Grrl Power #1478 – Achilles backstab
Not one of those space stations where the atmosphere is mostly sulfur dioxide and aerosolized mercury.
That sword is going to make Max lazy. Almost all of her opponents this round are magical in nature, except for the guy who got eaten early on, and also the specifically-not-iron-giant, who got blowed up. But if she wants to keep her identity a secret for an extended amount of time, she can’t really ever use it outside of the tournament. If she started brandishing that against an army of self-repairing golden golems with exposed gears instead of abs, just to pull an example from the æther, the aliens might be able to put two and two together.
Bluce says the sword is “functionally-indestructible” because while the sword is for all practical purposes actually indestructible, there’s really no such thing. If you stick it between two neutron stars just as they collide, it’s probably going to get messed up, no matter what it’s made of. People who make magic swords, up to and including gods aren’t usually accounting for truly obscene cosmic forces, unless the sword is specifically designed to cut a star in half or whatever. And even when something like that exists, it’s usually metaphorically cutting stars in half. Like the mythos explaining a binary star system. It doesn’t help that there’s little to no mana in space (outside of the rare but sadly predictable phenomenon which appears once a season on Mana Trek: TNG).
Oh, and to clarify something about Manavore, it doesn’t just suck up magic and store it for later, it eats magic, i.e. it digests and annihilates it. It might slowly poop heat or some other byproduct, I dunno.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Somebody has been reading the comments !
Indeed… In which case Manavore is a carnivore of Mana. Great at eating, then sleeps like a freaking rock while digesting. It’s also possible it’s sentient and thus this might just be waking it up after a long nap. Also is it eating only one golem energy, two at once, or possibly 4 entire cores? Depends on what Kaboomoid is powered by.
I’m not related to Somebody.
Sombody has it hard. Everyone expects him to do something about all sorts of issues.
Mana Trek;TNG sounds like a fun technobabble take on Spelljammer. Heck,I’d watch it! ;)
Mana Trek being an analogy to Star Trek sort of implies that mana for the space people is about as exotic as space travel (particularly to the stars) is for us.
After all, no one watches “Convenience Store Trek”, or “Park Trek” (at least when the park in question is the nearest one, not the one in Alaska in February).
Well, maybe someone would, but it seems a niche interest to me.
So I’m guessing that Dabbler is actually pretty exotic, and a lot of space people just use technology instead of magic to do things.
It helps a lot when the writers need to get out of a jam if the technobabble (manababble?) actually sounds vaguely plausible. As opposed to the equivalent of “I’ll just have to drive my car upside down for a hundred yards to reverse time here…”
That’s hard to do when mana usage is as ubiquitous as driving.
Yeah, the Fast and the Furious exists on Earth and it’s about as plausible as my example. But I think most people watching it treat it like wrestling – no, cars don’t really do that, but it’s cool to watch isn’t it?
Typo in panel 2, “Certianly”
Thank you for clarifying how they are using “Earth Units of Measurement” in this galactic competition!
“Speed of sound in a human breathable atmosphere” is a rather constant number. It being called Mach is likely a translation thing.
That’s not true.
Replace all the nitrogen molecules with CO2 and you get an atmosphere that’s just as breathable(used by divers), but with a completely different speed of sound.
You can also manipulate the oxygen concentrations within in limits especially if you filter out the reactive oxygen.
Also modulating the temperature affects the speed of sound and species canonically have a pretty generous range of temperatures of comfortable operation.
Replacing all the nitrogen with CO2 would kill you very quickly. That’s why they do the opposite, and SCUBA tanks replace the CO2 with nitrogen and oxygen.
Which is why it’s called Nitrox, Heliox or Trimix. The partial pressure of the oxygen needs to stay below the level it becomes toxic, the nitrogen fraction has to stay below the level at which it becomes narcotic (35 m and deeper for simple compressed air), and helium is a fantastically good conductor of heat so is warmed at depth. CO2 triggers the exhalation response. The mix changes with planned dive depth. It’s complicated which is why I stuck to simple compressed air and the shallows, which is where all the fun stuff is. I’ve no doubt a mixed gas breather will chip in with more detail if asked. :-)
oops Archon gass than
I think it would be more funny if Galmachs related to Earthmachs by a factor of 10:11, meaning that one unit of speed measurement is 10% faster than the other.
What about Achilles?
