Grrl Power #1351 – Flash… back
In my head, this page was very different. It was done manga style, meaning the sequence of Flash Drive going down the mountain road took 6 pages, and the panels were much larger. One panel of him cycling fast, a shot of his face with wind roaring past, a shot of him thumbing the gear shift thingy, a shot of the derailleur clicking the chain over, another shot of him cycling with a slightly blurrier background and at a slightly Dutch angle. Then a panel of the shockfront starting to form, then maybe another bike shot with an even blurrier background, even more Dutch and Flash Drive would be covered with some filter that makes him look like he’s vibrating, then another of the shockfront large enough to draft off of, then probably a full page shot, possibly so Dutch it’s upside down, of him just blasting through the desert, and the vibration filter is gone, but the background is basically just speed lines.
You know how manga is. When you’re putting out 10 pages a week or whatever they do, you gotta fill em with something. I think that scene would be pretty cool, though. But at two pages a week, even if I had the time to compress all that into two double sized pages, it would still feel a little obnoxious, IMO. I’m sure most of you can picture almost the exact sequence I described in anime form, with Sydney bursting on frame, yelling, “Is he drafting his own shockfront!?” Then the camera pulls back to reveal the image is Dabbler’s Televoyance spell.
I’m not sure “shockfront” is the actual correct word to describe the plume of… whatever that is when something breaks the sound barrier. But then Sydney just said it because it sounded cool. She’s not submitting a scientific paper here. Oh, I just looked it up. It’s actually called a vapor cone, which is pretty cool. Alternatively it’s called a Mach Diamond, which is super cool, but also kind of sounds like a 14 year old boy named it. A 14 year old boy whose own original character is a Utahraptor who pilots an F-22 Raptor – an F-22 that transforms into body armor around the Utahraptor that makes him look like a giant raptor (Naturally this configuration is called the Double Raptor), but one with normal sized arms so he can wield a sword – except it’s not a sword, it’s a macuahuitl, one of those Aztec cricket bats with the obsidian blades along the edge – only instead of obsidian blades, its Utahraptor talons! Oh, and the Double Raptor still has wings and can fly and shoot missiles, naturally. And his nemesis is the evil Dr. Vintana, who sort of looks like a 20 lb capybara and is trying to bring about the rise of placental mammals! He has a cape. That’s how Utah tells him from the other proto-mammals.
Please enjoy the increasingly stale vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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The Mach diamond is that pattern you see in the exhaust of rocket engines. I don’t think an object just being pushed through the air faster than sound produces one.
By the way, it takes an absurd amount of power to push something through the air that fast, that guy is putting out more horsepower than a race car.
Much much more – race cars don’t go Mach 1 or anywhere near it.
Nothing that uses the friction of tires with the road goes anywhere near that fast IRL.
It’s not so much that you couldn’t in theory break the sound barrier with ground propulsion; It’s possible to do with a thrust to weight ratio under 1 if you have really good aerodynamics, and tires can do pretty good in terms of thrust to weight.
But you get all sorts of aerodynamic instabilities crossing Mach 1 close to the ground, and the centrifugal force on the tires becomes pretty high.
And supersonic aircraft are usually operating at altitudes high enough that they enjoy reduced air resistance.
FD is wildly non-aerodynamic, even assuming a superpower that allows him that much thrust, his shockwave should be leaving a trench in the ground behind him. Heck, it would be doing that if he were as aerodynamic as the Concorde!
I don’t think supersonic speedsters are feasible unless they have some air resistance mitigating mechanism, like a zone around them where air becomes a frictionless superfluid.
Trivia:
The current wheel-driven (“friction”) land-speed record is 463-mph (745-kph, or around Mach 0.6). This was on a salt flat with a flying start and no turning. Averaged over two 1-mile passes in opposite directions in a short timeframe to mitigate any slope or wind effect.
The current “anything” land-speed record is 763-mph (1,228-kph). Straight, no turning. The certifying body confirmed they broke the sound barrier during each pass, so exactly Mach 1.0 at that elevation and temperature. It was wheeled and in contact with the ground, but propelled by dual fighter jet engines. It looked somewhat like an SR-71 Blackbird without wings.
The Team Vesco Turbinator II is the fastest wheel-driven car, having reached a top speed of 503 mph on October 2, 2018. This record was achieved at the World Finals event hosted by SCTA/BNI.
The driver was Dave Spangler. Don Vesco, the driver of the Turbinator I which reached 737.794 km/h (458.444 mi/h) on Oct 18 2001, died of cancer in 2002. His brother, Rick Vesco, built the second car.
