Grrl Power #309 – Conservation of momentum into your head
It is a huge pet peeve of mine when momentum is ignored with teleporters and gateways and the like in movies. Also someone being caught six inches from the ground after falling 500 feet, especially if the person catching them is traveling laterally at terminal velocity plus. Like the first Star Trek reboot when Kirk and Sulu basically fell from low orbit and Chekov transported them the instant before they splatted, and all that happened was they fell over in the transporter. I think a grating on the floor broke. Edit: As discussed in the comments below, that may not be the best example since transporters would have to compensate for the difference between the velocity of a ship in orbit and the surface of a planet at the very least. All I’m asking for is one line in the movie which explains that, especially since it was pivotal to the scene, and I don’t recall it ever being discussed in any movie or episode of the series. It’s one of those refrigerator logic things that fans think about but I suspect the show creators never did. Granted it would invite all sorts of questions about how it can remove external momentum without stopping blood dead in its tracks or hearts or whatever, but then at least that one scene wouldn’t rank 4 eyerolls out of 5. Low orbit! Still, you guys know the sort of thing I’m talking about.
The way Harem is delivering that kick is a good way to break an ankle or worse, but don’t forget she gets physically tougher when she un-teleports some of herselves. (Which, out of context is a super weird sentence.) So when she pulls a horizontal 2 story drop into the side of someone’s stone head, she quickly contracts down to two of herself for the impact, which makes the both of them about 4 times as tough until she re-exists the dupes. She does that almost immediately because she describes not having all 5 of her out at once like a regular mono-person with walking around with an eyepatch and one ear stopped up.
Fighting Harem would basically be the worst. She’s master of the blindside, and it’s hard as hell to hit her. Obviously a skilled fighter could beat her, (she’s never beaten Math) and if you get one good hit in, it staggers the rest of her.
I asked on twitter what it’s called when gravity overcomes upward velocity and I got a lot of answers, Ballistic Apogee and Trajectory Apex both sound cool but I think those are names for the highest point of the parabola, not necessarily names for gravity countering momentum. Harem went with “velocitudeinal equilibrium.” She’s not a genius, but she’s smarter than average and surprisingly well read. Still, there’s part of her that thinks people (boys) find brainy chicks offputting so she doesn’t wear her education on her sleeve much. She’s still young though so she’ll probably outgrow that eventually, especially hanging around with all the other capable women on the team.
The Renegade X books (one and two) are among my favorite superhero novel series, up there with Wearing the Cape and D-List Supervillain, and the author, Chelsea Campbell, is running a kickstarter in advance of the third book coming out. It doesn’t cost much (as far as I’m aware) to publish an e-book through Amazon, but kickstarters for books like this are cool cause they allow for hardback versions but more importantly, they’re so they can afford to pay artists for cover art. Otherwise you wind up with covers done in Poser with Microsoft Word wordart for the title. There are some god damned dire covers if you go looking through the dregs of e-books. Like unbelievably bad. I’m sure there’s a subreddit just for making finding and making fun of the worst ones.
Speaking of reddit, there is a subreddit for Grrl Power. There’s not too much going on in there yet, but if you’re a big reddit person, you can subscribe there and get updates to the comic that way.
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I sense Portal…
I sense the child of Portal + Misfile…
Wait, why Misfile?
I too, am curious, though it’s been ages since I’ve been caught up with Misfile.
See below.
Because Harem is not really teleporting in the sense of merely moving matter around through portals or what have you. (though she can subconsciously choose to command her higher self to “fake” those effects) She is breaking a shell down to energy and data then storing it somewhere in a manner similar to the Star Trek teleporter that is being mentioned so often. Except her limits are only constrained by what she can envision well enough for her other conscious to pick up on and attempt to recreate by the manipulation of data.