Man, the typical Yank can’t even handle SI, so I doubt Sydney could cope with alien units unless they were converted into washing machines, buses, or cheeseburgers per football field.
I agree about typical “Yanks” and the metric system, but Sydney is far from typical. I assure you that plenty of us are quite comfortable with SI. Mostly engineers, scientists, world travelers, and neuro-divergent types, but we absolutely exist.
Also “Mach” is not a unit of any type. It is a dimensionless ratio of velocity of an object relative to the speed of sound in a surrounding fluid. So while not an SI unit, Mach numbers absolutely are used in the Metric system for fluid dynamics and aerodynamics calculations using SI units. The local Mach 1.0 is the same speed no matter the unit system (US Customary or International System of Units or whatever system “Galmachs” is in), and any advanced alien civilization would have a name for that exact ratio.
We could assume Bluce saying “Mach” in the comic was an auto-translation; from the name the ratio in whatever language they’re speaking to the Earth name (after the human who first published the concept). Then Gail clarifying that it was “as calibrated for one atmosphere of pressure and composition on standard multi-species space stations” makes perfect sense.
But then Bluce comes back and uses a different name for the ratio as clarification, which isn’t auto-translated, which makes it more confusing to me. Did they both actually say “Mach” the first time (why???) and “Galmach” the second time? Or did it the translator translate the first time but not the second time (again, why???)?
“Galmach” is almost certainly a contraction of something like “galactic standard mach,” and the translation program seems to be advanced enough to be able to handle wordplay like this. That is, both “mach” and “galmach” are translations and not what Bluce actually said. Maybe he originally said “foo” (translated to mach), then after Gail clarified things, he came back and said “foobar,” (translated to galmach) which was actually short for “foo baron wakami” (which would be translated to “galactic standard mach,” note here I’m assuming different syntax from English with the above literally translating to something like “mach galaxy standard” or whatever).
That’s pretty advanced translation tech, but whatever, this isn’t some hard science setting.
“That’s pretty advanced translation tech,”
Is it, though? I’m pretty certain current AI can already pull that off. (They discovered LLMs could translate between languages without being taught years ago, and I know GPT can sift through the nuance of parts of words like prefixes & suffixes, handling slang and abbreviations fluently as well, soooo….)
I’m skeptical about the accuracy of AI translations given the oddities I’ve heard in AI narrations of video scripts on YouTube.
They are usually failures of pronunciation due to not understanding the context of words in sentences, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the heck the AI did wrong. If these programs can’t handle text speech in a single language, how can they reliably be multilingual?
Completely unnecessary use of an insulting epithet followed by negative stereotypes there, Canuck.
I get that Americans are going through some stuff right now, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to open up with how you really feel. Though I suppose I shouldn’t expect someone who wears their nationality in their user name to understand why it’s rude to talk down about people from other countries.
‘Insulting epithet’ being… what? ‘Yank’?
“Yankee” does technically mean “coward”, although nobody’s used it that way for centuries.
I was told that “Yan Kees” came from the Dutch in New Amsterdam, referring to their English neighbors from other colonies as “John Cheese”. Apparently it referred to their being untrustworthy trade partners.
In modern America, I mostly hear ‘Yankee’ in one of two contexts:
1. The salt-of-the-earth people from Connecticut up into Maine. Not-wealthy landowners (often farmers) with a “reuse everything, don’t waste money, be community-minded yet independent, be good to others” philosophy. Generally a compliment, but definitely a loaded term. Used almost exclusively by people from the northeast, at least in my experience.
2. More commonly used as a pejorative about people from north of the Mason-Dixon line. In this context it is used exclusively by people from the South who still hero-worship the traitors of the Confederacy and think that the Civil War was about states’ rights without being willing to admit that the “right” in question was the right to own slaves. Most of these people are poorly educated, and they are nearly 100% members of a certain fascist political movement currently gaining steam in the USA. When pressed, they can usually vomit up the usual raft of BS apologetics for slavery: it was actually a good thing, because the slaves learned valuable skills. It was really more like Social Security than anything else, since black people didn’t have other prospects at the time. Did you know that African slaves were mostly taken by other Africans, not by white people? Did you know that white people have been slaves too?
Re 2. The epithet is “Damn Yankees”. In 1898, General Wheeler, a former Confederate officer, used it to refer to Spanish troops. The Massachusetts Volunteers he was commanding cheered enthusiastically.
