Grrl Power #1123 – That’s one way to support the troops
Obligatory. (Futurama clip of them on a heavy gravity world.)
Man, it’s been a while since I broke out the Maxima Power Pentagram. I know it kind of looks uneven, with her being able to do 3 powers at the “Blue” level, but also two powers at the “purple” level and on at the “green.” These are not official designations, I just color coded them like item rarities in ARPGs so they hopefully make some sense at a glance. So don’t forget that Max has a power pool she can feed into her abilities. If you go by Marvel RPG stats, her default power levels are like Incredible across the board. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, it’s a 0-100 scale with 6 being “average human,” and Incredible is 40 points. (Yes, the scale went above 100 to “Shift-X” (150) all the way up to Class-5000 and Beyond, but that was mostly reserved for Thor when he put on Megingjörð (his belt) and Járngreipr (gauntlets) and used “Unfettered Might” and also like Galactus level stuff. 98% of superheroes and villains existed in the 0-100 range.) So anyway, Maxima’s “at rest” power level is 40 on that scale. She used to walk around with all powers at “green” which pushes her into the 50 range, but quickly realized that she just doesn’t need that much walking around strength. It’s actually pretty detrimental when trying to exist in a world made for people in the 4-8 range. So now she keeps a blue on armor and a green on speed and holds the rest of her power pool in reserve. A purple arrow pushes her into the 90-100 range, and as you see, she can pump up two stats like that and keep a little extra for a green boost. She can exceed the purple range, but can only pump up one stat that high at a time while keeping a few points in reserve for other things. The higher she pushes a stat, the less efficient the boost from the power pool becomes, and she can also draw down her other abilities to supercharge one stat if she really needs to.
You can see in the second to last panel, she actually lowered her strength as she upped her flight. The scientists aren’t entirely sure how Maxima’s flight works, but it doesn’t involve thrust. She just moves herself through space at a rate determined by how much power she’s putting into the ability. The advantage is that it takes nearly no power to hover, and she has no flight ceiling, the disadvantage is that while she can move extremely fast if she wants to, she can’t accelerate indefinitely. She accelerates very quickly if she needs to, but once she hits her top speed, that’s it. She’s done very limited testing with flying in space, so she doesn’t know if her vacuum top speed and atmospheric top speed are the same. She hasn’t exactly flown to the moon or anything.
The January Vote Incentive is up! The new on is being worked on. Time for the quarterly fashion show that Anvil puts Maxima through. Can you detect the theme?
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.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
I’m actually kind gf wondering if Stalwart’s mass/density control would get countered by Supermassive’s gravity manipulation.
I would say yes, mostly. there is a downside of lowering your mass/density to compensate for gravity, If your mass/density is too low you become tissue paper. Your average person could barely move under 2 G, this assclown seems to generate at least 5 g.
What an entrance 9.9, docking a bit for needing to adjust twice to stop the sagging.
Using her shield to block the gravity powers?
Honestly though, I’d be switching gravity directions all over the joint, not just down.
He said he’s part of the welcoming party so I guess we’ll see some buddies helping.
No, she’s using her flight powers to nullify the gravity powers.
You’re likely correct. I just remember Sydney commenting that Maxima’s flight doesn’t give localised gravity.
Although it could be she’s concentrating to extend it to all of her body, including hair, or at minimal power her flight doesn’t give localised gravity but at maximum it does.
Could also be interaction between her maximised defence field and maximised flight, extending over her.
Is there a reason she doesn’t put all of her spare into durability when she doesn’t need it? Like, is it draining to do so, or there’s a longer delay in switching allocated points than unallocated, or it desensitizes her to touch?
Bah this was supposed to be an independent comment, not a reply to you.
No, it’s probably her Flight “stat” that counteracts gravity right now, otherwise she wouldn’t pump it up. Defence up is merely a precaution against other crimson cowls (as well as against sudden gravity changes that could otherwise, say, fling her into a wall).
Max can counter gravity effects easily and on demand, during the early training phase of Sydney’s Max had flown down and upside down to yell at Sydney to get outside for flight testing and she didn’t bother with her boobs/hair for that and everyone standing by Sydney made a delicate comment about that and her hair.
I do appreciate a good Sha-Boing.
I’m imagining it sounds like the springs from the Genesis Sonic games.
As funny as the imagery of the bottom row is, hadn’t it been established before that Maxima’s flight doesn’t include personalized gravity? So while flight could help with movement under the strain of enhanced gravity, it shouldn’t stop her hair from hanging down.
That might be part of why she invested heavily into the shield? Perhaps that does do something to her localized gravity?
Pretty sure that is why she invested into the shield category. That one might have an effect on her localized gravity.
Perhaps that is the purpose of the shield being maxed?
I am sorry for the spam, it wasn’t updating that I had commented on anything. And I do believe this was my first time commenting. I was unaware that I had to do a full page reload to see them.
