Grrl Power #219 – Mach the knife
This page has two Patreon $50 supporter cameos. U. Kaya Yavuz submitted our speedster, Silent Shadow. Unlike Hex, who we haven’t seen the last of BTW, Silent Shadow is one of Kaya’s characters, repurposed temporarily for this appearance. I’m glad SS is a speedster, cause it’s not something that I had originally included in my supervillain mix. In my opinion, super speed is the single most overpowered superpower besides the obvious ones like reality control or time travel, and it’s a big part of why Maxima rates so high. It’s also why Silent Shadow had to use his first two attacks on people he had no real chance of hurting. Arc-SWAT will take their lumps, but I didn’t want one guy incapacitating half the team within seconds of his debut. Still, in one page he gets introduced, then gets three attacks with one good hit.
The other cameo is down in the bottom left of the page, courtesy of Shana Hills. She volunteered the fact she’s Australian so the first thing I thought of was “Where women glow and men thunder” so naturally she glows and has lighting powers… which isn’t to imply that Shana turns into a boy when you throw hot water on her or anything. Those are just the first superheroey powers that came to mind. She’s not out of the fight yet. It’ll take more than just getting hit with the Easy Bake beam to take out the mighty Glowbug.
Heatwave is one of those characters who is especially vulnerable in a fight. Normally she would wear kevlar or something, but right now she’s just floating and glowing. Yes, she has her heat aura, and that’s bad news for anyone trying to grab her, but it doesn’t do anything against lasers or bullets. Usually in comics, the guy with the heat aura can use it to vaporize anything trying to hit him, but bullets move really fast, and the amount of heat required to vaporize copper jacketed lead in the fraction of a second it’s passing through the foot or so of heat created by the aura just doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t know the math, but I’d guess it’d have to be millions of degrees. That sort of heat would radiate outwards like a nonstop bomb. Even if you say that the aura power contains the radiating heat, then essentially what you’ve set that character up with is a disintegration field. They’d be able to just walk or fly through any surface at up to the speed of a bullet, including a mountain of (copper jacketed) lead like it wasn’t there. So heat/fire powers in my universe can’t do that. It just breaks too much stuff. The best Heatwave can manage is extending her aura out and creating violent turbulence to throw bullets off course. That assumes whoever is shooting at her is on target. If someone is spraying all over the place, the turbulence can actually steer near misses into her. Hence the kevlar.
Oh and Dabbler isn’t summoning another sword in case that’s confusing. She can recall Soulreaver from where ever it is, I just didn’t have the room on this page for a panel showing it disappearing from where it hit the tree.
A-kon is this weekend! I’ll be doing a panel on Friday. Humor-Based Webcomics 1: Humor in Story. In case you can’t make it to the panel, I’ll wander by the Antarctic Press table quite a few times, and it would be cool to have a meetup for lunch or dinner one night with people. I’m not sure how to organize that. Best I can figure is to post updates to Twitter, and here on the page during the con.
My sixth (and final) Gynostar Guest strip is up! This doesn’t wrap up the story arc (which starts here) just my contribution to it. Come see Gynostar be bendy!
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People most suited to take on a speedster in arc-swat and how-
1) Maxima speed vs speed.
2) Anvil. If he touches her at all all his speed (ie kinectic energy) gets absorbed. (well up to her absorbtion max which we don’t know what that is yet? Can she touch a moving train at speed and stop it by absorbing all the kinetic energy at once? Or just the lead car…and OOOPS?
3) Sydney- she thinks fast enough and knows super power tropes and thinks on them all day long- she can’t help that. Best power vs the speedster? Her power-tentacle. It can form an area entangle field and also likely strike from an unseen position.
4)Dabbler focus full on lust field on the Male Speedster– try moving at speed when suddenly turgid and majorly distracted by the object of lust. — ie Magic. We also know that the inviso sticky web spell neutralized Maxima long enough for it to be called a draw. See my above surmise about the effect…(Losing all his clothing and some body hair at speed if she near misses him.) <– most funny as it will be fan service for the ladies and others, plus give DaveB a chance to have everyone, good or bad, make commentary /jokes at his expense. IF and only IF Dabbler combines her Focused Lust powers and the magic spell on the speedster at the same time, then we'll have the set up for a major level joke fest…especially if he's in line to collide with someone.
Who else already shown do you think can handle the speedster easily or with effort on ARC Swat?
all three could be great
but imagine him going after Harem and her teleporting just before he hits a wall.
that could get interesting hehe
ahhh….unicorn trap.
How about Harem? With a well placed tripwire, let’s see how his face looks after a highspeed gravelly-facial!
Alternately, I wonder if Sydney could use the non-force field orbs to slow him down, as I imagine they would be hard to spot and avoid.
I believe it was Math that Dabbler used the invisible web spell against.
“strike from an unseen position” in reference to the hentorb just sounds dirty.
I was thinking Sydney’s tentacle could just whip in at his feet and trip him. At that speed, he’d go a good distance before he ate asphalt. Something along the lines of “Dabbler, catch!” might be in order too.
It depends if he have superspeed reflexes too. If he does he might be able to evade the Lighthook.
If her forcefield can be shaped any way she like she could probably try to trap him inside a offshot bubble since there is no way he would be able to break out of it. Or she can leave herself unprotected to bubble him, not the best move but Sydney is as we know not easily predictable and might deside to risk it.
IMHO, Maxima’s order to “put [her] shield up and keep it up” would quash any temptation she may feel to do so.
And Sydney could shoot back (in true rule-lawyer fashion) “It stayed up, you didn’t say that it had to stay around ME all the time!”
like i said earlier… that only applies IF her ADHD let’s her REMEMBER that order…. as well as, if her competitive streak let’s her “lose” to Math and Anvil’s body count, without trying to get ahead of them…
While I couldn’t totally rule out the possibility, I would think it unlikely given she’s beginning to realize that she’s dealing with extremely dangerous people (second panel) and she’s demonstrated the ability to deal with opponents without having to drop the field.
Figured Dabbles was just re-summoning the sword from the tree (wonder if she could pull that trick with a stoney sword?), specially with the angle of the sword
You forgot to add Harem to the “Who’s who.” box, if Wart made it, so should she (and well spotting by Abbey, no way Bodie would have been able to *vorp* out without getting slashed otherwise)
Poor Brook, the first confirmed Arc-casualty
Can remember way back in the day, on a school camp, was chopping wood barefoot on gravel and the axe missed the wood and chopping block, fortunately for me the axe-head connected with the ground first and dug in becuase the edge of the blade stopped just between the big toe and the one beside it (connected with the skin between, but didn’t break or cut it)
Promptly put the axe away and went to put shoes on!
Considering that it caused Brooke to lose concentration and fry two of his teammates, Speedy might want to downplay this fact- at least in front of his fellow super-villains. He might also consider adding a blunt weapon or two, since knocking her unconscious would have been much safer.
he won’t care what they think, if he even acknowledges them having an issue with him. after all, he called them “slow-pokes”… to me that makes me think that he has a less-than-complementary view of anyone but himself… worst case scenario, he could just say that Heatwave “TRIED” to blast HIM, but he was too fast for her and that Heatwave just “missed” and they were in the way, “oops, sorry guys” (with a slight snicker behind their backs as they leave his presence…)
Hence the addition of the phrase “at least in front of his fellow super-villains”. He can snicker at them all he wants to behind their backs, would not be smart (although I readily acknowledge that his vanity might override his intelligence).
Ack… “behind their backs, would not be smart” should be “behind their backs, doing so openly probably would not be smart”
ach… i read it, but totally missed it as well, sorry…
Also, does this mean she’ll be on ABC’s Wide World of Sports?
After all, she’s experienced the “agony of de feet”.
You’re showing your age, that program went off the air in 1998. Of course Wikipedia does state the phrase is part of the culture so you may have been around someone who used it…
…Sydney is about to discover a power or power combo, isn’t she?
DaveB, have you read the webcomic Errant Story, by Michael Poe? (NSFW, by the way) It’s finsihed now, but among the many things in it was an order of monks who used time magic to essentially turn themselves into speedsters. They are considered one of the deadliest groups in existence throughout most of the comic. A few ways to counter them were found late in the series, but they were still seriously dangerous.
https://grrl-power.wikia.com/
Register, and if you can: you can put it full of data. If not, there’s gotta be a ‘contact admin’ link or something that you can request access to create pages from.
Cool, hopefully anyone can edit that, cause I don’t have time to do it myself.
Yeah, I’m hoping for that as well.
The ‘you’ was meant as the plurar, but I kinda misplaced it as a direct reply to Yorp. And then, at midnight, my lazy ass just copy pasted the post and put it here :p
Everybody can edit and add pages :)
Oh, brilliant thanks! I shall have to look at a few other wikis and see how they set up entries. I have only touched on a few, in the past, just looking up specific issues, so am not really aware how these things are structured. For instance, do they just work, like Wikipedia seems to, on key words? Or is it necessary to set up sections, such as “locations” and “characters.”
Given the comments DaveB made earlier, I am guessing it is a good idea to avoid “heroes”, “vigilantes” and “villains”, as it might not be clear which characters fell into each category? We certainly would not want to ask Dave to clarify any such points, as they would constitute spoilers, which we would not want to introduce into the Wiki.
So that was purely to express the thought as to how practical it would be to set entries up on that basis, given that the categories might be either vague or possibly changing. For instance Harem might either be a hero or a villain at the moment. Likewise, somewhere, we need to set up the disclaimer that this is fan-created, and not cannon, so that no one will get any wrong impressions when reading it. So that any judgement call we make, is known to be fan speculation, rather than the word-of-god.
Likewise I assume it is possible to set up re-directs, like in Wikipedia, so that if anybody searches for “Sydney” or “Schoville”, they get re-directed to the Halo page? I am guessing these can be done retro-actively? So that we can set up villains under their temporary ARC code name, only, later, re-naming it once their official name is revealed. And then setting up the re-directs from their code name (and/or real names, should those crop up at any point).
If structure is not important, and creating new entries is intuitive, then we can just start populating the wiki with characters. I will probably just start with some simple ones, who do not have multiple names or complex entries, when I do. But first I will have a look around to see how these things are normally done.
I will not rush into it though, as I would not want to bollox things up by setting stuff up the wrong way. If there is anyone used to these things, and wants to get the ball rolling, please do not wait on me. It takes me quite a while to familiarise myself with new things, especially if having to build up the confidence, that I know what I am doing, enough to start a project from scratch.
Thanks for getting things to this stage MuchachoNL. It gives us the basic framework within which we can start. If no one else beats me to it, I will start experimenting, with minor characters, at a later date. Right now though, I have only just got in, after a long day. And could not access the comic at all last night. So I have a bit of catching up to do.
If you want to dive deeper into the subject, I can make your useraccount Admin as well. Right now I’ve amped the Cast page a bit with mugshots stolen… errrr…. *borrowed* from the cast page here (set the copyright to: I don’t have copyright, but the one who does gave permission to use it) and you raise a good question. At the Wiki it’s set as Main characters and Supporting Characters… and also there’s a fine line to tread there. When is a character a main character and when is it a supporting character?
For me, since it’s told from Sydney’s point of view, only she should be the Main character.
But then again, she has a daily interaction with Maxima, Harem, Dabbler, Peggy etc. so are they also main characters? Funny thing to discuss :)
Anywho, right now we only have a Cast page, but anybody is free to add pages, and I’ll link them all in the main page, since I can’t figure out the proper navigation. (It’s my first Wikia page as well)
Could do. Or, if you are happy with the nuts and bolts side of things, I am fine with avoiding it myself. To avoid me getting too obsessed with the technical side of things. But am happy to pull my weight, if you are not into that so much.
Clearly Sydney is our principle protagonist. But, reading between the lines, there are actually five. Namely Halo, Maxima, Dabbler, Anvil and Harem. Anvil is actually just a guess, as we have not seen things from her point of view yet (in isolation). But I base it on the cast banner at the top of the page.
Refresh the screen a few times, to get the pictures to change, and you will see that the first five characters are always the same. Those I just listed. Whereas the rest, of the cast, share the final portrait slot randomly. If you think back through the comic, we have always had one of these individuals present in every scene. Usually it is Sydney. But we have had quite a few with Maxima, such as in the ambulance, or in in conference with the senior staff.
Likewise, we have seen Harem teleporting off to Machina Industries and the armoury. And the sniping shot with Peggy. I am pretty sure we have not had the story from anyone else’s perspective. Barring, of course, the odd frames like someone at the end of a phone line, or flashback memories or mental speculation.
Dabbler’s one scene, with the Demon forecasting the ‘great burning’, sort of straddles these two areas. It was significant enough though, that I feel it has crossed the boundary. And feel confident, beyond that, taking into account her history, that she will feature heavily as a central protagonist.
Anvil is the one I would not be sure to include, in that category, though. She may yet have her day, but at the moment, we could not say she is a main character at the moment. Although Dave may have been intending to make her central, he could since have decided that spreading the story too thin, across to many points of view, might be pushing it too far. I think we will just have to wait and see.
Not that I feel it would be necessary to make the distinction, other than for the sake of interest. We will be listing all of the characters, eventually, either way.
True, but an anonymous user started with the 5 Main Characters you mentioned (Sydney, Max, Dabbler, Harem and Anvil) and an empty Support Characters field.
And I’ve seen Arianna plenty of times in the top bar, even now when I’m typing this…
So I’m not sure to follow that one, but sure: I get your point.
Now I’ve also added Heatwave and Peggy, and I was starting to wonder where to draw the line.
Stalwart is ARCSwat, so a big gun, but he had like, what, 6 appearances?
Same goes for Mr. Amorphous and Achilles.
So I’m kind of wondering if we shouldn’t just list them all alphabetically without any distinguishing between Main/Support/Villain ?
I think that the main list should always be alphabetic. People will most likely be looking for a specific character by name, and will have have to guess the judgement calls we made if it were to be split up. That would not stop folks from setting up separate lists split different ways. Just that the most visible and accessible option should be the alphabetic. If they are after something else, then they can look on for the next options, after that.
So…something of a silly thought…why not just group them by association/team? You know, put ARCSWAT Team A in one group, Team B in another, Villain Group A in a third, etc? That way, you’ll be able to cover any shifting allegiances quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
You know, now that I think about it…Dave, if you want, I could see if I could put together a program for you, to only reveal characters on the cast page depending on how far the reader has progressed through the archive? Plus, that way, as the archive progresses, new information could be revealed, and characters could be moved around as the story progressed, without causing spoilers.