If the unCivil War really was about slavery, the why was slavery still around over a hundred years later?
And no, not just in the south
The last part of your post, can’t tell if you meant that as a continuation of your rant about “BS apologists”, but it actually is fact: white people may have bought the Africans, but it was other Africans who actually captured them (who found it was more profitable to sell their enemy than kill them, as they had in the past)
because Lincoln broke and accepted a fast effective, but imperfect solution instead of a perfect one.
Also, becuase the slave holders won harder than people admit. Lincoln got assassinated with motivation “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” This put his pro-slavery vice president in power who spend his considerable influence slowing down black emancipation.
If the uncivil war was really about state power, why haven´t the USA system of checks and balances, rule of law or electoral system changed, since the civil war except for the admittance of former slaves.
If the civil war was really about state power, why did the changes in government structure in favor of the states come a hundred year after the war?
Also why did the states of the confederacy submit to military rule if the goal was more power to the states.
Wars are never about one thing.
They always have multiple sides and multiple concessions.
The south got money to rebuild, amnesty, time and some state power concessions, which I can´t find(please help).
The north got black rights in the constitution and courts, temporary control over southern policy, Preservation of the Union and industry favorable policy.
“and they are nearly 100% members of a certain fascist political movement”
Not remotely true. I assure you that there are many members of the resistance living in the South, and that there are equally many adherents of the authoritarian regime living in other places.
Pretty sure that was intended to apply only to the subset of “people from the South who still hero-worship the traitors of the Confederacy and think that the Civil War was about states’ rights without being willing to admit that the ‘right’ in question was the right to own slaves”, and not just “all people from the South”.
Shouldn’t that, technically, be “traitors of the Union”? :P
And yes, the unCivil War was about states’ rights: primarily the right to own another human and force them to work for minimum wage at a lousy job they can’t leave ;)
I think “traitors to the Union” sounds more correct.
Lol, no worries, we don’t mind, especially given he clearly was being funny with it. We’re not THAT thin-skinned.
And believe me, no matter how high a horse the rest of the world gets on about SI units, no American is ever going to see sense in using an outdoor temperature range, in casual conversation, that DOESN’T swing more or less between 0 and 100 (among other minor issues with daily use of SI.)
“Completely unnecessary use of an insulting epithet followed by negative stereotypes there, Canuck.”
USA citizen are using american as an epithet it’s prety insulting for Canadians , an latin amrica excludng El Salvador.
They don’t pledge alegiance to, the real Jaba the Hutt, the diaper don , Donald Trump.
Canuk is also an insulting epithet for french speaking canadians …
USA is one of three countries without the generalized us of metric system the two other being Liberia -a former US colony in africa an Myanmar-.
USA is a country with an main character syndrome.
A nouveau riche country to sumarize it.
« Les États-Unis d’Amérique sont le seul pays passé de la barbarie à la décadence sans jamais avoir connu la civilisation. » Georges Benjamin Clemenceau
From a french speaking French
Cheeseburgers per STADIUM. We do include baseball and basketball. Sometimes “hats per hockey arena” and the occasional “Beers til strike.” Sorry Moon Bunny. I have to correct it. If we’re going to meme at Americans (no, that’s allowed, even if not American) you have to bring the full Bandit Keith bandana and sunglasses. Now someone in the replies say the catch phraze! Yes, with a Z!
A LOT more Yanks are comfortable with Metric than non -Yanks are comfortable with Imperial. We do get taught both in school even if we don’t need it for our profession. I’ll never understand why people like to brag about ignorance the way a lot of non-Americans brag about not understanding Fahrenheit and Imperial.
An inch is 2.54 cm a foot 30.48 cm , a mile 1.609 km
5 feet about 1.5 m
2 miles about 3.2km
100 mph about 160 km/h
6 feet about 1.82 m
Fahrenheit is very convoluted 100 °F is about 38°C and 0°F about -18°C
the formula is (°F − 32) × 5/9 = °C
32 ° F being 0°C
From an citizen of the country who invented the metric system.
But try to convert cubic feet to gallons it’s more dificult than cubic meters to liters .
Celsius comes from Sweden.
American’s don’t use Imperial, they use Customary.
The difference is real, but exists primarily in volumes.
For example 1 US Gallon is 0.832674 Imperial Gallon.
