Grrl Power #165 – How to pop the wheels on a tank
AKA Coilgun, Gauss Gun, Scram Cannon (sort of), Kinetic Bombarder. I think we’ve mostly settled on “railgun” as the common name for the things, though I sort of have a soft spot for Gauss Gun. Really big one would still be called mass drivers I assume. Deciding on where the railgun/mass driver demarcation is the next debate I suppose.
Drawing debris is tedious. I probably should have drawn more crap flying out of the tank, but I need to figure out how to do that without making that take up the bulk of the time I spend on the page.
I just found this comic over the weekend and thought it was really funny. It’s called Superbitch. I’ll let you guess what it’s about. I’ll just say the titular character and Maxima would probably get along… for a little while anyway.
Update: Looks like linking to Superbitch took down their site (oops) but it’s sorted out and they’re back online if you didn’t get a chance to read it yesterday.
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.
Huh. I never realized that railguns (and whatever else you call them, as Dave pointed out) work the same way as slingshots. Go figure.
So Mr. Amorphous and Achilles have the fastball special as part of their team repertoire?
Sort of. Knew this one guy who made one big enough to shoot a Coke can with. Filled it up with steel wool and water, went through a cement wall like it was nothing. Thank god there was a hill behind the wall.
A railgun doesnt work like a slingshot. A gaussgun neither and they work very differently.
Maybe it’s “slingshot-y” not to fire the actual projectile, but to somehow compensate for the recoil? Considering that it went through the tank and still had enough energy to send Achilles flying, without any compensation (or magic), it would probably tear an unaided human’s arm off. (sure, Dabbler is anything but, however, she seems to be simply standing still after the weapon goes off; and provided she isn’t exagerating, it is capable of firing a projectile while consvering significant impact force to at least low Earth orbit; or shooting through a hill, which is a LOT of friction to overcome – thus the power and therefore recoil of the weapon needs to be immense)
Not sure why, but I think recoil, while accurate, is wrong for what happens with these types of guns. It probably has a similar recoil prevention as crossbows since the force generated is the same.
errr type of force.
I think that we’re forgetting that the weapon came from hammerspace (tansported in) so could it be credible that some of the weapons features are not tangible?
Now, the slingshot builds up kinetic energy when pulled back. The railgun has magnetic energy stored and released through computer sequencing to propel the projectile forward. The main difference being the types of energy as released.
Yep, the recoil absorption mechanism could be vast, but tucked away in extradimensional space.
A railgun pulls the projectile along with magnets and shuts them off as the mass passes. Sort of like a slingshot does with the elastic band. It’s an apt description if not exactly accurate. The point about the recoil is accurate though. Perhaps Dabbler’s version is somehow tapping, or redirecting, Earth’s natural magnetic field to create the same effect? That would be way beyond our technology but it would be equivalent to being thrown by the planet, or a significant fraction thereof. That might explain the lack of recoil.
I’m not a scientist, don’t know how possible that really is, but this isn’t our universe either. =)
And Dabbler’s magic kinda throws conventional science out the window
In the Mass Effect series they used the titular effect in Railguns (both handheld and shipbased). Both to reduce the mass of the projectile in the barrel (more acceleration over shorter distance possible) and to reduce the recoil working on the guy firing the gun.
Plus dabbler is superstrong, supersciency, magic user. She has some way (or maybe a combination of ways) to deal with the recoil.
Rail Gun – PUSHES the projectile along using the force exerted by a current running from one railto the other inside a magnetic field -in layman’s terms – it is an arc.. er spark … between the two rails that forces the projectile forward. That is why the ammo is ceramics and not metal. Metal ammo would weld itself to the rails.
The first gen rail guns were the size of freight cars and could be fired once – firing kinda destroyed the things. Latest generation ones are the size of a V8, not including barrel, and have a high rate of sustained fire.
Gauss Rifle – Using a magnetic coil or series of coils to accelerate an object.
Years back in my stupid grad student days – I helped my baby brother build a very basic Gauss Accelerometer for a grade school science project out of salvaged fluorescent ballasts, wood dowels, aluminum foil and a car battery with ball bearings as ammo/switch. Not scary fast but very good accuracy and precision.
Some of the Techno-geek-hardware-nuts here have built single coil guns based on the same principle by effectively hitting the ammo with a hammer in the general direction they want it to go. Think of their coil guns as golfing for geeks.
You built your little brother a railgun?
Best brother ever.
That is a gaus gun. A Railgun has two rails and a conducting medium as projectile between it. Then you send a high current through the rails and the projectile and the projectile will be propelled forward through the Lorentz force.
And no a gaussgun doesnt work like a slingshot unless you start calling a crossbow a slingshot
Soft of in a weird way a crossbow IS a slingshot.
It’s a projectile being shot by pulling back, and than releasing a string
If by slingshot you mean the biblical weapon of a piece of leather tied to 2 strings and spun to throw a rock with the aid of centrifugal force, than yes, you are correct.
However, if you refer to this(https://media2.hickorees.com/image/SlingShot_L1.jpg), than no, the name is rather apt.
The electromagnets in the rails switch on and off in sequence, propelling the projectile forward, in sort of the same fashion a piece of rubber contracts to send a projectile flying forward.
You are talking about a Sling, not a slingshot. Different things
Also, THIS is a proper way for Achilles to demonstrate his power.
Totally agree.