If you want me to try it, shoot me an email at whlindsa@yahoo.com.
Pfft! Yet another program that insists on using foreign. I get fed up with that! I make sure that my options always have my language preferences set. But will they choose to check that? No. Instead, they go, ‘ahh, Bulgarian IP address, he must use prefer Bulgarian.’
So now, in order to authenticate a new account, I have to try and read almost incomprehensibly blurred Cyrillic characters. And then try to type them, using a keyboard which does not support that.
Do they really want people to have to access their services via a proxy in another country, just so they can get through the identification process? Or are they expecting us to use virtual keyboards, or other get-arounds? Given that their is no ‘change language’ option visible, and that the help is in foreign, I guess they simply do not care about users who do not fit in the majority groups.
To cap it all off, they do not even indicate whether the email address will be visible to other users or not! Which I simply do not leave to chance.
I think I will just be an anonymous user myself, for now. I just get too irritated, at being made to jump stupid hurdles.
Weird, I’m from The Netherlands, with prime language Dutch, but Wikia was all in English.
The body of it is fine. It is just the account set up/authentication program, that generates the wobbly text, which is the problem. Because Dutch and English share a common alphabet, that would not have been a noticeable problem to you. You can still recognise the characters, and they all appear on your keyboard.
But no biggie, unless anonymous users have any restrictions.
Mind you I know that Wiipedia gets around the issue of troll postings, by making the IP address of anonymous users available, instead of the login name. Which is even more worrying, than showing the email address, now that I think about it.
*assumes hang-dog personified expression*
There’s a tremendous selection of character pictures to use for some of the characters (the ones at the top of the page)
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/wp-content/themes/comicpress/images/page_gfx/halo/port-halo-006.jpg
replacing the person’s name goes to a different person
numbers that work for different characters
Halo 006-094
Max 002-066
Dabbler 001-019
Anvil 001-008
Harem 001-020
Nice, thanks.
DaveB, is it alight with you if we use such images, and/or ones cropped from elsewhere in the comic? Obviously, if it is acceptable, we would incorporate a disclaimer, that the copyright of the images, names and distinctive likenesses remain with you, and that your permission would be required for other uses.
Plus, are there any guidelines you would like us to follow in the Wiki?
Some of these I don’t recall having seen in the comic though.
For example dabbler 019 is green.
I’ve seen that one. Several times.
Too lazy to look for the link right now, but it’s from the ‘discussion’ she had with the Archon board. She was reading their desires and projecting them back. In this case a “green skinned alien babe”.
Oh, I was just referring to it appearing in the banner rotation fairly frequently. Yea, there was only the one instance of the image appearing in the story, which was that scene. I did link it elsewhere in the comments for this issue, yesterday, or the day before. But, likewise, don’t fancy looking for it again.
Wondering why speedy did not do a carreer as a never-spotted pickpocket or other safer such (criminal or not). I suppose a secondary effect of super powers is a bit of PRRRRIDE??
Especially if the superheroine in question is Shadowcat.
You cab probably get paid allot more in one job as a assassin than fleecing pocket change from peoples wallets. Besides where’s the challenge in that? Speedsters love a good challenge weather its foot racing superman around the world, or breaking into the pentagon.
A well-placed banana peel+mach 2 on the ground = ‘slip and slide’ being his name via headset.
So DaveB. Your comments about “millions of degrees” kindled my interest so I did the math (with tons of assumptions, as per necessary for amateur physics that doesn’t use a super-computer for full-on simulation). [Thanks for giving me problems to torture my students with, btw: MUAHAHA]
So… in order to effectively protect herself from bullets, all Heatwave needs to do is maintain an effective zone of about 1 meter from herself at 8000 degrees Centigrade. Not millions of degrees. That’s of course if she doesn’t get sprayed with the equivalent of high-velocity water. Even with vaporization of bullets, it would be about 200,000 degrees Centigrade… Not millions.
Of course, this calculation was based on many assumptions, in order of sketchiness (* indicates reference was used to back up assumption):
1. assumption that density of air doesn’t change under heat (it does. Also, heatwave must be immune to heat as well as oxygen deprivation… otherwise her having the ability at all is a bad idea…)
1a. Assumption that Heatwave is immune to heat-based damage (liquid metal on skin, super hot air, etc.)
2. Heatwave doesn’t need to vaporize the bullets… all she has to do is melt them and keep them liquid as they splash onto her. (Enthalpy of fusion is usually significantly lower than than Enthalpies of vaporization, saves energy and heat and temperature needed to heat air up to; because fuck vaporization)
3. The air can effectively transfer at least half the heat it holds to the bullet as it contacts and moves though it (Metals being effective conductors of heat can absorb it easily).
4. The bullet is a copper-plated lead bullet composed of approximately 10% copper and 90% lead
5*. The bullet has a mass of .03 kg and travels at a velocity of 1000 m/s
Y’all are smart kids. I’ll leave the mathing up to y’all :P. (Hint: enthalpy of fusion, enthalpy of vapoirzation, and molar masses for elements are needed, so are density of air, mass of air the bullet contacts, and heat equations.
[References:
bullet mass: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/ShantayArmstrong.shtml
muzzle velocity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_velocity
Enthalpy of Fusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
Enthalpy of Vaporization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
List of enthalpy of fusion for elements: https://periodictable.com/Properties/A/FusionHeat.an.html
List of enthalpy of vaporization for elements: https://periodictable.com/Properties/A/VaporizationHeat.html
Periodic Table of Elements: https://www.bpc.edu/mathscience/chemistry/images/periodic_table_of_elements.jpg
specific heat of air: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-specific-heat-various-pressures-d_1535.html
Density of air (at 1 atm, dry air at 20C): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_of_air
Amount of mass of air that bullet “encounters” (assumption using density of air and volume of bullet travel path inside the zone of influence 1m)
heat equations (Q=mC*delta T)]
And really DaveB. Any superpower that breaks the laws of physics “breaks too much stuff”; used and thought of in a correct manner would result in mass mind-fuckery. Which is why we don’t think that much about it and just enjoy the superpower stories. Don’t feel too compelled to limit Heatwave’s power because of logic. This is a superhero comic. Fuck logic: “She can stop bullets but not go through mountains.” “Whhyyy?” “Because that’s just how it is. Deal with it”
Besides. don’t forget just because you can vaporize bullets doesn’t mean you can vaporize larger objects (the whole energy/power dealie)
See but part of the fun with sci-fi/superheroes/fantasy is to think of the logical extension of tech/powers/magic and come up with ways that do break the world. Star Trek’s transporters is the prime
directiveexample. There would be a whole branch of Starfleet dedicated to exploiting transporter tech. There are two Rikers, why not devote a hundred scientists to figuring out how that happened and making a Data for every ship in the Federation? Or improve transporters so they could breach shields. Every fight would be over in a second. Transport key crew members to your brig, or transport a photon torpedo onto their bridge. Don’t even get me started on the genre breaking transwarp transporters in the Abrams Trek verse. Kahn had a personal transwarp transporter that beamed him from Earth to Kronos. What possible use is there for starships if you have tech like that? :)I believe subspace transporters can go through shields in Star Trek.
Research abandoned due to range issues and also it’s safety issues near any space anomalys.
From a series episode or film. I am only a mainstream Trekkie. Used once by ferengie I think.
It was a TNG episode, with that Ferengi who blames Picard for his son’s death. But, there’s supposed to be about a40% chance of getting your quarks spread across a lightyear or something, IIRC – not that that actually happens to anyone in the episode…
Poor Quark. I know he is quite a rogue, but he is a nice enough fellow. What did he do to offend the Cosmos enough that he risks gets randomly disintegrated, if somebody tries to use that means of travel?
40% chance of failure?
That’s more than reliable enough for beaming over high explosives. If it fails you just try again
Unless of course the failure was at the transmitting end. A 40% chance of blowing up your ship, or your transporter room, is not quite such a viable tactic.
But even that can be worked around. You could contain the blast with armour and/or a purpose maintained force field, around the transporter. Keeping as much of the mechanism on the safe side as possible. And using cheap, easily replaced, components, where available, inside the danger area. The cost of replacing teleporter parts is bound to be less than the risk posed from an enemy warship.
Learn from the disposable razor blade, and design the devices accordingly. So that you can just slot in the replacement parts. Only make sure that you have sufficient teleport weapons bays, and technicians (or an automated repair/replacement process), in order to keep enough functional, at any one time.
Even easier would be to transport a binary bomb: a bomb made of two components that are individually inert. You could even use two transporter rooms for this. If it failed on the sending end, no biggie.
Smart.
The cloning thing would be beyond controversial. Also they once used the transporter to de-age someone who had been affected by a virus that caused her to rapidly age.
The transwarp teleporter was brought up in the enterprise series. A scientist attempted it and his son who had used it was killed. Particles left drifting through space with an odd energy being left behind.
Plus it would only work if you had the exact precise coordinates each an every time and the computations for that alone would be impractical. Dozens of supercomputers working solely on it combined with power requirements make it unusable. Khan’s was pretty much a stolen prototype based off of Scotty’s work.
Anyways, much more feasible to just yanks wires and other stuff out of the ship leaving it a derelict with only life-support than kidnap the crew and blow it up.
The de-age was them using the transporter as a medical kit, if I recall correctly. Scan the body as it goes through the system and remove anything that wasn’t part of ‘human’ baseline.
Which leads to some really awkward issues – if they can do that, what else can they modify? What else have they modified, without people knowing about it? You could do eugenics on a massive scale… (And why didn’t they discover Bashir was enhanced the first time he beamed aboard?)
They didn’t spot Bashir enhancements because they weren’t looking, I presume. That much is realistic. You don’t see what you don’t know to test for.
Under normal circumstances, the transporter reads a person or object, stores that data and uses it to reconstitute the person object at the destination. So of course Bashir’s altered data was there for ay one with access to see and notice. But normally that data isn’t presented to the transporter operator. Its a lot of data after all. And even if it was, how many transporter operators are trained medical specialists who can analyze DNA?
As to altering the pattern, yes its possible once alterations have been identified. Replicators including food replicators are essentially mini transporters. X amount of material goo is beamed out of a storage tank. The pattern altered to match the requested item. Material is beamed into the replicator terminal. For recycling, you place leftovers back in terminal and the terminal reverses the process. So all that would bee needed to turn a normal transporter pad into an oversize replicator, is the pattern alteration program. As seen, the capability to alter the matter stream and pattern already exists within the system.
One thing to keep in mind, even in Star Trek, replicators and transporters are power intensive systems. When power gets to be on the short side, Holodecks (Which also employ transporter/replicator systems), Replicators, and Transporters are among the first systems to be taken offline to conserve power. In ST-TNG we do not see this often as the Enterprise is operating in Federation space where fuel, and thus power is not an issue. However, Voyager was in a situation where they could not just simply stop by at a starbase to refuel or callin a friendly tanker, and thus had to ration power consumption. Thus the idea of replicator rations and holodeck times.
Answering the wrong question. In a universe with shapechangers and parasitic intelligences, every transporter on a military/government ship should have a standard, built-in filter that lights up a button saying ‘This individual is not what they appear to be. Beam directly to brig?’. I can’t imagine why it isn’t there: They know enough about each species to create a baseline, and normal variance, then all they have to do is check the input against the baseline. The computer should be doing it, not a human.
There are so many examples of lapses in logic when it comes to common security precautions on star ships in Star Trek that it goes beyond “sad”, past “so bad it’s funny”, and well off into “too stupid to be believed.”
Starfleet easily has the technology to be tracking the location of every member of the crew of the ship in real time. Security should always be aware if anyone tries to go somewhere they aren’t supposed to be, if there are more or fewer people on board than there ought to be, or if there are any unexpected environmental changes anywhere in the ship.
None of the ship’s systems should allow themselves to be operated by anyone not specifically authorized to be using them. That includes the doors and turbolifts.
I could probably write entire pages of simple and obvious stuff like this.
All they need to do is keep a pet tribble in the transporter room. If it squawks after someone beams in, the person is a Klingon.
Any transporter operator who analyses my DNA, for any purpose, other than ensuring that the machine will not scramble me up, in transporting me, shall be shot on making the attempt.* My permission to transport me does not extend to conducting unauthorised medical or scientific examinations.
* Lesser penalties will be tolerable, if adequate in degree to reflect the seriousness of the crime. But only if the local judicial system does not allow immediate execution. I certainly would not expect them to be allowed to remain in their job. Nor to ever be allowed in a position of responsibility again.
On a purely civilian vessel, I’d agree. On a warship or battlestation, not so much. DS9 is therefore borderline: It’s under civilian jurisdiction, but military control. Enterprise – the flagship of the Federation fleet – I’m going to say should have basic protections against enemy sabotage.
That makes a lot more sense, I had thought the replicators turned energy into matter, but then I realized that a ship like the enterprise-d would spend more power on food than on propulsion.
a fair amount; the use of replicators- which are copiers based on transporters- regenerators, and mini transporters for medicine is fairly common.
there is a short list of unusual diseases and medical conditions they don’t work on ( for example, large scale radiation damage).
transporter data is stored in the ‘buffer matrix’ and its very large, even by their standards. It also decays; so just walking into a transporter bay at age 80 and beaming yourself back into your younger body tends to result in well, this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro_QpDJX-Sk
– Duck, all around start trek guru
The whole “de-aging” thing was one of the reasons why people say that Star Trek is very poor science fiction. They violate the Star Trek Universe “rules” on how the Transporter works, but only for that one episode. They never do it again, or explore the implications of what being able to edit a transporter template without killing the person would mean.
Don’t forget that Scott found a way of saving him and another man who unfortunately degraded too much to be brought back from the transporter buffer set on a closed loop for 74 years in “Relics.”
