Grrl Power #1151 – Vanta black-ops
I actually have no doubt that if you added a bunch of shit to chess, nearly every chess master would have a crying fit about it. At the time I was working on the page I couldn’t think of a better way to liken spycraft tactics nerds getting paid to think about superpowers being added to the mix. There has to be a few chess masters who would be interested in extending chess to a reasonable degree… well, maybe not chess masters, but chess pretty-gooders. Most chess masters’ entire identities probably revolve around being good at chess and wouldn’t want to risk not being able to adapt to new rules. But there have to be people out there that have come up with extended chess rules that involve replacing one of the pawns at random with a Doctor Octopus action figure and he can 8 different directions at once but then he goes to whatever the Marvel equivalent of Arkham Asylum is for the next 12 rounds. Whatever it is, I know it’s not called Markham Asylum but I really wish it was.
I’m not quite sure why Max is hefting her drink in that last panel. I think I had the planning scene from Shaun of the Dead in my head when I drew it. Weirdly, while the scene influenced my drawing, it took me a solid 5 minutes to remember where I had seen that. I was like, a guy holds up a drink and winks, and… I think… he does it several times… was it… Simon Pegg? Then it still took me several minutes to recall the movie and scene. The way my brain works is like a hard drive that has a lot of inertia and it takes forever to spin up.
BTW, the panel Max is reporting to there has read all the reports that get sent up the chain, and they academically know that Sydney can go to Fracture Station, but sometimes when you need a tiny bit of gold and your friend is planning to break into Fort Knox, you have to elbow him and hold up a shot of Goldschläger. Of course, getting to the station is just one of several hurdles. A humongous hurdle without Sydney and her orbs, but once you’re there, you have to worry about currency, getting mugged by aliens, not betting it all on Flib-Snarb 17, or getting distracted by alien prostitutes/sex-a-roids.
The April vote incentive is up! As promised, it’s a Sydney pinup. Not airplane bathroom selfies, but hopefully her cuteness will satisfy.
Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon, as well as the semi-usual bonus incentive related comic.
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I’ve seen youtube video’s of a chess master trying chess variations. His brain *violently* rejected new rules.
seeing the back fire effect caused by changes to a game they love. I wish I could say that was something new, but it is sadly rather common when any popular or deeply involved game has a spin off or significant deviation from what these players or fans would consider the norm.
*note: the back fire effect goes beyond games, and is one of the (backsliding five), five instincts or behaviors in humans that may be responsible for frequent social and societal backsliding.
Not just Chess. Most games. That is a part (possibly a small one) of why D&D fans get ticked every single time there is a rule change.
I don’t know about today, but 35 years ago, it was because Wizards of the Coast was transparently money-grabbing. A had well over $100 (then) in those books, and they want me to replace them all?
I said a small part. A large part is because they are greedy and changing the rules is probably only so people have to buy new stuff.
Yeah Idk what he’s on about either. The majority of the end community favor fudging the rules for the sake of a good game. The idea of rule and mechanics changes were never on the forefront of very many people’s thoughts. Beyond 4e being an oversimplified trash heap, all the versions and expansions seemed very well received. Its the same today as it was 35 years ago. Wizards being greedy pigs.
35 years ago? It was still TSR running the show (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition)
Still have the books, plus Oriental Rules and a Spelljammer book (fairly sure had a Spelljammer book…)
35 years ago, WoTC wasn’t around, M:tG came out early 90s, 33 years ago or so.
I think they were around before M:tG, but almost no one had heard of them.
The thing I remember (as I had bought the books), they published some supplemental rules about planes and powers, with conversions for a number of rule systems. There was a legal kerfuffle with SJG for publishing GURPS conversions without coming to an agreement. The legal climate before the OGL was different.
So M:tG came along at just the right time for them.
That said, ~casual~ chess nerds, such as myself (folks who maybe played on their high school team, or like to hang around parks like the old guys in the movies and play against a handful of opponents they know) are actually quite apt to adopt variant chess rules.
My personal favorite is Knightmare Chess (1 & 2), a deck of cards that you add to your chess games. Cards can transform pieces (either into other common pieces, or even into totally new pieces with different movement rules), allow for double-moves, detonate a Pawn (killing all the adjacent pieces on either side), or just turn the board 90 degrees and have play continue using the new orientation. (That last one is very fun to drop on the first turn–suddenly, both sides get a free Queen, and have a column of Pawns marching in a straight line….)