She stores the energy but she also stores the data in something like the organic other dimension version of a “file” then her other self, which she isn’t terribly consciously aware of, alters the data in the file to create the effect that the meat Harem’s desire in the target location (fudge matching momentum to local object values etc… ) then uses the now altered data in the file in combination with the stored energy to recreate the altered Harem shell which now smoothly matches certain elements of the local matter’s data (She can feel out a target location. Maybe why she can’t see to scout it in detail is because her other self is busy doing other things with that ability)
It took her a while to form her first “clone” so she was probably storing the energy needed for the process up till then. (reminds one of Anvil a little but much more data involved?) Probably also stored extra energy so if the sum total of energies available from a body’s “destruction”/storage was less than those needed she could impart it to the altered data form. Wash rinse and repeat for future clone body creation till she had the five. (may be an element of her energy being self’s “overmind”/whateveritis growing to handle the new work load in Harem management)
So while the visual effect reminds me of the game series, “Portal” the way she stores data in a “file”, alters it to suit her needs, and uses stored energy to create a Harem in the desired location (like moving files around) reminds me of how the filing system of Misfile’s Heaven’s Filing Department (sorry forgot the name) functions in the that universe except that system uses code or shorthand which a Heavenly computer/system then fills in the blanks in order to create the item/being when, where, and how they want it to be while Harem’s “system” needs a copy of the original’s data to start with maybe in order to cut back on the overall work load since she doesn’t have the entire power of a Heavenly Host Server backing up her actions. ;D
But we don’t know that.
Sure, she’s not using portals, but if it was startrek/fax machine teleportation, why would conservation of momentum need to be worried at all?
It seems to me more likely that she literally stops being one place, and suddenly starts being in another, no breaking down into energy needed.
Well, in this comment section DaveB seems to be starting to show interest in using worm holes or whatever but originally he used words like copy/cloning without destroying the original (resulting eventually in her current limit of 5), storage of bodies for later recreation and explanations along those lines. This led me to believe that she destroys the original (or not if she is increasing her “harem” by one that day ), stores the information and energy gained in that destructive scan which she can then use to reconstitute it either immediately (looks just like teleporting ) or hold off on its reconstitution (storage).
In this comment section it looks like Dave is being won over by other types of teleportation (portals, worm holes, etc… ) and that frankly makes me a sad panda as the original idea (or what I thought was the original idea) is so much rarer and more cool for a super human to use. Its usually something machines do not organic supers.
“why would conservation of momentum need to be worried at all?”
I’m not terribly down with the science but RobK, in reply to a comment where I outlined a simpler version of my theory about Harem storing copied information, had this to say:
“RobK April 9, 2015 at 6:26 pm
That’s the problem though.
Momentum is an actual physical characterisitic of the atoms/molecules that make up your body. So on that explanation, the information stored would also contain that momentum”
He sounded like he had a much better idea of what he was talking about so I changed my theory to account for a being that had a specialized intelligence part of herself “somewhere” that alters the stored information to match objects in the target location and add/subtract the energy needed to make that information work (which requires that part of herself to store a reservoir of captured energy to deal with differences)
This makes me wish that Portal had actual combat in it. Not that Portal and its sequel aren’t amazing games as is, but imagine a game with Portal’s mechanics but with enemies that actually moved around instead of just sitting there waiting for you to drop stuff on them… Even better if some of the advanced enemies had portal guns of their own and knew how to use them like that…
Ooh, someone needs to, ahem, port that game into a multiplayer first-person shooter centered around ballistic weapons.
When physicists finally produce a theory of everything, I hope it contains vorpal physics within it.
For now, Daphne is like one of those incredible athletes that can’t really explain how they do what they do. In John Madden’s biography, he talks about good players who explain their footwork and whatnot, while great players say, basically, “I dunno coach. I just go.”
Especially the part that creates that “snicker-snack” sound.
Yes her conscious meat mind being the athlete.
It’s the Co-ed portion of Harem that’s doing the schooling here, I notice. The meat that accentuates her scholarly side. Did Dave do that on purpose? Gotta wonder.
It would be nice if she used different members of her “Chorus” to do appropriate actions. Like having a favorite hand for certain functions.
https://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Riva's_chorus
Seems like Star Trek is the go to reference of the day.
