Grrl Power #1095 – Cooldown
A lot of you more or less guessed the same thing as Dabbler here. Using your weird artifacts with no detectable power source to output massive amounts of energy? Maybe you’re draining the batteries or wearing down the capacitors. Or heck, maybe they’re overheating? Only the heat is being dumped in some dimensional pocket or whatever. Or maybe it’s not heat, but human souls!
Actually, that would suggest that the byproduct of using the orbs is human souls, which would cause a lot of theistic hand wringing if that information ever came out. Actually most religions would just stick their fingers in their ears and go “N’ya n’ya n’ya! I am immune to new information!”
Wow that tangent has nothing to do with this page. So the reason they’re hanging out at “nondescript coastline” is as supers, they’re not allowed to just pop into other countries uninvited or unannounced. This is due to concerns about cross border super warfare, and the agreements hammered out during America’s extended wars in bits of the middle east. Not that Galytn pays those treaties any heed, and those same treaties probably have some stuff to say about the use of supers in off the books shenanigans, but every country with more than a few dozen supers has shapeshifters and telepaths all up in everyone else’s business, and everyone is equally on guard about it.
Eventually, once the world has had more time to get used to the idea of supers, travel restrictions will probably relax, and there will at some point likely be a more nuanced categorization that just “Super.” Everything from “Can blow up a city or otherwise massively compromise infrastructure” to “Smells good.” Not “Enhanced olfactory sense,” literally, they just smell nice. But like, super nice. Those people shouldn’t have any trouble getting on a plane.
The October Vote Incentive is actually up!
Why did it take so long? I couldn’t tell you. Well, I hand drew the lace on Lorlara’s body stocking, so that took about an hour by itself. Anyway, it’s likely the next one will be single character, and hopefully it won’t be so late. Usually with fewer characters I can do more outfit variants but we’ll see.
So I have enough “Blue Babes” to do a theme. Eventually I’ll be able to fill in the whole rainbow of my own characters. I did a rainbow lineup previously for those who hadn’t seen it. I’d love to revisit that one of these days.
Enjoy variant 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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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Now seems like a solid time to grab for the unknown orb and see if it can be activated. One of the theories was that it was a power source for the rest, well, maybe it is? Who knows?
Also, excuse me. Is dabbler trying to say that megaton nuclear bombs produce more energy output than extremely advanced intersteller capital ships do? Good ole’ flyball can open atherum caseway portals or however you spell it when it’s not 4 AM. The only other things capable of that are capital ships. Sydney had popped those back to back like candy before with no issues.
No, she’s saying that beam has the equivalent power of a WMD packaged into a neat little beam with little to no fallout of harmful radiation.
No teksura is right. If they sheare a power source then it counts. And let’s not forget Syd had been fighting big f* monsters before that. With the beam and sheald, in space we’re she had to recycle air.
Maybe being in space helps with power generation or removes some kind of safety features that are necessary on a planet to not break it too much to live on it?
Maybe, but I would also bet that ordinary (non-Nth) capital ships simply don’t have those safety features at all, and are careful not to make causeways near planets. That doesn’t detract from “only capital ships can do this” at all.
Point is, melting the desert drained the orb, while opening multiple aetherium causeways in rapid succession apparently didn’t.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us anthing about the orbs energy output relative to a capital ship though. Quite often, the energy levels required to achieve an effect falls dramatically as technolody advances. Whatever super tech the orbs use might be able to open a causeway with far less energy than less advanced spacecraft are capable of.
Compare the energy used to turn a key in a lock with the energy needed to mow your lawn, for example. That may be an appreciable analogy to what Sydney’s done with the orbs.
She also created or transformed a lot of material into pure nitrogen. That eats more energy then you can possible believe.
We have no idea what mechanism the orb uses to provide nitrogen. For all we know, it’s opening a portal to the elemental plane of nitrogen. Or maybe it simply doesn’t obey conservation of energy, which isn’t a hard law in Grrlpowerverse anyway.
Hoping they just filtered it from the surrounding atmosphere, but transmuting it definitely seems possible. The air generated in the swimming pool wasn’t purely derived from the surrounding water, or the oxygen poisoning would’ve been worse for Sydney than inhaling the water.
Nah, takes extended exposure or high pressure to get oxygen poisoning. A couple minutes at ambient pressure just makes you feel alert.
You’re overlooking the time factor. Dabbler is saying it takes the equivalent of a nuclear explosion to generate the heat necessary to glass silica in that short of a timeframe. Sydney kept up that energy output for a solid 15 minutes, while flying at high speed. Then she did the equivalent of alchemy to convert Oxygen into Nitrogen, something even the energy output of the Hadron super-collider wouldn’t be able to do. Not sure what the energy requirement would be to do that, but I’m thinking A LOT.
I’m thinking that’s a bit more of an energy drain than opening a few jump points or flying and shooting her pew-pew beam for a few seconds at a time.