Even better: Tie Achilles to an old broken satellite in orbit and let Dabbler shoot it down, added bonus-points for hitting Achilles. And up to now, Achilles is one of two people around who’d surely survive Syd.
He’d find a way to commit suicide after a while.
I think Mr. Heel still needs to Breathe…
^ This.
There was a person with a power almost exactly like Achilles’ in the comic book series Rising Stars. He was killed by suffocation, a problem Achilles apparently does not have according to the Cast page.
Nope. It specifies in his bio that “Achilles can’t be poisoned, suffocated, starved, irradiated, crushed, cut, pierced, burned, frozen or injured by any method yet discovered.”
Have they put him into a Hard Vacuum Environment yet?
or stabbing him in the foot?
But he can be aged to death?
Unknown but not likely since it seems he stopped aging at some point.
If Dabbler would hit Achilles rather than the satelite, it’d only knock the thing into a higher orbit
I think Achilles may be the only one capable of taking on Sydney in a spicy food eating contest. And then wash it down with some concentrated hydrochloric acid to cleanse the palate.
The difference is: Sydney is still affected by what she eats, so that makes her superior
Doubt it actually.
Cause Capsaicin doesn’t actually cause pain or damage. Instead, it tricks the nerves into THINKING they are on fire.
As long as he can still taste anything, capsaican probably hurts him
Is that guy with the strechy arms in frame two Mr. Amorphous?
Unless Stretch Armstrong has joined the team, that’d be my guess.
At that speed, it would probably be superheated plasma and dust, so kinda like if you took a sparkler and magnified it a hundred-fold. Blindingly bright…
No, not really. The typical “rail” has a sharp point and is made of hardened steel. The larger ones are often fitted with a depleted uranium head. But it goes fast enough that it doesn’t have TIME to get hot enough to melt … and besides, it didn’t travel that far. A reasonable muzzle velocity for a railgun is around five to seven miles per SECOND. (Let’s just say you don’t have to lead your target.)
Dabbler Magitech. The railgun slug was probably degenerate matter or adamantium or some other gawd-awfully durable material that wouldn’t instantly turn to plasma upon hitting anything solid.
You do realise that Railguns are already in Development, right?
There is no such thing as turning to Plasma, just turning targets into swiss cheese.
Yes there is such a thing as turning to plasma, it’s used intentionally in hybrid armatures for railguns to produce a secondary form of propulsion.
Ok, let me clarify that.
I´m well aware that you can turn metal to plasma using magnetic fields, but if you use said fields to accelerate a Bullet, there is no way it turns to plasma during flight of when it connects.
Theory is fine, but when reality hits, theory should shut up.
That is why i can live in Germany without walking on the south wall of my appartment.
Because Cern didn´t turn into a black hole, neither did the particle accelerator in Hamburg (only 60 Km from me but still south) which is even older (albeit not that powerful).
It did create a black hole, but only in one in every ten thousand alternate Earths.
Incorrect.
The amount of pressure the armature imparts on impact shares a direct relation to the amount of heat it generates. Along with the effect the narrow profile of the armature has in flight causing aerodynamic heating of the armature itself as well as the air around it.
The armature of a railgun would be perfectly capable of causing plasma to be produced in flight.
It’s complete non-sequitur and hyperbole to bring up black holes or CERN in this context as well.
actually, look up “platter bombs” – a particularly nasty sort of IED used against our boys in the middle east – usually attached with a high-powered magnet – turns a plate of copper or other fairly dense metal into a plasma bullet that cuts through tank armor easily and fills the interior with droplets of superheated metal
Also known as a shaped charge, generally created by placing explosive behind a disk of copper or some other soft metal. That has nothing to do with a railgun, as the principles are completely different.
Actually. What he’s referencing would be two things that are both true.
One, there are plasma armatures that are designed to increase velocity by reducing the bulk of the armature into ionized gas as it’s propelled along the barrel, to generate additional propellant force.
Two, it’s not uncommon for solid armatures to also experience this, due to the velocity threshold being passed and the material breaking down.
Military standard speeds actually translates to essentially being mach 6 to mach 10. Most materials for ships traveling in that category either need to operate ‘hot’ or be made of ceramics, as the material does indeed become superheated. This heat increasing on a object such as a projectile and armature due to the aerodynamic heating of an object with a slim profile.
Functionally the shot would produce a lot of heat and light even if it didn’t burn itself up completely in the process of firing, as the friction of the projectile firing also reacts with the air itself to produce some sometimes explosive effects.
Well explained. Much better than my guess above and has information I didn’t know. Thanks for the info. It’s also possible that Dazzler’s “bullet” has a heat shield on the nose to prevent it from burning completely up.
Those kind of speeds might explain the lack of immediate debris too. It takes a little time for the shrapnel to move away from the point of impact. =)
That, and it takes DaveB time to draw the debris. Still, I find what we see a fantastic level of detail.
It’d have plenty of time. Going faster just means it experiences more friction and heats up more in the air. Never mind that meteors travel far faster then we can shoot anything, and they do a plenty damn good job of heating up. Metal ones too, all sizes, from grain of and sized, to mountain.
By heating up….
Do you mean “warm to the touch” or “forms a layer of frost”? Meteorites aren’t exactly known for being hot objects, and both those descriptions are used in describing just-landed space rocks
Meteors heating up? From what? The friction with vacuum up there in space?