If you don’t get an error message, then your message went through, it’s just the way the comments are “working” lately: extreme time-delay
The server for the web comic must be located within a severe gravity well or traveling at .9 C. That would cause the delays we see in posting. (or it could just be an old junker that needs to be upgraded)
My first instinct when looking at it was that I thought the armor points stabilized her form against the gravity. Like, stiffening her so that gravity doesn’t deform her.
She did pick up an ambulance one-handed with out damaging it, she does have anti-gravity as long as she’s touching something, her own body would certainly fit that. In the micro-second she punches something that falls into effect removing the target’s gravity long enough to react to her strength with greater effect.
I suspect her power also counters the inertia as well, making it much easier for her punches to deliver all the kinetic energy she is sending into the target. It also explains why she can fly with such sudden acceleration.
Her picking up the ambulance was actually a type of “zero point TK” similar to Superboy’s tactile telekinesis or Superman’s/Supergirl’s kryptonian biomatrix.
DaveB discussed how she did what she did with the ambulance previously.
Hair doesn’t have internal structural elements, and cleavage does. In a young woman, the latter stands up under normal gravity.
I think there’s a lot of “gravity is magic” stuff going on.
Fighting against Gravity is the most common thing ever; all of us do it every day of our lives.
Maxima can fly; telling Gravity to fuck off.
LOTS of Superheroes can.
Supermassive is nice, but honestly, Gravity Control is kind of a niche power in a lot of ways. It’s more of a debuff than anything else. That and, if he can do things like adjust the plane of gravity and turn up to down, etc, kind of a playful control type power. But, we haven’t seen yet tho.
He JUST seems to have a knob that controls the intensity.
At the scale maxima operates at, that just isn’t that big of a deal for her. Especially at Epic Quality Flight.
That’s incorrect if you notice in panel 5 of https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1120-superheroine-on-cinderblock/ Varia is completely off the ground when effected by his gravity, so he can change the direction it is going
EVERY ONE of these chumps has thought their power would give them an automatic advantage over trained professionals. It hasn’t gone well for *any* *one* of them. looking forward to this moron being unpleasantly surprised
Super villains always think they are the best, and find out the hard way they’re not. Imagine how every super in the first fight that felt stupid after that short, skinny gal with funky orbs kicked their ass, much less Kevin! Watch as Supermassive (ego) finds that out in spades! During the first press conference, Max, right after she sent that uber nuke off, but before it fully went off, commented that anyone that has powers may be alone in the area and it makes them feel powerful and they can beat anyone, they’re not.
For all we know, this guy is also trained.
“She hasn’t exactly flown to the moon or anything”
The first thing I would be doing is flying to the ISS at least! Its not that far away.
While she apparently is not affected by the simultaneous vacuum, cold and heat of space, it is established that she needs oxygen.
I would not be too eager to risk my life on a stunt :) I mean even at her speed holding her breath long enough to get to the ISS and back down again may be tricky. Flying to the moon would require quite an oxygen tank…
The ISS orbits at about 5 miles per second, or 18,000 mph, or Mach ~23. We don’t know what Maxima’s top speed is but it may not be high enough to match orbits with the ISS. If she can’t then even if she manages to fly high enough to see the ISS close up (~254 miles) it will simply zoom past her faster than any bullet.
She doesn’t have to fly fast enough to catch it, just needs to match orbit and wait for it to come to her
If she wants to go aboard as anything other than an impactor, she needs to exactly match velocity as well (other than miniscule differences for maneuvering to the airlock). Even if she were doing “nearly” the same speed at Mach 22, the difference of Mach 1 would be catastrophic to the station.
If she could fly to the moon, this information would be classified. Especially if she already did. *winks*
How much oxygen could she carry? I expect she will need a lot of oxygen for a trip up there. She will a pressure suit, not to prevent vacuum exposure, but to allow her to continue to breathe while in ultra-low air pressure.
I think she could manage with a helmet and a re-breather, otherwise ice could form on her eyes. The hot/cold effect in a vacuum might be an issue as well, sun-side would be over 300C and the shadow side could be -240C. She’d have to sacrifice speed to boost her shield and even then her clothes might break down. Sydney could make the trip with just a re-breather, however she IS a space ship, basically.
Just. Shoot. Him. Cops don’t “discuss” things with people during a raid. Shoot him and move on.
Supers play by different rules.
Also, she knows they have hostages and kill switches rigged to their holding cells, possibly including her teammates now or very shortly (per Harem’s report of Death Toll’s presence). No holds barred works both ways, her goals very much include negotiating with the leadership if possible, rather than escalating as hard and fast as possible. At least until they prove unwilling to negotiate, then yes she should disable every Ascender in the facility asap.
it is a flaw for both superheroes and villains.
gotta talk and posture.
Killing does seem to be what cops do most, as we keep seeing.
Repeatedly.