Let’s also remember that those orbs power down when she sleeps, so maybe they’re regenerating energy at that time. Who knows how much they might be regenerating during that time period, but maybe Sydney just needs to take a day long nap to recharge everything.
No, Dabbler says it takes a nuke equivalent to do *all of it*. The heat needed to glass sand depends on the amount of sand, and Sydney didn’t glass it all at the same time.
We don’t know whether the orb converted the nitrogen or created/summoned it, and if she did, what kind of technique was used. It certainly wasn’t anything like a particle collider.
My thought is that the Orbs started out with a full energy bar, and Sydney’s been slowly using it up all this time. And now she needs to recharge them. Maybe the final Orb is used for that. (I hope it doesn’t do that by converting all matter around it into energy and then absorbing it, but who knows?)
I think the real issue here is Dave is using won’t unit of measurement. After all, Tsar Bomba had a yeild of about 50 PETAJOULES
Well, megaton nukes are basically “there is energy here right now” which manifests as big ‘ole boom. If you manage to actually harness all that energy and put it towards something useful, like ripping a hole in subspace, and so so efficiently, I’d say that is about right. It’s more complex rather than power intensive, needing to harness that level of energies withouth breaking anything.
Let me ask it this way, if a capital ship capable of opening aetherium causeways goes boom, should it release orders of magnetude MORE energy than megaton e nukes, designed to do specifically and only that?
Maybe the problem isn’t energy, when it comes to opening atherum causeways. Maybe the problem is that you’re using matter to manipulate something that’s a lot more fundamental than matter, and the process is insanely inefficient. As in, the causeway is just an incidental byproduct of what the engines are doing.
After all, you can do it by sacrificing psychics, too, and you’re probably not talking huge amounts of energy, as such, when you do THAT.
While the orbs can do it efficiently, because they’re actually constructed on the same fundamental level.
It must be math (not Math)
After all, everybody knows that ‘sufficiently advance mathematics is indistinguishable from (black) magic’
(and I very much recommend reading Charles Stross’ series ‘The Laundry Files’ which abuses this concept in all kinds of funny and often hilarious ways. When it is not deeply disturbing in a good horror story kind of way)
About what I am thinking, not everything is brute force, combinations of forces or types of energy are also factors. The Aetherium Causeway is also plip one on the portals side bar so to the makers of these orbs is their idea of a basic wormhole and accessing the type of energy necessary is a simple matter to them.
Basically, every theory above the sun has been thrown at that brown ball of orby-ness by now
What if it’s actually a brown dwarf?
I think you’ve nailed it – a brown dwarf can’t sustain fusion, so this battery is nearly burned out. Would’ve started out as perhaps a white dwarf or larger, and now that all the fuel is nearly used up, the Nth user had to buy a new set and carelessly discarded them on an unfashionable backwater.
Apparently even the Nth haven’t managed to outwit planned obsolescence and non-serviceable products.
That would be a hilarious writing prompt. A superhero or villain *or rando in a non super world* using like a battle suit or “cube of infinite power” they found and everyone is fighting over it as this ultimate weapon, including some aliens visiting Earth detecting it…only for a clean up crew from some type 4 or above civilization to show up, look at the little animals fighting over the trash and take it away to be recycled. It turning out to be an older toy or novelty item that got discarded because the new model came out and the user carelessly discarded it on Earth.
bonus points if it had an “AI” that while simple to the beings is smarter than any super computer and most sapient beings in the known galaxy and it was trying to follow its directives knowing full well it had been replaced by the new upgraded model.
I vote the AI is trying to uplift the monkeys as a petty way of getting back at its negligent overlords, and we get embroiled in an Nth ethics crisis when they try to deactivate it.
Imagine Maxima and Sidney as Earth’s representatives pulling a Justice League or Avengers giving a passionate speech a out life and consciousness to some big cosmic beings. Just to have one lean over to the other and say, “is that animal trying to convince us to spare that toy?”
Already my favorite moment in the story :laughing:
Called it!
As did everyone else, tbf
It might be a matter of miniaturization for the causeways. It’s not impressive that she can open them, it’s impressive that she can hold the thing that dles it in her hand.
Now i have one question: were the orbs already recharged or were they still recharging from her little spacetrip with the fight against the giants.
I’m really interested to see if she’s been running off the same charge the entire time, or if there’s been a passive recharge happening between her major encounters. A cooldown is inconvenient but manageable, running out of juice if she never figures out how to recharge is not.
“Love is a very powerful force. Even more so when it’s focused into a coherent beam of destruction. Every time I use the PPO, it siphons away some of the love in the universe. I’m not sure how much, but I’m given to understand the divorce rate goes up with each blast.” — Black Mage, 8-Bit Theatre
Well, at least it’s a renewable resource.
depends on your perspective. also, the amount of sex occurring appears to be decreasing, as is the global birthrate. although both measures are not fully Love, (both being Eros) measuring Agape love is harder.. (watches cable news) umm that’s going down too… Love does not feel like a renewable energy source.