Umm…you are aware that the definition of meteor is a foreign body of matter that has entered the earth’s atmosphere, right? If it’s still in the vacuum of space it would called an asteroid or comet.
Still, meteors in atmosphere don’t heat up much.
They may ablate, or sublimate or whatever techy term might apply, but there’s little real heat transfer – the process is too energetic and too short for much heat to actually transfer. Give a rail-pistol a target at 200 yards, and a muzzle speed of merely 3 Mach. How long does the projectile stay in touch with the air before it strikes the target? How fast will heat transfer into the projectile from its edge?
Granted, any bit of metal striking any target at multiples of Mach will generate some amount of heat from the impact, that’s impact talking. And the act of firing it may expose the projectile to strong magnetically induced currents (induction furnace?), so the round probably starts out quite warm. In transit? Not so much. Granted, the transit might be like dropping the round into the flame of a plasma torch, but only for a very brief moment.
Now Dabblers worried about hills being insufficient backstop for a weapon that hits targets in orbit… I doubt very much it fires at merely Mach 3. There’s a bit less time for heat transfer.
Actually, there’s a ton of heat generated in a meteor once it hits the atmosphere. The moment it goes from vacuum into air even at the high altitude layers you’ll see a shift that causes the meteor’s matter to experience increasingly excited states as it enters higher air density. This is both where the light of a meteor comes from as well as it’s heat.
And it does indeed get to the point where the interaction is strong enough that it creates plasma from the reaction between the meteor and the air.
It’s the ram pressure of the meteor more or less hitting the objects limit and causing a high enough buildup of pressure that it forces the meteor to actually heat up to ~3000K or roughly 2700-2800 degrees, melting and evaporating the meteor from it’s own force.
Pointing this back at railguns, they experience a similar as well as a different reaction as the armature fired would instead experience ‘aerodynamic heating, as the pressure is diverted around the length of the material and it experiences the friction of it’s dramatically increased velocity.
Time in the time out box… 30 seconds.
W-e-l-l, in fairness, we don’t know how long Sydney was there in time-out.
Besides, for her, 30 seconds would probably seem like an eternity anyhow.
Next panel:
Maxima: Scoville, where are you supposed to be?
Halo: Hunh? Oh, right. [ Drags her feet back to the box drawn in the dirt as Maxima sets up for her shot at the tank. ]
…Which makes me wonder how Maxima is going to deal with Sydney, for being OUT of the time-out box in the last panel…
Sydney will end up being the shield on the other side of the tank.
Did that turn the ground into a glass splash?
Nah, there’s probably a deep hole in the ground instead
Also, railguns and coil guns work off of slightly different properties. What she has would probably be closer to a coil gun.
I’d suspect “railgun”. A coilgun would have regular nodes along the barrel, and the only such thing here is the nodes along the brown circle – but in a coilgun, they’d be equidistant from the barrel and pointed in the same direction, not in a circle and pointed at the same spot.
…I wonder if the author will have Sydney and/or Maxima going into the details on-panel. Both of them would likely know the difference.
Gotta love that 6’th panel. WHEEE!!!
Shouldn’t the have put Stalwart behind Achiles to prevent that he is thrown away like that
Achilles is in good shape. He can run back the kilometre or so he got thrown. The demos should last a longer than the 4 minutes it will take to run back.
His power probably also means that he doesn’t get tired from running, so he can just keep on running forever (kinda like this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes )
Who’d want to deny Achilles the fun of being hurled backward by the impact? Look at how happy he is! He’s even going “whee!” (Which is incidentally freaking hilarious.)
+1
Shooting satellites from orbit? Now, let’s try it on Syd’s shield.
Whatever it’s called, I’d like to order one, please!
There’s nothing quite like having a man (or woman)-portable gun that could knock the Enterprise out of orbit. If there were no copyright issues getting in the way, it could be called “Superman’s Shotgun.”
To cite Stargate:
Carter: “Sir, you can’t call it the Enterprise.”
O’Neill, disappointed and a little whiney: “Why not?”
To be fair, it’s a topsecret military space-ship they’re talking about, so it’s not like anybody who cared would know anytime soon.
Gotta agree with The O`Neil: The Starship Enterprise was named after the USS Enterprise, so it’s not like Star Trek copyrighted the name or anything
Not to mention the sheer symbolism a Starship Enterprise would have.
Why is Yellow flying solo on the last panel? It’s in formation with the rest of the orbs in first panel, and there’s little need for X-ray vision after the hammerspace incident…
Cause it’s swerving out of the way of Sydney’s flailing arms. Generally a good defensive policy no matter who you are.
So, are you hinting that these spheres are self aware?
So of us have talked about that before.
Nuts. I want an Edit button.
Some of us…
Their collision detection is more advanced than a Roomba, but are unresponsive when asked Voight-Kampf questions.
Maybe that’s the power of the eighth orb (whoever made it even numbered it!) that Sydney somehow missed? Unfortunately, it usually gives somewhat cryptic answers.
Damn DaveB.
That cracked me up good. I’ve been laughing for the past minute or so
Same XD
Not answering the question huh? This has been noted.
Very sharp :P
Tell me……
What are your thoughts about, electric sheep.
Go ahead, what ever comes to mind first…….
Whaat? My, mother? Let me tell y—NeeeeeT! humm,,, ok, Collision detection? Like a program, or the magic of comics? ;-) but more likely if Sid can move them, then she, would not want to be battered by them, eh? Well there was that foot thing which caught her unawares.