The Mach Diamond is basically a real-world visible version of the physics textbook diagram of harmonics within an open-ended tube.
The exhaust, being at a much higher speed than the surrounding air, has a correspondingly lower pressure, resulting in the majority of its particles being trapped within the ‘tube’, bouncing off the ‘wall’. The wake of the exhaust, being held within the ‘tube’, then is concentrations of particles, which form sinusoidal waves rotated about the longitudinal axis, and approximate to a series of alternating cones, that appear as a series of diamonds when viewed from the side.
Flash Drive’s less-than-aerodynamic shape would result in enough turbulence to disrupt a ‘tube’ before it could get long enough to generate diamonds. This is assuming he was just travelling that fast. The fact that his wake appears in front of him, instead of behind, suggests he is inside some kind of bubble, possible with an effect gradient interface, and it is this interface that is generating the wake.
I’m sure that there is an equation that explains it more exactly but the rule of thumb is power requirements increase with a rate of the square of the increase in speed.
Unless you are trying to be funny the (Yiddish) word is spelled: “Schtupping.”
Bad Yiddish? I don’t think Sydney would… schtoop that low.
Wasn’t Max about to leave before she was stopped by Dabbler and then distracted by Flash Drive? You know, just wondering if she has time to listen to a flashback.
I’m curious what it was about his flavor that is obvious now. Don’t think it could be a super because supers are supposed to be unique to Earth born humans, and she uses male pronouns so a succubus having charged up on supers is also out of the question (and incubus demons don’t exist in the grrlpower-verse). Tantric energy absorption might not be unique to succubus though so who knows.
Maybe it was that Elvis-ish-looking guy from hundreds of pages ago.
The way she is talking makes me wander if this is going to be a reference to the old comic Wereworld, or a retcon of events from it.
Could have been a vampire. While I don’t know if it’s been established that vampires get anything extra out of feeding on the blood of supers, we know from Sciona that, at the very least, their blood does still contain some link to their powers (she was able to use their blood to give herself temporary superpowers in her old body), and a succubus might be able to feed off that. Or maybe a doppleganger – those have been established to be somewhat succubus-like (Dabbler is something like 1/4 doppleganger), so maybe they can feed on energy in a similar fashion. That would probably fit better with her “Ohhhh, no…” than a vampire or other option – she thought she was schtupping an old friend, but she was actually schtupping a doppleganger who had previously schtupped with some supers.
In fiction, there appears to be a difference between speedsters and people who can just propel themselves really fast.
(One can pick up a normal person and move them around at Mach speeds with no ill effects; the other has to worry about a passenger losing the ability to breathe if they go above 300mph.)
This bike guy seems to be the former; the laws of physics are bending so much that the effects of him going that fast don’t look quite right.
It was Deus wasn’t it? Deus in disguise.
I don’t imagine it was Deus… but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone Deus *interacted* with, maybe *made deals* with. Maybe gave a boost to.
“Oh, no…”
Sounds like someone realized they are now “sisters” with someone they’d rather not be.
That ‘mach mist’ can appear on aircraft when they’re approaching the sound barrier but not quite through it yet, it depends on the humidity in the air, density, etc. We used to get hot passes down the flightline between the parked A/C and the infield, maybe a hundred yards from the hangar, when someone hit a milestone. The best I saw was our departing CO in a CF-18, he was so low he couldn’t have put the gear down and the ‘fog’ coming and going on the wings looked like it was pulsing. That one was a lot lower and faster than any I’d ever seen before except on an Air-Ground range, we got some nice ‘no rules’ flybys there :) and ordinarily he’d have been met by the Base Flight Safety Officer when he taxiied in, except he was in the back seat and the CO was going to be the new one :)
Is she about to tell us the ending to Wereworld? He was an earthling that she shtupped out in space.
Was just thinking that, have long wondered how that was going to end (it was what lead me here in the first place)
A Utahraptor is a F-22 sounds exactly like something Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes would dream up, especially if it was blowing up his school. He had quite a few dream sequences involving raptors and jets IIRC
No, in Calvin and Hobbes it was a T-Rex in an F-14. January 1st, 1995. Totally different.
I’m trying to figure out the RPMs of a bicycle wheel that’s doing + Mach 1. How is the bike holding together under those kinds of stresses?
Racing bike wheels have a diameter of 700 mm. That gives us a circumference of Pi x 700 mm =2199 mm. Mach 1 is about 343 m/s. That means the wheels turn 156 times per second. The outermost parts of the wheels will experience a constant centrifugal acceleration above 34 g.