Actually, 60 Symbols did a thing on teleporation and wormholes in portal 1 and 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=128&v=ASUUN0W4_JY
Speedy things go in, Speedy things come out!
You can’t explain that.
In fairness to Star Trek, the teleporter would have to remove momentum. A spacecraft in orbit is moving at about 10km per second with respect to the ground, and they can beam up and down to the surface without any problem at all.
To build on that, and to try and get DAVE to think it through a bit more …
There have been a LOT of transporter tricks and explanations throughout the course of the Star Trek universe. There’s even (at least) an incident where an away party is transported into another ship while the Enterprise is traveling at (multiple?) warp speed (1st or 2nd season of TNG if I recall). I mean … complaining about low orbit transporter tricks isn’t even in the same universe as transporting out of warp and into “stationary” space.
The most simple consideration to keep in mind is that the transporter technology of the Star Trek universe involves total conversion of matter and energy. Disassembling matter into energy and holding it in buffer merely conserves the energy of momentum in another energy form, and allows that momentum to be removed or added as necessary when re-assembling that energy signal back into matter.
When you are in a transporter beam, you exist as pure, momentumless, energy. Reconstituting atoms from that energy dies not require that the original momentum be imparted. Think about it this way: how much momentum does light have? By definition, as a wave form, the energy of light exists in the frequency of its spectrum, not any momentum of its particles.
If there’s excess energy (e.g., momentum) for any person/object being transported, that energy gets dumped into whatever local power grid(s) the transporter is networked into. If you require the addition of momentum, you have an anti-matter-conversion system to dump whatever energy is required into the transporter system. In a sense, you adjust the frequency of the waveform of whatever energy is in your transporter buffer, with a positive or negative delta in total energy being moved in or out of the buffer into your power grid.
It’s fundamentally impossible to have practical & functioning transporter technology if it doesn’t have this capacity. Basic ship-to-ship transports would be impossible otherwise, since virtually all ships are very nearly always in motion relative to each other (sometimes c-fractional motion), let alone any transport between ship and planetary surface. Any ship in orbit is traveling at dozens of kilometers per second in relation to any surface region … the only exception being a perfect geosynchronous orbit, and I doubt there is a single example of any Star Trek universe ship ever being specifically mentioned as being in (or having to be in) geosynchronous orbit. A ship docked statically at station is actually a pretty rare occurrence, especially when transporters are in use.
So, yeah. I agree that in other universes it would be nice if teleporters gave some explanation for conservation of momentum (X-Men would be a vastly better example). But, Star Trek is not a universe that has neglected that detail.
If there is a real nitpick with the Trek universe, I think it is the phenomenally robust energy grids that have to be in place to handle this differential. But, apparently, the magical “transporter buffer” is The Mother Of All Capacitors and handles this with extreme reliability.
Man. I have such a geekout headrush now …. ;-) :lol:
Well – if we are going to talk physics, there’s always that nagging problem that if a teleporter changes their location vertically, they’ve changed their potential energy so conservation of energy seems to have been violated. We just have to ignore physics sometimes and engage in willing suspension of disbelief so we can enjoy the entertainment.
In response to datora, there are some episodes of TNG where they state in Picard’s initial mission briefing dialog at the beginning of the episode that the Enterprise is in geosynchronous orbit around some planet or other. I don’t think it really matters but you said you didnt think they ever said it.
On relative spacial momentum and transporters, that actually is NOT accounted for in the transporter subsystems. The excess momentum is shed down to a specific relative limit by the ship’s inertial dampeners which allow for a certain level of movement but are designed to keep the speed of that movement below a level dangerous to life forms and can adjust inertia instantly and massively else everyone would be wall paste the first time a ship tried to maneuver at high speed. Gravitic fields are a wonderful thing…until they arent…
Fair enough, as far as geosynchronous orbits being mentioned. It has been over 5 years since I’ve watched any Star Trek, and that was a DS9 marathon. Could be nearly 10 since I’ve seen more than one or two random & partial TNG episodes.