Cats hate Roomba’s, six of em at once makes cats run.
Michael Buffer at an automatic vacuum cleaner convention: ” Let’s get ready to Roomba….”
Love the Time Out zone. I’ll bet THAT picture is going to go viral.
Ah, the railgun! One of my very favorite ways to transfer massive quantities of kinetic energy to a target. Obviously, Dabbler must have been using magic to anchor herself in place, as the recoil from accelerating a steel spike (let’s say it masses, oh, around 500g) to upwards of nine thousand m/s in a tiny fraction of a second … is non-trivial.
(As an aside, the lunatics who thought it was a good idea to waste billions of dollars constructing giant robots to fight giant monsters in “Pacific Rim” should have taken a page out of Dabbler’s book. “Rail Guns: For All Your Giant Monster Elimination Needs.”)
The great thing about rail guns is that your projectile can be shaped in any number of ways that are not safe for your regular firearm.
Hey, you can’t blame that lunatic in Pacific Rim. Probably a fan of the odd incarnation of Power Rangers or other Super Sentai; and frankly, if you had ‘justification’ to get to make giant mechas, wouldn’t you?
Besides, mechas could easily use sizeable railguns as ‘personal’ weapons, to give them more viability.
That would have indeed been a better idea than making them slug it out in melee :P
Not as awesome a movie though
Del Toro is quite shameless about the fact that “Pacific Rim” is built on, built of, lives, breathes, eats, and poops the “rule of cool” as opposed to boring things like “realism” and “sound scientific principles” and “economic feasibility”. I respect a man who’s up front about the fact that he just wanted to make a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters in the face, and respect him twice over that he got other people to agree that sounded awesome enough to give him a shed-load of money to do it well. :D
Yes, there needs to be a wallpaper of the ‘Time Out Box’ panel.
Yes!
Wallpaper? Nah, make it a poster!! Even a demotivational poster
I agree =)
Also I remember one science fiction novel where a pistol used any form of matter, though iron was preferred. It would chip off a portion of the matter to accelerate according to the setting on the dial one to ten. One was about gunshot strength and a higher number, not ten, blew up a house. I think Andre Norton wrote it but I was still a teenager when I read it (55 now).
That particular model was part of a short story and has since emerged in various incarnations from a number of writers of SciFi since then. “The Practice Effect,” used this weapon in part of its story line to great effect.
So same basic Principles as the weapons in the Mass Effect Games.
Where do you think the ME guys got the idea from?
These days? Reading Einstein while being drunk off their asses
The problem is, they took the page from Dabbler’s book, but they used it as toilet paper.
Am I the only one that actually Enjoyed Pacific Rim?
PacIfic Rim is awesome. Giant robots fighting giant monsters with a well crafted soundtrack, what’s not to love?
Pacific Rim was awesome. Some people just want to get their science all over my science fiction. I am fully aware about the physics issues in creating and using a giant robot even half the size of Gypsy Danger, I just don’t care.
That movie was awesome, it was an anime brought to life. That is what I wanted to see, and that is what I got.
Best movie I can remember ever seeing.
Ofcourse it would have made alot more sense to give them weapons.
And I somehow doubt those Kaiju could shrug off a high yield warhead to the face, but could be killed by punching them.
Gipsy had a plasma cannon in it’s hands, not to mention the swords she and Striker had. That big Russian one had a dozen launchers in it’s chest, just didn’t get to USE them. Gipsy also had the directed heat blast from her reactors.
Oh, no. HEAVENS, no. You are certainly NOT the only one who enjoyed the movie, as is evidenced by the insane piles of cash it made.
However, I don’t believe any ENGINEERS or PHYSICISTS could POSSIBLY enjoy the movie, for the reasons given in other comments. Sound science, feasibility, and financial considerations would have prevented it. For my own part, given that my Willing Suspension of Disbelief simply will not stretch that far, the thing was starkly un-watchable. I feel the same way about “The Core”, which has the distinction of being recognized as the worst example of Bad Movie Physics ever committed to film. While the physics in “Pacific Rim” are not as laughably inept (one COULD, I suppose, build giant robots) the plot holes are at least as bad. I can only imagine what sorts of drugs had to be employed to get The Powers That Be to authorize funding for something so hideously expensive and at the same time so comparatively fragile.
Shoot the damn monsters from two miles away with something that will poke a hole all the way through them, and do it A LOT. Problem solved.
(Sorry. I can’t NOT think like an engineer.)
Which would obviously be a problem, if she was using gunpowder.
She doesn´t.
It´s a magnetic accelerator. Magnets are pulling a magnetic bullet. It is even held in the middle of those fields without the need to physically connect to a barrel (which would also be a problem).
Recoil would still a problem, even with the magnets. Equal and opposite force and all. The magnets are going to be trying to pull toward the projectile (which happens to be toward you) as ‘hard’ as they are pulling the projectile away from you. They have more mass so they wouldn’t achieve as high of a velocity as the smaller projectile will, but there would be a *lot* of energy moving that projectile forward (and the magnets backward).
We see the ‘equal and opposite force’ with her hair and jacket, there is no recoil as the only moving part of the Railbow is the projectile
Frame love and frame six are amazing! xD
Grrr, that should be “Frame one and frame six are amazing! xD”
Freudian slip? :P
Anyway, since I’m spamming myself, will being shot like that leave Achilies with a big hole in his clothes? Or has he got a Superman style clothes-strengthening field?