We could try spite, vitriol, malice, or ignorance; those all appear to be self-sustaining reactions with excess energy output.
Sydney “concentrates” on charging.
Dabbler: Hmm. Is is just me, or did the the sun just get a bit dimmer than usual?
Fingers crossed that she doesn’t have recharge with astrophage and bring a plague on the entire galaxy.
Re: Sydney “concentrates” on charging.
Is that why Sydney can’t concentrate on most things very long? The orbs need to absorb her concentration as a power source to recharge!
(Misinterpreting Boson Buddy leads to an interesting funny idea of how the orbs operate.
This hypothesis seems contradicted by Sydney’s performance in SCUBA class before finding the orbs, and genetic heritage. Green Lantern Willpower tropes for orbs performance when well powered… maybe possible.)
Syd: Humm. Come on, brownball! Hope you’re good for charging something.
Anvil: Um, Syd? I’m concerned. I think the sun just got a little dimmer.
Dabbler: Sweet! we just found out how you monkeys are going to manage climate change!
Syd: Uh, I stopped doing anything. Why isn’t it getting brighter?
Dabbler: Oh! Now I’m concerned too….. does that aethereum causeway thing still work? You know, just in case?
Opening a causeway is an unknown energy use, plus such things might simply pay back that energy when they collapse. Black holes eventually give back everything they took in, just slowly (up to the end then it gets rapid) so who knows?
Intake seems restricted, perhaps to avoid draining the local star? Though melting a few cubic miles of sand is on the order of .001% of what Sol outputs per second.
“ Black holes eventually give back everything they took in, just slowly”
I am assuming that you refering to Hawkings radiation. While possible it’s still only theoretical.
Also worth noting the time scale on Hawking Radiation is in the quintillions of years even for a smaller black hole, assuming the Black Hole consumes nothing else. Its the equivalent of saying the lake will eventually evaporate so long it loses one water molecule every 10 trillion years, so long as no more water is added (as a hypothetical).
Also not factoring in the unknown variables such as not knowing how the ultra massive black holes got as big as they are in only 13 billion years *defying the theories on black hole growth, implying there is an unknown factor adding to black hole sizes in some cases*,
and while math is fine, observation will always throw things at us, like the idea that physics may get wonky at those scales and power levels, heck a black hole was recently observed to have spit out some matter three years after it finished its “meal” (so not just flinging material off while ripping apart a star), breaking what we know about how gravity works and theories on how black holes work.
So for here, the Aethereum Causeway may not be about using astronomical amounts of energy to force a connection in space but a finesse using combinations of forces in a precise harmonic that opens it.
Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the mass of a black hole, so small black holes actually evaporate faster, and a nickel crushed into a black hole would evaporate almost instantly and basically just be a bomb.
Also worth noting: I recall it theorized that for black holes formed naturally (from collapsed stars), the Hawking Radiation would be colder than the cosmic microwave background, so ultimately such black holes would never reach the point where they’ll lose more than they gain.
Quite. The time required for disruption is calculated to be on the order of t^26 inverse to the mass. That last few hundred thousand tons will exceed the local shear tensor for space and go “BOOM” nearly instantly. It will be one ginormous burst of gamma radiation and particles.
As for the cosmic background, it is lower every day. No matter the temperature of the black hole, eventually the cosmic background will be less. Unless, of course, the universe stops expanding, which seems unlikely from current knowledge.
If of course, the expansion is accelerating (something I seriously doubt is a real phenomena) then all black holes would eventually be torn apart as the expansion simply expanded them out of being black holes. (The expansion would be close enough to the speed of light on that scale of size that they would no longer have an event horizon.)
There is some debate there if the scaler field expands everywhere, or only does so in areas of low mass such as between systems or between galaxies; as well as if the expansion is due to a expansion of dark matter/energy and not between atoms.
there are so many X-variables already it will be interesting to see what is discovered the more we observe the universe, like if symmetrons or a second scaler field are verified or not.
Hmm need more hardlight fuel, time to abort some alternate futures.
Ahh the return of my fave Dabbler Glam. Professor Dabbler!
I guess the central pie slices on the orb upgrade screen might indicate the power source, then?
(Possibly with bonuses like better intuitive understanding of the orbs.)
Maybe not worth upgrading, even so, since lack of power only came up this one time.
(Maybe two times, counting the time when the shield got temporarily exhausted. Better power might provide speedier shield recharge or an all-around boost to every orb’s functions.)
I’m with you on this guess. Each slice is a squared increase in the overall power storage capacity, along with a linear 14% improvement in innate understanding of the orbs. If I get to thinking that recharge rate improvement could be possible without Sydney becoming ridiculously OP, I’d need to go back and look at the diagram again to see if it fits anywhere.
I’m of the opinion that bumping into your bottlenecks is an excellent way to decide what you need to focus on improving next within a given system.
What I am thinking, goes back to the orbs are Nth tech children’s toys. Another game mechanic, the power gauge. Get so wrapped up in upgrading shields and speed and weapons but forget or don’t realize that games have restrictions and limitations, like a fuel gauge mechanic.