“Most cops”? There are roughly a million police personnel in the US. Roughly a thousand police killings a year including all shootouts of any kind.
Roughly 43% of officer involved shootings are on calls that already started in violent categories (ie armed person, homicide, assault, shots fired, and robbery).
More than half of OIS’s are non-fatal, and only about a third of the OIS incidents included more than one officer discharging their weapon, so if we assume that the number of officers shooting is a power-law distribution, we get at most 2500-2700 officers firing weapons in fatal OIS’s. The “killing officers” are less than 0.3% of the police force, and that’s including all the shootouts with violent criminals.
a) “cops do most” is not the same as “most cops”, if you’re going to quote people quote them
b) there is no actual tracking of how many people police kill over the USA
c) there are individual areas that track things but they don’t count things like bystanders police shoot when they engage with cops, pedestrians killed by police cars during police chases etc.
d) of the figures released only 49% of people cops kill were involved in any criminal offence, and most of them are non-violent offences. Mental health checks, safety checks…
e) USA police kill at least 4 times as many people per capita as Australian police do
f) have a look at the police reports of incidents before video footage of the incidents is released and ask yourself how much you can trust the police takes on things
“ there is no actual tracking of how many people police kill over the USA”
Actually there is. Rather specific tracking in fact by the FBI, including the annual FBI crime report, various police agencies, and most cities. Not to mention it’s mostly a matter of public record.
“ c) there are individual areas that track things but they don’t count things like bystanders police shoot when they engage with cops, pedestrians killed by police cars during police chases etc.”
Yes they do for bystanders as well. See my previous response.
Would respond to the rest but currently on my phone and I need to be at my computer to respond more comprehensively to each part of your post. Can do so tomorrow! :)
It’s strictly voluntary reporting.
Most departments do not participate, and the numbers are never subjected to any sort of actual QA.
It’s all foxes & hen houses.
“Most departments do not participate, and the numbers are never subjected to any sort of actual QA. It’s all foxes & hen houses.”
On average, it has at least an 80% participation level according to FBI.gov (the point at which they start to present aggregate use-of-force data). That gives a rather good baseline to work from, at the very least. Your foxes and hen houses statement likely does happen in a number of areas, but we can only base any sort of reliable statistics on actual reported numbers, not unsubstantiated rumors of people suppressing those numbers without supporting evidence to back that up.
I don’t think it’s nearly as pronounced as Mad Hamish was making it out to be though, and he made several errors or outright mistakes in what he posted, which is why I responded at all.
Then there are numerous independent think tanks, statistics aggregators, and activist groups (Statista, Manhattan Institute, MappingPoliceViolence Project, PoliceViolenceReport, CivilBeat, etc) which also track police interactions and the details of those interactions, including when deaths of suspects occur, bystanders, and the types of crimes involved.
(National Use-of-Force Data Collection)
Whether you choose to believe them or not is another opinion , but I’m just giving the basic official numbers since you brought up that it’s voluntary (which you are correct about saying that it is, but still for voluntary it seems rather thorough and supported by, at the very least, incident reports and case numbers which could be subjected to further investigation in the event of a wrongful death lawsuit or criminal action against the police officers because of any of those reported deaths.).
The data collection by the FBI also includes details like:
For the officer(s):
Age, sex, race, ethnicity, height, and weight
Years of service in law enforcement
Was the officer a full-time employee?
Was the officer on duty?
Did the officer discharge a firearm?
Was the officer injured?
If so, what was the officer’s injury type?
For the subject:
Age, sex, race, ethnicity, height, and weight
Injury/death of subject
Type of force used
Did the subject direct a threat to the officer or another person?
Did the subject resist?
Types of resistance or weapon involvement (threats, active aggression, firearms, etc.)
Did the subject have a known or apparent impairment, such as mental health condition or being under the influence of drugs or alcohol?
Was the subject believed to have a weapon?
And information about each incident reported:
Date and time
Total number of officers who applied force
Number of officers from reporting agency who applied force
Location
Location type (street, business, home, etc.)
Did the officer(s) approach the subjects?
Was it an ambush incident?
Was a supervisor or senior officer consulted during the incident?
Reason for initial contact (routine patrol, traffic stop, etc.)
If the initial contact was due to unlawful activity, what was the most serious offense the individual was suspected of?
If applicable, the reporting agency will include the National Incident-Based Reporting System record or local incident number of the report detailing criminal incident information on the subject and/or assault or homicide of a law enforcement officer.
If the incident involved multiple agencies, the reporting agency should provide case numbers for the other agencies’ incident reports
I’d like to see some baseline data collection start. Maybe the equivalent of an MMPI and a Psychopathology Checklist as a condition of new or continued employment in law enforcement. I expect state or higher level government would have to pick up the cost to get small municipalities to go along. You could get a baseline of “maybe you shouldn’t be a cop ” traits. It feels pretty far down the slippery slope to a Big Brother state but it seems likely that the issue is one of personnel selection or training. My experience of working in a high risk envirionment is that it is both.
