than a few occasions.
Sydney has voiced a preference for Silver Age rules.
”The ice man cometh” Was that a quote from the punny masterpiece Batman and Robin? That glorious piece of art should be quoted all the time.
The Iceman Cometh is a 1937 play about a bunch of alcoholics living in a flophouse. It was referenced on Batman and Robin tho.
[quote]Hmm. That makes me wonder if a country that’s in the middle of building infrastructure would take supers into account. Like, instead of Superman having to rip a water tower out of the ground to upend it on a massive fire (thereby causing probably more expensive damage than just letting the local burrito stand burn down), maybe Galytn has water towers with giant handles on top and a big level that will close off all the pipes going in and out of the thing, and also detach it. Like the top of the water tower is actually just a big portable bucket.[/quote] @daveb
You magnificent bastard, you don’t need a super to make that practical, you just need a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane
A Sikorsky is ‘only’ rated to lift 20K pounds though. A spheroid city water tower can hold 350-500K gallons of water, or 2,900K to 4,100K pounds of water. Plus the weight of the tank itself.
“Well, probably not. Stuff like that is definitely on Deus’s “nice to have” list, but the number of supers currently in the world who could actually make use of a system like that are incredibly rare.”
Usually fire supression warrants dedicated, high pressure water infrastructure. That is what the fire hydrant system is, after all.
However, cities are generally designed to avoid large scale fires in this day and age. Between Building codes, materials and spacing it can be relatively easy to fireproof a city as a whole.
At the same time, most of our large area solutions would probably deal more damage then help in a city.
So large fires will happen in relatively remote places, which adds some logistics challenges (but also solutions):
– direct projectors like Cthillia make good first responders, but I question their endurance and range of area. Also they are probably much more useful in a combat role, so you want them only there as first responders until better fitting units can take over
– do not rely on one solution alone. It is nice when you have Opal around to just drop a literal lake on the problem, but you need to be ready for her not being around, exhausted or plain at capacity
– A quick solution would be giant buckets near reservoirs or natural lakes. They are good sources of bulk water in a pinch. And in fact, we are using them for Aerial Firefighting – you would just change the delivery system to something slightly more super powered
– Another option would be to have a “digger” unit. Lots of Tele- and Lithokinetics in Galtyn. Enough to make a channel to guide water from a nearby source over. Or make a local reservoir so your Superhuman Watersources can focus on producing water, not water and moving. The can also make rock-solid firebreaks
– Pyrokinetics can be useful. Ideally if they can directly control/absorb fire, but even “fighting fire with fire” can be a usefull containment technique (basically you use a controlled fire to make a fire break out of ash).
– the best prevention of course is to not have giant fire hazards. Too agressive fighting of small fires resulted in lots of material for large fires piling up. If you could remove that fuel buildup, it would be nice
– while doing this, take care not to remove your mundane fire fighting ability. Have a “mundane” solution for every single piece.
The supers might be all exhausted, deployed elsewhere, depowered or the like. And I doubt Deus trusts the superion field, given he does not fully understand it – or it’s creator.
Heck, he probably put bombs into every of his supers just in case the superion field can be used for mind control of affected beings.
I was a fireman for 10 years and I want to point out something: there is no such thing as fire proof! It’s fire resistant anything can burn under the right circumstances. Even cider blocks will burn like in an oxy rich environment. Take iron or steel it does burn, it’s called rust. They have taken “super-slo-mo” video of rust and you can see an actual flame.
Water is commonly used because it does remove enough of the heat to put out a fire HOWEVER if the fire is too hot or the fuel is oil based it will only feed the fire because the water flashes to steam and adds oxygen plus it throws burning oil everywhere! NEVER use water to put out an oil/grease/fat fire on your stove it will turn into an inferno!
There are 3 parts to any fire; fuel, air, and heat. remove any of those and no fire. there are exceptions of course, to that rule like magnesium, it makes it’s own oxy and the amount of heat is so great that water only adds to the problem. A special foam is needed (VERY expensive) or just bury it and let it burn out. Normally we used water, CO2, powder, and foam to deal with the different fires.
Water: removes heat in wood, paper, and non-oil fires. Not safe to use on tar and other petroleum based fires. Nor is it safe for electrical fires.
CO2: removes both oxy and heat from a fire and is safe for oil fires, electrical fires, as well as common fires, costly and short lived not ideal for full house/industrial fires.
Powder: removes oxy not heat, fire can relight if there’s a wind to remove the powder. Not recommended for outdoor fires. Safe for electrical fires but can damage wires which can cause new fires to start if power is not cut ASAP.
Foam: safe for oil fires and exotic fires but not electrical fires. Costly and hard to store long term.
Fire breaks are effective in forest fires but tricky to control and dangerous if not done correctly; a major California fire was started because the group trying to prevent a huge fire didn’t take into account the wind speed and the width of the fire break resulting in a major fire that burnt out several homes and took weeks to contain.
The lesson here is that if Thor’s hammer catches fire while he’s using it to call down lightning from the heavens, don’t throw a bucket of water on it.
I enjoy having a forum where this sentence is not only relevant, but makes perfect sense.
are you Thor? Yeth, vewy Thor, I jutht got hit by lightning, y’know.