I think we will get to see him coming back showing his manly chest, or at least the part no longer covered by his shirt, as about a foot radius centred on his sternum.
So, Max is allowing Dabbler to fire a weapon that Max had no knowledge of ahead of time? Doesn’t seem like this live-fire demonstration was well planned.
It’s not Max asking what it is.
Not in the second panel, agreed. But it appears she is still wrapping her head around what the weapon is in the last panel. The whole demo seems “by the seat of their pants” as opposed to a choreographed program.
I’m betting Max trusts Dabbler to exercise good judgement above and beyond what Halo might display.
Interesting that the railgun round was redirected into the ground, rather than, say, ricocheting right back towards Dabbler. Part of his power?
If it is going that fast and could not punch through it would disintegrate (assuming the projectile is sort of ordinary matter acted on by sort of ordinary physics).
It all depends on how his power deals with kinetic energy. If he absorbed most of it then it would just drop to the ground since gravity would take over and he would fly backwards with the same net kinetic energy. Conservation of energy people. Don’t forget your basic Newtonian Physics.
Achilles’ chest isn’t a flat mirror, so it wouldn’t make sense for anything hitting it to bounce back the way it came
Nitpick – I know it’s just a glamour field, but Dabbler’s yellow hairbraid switches sides between panels.
She has one on each side. Sometimes I omit the near one if it looks like it could be covered up by her collar or something.
“Scrooch gun”
ecky – ecky – ecky – ecky – P’TANG – zoom – boing !!!! :D
Guass Rifles (I was a Battletech fan) are quite handy if you really need to shoot down any huper-sonic aircraft/missile.
Or on “War World” a great way to take down a Sauron Super Soldier.
The Gauss Rifle in ‘Fallout 3’ (in the Anchorage DLC) is pretty bad-ass.
Tends to need lots of repair, and its rate of fire is dang low (one shot then reload), but most of the things one shoots with it tend to die EVERYWHERE.
A friend of mine told me about a science fiction story where the protagonist had a fusion powered gun. He dragged the reactor for it behind his boat so the water could cool it off (post apocalyptic future). The gun was named “Reason.”
Which gave a whole new meaning when he said he was going to “reason” with someone.
Neil Stephenson’s “Snowcrash”. Love that scene. Ever since, any time a minigun is introduced in a game my group’s running, it is dubbed “Reason” for the sheer awesome.
‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson, a personal favourite.
Except that ‘Reason’ was definitely *NOT* fusion powered. Ran on radiothermal isotopes, if I recall correctly – the business end of the power generator HAD to be kept immersed in water (and lots of it) to stop it from melting.
Don’t forget the Glitter Boys and Shemarian Warriors from Paladium’s RIFTS Earth both used Gause weapons to great effect.
I love that Mr Amorphous throws Achilles into position.
Is that Amorphous or a badly drawn Hiro? I did not think Amorphous had super strength.
Never mind. I just checked the cast pages and it appears that Mr. Amorphous has some super strength, right up there with Anvil but not as strong as the tank-kicking Stalwart.
That was quite possibly my favorite part of this page.
Hiya Peeps,
Hey DaveB, got a question for ya…. ;)
Does Dabbler also have the ‘Incredibly Expensive Machine that goes “ping” ‘, as well? ;) (it’s also from M.P {Monty Python}, specifically their movie “The meaning of life” [the birth scene iirc..])
Cheers & Thranx
PBIiNGG!
The economics of where Dabbler is from differ slightly from Earth. But yes. Yes she does.
I don’t hear “mass driver” very often, but when I do, it’s usually not a weapon. Maybe that’s a good distinction. It usually refers to spacecraft launchers and things designed to deliver bundles of suplies, in my limited experience.
That depends on the specs. I believe rail guns, gauss guns, and coil guns are all classifications of mass drivers, depending on construction. Weapons grade mass drivers usually fire at higher velocities, but even mining and supply mass drivers have been used as weapons in sci-fi space battles.
Larry Niven has/had an interesting take on this.
Humanity actually sticks to the no weapons in space treaty. The Kzin invade thinking easy prey since there are no weapons mounted on ships. Except that to get ships up to meaningful speeds the self propelled ones used fusion torches to accelerate, then there were the solar sail ones powered by gigantic lasers, etc, etc, etc.
That goes into the “swords to plowshares to swords” category.
More like a world government with a very firm grasp on how to guide the development of dual use technologies.
For example the Mercury array doesn’t need to be powerful enough to vaporize ships in Neptunes orbit to push sail ships around the solar system.
I have read a lot of Niven’s work. One of his stories was about how the defense of Earth was designed by a paranoid schizophrenic working for ARM off his meds( on purpose). I kinda liked the Protector race too.
The only magnetic mass drivers I have ever been around take protons and try to accelerate them up to the speed of light. There’s a really nice one outside of Chicago.
Like in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress– themass driver is intended to launch food grown in the lunar colonies to Earth, until the rebels repurpose it to fire kinetic strikes.
Ha!, Tell that to the Centauri from Babylon 5… there is a reason they were banned under interstellar treaty (similar to the Geneva Convention nowdays)…
That is a gun that formerly said “Ni!”
Not sure I care for for Achilles new look, I think I preferred his previous appearance.