They have been having problems recruiting for a while now. thats why you get cops washing out of one force going into another. I suspect if we had a decent test there would be places that refuse to use it because they can’t find anyone to hire when they do.
One reason why they are having trouble recruiting, is because of the blue-hate: who would willingly want to become a target to that?
And note, said willingly, you don’t get to pick your ethnicity
Pretty sure a gun actually wouldn’t help here. The bullet would enter the gravity field and, assuming it managed to even leave the gun, get dragged down immensely by local gravity. She’s got personal defense and flight on High just to *stand normally.*
The use of lethal force might not be justified in this case. Definitely arrest him, recite his Miranda rights, hand him over to Hiro to secure him top-side and move on.
Similar thinking. Put enough energy into her force projection peer & one-shot him, ala “Indiana Jones”.
She doesn’t want to do a kill-shot and I have my doubts she has a “stun” setting. This is why they used a “sleepy time shot” during that first super-battle, the idea is to arrest, not kill. “get a badge, or a 10×10 and a pot” to quote her. Supers are rare and valuable, you don’t want to start killing them at random.
A) She doesn’t have the speed to draw and fire before he reacts.
B) The gravity gradient may not affect her, but it affects everything that isn’t her, including bullets.
A) Maybe not with strength maxed, but we’ve seen her catch a bullet, and with speed maxed she was able to visibly move inside a stasis field. She’s got points to spare right now, I think she could probably quick draw and fire.
B) Her zero-range telekinesis extends her flight / anti-gravity to whatever she’s holding, e.g. the ambulance. I’d expect the field of her personal shield to extend to her sidearm and the bullets in it. As to whether the bullet ‘sees’ 10 g’s after it leaves the barrell, that depends entirely on whether his power is affecting her directly or just an area effect on her location.
If it’s on the location, we should expect an effect on the surrounding air, i.e. wind/turbulence around her.
Just pick up a discarded piece of body armor and fly over his head. Then just drop it and watch it hit him with the weight of a of a car. Or just let herself fall down on him. She has her shields up already)
Gonna be honest here. Gravity powers are really neat, depending on how they’re implemented. Set it up so that there’s a gyroscopic series of weak gravity anchors spinning around in and around someone’s head, and watch them vomit and pass out as their inner ear fails to cope with sensory overload. ‘I push things down’ is both really basic, and really lame. At that point it’s not ‘gravity’ so much as ‘density shifting’.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you could place two opposing forces as gravity wells in a tight enough space, the space between the two becomes a whirling spin of constant acceleration. Picture one of those colorful wind wheels, if you had two perpetually accelerating gusts of wind moving in opposite directions. How long before something, anything, suffers catastrophic failure?
Then there’s the concept of gravity snapping, where you simultaneously enforce maximum downward, and then maximum-1 up. Load the space above a target with whatever ordinance you want, turn off maximum-1 up, and let it all come crashing down simultaneously.
Just a test, it isn’t letting me comment as a reply under someone else that I think it is her investment in defense that is reversing the effects of the extra gravity, since flight alone has been shown not to.
I don’t think it’s that your comments are being rejected, it’s simply that this discussion board is *abysmal*. It generally takes minutes or hours for comments to appear after they are posted. It’s essentially unusable for anything other than driveby comments.
I found that out much later. At least maybe I won’t spam in the future.
It’s a rite of passage, and still catches some of us from time to time.
How far can she reduce her powers? To normal human levels, or is she just permanently super?
Yes, her minimum is still above the highest ‘normal’
Based on my recollection of MSH Incredible (40) is about Spider-man’s strength level
Incredible Fighting is Wolverine’s combat ability
So that gives a pretty decent idea of how much above standard human levels she is
I’m interested to see how Masshole’s gravity powers are going to protect him against Maxima’s particle beam. The team is full contact and while she may not need to kill him, it’s got to be hard to focus with 1 1/2 legs.
“Disarmed?”
“No- Dislegged.”
Maybe a localized distortion to throw the beam off or maybe even a gravity bubble around himself. Depends on how much control her has, but if he were strong enough, he could shred anything that got close.
Enough, stop with those landings. Yer killin’ yer knees darlin’ and at 45 years old that bill will come do. Don’t matter what kind’o super you are. Now, this reminds me of the pachyderm in the room…the ballooning. What, why, how and when did the En biggening start. We all know where it started, that’s out there front and center with ever female super.
p.s. just worried because the boss is no angel, but she get tetchy if she needs new gear.
Look again: the sha-boing is countering the gravity of the situation (aka the panel before it)
Given the “oof”, I don’t think the three point landing was intentional.
By the way, in this universe, the same “embiggening” applies to male supers. Early on, Sydney made a comment about “vagoos of holding”.