That at least is reasonable engineering. The machine feeds data into a temporary buffer, and then out to the destination. Reconfigure the system to feed into it’s own buffer, and you’ve got a closed loop – with possible loss. As long as the buffer is large enough (and if it’s a FIFO ring, that’s ‘large enough to hold the original data’), it should work.
souls- ie katras- exist in star trek, When a copy of a person is made via transporter, you don’t get the same person- in some way it either splits the katra ( good kirk, bad kirk) or creates a new one ( new riker is more of his twin than himself).
that’s also why people don’t die when they get dematerialized- the soul/ katra/ memory engram just gets moved.
as to vast hordes of datas, they discussed that in an episode (the measure of a man)( it’s good, watch it ). The judge decided data was a person, with full human rights, and could chose when or if he wanted to copy himself. Also, in some way, artificial intelligences in star trek have ‘selves’ too- that’s why data, his brothers, and his daughter are all different people.
lastly, please ignore STID. It should be called ST- VD. it’s soooo not canon.
I though Kirk was the one who had to worry about catching an STD in TOS every other episode.
In Stargate: Atlantis they touched that subject of just transporting explosive devices onto Wraith hive ships. I think they were battling the jamming sequencers of the Wraith that would allow transporting to and from their ships. In Star Trek it’s the shields that prevent people from being beamed up/down.
It’s been a long time, but I believe those wraith ships also didn’t have shields.
Just alot of flighters shooting down missles
See, this is what I don’t understand about the transporter tech: if you can operate transporters the way they’re supposed to work, there is nothing preventing you from building entire warships in an instant. And if that’s true, the only limit on how much a society could produce would, logically, be how good their fine control of the process was, and how much energy they could safely produce. And Star Trek notices this, and has the replicators, and it’s all good…except they never take it any farther. Because if you can build ships by magic (essentially), you should be able to REPAIR them by magic. Or even build drone starships, that can be controlled remotely, and which need little to no crew to fight (please note: this is NOT a good strategy for ships built for exploration, etc).
And if the Borg can adjust to the frequency of energy weapons, why don’t photon torpedoes work against them? Or, for that matter, why doesn’t anybody just fire a super-luminal projectile at them? Or take a ship’s artificial gravity, and rip the Borg apart? If you’ve got the energy budget to fight them in the first place (and every indication is that Starfleet does indeed have that kind of energy budget), you have a whole plethora of options that are never explored by the show or the fiction.
This is one of the things that bugs me about Star Trek: its writers have created a whole fantastically complex universe for the stories to happen in, and then given it the technological equivalents of ships closing to trade broadsides from black-powder cannons. Granted, they won’t think of everything the fan base does…but they don’t even try to put a unique perspective on the tech, or even to come up with a coherent tech system. They just go with rule of cool, and let it go at that.
I have never seen the point addressed, but I suspect there is a practical limit to just how large a Replicator can be, and likely a mass limit of some kind on Transporter technology. Starfleet is always shown building ships the hard way.
There are some things that Replicators cannot replicate. One of them is dilithium crystals. That would be one major limitation. Another would be getting hold of enough trained crews.
Starfleet does not quite have all the wrinkles worked out on artificial intelligence. This limits the use of autonomous drone ships.
Starfleet has faster-than-light communications, but those systems do not function for ships in Warp Space, and there can be significant lag in communication depending on how far a ship is from one of the communications relay stations. Remote piloted ships would have little utility.
You are correct, ship to ship combat in Star Trek resembles battles between ocean going Naval vessels. Pull up next to each other and exchange broadsides. Given the technology in the setting, that actually makes perfect sense.
Ships cannot detect or affect each other while in Warp space traveling faster than light. All starship combat in Star Trek takes place in Normal Space. That means the speed of light actually does make a difference. If you are too far away from your opponent, they will have time to dodge out of the way of your shots. Thus, fights take place in what qualifies as close range in astronomical terms.
Ships have Deflector Screens, or Shields, which are much like Sydney’s force field. They are proof against energy and matter attacks, and the ship inside the bubble cannot be harmed until you get rid of the bubble. It costs a lot of energy to maintain a shield, so if you keep shooting, eventually you will bring down the enemy’s shields.
Deflector Screens stop pretty much everything. Phasers, lasers, phased plasma in a 440 watt range, thrown rocks, sharp sticks, transporter beams, gravity beams, steel I-beams, and waxy yellow buildup.
The larger the ship, the bigger the power plant you can put in it. In the Star Trek universe, bigger is exponentially better, so having a power plant double the size of the one your enemy has gives you more than just double the power they have.
Thus, ship to ship combat in Star Trek will be large ships that move up next to each other and blast away, hoping to be the ones who bring down the other side’s shields first. There isn’t a whole lot of tactical subtlety that can be brought to bear. About all there is to it is deciding how much power will be put to the shields and how much to the weapons.
Phasers, the Good Ole Generic Energy Weapons in Star Trek, work well against shields, but don’t do that much to hulls. Photon Torpedoes don’t do much against shields, but they are great once the shields are down.
The writers do try and find clever ways to mix things up. They throw in weapons made by non-human cultures that work differently.
When they invented the Borg, they decided that Deflector Screens didn’t actually deflect all forms of energy at the same time. Instead, keeping up your shields involved changing the Frequency of your Shields constantly to make sure you kept all the bands covered. This was done by the ship’s computer, which would change the frequency of your shield randomly and at random intervals measured in nanoseconds. The Borg, having Superior Technology, were able to adjust the Frequency of their Phasers faster than Star Fleet ships could change the Frequency of their shields. Thus, Borg Phasers would go right through Star Fleet ship shields.
The Borg use Shields too, of course. They tended to show up to fights with ships that had power plants bigger than the entire ship they were fighting against. That made them rather difficult to fight against.
*sigh* Missed out closing off that blockquote again.
Of course, if you have a combined replicator/teleporter, you can just use the single machine to build the entire structure being manufactured. Just like a printer head moving along. Except the parts are being teleported directly into their final destination, upon construction.
It’s not even that much sci-fy anymore.
We already have replicators. 3D printers. Offcourse they don’t teleport stuf from somewhere else, but they can build whatever you tell the computer to build.
Put in the right cardridges, and it’ll print you a pizza.
3D printers can print anything, including complicated, moving parts. If we can do that, replicators should also be able to do it
In Star Trek, building a starship in a shipyard isn’t exactly a matter of people running around using hand tools. The parts will be coming out of Replicators, large and small. Things will be put into place using Transporters.
One reason for doing it this way might be because the ships can be altered from the base design during the construction. They can customize things, make attempts to modernize older designs, or even install experimental systems for live testing.
Another thought is that citizens of the Federation might place a higher value on things that have been created “by hand” rather than simply replicated.
With effectively unlimited power generation, and the ability to convert energy directly to matter, the Federation is a society of nearly limitless material wealth. No citizen of the Federation goes hungry. Everyone has all the necessities and luxuries they wish. The Federation has evolved beyond the need for money. People do not hold jobs to get paid, they work because they enjoy what they do.
Starfleet is no different. Every member of Starfleet is a volunteer. It is for this reason why I suspect the biggest limiter on the number of ships Starfleet has in service is the supply of trained crew. Even if the Federation decided they’d like to increase the number of ships in the fleet, they have no direct way to get more people to join Starfleet.
Not that this creates a problem. Starfleet has all the ships they seem to want or need. When the plot calls for ships to be scarce, they explain it by saying that all the ships are scattered around the galaxy, rather than being conveniently nearby when the crisis comes.
There is one aspect of technology that the Federation hasn’t got figured out, and that is artificial intelligence that is as capable of problem solving as living sentients. Starfleet doesn’t seem to use all that much automation, and their tests of drone ships have always been disastrous.
Within human society there will always be a market for customisation, personalisation and craftsmanship. But, now that we know that off-the-shelf is much more cost-effective that concept will not just go away. Especially now that we can combine the two into a single combined model. We are in the era, now, where you can say, “Ok, I will go for your standard model. I want it in black though, with all metallic parts tinted gold.”
You will not need to specify that you need it to fit you, any such modification would be considered as standard, for any society that had progressed through 3D printing and beyond. Scanners will just pick out your body size/shape (and/or other blatantly obvious needs like life support for your species) and make the normal adjustments automatically.
.For both this point, and the one above, do not worry, natural evolution will sort the problem out. If humanity/the Federation fails to take into account the more efficient options available, their competitors and enemies will be very happy.
“Cost Effective” has a limited meaning to a society with all but limitless material wealth. Features that a less wealthy society would consider unimportant or as luxuries might get a higher priority simply because they can afford it.
The advantage that Replicating entire ships at once would have is that it’s quick and easy.
The advantage that building ships in a ship yard has is that you can make changes.
To my knowledge, Starfleet has never had a pressing need for more ships in a big hurry. They chose to build them in shipyards.
I don’t quite understand why you would think this would put the Federation at a disadvantage. So long as they have the requisite number of ships when they need them, does it matter how much time and effort went into the construction?
I refer you to “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, my favourite episode.* In it there is a single change in history, where the Federation do not make peace with the Klingons, but get into a fight to the end. The Federation were on the brink of loosing the war, and surrendering. Despite having taken extreme measures, such as only making dedicated warships (the Enterprise was not commissioned as a science vessel). And diverting all energy from non-essential things, including the replication of non-standard emergency ration-type food.
That episode is not alone. The Federation are often portrayed as being outnumbered, and hard pressed to field enough vessels, in an emergency or a war. For instance the shape-shifter invasion fleet that came through Deep Space 9.
Clearly, if they have literally unlimited wealth and energy, they are useless at stockpiling reserves for emergencies. And those kinds of vessels could be heavily automated, and officered by reservists, who only get called up in the event of an overwhelming disaster or war.
But, all these anomalies happen because immediate plot and entertainment, for each episode, takes precedence over a realistic exploration of where the changes, in technology and society, might take us. Plus the fact that the show had it’s roots in the 60s. A time when we were not anticipating the information revolution to be quite as dramatic as it was.
Things that we can easily do, and envisage, by means of computers and programs would amaze folks of that era dropped here today. Although they would wonder why we do not have aircars and bases on the moon.
I can still remember holding my first computer in my hand (a ZX-81) and thinking, wow, now that I have upgraded it’s memory, it is as powerful as those building-sized computers NASA had, in order to send man to the moon. All 16Kb of it. So whilst warp drives might have seemed realistic, AIs would not.**
* A TNG one, even though I prefer DS9 as a series.
** Data came later. Although, ironically, we are a lot further away from real AIs than we might think. Do not let robots or computers make battlefield life or death decisions, for another couple of (our) generations. They will get it wrong.
I stopped watching Star Trek shortly before the Dominion War. After Gene Roddenberry passed away, the stuff they were writing really didn’t seem much like Star Trek anymore.
One thing that could never happen to the Federation would be losing a war due to lack of resources. Their technology makes that impossible. There would never be a need for rationing. They would have all the Stuff they might want or need right up until the day the last Human was killed.
I never said they -couldn’t- replicate entire ships if needed. I said that I’d never seen them need to, and unless they really needed to, they probably would go on building ships in shipyards.
I wish they had kept on making episodes in which social and philosophical issues were examined, thinly disguised by a veneer of science fiction. Those were always the ones that left you thinking about something other than how badly the writers had screwed up some aspect of technology or continuity.
Our first computer was a Spectrum ZX-81 as well! Loved the ‘Horace’ series of games (we had 3 different titles) :D
Yes, they are shown building ships the hard way, which is sort of what I mean. As is said elsewhere, it should be trivial to build ships by means of massed replicators and transporters–sort of a constant process, which would, I would guess, take something like a couple of weeks for a major warship. At most. And yet, they build them the hard way, which appears to take months, if not years.
While they say that replicators cannot make dilithium crystals, they never (to my knowledge) explain why. I mean, they can essentially replicate an entire human being, complete with memories and personality, at will (this is, supposedly, how transporters work). But they can’t replicate one lousy crystal? The hey?
Drone ships: who needs AI to manage these? You’ve got FTL communications, that can contact a ship moving at Warp speeds (this is shown on the show, so I know it’s possible. For all practical purposes, you could remotely pilot these ships from enormous distances (7 light years or more), making finding the pilots practically impossible.
Plus, why the heck are they having problems creating the AI for these ships? Look at all that we can do with computers now–why would we expect the computers of the 24th Century to be at about the same level? You don’t need true AI for drone ships–just a computer good enough to handle most known contingencies, and a subspace transmitter to call for further instructions in case of an anomaly.
Ship to ship combat in the setting does NOT explore all possibilities. No mention of using something like a missile with single-shot energy weapon as its warhead is ever made, the concept of weapons that move at FTL speeds is ignored entirely, and, while mention is made of self-replicating minefields, no mention is ever made of translating that same concept to something like a warp-capable missile. This last is particularly surprising, since, given Starfleet’s rather lighter vessels, one would think that they would be particularly excited about anything that let them engage from extra-solar ranges.
Ships can most certainly detect AND effect each other while moving at Warp speeds. If not, the Picard maneuver would be nothing more than so much stupidity. Plus, photon torpedoes are Warp-capable weapons, which would make them automatically able to engage vessels moving at Warp speeds, no matter how Warp travel worked.
Deflector screens, if they work the way you describe, would be absolutely useless, regardless of who you are fighting–all you would need would be an energy weapon (like, say, a phaser) that could hit along a wide array of frequencies, and then sheer luck and/or computer power would guarantee that, sooner or later, you’d be able to ignore the enemy’s shields. In that kind of combat, being able to get the first shot in would almost always result in total victory–once you’d isolated the enemy’s shield frequencies (preferably while lying doggo in space), you fire once to punch through the shields, and you’ve won.
Deflector screens are described in the fiction as stopping MOST things…but not everything. Since they supposedly work by creating a high-gravity field around the ship, that slows and/or deflects incoming projectiles, energy, etc, this makes sense–some things would be able to correct for the shield, and punch right through. Subspace weapons, for instance, are shown in the movies as being extremely dangerous even to ships with fully-powered shields.
Phasers are shown on numerous times to be able to work just fine against starship hulls, thank you very much. There would be little reason to use them if this were not the case, as torpedoes are shown to work against shields. Even if they did not, however, a simple EMP attack would disable the shields described earlier in your post.
While it is true that, the larger the ship, the larger the power plant, we have definitive proof that Starfleet was no longer limited by this rule, as it was beginning to deploy weapons using zero-point energy reactors. Starships, on the other hand, with so much more space to work with, still used regular matter/anti-matter warp cores. All evidence suggests this was completely unnecessary…but even the Enterprise-E uses a main reactor that is known to be completely obsolete (compared to zero-point energy), and absolutely insufficient to confront Starfleet’s enemies.