Not having mastered the official chess rules and strategy to the nth degree, there’s really no barrier to enjoying something “like chess, but not quite”.
My favourite chess variant is Bughouse Chess. You play in teams of two, with two chessboards facing opposite ways. Whenever you take one of your opponent’s pieces, you give it to your partner. Your partner can then use their turn to place a captured piece on the board.
Speed and aggression are prioritised over strategy. It makes a great drinking game…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants
it turns their practice into sunk cost.
The strangest chess variant I’ve seen was boxing chess. Don’t ask me to explain the rules because I have no idea. I just know they were playing chess in parallell with boxing between moves.
I should also add that boxing is in my opinion just about the stupidest sport there is. Why would you get in the ring with someone whos ultimate goal is to knock you out? Yea I know, few matches actually end with a knockout, but yet, your face it your opponents favorite target because if you get dazed you will be easier to hit again. Now chess is the opposite of boxing. Fast reflexes doesn’t mean anything. A fast brain is all that matters.
Now someone thought it was a good idea to combine these because???
Boxing chess is speed chess for adrenaline addicts. And since speed chess is a higher stress game where you are expressly given a tight time limit to plot out how many moves ahead you can keep prepared, it can be quite fun and liberating.
The same people who best enjoy it, are also the ones that are so high energy they’d be literally outside running around the block in between matches. Given how physical exercise can improve memory and cognitive function- I can see a few legitimate arguments for saying a skilled boxer that is good at protecting the head/dodging can definitely get an extra edge on their opponent that way.
Funny you should say that; Alan Turing (yes, that Alan Turing) invented a variant called “round-the-house chess” where the basic idea was that you ran around the house and every time you got back to the chess board you could make a move.
Chessboxing was originally invented as a type of contest played in a very, very weird sci-fi graphic novel. Enki Bilal’s Nikopol trilogy, where the flying pyramid of Ancient Egyptian gods is stuck above Paris while the gods try to negotiate for more gas so that they can go away. Also there’s a disease that turns people into cement, and Equator City in Africa (which, as its name implies, is right on the Equator) is covered by snow due to a weird microclimate thing going on. There’s a whole lot of other strange and surreal things; chessboxing is positively the most mundane, normal and boring event.
Regarding adding stuff to chess… Steve Jackson Games Nightmare Chess and Nightmare Chess 2 are cards that Turn chess on it’s ear and are exactly what I want to see if anyone is adding anything to vanilla chess.
(pedant on)
Its _K_nightmare Chess, BTW. Because OF COURSE SJG would put a pun in the title.
http://www.sjgames.com/knightmare/
(pedant off)
> There has to be a few chess masters who would be interested in extending chess to a reasonable degree… well, maybe not chess masters, but chess pretty-gooders.
I’d be surprised if there wouldn’t be Chess masters with some experience with Shogi or other Chess derivative.
> There has to be a few chess masters who would be interested in extending chess to a reasonable degree… well, maybe not chess masters, but chess pretty-gooders.
There litterally is a chess 960 tournament organised every few years by the FIDE that has super GMs participating
Didnt the Big Bang Theory have a running gag where they were making a new 3 person Chess game with all sorts of new pieces?
https://youtu.be/VRXCXrTmm7I
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On Super Intelligence, could Deus imagine a color he’s never seen? Theoretically a more advanced pattern recognition ability could imagine an aspect such as color expression of light by observing how light shifts from one color wavelength to another and thus imagine how that would express if the pattern continued. a concept unimaginable/impossible for the human brain (which relatively speaking can do the impossible relative to a “cunning animal” and even puzzle solving animals as the human mind can rearrange aspects of their environment mentally into forms given new meaning *art and imagination*, which is a step or two below being able to imagine an aspect never observed before, but still more complex than needing to see something happen first and putting the pieces together in a pattern (like knowing if you drop this nut there this big thing that always goes this way may crush it open). In this thought experiment this type of imagination could give one a massive leg up in problem solving, figuring out how to decode the base forces of the universe, and achieve technological concepts and forward planning bordering on future sight with how accurate the predictions can be that they can with the right resources outpace humanity to the same degree humanity outpaced great apes.