Maxima has a healing factor, so she probably doesn’t need to worry about cumulative damage. Other kinds of supers who don’t need to worry about that kind of thing include Achilles (completely invulnerable), Mr. Amorphous (super flexible), Chimyriad (Shapeshifter).
We are also not told the entirety of health benefits super physique offers – for all we know, the base package includes health into old age along with embiggening.
So, did he make her heavy enough to fall through the floor above him, or did she bash through herself and then get hit by his powers?
Looks like Max was hit by 10x gravity as she was punching through, which caught her by surprise.
She hit hard enough to make her flak vest disassemble, though was able to prevent cratering the floor (much).
The latter, I suspect; He’s probably got limited range.
Well….that depends on how close to real physics his power gets.
Gravity has actually got a massive reach. Like, on a cosmic scale.
But the relative strength tapers quickly. We shall see…
I wonder if he can also remove gravity entirely from an area? We’ve seen that he can already redirect gravity like he did with the bars and with Varia, and here we see that he can increase gravity in a directed area.
It would likely not help with Maxima (or with Sydney when she is holding the flight orb), but would help a lot with others who do not have a flight ability.
That description of her flight powers makes enormous sense from a physics standpoint: She’s pushing against local mass around her. Distributed enough that if she takes off fast the people next to her don’t get squished, but locally enough that she’s stuck in the local reference frame.
Standing still requires force, but it doesn’t consume power. Work is force through distance, and there’s no distance going on.
Accelerating starts consuming power to feed into her kinetic energy. And the faster she’s going, the more power is needed to get a given amount of acceleration. (It doesn’t work that way for rockets, because they push on fuel they carry with them, and when that’s gone, can’t push anymore.)
Eventually she hits a top speed where the power she’s pushing into flight is just enough to compensate for atmospheric drag. It’s just like a car, eventually the engine is running flat out just to maintain the speed, and it can’t accelerate any further.
I bet if she got out into space, she’d find that her flight powers simply stopped working once she was far enough away from any other object that she couldn’t push on it anymore. She might be able to make it to the ISS, but find she couldn’t pull many Gs. She’d totally run out of steam before reaching the Moon, though she’d get there in time because she could easily build up enough speed before she lost contact with Earth, and her flight power would kick in from interacting with the Moon in time to stop again.
I gotta disagree. The description does not make a whole lot of sense in a Newtonian or Einsteinian universe and seems positively Aristotelian. What you’re elaborating on seems to me not like the description given by Dave B. but your own head canon how Maximas experiences could be explained with some understanding of physics.
And while we’re on the topic: “She’s done very limited testing with flying in space, so she doesn’t know if her vacuum top speed and atmospheric top speed are the same.” That’s hardly an excuse. Wind tunnels and vacuum chambers exist and there are absolutely measurements that should be taken in those to understand the capabilities of your most powerful asset, dear „The scientists“. Some of them would distinguish between what I consider the most conservative extrapolation of the authors description and Brett Bellmores head canon.
I’m assuming something similar to Mach’s principle, only her range of interaction has an upper limit. She’s obeying normal physics except that she can push on mass that’s nearby without touching it. Where “nearby” is something larger than a few meters, but possibly smaller than planetary scale.
It may also be that her flight is based around space-time dilation, rather than pushing off of objects in reference. That would explain why the gravity suddenly stopped affecting her as much- her flight literally controls how gravity, within a small zone around her, functions.
Would explain the Sha-Boing.
The sha-boing is (also) explained simply by internal structure reasserting itself when gravity is no longer multiplied. While her clothes and hair have no reason NOT to call upwards when she is inverted, that does not mean that the gravity pulling on them is a full g.
Maxima makes sonic booms, so she appears to be physically moving through the medium, not just manipulating space.
Fixed reference point of local mass she pushes against is actually physically consistent.
Again, that would be explained by a very small field-effect.
By having the zone of spacetime distortion fitting around her body, you would get the same effects as well- shockwaves as the air within the millimeter or so of her skin hitting the air outside her field. Since we do not have a microscopic view of her skin at those speeds with schlieren imaging or some other method, we cannot say for sure.
Besides- she NEEDS to move through a medium. Manipulating space would still involve moving through the medium between point a and b unless she pulled some portals out of her pocket- it would just have a zone of relative ‘standstill’ where there was no effective movement… Until the medium within the zone interacted with the medium moving into said zone, and then we would see movement anyway.
Space-time distortion doesn’t really make sense. How do you float with that? How do you cancel gravity?
It makes more sense if it’s just forcefield that accelerates her, or cancels out gravity.
That’s the thing: in space, you only need engines to stop acceleration and momentum, because there is no gravity working on you, it’s also why the Borg cubes work
And, never really thought about it too much, but whenever imagine me moving at highspeeds or flying, that’s basically how it works: don’t run, or even walk very fast, just… move to new location, almost like translocationing (or *VORP*ing) but still moving between the two locations
C’mon girdle! Hold! Hoooold!