A reactor in the Star Trek universe that is double the size of a previous reactor would give about eight times the power. It is shown, however, that one volley from Starfleet’s newest capital ships can completely destroy a Borg cube…if it’s placed correctly. This suggests that the immunity enjoyed by the Borg has more to do with hull and materials design than anything to do with shields or energy generation.
And while the writers do, indeed, try to mix things up, they never think the implications through. The Federation of TNG, for instance, is supposed to be bigger, richer, and more advanced than the Federation of TOS…but the Federation shown struggles with the Cardassian Union, an entity that is described as dirt poor, and with few if any planets with a substantive industrial base (because if they DID have a substantial industrial base, there would be no need to plunder other worlds for their natural resources). Federation ships in TOS are portrayed as being at least equal, if not superior to anything used by the other major powers…but in TNG and DS9, the ships are effectively slightly inferior in everything but speed, as is shown in the Dominion Wars game. This would seem to indicate a power that valued the lives of its serving officers very lightly indeed, which, in turn, would require that ships be constructed quickly and cheaply…which is not done.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Star Trek is not created with technological consistency in mind so much as with political consistency (something which Star Wars seems to lack). The end result is a universe that lacks much in the way of narrative or historical consistency from episode to episode.
+1
Lot of points to address. I must admit that I stopped watching Star Trek somewhere along the line. I saw all of the Original Series, most of The Next Generation, some of Deep Space Nine, and the first 8 Star Trek movies.
Star Trek has always been really BAD science fiction. One of the reasons people say that is that plot always seemed to trump internal self consistency. They kept explaining how things worked and then changing things later on. Technologies might be introduced in one episode never to appear again no matter how useful they would have been.
I have kind of covered my thoughts about why Starfleet builds their ships rather than directly Replicating them in my comments to Yorp. I don’t think the issue ever came up in the show, so I don’t know if other explanations were ever given.
There was an episode of the Original Series called “Mudd’s Women” that talked about dilithium crystals as a background element. It was explained that the crystals had to be mined. They could not be Transported or Replicated. Attempts to do so resulted in explosions. Later episodes kept the idea. It was even a central element of one of the movies.
Speed of communication in Star Trek was faster than light, but not instantaneous. This was a major plot element in the Original Series, and continued to be brought up in Next Generation. Asking Starfleet for orders or instructions could take hours or days depending on how far away your ship was from one of the Subspace Relay Stations.
That’s the problem with remotely piloted vehicles. They would have fairly limited range. You have a point about drone ships smart enough to stop and ask for orders when they hit a problem they couldn’t solve. Given how long the delay in communications could be, it might simply be more practical to have pilots.
Artificial Intelligence was the subject of any number of plots. The Federation was never quite able to make it work. At least not to the extent that they could program a computer to problem solve as well as a living sentient. I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t believe that Artificial Intelligence will be possible to create until we fully understand Natural Intelligence, and we really don’t have the faintest clues on that yet.
I think you are a little confused about some of the basics of the Star Trek setting. (Or maybe they have changed things beyond recognition at this point.)
Normal Space is supposed to be just like what exists in the Real World. The laws of physics as they were known when the episodes were written apply. It is not possible to accelerate to the speed of light. It is impossible to detect anything traveling faster than the speed of light, and things traveling faster than light do not interact with things in Normal Space in any way. Ships travel in Normal Space using their Impulse Engines.
Traveling faster than light requires using the Warp Drive. The Warp Drive creates a field effect around the ship that isolates it from Normal Space and allows Space to be warped in such a way as to travel faster than the speed of light. While using their Warp Drives starships cannot detect, communicate with, or fight with other ships.
There is no Warp Space. That’s not how Warp Drive works. It’s more like making a bubble that hides your ship from the laws of physics. You can’t affect things outside the bubble, and your bubble does not connect in any way to the bubbles around other ships.
Thus it is that there are no “FTL Weapons” and all combat takes place in Normal Space.
For the record, the Picard Maneuver™ was a trick in which they turned on the Warp drive for a micro-second. Because sensors gather information at the speed of light, for a moment it looked to the enemy like there were two ships, and they could not tell which one they should be shooting at.
I never claimed that Star Trek came close to exploring all, most, or even all that many of the possibilities for combat between starships. What I was saying is that in the context of the technology used in Star Trek, the “Pull up alongside and exchange broadsides” model of combat makes sense.
The existence of Shields does rather simplify things. It doesn’t really matter what kind of missile you use if it can’t penetrate the shields. The shields worked very much like Sydney’s force field, meaning they just stopped everything dangerous from getting in while still allowing ships to see and fire out of them.
Interestingly, you could fire phasers from inside your shields, but not Transporter beams. That was used as a plot element a number of times. “Oh no! We can’t rescue our people because we would have to drop our shields to use the Transporter!”
How exactly Deflector Screens worked and what their limitations were is one of those things that seemed to change randomly depending on the plot.
I fully agree with you that the writers didn’t think things through most of the time.
Part of the reason for the changes you see over time have to do with the fact that Gene Roddenberry passed away. During his life he fought with the people who owned the Star Trek license -constantly- over what the Star Trek universe should be.
Roddenberry created a very utopian setting. With matter/anti-matter reactors the Federation had abundant power. With Replicators they could turn that power into nearly limitless material wealth. No citizen of the Federation ever needed to go hungry, or wanted for any necessity or luxury they could desire. Under such conditions the Human race made major advances, growing beyond the need for greed, prejudice, and war. The Federation didn’t use money. People didn’t hold jobs for pay, they worked because they enjoyed doing it, or felt it needed doing.
In theory, any race that developed to the point of having Warp technology would be in pretty much the same condition. There would be little reason for fights. There was nothing really to fight -about-.
The producers of Star Trek disagreed. They felt that their audience wanted space battles and lots of stuff blowing up. Exploration of social issues thinly disguised as science fiction wasn’t interesting enough.
There was a reason why Starfleet ships seemed to hold the edge in technology over their enemies. According to Roddenberry’s view of things, only civilizations less developed than Humanity would have any real desire for warfare. The ones who came looking for trouble with Starfleet were almost by definition savages and would have inferior technology.
The many, -many- civilizations the Federation encountered that had superior technology weren’t interested in fighting.
I kind of gave up on Star Trek after Gene Roddenberry passed away. It went downhill fast. He’d have never approved of something like what they did with the Cardassians. How could they be poor in a setting with Replicators?
+1
One minor point:
Yea, I remember saying that to a friend once too. My mistake being that he was a Star Trek writer, and fanatical Capitalist. He then proceeded to cite half a dozen canon examples of them using it.* One of which he was extremely smug about, having sneaked in himself.
I used to get my revenge teasing him about being a worshipper of Ayn Rand. Which used to tick him off no end. Mainly because he was, even though he refused to admit it to himself.
I can be a bad puppy sometimes.
*hangs head*
* I make no claims about whether Roddenberry approved those or not, as never came up.
I’d love to see these points, as far as I’m aware they didn’t use money within their own ranks. Stating that they paid a mercenary off with gold pressed latinum or something doesn’t change that point. It’s obvious that any civilization will have to trade with outsiders somehow, you can’t just go up to a Ferengi trader and tell them you want to buy that cloak enabled ship for study for free because your civilization doesn’t use money.
Sadly I did not save them for posterity. Mainly because I chose to ignore them. I too prefer that setting without money in it. I can easily envisage society without money, and there are multiple routes to achieving it. Which are not without president.
The utopian society thing, on the other hand, sadly, simply is an impossible dream. Even with unlimited resources, we still have a mix of different personality types, plus varying goals and desires, of individuals within society. So there will always be anti-social, psychopathic, and other negative elements, present in any future society. Unless humanity changes into something completely different.
I tend to put any instances of that into ‘setting decay’ – The Federation was intended to be past such things as money, by it’s original creators, but latter writers didn’t like it, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t make it work, etc, so they added in money and changed the setting – usually without realizing how much damage they were doing to the setting as a whole while they were doing so.
Instead of having the ‘drone’ ships go off doing their own thing, how about forming Battle Fleets: one Primary capital/flag ship with ‘drone’ ships acting in support, depending on how they were configured
Capital ships are a big juicy tempting target. Get one saboteur or other attack inside the shield and you can loose the lot. Personally I would go with dispersing the crew more widely in a fleet. Some aspects need a big, central, ship, such as to provide socialising and diplomatic facilities. But as much of the military crew should operate in autonomous ships, any of which could take control, in the event that the flag ship fell.
But, your principle I would stick with. Namely surrounding each of the smaller, crewed, vessels with a swarm of robotic ships. If you do have near limitless resources, you may as well give your precious squishies the maximum protection you can.
So rather than one ship with a couple of hundred crew, I would go for twenty ships with an average of six crew in each. Each of which had a full fleet of unmanned warships. Although you would want to have a large number of robotic marine transporters in the mix.
One of which, indistinguishable from the others, would be designated the flag ship. Most could have a crew as low as four, to ensure that there was always one human on watch, to make the command decisions. Allowing others to have more crew, such as those that needed to house research departments, plus the primary and auxiliary fleet command staff.
Then the remaining eighty crew would go on the diplomatic ship, where they could socialise, continue non-combat roles, and get in their rest and recuperation, in between serving their rotations on the smaller ships. But that vessel would not form any part of the robotic fleet command capability.
“Traveling faster than light requires using the Warp Drive. The Warp Drive creates a field effect around the ship that isolates it from Normal Space and allows Space to be warped in such a way as to travel faster than the speed of light. While using their Warp Drives starships cannot detect, communicate with, or fight with other ships.
There is no Warp Space. That’s not how Warp Drive works.”
https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Subspace
I’m sorry, you were saying?
I usually figure it’s a scale/resources issue: They have to get the mass from somewhere, and it has to be in a usable form. The form doesn’t have to match exactly what comes out, but it likely needs to be fairly refined or processed.
So a warship flying around has reasonable stores of materials it’s likely to use, and replicators probably work as some sort of recycler as well. But if you want to build a ship, you first have to mine and process all the materials – and by the time you’ve done that, you’ve done most of the work anyway, so it’s just as easy or easier to just build it directly instead of using replicator tech. (Which is likely energy-intensive; no problem on a warp-capable starship that has to be able to power shields and phasers, but there are probably ways that don’t use as much energy if you don’t need to.)
You end up with replicators being good for one-offs, prototypes, replacements, and emergencies, but not so great at mass production, compared to other tech. They are a great replacement for a machine shop on board the ship, but not so great for the shipyard that is building ships. Their speed makes transporters useful, despite energy disadvantages.
Mostly this. It’s worth noting that Federation starships don’t carry all the matter they need to fuel their replicators at all times. The fronts of the warp nacelles are equipped with what they call Bussard Ramscoops (because they ‘scoop by ramming’), which are essentially force field funnels that gather interstellar gasses and particulate as they travel at warp speeds (which is mostly various isotopes of hydrogen). They can then use that bulk matter for replicator purposes, refine it into Deuterium and Antideuterium, or let it pass out of the exhaust system. In essence, they fuel their ship and their replicators BY TRAVELING through the interstellar medium, which is only practical because the things they replicate are small, and their replenishment of stock instantaneous. That works for a starship, but it’s not workable for a shipyard, because we’re talking about making something a lot larger than a meal, and we’re talking about doing it at a stationary location, which means all the construction matter would need to be collected before it could be utilized… and it isn’t efficient to only use bulk matter (which is chiefly hydrogen) for that purpose. Starships get away with that because they’re flowing matter in and out of stockpiles intermittently while constantly refreshing their supply, but a stationary facility would want raw material that is as dense as they can get it without it being radioactive… which is basically by definition already refined versions of the material they would use to make the hull.
“Starfleet has faster-than-light communications, but those systems do not function for ships in Warp Space”
Er… yes it does, because the technology behind the FTL communication (subspace) is the same technology behind FTL propulsion. Yes, it’s not instant, but it’s not like ships are cut off communication-wise while traveling at Warp. There are numerous instances of ships receiving and transmitting at FTL speeds.
“Ships cannot detect or affect each other while in Warp space traveling faster than light.”
What? Yes they can. It happens all the time. For pete’s sake, we see an instance of two ships traveling at warp both tracking each other’s locations, but communicating with each other to synchronize courses and merge their warp fields so that they can physically transfer an engineer from launch bay to launch bay via a grapnel cable.
“All starship combat in Star Trek takes place in Normal Space.”
Nope. You’re correct that the vast majority of it does, because phasers are ineffective at warp speeds (they already use subspace technology as part of their confinement beams, so firing them while at warp means they lose confinement rapidly, and given the speed warp travel moves at, they’re effectively about as offensively valuable as a squirtgun when traveling at warp), but some of it does happen at chase speeds, and it is for those occasions that Photon Torpedoes were designed. Each is capable of short bursts of high warp speed when launched from a ship traveling at said speeds, and they’re explicitly called out as having this use in the technical manual. In fact, we see this in TNG when the Enterprise is desperately trying to outrun a Borg cube, and fires a spread of photon torpedoes from their aft launcher. At the time, they were close to redlining the warp core trying to maintain a speed in excess of Warp 9.7.
Interesting aspect of Transporter and Replicator technology. You could not replicate living creatures. Any attempt to do so got you a corpse. I believe this even applied to plants. You couldn’t replicate a living flower.
You could Transport living things, but you could not make “transporter clones”. Attempts to use the template for a living creature to make a second copy got you a coprse. There was something about living creatures that could not be detected by anything the Federation had that could not be duplicated.
Oddly enough, Mr. Data could not be replicated or copied either, which is a total mystery, as he’s not a living creature.
My personal theory is that the way the Transporter works proves the existence of the Soul in the Star Trek universe, and establishes that even plants have souls, as well as at least one Android. Riker must have had two.
Rodenberry (which sounds like something they put in breakfast cereal) said that the transporter in the original series could never bee too reliable, or there would be no dramatic tension. Every time the crew got into a dangerous situation, they could merely say ‘beam me up’ and the show would be over.
In the episode ‘The Enemy Within’ Kirk was split into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ copies. This kept the landing party from being beamed up until it was fixed for human transport. As they sat there slowly freezing to death, all I could think was ‘Sure, you can’t beam them up, but what’s keeping you from sending down a a tent and few nice warm blankets while they are waiting?” P.S. It’s the transporter that is broken, not the shuttle craft you idiots.