1 US Fluid Ounce is 1.04084 Imperial Fluid Ounce.
1 US Pint is 16 US Fluid Ounces. 1 Imperial Pint is 20 Imperial Ounces.
Nobody generally needs to convert cubic feet to gallons because cubic feet matters when it comes to storing and transporting boxed goods. Such containers and structures are unsuitable for storing liquid and powdered materials. The containers and structures that are suitable for storing liquid and powdered materials tend to be curved, which is wasteful when it comes to storing and transporting boxed goods.
For that reason, the conversion never really needs to be made.
Have a nice day.
P.S. 1 US Fluid Ounce is legally defined by the FDA as exactly 30ml. Making the conversion into metric units fairly trivial. And when following a US recipe, converting to metric by assuming the units are Imperial is going to result in a complete culinary failure.
Have a nice day.
From someone who is comfortable working with Metric, US Customary, Imperial, Chinese shizhi, and Japanese shakkanhou systems of measure.
So France stole the Celsius scale from Sweden?
Now that’s funny!
When I was in third grade, my teacher marked an answer wrong on a test because I wrote Celsius instead of Centigrade. I raised my hand and told her they were the same thing and she said they weren’t. I was sitting right by a bookshelf with a dictionary on it, pulled the dictonary out, looked up “Celsius,” and read the entry out loud, which included “Centigrade” as one of the definitions/synonyms.
She gave me detention.
My mom and I talked to the principal and my mom got me transferred to the other third-grade teacher’s class because my teacher now clearly hated me. I said it was because that teacher was “too stupid to teach third grade,” a comment I stand by to this day.
Remember boys, girls, and aliens across the ‘Verse, the speed of sound is not 343m/sec it is 1; just like the speed of light is 1.
Nah, the speed of light is 1, always was, always will be. The speed of sound needs to have a standard galactic value, since it’s not the same at the surface or deep inside your typical gas giant.
C is constant and describes the maximum speed of information, which happens to be equal to the speed of light in a vacuum.
The speed of light varies by medium.
https://gurumuda.net/physics/speed-of-light-in-different-mediums.htm
Actually now I think about it in a ftl society the maximum speed of information is different.
C is the speed of gravity for these people
How do you type that without realising light also varies in speed depending on what it’s moving through?
What we call the “speed of light” is always the speed of light in a vacuum, or more accurately the speed of any massless particle, and the speed of causality in the universe. 299,792,458m/s, by definition in our system of units. That is “1”. The most “1” there can be, because it’s universal in our universe, and remains unchanged even in various point of reference.
There is no such thing for sound, because sound doesn’t propagate in a vacuum, and changes by a significant margin depending on a variety of parameters, including pressure, temperature, material…
(Also, if you want to get technical, light doesn’t actually change celerity depending on the material it goes through. All photons always go at the speed of light in a vacuum, but when it interacts with matter, that creates additional electromagnetic waves that interfere with it, which at a macroscopic level is equivalent to a slower light. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewald%E2%80%93Oseen_extinction_theorem on the subject.)
Every alien everywhere has access to the same standard vacuum for lightspeed metrics.
The same is not true of the infinite ranges of mediums through which sound can travel.
They don’t, true vacuums don´t exist and the density of space varies place by place.
Close to a star it’s denser than between star systems, in a dust cloud it’s enser.
When people say “the speed of light”, it’s always the celerity of light in a vacuum, which is 299,792,458 m/s in our system of units. It is also the speed of all massless particles, the speed of causality, the speed limit of the universe, and the factor between energy and mass through E=mc². That is “1”. The most “1′ there can be, since it is unchanged no matter the place, the time, and even the point of reference.
Sound doesn’t have such a thing, because sound doesn’t propagate in a vacuum, and its speed varies from a number of factors, including temperatire, pressure and material. Thus, there can be no universal constant for the speed of sound, but the speed of light in a vacuum is THE universal constant.
(also, if we want to get technical, light doesn’t actually travel slower in a material at a microscopic level, photons still travel at c, but their interaction with matter produces other photons that interfere with them, which equates to a slower lightwave at a macroscopic scale)
I would have said that Max doesn’t have mana, but then again she’s getting her powers from somewhere, somehow, so it does make sense. That said, she has an almost bottomless supply, so like in the first Hulk movie, where his father tried to absorb him, and there was too much for his body to handle, he went boom. Or, she could just start to chop the Manavore up. Here’s the thing, if she blasts hm, she could blow a hole right through the bigger golem’s leg.