I WAS thinking that Max must have some Anvil-level overengineered bra to handle Masshole’s power.
While some would say that Maxima’s flight does not in fact invoke localised gravity as seen before, I choose to believe they do but just to make her… hair… look good.
Maxima’s hair is still affected by gravity – it falls down. What happens is that, apparently, increasing her durability makes her hair more resistant to being pulled straight down making it more floofy.
Similar effects can be observed on her boobs*, which become more resistant to gravity.
*Motivated by scientific curiosity, of course.
That’s a wonky explanation but I like it. So if she pushed her shield to the max, she’d float?
I don’t think so – I believe it’s a matter of structural integrity – it’s just resisting deformation be extra gravity.
Yeah, the concept of speed as a fixed number falls apart pretty quickly once you leave the atmosphere. And even on Earth, there are issues – if you’re inside a closed shipping container, it’s famously supposed to be impossible to tell how fast the container is moving without some sort of external cues (even trying to track the acceleration as you move doesn’t help that much since it’s hard to tell the difference between accelerating forward and pitching up. But if Maxima’s flight speed limits are tied to the Earth rather than to local airspeed, she could do really dialed-down flight/hover and tell exactly how fast and in which direction the container is moving relative to the Earth.
Take the Moon for example – that’s moving at a (by astronomical standards) leisurely 2,300 mph (relative to Earth’s center of mass), give or take – around Mach 3. Does that mean that if Maxima were on the Moon, she’d need to have enough points in flight to hit Mach 3, or she’d fly off into space? It gets worse. That’s not considering that the Earth rotates. To stay directly above a fixed point on the Earth’s surface starting near the Moon, you’d need to move at around Mach 11.75 (relative to Earth’s center of mass). So just to hover on the Moon, Maxima would need to be moving at Mach 8.75 relative to a fixed point on Earth. Going further afield, the speeds are generally going to get much worse.
You are assuming that Maxi is centrally locked on to the center of Dirt, that’s not how things work (or Buzz would never have been able to leave his foot print on Luna)
That would only be an argument if Buzz had the same power as Maxima.
Not fixed to Earth, just whatever is nearby and really massive, and that’s normally Earth. I mean, she didn’t encounter any problems on Alari.
So Maxima can re-allocate how her powers act.
What do you mean?
Max has had a lot of practice over the years, so she knows what she can do and how to use her skill set to handle the situation way better than most supers do, she’s always been able to, this is the first time we actually see it in all it’s glory. Move ahead 10 years and marvel at how Sydney uses hers! Max has been learning her powers since she’s been a teen. I’m sure the military has helped her in that regard as well.
Masshole is about to find out (the painful way) that Maxi can do more than just counter gravity
*heh* Ok…loving the new nickname for this soon to be short lived character. :) Also, wondering if this WHOLE facility was a trap for Maxima given their rather casual attitude to the intrusion so far…
Love seeing FASERIP in the wild; thank you!
Most minor of nitpicks: *technically* (he said in a nasal voice, pushing his glasses up with a finger), with the Advanced Set, all the ranks except Shift 0 and the “cosmic” ranks had a range, and that meant Unearthly was 88-125. But 100 was the Basic Set number and default average, yes.
But forget that, I’m really just jazzed to see it mentioned!
So, I got bored and wandered around the website. Dave, you haven’t updated the cast page in…forever. Something for that late night thumb twiddling time that we all have?
When you write
I know it kind of looks uneven, with her being able to do 3 powers at the “Blue” level, but also two powers at the “purple” level and on at the “green.”
That would be a hexagon, not a pentagon, wouldn’t it? 3+2+1 is six. Author: revise?
I have to say I was assuming, not looking at the pentagon, that she was just amping up her strength to exceed the applied gravitational field. For her, 10 gs would be pretty much nothing . . .
“with her being able to do 3 powers at the “Blue” level” refers to panel 2, and then “but also two powers at the “purple” level and on at the “green.”” refers to panel 6.
Okay, I can see that it can be read that way, but that reading didn’t even occur to me. I would suggest “but alternatively” as a possible clearer wording.
I so much want to see Maxima feed this jerk his own spine.
Are her flight powers gravity based? It would explain her effortless movement as well as her hair seeming to ignore the surrounding gravity once she activates it.
I still remember that chapter way back when she was upside down but her hair was still in the ‘normal’ position compared to her body.
…What happened to “Maxima’s flight powers DON’T include localised gravity”?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-350-its-localized-its-just-not-personalized/
She’s not normally leaning into that power quite so hard, I suppose.
She’s using multiple abilities in tandem to nullify external effects
Anyone else thinking this dude is catastrophically overconfident? The boss authorized lethal force from the get go….
Maybe he’s not the entire welcoming committee, and his only job is to keep her pinned down while somebody else tries to take her down?