Why the hell would you use an unreliable transporter technology, when you’ve got perfectly reliable shuttles?
What would you be willing to bet that the rate of accidents involving the Transporter is lower than the rate of accidents involving shuttle craft? That trip for trip you are much more likely to return alive using the Transporter?
Very much the same thing as how people are often reluctant to fly, in spite of the fact that it is by far the safest way to travel.
Actually I’m reluctant to fly now more due to the TSA then the plane. Tho the fact that I’m not alllowed to bring weapons when I’m likely to be dropped off in a city with a higher murder rate than birth rate doesn’t really help.
Transporting a torpedo on enemy ship WAS done. To Borg, by Janeway, in Dark Frontier. They first overloaded the shields, then transported torpedo inside before Borg regenerated them.
Remember that shields are not single technology. Different ships can have different kind of shields, the developement of better shields never stopped. I’m sure StarFleet DOES have group of scientists working on transporters which can go through shields.
Generally, lot of one-episode stuff got ignored, but if something persist multiple episodes, it’s relatively well though-through. And in some of those one-episode stuff you can argue it has drawbacks, is not reproducible reliably or something.
Which is the classic arms-race issue. As there is inevitably an effort to develop shield-penetrating transporters, there is also an effort to develop new ways of disrupting (or, to paraphrase, shielding against) shield-penetrating transporters.
There was implied to be a similar technology race between Romulan cloaking devices and Federation sensors… which is partly why Federation sensors are widely regarded as some of the best scanning technology in the galaxy; they’ve spent the better part of a century sharpening them against Romulan stealth tech.
Whereas all the Ferengi have to do is open a door, so that they can hear the cloaked ship.
Making the bullets liquid just before impact actually makes them much more deadly. They cut into her like a waterjet, the speed and the mass are still there, but the energy is absorbed all at once, like a fragmenting bullet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_ballistics#Fragmenting
High Explosive Anti-Tank munitions work by exploding a feet or so away from the target and blasting a stream of molten metal through the armour it has. Melting the bullets into liquid will only make them more drop-shaped, improving their streamlining, and that would not really lessen the damage. Vaporizing is the way to go if one want air-resistance to be able to slow it enough. And that, as Dave decided, would be highly impractical. Even if it worked in a very small, contained band that retained the heat, it would cause all sorts of strange happenings. To stop a bullet efficiently, you explosively vaporize all or even better the front part of it. And that, unless targeted specifically at the projectile in question, would likely require heat in excess of that which you find in large lightning-strikes. The ones that blast up a tunnel of plasma straight through the athmosphere. (Which incidentally is what causes the sound of the lightningstrike) I agree with Dave when he says that kind of heat would be impractical. If nothing else, she, and people around her would have to be immune to ozone-poisoning before she could safely use it.
Incidentally, there have been thoughts on using electrostatic armours, where an inbound projectile would lower the resistance enough between a network of electrodes enough to cause a spark to jum between them and the projectile, causing partial vaporization or at least softening solid penetrators enough for regular tank armour to defeat the hits. As far as I know, they have not even gotten to an experimental stage due to the power-requirements for such a system… And also, it would make any kind of electronic stealth or countermeasures totally impossible.
Before you drop that question onto your students, you should know that you have made a mistake in your assumptions. Your calculation assumes that heat transfers instantly from the air displaced by the bullet into the bullet. That doesn’t happen in real life. If it does, it would be impossible to drink soup with a spoon since it will become too hot to hold the instant you put it into your soup.
The correct (and waaay more complicated) method would require finding out the rate of heat energy transfer between the bullet and the air, aka the heat transfer coefficient. To makes matters even more complicated, the heat transfer coefficient is not a constant because when the surface of the bullet will melt first and insulate the rest of the bullet. Solid > Liquid > Gas when it comes to heat transfer.
Secondly, to get an answer that’s even remotely accurate you need to take into account of the flow condition around the bullet. Because of turbulence, the bullet will “carry” along with it a thin layer of cold air, which insulates it from the hot air. (Gas is a pretty terrible heat conductor)
Thirdly, at that sort of temperature we are no longer dealing with air. Rather, we are working with plasma, which is a completely different ball game. Not only is it hot, it is also corrosive because of all the free radicals. In addition, conventional fluid modelling is no longer applicable since plasma molecules are charged and interact with each other at long range (most fluid models assumes that the gas particles do not interact at long range).
tl;dr You don’t really want to get into this.
Source: I am a chemical engineer. Heat transfer is what I do.
I read it! And it was very interesting.
Yeah, I was curious as to why everyone seemed to have different numbers for what it would take to melt a bullet, so I started to do the math. Then I got to that.
Were this a Saturday, I’d have had nothing better to do, weekdays are busy however.
You are, of course, absolutely right about the rate of heat transfer. Thanks for helping identify another totally sketchy assumption!
Don’t worry, this won’t end up as a test question (There would be no way in hell they’d be able to complete this question within a reasonable amount of time; this is also the reason we don’t actually throw any half-baked question into a test, another teacher actually looks at it first, lol). I’m planning on just make it an optional extra credit homework assignment once I can write up a solution that can hopefully eliminate some of the more sketchy assumptions.
The rate of heat transfer is definitely important enough it can’t be hand-waved, so I’ll take a look into incorporating that. While I’ll see about getting as technically accurate an solution as I can (short of actually conducting the experiment), I’m more interested in seeing how they’ll to work on solving the problem.
I can answer assumption 1a for you.
Or better yet: DaveB
* already did
Kinda amazed no one pointed out how Dabs is drawing her sword, which is presently impaled in a tree, in pretty much the same way Minmax draws Oblivious.
I’ve never read Goblins. It’s one of those ones I ought to check out eventually cause it sounds like it has some fun ideas in it.
You really should, and possibly give the artist some artist to artist attention, Tarol recently had a nervous breakdown caused by self imposed stress of trying to keep the schedule. Right now the story’s in hiatus until the poor guy can calm down enuf to stop driving himself insane.
Much love and support to Tarol. Goblins is a great comic, and I wish he could see it through his fans eyes, and feel proud of the great work.
Most artists can’t do that. They see the flaws others miss, because they already know where the flaws are, and how that prevents them from perfectly portraying what is in their head. Some artists can ignore those flaws if people praise their work, because they can use that praise to understand how those same flaws contribute to the work as a whole…but some cannot. Regardless, the pressure on any full-time artist is immense, and almost entirely self-generated, as I have no doubt DaveB is finding out. Some folks thrive under that sort of pressure. Others…don’t.
As much as we all want this to be a daily comic, we don’t want to break DaveB.
Artists who have a schedule really have pressure and each comic reader adds to it.
I’d only start posting an online comic after completing the whole thing so I have no pressure.
A crying shame for such a talent to be struck down. Goblins is a very good read, and I wish him a speedy recovery.
I am just glad that calls for a faster update schedule have all but died out here, since Dave went to two a week. Doubtless there will always be exceptions, but we can ignore those. I much prefer a stress-free artist/writer, who can carry on at a steady pace, without feeling pressured into doing more.
Aside from the risk of a break-down there is also the likelihood of a drop in quality. What Dave does is creatively intense. It is not just a matter of drawing things. The ideas and inspirations which drive the process are every bit as important to the end result. And those flourish most in a care-free environment.
Oblivious Used to be a sword that’s material changed into whatever substance it came into contact with. And then Minmax stuck the blade into a pocket of Oblivion. What happens is He doesn’t actually “Draw” Oblivious as retrieves it from himself from a few seconds in the future. (Which also means he CAN’T lose it or give it to another.) https://www.goblinscomic.org/01112014/
Well aside from the two other times it’s mentioned as being recalled. But still, very Minmaxy. bonus point if you make it’s booby-trap be that if anyone else touches tries to draw it they’ll be erased from existence.
if we’re talking about a strictly magic (non-tech) based demonic weapon I’d think you would need to worry about possession spells/bonding that leads to a hopped up un-inhibited victim playing like red kryptonited superman with a sword. A spell based kill/damage trap for anyone not (possibly this sword) bonded to the weapon, like ‘Blades’ sword lo-jack but a sorcery based version. The possibilities mirror the above and add a thousand more combinations of traps and damage for someone grabbing a demonic blade. *logging off*
Actually, with Dabbler it’s more likely to just knock them unconscious or some mild pain, I mean can you think of someone who wouldn’t try to pick that up if they found it lying in the street? Dabs doesn’t wanna kill kiddies.
Well if you are strong enough you can stop a speedster, and fast enough. Saw Vilgax do it to Ben as XLR8 with additional powers from Dr. Animo. So speed and strength could stop one. Also another speedster. Also Energy beams can slice them up too. Or at least give them a bad burn since even they can’t out pace light speed, just human motion speed.
If Darker than Black is correct, rain drops will kill them too.
How about teleportation? Harem can’t actually teleport onother whole person, but her teleportation effect would prolly take just a tad bit longer than he’d be in one place at his speed. Essentially, she’d only be able to teleport bits of him away. It’d be like him running through a cheese grater.
I’ve also often wondered about offensive teleportation……for instance if instead of Nightcrawler focusing on teleporting himself, he just ported whoever he punched into a wall……literally…..into……the…..wall.
You know I’ve thought about that before.
Would Harem be able to teleport away with part of something, rather than the entire thing?
If she could, she could grab someone’s head, teleport away, and leave a decapitated corpse.
Though that would be extremely OP, so I doubt DaveB would allow it, for the same reason he won’t let Heatwave fly through mountains.
Because if it was allowed, there would be no way to stop it. Harem teleports right behind you, grabs you by the head, and teleports out before anyone realizes what happends. Impossible to catch, impossible to stop
You say that word a lot. I don’a think it means what you think it means.
But, jesting aside, yea, way overpowered. Of course, coming up with restrictions, which prevent such abuses, can introduce just as many complications as the power does in it’s own right. Either in making it harder to explain how the power itself works. Or in opening up new abuses.
Obvious restriction: Harem holding an instantly severed, still alive, still blinking, still thinking head that would immediately spew blood all over the place as it would have still been moving at the same rate as it was when it was connected to the body. Again, Harem holding a head. Dabs has the experience with demons and such that she might be able to do that, Harem does not. Harem would likely be in dire need of a trip to a padded room.
Read a book at least a decade ago (probably longer, not sure if have read a novel this millenium) with a teleporter. It worked for him the same as Harem: can ‘port anywhere he can see or has been (believe he ‘phases’ in so can avoid appearing inside something/someone, but not sure about that). At one stage he was attempting to free a prisoner who had been shackled to a wall by porting just the shackles, first attempt ‘ported part of the wall as well (and fortunately the prisoner was still intact), but at least they weren’t stuck to the wall anymore
That sad moment when you catch up on a comic and actually have to WAIT.
I do really want to compliment you on Sydney/Halo. I’ve seen people attempt the hyper-active ADD girl before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done properly. Most exagerrate it to the point where I’m left wondering how this girl hasn’t been locked away (if I’m not wondering if she’s killed anyone in the past). It breaks any suspicion of disbelief.
Sydney’s not like that. She’s a bit exagerrated, but not too far off from some actual girls I know.
Just felt like that warranted some appreciation.
Thanks! I try to write her so she’s amusing and quirky but not actually diagnoseably insane. :)
I’m not crazy… my mother had me tested :p
crap, forgot the quote marks… *shakes fist angrily at the absent edit link*
here..
” “
Did you just make ‘air quotes’ with your flippers, or your wing tips?
What about Super-math, Super-weaving, Super-hypnotism, Super-ventriloquism, Super-landscaping, Super-hunches, Super-friction, more Super-ventriloquism, and… something I’m not going to even try to figure out. IOW, pretty much anything .prefixed with “super-“.
Have you seen the new X-man movie? One scene in that movie will show you what we are talking about.
I’m not going to tell you what happened, because that would spoil your enjoyment of a truely exelent movie.
Quicksilver is odd. He doesn’t seem to fit in the xmen world in my opinion. He is the only one I feel like that about.
Like the can’t hit me prankster guy, the theory may work yet it seems a bad idea to include them in the storyline. They work as extras.
“Can’t hit me guy” works just as well as “can’t hurt me guy” aka Achilles. In a team he’d be in charge of distractions and annoyance. Annoyed, aggravated, or angry enemies are often easier to deal with the cool headed rational ones.
I was thinking about how our Speedster friend here has been sitting out the fight so far and hit on a possible why. In Champions terms he is Spd 10 but has to wait a number of actions equal to the number of consecutive planned actions. IE if he is going to do a 1 minute stint at speed he has to be still for about the same time. This is an original limitation I think, so would drop the cost a lot. Probably also running on some kind of END reserve as well.
Also, he did not show any enhanced reaction times, just did a planned set of moves against opponents who were essentially standing still for him. If Max came after him he would probably break contact, try to get out of line of sight and hit a shadow and go absolutely still in it –his power sucking up motion around him to fuel a power run. So in a way he is like Anvil but converts kinetic to speed…
Or it could be caloric, IE energy useage. Moving that fast takes up a huge amount of calories, so he only uses his powers when they are needed. Then sucks up as much high energy food as possible so he won’t pass out from low blood sugar.
Actually most overpowered superpower is control of electrical energy.
The reason being was explained in science class. What binds atoms together?
The electric field created by the electrons and protons.
So a person with a good understanding of science and real good control of their power would in effect become a god ala Dr. Manhattan style.
Further thought on this lead me to creating a second question that proves my point.
How does the human mind ‘think’?
The electrical energy created and processed by neurons.
If you are indeed able to control the electrical fields that hold atoms together. Then yes I would have to agree with you. Electricity does tend to be underestimated.
I so want to see Magneto vs. Graviton done by someone who understand the physics someday. Graviton is often shown as a nearly unstoppable force of nature. It’d be fun to see him try his tricks on Magneto and have Magneto remind him that gravity is the weakest of the forces.
Grrr, was about to go to bed and got thinking about Magneto.
1) Magnetic and Electro-magnetic force are separate things.