Plot twist – the PPO is not the “weapon system” of the Obrs, it is the Power-source access and regulation system. the incineration beam that results in Sydney using the Orb is just a very very very inefficient side-effect. the metaphorical description of “like touching a star” https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-192-touching-star/ could turn out to be not so metaphorical after all
As I recall, they all went innert when she passed out, I wonder if they convert something about her biology to power. Something beyond simple energy, maybe imagination? Maybe its her desires or something, her will to be a superhero gave them no small amount of power, but as it become more day to day its not meeting the needs.
Like Dabbler and Ven, they all need something beyond the physical.
If that was the case she’d be exhausted or passed out and not know why. Most likely they tap into the Anther(?), the same source that all “magic” users use. I doubt the one’s that created the orbs intended the PPO to be used like that, it takes a lot of power to run a constant beam like that rather than short, focused blasts.
The orbs interact with the Superion Field, as demonstrated by Varia.
The Superion field interacts with the Thaumion Field, as demonstrated by Jabberwocky.
It is reasonable to theorize that the Orbs _also_ interact with the Thaumion Field, as well as all other ambient energetic fields, and specifically that they absorb power in this way, as suggested by the fact that all attempts to scan them result in zero readings, I.e., total energy absorption; we know this because Gwen, Dabbler, Squidward, and Digit _all_ tried scanning them, and got nothing. Squidwards pov panel showed them as distinct Absences, and Gwen also described them as “a distinct absence of anything,” which “indicated a presence of Something.”
So…building off of this, we can assume the orbs passively absorb all energy (in a practical sense), but we also know that there is an upper limit, given that Squidwards BFG was enough to push them into the red zone. I am, obviously, theorizing that the Shield’s functionality is probably also connected to energy absorption, which leads me to think that she might actually be able stalemate Vehemence, as long as he can’t juice up faster than she can…but such speculation lacks enough data at this time.
So…in simplest terms, I’m suggesting that the Orbs may be designed to absorb environmental power in a benign fashion, while also being specifically designed like a regenerative breaking system, but for combat purposes. Which tells us something about the designers.
They seem to have a philosophy of Proportionate Responce.
This would also explain why Sydney’s fight with Squidward & family didn’t tax her out. She was being efficient, likely started with a full mana bar, and was getting fed by them as the battle continued.
All in all…this is a good design.
I’m thinking they can’t recharge while in an active state. When she falls asleep/passes out, the orbs go into hibernate mode to recharge/regenerate
12 billion kilograms of sand. At approximately 1.5MJ per kilogram.
18,300,000,000,000,000 joules. That’s actually about 18 million gigajoules.
A 1.2 MT bomb is good for about 2 million gigajoules. So, equivalent to about 11 megatons.
You must have actually done the math!
Where are you getting your dumb numbers? A 1.2.mwgaton bomb is 5.01 e15 J. Not 2e18, which is what you wrote. You can use Google as a calculator you know
He wrote 2e15. Giga is 1e9, million is 1e6. Your sources are less than a magnitude away from each other.
Although a full reckoning would have to include the incredible speed of energy transfer into the silica, as Dabbler mentioned, which indicates a much higher temperature differential than just heating to the melting point. Probably a way to plug it all into Wolfram Alpha (my go-to for crunching ridiculous numbers and units).
I suspect the energy emitted is actually 1-2 orders of magnitude higher.
What do you mean? Heating matter up by pointing a laser at it is straightforward, and to do it fast you only need power. The energy transfer would be direct and instantaneous.
Right – the faster you want to transfer the energy, the more power you need. The rate of heat flow (energy transfer) is directly proportional to the difference in the temperatures – the higher the difference, the faster the heat is transferred. All other things being equal, a heat source 200° hotter will transfer energy to another object 2x faster than a source only 100° hotter.
I couldn’t find a good source for how long it takes to melt raw material into glass, but mostly seems to be around a day for the full cycle on commercial/industrial operations. Closest relevant and reliable example I found was these lecture slides at a conference on glass and solar manufacturing, which gives ~1hr for the initial melt at 1100℃ and about 24hr for the full refining process.
For a quick Fermi estimate of Halo’s blast temperature, let’s run with a furnace temp of 1100℃, and an ambient desert temperature of 100℃ (so a temperature differential ΔT of 1000℃), and it takes 1 hour to melt a given quantity of glass. If we wanted to cut that melt time in half (30 minutes), we’d need a ΔT of 2000℃. A tenth of the time (6 minutes) requires a 10x ΔT, of 10,000℃. Dabbler proposes a melt time of 0.25 seconds, or a 14,400x ΔT = 14,400,000℃. For reference, ΔT of the sun is only 5400℃ – clearly there’s some kind of containment safety field on the PPO’s beam.