Either that, or he’s not really trying hard yet, and thinks he can overpower her.
Yeah, he’s counting on Peri to show up, won’t he be a red-mist when he finds Peri has been placed in a time-out
Was wrong on that :(
He’s still counting on someone else to keep him safe though
This was supposed to be an independent comment the first time :(
Is there a reason she doesn’t put all of her spare into durability when she doesn’t need it? Like, is it draining to do so, or there’s a longer delay in switching allocated points than unallocated, or it desensitizes her to touch?
I’d wager if she puts everything into durability (defense) she would have issues. Like when Z-fighters are exposed to gravity much higher than Earth and have to get used to it over time. She switched to Def > slightly above baseline STR < Flight. Flight being the main thing that's neutralizing the gravity. Def, for what might be coming. and Str to somewhat fight while managing the other two.
What I mean is, allocating her stats towards defense for walking-around normal levels. The commentary says she keeps much of her power in reserve and puts fairly high into defense, but unless there’s some issue like what I stated, I don’t see a reason to do that. It would make sense to keep defense high at all times if the power isn’t needed elsewhere, in case of ambush.
It would make no real sense for Maxima to have a maximum speed in space. Relative to what? It’s most likely that she only has a maximum speed in atmosphere because of wind resistance.
Exactly. Earth moves around the sun at 30km/s. Sun moves around the galaxy center at 200km/s. The galaxy moves towards the Andromeda galaxy at 112km/s. Big differences.
what a lot of people don’t understand about really really heavy things is that the ground itself may not be able to support the thing. it all has to do with the ground surface pressure of the thing. cranes have outriggers with thick wooden/metal/composite pads beneath them to spread out their ground surface pressure. the surface they are standing on also plays into it.
a person who weighs 100 tons standing on concrete would probably crack the concrete and sink up to their knees, or further. on soil they would bury themselves.
Dirt compacts pretty well, I don’t think she’d sink in to her knees even at 10g. But she should definitely be leaving visible footprints, especially on grass, although there’s likely only a thin layer of topsoil over a concrete foundation.
As for anyone “burying themselves” – concrete is pretty tough, usually spec’d at about 4K psi compression strength, so able to support that sample 100 tons requires (100*2000 lb)/(4000 psi) = only 50 square inches. Not much more than a single human footprint at approximately 4×10 = 40 sq.in.
The actual failure for say a sidewalk would indeed be the ground under the concrete slab giving way, allowing the slab to fail in tension/shear and force a chunk out. However the person still wouldn’t just punch through into the ground like Wile E Coyote – typical soil bearing strength is around 3-6K psi. The load spreads out at roughly a 45° angle to the underlying soil, so after sinking a couple inches the punctured section of slab would just stop.
I hope you are considering time dilations in regards to greater gravity.
What are Maxima’s stats in MEGS (Mayfair Exponential Game System aka DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes)?
More important, how many APs is her Power Reserve?
It’s probably easier to quantify in terms of the Hero System (Originally called “Champions”) With a base of 20 extra points in all 5 abilities (DAMAGE REDUCTION, STRENGTH (Defined via special effects as touch range telekinesis), SPEED, FLIGHT, ENERGY BLAST) Which gives her a base strength roughly equivalent to Spider Man (Can lift a car with no real effort), Speed about a quarter of Barry Allen’s Flash when he’s not really making an effort, Flight of about fast (Not Jet powered) Helicopter, and an energy blast able to punch through 2 inch thick steel in about 2 seconds. (Those are the bare minimum levels if she’s not pumping anything)
Then she has a Variable Power Pool of about 100 points, which, if she distributes it evenly, basically doubles all of that. But she can concentrate those points in any one of these. If she puts all of it in one thing, that’s 120 points (An average human has zero points in any of these, and a fledgling superhero starts with 100 points (Plus extra points bought with disadvantages, like the vampire’s weakness to sunlight))
See the first couple of pages of the comic for people using the Hero system to play an RPG.
FYI for everybody who doesn’t know Hero – every 5 points active in a power doubles the effect, so…
If an average 10 STR man with some practice can dead lift 100 KG once (and does 2d6 damage with a normal punch), then a 15 STR bodybuilder can dead lift 200 KG and do 3d6, a 20 STR agent or minor meta can dead lift 400 KG and do 4d6…
and when you get to +35 points at 128x — 2^7 — it conveniently shifts to 125x so that at +50 points it’s a nice even 1000x.
Thus, evenly split at +20 points in each, her strength of 30 (10 base + 20) which lifts 1600 Kg and does 6d6 damage becomes a STR of 50 which lifts 25 tons and does 10d6.
Assuming purple is 40 active, then her purple level str would be 70, dead lifting 400 tons and doing 14d6 with a normal punch.
So what’s Max’s stats in MEGS (Mayfair Exponential Game System aka DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes)? How many APs is her Power Reserve?