Wo do everyone here have to be so much better educated than me?
Googling “Dutch angle” made me very uncomfortable…because all the results are at a Dutch angle.
I have to say I’m having trouble picturing a capybara as evil, even one with a doctorate and a cape. Perhaps a Dr. Doom style mask is needed as well?
Next time we see the comic shop, I want an issue of “Double Raptor” seen. Maybe even one of those cardboard stands.
That caption about the manga style riding a bike reminded me of GoldenBoy, racing down the mountain against the motorcycle lady…
Studystudystudystudystudystudystudy….
*Queen’s “Bicycle Race”plays in background…)
Assuming someone actually could pedal a bike THAT fast (without the pedals, crank arms, chain, gears etc disintegrating), and assuming that a human being’s skin could withstand mach 1 airflow, and assuming that a person could breathe in such a condition, and assuming they had some sort of superhuman perception so they could see an absurdly long way in front of them and had absurdly fast reaction times, there’s still tons of stuff wrong with this character’s concept. Running into a small rock on the road would be disasterous. Potholes, likewise, How about a pedestrian crossing the road after emerging from a building? Or a car suddenly changing lanes? It’s not as if slamming on the brakes would help – brake pads and discs can only do so much, and bear in mind that when cycling, your contact area with the roads is just two tiny spots where the arc of the tire touches the road… meaning even if someone COULD go that fast on a bike, they’d have enormous control issues, prsent an enormous safety hazard, and they’d have NO hope of stopping quickly.
Superspeed mostly makes sense if you assume the speedster is breaking the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass.
If you could reduce inertial mass without affecting gravitational mass, it would to a first approximation look like your personal time was running faster than the world around you; You’d be able to do everything proportionately faster. Even your thought processes and reflexes would speed up, because it’s all based on the relative speed of molecules.
Then assume the effect extends a little beyond your body to your personal effects and a layer of air, so that the air entering that area just slides around you at subjectively normal speed, and you’re not having to exert enormous forces on your clothing to get it to follow you around.
The downside of this is that all biological processes would accelerate proportionately, so you’d age faster while speeding, and you’d see the world dimming because of your eyes intercepting fewer photons per subjective second. But that latter effect would only be a problem at very high speeds, because the human eye can adapt pretty well to low light levels.
If you pushed this too far, chemistry would probably get pretty whacked out before you were traveling anything liek light speed, though.
In the Cape series, this was pretty much how speedsters were handled, and they did have short careers as far as others were concerned due to the accelerated aging. But lived the same time subjectively as anybody else.
Some element zero from Mass Effect should do the trick.
One of the other problems, if we are applying real world physics, is that about the time that you really start to build up some speed you have arrived or need to make a turn. There some places in the Western U.S. where you can theoretically run over 100 mph for extended periods of time. But making deliveries in an urban area? You just wouldn’t have room to get up to speed.
But, that’s the point of superpowers in this story. FD’s super abilities mitigate all or most those real world concerns. It would be an interesting quirk if his super speed abilities only work when he is on a bicycle.
You could say all the same thing about all physical superpowers. “Finely controlled super speed that doesn’t make everything around you explode” is hardly out of place in this comic in terms of scale or complexity.
One of the oddities of super speed seems to be it applying it’s physics breaks to whatever the user is holding or using withing a certain range, unless specific to the story. Like Sonic in the second movie using a power tool to take apart an armored car. If we apply the super speed to only Sonic as going fast then no amount of speed would let that tool take apart the bolts fast enough. A time dilation must be assumed otherwise the tool either doesn’t work or if sped up with him make the metal super hot from friction.
Does Dabbler have an alias named Lilly?
“Here’s a story… of a schtooping lady,
Who was schtooping every space stud that she met.”
Surround her with 8 pictures of partners…. Then more start squeezing in, the pictures of men start forming extra columns and rows and changing in size to accommodate more. Some remain ‘bigger’ for reasons.
This continues and never stops.
I’ve really never understood how being a “speedster” contributed to “fighting crime”
Presuming the bicycle itself is a standard bicycle, then he is pulling off some kind of magic to keep the bicycle together. If the idea was that he is a super that has amazing legs, then this doesn’t quite work as any bicycle would fail pretty quickly.
This only works if he’s a super with an enveloping-type magic field and he happens to enjoy being on a bike versus running, or just flying near the ground.
The amount of animals he kills and permanently deafens, and objects he breaks as he rides around must be enormous.