And now that I’ve nerd-sniped myself this far down the path, no point in stopping now that we have almost all the info* needed to compute the total energy Q = -k·A·Δt·ΔT/Δx = (-1.5 W/m-K)(10 Km^2)(15 min)(14.4M ℃)/(1cm). I found an online heat transfer calculator that knows those units already if I make a few reductions. If she covered 10 km^2 in 15 minutes, that’s 2778 square meters every 0.25 seconds (wow!), and let’s say she only glassed the top 1 cm.
The calculator says that’s 1.5e12 Joules total for a single section, or 6e12 J/s which Wolfram helpfully tells me is just under 1/10th the energy yield of Little Boy (Hiroshima). Every second. Multiplying that over the full 15 minutes = 5.4e12 J total, or 5.4e6 gigajoules, or 1.29 megatons of TNT. Well within an order of magnitude of Dabbler’s estimate, and almost exactly what Brett quoted.
Or 86 Little Boys, or 0.02 Tsar Bombas (which is when we finally decided to stop being silly before things got out of hand and we set the atmosphere on fire). Some other helpful comparisons Wolfram provided voluntarily: 1/20 the surface energy of the 2004 earthquake & tsunami; 1/2 the impact energy forming Meteor Crater, AZ; 1/6 the daily worldwide production of all nuclear plants; the mass-energy (E=mc^2) of 60 grams of matter.
That last one makes me think it really was the nitrogen production that drained the power; 60g of nitrogen gas is about 48 liters (12.6 gallons, 1.7 cu.ft.), and we don’t know how long she went around pouring transmuted truckloads of it on the fires.
* sources:
Thermal conductivity of silica
Area, time – Dabbler
Temp – from above discussion
Slab thickness – thin air, but seems reasonable
Heat flow is what happens when heat is transferred from a hot material to a less hot one. Heating up with an energy beam is something else – the beam just immediately transfers its power into what it hits.
It is possible that there was heat transfer through layers of sand, but that seem to not fit very well with what we see happen. If Sydney heats the topmost sand up so much, it would flash vaporize and after the fireball settles we’d see tiny obsidian crystals raining down or something like that. It seems much more plausible to me that the beam has a certain penetration and hits and heats up all the obsidian’d sand at the same time.
You don’t seem to actually look at that, instead just simulating the beam as very hot material, then calculating the heat transfer power – which still comes out right, but the whole temperature differential part is a red herring that could have thrown you off, while calculating it directly like Brett gets you the right answer much easier.
Most importantly, it doesn’t change anything like you originally said.
International treaties are only binding on Countries that actually sign them THEN ratify them through internal Governmental procedure. Which is one thing the US of A (and a bunch of others) does a lot – their Ambassador or other representative signs but the treaty is never ratified by Congress so the treaty can be ignored by the US, but other signatories are bound by that treaty once it has been ratified by their own Government. So Galtyn is probably not legally bound by almost every International treaty because they haven’t signed up to them for whatever reason (like, no one asked them to) or ratified them.
Well wonder how they’re getting back home now. Portal? Or Anvil jumping with them under her arms/on her shoulders?
It’s fine, Dabbler is there, she can macgyver something to get them out of this.
Worst case scenario: Dabbler glams herself up as a human tourist, heads into a nearby town, acquires a phone, calls Maxima to come pick them up.
Anvil has a phone… It’s sat connected so service is basically “are you on earth” range.
Dabbler also has a ship. Worst case, she calls the ship and flies them back
No, just gonna be late home for dinner (hope Momma Maxi doesn’t spank them for missing curfew… Dabbles is hopping up and down hoping she does :P )
“Smells super nice” is great on paper, but could still cause issues for people with allergies or extreme olfactory sensitivity, like migraine sufferers and the like. That could cause problems with one of those supers getting on a plane.
Nice isn’t necessarily strong. It could just be faint but extremely pleasant. Addictively so, even.
Pheromones control.
That’s a thing I’ve seen. Pretty common in Mage, for Hollowers & Verbena, and Syndicate too, oddly enough.
Looks like they may have to flag a ride home….?!
This is also assuming that the orbs naturally recharge… I don’t think Dave is going to [All-Star](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Olivia_Dawson_(DCAU)) Sydney, but there could be some fun drama as Sydney has to learn how to not use her powers so casually as they figure out how to get power back into the orbs, and what it might cost.
I think we saw at one point, either when Max was testing Sydney’s capabilities or the Kaiju battle that Sydney’s shield had a moment of react and recharge.
I interpreted the shield’s reaction after Squidzilla attacked it more as a sign that it nearly was broken through. Even Syd’s shield orb has to have it’s limits, logically speaking.
For the love of fuck, Google or ask someone who knows basic physics before you have your super scientist blather on about shit. A megaton nuclear bomb releases terajoules worth of energy, for a start. At least you’re ballpark right in the energy required – about 3 gigajoules per square kilometer to raise 1cm of silica to 1700C. But again, that’s terajoules for a 15km diameter circle with wastage. Also why all the farmers/people even close to this ‘event’ would all be flash fried or killed in the subsequent heat vortex/firestorm.