2) Magneto’s ability is not magnetism but metal-kenesis. He does far too many things that you simply can’t do with magnets. Such as making things fly (yes you can make things levitate with magnets but Magneto actually flies about and makes other things fly with his ability), bending metal around other metal, and weaving metal through things such as robots, and Wolverine. Also he would be able to alter Earth’s own magnetic field. Hole up in a specially made safe-house with any mutants he wants to live, lower the field and let the normal humans and any mutant against him die from radiation poisoning. Raise the field back up and live on a mutant only planet.
But Mags has expanded his powers through powerstunts and whatnots (overzealous writers?) to include control of all forces that could be derived from magnetism, including electro-magnetic effects and such. Depending on wich comic you read, he is more or less omnipotent. I prefer the issues where he is less omnipotent. Omnipotence is boring.
Wrong, sir. Magneto is “Master of Electromagnetism”. It’s not his fault that most writers only realize that means “Magnets”.
You’ll note that he often hovers, projects forcefields, has ‘energy blasts’, and a lot of other things. He’s made anti-thought-reading helmets, too.
Maybe back in the day he just threw cars at people, but these days he’s considered akin to a minor god. Interesting that two of the most powerful other mutants are his children, isn’t it, including one Speedster?
Most writers also forget that he’s an intellect on a par with Reed Richards, with multiple doctorates and specialising in electomagnetism and particle & subatomic physics… With enough time to concentrate, he can literally manipulate anything not made entirely of chargeless particles (in theory, even neutrons!)
3 kids. Wanda, Pietro, and (Probably) Polaris
Fairly sure Polaris just shares his control over magnets
Can’t remember if it was proven or not But I know Polaris claimed Magneto as her father for that reason (similar to how Cyclops and Havoc or Cable and Madeline Pryor/Jean Grey have similar powers).
Which is why I qualified it with ‘someone who understands the physics’ – most of the writers obviously don’t.
The most dangerous master of electro-magnetism is the level 5 “esper” Misaka “Railgun” Mikoto from To Aru no Majutsu Index (A Certain Magical Index) and To Aru no (something) Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun). The things she does are outright incredible. She has pinned a helicopter attempting takeoff to the roof of a building. She has literally walked on walls/piping. She has manipulated a falling latter into floating platform steps, as well as taken steps ON AIR by riding electromagnetic currents from nearby wiring. She has made weapons, like swords, from iron sand, and wielded them effectively. She has hurled LIGHTNING at people, and her signature attack is flipping a one yen piece into the air and accelerating it to twice the speed of sound via a “railgun.” Plus, in a side story, when the conditions were JUST RIGHT, she turned evaporated, ionized seawater into a hydrogen jet pack and FLEW at supersonic speeds. Scary thing is, she’s not anywhere close to the strongest character in the series where she stars.
For mundane stuff, she can also crack any electro-magnetic lock (and a few that aren’t), she’s a super-hacker, and has been known to taze people who annoy her. (And she’s portrayed as a hero character.)
Her power is strong, but her ability to utilise her power is weak, otherwise she would have beaten Touma dozens of times. Heck, just attacking him from two directions at once would have worked.
super strength i this is the most overused.. durarara had the most realistic take on a person with super strength and its problems.
Yeah, it reminds me of the old Six Million Dollar Man television program. Okay, I get that he has “bionic” legs and arm with the strength to pick up a car. How does this not break his only human back? My fathers answer to this question: “It’s not in the script.”
Thanks for the help, Dad. :)
Reminds me of a friend’s altered version of the Mickey Mouse Club closing song:
M-I-C… See you real soon,
K-E-Y… Why? Because it’s in our contract.
M-O-U-S-E.
ray gilette, the bionic legs in the series archer had the true outcome happen. He forgot to lift the jeep with his legs and pulled his back rather badly.
A bit on physics.
Yes, she [Heatwave] has her heat aura, and that’s bad news for anyone trying to grab her, but it doesn’t do anything against lasers or bullets. Usually in comics, the guy with the heat aura can use it to vaporize anything trying to hit him, but bullets move really fast, and the amount of heat required to vaporize copper jacketed lead in the fraction of a second it’s passing through the foot or so of heat created by the aura just doesn’t sit right with me.
As DAGamer touched on, melting the inbound bullet is no protection against the impact of the mass against your body. This is why shooting nuclear bombs at incoming mile-sized comets/asteroids won’t protect the Earth (or more accurately, life on Earth) from being wiped out when the fragments hit. The bombs don’t make the mass go away, they just break it into smaller pieces which will introduce the same amount of energy into the Earth’s biosphere as the single large mass would.
The best Heatwave can manage is extending her aura out and creating violent turbulence to throw bullets off course.
This won’t work either. Bullets move too fast for even a ferocious wind to have much effect across the small distance you are describing. And if you have it work, then a thrown knife or even a swung knife would be effected much more severely both due to having more area for the turbulence to operate on and because they are moving much slower. It wasn’t clear to me whether Silent Shadow Unless Silent swung or threw the knife that hit Heatwave, but unless SS can move faster than a bullet he would have a hard time hitting Heatwave with a swung knife because not only the knife but his arm and body would be being impacted by the turbulence you are suggesting she can create. And a knife thrown by SS will again have a lot more surface area for turbulence to act against.
There is an online novel which addresses the physics of super speed very well. Relativistic effects and all. One of the main characters is faster than the fastest superheroes ever published by Marvel or DC. (Well, except for the ridiculous things like time travel. So far at least…) So although she can run a search pattern across miles of territory in a very tiny amount of time, she can’t search buildings within that territory. Not unless she wants to be leaving behind multiple small explosions in the form of closed doors being converted into plasma when she opens them while moving at large fractions of the speed of light. She deals with really tough superpowered foes by throwing rocks at them. Because no matter how tough you are, you probably aren’t tough enough to withstand a 4 oz. rock hitting you at .2C.
It is a really good read, and I’m pretty sure I first saw a link to the work in the comments of this comic so I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet. Here is the link to the start of the story:
https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/82363551272/fall-of-doc-future-contents
The idea behind shattering incoming asteroids works because if shattered outside they atmosphere, most of the now small fragments will mostly burn up before hitting the ground. The amount of air resistance comes into play too, as it is a function of the cross section of the body in question (size squared), while mass is a function of volume (size cubed). Two spheres each with mass m have a combined cross sectional area 1.12 times that of a sphere with mass 2m.
Lesson: smaller things are less dangerous.
No, the idea behind shattering incoming asteroids works because if you do it far enough away you can make a fair amount of the asteroid miss the Earth.
Burning up on entry is actually worse than hitting the ground, if you have enough of it.
Yea, every movie which portrays blowing up an asteroid, with a nuke, as being a solution just bugs the hell out of me. Especially as they also always feel compelled to make the threat of impact imminent. If the rock is going to hit the Earth in the next day, or week, there probably is not enough nuclear firepower on the entire planet, to divert a planet-killer meteor off course.
And unless you can divert it from hitting the planet, it does not matter how many chunks you break it up into, all that mass is still coming straight at the planet. So even if there were enough nukes to tip it off-course, the first one you use to start it moving, will likely just break it up.
Now, if we were to get our fingers out of our collective butts, and get on with developing an orion drive, we could push such extinction-causing threats off course. The earlier we spotted them, the less force being required, and the lower the chance of breaking the meteor up, in the process.
It would also give us an option for getting off this rock, if we carry on mucking up the atmosphere, so much that it becomes uninhabitable.
There are actually a couple of proposals that are out there on how to deal with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlbaYbWuPCU
Yes, but unless they can also get us off this rock, then we are still face the fate of the Easter Islanders. All well and good stopping a meteor from hitting us, but so long as we prioritise building big stone heads, over avoiding extinction, even those of us who can see the danger will still end up dying. I prefer solution which covers more than just the one eventuality.
The thing is evolution does not just work at an individual level or a species level. It also works with societies and ecosystems. Using the same basic rule. The fit survive to pass on their inheritance. Be it by genetics or social behaviour or written down on paper or in digital form. And thereby influencing subsequent generations.
Those societies which succeed, flourish and propagate. Those which fail die out. Even those which die though, rarely loose all the individuals within it. But that can happen when there is either an uncontrollable catastrophic environmental effect or the society trying really hard to kill itself.* Provided the individuals have nowhere to escape to.
In our case our society and species have expanded to fill up the entire ecosystem. Which we now know we are profoundly affecting as a whole. As such, we now have nowhere to escape to, as individuals, should it fail. This is a very bad evolutionary strategy.
* In very broad terms. Usually there are multiple compounding factors. Societies, races and ecosystems can often survive one or two serious challenges, but are less likely to if facing several critical problems simultaneously. But sometimes something particularly nasty comes along that can wipe them out all on it’s own.
” Not unless she wants to be leaving behind multiple small explosions in the form of closed doors being converted into plasma”
Here ya go: https://www.the-whiteboard.com/autotwb1059.html
Just keep hitting “next”
I don’t know if I’d call super speed as being one of the most over powered powers there are. Is it an incredibly useful ability to have? Absol-freaking-utely! Hell one of the best scenes in the new X-Men movie was when Quicksilver used his ability to knock out all the security guards and redirect the bullets they fired at the party. But overpowered? Even Flash doesn’t rank that high compared to the other justice league top members. So while it may be incredibly useful it isn’t godlike.
It’s only not seen as overpowered because superheroes practically never use it properly, or are left in odd plot-dictated situations that are specifically created to prevent them from being effective. But since you brought up Flash, perhaps you should watch the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, at the end of the Cadmus arc, where Flash singlehandedly defeated Brianiac (who was merged with Luthor and had absorbed a super-davanced alien world-destroying nanotechnology weapon) after Brianiac had just finished wiping the floor with rest of the original seven members of the Justice League (those being Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Hawkgirl, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter).
There’s an excellent little..video..thing of the segment he’s talking about. To music. I’ve kind of watched it a few dozen times since I first saw it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odU1bHaYNDQ&t=3m9s
Only because the authors intentionally cripple him. As some other commenters have already mentioned, if flash while running at near the speed of light, it would turn into a weapon of mass destruction. A 1 kg rock thrown at 5% of the speed of light has more energy than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
If flash throws a rock*
Have to agree about Super speed. If used properly most fights would be over before they began. Always annoyed me with Superman, et al. (And Flash of course) Most of their fights wouldn’t be, unless fighting another speedster, which would get kinda old.
True, but Flash’s Rogues while admittedly goofy-seeming, have ways to at least slow him down, when they can use them. Weather Wizard can freeze the roadway or cause a blinding blizzard for example.
I’ve totally fallen in love with Dabbler all over again. I love her saucy carefree attitude and she looks damn sexy on this page.
Also, I agree with you about heatwave. Being able to generate heat isn’t the same thing as full thermodynamic control. Full thermodynamic control, assuming she could generate high enough temperatures would put her in Maxima’s league. Being able to totally control the flow of heat energy both into and out of things would be near godlike. You could freeze one person to death while scorching someone next to them by directing all heat energy from the one to the next. Though, I just thought of this, controlling existing heat isn’t the same as heat generation, so I suppose you’d need both thermodynamic control and Heatwave’s heat generation.
Dave’s comment that super speed is the single most overpowered superpower besides the obvious ones like reality control or time travel and the vivid discussion about speedsters regarding their characteristics got me thinking:
If one does want to discuss the characteristics of supers in regard of feasibility as in physics and bio-chemistry of their abilities, one must not forget about the environmental setting such as the powers source ( and its home universe ).
I mean, are we talking Dark Angel style super-tuned abilities, are we talking super human yet science based boosters, or is it the realm of actual supernatural – as it appears to be at least partly the case for Dave’s mix.
There currently are a few amazing scifi / super-stories out, such as my favorite non-comic one Wearing the Cape from Marion G. Harmon, which describe supernatural powers a bit like a bubble engulfing perfectly normal biological bodies. Which means that the super-powers are mostly only seemingly present to those on the outside.
The easiest to understand example for this are speedsters, which brings us back to the topic at hand.
Here, the ability of speedsters is described as desynchronizing ones subjective time in relation to the rest of the world. Which means that a speedster is but moving at a completely normal human speed, but since his subjective time passes a lot faster than the time around him, everything else beside him appears to move incredibly slow. For someone on the outside of course, the speedster appears to move incredibly fast.
The interesting thing about this concept is that is does not require any special reflexes. There also is no danger of clothes going up in fire due to friction heat, or jerky jumping about to avoid ending up spattered with smashed insects.
The again, like DaveB already said, this enters the domain of reality distortion / reality manipulation and can easily be considered overpowered. It is hard to create an enthralling story-line of unpredictable outcome if all main characters basically are Gods.
Done fairly well in Fate/Zero, in that use of such a power causes a massive strain on the body when it’s turned off – the universe itself basically turns around to say “what the hell was that” and clobbers you one…
That would be the kryptonite concept:
Adding something, be it a substance or another variety of handicap, limiting the would-be God to more
human levels.
… the universe itself basically turns around to say “what the hell was that” and clobbers you one… . Love it ! :-)
As for Fate/Zero – I only know “Fate / stay night”, but it looks like I missed out on something worthwhile watching.
I started watching one of the “Fate” anime until it got to the scene where the girl was being abused , while naked mind you, by a cellar full of insects to “strengthen her will” or something along those lines (was really to blackmail the MC, if I remember correctly) and, well, that was enough of that.
The only problem with the ‘time distortion’ speedster is the acts they are claimed to do within the comic/movie. It it not unheard of for someone to do something like physically run from New York to L.A. Yes, it would be possible, but hardly practical. If you say a speedster runs at a human speed of 10 mph in his own time frame and can somehow do that for 10 hours a day. That makes for only about 100 miles per day (and then find a place to speed-eat and speed-sleep). The 2500 miles from NY to LA would take him 25 days personal time. (He might cut that to a week or so if he rode a bicycle).
Getting perilously close to my superpower there youngster.
If you want to find some truly reality breaking powers look to someone who describes their abilities as such:
“Ability to the extent of….”
Touhou powers are….insane.
For example. “Ability to the extent of Controlling Density” sounds pretty simple. The character who has it could grow, shrink, get heavier or lighter…the normal stuff….and then she could clone herself by increasing her own population density.
One I theorized was “Ability to the Extent of Hiding” where the person who had it could fly by hiding from gravity.
Nobilis is a bit like that. Pen-and-paper RPG where the players are gods of one particular concept. The Power of Love can make a gun love its holster so much that it can’t be drawn. The Power of Imagination can make a bowl of popcorn be as limitless as the human imagination. The Power of Fighting Games can turn real people into fighting game characters.