with just our three vision cones we are already able to see all posible visible colours of the spectrum, the idea of colors that we cant see is a fun academic excersice about things that we may be unable to perceive or even imagine but ultimately is scientifically incorrect, for example people with four cones (because yeah those exist) are not able to see more colors, at most they are able to see some little mixes of colors like a redder yellow for example, or a blueish green, but thats about it its not very useful
in actuality having too many cones of vision can be very bad, there are a couple of animals that have like a dozen cones and they actually cant distinguish between colors very well
there are theoretically colors that we cant watch but those are ultraviolet and infrared and honestly you wouldnt want to be able to see those colors, anything beyond ultraviolet would burn your eyes and everything beyond infrared would probably be too distracting
just a couple of curiosities
you are missing the forest for the trees, its a thought experiment and the “imagine a color you’ve never seen before” is the best way to visualize the concept (or at least a less wordy and usually less confusing way to explain it).
The idea is if you had a person that was raised in an environment where everything was white, brown, and red. They never saw green. Then they could never imagine the color green, as while the human mind can rearrange aspects of the environment into new and creative ways it can’t produce a unique aspect just from observing the existing ones.
So the idea is if you had a mind that could look at something like that and predict an unknown *which tested later turned out to be true* it would be evidence of an advanced mind. This idea being humans may lack the mental capacity to accurately decode the nature of the universe beyond what we can observe and experiment with, and thus miss details that can’t be found unless you are looking for them or have some idea on how to find them.
Now humanity has compensated for this thanks to equations saying *well if X is true then Y may also be true* which has confounded scientists which after some experimenting based on these found (well..look at that there it is).
To be fair, explaining this concept without using the simplified visual as a basis is difficult, its essentially an expanded version of the shadow on the cave wall idea, that you only ever see the shadow and assume that is reality and never realize or imagine that behind you is the thing the shadow is only an outline of.
this is why half of what I wrote was related to pattern recognition and prediction relating humans to the next smartest animals and not hyper focusing on color vision.
If we could see infrared or ultraviolet, those would appear as different colours to the other colours of the visible spectrum.
Mainly because we modify our environment to the Nth Degree, live within the most comfortable range, and have little in the way of specific food requirements. An aquatic species that lives in near total darkness probably uses the hyper active colour vision to pick up extremely slim amounts of refragmnented light deep under water; the normal conditions that we live in would be a burning colour hell to it.
There are many floral specimens that have patterns that are not inside our vision range because we do not see into certain parts of the ultraviolet and infra red range, or completely miss because we can’t see the subtle difference between 2 shades. The use of contrast colour filters has been used to find these patterns in some of these cases. Species specialization studies can be an interesting Rabbit whole when you need university research grade writing before bed to actually fall sleep.
“If there is a blurple, the good Lord keeps it hidden for a reason.”
Tactical geeks, is that the official military terminology?
Much as I like Maxima’s description of chess geeks, my real-world experience is quite the opposite. I know someone who invented a three-dimensional chess. We took the 10x10x10 plexiglass board to a chess club several times, and just set it up and started playing, and talking to anybody that would talk to us. After a couple of visits, we noticed the best chess players walked around us, staying as far from us as possible. Literally hugging the walls. They did NOT want their minds contaminated by any “fairy chess” concepts.
Yes. However, she’s not talking with chess masters. She’s talking with people who aren’t chess masters but have ideas of them. As such, despite her simile is completely off, it’s still effective to communicate to her current audience.
I had very similar experiences with my brother’s chess variant. It’s my impression that chess variants mostly come from people who think they’re very smart, but haven’t focused so insanely on this one game that they’ve gotten to the level of being a real chess master. Their chess game isn’t as good as they’d like, so they want to mix it up a bit and get the people who beat them off of their game enough they can win. They then don’t understand why those people they want to lure into their trap aren’t interested in going there.
Of course, from the chess master perspective, you’re asking them to go into a sucker’s game and they are observant enough to recognize it for what it is.
She literally said “chess masters,” so, yes, she is talking about chess masters.
“About”, yes, but not “to”. The point is, the panelists are not chess masters, and will likely perceive the comment the same way she intended it. The fact that the simile is wrong is irrelevant; what matters is if the intent is understood.
Something tells me Maxima has not seen any tactical geek vs chess master discussions… that’s unfortunate.