So her flight powers is more about nullification of physics and willing herself to move than some force or internal power that is subject to the laws of motion?
SHA-BOING.
I agree whit Suppermassive “Excellent”.
Ah yes- the opponent is excited for a fight.
Not a good sign at all. Best to have someone sneak-attack the dude.
Trying to build a skill-base for a set of superheroes; anyone suggest stats like intelligence?
Well, superheroes can vary wildly.
For example, you have the “Brick” which is the tough/Strong guy, who isn’t necessarily super smart(Ben Grimm and the Hulk would be examples)
Then there’s the “Spark” (AKA “Mad Scientist” like Reed Richards) who isn’t necessarily all that strong, but knows his way around a superscience laboratory
The “Blaster” who specializes in ranged attacks, and probably puts all his “Skill points” in accuracy (Think Cyclops of the X-Men), and so on…
Comprehension maybe? Like Sydney’s ADHD mind powers, just not as random. Max’s power covers a lot of them, but she can be a bit dense in a battle, focused on the battle, using only her military training, and missing little clues that Sydney picked up. Sydney really needs to be there this time, she could provide Max and the rest of the squad some intel on the situation. Even if she can’t fight, she could be eyes-on.
I always use the Hero system, which provides a simple and elegant scaling system and you define the powers in terms of game effects rather than special effects. A physical attack that does 6d6 damage is the same cost, whether it’s throwing a rock, a telekinetic punch, a bean bag gun, or shooting a chunk of ice. Then you can add modifiers if you want, like area effect or armor piercing.
Hero has INT as a base stat. A power based on intelligence might be defined in terms of perception, in terms of knowledge skills, science skills, language or professional skills, or in terms of gadgeteering (the ability to make items that have powers of their own.) There’s a perception-based skill/power that allows a character to find weaknesses in an opponent’s defenses… and you can define that in whatever realm you want, so a hacker could be finding weaknesses in a computer security, a fighter could be finding weaknesses he can punch, and so on.
I always liked the build I made for Karnak The Shatterer: He got “Find weakness” with the “Autofire” modifier, so he could look at someone and lower their defenses multiple times in one shot. Find weakness only works for HIM, of course, but his normal-ish punches could actually get some damage in on tough “Brick” builds.
Here I always thought her base stats were Amazing Rank, not so low as Luke Cage/Spider-man level. Oh right she’s always running the power pool to bump up the Incredible to Amazing it would seem as her default.
Is Max making her hair and boobs fly?
Called it! I knew that Supermassive’s (ego) power wouldn’t effect her. Unless he has other powers he’ll need backup, a lot of backup. Which I’m sure he has, but Max just opened a hole directly to the surface, I’m sure there’s going to be a a lot of the squad repelling down, the one’s that can’t fly. Max just needs to take this guy down so he can’t effect any of them. A bit of super-speed, a quick punch, and a Harem to put a “sleepy-time” watch on him, problem solved. He might start to try and crash things into her but I’m sure it’ll just piss her off.
She can’t have super-speed while she’s using flight and shield to counter his powers.
The green 1st-tier skill arrow in the final allocation chart says she can, just not at full capacity. Given that maxing out her speed stat let Max moving in a stasis field though, even her “low level” speed should let her out-maneuver a non-speedster.
Even her “baseline” speed, without any of the extra points put in, is superhuman.
That menu is her boosting her powers not shutting them down. Like hitting your nox in a race. Her normal speed lets her catch bullets.
Bullet catching is her max speed, but her baseline and normal speed is still superhuman.
I don’t think we have any grounds to say what her max speed is relative to a bullet, but visibly moving in a stasis field has got to be a lot faster than a bullet. Bullets really aren’t that fast, many are subsonic or only slightly hypersonic, and we know Max can go at least several times Mach 1.
Bullets absolutely are incredibly fast – I don’t think the comparison to the speed of sound in glass, which looks instantaneous in real-time, is all that enlightening. Catching a bullet from 1m between the fingers like Maxima did is really impressive – at x200 speed you only have half a subjective second for that.
If you assume the stasis beam had a slow-down factor of 1000, it would take a normal human two minutes to blink – enough stasis for the practical purposes of bringing in the real stasis cell, but if you combine it with x200 superspeed, a resulting slowdown factor of x5 is very little.
Flight speed and combat/reaction speed should not be equated – fighter pilots routinely travel supersonic without having superhuman reactions. These are different things with different requirements, and in fact we know that in the case of Maxima it’s explicitly two separate powers.
You’re right in that we don’t know for sure, but bullets being her max is consistent with her portrayal so far.
While the stasis factor was only around 50, but I expect Max had way more safety margin than 0.5 seconds for either her or the undercover teammate to take the chance. Later when Max demonstrated the intimidation factor of a gun, the barrel was mere inches from Sydney’s face, but Peggy said it was still safe, and that Max could aim the gun away from her before the bullet left the barrel.