As far as transporter buffer vs. inertial dampers, there really isn’t any difference. The technology underlying them is founded on the same basic principles, namely that energy & matter are converted interchangeably and that energy itself can be converted with a very high degree of efficiency into different forms of energy. These are the same principles that make functional holosuites and replicators possible.
I’m not going to dwell on this topic at this time. My main point is that the Star Trek universe has a lot of canon discussion, and that the various technologies that have been explained would easily and intuitively account for buffering forms of energy (such as momentum) and manipulating them in ways that “magically” make them “appear” and “disappear” from the observer’s perception. That’s what the mind-boggling capacity of Trek universe supercomputers spend a good chunk of their resources managing automatically.
I guess I’ll leave it at this thought, which I want to mull over a bit.
Harem is likely a being that exists in both a quantum and a wave form state. Part of her ability would seem to be an extension of her ability to balance between those states, and shift toward one or the other at need.
Imagine the immense energy it would take to manufacture an entire human mass. She has to be able to both tap into an energy source to create that much mass, but also needs a place to either store or dump excess energy when she maintains fewer bodies. For example, if when decides to only have three copies of herself in existence at one moment, the other two copies represent the equivalent of a complete matter/anti-matter conversion of about 100 kilograms of mass.
If released as an explosion, you could vaporize a continent or shatter a moon with that much raw energy. So … some part of her ability allows for buffering and converting mass & energy, and (it would seem) that has to take place outside of the immediate universe.
What’s interesting are her limits, such as not being able to teleport another person. A full-sized person, at least. Could Harem save a baby from a burning building? By pure mass involved, yes, she could. At some point an older child would be too much mass and she could not, unless living beings are the problem. Then she couldn’t save a kitten … but she also couldn’t maintain her basic human biology (gut bacteria, for example).
During the course of this universe, she stands the possibility of understanding what & how she does what she does enough to unlock a higher achievement. Perhaps being able to teleport an elephant or multiple colleagues, for example. Dabbler might be able to comprehend what Harem does & explain it to her, but Harems own cognition and will would then probably be part of her limit(s). Her perception of self may be limiting her more at this stage than her actual capacity of ability.
As a though experiment, Dabbler could hypnotize Harem, walk her through explanation and perception, and “convince” Harem that her “self” encompasses a larger segment of reality than her mere human-sized body. That’s when she would be able to truly test the physical & physics limits of her ability.
Just how much “buffer capacity” can her will manipulate? Could she manage the energy requirements of teleporting an aircraft carrier, so long as she perceives it as part of her “self?”
The explanation given in today’s comic could be nothing more than her personal mental gymnastics to grasp what she is doing, to “explain” to her own brain how she is expressing her will through her ability. If her understanding changes, then she may be able to modify the expression of her ability.
Such as “Oh. Cool. I just need to buffer energy and balance the transit between a particular body and the ‘magic buffer location’.” Poof. She can hover in place (“momentum buffering,” to give it a conceptual term), as stable as a mountain in a hurricane. The energy requirements to do that would be a miniscule fraction of what it takes to teleport the mass of a single coin. Even Maxima or Anvil might have extreme difficulty in budging her if she could learn that trick.
As always your discussion is based on physics as we understand it now.
And if and when teleportation is developed our understanding will be quite different.
I like that idea. I don’ t think i’ve ever considered the ramifications of a living being who was both a partical and a wave. I agree on the possibility that her limits are all in her head regarding living beings, but there is also the Enderverse theory, that her “soul” can only sustain so many living beings and attempting to transport any but the bodies that are quantum entangled to her is truly impossible. There are two future options to this as well though. She can continue to expand, splitting off more bodies every so often or she might one day be able to quantum entangle another living being. Not sure how messed up that would be but it’s possible given this chain of thought it could happen.
Now on to other hypotheticals. If she’s pulling and dumping massve amounts of energy and she has the ability to tap into other dimensions then it’s possible she’s using zero point energy, drawing from and dumping back into the limitless underpinnings of our universe. That would suit the idea that her limitations are in her head and means she could probably teleport the planet if her brain could process it.