Max should be happy there is finally someone who can annoy Dab in the same way Dab annoys Max. (Well, not quite the same way)
Agreed, something seriously ‘off’ about his new look
The Mane doesn’t quite suit Achilles but the Mullet did. Short sides and long back, or as they say “Business out front, party at the back”.
It’s not the hair, it’s the face, kinda looking like a non-orange George Harrison (umm, the actor, not singing bug)
Rail-gun, Coil-gun, and Gauss-gun are not synonyms. They are three very different forms of magnetic propulsion. A rail-gun has two conductive rails with either the projectile or a sabot completing a circuit between them, creating a magnetic field in the projectile that pushes against the field generated by the rails . A coil-gun uses one or more electromagnetic coils to accelerate a projectile like a linear motor. Gauss-guns rely on a series of permanent magnets with ferrous strikers between them that add the kinetic energy created between the magnets and strikers to a projectile at the end.
Thank you. I was going to look that up after I finished reading the comments.
Coilgun is Gauss gun, princip is the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun
Thank you so much for pointing that out. I was planning a rant explaining this very thing when I saw your comment. Really, with how many people know the words “railgun” or “coilgun”, you’d think more people would look up the terms and find out they aren’t the same thing. Heck, even Wikipedia shows off the distinction between them, so I figured the first, second or third comment would be the one explaining it… not all the way down here :/
anywho. again, thanks. :)
Also, “Mass Driver” literally just means “non-energy gun”. In firing any projectile, you are Driving (propelling) a Mass (any object), so our conventional rifles and sidearms are actually mass drivers just as much as a magnetic propulsion system. :D
Interestingly, a rocket launcher is NOT a mass driver, cause the rocket is propelling itself so the launcher is not acting as a “driver”. more of a… launch pad. :P
And lasers or plasma are not mass drivers because you are firing energy rather than an object. Fun fact though, plasma DOES have a mass. “Plasma” is free-floating energy, but it still requires a medium to appear as a plasma. The typical fiction weapons-grade plasma is a set of gasses that have been excited enough that they begin to break down (Nuclear Fission), and the damage is done via the heat given off of said gasses. In this case, the plasma as we see it is actually the gasses, which have a mass, though what qualifies it as a “plasma” is the heat energy. Electrical energy moving through the air is, believe it or not, also plasma. Cause it’s a free-flowing energy… you see plasma every time you see lightning strike, or whenever you see the spark from a static shock. So a lightning gun is also a plasma gun.
And while I’m here (slightly off-topic though), a Tesla coil is neither a weapon nor a toy, though it can be used as either. It was developed by Nicholas Tesla, who was trying to find a way to wirelessly transmit electricity. And yes, it works. Hold a lightbulb up near an active tesla coil and it WILL light up. The problem is that it’s INCREDIBLY dangerous (basically a lightning generator, wheee)… which is probably why we see it as a weapon in some fiction. It’s also absurdly loud, since each charge tends to crack much like lightning. The toy variant is actually using a much smaller charge generated by static. So… we’re doomed to be forever plugging our computers in to a wall. Oh well.
The More You Know. :)
Actually, plasma is a state of matter, like liquid, solid, and gas, so yes, plasma always has mass, and something that fires plasma would still be, technically, a mass driver.
But the damage is imparted by the heat energy from the plasma state, rather than the kinetic energy from the gasses/electrons smashing into the target. Yes you’re driving a mass, but the mass is negligible in this case. Tis an energy weapon. :)
You might consider the accelerated protons or electrons in a supercollider to have a huge amount of energy and you would be correct, but more than half the mass is still coming from the rest mass of the object.
E=mc^2
where E is the total energy of the system, m is the mass of the system and c is the speed of light.
Ek=0.5mv^2
where Ek is the kinetic energy (energy of motion), v is the speed of the object and m is the mass of the object.
As you approach the speed of light, the kinetic energy approaches half the total energy of the system. But the majority of the energy is still coming from the mass itself. So, even if you accelerate an object to nearly the speed of light, you are still driving mass and most of the impact is from the mass, not the introduced energy.
I would consider a plasma weapon an energy weapon as well (just like a flamethrower, which is basically what it is, really), but the point was that plasma is not simply “free-floating energy” (also, you don’t get plasma every time you see a spark of electricity). You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what plasma is.
No fission going on in plasma (where did you get that idea?). Technically, it’s an ionized gas. What’s breaking down is the bonds between the nuclei and the orbiting electrons. (Well, some of them anyway).
I… am not sure where I got that idea, actually. it seems my physics knowlege has been degrading severely since I switched to computer sciences from physics at uni. :(
Sorry all, for the misinformation :(
And because when I posted my last reply, I didn’t remember that the Tesla coil bit was part of the same comment, let me add that I don’t think holding up an incandescent or LED bulb next to one would work. The demo I saw at the Museum of Science in Boston involved fluorescent specifically because of the way they work.
Also off topic… because this came instantly to mind when I read Tesla. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjtzib0G9Rs
What was shown was a penetrator (big spike). Usually made from either Tungsten or depleted uranium. What she made it out of is open to discussion. I vote for unobtanium. In the real world, a penetrator would leave a small hole going in, a slightly larger hole coming out. Pieces wouldn’t fly off it unless there was a sympathetic ammunition detonation. One other point, depleted uranium is a pyrophoric, it sparks like crazy going through things. As far as deflecting into the ground, the angle of impact with his chest would determine deflection. After that data dump, here is some coolness.
https://youtu.be/eiUDdAGCht0
Whee!!