Sounds fun. A creative way to stretch the imagination. Rather than being bound in by rules or other peoples’ expectations of reality.
I use similar concepts in Divine Blood, partially because of a lot of exposure to Mage the Awakening, and lots of conversation with a major fan of Nasuverse and Touhou.
Though my Conceptuals, Gods and Demons more or less use the concepts to help focus what is essentially telekinesis with quantum level precision.
Battle between skilled conceptuals involves some talking to make the opponent question their ability to actually accomplish what they’re trying to do and weaken their control while hyping their own confidence up.
An example of a confrontation between a Goddess of Victory and a Demoness of Smoke went like this:
********************
“Geisthexe is first tier,” Lady Tinia said. “You are second tier. Though, I am victory itself and also of the first tier.”
“Victory can go up in a puff of smoke in the shortest of times,” was the response. She pulled the cigarette to her face and then breathed out a cloud of tobacco smoke that was long and impressive, but nothing more than any human could make. “And last I heard, you were suspended from duty, you can’t be first tier without support from your precious tree, can you? I wonder how long it’s been since you reincarnated, our files can’t place it within the last seven hundred years.”
“Speaking of records, Geisthexe,” Lady Tinia said. “You were injured less than two months ago, weren’t you? A simple disaster containment woke something up and you only lived because one of us sealed it for you. You might have full support from Orochi while Ashvattha considers us pariahs, but we’re all completely healthy. What do you say to that?”
“I say,” Lilitu noted, standing up and turning around. “That Hel’s plane is taxiing while you chat with me.”
As she spoke, her image broke up into a smoke cloud the way that the fake Hel had earlier. The fake image’s last act as a discernible figure was to take a long draw on its fake cigarette and then breathe itself out into the air.
********************************
The “Victory can go up in a puff of smoke” was the first of several assaults on what was essentially an “I win” spell that Lady Tinia had running. Probably the biggest assault. To be honest, Lilitu had started tearing into the spell quietly from a distance for minutes before hand.
The next assault on the spell came from a young Demi-Goddess and was rather clumsy due to lack of training but allowed said demi-goddess to escape in more or less one piece while Tinia was frustration flaring.
The final assault came from the Demi-Goddess’s human mortal…after said mortal had pretty much pwned Kratos, Zelus and Bia like Math did the room.
Lilitu was the only one that actually directly attacked the spell. The Demi-Goddess just kept redefining what she considered to be winning so that the spell couldn’t keep up with her until Tinia…ah hell…until Nike got distracted and stopped paying attention.
The Demi-Goddess’s mother was willing to make Nike suffer a Pyrrhic victory…and when Nike realized that her brute force approach to conceptual magic had been seen through by a mortal, she lost the spell completely.
Heh. Nice to see the layers behind the banter. Not to mention that there was a battle going on, along with it, despite being veiled.
there were quite a few “bad” guys involved…Nike had some of Hel’s Nirvana-side relatives manipulated into making an attempt to draw off her bodyguards first and a human-based secret society was also in the process of highjacking the plane quietly. The rest of the battle took place on an island in the south pacific.
Sorry, I rant about my own creations a lot.
I’m prone to thinking of anything I enjoy thoroughly in relation stuff I create.
Not to worry. We all do that. And it can bring unique insight that would not be available from people who only draw from generic or well-known sources. Fascinating base concepts, and implementation, make it all the more interesting.
The commentary so far has missed one of the classic harder SF looks at superspeed: ARM by Niven. Niven came up with many of the problems already identified for the fast time area and his protagonist killed the speedster using a problem that I haven’t seen any commenter mention so far (left out to avoid spoilers).
A good point, and a nice sci-fi approach.
In most superpower-stories which use this bubble like base-concept however, the bubbles is neither visible nor actually a bubble as in an spheric entity encasing a person, but rather something of a morphing field aligning its outer walls to the outer skin of the super in question.
In many of those stories, the super can but has to learn to extend this field to also encase his clothes, or even people he / she / it touches.
One thing I thought about with speedsters is to enforce metabolism. You want to move multiple times normal people, you also gotta eat, drink, breath and void waste multiple times. You also can’t avoid bug splatters. They’re everywhere and won’t oblige you by getting out of the way or even dust particles. Mach doesn’t look to be superhuman durable. Now Maxima, her metabolism seem to fuel her powers.
The print comic Common Grounds focused on the off-duty, non-combat lives of superheroes. In the comic, Common Grounds was a chain of coffee shops owned by an ex-hero and he enforced a no fighting rule.
One vignette was the interview of a speedster by a reporter. It started with a brief failure to communicate due to the speedster speaking too fast for the reporter to understand. After he slowed himself down enough to talk to another human being his life of anguish started to be revealed. As you suggested, his metabolism was also super fast, so he had to eat constantly. Luckily for him, as a celebrity he was often given food “on the house”, because being a superhero doesn’t pay and he couldn’t hold down a job. And he had to spend a commensurate amount of time on the toilet… He couldn’t keep a girlfriend, because holding more than a brief conversation was for him like pulling teeth, and when he had the opportunity for intimacy he caused friction burns on the objects of his attentions.
All in all, he described a life of misery, loneliness and despair. And yet the reporter’s take-away was “Wow, I’d sure love to be like you!”
I think you might have it backwards- the reporter went into the interview wishing that he had superpowers, but at the end of the story, he was feeling glad to be an ordinary man, with ordinary responsibilities.
I’ll accept your correction without argument. It’s been a good many years since I last read those comics, and I guess all I remembered about the reporter was his envy, but not his change of heart.
If she does, then her particular digestive system is capable of decent mass-energy conversion. Because you do not get enough calories in a day to fly
. Let alone do this.
Hey, if DaveB sees this, I think I’ve just come up with a solution for a question he semi-rhetorically posed a few pages back.
So remember when Maxima said to take care of the villains “non-lethally” if possible, and the commentary pointed out that that’d be difficult, if not impossible, since it’s hard to tell how much super-strength and toughness someone has, so you’d probably either use so little strength you wouldn’t affect them, or so much that it’d splatter them instantly. So Maxima just effortlessly knocking that big guy out without killing him was chalked up to narrative convenience.
ANYWAY, introductory ramble aside, I think I know how.
Max has super-speed, right? (This page reminded me of that fact.) Maybe she begins her punch at a strength level that would knock out a normal human, then if she’s not making an impression increases the force incrementally until she’s achieving the desired kind of impact, stopping at just enough strength.
Since she’s so fast, all this happens in an insignificant amount of time to everyone but her, her non-super-fast opponent doesn’t notice the incremental increase and just feels the end result. And, y’know, then doesn’t feel anything for a while.
I don’t know if somebody’s already suggested this, but there’s my take on it. Hope you see it, and hope it isn’t entirely full of logical flaws…
simple that would require her to use speed and strength at boosted levels which she can’t do and the concept that repetitive impacts in the same place will if delivered fast enough be the same as a much harder impact.
Why can’t Maxima be strong and fast at the same time?
It’s the way her power reserve works; she can supercharge any one of her abilities at a time, but only one at a time.
(What we don’t know is whether maximising an ability also minimises others…)
We do, it is just a matter of how you visualise it. DaveB has indicated that Maxima always has a certain minimum level of super capability, like her strength. Everything above that though is in a limited pool, so she cannot be maxed out in all of her abilities/powers simultaneously. So if she is high in some areas, she will have to be low(ish) in others.
What we do not know, yet, is just how big that pool is. Nor how low her minimums are. One of the things that acts to conceal this is that she does have superhuman reflexes, so can use this to justify swapping things around really fast. As such I think it will take a considerable challenge, to her, in order to narrow down the range of her capabilities. Because she can emulate having full power, in all areas, so long as she only needs to use one power, at any one given moment.
Once we have seen her being pressed at doing two or more things at once, we will have a better idea. Likewise if she is struggling with some task, so that we know she has fully committed her reserves.
For instance her base line could be as low as one or two stars in each attribute/power, with just a single one that can be pushed to maximum at a time. I doubt very much if she would be rated as a 9 star hero though, if that were the case. Maybe she has average minimums of 3 and up to two powers at full strength?
Perhaps it is quite complex? It seems likely, given the logarithmic or exponential aspect to the star rating system, that increasing a 4 star power to 5 star will take more than just lowering a 3 star power to a 2 star one. So perhaps she can have one power at 5 stars, and the rest hovering around 3. Or two at full power, but the rest at 2. And any increase beyond that would be minor swapping around, to slightly improve a third ability, at the expense of flattening others to barely super-human levels of 1 star.
Actually we do know that.
DaveB has said (somewhere) that Maxima has a minimum power of 3 in each power.
On top of that, she can boost 2 powers to 4, or 1 to 5
Thanks for all the feedback on this idea, people. I suppose if RobK is right, then it depends how fast a “3” in speed is, since if it’s fast enough to have the necessary reaction time for what I suggested, she can still boost her strength if what she initially tried wasn’t enough.
Also note even if you melt the bullets into gas they still have mass and inertia and they’re still going to impact you. Granted heatwave is probably heat resistant, but still that would not be zero impact.
-S
What about Technopathy? In this day in age were machines and technology run practically everything that would be an incredible power to have. M.O.D.O.C.K. in the avengers show and to a lesser extent, the new game Watchdogs, have both shown incredible things you can do when you can control all technology. Extend you’re ability with all the global wi fi and sat alights orbiting the earth and you could be a god.
There are multiple versions of this, too:
1. The “Verne”-Type supers: Able to use processes nobody can reproduce while creating all kinds of normally impossible scientific stuff and machinery.
2. The “Technopath”: A word merging “techno” and “telepathy” thus possessing abilities ranging from using technology mentally over reconfiguring stuff to your need to actually creating stuff by your minds will.
3. Technolinks: The ability to mentally merge with networks or technology, actually becoming its consciousness, in order to access information or even have it do your bidding.
4. Mad scientist / Genius: Extremly impressiv superhuman mental abilities, allowing an incredible level of technological creativity and therefore continuous invention of all kinds of new stuff that actually is science based and can be logically and physically explained as long as your level of knowledge and intellect does suffice to understand what you are seeing.
Those are the 4 versions I know about, but none of them qualifies for full out direct combat. Sure, some build themselves impressive protective suits ( Ant-man, Mind-mistress, Riveter, … ), but they still are a few steps behind those who can apply their skills in battle directly rather than through any creation.
Well that depends on there opponent. If they happen to be facing a tech based opponent, Iron Man, Cyborg, ect. then they can easily hack into there tech and take it over. Not to mention take over other electronic devices to cause distractions or for offensive purposes. Plus don’t forget making robot minions to fight them.
Iron man could easily counter this by turning off his wifi.
Hey, I ain’t saying they are useless. Quite the contrary actually; those types are quite usefull if it comes to creating your tools or to provide some support. In a real fight again multiple adversaries, it usually is the multi-talent mix of your own team that decides if you win or lose.
I am just saying that they are no front-line material and shouldn’t be going at it all on their own either.
That didn’t stop DC’s Steel.
Also poor heatwave. Getting a knife in the foot has got to hurt bad. Foot is a very sensitive body part too. Hopefully her heat emotions don’t cauterize the wound while the blade is still in there otherwise that could leave her with a really messed up foot.
Wow, just spotted the news that a couple of kids have attempted to murder a girl, because they believed a web-comic character was real!
I can remember, when I was very young, probably under six, saying to a friend that I thought that Obelix, of Asterix and Obelix fame, could carry the big stone menhirs because they were fake stone, so could be easily lifted. I had not quite grasped the concept of cartoons. But, even at that age, I knew they were just characters in a story, and not real. These girls were age 12!
I guess mental disorders, such as those which cause delusions, can strike at any age. But it seems very odd to have two sufferers? Unless one was simply very gullible and bought into her friend’s delusions.
Although I bet that this will cause the ‘films, role-playing , computer games and comics cause crime’ nutters to come crawling out of the woodwork again.
These girls are disturbed. Whether or not they’re lying about believing in Slenderman they are seriously disturbed. Thankfully the victim pulled through, save for the PTSD that will result.
Reminds me of a murder case I read about in Belgium. At least it might have been a murder case: a torso was found with a note attached to it written in Japanese, “I am kira.” That case is still unsolved.
That is really a disgusting story.
At 6 years old my younger sister believed that the Flintstones were real. Probably very briefly, because I at 10 was quick to taunt her mercilessly about it. And yet she managed to not stab anyone over it, not that the Flintstones had much in the way of violence in it anyway.
As a kid I watched all the Looney Tunes cartoons which had the Coyote trying to kill and eat the Roadrunner, with quite a bit of violence being inflicted on the Coyote from backfiring schemes. Tom and Gerry were constantly harming each other with hot irons, hitting each other with sticks, etc. Elmer Fudd would be firing guns at Bugs Bunny and quite sincerely trying to kill him. Bugs and Daffy Duck had the same sort of adversarial relationship as Tom and Gerry. Foghorn Leghorn was constantly taunting the dog and being beaten up by the chicken hawk. And then there was the Three Stooges… I also loved scary movies and Kung Fu Theater.
And yet I managed to grow to adulthood with maybe three serious fist fights (and by serious I mean that we both maybe got a split lip and some bruises) and no stabbings or shootings.
All those cartoons have been tamed down into feel-good, social situation, animated sitcoms. And yet violence kept growing just the same. Violent TV shows do not cause violent behavior.
I think it depends on how many religious people live in a country that depicts how susceptible people are to believing in the existence of a fictional character.
People tried to blame violent videogames like Counterstrike, World of Warcraft, Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. for massive killing sprees, but the truth is: millions of others play it, and it’s only one player that lashes out like that. And truth be told: if you’re in a country where 98% of the population are part of a religion, you get a higher chance of people believing anything else is real (if properly written) than when you have a country where only 45% of the population is religious.
Oh, bullshit. How religious a population is has no more to do with it than how violent their video games or movies are, and you should damn well know it. That argument is no different than claiming that the problem stems from violent video games, movies, or literature. Only the target of your blame is different, in the end.
The unfortunate reality is that the story that is being referenced, along with a whole host of other sick, sick stories, are by no means unique to Christian countries, or to this period in history. Murder, the Bible tells us, is an inherently evil act, that reflects a supremely twisted soul and a deranged mind. It should come as no surprise that anybody willing to resort to murder, for any reason, should be more than a few bricks shy of a building. The fact that it apparently is indeed a surprise to most people continually amazes me.