Dude, MANY chess and chess adjacent folks love and play with chess variants for fun. Look up “Fairy Chess” if you have a few hours…
Newspapers (yes, I’m old) used to run chess problems, MANY of which used variant chess pieces (like The Diplomat, which prevents adjacent pieces from being taken).
Hopefully if they send Sydney back to Fracture for tech, they send Dabbler or even get assistance from Cora’s team.
The last time Sydney visited Fracture, the residents showed they could detect her arrive and had her traced back to Earth.
To be fair, that was before Earth proved itself capable of defending against invasion forces.
I think that was AFTER the Fel invasion and Alien mercs, actually. Detla was part of the fight training against Vehemence remember?
Wow. Stealing from a third world country when all they asked in payment is construction equipment. Why am I not surprised?
I hate to be the bad guy but its also a hostile third world country whose leader has openly declared their intentions to conquer the world with an army of human WMDs, Demons, magical creatures, and god knows what else.
Wilddeath, don’t worry. You can’t be *the* bad guy here. Your only options are to be *a* bad guy, *a* different bad guy, or *a* third different bad guy. There may be a few more different bad guys you could be.
“What, no good guy option?” you ask.
Explain what is this “good” you speak of, and get religious leaders from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever major religion is actually in fifth place, because it feels like Judaism is more likely to only be fifth place in clout rather than fifth place in adherents. I mean, if it is Judaism, that’s cool. Anyway, get religious leaders from all of those groups to agree on your definition of good and I’ll consider whether it’s plausibly actual good.
Isn’t atheism up there in the demographics?
Yup. Somewhere between 500 and 750 million people lack a belief in a god.
How are they hostile? As fas as we’ve seen, they’ve never taken any hostile action against the United States or any of their allies (although Harem has leaked highly classified national security information to Deus, so she could be in a world of shit for that.)
So, as long as they continue to be hostile to only their neighbours, it’s okay to ignore the threat, even after the leader openly declared his intent on conquering the world?
The moment you declare your intention to conquer all other countries you are considered hostile to that country.
Yeah Deus feels more and more sympathetic over time with stuff like that
Also, regarding the army mentioned by Wilddeath.. so? Anybody would think the other powers didn’t use their armies for all kinds of stuff too
I’ve said it before, if you judge by how much actual good they’ve done in improving people’s lives, Deus is by far the biggest hero in the comic.
I mean. As a super genius with an intentionally vague plan for world domination, I would absolutely make myself as big a hero as I can regardless of how malicious or heroic my plans were. All these other villains are really dumb.
If you actually follow the evil overlord list you end up a benevolent dictator with a few quirks.
Which also describes Deus to a T.
Welcome to Team Deus. :)
Another acolyte, High Priestess! I shall prepare the ritual Cookies of Welcoming.
Because you have the barest familiarity with the track record of the United States? ^_^’
There’s this one version where there’s dozens of new pieces and you can both make your own ‘side’ and upgrade pieces.
Chess Evolved Online
It’s kinda fun watching YouTube chess people play it.
Welp, first directive is definitely out of the way, the arms race is on
The next time Max comes before that committee,Deus would replace them with synthoids!!!!
Didn’t they actually create and market the 3D chess game from Star Trek?
I seem to remember having one, for a while but it fell apart rather quickly from the cheap ass materials the “boards” were made of.
Pole chess has some adherents.
bruh i’m certain someone else here has mentioned 5D chess
If they did, I can’t find it. Which is weird because it fits so well with the topic.
Pyro did, on the first page of comments.
… This isn’t the first page? O_o
This is the second page of comments on this page of the comic, assuming that they are presented the same way on every device.
Was sarcasm, but you knew that (by the way, so is this)
I didn’t, actually. I don’t get the “joke”, or point of your comment. I could only interpret it as genuine confusion, and an indication that pagination might differ under some circumstances.
I don’t know what’s supposed to be sarcastic about the comment I’m replying to either. I am perhaps not good at detecting sarcasm under the best of circumstances, and written comments are not the best of circumstances for interpreting intent.
I’m confused why they wouldnt just pay for the shield tech via trade for construction equipment. Seems to be a lot easier, doesnt risk an international incident, it’s rather inexpensive overall, and the ‘provocation’ Deus might be wanting is to make the US look bad if they did try to steal the tech.