Yeah, Larry Niven was pretty fond of pointing that out in his books- teleporters had to deal with the changes in the Earth’s rotational velocity not only when altitude got changed, but also when latitude changed- moving from the Equator to 45 degrees North caused a huge change in rotational velocity that needed to be compensated for.
I think that the reason most teleporters don’t have to deal with it (like in Marvel and DC comics) is because it’s a huge pain in the butt to remember and relatively few readers actually care about the math involved anyway.
ehh…
Potential Energy is slightly conserved if she time dilates/contracts. I would agree with you that gravitational potential energy would change her speed though and massive heat would need to be released if that speed didn’t change. However, the question is what is the major potentional energy term? Is it just major gravitational potentional energy is just the earth or could it als be from wormhole/teleportation field?
Now in terms of heat, maybe pink/purple shield helps to dissipate that heat?
In other words besides that tiny amount that is conserved thanks to dilation, you would be right that their is the issue of conserving gravitational potential energy.
Gnaster depend on which version of star trek your talking about. In the new one, part of the problem that Scotty’s equation had to solve that you have to conserve momentum. He’s has a quote about horse’s :/
Then again star trek does not have the best track record with physics and teleporters, so there could be something, I am overlooking.
“… the teleporter would have to remove momentum.”
From what I’ve read in “tech manuals” written on the subject, the basic theory of operation of the transporter harmlessly “bleeds off” the difference in relative inertia during the act of “energizing” the subject…the inertia, at worst, might cause a slight breeze in the air surrounding the subject during teleportation, but most of it is compensated with the enterprise’s inertial dampers.
Nice shout out to Jim Bernheimer. I have several of his books including Confessions of a D-List Supervillain. A quick check of Amazon shows that there are 3 books in that series now and he’s apparently working on the fourth. Fun fact, before he started writing original fiction, Jim honed his skills writing Harry Potter fanfiction https://www.fanfiction.net/u/940359/jbern
I recently came across a very well written (and totally free) Potter revisionist novel that basically started with the premise that Harry was raised by relatives who were supportive and scientists rather than harsh and uneducated. When he arrived at Hogwarts his initial reaction was to say that there was no way according to the rules of physics that magic could do what was claimed. He gets sorted into Ravenclaw with the other inquisitive bookish students. The author takes liberal potshots at the original version with comments from characters like ‘Of course Hermione would be put into Ravenclaw. If someone like her didn’t get sent there, there would be no point in having a house Ravenclaw’. Harry is offered an owl and says ‘Can I just pay a knut to send a message when I want? Then why would I need to take care of my own owl for 24 hours a day?’ The author makes a lot of references to various theories of science, logic, and rational thought, and how it flies in the face of the magical ‘wave a stick at something’ method of operation. In one letter home Harry writes ‘Today I broke the law of thermodynamics and at least one of Newton’s Iaws of motion’. think his style fits with a lot of the people who frequent this site.
Note: It takes the author until about the second or third chapter to find his voice, but it gets really enjoyable after that. Also, as part of the Dark Arts Defense class the teacher runs various battle simulations to teach the students. You should have a cursory knowledge of the book Ender’s Game to get a lot of the inside jokes.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
In panel #3, is that yippe supposed to be yippie?
I think you meant “Yippee”, although, she could be part of a hippy group (at least one of them).
Oh, duh. Sorry. Yeah, that’s what I meant. Thanks for catching that. : )
In fairness, this makes a reasonable amount of sense, else teleporting to anywhere else on the rather swiftly rotating oblate spheroid we live on would cause all manner of problems. At the equator, your tangential velocity is in the 450m/s region. Move from that to the other side, and you’ll find yourself moving at 900 relative to your new location (since the tangent is in the opposite direction). That’s pretty quick. You also have problems moving north and south, since your angular momentum is relative to radius. So, honestly, staying at the same momentum relative to your own reference point makes as much sense as anything else, really.