Lol!
A soft spot for Gauss gun? Is there a TFTD fan in the house?
Just incase there are still people who didn’t see this on previous comments section (and yes if Dave is ok with it I will put this under every page until KS is over :P)
I just want to get your folks attention for a split second for something on kickstarter. More information about it is in the link but I will tell the short story behind project if anyone interested. I am posting this here becuase well Super Hero business :P
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans
Heh, I was about to post the same link, though your text is much better than I had planned.
You didn’t really think we had attention spans longer than that, did you? =OP
Well, we are reading a comic featuring a couple of people with ADHD.
Now if someone could just remind me what we were discussing.
Well that was cool and a much better show of Achilles’ power love the Wee! after he was hit lol
Panel 4: Might want to get rid of that balloon tail. Makes it look like Dabbler’s asking the question, which makes no sense.
On behalf of Al Gore, Captain Planet and Sandra Bullock I would be remiss not to bring up the hazards of shooting at satellites whilst they are in orbit. This can start of a chain reaction known as the Kessler effect where debris from one exploding satellite creates shrapnel that then hits and breaks up others, that takes out still more, etc., etc. The end result is a cloud of debris orbiting the Earth that makes it impossible to put anything or anyone safely into orbit until they eventually fall out by themselves, which can take centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Well the “blow up the non-functional satellite idea” is actually based on the basis that once the terminal orbit starts, you pulverize the satellite so that the smaller pieces burn up on reentry. (assumes there is no uranium core that is dense enough to survive)
or plutonium power-supply that will poison a good chunk of the Earth as it disperses.
Hmm. Maybe I should change “derelict” to “pesky”
It should be noted that she never said they were HUMAN satellites. Who knows what sorts of “no/limited-shrapnel-in-the-case-of-explosion” technologies there could be?
Not to mention, the moon is technically a satellite, so yeah, if you change it to ‘pesky’ it would cover natural satellites as well as artificial (because who says she developed the Railbow on Earth?)
A handheld weapon capable of shooting down orbital satellites? Sniper from hell, there. Good thing she isn’t the traitorous one. XD
Now, a very badass sniper in the supers-category (Peggy with stuff from Dabbler) would find a way to only shoot the target they want shot, as in: shooting straight through any matter. putting the projectile in hyperspace for the travel perhaps or beam it near the target (including the velocity). Yes, there was tis episode in DS9 who used the latter.
Actually, Johhny Alpha (aka, The Strontium Dog) had a gun that could do something similar: been years (decades even) since read it but believe it phased it for a few seconds so it could pass through objects (kinda picturing a scene where Johnny had to take out a badguy who was using a hostage, the phased bullet passed harmlessly through the hostage shield and entered the badguy where it un-phased to full effect)
There’s a scene in Goblins where one of the characters does that…
… with an axe.
I love the attitude Achilles is showing. I mean, if you really were annoying invulnerable, that’s the way to go: flying through the air at high speed and hitting the ground with no protection? FACE FIRST, BOOYA! Flying through the air because you just got hit in the chest with one of the most powerful projectiles known to man? “Whee!” Waiting to get shot by said projectile? Hands in pockets… bored. That’s hilarious.
How about we use him as target-dummy for experimental weaponry? I’d believe he’d even pay for the thrill.
*Finally make him take a nuke t the face.
*Maybe let him ride an ICBM all the way from launch to impact akin to Dr. Strangelove.
*Take him into space and kick him into a decaying orbit to see how long it takes for him to make an impact.
*Make anti-matter and have him touch it.
*Make him swim/dive in an aciteve volcano and see how far down he can go.
*Hang him over a black hole to test various stuff.
*hang him over the sun to test various stuff.
*Have him repair / clean up the Chernobyl site.
*Test how long he survives snoo-snoo with Harem (and maybe the rest of the female team).
OK, THAT one would be awesome. Most of those other ideas don’t really go anywhere (molten rock is still WAY too dense for a human body to actually swim or sink in, for instance, and the black hole or sun idea runs a serious risk of stranding him in one of those places… though dropping him in a black hole would be a very interesting thing).
And that last one is just wrong, man. Heh.
His background states he has experience with something that is fairly similar to anti-matter seeing that it describes him being hit with stuff that would destroy matter on a sub atomic level.
Achilles’ previous job:
Jamie: It feels way to dangerous to be wrapped in flammable foam padding and then drop a cigarette into a toilet filled with explosive vapours.
Adam: Don’t worry. I have found an alternative. He’s downstairs.
In our universe, this is where they reveal Buster. In GrrlPower universe, they meet Achilles.
Achilles: You see I am pretty much indestructible. Anything that would be too dangerous for most people, I can do. So what is my first job?
Achilles gets “hired” by the government just after the exploding train station myth, which does not result in a large miss by the hapless (and unnecessary) Ted, the ballistics dummy.
swan dive? somebody’s been watching old spice commercials.
If I may be excused for picking on a fictional, and possibly magical weapon, The ‘gun’ appears to have no aiming sights or other targeting device. My best guesses are that one of the bits on the front is a laser pointer, or it projects some kind of heads-up display visible to the user. And my submission to the ongoing name-the-weapon contest is based on its shape. I present to you the ‘electro-banjo’ !