As for the Mass Fab tech, THAT they can get on their own via Fracture Station, thanks to Sydney, if they have anything worth trading for it. Just like Deus did.
Actually, I’m pretty sure Deus has no interest in the construction equipment. If they gave him what he was asking for, he would have to figure out a use for it. Them trying to steal it is the reaction he wanted.
Yes and I think that was an OBVIOUS reaction he wanted, which is again why I”m not sure why they shouldnt just pay for the tech with a trade of construction equipment.
Because Uncle Sugar has serious problem with both narcissism and paranoia, and unadulterated greed.
Deus knows this.
Literally the only way to neutralize the threat posed by the US, is to turn literally the entire planet against us, isolating us from global markets and systems of power & organization. The best way to do that, is to ensure we get caught, red-handed, very publicly, undeniably doing the thing that is current known-but-not-said.
Deus knows this, too.
The nightmare scenario for our government – and more importantly the oligarchs who own it – is to be frozen out, ostracized, and unable to act with the rest of the world. To become the Official Bad Guy, as opposed to “the asshole who happens to have enough power to get away with shit.” Can you imagine if Reginald Delano Phillip Worthmoore III wasn’t able to jet off to Macao for his weekly night of illicit drugs and child prostitutes? How Senator Griftblatt’s wife is going to react when she can’t get to Paris for Fashion Week? What would happen if every nation on Earth stopped buying US exports, or dealing with companies that hold US stock? FFS, the grocery runs out of bananas and people lose their goddamn minds.
*cringes* don’t talk about that. I happen to know how much of Canada’s food market logistics are owned by US monopolies…
Here’s a crazy idea: maybe that’s a Bad Thing.
Monopolies are bad things in general.
Thy are also the natural end state of capitalism.
Which is the reason why a law like the Sherman Antitrust Act is necessary to prevent capitalism gone to its extreme. Monopolies are inherently BAD for capitalism because they completely (or nearly completely) control the market in which they do business, which means consumers have no choice but to buy from the monopoly since they have no competitors with which to have the inherent strength of a free market system. As with government, companies also need to have SOME sort of check on its power – and that check is supposed to be the prevention of monopolies in order to ensure that the consumer has choice, so the monopolistic company has a reason to lower prices or improve the quality of its products or services.
A capitalist system without competition will eventually devolve into corporatism, just like a socialist system will eventually devolve into totalitarianism. Checks and balances are a necessary part of government AND business, for the same reason I mentioned in the beginning of these threads. The reason for checks and balances to make government less capable of doing whatever it wants is the same reason for laws like the Sherman Antitrust Act to make a company less capable of doing whatever it wants – it’s necessary in order to channel the human inclination for self-interest into a positive outcome instead of a negative one.
Unfortunately many politicians and judges do not have the political will to actually apply the Sherman Antitrust Act when necessary (ie, many of the Big Tech companies or the oligopoly of the 7 major media megacorps, etc) with VERY few exceptions, like when they broke up Ma Bell in the mid-80’s.
Because a great many of the strongest advocates for capitalism hold it to be self-regulating and incorruptible, that no government is necessary, no external checks on capitalistic forces are necessary, and that all attempts to keep capitalism pure are actually what poisons it and turns it into corporatism.
You are a rare exception in both believing capitalism to be good, while also believing it needs external restraints.
“Because a great many of the strongest advocates for capitalism hold it to be self-regulating and incorruptible”
I can’t think of anyone with a basic working understanding of economics and basic human nature who would be naive enough to think any economic model is incorruptible.
It’s a basic principle of economics that monopolies are BAD for capitalism, since it remove the primary thing that makes capitalism PARTICULARLY successful to a society – the free market and competition that arises from the free market. That’s the whole point of ‘The Invisible Hand’ that Adam Smith wrote about. It was the main problem with the precursor to capitalism – mercantilism. It’s also the reason for the Sherman Antitrust Act and why Robber Baron style capitalism is considered bad by even the most ardent people who study capitalistic models. Most people who are major advocates for capitalism are because of the free market system and open competition. Two things which monopolies and, to a lesser extent, oligopolies, destroy.