I’m pretty sure what’s happening in the third panel is that Zerathax is trying to blast Maxima with magic but the sword is eating HIS (spell’s) mana. That confused me at first too. Maybe Dave should’ve switched the colours on the “Magic” and “Slurp”
I think it’s trying to feed on her but the sword is feeding faster than it can draw on.
No, the two colours are indicating the fire and ice attacks from Zera
Thank you for that reminder. I’d forgotten this guy was a fire/ice attacker.
It’s been established that the quantum fields governing magic and superpowers are distinct. Max gets her powers from the superion field
I agree, it’s not fully connecting to Max, while her sword is to it. It’ll fall apart shortly I believe. Or the core(s) will explode, knocking Max back and blowing off the mountain man’s leg.
>Nigh-indestructible
So, destructible?
:V
All you need is a 10 year old with an adjustable wrench.
When the guy from the Unlimited-Class Battle Arena says it’s “nigh-indestructible”, you can assume that’s indestructible, because the planet you’re trying to destroy it on will break before it.
“Nothing has destroyed it yet, and it has withstood just about anything you can conceivably measure with no effect whatsoever. But we can’t entirely rule out that there may possibly be some esoteric way to overtax or disspell its durability.”
Everything has it’s Achilles’s heal, including Achilles.
I want an Achilles Heal. How many HP back do you get. All but 1-4, like in the old days?
Achilles Heal, you get back 90 % of your total health but you step on a Lego piece
Who knows, maybe driving a micro singularity through the sword might be the thing that does the trick. Of course, the tricky part is containing said singularity so it only affects the sword and not the user, bystanders around the user, adjacent equipment/structures, landscape, or the planet it’s being used on.
Nice “Stripes” quote (“blowed up”)
“Blowed up” predates “Stripes” quite a bit. It was commonly used, for example, on SCTV’s “Farm Film Report” with Big Jim McBob (Joe Flaherty) and Billy Sol Hurok (John Candy)
Yes, some nice “As you know, Bob” exposition
That’s to be expected from color commentators. Their value add actually *is* garrulousness.
My favorite moment of all time in American football is when I heard John Madden say “Now what Dallas is looking to do here is put some points on the board.” Might as well have said “Dallas is playing football.”
“…put some points on the board.” As opposed to preventing the other team from scoring by running out the clock, which is a valid tactic late in the half, if you have the lead.
Presumably there are species that exist with higher or lower variables, including air pressure, but most would not resemble humans in any meaningful way. So all the aliens we’ve met that do resemble humans would have had to have come from planets relatively resembling Earth in most, if not all, meaningful capacities.
Humans have a pretty wide tolerance for variations in air density, composition and temperature, which are all factors that influence the speed of sound in air.
My intuition on the byproduct of the Manavore’s mana-vore-ing, would be the whole indestructibility thing. It’s putting all of that energy into keeping its physical state. So I would imagine if someone WERE to find a way to destroy it, they better do it from a few star systems away lest they find out how what the blast radius of the amount of energy it’s been keeping inside itself is.
It doesn’t need to be inherently explosive: on this very moment, your friendly neighborhood forest trees are turning airborne carbon dioxide into carbon based material by using considerable amounts of solar radiation as their energy source. People have been harvesting and using for a very long time: you might know this material as “wood”. While you could argue it being flammable, it’s mechanically rather stable, and if you extrapolate the amounts of energy Max’s sword is eating, it could be constructing itself into very strong/dense/indestructible material.
I was actually leaning in the opposite metaphysical direction. Manavore is the final expression of the balancing of the mystical equivalent of the First Law of Thermodynamics. All the truly disgusting stuff magic does where it’s ignoring the creation or destruction of energy comes to rest in Manavore. Since there’s just so much more creation than there is destruction, it primarily just destroys as much magic as it can to maintain the cosmic balance.
Simply saying whatever translates to “Mach” in the local language without further exposition would be okay. It would be a fair expectation that any species watching these matches is also technologically capable of transporting things at a rate exceeding the speed of sound in their local environment. Or at least capable of conceiving of the idea. While there would be exceptions, “Mach 10” in the context of travel near a planetary surface would translate as “really fast” for most civilizations.