Pure fluorine gas can’t burn: there are no oxidizing substances strong enough to break the fluorine-fluorine bond. Many fluoridated compounds are fireproof for similar reasons (they may decompose when heated, but they don’t undergo an oxidation reaction).
Read the Wikipedia on Fluorine…The trick is to keep it from reacting. It’ll even attack Platinum.
Want some fun? Take gallium at 90 F (30 C), add in aluminum foil until it creates a paste, then add water next to a burning candle and stand back… Reminded me of sodium and water…
Need proof?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afINW7PGDFI
You can take the fireman away from fire but you can’t take the fire out of a fireman LOL!
So creating atmosphere “gasses. In panel three did Sydney create and combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water? Sure seems like what happened. That has great implications as she seems to be creating basic elements out of “nothing”?. Does that ability extend to all elements of the periodic table? Or does she have to unlock more aspects of the orb to climb higher on the table than atomically simple gasses? That kinda boggles the mind. Taken to the extreme, that makes it possible with great knowledge and experience to creat and combine matter to make anything. Want a Tesla.? Just whip one up Mr. Orb. That said, I think the limitations would be the knowledge, education, engineering, experience, “what have you” in order to build what ever it is she desires. Popping up a loaded .357 S&W model 19 Combat Magnum, entails a gunsmiths skills and relatively basic knowledge of chemistry. Making a Tesla or just a basic VW requires a much higher level of knowledge.
No, Cthillia used an ice-beam from her eye to flash-freeze the area.
I’m a little slow on the FZASH effect in P3 (it’s before my morning caffeine kicks in). It looks like the FZASH happened at the same time Cthillia arrived and the last 2 panels it looks like Cthillia is laying it down as they go.
As far as a nitrogen blanket is concerned, if the heat isn’t reduced it’ll flash back into flame as air rushes back in.
Now, I don’t see why Lil’ Syd can’t generate liquid Nitrogen…probably get a bang as it flashes into gas (see BLEVE) but that would just add to the fun.
So apparently Cthillia can kill with one eye… and freeze things with the other eye.
It’s pretty clear that she froze everything, and you can see in the last two panels that she’s freezing the fires as they fly along (the other guy seems to be a telekinetic).
So far I’d venture three distinct “eye” powers, perhaps a fourth is implied:
1. Evil Eye – causes despots to have heart attacks.
2. Blue Optic Blast ala Marvel’s Cyclops – uses this to blast in the severed ring from the vault door, once it had been weakened by the hot/cold laser drill.
3. Freeze Beam – seen here with Sydney.
Also, while in the vault she threatened Sciona with a facefull of death ray. If that’s different than her Heart-Attack-Causing stare, it would seem like she has at least 4 types (maybe more?).
I can’t believe that I completely forgot she used an eye beam back in comic #565 in the Black Reliquiry.
Great recall!
+1 Get-Out-of-Ninja-Attack card for you. Non-transferrable.
Btw… are we sure that the beam that came out of her eye was a different beam than the beam she used here as well? The laser had actually cut through the entire door and her beam was used to ‘push’ the lasered door hole in, and maybe it did the same thing to the door but the blast of ‘ice’ just shoved that severed ring in to make the opening?
Most likely you’re right though. Probably three different powers, not two.
Although I suspect the ‘heart attack stare’ IS the death stare.
Okay I was thinking about it and I think you’re right that she probably has more than 3 eye powers. It’s possible that the optic blast that Sciona used was from Cthillia’s blood, since Cthillia has worked for Sciona and probably gave her that blood. And that blast was completely different than either the Black Reliquiry beam OR this beam.
I can’t decide if the force blast from the vault is different from the one on this page or not, but I’m leaning towards it being the same. The vault blast obviously had kinetic energy, whereas this one could be only thermal. But the giant ice crystals here are far too big to be created only from pre-existing water in the nearby air/soil, so I’m thinking Cthillia is emitting (or transmuting, or whatever) water vapor which would have both mass and temperature. So it seems her blast works like the classic cartoon-style freeze ray that covers things in ice, rather than just lowering their temperature like an energy ray would.
Different eyes though, but does that matter?
Also Dave I think what you’re talking about is putting the tank on dry break fittings to connect it to the water system, that allows disconnecting things without draining the rest of the system. They’re common on automotive systems that require frequent replacement or need rapid repairs without bleeding air out of the system like in brakes that need loaded calipers relaced in the middle of a 24 hour race. A more familiar use is on the refueling system like in NASCAR dump cans.
Well some some universes take superhero tropes into account, the wearing the mask universe has aircraft that has visible hard points for supers to fly the aircraft, NASA uses certain supers as reactionless spacecraft motors, and at least the US army core of engineers has machines that quick cast cement barricades for emergency flood control. Also Japan has there local mad scientists make army’s of Mecha because they have a Godzilla problem because JapaN, Godzilla is literally the least of the problems they can have in the land of anime. I’m just surprised they did not also have shipgirls given that’s a thing.
Well, that’s what you get for building your capital city right on the Giant Monster Migration Route.