“no external checks on capitalistic forces are necessary”
While pro-capitalists want minimal regulation, one would have to be massively short-sighted to think ‘no regulation whatsoever’ is a good idea. You should want enough regulation to ensure competition and a free market, but not so much that you crush any ability of business to innovate and take risks or to have new startups form (which would increase competition to existing companies) and you should want the government to not ‘play favorites’ with any one company, or give handouts to one company which LETS them become a monopoly in the first place (which they do far too often, substituting themselves for the free market and consumers).
“and that all attempts to keep capitalism pure are actually what poisons it and turns it into corporatism.”
To keep capitalism ‘pure’ requires keeping competition active. Corporatism is not keeping capitalism pure. It’s instead the same as socialism devolving into totalitarianism… but with private industry as the culprit instead of government as the culprit. It’s going to an unhealthy extreme and having essentially a privatized form of socialism. Like OCP in the Robocop movies, or the MegaCorps in most dystopian and cyberpunk media and many animes.
“You are a rare exception in both believing capitalism to be good, while also believing it needs external restraints.”
I appreciate the compliment but I don’t think I’m all that rare. I think you might be describing people who don’t know anything about economics, or perhaps things you’ve seen in movies and on TV shows which depict ‘evil capitalists.’ Or maybe you’ve seen one too many examples of criminals who abuse the system in recent times (Enron – Kenneth Lay, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, FTX – Sam Bankman-Fried, Bernie Madoff, etc). I’m just someone who has a good, working knowledge of economic models and understands the laws that have been put in place specifically to try to PREVENT monopolies from forming (in theory, although less often in practice because of a lack of political will to use the damn laws that are already in place).
When I think of free market capitalism, the important thing to keep in mind is the FREE MARKET part, which necessitates open competition without the government putting a foot on the scale of the dominant players in the industries (Too Big to Fail sort of stuff). It would be insane to think that any system of government needs no restraints whatsoever. That was the entire point of the initial thread. That the idea of the Founding Fathers was to keep the government at odds with itself with a system of checks and balances and hurdles to go through before making any decision. The same is true with economic models.
“I think you might be describing people who don’t know anything about economics”
So about 90% of the human population.
I think you’re exaggerating the amount of people in the world who are ignorant about basic economics. Anyone who runs a business (large, small, whatever) should have at least a rudimentary understanding of what I’ve been mentioning. Even when the business fails.
And what percentage of the population runs a business?
I looked for studies, and didn’t find a single, conclusive answer to such an abstract question as “How much do people know about economics?”, but many references to anywhere from 40-85% being completely ignorant on one basic aspect of economics or another.
So yeah, maybe 90% is a few percentage points too high of an estimate.
let’s see if I can remember the Marvel super hero prisons
– The Big House is a giant complex which deals more in rehabilitation and attempts at working through various mental coditions. It is about 2 metres long and run by Hank Pym
– The Cube specialises in Gamma containment (Hulk variants, like abomination and the leader etc.)
– The Raft, under sea prison, exists in MCU- I think it specializes in Tech villans and is usually run by SHIELD.
(or is that the Vault that does tech, and the Raft is super high security?)
– and obviously Riker’s Island- which is only step or two up from a “normal” max security prison, for “street level” thugs and guys with barely superhuman powers (I think the wrecking crew did time there?)
– At various times Richards (and the Fantastic Four) manage and extra dimensional prison in “The Negative Zone” fpor totally irredeemable and/or otherwise uncontainable threats
Is it wrong that despite all the discussion going on here, all I can pay attention to is how impressively wild that scientist’s ear hair is?
So, Max is planning to set Sydney lose at Fracture Station to acquire tech if Dabbler doesn’t share her own. The idea of setting Sydney loose among high tech races who might get very peeved off and attack Earth is a pretty big threat.
Hope for their sake she is bluffing, and for ours that she is not.
I would send the construction equipment, with Sydney to oversee the transfer. She has already developed goodwill with the refugees by bringing a whole load back to Earth, offering sanctuary. Then they see her government is helping to give them supplies for homes and other things.
One thing that was not mentioned is that by studying the tech they can find weaknesses. Other people probably got their hands on that shielding tech
Honestly, this feels like a Max & Sydney outing… not a let Sydney loose outing.
Pretty sure their plan is closer to doing the exact same thing Deus did *even though they don’t know he did that*,
sneak onto the station, purchase advanced tech, and use their own personal portal back to Earth to avoid alien customs that would confiscate the advanced technology.