Exactly. For Harem to teleport around on the Earth at all she has to be able to compensate for huge changes in momentum.
Most likely her believing that momentum is conserved on the local scale is all in her head, a disadvantage to her power that she could buy off later on. Then she could simply teleport down rather than fall.
What I am wondering Is if she can fly using this, and some sort of a relay type system. ‘port H1 up 4000 feet, wait for her to start falling. when she reaches terminal, ‘port to 4000 again, angle herself so her movement is sideways, and repeat. would look weird for the first few, but after a bit, she could just keep an angle of like 45 degrees and fly like \\\\\\\\\\\\. though, not really that efficient, it beats being stranded.
To me, the trajectory would most likely look like a kangaroo hop. She would initially teleport up to a point where she could reach vertical terminal velocity (at some safe point above the ground) then port from that point at 45 degrees upward towards her destination. That would get her maximum horizontal travel. At the base of the next parabola at her predetermined safe height she would be at max vertical velocity again and she re-ports, er, repeats the procedure in the same direction.
For those of you who want to add in air friction, she would need to include a small height boost at the start of each ‘bounce’ cycle to maintain her travel speed.
There’s a game on Steam called The Swapper where you can do this. You click one button to create a clone of yourself, and another to transfer your consciousness into it, making it the “primary.” So basically you can create clone after clone and keep jumping to the next one, effectively flying. You have a finite number of clones you can make, creating a new one destroys a previous one, otherwise you could cross a pit by just filling it with corpses of yourself then walking across. :)
At least for Star Trek, momentum in transporters seems to be a setting (heck, they already compensate for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.) See the DS9 episode Field of Fire which features a rifle with a micro-transporter attached to the barrel allowing for shots that are very similar to harem’s kick.
Actually, that IS already covered in Star Trek. Kirk and Sulu shouldn’t have fallen, even. See, in Star Trek, Teleporters work by converting your body into energy particles, “beaming” the energy to the destination, and reconstituting it into its appropriate matter afters it passes through a buffering system on ship. Them *having* an issue of continued momentum was the problem with the scene, not the lack of their momentum. That’s also why McCoy always steadfastly refused to use beaming, referring to be as being “broken up into a million pieces”. In Next Generation, they can even disable or remove weapons while their energy is still in the buffers, thus killing the ability of an enemy to just beaming a bomb onto the ship.
Can you tell I was the kid with the Tech Manuals?
Thanks, saved me the typing.
Which means Harem has access to a “place” that can store such things (even “instant” teleports go through the “buffer”/storage) and probably holds the non-meat based mind parts responsible for doing the calculations the computers of Star Trek do for their teleporters. Thanks for making me feel less alone in thinking of her “teleporting” as NOT being a simple matter of shifting her mass about through multiple dimensions but a function involving transformation into energy and data which can be manipulated on the other end.
Its not really surprising that Harem could only make one copy at first (and didn’t have that ability till she reached a certain age) no matter the data crunching power of her overmind since she would have to “save up” the energy needed to create the matter for the copy of the originals template and also extra energy to make up for altering a copies momentum etc… upon reconstitution if the energy stored from the last position summed up to less than what was needed to reproduce those momentum energies, etc… required for safety at the destination.
New Harem tangle attack: Jump high and start falling with a pair of 2 lb weights connected by 10 feet of steel cable. Flick out one end while holding the other. Teleport again to 4 feet off ground, reoriented to horizontal travel, behind and to the side of the target. As you pass target, let go –flip bird– and teleport away. One second of winding and enough time to be able to catch that lovely clang as the weights hit.
Advanced version: the weights are grenades wrapped in 10 penny nails and the cable is wrapped in set cord… One pin on ring is around “bird” finger. Timing is everything.
DET cord (damned spellcheck)
For a non-lethal version how about a small thin glass globe of acid on one end of the bola and a similar container of napalm on the other end with a lit fuse connected with razor wire? You know, for when you just want to distract them or get their attention. ;D
Well they still fell because their leg muscles weren’t in a position to support their bodies (think about when you think there’s one more step down and you hit the floor too soon).