I would also like to point out the often-overlooked fact that the reason these kinds of murders attract more and more attention is not necessarily an increase in frequency, or because of the ills that plague our society. Instead, it is, I think, a reflection of just how successful our society, our religion, and our legal system and code of laws (including the bit that lets people run around armed, thank you very much) has managed to make our society a safer, more civil, and overall better place. In short, the fact that you find out about these awful, awful crimes at all is not an indictment of violent video games, or of religion, or of any other factor. It is a glaringly powerful statement in its own right about just how effective our society has been at reducing violent crime, and bringing law and order to this world.
Five hundred years ago, those crimes would have vanished into the background noise of living. If the girl who was attacked had thought anything of it, she would likely have done so only in the sense that she would avoid that part of town in the future. Today….we can be shocked, and horrified, and never once stop to think about how wonderful our life has become compared to what it once was.
Well, I’m being utterly blasphemic here, so if you’re offended: I apologize in advance.
But who’s more likely to believe and be appealed to a well written character: a down to Earth atheist who has to see things in order to believe them, or someone who is already taught from childhood to believe in an invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent God in the skies?
What do you think the Al-Quaida is fighting? Greed, Capitalism?
Perhaps, but mostly they fight the ‘infidels’ the ones who do not believe in Allah, and are thus enemies to their religion.
Of course: it’s the *extremists* that go for the killings…. but I don’t think I haven’t seen any (mass) murder case where the killer was an atheist extremist…
I get your point where you say that five hundred years ago this would be brushed aside, since people would be shot/stabbed just for being crossed at how someone looks.
But you fail to see that we (and by ‘we’ I actually mean ‘you Americans’) are so hellbent on keeping your precious guns, that you fail to see that ‘we’ (and again I mean ‘you Americans) shoot others over how they wouldn’t shut up in a theater.
Yes, this was an actual happening a few years ago, in Florida I believe, where a middle aged man shot a 20-something year old man because he was too noisy.
So you can’t tell me that the guns make it safer, or that society is so great that we can be shocked at a mass murdering… on the contrary.
The only reason that we are still shocked is when it involves one or more children under the age of 16, or when it’s more than one victim, or not gang related.
This can’t be a healthy society.
And the only way to redeem it, is to start gun control RIGHT NOW.
I read that the 8 million gun owners outgun the government AND the army 79 to 1.
79 to 1!!!
79 guns in the hands of civilians, vs 1 gun in the hands of the police, FBI and the army.
Every one of those 8 million gun owners can arm 8 other people with their own guns.
I’m not preaching you should ban guns completely, but regulate it firmly.
Max. 2 guns per owner, have the owner certified to *own* the gun, not carry it.
Have them have a safe for their guns, and store ammunition separately.
So no loaded guns lying around the house.
This’ll come a long way in all those gun homocides and accidents, I can tell you that.
crap, double negatives… correction: “I don’t think I’ve seen any….”
Also, terrorists are highly motivated because they believe 72 virgins awaits them in the afterlife as a reward for their martyrdom.
Now please explain to me why religion isn’t to blame for the vast majority of death, destruction and hatred in this world.
Religious killing is a subtrope of xenophobia
You are actually mistaken, violence of all kinds has been in steady decline (or at least holding steady) for decades. And that is both total amount, and per capita, across all demographics.
It’s amazing how many people don’t know this. They watch the sensationalized news which show every bit of violence they can find to up the ratings and think they see truth. Fear sells.
Even if the are “steadily decreasing”: imagine how much harder it can decrease when you enforce gun control?
Americans have every right to choose to cull their numbers. Plus it is an important part of their national psyche. And, sad though it is when innocents die needlessly, the rest of the world can’t really criticise. It is not like any country is a shining example of civilisation.
Had heard about it, but was not interested, in the slightest, to find out more details about it
The screened the ‘Thinman’ episode of Supernatural 2 nights ago
While there is a Slender Man web comic, he originally was a figure digitally added to photographs of groups of children. Furthermore, the name is a registered copyright of Eric “Victor Surge” Knudsen, which the web comic may be infringing on.
The usual (and likely some unusual ones as well) disclaimers about me not being a lawyer and this not being legal advice apply to this post.
Wanna know what the scariest thing imaginable in a superhero universe? A speedster with a cheese grater. That would be downright terrifying. And yes, I’ve thought about it a lot.
Ugh. I’m gonna have nightmares now. Skinless anatomic model type variety.
Use a (somewhat coiled) length of razor wire instead for increased effect.
I had been thinking of monomolecular fibre, myself. But, just to up the eew factor even further, it could be tethered at one end, and spooled out to a considerable distance. The psychopathic speedster could snake through a city, laying out wire behind him as he went.
Up until it had all spooled out, and it tightened, rising up to waste height, or thereabouts, as he continued. If he had the strength to pull it taut, and it resisted breaking, he could wreak utter devastation at that point.
But if everyone falls in half at once who is left to be terrified?
Have you read Larry Niven’s Ringworld? That exact scenario was part of the plot. Their ship crashed when it got caught in the mono-filament wire that was holding the sunshade day/night panels in place over the ring. They came up with a plan to relaunch their ship by basically using the miles of displaced wire to drag their ship up and over the edge of the spinning ringworld and launch it by centrifugal force. The one downside was that the fallen wire was draped over an inhabited city. When they pulled their ship with it, it basically ripped a path through the city cutting down anything and anyone in its way. (And these guys were the heroes of the story)
The city was abandoned I believe, and floating. Although I did like his solution to ring wobble which killed countless millions. Line up a bunch of hydrogen ram jets and fire a solar flare at them.
In the book “The City Who Fought” Joat used Monomolecular line to turn some nasty space pirates called the Kolnari into chum. An abused and brutalized orphan who was lost in a poker game at age six she thought she was tough but even she got a little queasy when she watched one of them basically fall to bloody pieces on her trap.
I know what you mean. You have to deliberately cripple the power in some way to make the character relatable. I have a heat based character who can fly and generate fireballs. She also does the heat shield business, but only for a short period of time. She couldn’t keep it up for more than a minute. As a lark, I made her hair turn to flame when she powers up. One of the running jokes is that she risks catching the ceiling on fire of setting of the sprinkler system when powered up indoors.
I like your character, and the being drenched part might actually not just happen indoors.
If you create a localized heat-bloom, you increase the capacity of the air to absorb moisture. The problem with that is that warm air climbs and inadvertently hits colder air layer creating clouds and possibly static charges. The same would happen the moment your characters powers down, too.
She probably would be running about with a constant sniffle and had to redo her hair every time it gathers static charges. :-)
You know, I don’t think anybody has really mentioned this, so I thought I’d bring it up:
A bullet, when fired from a 9mm pistol, is traveling at about 800 mph, which is about 1.3 times the speed of sound. That bullet is invisible to the naked eye–without very specialized cameras, you cannot see it, you cannot see its afterimage, you cannot ever tell that it was there unless you can backtrace the round’s trajectory. The only indication you will get that it has been present is that the round leaves a sonic boom when it moves past your head.
Mach the Knife is moving slowly enough that he is–just barely–visible to the naked eye. You don’t have to use a camera to slow down his movement, you don’t have to do a frame-by-frame replay–you can see him, even if you cannot bring any details into focus. Since they have to run in slow motion to clearly display a football pass on TV, and since those things move at about 60 mph, I think we can safely say that SS is moving at no more than 2-3 times that speed–no more than 200 mph, tops. That would create a lot of wind when he moved, and give him a pretty nasty case of windburn, but would not cause a knife to heat up from the air friction when he threw it. Which means that a bullet fired at SS is VERY, VERY dangerous, as it would be not only faster than he is, but would also have the chance to impact him at a combined speed that is many times greater than normal (and this WOULD be true, since the bullet’s mass and area of impact would be so much smaller than the body’s). Of course, hitting him is harder than it looks, since he moves so fast, but that’s still true–and an exploding shell would be quite dangerous to him.
As for the knife throw itself? It looks (and is) quite dangerous, but, surprisingly, the physics of that weapon make it unexpectedly limited. Knife throws tend to move at about 30mph, so SS’s throws would move at about 9 times the speed–about 270 mph. The fact that he can hit a target with a thrown knife says impressive things about his reflexes, that he can hit a target like that. Still, the distance of the knife’s movement is actually not determined by the speed of the throw, but by the radius of the throwing arc–in short, the longer the arms of the person throwing the knife, the farther the knife will go.
Thankfully, SS is fast enough that it’s really hard to hit him.
A knife that starts off travelling 200 mph is going to go a lot farther than one at 30 mph, regardless of the length of a person’s arm.
But it will slow down a LOT faster then a bullet due to it’s size and density. Ever tossed something out a car window? Unless it is small and dense it slows down fast.
I’m kind of surprised that DaveB mentioned Harem as being someone Mach had no real chance of hitting. We’ve seen her take two surprise hits, including a wedgie, when she was unsuspecting or distracted, so we know her reflexes aren’t that good. While I grant that she should have really good battlefield awareness with the multiple sets of eyeballs, she’s also pretty busy.
I’d have thought she would be at risk for a good hit if too many of her selves were occupied to see the attack aproaching.
Yeah, that’s why Abbey is acting as a spotter (what? you thought she was only spotting for Peggy?), and as soon as Maxi mentioned there was a Speedfreak in play she would have been on the look out, and probably spotted a blur heading towards Bodie’s bodacious butt like the coward he is (note how each attack was from either behind or from an angle the victim could not even see) and Bodie barely managed to *vorp* away in time
don’t forget that Harem has one of her copies on the rooftop doing spotter duty… she may not be able to get a good focused snapshot in her mind of the guy running at one of her copies, but she can at least see the “blur” that represents him as he approaches from behind that one copy, and she just barely TP’d away even then… if he was coming directly at her, not a chance, as he is still traveling slower than her thought…
Ice powered sword versus speedster…
I had another thought about the speedster. What if he wasn’t a speedster. Instead he hit everyone with a slow power or slow stuff with his mind. Yes you can have superslow. Solve the problem with metabolism, stuff hitting you at high speed etc. He may not even realize he has this power and always thought of himself as being speedy.
We must see him run past a clock to test this hypothesis.
Another solution to the metabolism problem: eating butter
You know there is the “Kid-sensation” who has a pretty crazy AND redundant power set.
He can, for instance, teleport and speed about.
He can make himself invisible and insubstantial ( phasing )
He can read thoughts and emotions – separately from one another as two different powers
…
He is an interesting example because he actually does speed up his metabolism when speeding, which is why he is frequently having a calories steak party to recharge. And while I don’t know if he can go extra slow, he certainly has proven capable of inverting his phasing ability to become super solid instead. And in order to be able to speed without collisions, he has supplementary powers such as periscopic tunnel vision. Not only that, he actually can use the cinetic energy his speeding builds up to slap someone super-strength like.
In short, he is one of the most unlikely supers to be, reminding me somewhat of a shopping list power-up of someone who didn’t know what to have for dinner.
This kind of powerset can’t possibly just happen, but either needs quite a few generations of evolution or is something that was created intentionally.
As interesting as a slugger/snailer ( as the opposite of speedster ) would be, I fear that if we go down the road of crazy and overpowered too much and create somewhat of a power-slam, we might lose sight of the super as a person. After all, the reason I like GRRL so much is it’s emphasis on character and comedy of the situation.
Besides, bricking oponents somewhat reminds me of medusa.
Also I really like Mach The Knife. Punny cute name/idea, even if it is a homonym stretch.
Maybe both Sydney and Stephen Hawking are right, in that we should not keep on ringing the dinner bell and attracting attention to our planet. Full of happy-meals on legs as it is.
Except that sort of “mua ha ha” evil-alien invasion bit only makes sense if you have really, really good FTL tech. If interstellar travel is not both fast and cheap it makes no economic sense whatsoever to engage in interstellar conflicts.
Now a really paranoid race might decide it doesn’t even like the idea of competition/otherness and do something spectacularly stupid like seeding the galaxy with Von Neuman berserkers, but we should already be dead if that were the case.
I suspect the fact of the matter if that we here on earth lucked out in having several overlapping Goldilocks effects and we may well be the galaxies one chance at evolving a space faring race. Which is mildly depressing.
The idea that no sentient species has survived the fact there are always more fools than geniuses is more depressing. I’d recommend intense culling, but guess who would end up in charge? We are already outnumbered.
Eh…fools are surprisingly important in today’s society, and not just because they’ve got the vote. The fact of the matter is that fools are dumb enough to believe in things like ethics, and currency, and freedom, and love, and our society could not function without those beliefs.
Or, to put it another way: in China, the geniuses are in charge, and crossing them will get you shot, no matter why you did it, or what the geniuses stood to gain by your going against their will. In America, the fools are in charge, and crossing them gets you ridiculed…for about fifteen minutes.
As a genius, I think I’d rather live in the land of the fools. At least here, they don’t obstruct the productive flow of society (primarily because they’ve all been elected to Congress).
Or if you’re from Krikkit. They hate everybody.
That’s basically religious-based xenocide, a reasonable worry.
Part of the problem is that the cost of defending against a species-wide genocidal attack is many magnitudes of order higher than carrying one out. (Particularly if the species is limited to one planet.) And it doesn’t take much to not let the species you are wiping out not have any warning either.
So the question becomes: Do you take the chance you’ll be able to meet friends and not enemies? Or do you make sure you don’t get exterminated?
So Dabbler summons the blade through a handy mini-portal.
Having visions of using a thrown hook weapon and yanking them closer as a stepped up Scorpion. from MK
Or would they get stuck in the portal? :P
Shh, she might hear you!* She needs way more sword practice before you go tempting her off to try playing with another exotic new weapon.
* Disclaimer: This comment is made for humorous intent only. These characters are not real. Probably.**
** In the remote possibility that they are real…. um… say “Hi” to Sydney from me. Let her know I am free for gaming, any time she wants.
Count me in for a gaming session with Sydney.
Is she more for tabletop or digital?
i haven’t seen her pictured playing anything but tabletop so I’d go with that. Her rule lawyering just doesn’t work in video games so they’d prolly just aggravate her eventually.