“But again, that’s terajoules for a 15km diameter circle with wastage. Also why all the farmers/people even close to this ‘event’ would all be flash fried or killed in the subsequent heat vortex/firestorm.”
Apparently Nth level technology has a way around that problem.
It’s not like sci fi and comics dont have a long history of using tech that nakes current understsndings of physics go ‘whaaa?’ Even for series tgat trybto have various levels of ‘hard science’ sprinkled into the sci fi.
The Tollan and Asgard from stargate sg-1
Kryptonian Biomatrices
Thanagarian Nth Metal
The shi’ar M-cron Crystal
Vibranium
Star Trek transporters (requires Heisenberg compensators because physics say it cant work due to the heisrnberg uncertainty principle)
The First Ones tech in Babylon 5
The Mass Effect in Mass Effect game series
Aperture Science’s Portal Gun
Pretty much every single thing Rick Sanchez does
there we have it. Sydney’s orbs are powered by everything Rick Sanchez does.
A common handwave I have seen on not being incinerated or kinetically demolished by excess energy and shockwaves in hyper tech, super powers, and magic has been what collectively could be called a backwash collection/buffer field. Basically isolating the area of effect and possibly either exhausting the excess force back into the source dimension or else Recyling that energy back into the system to reduce over all loss.
Shlock’s hand-cannon for example (and other weapons in that universe) shoots a plasma beam with some kind of hand-wavy gravity braid sheath to contain the lateral effects.
This shouldn’t really be somehing the orb does – it justs melts the sand, it shouldn’t really be involved anymore in the cooling down, especially as it seems to be a weapon.
We know that the PPO doesn’t protect its user from Danger Close side effects – at the press conference she blasted herself with sand.
Not from debris, but she also hasn’t been affected by the likely heat it emits from the beam. So primary effect yes any secondary effect no.
Physicists hate mixing theory and reality.
Where does your number come from? I’m getting ~40 terajoules per km^2.
I think DaveB should just like, put numbers that he’s thinking of putting on screen onto Discord and wait for people to give him actual numbers for what he’s suggesting instead of using his terrible math skills to do it.
One would think punching a hole into spacetime to travel across the universe is more energy intensive than making obsidian.
What if the orbs are entities instead of technology? They could be simply “tired”. Sydney might need to give them the orb version of a sandwich and a nap.
I wonder if their is a super/mage somewhere that has a power related to knowing stuff about something there touching. Like Psychometry but not fake. ARC should start looking into museum and antique shop employees. If they find one they may be able to touch a orb and get some useful data.
Zeong is their “museum and antique shop employee”. He was unable to find anything, but was going to research further.
So there potentially is a power limit?
I think they suggested the remaining unknown orb might be the power source. Maybe it needs to be active to recharge the batteries?
The orbs do seem to power down when she is asleep or hasnt used them in a while.
I would say more like Terajoules of energy.
Probably way way more. Contained enough to not harm her or bystanders, while she was flying, without releasing any form of gas that would have been noticed by Darude or Maxima and thus no heat released…
I’m gonna go with a guess that each area was HELD at the 1700 degrees until everything liquidized or she stopped blasting… possibly both as once it solidified it stopped being held at that temp and waste heat was started to be recollected otherwise EVERYBODY in the area would be dead including that farmer and Sydney herself.
There’s certainly something weird afoot about how exactly Sydney did this.
A Sidney could do this because she thought she could do this, and the orbs compensated physics for her intent, which may have been the real power drain having to correct and lay out containment and backwash buffers etc… unseen safety functions she set off subconsciously that require many magnitudes more energy than the basic act she was committing to.
I was told that there would be no math.
The seventh Orb(Unknown) is the one that powers the others..?
Maybe that is the case, if she activates it, maybe it will convert whatever energy locally available to what the orbs need. “Dabs, call Tom! It needs the souls of the damned!” Naa just a weird thought…. or is it… ;)
Time to do some orb research. Like any device with a limited capacity, there has to be the equivalent of a gas gauge in them somewhere.
A foreign sovereign state is a terrible place for Nth-tech R&D, no matter the outcome. Best case scenario nothing happens, worst case you create an international incident (again) or reveal some highly sensitive intel.
Would the oxygen have to be converted to nitrogen? Air is already 70 odd percent N2, all you’d have to do to kill combustion is just remove (some? most? of) the O2 from the equation. Magic it away somewhere else.
Or just filter it out of her air jet intake, no reason to convert or dispose of it. But who knows how the orbs are doing anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe the seventh orb is the gas tank. You aim it at a sun, and it sucks out all the energy to recharge the orbs, or you can let it passively absorb power over time, and it recharged them during the 65 million years since the KT event? That could explain what happened to the previous user. They put up the force field when the KT meteor hit, and there wasn’t enough power left to protect the user at ground zero, but the orbs survived?
Cosmic Rays? Neutrinos? Earth is passing through space all the time so there should be plenty.
If only they could absorb solar energy, they could recharge *AND* provide shade for an unspecified area.