Of course the *ominous thunder* moment here is remembering that Sydney’s portal is so high tech that it sets off the alarms in the traffic control tower who are now keeping their eyes out for it, and since while its open they can detect where it connects to, know that this mysterious Aethereum Causeway that pops up every so often connects to Earth.
So chances are they already suspect Earth has been smuggling tech…or someone has been giving them tech as detecting that kind of portal without an accompanying *capital ship* is an alarm on top an alarm, someone call the 3rd tier civilization reps because someone way up the ladder is sneaking around doing something suspicious kind of worries they could have.
Oh, they do. Shogi, Juggernaut Chess, 3 and 5 board. There’s a bunch of variants. Heck, modern chess “of the maddened queen” only dates back to the late 1500s. Before then, bishops moved just two spaces diagonal, and the queen just one space diagonal, and games dragged on forever. It took generations for the classical chess to die out.
Wait, wasn’t there a whole thing with the earth location history / bookmark being glitched out on the aetherium causeway orb?
Did that ever get fixed? because otherwise Sydney might be able to *get* to Fracture Station, but she wouldn’t be able to get *return*.
Yeah, actually, once she’d gotten back to Earth by spaceship that apparently cleared out, she’s left Earth and returned several times since.
It’s possible the original bookmarked location was inside solid rock, or otherwise unhealthy to jump to, the bookmark updated after she got back to Earth in a more conventional fashion.
Yes it’s been fixed. After she came back to Earth it fixed it’s self. We’ve twice seen her transport to and from Fracture station and Earth since then.
We have? Which pages?
To get graks that she gave to Neil Degrasse Tyson, and then while sparring with Vehemence. Both times portal to Fracture station and the. Back to Earth. That second time even included the station traffic control taking note of the mysterious Aethereum causeway showing up on their censors and where it connected to.
We’ve seen her make the hops – we haven’t seen the waypoint screen again, so we don’t know if the fritzed bookmark has changed or not, and therefore can’t infer whether it was indeed associated with Earth or not.
As there was no Earth on the dial, it was assumed to be Earth, that said the question being answered,
Vin: Did that ever get fixed? because otherwise Sydney might be able to *get* to Fracture Station, but she wouldn’t be able to get *return*.
We are pointing out that she can and has gone to Fracture station and returned to Earth already, multiple times.
I am disappointed in all the internet people here I read through all the comments and no one mentioned “5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel” which is probably the most accurate analogy to this setting. you start with one board and then 5 moves in you at 3 boards with no idea what’s going on. and it only gets worse from there.
I only saw one other mention of it, also wondering why nobody had mentioned it yet.
Stealth Chess, from the Discworld series. 10×8 board, except the outer two rows, called “Slurks”, are specifically for one piece, the Assassin.
The Assassin moves one square in any direction, and two to capture; however, on exiting the Slurks, the assassin may make as many moves as it has taken within the Slurks and, optionally, a capture move. An example may clarify: If an Assassin enters the Slurk and takes five moves within the Slurk, it may then appear in any square that is five moves from its entry point into the Slurk, before making a one-square move to capture. The Assassin may take pieces of its own colour, should this give the player an advantage, but may not take the opposing Assassins.
Forget about Stealth. Make an advanced version of the Planetary Express Ship (Futurama). The ship’s engines are described as not being faster than other ships. They don’t move the ship through the universe so much as they move the universe around the ship. But it looks to me like that has limitations as it just makes it appear “fast”. You wouldn’t need stealth as much if you could fold space, essentially, teleport a ship where you want it. Kinda like the Sun Crusher from Starwars novels. It DID have stealth tech, but it could hyperjump into a galaxy, fire it’s main weapon, then either jump out again, or wait for the fireworks while stealthed. They’d never know it was there.
Oh God the single best purchase earth could make would be educational modules grade to college on how things work.
Yeah, Chess is a “solved” game, as it were. Changing stuff wouldn’t be “accepted,” nevermind that it’s changed tons over the years.
I think Sydney’s getting an immediate promotion and a mission to go to Fracture Station to acquire whatever it is she can from whoever she’s able! I think we’re getting super close to the first page!
Has anyone discussed if there are Spacer Human Supers, or if Supers are limited to Terran Humans? That thought just occurred to me out of the blue.
Yes, the blue Space Human confirmed that it is just native Earthers who are Super