Since the Atmo-Sphere is presumably intended for life support, presumably it can also modify temperature and pressure (no good creating the atmosphere of your homeworld at 20C and 1000mb if you live deep inside Neptune), so she could theoretically create N2 at eg -80C and 20 atm, which would quickly expand and get even colder.
OHhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, reading the comments gave me an idea for a very short arc….. or maybe bonus pages.
Max orders Sydney to attend a College level Chemistry course in order to better understand what possibilities her atmosphere orb can do. ESPECIALLY what could go wrong. Cue the explody scene.
The professor is rather well trusted, so maybe even preform some experiments with a small crew of undergrad students (You need to get thru that Patreon list eventually). Some wacky hijinks ensue as she learns about her ability to create any gaseous element.
As bonus stories, it frees up the main comic to tell more stories rather than focusing on her learning her abilities all the time. You can draw them in Black and White strip style to save on resources (mainly your time), and have Dabbler coming in to explain the sciencey bits more.
Sydney’s latest power discovery is the coolest yet.
Helium doesn’t burn under normal conditions. I understand the noble gases in general require some pretty unusual circumstances before they’ll react with another element.
Efforts to create helium compounds have failed. There are ions that include neon as one of several atoms. Argon and xenon compounds are known. The study of radon compounds has been limited because radon is radioactive and extremely expensive, but RnF_2 is known.
And, upstream, the obvious unstable fertilizer is ammonium nitrate, which occasionally detonates by itself. A recent stored location spontaneous explosion leveled a significant part of the city of Beirut.
The problem I see with Helium in this case is that it’s very light, and wouldn’t stay at ground level long enough to smother the fire.
Is that the guy standing behind deus here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1014-the-zambezi-high-club/ ?
Sure looks like him, why not have a strong telekinetic and a highly skilled fighter as guards?
He does bear a very strong resemblance. More so than some of the characters do to their previous appearances in the comic.
He has sharp angles like the original Maxima so he might be the same person with newer art style.
Panel 2 is again the face of a man who didn’t ask for this shit.
If she can make pure nitrogen, perhaps she could produce a pure oxygen bubble. Burning flammables within would flash up, quickly reducing everything within the bubble to ash and leaving no fuel to burn. She might also be able to create a vacuum inside the bubble, either directly or by creating a small bubble and then expanding it without generating any gas.
I just have one thing to say canonically spiderman is one of the strongest supers so probably switch thor and Spidey around on you super scale
Correction: In isolated incidences where rule of cool is more important than canon, Spiderman comes off as improbably strong. In all other instances, he’s on the lower tier of super strength. His biggest ability is that he has an impossibly strong grip and is very braced, because of his ability to stick to stuff.
Thor, on the other hand, grapples with the Hulk and tosses tanks around.
“Pardon me, but could you help out a fellow American who’s down on his luck?”
I’m happy you’re getting comfortable enough with the new art style to start making her face a bit more comical again, it was getting a little too uncanny valley there for a while, *ESPECIALLY* Leon’s new face. I hate the tiny pupils, not gonna lie. He never looked like that at first. D:
WARK!!!
Golden saucer them commences.
Sydney was very lucky the atmo-orb was already set to Oxygen when she used the first time.
Presumably, since it’s main use is life support, it auto-adjusts to the owner’s preferred atmosphere, but can be adjusted manually.
Hopefully, Syd will remember to reset to Nitrogen/O2 instead of just Nitrogen. Hopefully she gets that right (70% N2, 20% O2, and not 100% N2O (Nitrous Oxide or, colloquially, Laughing Gas)
She could totally do a Joker attack!
So, his left is fire and his right is ice?
I doubt eating grak will affect him much.
‘Her’. Cthillia is a woman.
Maybe we found Shoto Todoroki a girlfriend?
So remember like a page ago there being discussion on where the matter Sidney’s orbs are creating comes from, or the energy, and talks of rearranging molecules or transporting from someplace else.
well, science has just given sci-fi writers a big ole free pass to make stuff from nothing.
so theory time: everything at its most basic components is an expression of the higgs field *possibly another hidden field as well*, that is then controlled by the force fields *strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravity*, and like a symphony of expressions play together to build up and up to the matter and energy we know.
so this means it should be possible to make this base field express and produce something from apparently nothing.
and…much like the unexpectedness of atomic science popping up in a civilization that was using vacuum tubes, aluminum conductors, broad band radio communication, and combustion based fuel and weaponry…despite everything else in the world…they have apparently achieved this on some basic level…
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/?fbclid=IwAR1kP6slGFeBwmWSD4Dk7mHFNNhnSdJ9JR7dMkRxnehST5hXNCy7cNmouJs
so that means your aliens and future people and Nth level super advanced cosmic beings able to directly manipulate the quantum fields get a big pass now as like the simpsons said, science inventing magic.
so have some super advanced aliens create a multi-dimensional lattice to directly manipulate the quantum fields in a *controlled quantum expressions* device and blammo. You get whatever molecular compounds, energy, etc… you want.
now keeping in mind, this was a very basic experiment, and the idea of being able to control what it does is pretty far removed from what actually happened and would be your ultra advanced science territory.