Not so much that it’s inconveniently dark but some shade would be appreciated in Senegal at noon.
Or the orbs were under/overcharged and vented waste, and that was the source of the KT event and not a meteor.
That wouldn’t make sense, since the KT layer definitely contains meteor-sourced minerals.
Maybe it converted energy into matter ..
Specifically, iridium.
Better get LiPO! Or like… a mini-nuclear reactor in a tiny pocket dimension equipped bracelet.
Wait a second, here.
The super gadget is operated by concentration, and in the hands of (arguably) the planet’s worst case of ADD/ADHD?
*facepalm*
Wouldnt be the first time in comics :)
Kyle Rayner of the Green Lanterns :)
Hal Jordan: Green Lantern can do anything!
Batman: Except shut up apparently.
*Little later yoinks his ring without him noticing
Batman: What’s this do? No buttons. I assume it it works off concentration.
Hal Jordan: How’d you do that?
Batman: You weren’t concentrating.
*Jedi Yoinks ring back
Hal Jordan: YOU WON’T DO THAT AGAIN!
Batman: Unless I want to.
ADHD isn’t *that* bad, interesting things cause hyperfocus. We should be worrying about when the orbs get boring to Sydney.
Have you been on TikTok / IG recently? ADHD is the new snowflake badge; there are so damn many videos of kids giving themselves excuses for abusive treatment of their friends & partners, lack of work ethic, grossly exaggerating the difficulty of basic tasks (“it’s just like you forcing yourself to burn your hand off, you can’t do it!”), the list goes on and on. It’s apparently the new Get Out Of Jail free card to play.
This feels like recycling the same judgmental, ignorant complaining I grew up with thirty-five years ago, with an “I hate the Internet” garnish added.
No one is saying that AD(H)D isn’t a real problem, Tahnru is simply stating that internet morons (whatever platform they are infecting) are using it as an excuse for when they get called out for being morons, specially when they are influencing kids to do the same shit (remember that whole ‘Tides pod’ thing?)
Huh. I would think powering an Aethereon Gateway / wormhole / whatever to cross light-years of space would take more power than a thermonuclear bomb.
So I’m not sure Dabbler’s theory is correct here.
I’m more inclined to believe it’s not a problem with the power supply, but the power circuits overloading.
I don’t know about that. Since trying to brute force FTL travel is impossible due to the infinite energy requirement, all thinking on accomplishing it has been about how to side-step the E=MC^2 barrier. The wormholes appear to be more like finding the tab for a universal zipper to slip past the fabric of space-time. Maybe the key to it is a huge gravity well? Capital ships might be able to manage it due to their size & power enabling them to tow around a stable black hole, whereas Sydney’s orbs have miniaturized the process.
Then again, the power of fiction means we just have to accept some of the things the author tells us about this universe.
Has anyone considered that she might be Depressed? She has been running hard at it for a long time, she has seen and experienced a lot of amazing stuff. Her old life, which was seriously important to her is gone, just gone.
Maybe she needs some downtime to process all this and given the extreme nature of hings, a little more therapy than people would ordinatilly get in a situation like that, whatever that level is.
She has not had years to adapt, like most of them. No mater what she has to have doubts about being worthy of her powers, and honestly, she’s cute as hell, but she does not really fit in in any way.
She’s a great mascot, one that has the power to likely obliterate solar systems, eventually, but it’s hard to look at a group picture and wonder witch one she is.
One assumes they can be recharged in some fashion… but how remains a very good question.
I foresee Sydney having a panic attack over this next page.
B Batteries at one time were used in radios that used vacuum tubes.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/why-are-there-no-b-batteries/
Here’s a thought; When Vari held Sydney’s hand the orbs circled BOTH of them. IF the orbs are powered by her mind wouldn’t that mean that if Harem and Vari teleported in and she linked up with Sydney could that mean she could act as a back-up battery?
Hmmmm…
Sydney is both wacky and smart.
Is she thinking that if the Orbs *can’t* be recharged that her career as a Super Hero is over?
Just like the giant squidword fight she found out that her shield has limits so she just found out even the orbs have limits. It wouldn’t make any sense if the creators of them wouldn’t account for this type of situation. The original user hardly stayed home or kept in close to a recharge station. They clearly use a type of energy that we have yet to have access to so it would only make sense if they could recharge themselves over time. Until they can figure out how to recharge them Sydney will have to avoid any future over-use.
Recharge them with *what* though. You bascially need to stick them into the sun to get that kind of energy in an appreciable timeframe.
Casimir effect vacuum energy extractors. The smaller they are the more effective they become. The nanotech Iron Man armors apparently use them.
VE density is potentially as high as 10^113 joules per cubic meter. So that comment by Sydney holding a star in her hand, is possibly VERY true.
or maybe a quick nap and a glass of milk.
Well, she may have used up the power creating a bunch of Nitrogen gas out of nothing (but stored energy). Or transmuted Oxygen to Nitrogen, which is an endothermic reaction, consuming energy.