“Space unit of measure which is conveniently and coincidentally identical to the Earth unit of measure” is one of my favorite gags.
Given how Earth’s atmospheric composition has fluctuated over time, it’s impressive how many extraterrestrial species can share the same air.
I think of it as being like in Galaxy Quest.
“How do you know it’s safe!?!”
sniffs
“Seems safe.”
It they’re not wearing suits, it’s probably safe.
I suspect that a lot of space people tech is more or less invisible stuff that *subtly* keeps everyone safe from doing stupid things like accidentally walking into a zero air pressure zone. It just won’t happen unless you go through the ritual of putting on the pressure suit showing that yes, you want to encounter this danger for reasons best known to you. At which point the tech figuratively shrugs its shoulders and allows you to encounter zero pressure.
This should be doable with ubiquitous nanoparticles. See “utility fog”. Tech would be pretty much absolutely reliable, with a fair bit of self-repair capability (given available energy).
Ubiquitous magic would also allow that, but as with my earlier post I’m assuming mana use is somewhat exotic. Magic is also usually depicted as having a bit of a mind of its own.
As a tech guy I can tell you.
You’re partly right and I’ve some ideas how to achieve his.
Most people hate noticing technology, but really like experiencing its benefits. As such they also dislike being obstructed from doing stupid things especially if the tech can handle it.
As such one of the bigger incentives within engineering is to design your stuff in such a way that it will not be noticed.
It’s hard to achieve, but important to get any market traction.
So yeah most life support tech will be super subtle, but it will predominantly try to limit the category of “stupid things” to as little as possible and have the “space suit ritual” provide real benefit for the availability of resources for the tech.
Now my ideas of how subtle tech would keep people safe in this setting.
Supplements in drinks, which stick in the nose and mouth and react/move away poisonous gasses.
The use of hard light(canonically established) to make transparent pressure correcting force fields from centralized and hidden projectors or clothes.
Vaccines against poisoning.
Clothes with very good temperature and pressure regulation(might explain, why everyone wears form fifting clothing.
It’s like the air conditioning running in your berthing compartment. You don’t really notice it until it cuts out.
soooooo Is Maxima’s disguise powered by mana?
We don’t know its power source.
We know it uses hard light projectors to achieve the desired effect.
This update brings exciting developments for Maxima, facing magical foes with her unique sword. The intriguing discussion about its “functioThis update brings exciting developments for Maxima, facing magical foes with her unique sword. The intriguing discussion about its “functionally-indestructible” nature and the Manavore’s magic-eating abilities keeps the plot fresh. I’m eager to see how these elements unfold, especially if she needs to hit a home run in a tight spot, perhaps like a thrilling game of Doodle Baseball to escape a magical bind!
This update brings exciting developments for Maxima, facing magical foes with her unique sword. The intriguing discussion about its “functionally-indestructible” nature and the Manavore’s magic-eating abilities keeps the plot fresh. I’m eager to see how these elements unfold, especially if she needs to hit a home run in a tight spot, perhaps like a thrilling game of Doodle Baseball to escape a magical bind!
I find myself hoping we see Maxima’s leadership prowess in the final round. She offers a partnership to another fighter in the upper third of the finalists. Team up, take out the rest, and settle things between them at the end. Could be some backstabbing. Could come down to just them; Maxima turns ready to fight and they just “Nope” and concede
“Max! Use your sword as a lever and throw that guy!”
So, I’m guessing most of the spectators, including Bluce and Gail, are watching this contest in “Mock speed.”
Ordinary biological eyes of the sort evolution probably gave most species can’t even focus on a human-size object moving that fast, so they’re seeing the entire contest in terms of the “slow motion instant replay” within a few seconds after things actually happen. “slow motion” is still running at such a high speed it’s difficult to follow the action, but a whole lot slower than the actual plays taking place down on the field.
Which means there’s a gap. No matter how good they are, unless people down on the field stop every so often for them to catch up, the play-by-play announcement and broadcast are falling behind the action.
A gap between things happening and the broadcast of them happening, is getting longer and longer as the round progresses. That is a thing someone could possibly take advantage of if they have access to truly realtime information, can make sense of it, and can react fast enough. None of which would be easy for anyone at a distance.
They’re allowing people to continue to make bets during the fight, aren’t they?
“Mach” is defined as the speed of sound through the medium (usually an atmosphere) through which an object is moving.