Nah, ‘rail-crossbow’, or ‘railbow(tm)’
I guess I haven’t said it yet in the comic or the cast page, but one of her eyes is cybernetic too – hence the color mismatch – and her guns have a smartlink in them so she can fire from the hip and still be accurate since she has a crosshair like she’s playing a FPS.
So one of her eyes can do a video feed? Because of her ADHD you know that about half way through each weekly staff meeting she is going to zone out and start watching You-Tube cat videos.
Nah, she’s part succubus. So, she’s probably already invented stuff that can make her eye look through clothes, or she’d just be looking at internet/ interstellar/ intergalactic/ interdimensional porn.
That is SUPER RAD. Why have I never thought of that?!
The Cybereye/Smartlink system? Standard equipment for any Yabbo in Shadowrun.
Guys, going to clear this up now. A ‘railgun’ is a gun that uses one or more ‘rails’ to project something very fast in one direction. Often this is either energy or a solid projectile.
This would appear to be a railgun that fires a pure, focussed wave of concussive force. Essentially,
it’s a Superkinetic railgun.
What’s its power source?
Powered by a 6 Farad capacitor in the handle. It takes about 8 hours to recharge plugged into a 15A, 120V wall outlet.
Having a 6F capacitor actually would need super-high tech or magic to be carried by a single person…A capacitor with only 1F would require 2 conductive plates of 1-mile square in size, separated by 1″ of air. Yes, one of the teachers was drawing a schematic for a problem to be worked out by students. It included a 1F capacitor. When I pointed out the 1F capacitor, she admitted that she forgot her decimal point.
This is why most electronics (that YOU are likely to see) use the uF (*micro* farad) measurement for capacitors…
take pick
https://www.ebay.com/bhp/6-farad-capacitor
they are usualy used in cars audio systems
I’ll be honest, I don’t understand much of what is said in the comments, but I’m always happy to see that this comic attracts so many nerds that know their shit.
golfclap.exe
I wasn’t trying to imply that a 1F cap would actually need 1square mile to work…Capacitors of smaller ratings can be combined for a cumulative effect. Also, I should have mentioned that this particular instance I cited was when I was in the electronics A School back in my Navy days…Over 20 years ago.
Back when somebody said, “Microprocessor? Yeah, that’ll never happen!”
Anyone else getting a lot of server errors from this site:
https://superbitchcomic.com/
I am getting them on occation. I wonder if we are overloading the site. Sort of like SlashDot users bringing web-servers to their knees when a site gets featured.
Yep, I’m pretty sure my servers are freaking out over the influx of visitors. Wasn’t expecting this many at all. Working on it. :)
Sorry! Sorry! Since I’m not Penny-Arcade I usually don’t have to worry about overloading a site. Based on your Project Wonderful stats, it looks like only about a thousand people have checked out the comic, but a lot of them are reading dang near your whole archive.
Yeah. I think I broke it. Sorry.
I hope you do not mind if we use your Tumblr or Facebook meanwhile.
… … OOPS? *slinks away while picking up where he left off in the archives.*
Forgive me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t the projectile just push Achilles either along the same path or just out of the way? He has mass that can’t be damaged but I don’t think he has the mass to stop or deflect that kind of shot. If so he would have to have mass greater then that of the tank which the projectile pretty much ignored. Which would give him the ability to lift the tank or at least move it. As the mass that his muscles would be moving on a regular basis would be rather impressive.
his body negates kenetic force projected against it
So then wouldn’t that just make the projectile stop? And he should just be standing there not moving at all?
“Forgive me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t the projectile just push Achilles either along the same path or just out of the way?”
You mean, like what happened?
No the projectile’s flight path shouldn’t have been altered unless Achilles just had that much mass. Those type’s of weapons work off of the idea that mass and speed are related. IE the faster something goes the more mass it has. Normally if a projectile like that hits something that can stop it suddenly there’s often a rather large explosion as that energy has to go somewhere.
That’s not exactly what would happen.
You have to remember that the tanks total mass is irrelevant to the projectile. The only mass that matters, is that of the material it pushes through. That’s not all that much.
Achilles on the other hand, is something the projectile can NOT push through. Therefore, when checking who pushes who, it’s his entire mass (and speed, but that’s 0) vs the mass and speed (aka kenetic energy) of the projectile.
Because the mass of the projectile is so miniscule compared to Achilles (massdrivers shoot projectiles no bigger than a single particle of dust, at extreme speeds), it’s kenetic energy would not be nearly enough to ignore him. Ofcourse it would still give him a serious kick, which causes him to fall back
Ah that makes sense. I was thinking more of the larger rounds used by the military ship mounted rail guns. Those rounds tend to be closer to the size of a hand or arm and do some massive damage. Example:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kRjNBD2XfZc/Ta4BryepwnI/AAAAAAAALI4/egUEqywwsPY/s1600/railgunprojectile.jpg
Guessing at the design, and the fact that Dabbler herself said that the weapon was designed to “shoot derelict satellites out of orbit”, I’m guessing that the round used is somewhere on the size scale of a marble. I can only assume that Dabbler has access to some extremely compact high capacity power cells in order to make a weapon of that size as potent as it is.
If she can make something like this, she probably designed the powercells that come with it a long time ago
She uses Jiggawatt to recharge the gun for the next shot.
Shew could ask Jiggawatt to OVERCHARGE the shells for those really tough meteors
*the Cells*