So, maybe she can recharge by vanishing a bunch of matter, or converting a bunch of air into iron. That would be highly exothermic.
The problem is probably how she figures out what she needs to do, not how she does it. Recharging is probably as easy as just commanding the center orb to recharge, once she finds the “button”.
Dabbler covered the different types of “magical” energies, while the sun is nuclear/thermodynamic, a totally different kind of energy. When Deus did his smug smart guy bit, just before the sandman attack, and explained why supers have have been created, humans have tapped into an energy that was “created” in the grand scheme. Who else could of done it? The same folk that made the orbs! That would explain why there were just laying around… waiting…
I’ll just go ahead and join the ones that speculate that the orb with the unknown power is recharging the others, because any spaceship needs something like that. If that’s a Red Herring, then goob job I’ll take the L.
But unless Sydney’s orbs can do something that’s considered outrageous according to our scientific knowledge, like breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics and converting heat into higher forms of energy, I can’t imagine how her orbs are supposed to get this much energy. Also, using enough heat to crystallize sand would be dangerous for anyone being remotely close to her, so I’m actually not ruling out that her orbs can break that very law.
Of course the explanation can also simply be: It’s a fantasy comic with supers who do all kinds of things that give the impression that our laws of physics are more like guidelines to them, so the orbs could just be explained like that as well, but if Dabbler starts contemplating the orbs’ power source even though we never saw Hiro’s and Maxima’s power source being discussed, then there might be more to the orbs than just something like “a wizard did it”.
If the last orb is the power system, it would be extremely interesting to learn the science behind how it transfers energy to the other orbs without frying the user or anyone else who passes between them. Tesla had some interesting (and functional) prototypes for wireless energy transfer but the side effects were too dangerous, such as microwave transmission towers (still in limited use in certain applications).
Presumably through non-physical space.
Quantum tunneling, possibly.
Or the conduit exists in a set of spatial dimensions that don’t intersect with those normally occupied by the rest of Reality.
Honestly, I used a similar explanation for certain Gnostic Technomagus Devices I created in my Mage games.
“You don’t have a high enough forces rating to create the power to run that machine.”
“I know, that why I’m not creating it. I’m transferring it from my solar farm in the desert.”
“You can’t create sunlight with Forces 2.”
“But I _can_ co-locate the vampire with the sunny side of the planet use my rating in Life, Matter, and Correspondence.”
“You need a higher rating in Spirit before you can effect the werewolf.”
“Who’s targeting the werewolf? I’m dilating the distance between us and filling it with a cloud of silver atoms.”
“…stop breaking my game. Please?”
*giggles*
fun at parties you are not. legal studies do you must.
Could be worse, they could take AAA. Then this would have happened much sooner.
First thing to come to mind is what if its not a battery but an interdimensional welling effect. Like the energy source is nigh on infinite but drawing too much in a short type causes a welling effect *decrease in pressure and local resources* n the pocket dimension and it needs time to refil the Nthpowerfer *or whatever we want to call the aquafer equivalent*, some spell casters have a limit like this rather than personal mana where the available magic in the air or local astral plane can be drained and needs to refil over time.
Another thought is an intentional restriction on power flow or amount within a set period or, like something she can upgrade. Which being this is supposedly Nth tech is another tick in the “these are Nth level being toys” box. Possibly even like training wheels. So much power available making the baby Nths supply the rest if they want to keep going, or else its like any toy where the power source is far more limited than what the main tech uses. However as a restriction as a game mechanic also works.
-oh you want to keep playing at these higher power levels? Well you need to put points towards the power gauge, like playing a mech game, sure you loaded up armor, the thrusters, weapons, but you forgot to upgrade the engines, surge protectors, and such so now you are just running out faster before needing a recharge.
Or maybe they share power with another user. Someone who gained her powers from a burned out orb that split in half and spilled “geode water” all over her.
Interesting… this is definitely the farthest Sydney has been from Max since starting to use the orbs…
Except for that time when she got stuck on another planet.
Point. But the shield was starting to approach its limits – the only other time we’ve seen the orbs strained in any way.
That was when Maxima was still there, and the shield being strained is entirely different from the power running low.
Also a fair point, although not definitive. The alert may have been from depleted power rather than the blast approaching the shield’s actual limit, which may be limited by available capacitance rather than maximum force. Max was there when the shield was strained by the first blast, but also for a few 10s of seconds afterward, so perhaps that was sufficient to recharge it.
Hoping they just filtered it from the surrounding atmosphere, but transmuting it definitely seems possible. The air generated in the swimming pool wasn’t purely derived from the surrounding water, or the oxygen poisoning would’ve been worse for Sydney than inhaling the water.
Time to go hunt down a new Battery of the Gods.
Im pretty sure theres a ZPM or two located in Gaza.
Meh, those things are pathetic, she’d drain one in like ten minutes.
True, but a weak battery is better than a dead one…
Nice Earthworm Jim reference there.