That speed is not a constant (expressed in, for instance, meters per second, or feet per second, or miles an hour). Even in earth’s atmosphere it depends on many things, including air density, temperature and moisture content.
There is no “standard Mach”.
So when Maxima is moving at Mach 10, she is moving at ten times the speed of sound through the local atmosphere, whatever that speed of sound may be. This is universal and should be clear to anyone. If you want to know what her speed is in terms of distance over time, then you’ll have to find out what the local speed of sound at her location is.
The addition of “Mach, as calibrated for one atmosphere of pressure and composition on standard multi-species space stations” is not unnecessary and unhelpful, and goes against the reason Mach speed was invented as a notion. This presumable definition of a “Galmach” attempts to tie down the Mach to a specific speed, while a Mach is not a constant. The presenters (and by extension DaveB) messed up here.
The phrasing actually raises more questions:
– Is it assumed that “one atmosphere of pressure” is a galaxy wide constant? If so, is it equal to the earth unit of one atmosphere (atm)? Don’t all planets (yes, all planets) have different pressures at sea/ground level?
– What is the “standard” composition of an atmosphere (gaseous envelope)? Is there so little difference that all species can handle an earth-like atmosphere (mostly nitrogen and lots of oxygen)?
– And, as said, why did they feel the need to define a “Galmach”, which is unnecessary, pointless and confusing?
Air speed and ground speed are not the same, if memory from reading my progenitors private pilot manuals serves. (it’s been more than a few… A very, VERY long time.
The weird thing is, Bluce, Gail and DavidB go out of their way to specify “Mach” while there is no need, and at the same time use various earth units without a hint of explanation.
– seconds: p1439 (30 seconds; 25 now), p1441 (only seconds), p1473 (26 seconds), p1477 (3 seconds). These might be defended as a common measure, about the time it takes to slowly count. But their use becomes very exact.
– kiloton: p1433 (80 kiloton stomp). Might be defended as “a lot of mass/weight/force”, but why 80 and not, say, 90? Might be auto-converted in the translation, maaaaybe? But then, why 80 and not 81.3?
– kilometers: p1477 (10 kilometers). This is getting ridiculous. There is no excuse. This is just a straight-up earth unit. “6 and 1/4 Miles” would have been acceptable, as a mile is a thousand paces, and most humanoid species are depicted as having roughly the same stride length.
– Atmosphere: p1478 (1 atmosphere of pressure). Not “standard pressure”, but again a straight-up earth unit.
– year: p1426 (this year’s tournament), p1439 (years or lifetimes to escape), p1466 (60 years ago). A year is the period of the orbit of a planet around its sun. This period is different for _every_ planet in the galaxy. The tournament is held every year, or in multi-year period, without explanation about _which_ planet’s orbit they count as a year. “60 years ago” is used to describe a specific time span, again without specifying how long the year is they are talking about.
And then, when they say Ixah was moving at Mach 10, that suspiciously corresponds to traveling 10 earth kilometers in 3 earth seconds in earth’s atmosphere.
It is almost as if DaveB is making fun of Sci-Fi media over-explaining purportedly “space” units while casually peppering earth units everywhere without comment :-).
Look, I could have the space commentators say, “Ixah only has 10 killicams to return to the fight,” but then I need to put a little “A killicam is coincidentally almost the exact same amount of time as a second. – DB” exposition box down on the bottom of that panel, and since “we” by which I mean Sydney and Harem and the people reading the comic are listening to the sports caster after being translated and real-time dubbed into English with algorithmic lip-sync matching and all that good space-tech stuff, why not have the units translated as well?
Besides, a galactic community would most likely have an agreed upon standard unit for a year and other time units, distinct from local orbital periods.
When I call out things like Astro-bucks or space-minutes or whatever, I just do that because it’s funny to me. It’s like people in India saying, “Let’s get Indian Food.” Although, an Astro-buck might be a specific unit of currency, distinct from a “space-benjamin” and then you have to deal with conversion rates.
Heh, eats mana eh? Oh the poor thing is going to utterly starve once it tries to get her. (snicker)
the Voting incentives aren’t working
keeps telling me I failed
Suggestion: The Manavore is feeding someone/thing. Some entity, or structure, or something, put the sword out into the universe as a way to feed, making it a sword so people would bring it to concentrations of mana without trying to stop it like they did the previous feeding method (rampaging mana-devourers).