That and the transporter safeties calculated the lowest appendage and added a small margin. You don’t normally fall with both feet exactly level. Two people clinging get treated as four appendages.
What I find worse is when I’m expecting the ground and it’s an inch or two farther down…
Again, though, they still shouldn’t have fallen, since they could be beamed in flush with the deck of the ship. They don’t have momentum to fall with, because why would the Enterprise teleport the empty air beneath them for them to BE off the ground? I mean, it would be a great practical joke to play, since the transporter chief would’ve had to do it on purpose (having to lay in the coordinates, but like 1 or 2 feet off the deck) but they still should’ve coalesced on the deck of the transporter pads, even if they were laying down when they did so. This has been done plenty of times on the show, and in the movies. In the instance of their feet being slightly out of alignment for the transport, they would simply be teleported in with their backs flushing level, since spread eagle position they’re trained would put both legs slightly in front of their torsos.
I really like this page. It’s an infodump, but done in a nice character + relationship building way.
Hmm, a thought just occured to me. She’s traveling a few hundrew MPH sideways due to the rotation of the Earth. If you turns upside down to flip her vertical velocity, wouldn’t that flip her horizontal velocity too, meaning she’s suddenly breaking the sound barrier horizontally?
Unless her teleport is somehow tied to the local frame of reference.
Nope, because she still travels at the same speed with the earths rotation after teleporting. its like throwing a ball up in the air when driving in a car. you can throw it with 100km/h without issues. Just a matter of defining your references
My point was, if rotating your teleport exit 180 degrees with relation to the entrance reverses vertical velocity, then it should just as much reverse horizontal velocity.
I think it may be locally oriented.
nice strip, but if you talk about things which annoy someone: It always annoys me greatly when gravity doesnt work properly with people their hair (in otherwords, why is it that sydneys hair points upwards and doesnt hang down)
other than that: nice page
That’s intentional. Sydney’s flight power works by altering her personal gravity field.
Normally I’d agree, but that’s a particular quirk of the flight orb.
Oh ho, you have hit upon something that has shown up before: The orbs dont follow the rules, and the flight orb really doesnt follow the rules. Check out her first reveal of it: “She’s flying, albeit in an aggravating manner”. Page 87.
The short answer is that her hair flys in formation with her. The other way around always bugged me (unless it was wind moving their hair) because it’s not like just their skeleton is flying and lifting the rest of them, their whole body is flying.
X-men: First Class is a good example of ignoring momentum. Havok, Azazel and Beast all fall a few thousand feet, then teleport 3 feet off the deck of a ship, and all just go “uh” instead of “Splat”
Well for Nightcrawler it makes sense. He doesn’t teleport strictly in terms of A to B. It turns out he actually goes through an alternate dimension for a fraction of a second, which would kill his momentum and anyone he carries.
He’s also to set the portals in whatever direction he wants, such as putting them in an up-facing direction to break any carryover momentum by coming out moving against the point of gravity, as opposed to following it.
Readers see … “Blah, blah, blah … tops-down view of Harem.”
Actually, safety tip for Miss Scoville:
She’d be SAFER to fly HIGHER before doing that trick. It runs contrary to instinct, but flying lower before doing something risky means you have less time to correct before you go splat. Going up a few thousand feet gives you several seconds bail out if things go wrong.
That’s true of flying, but in flying you also have the forward momentum of the airplane working against you if you crash. Here we only see a vertical drop of a human body.
BTW when you fall under the effects of gravity you are accelerating each second so if you’re thinking of reversing in the last few feet you actually have LESS time the higher you drop from.
There’s no reason for Harem to wait until the last few feet, unless she’s trying to maximize the efficiency of the maneuver, which she has no reason to do if she’s just using it as a feather-fall replacement. Even if she is trying to maximize efficiency for, say, kick-energy delivery, it works just as well to just vorp to a higher altitude in step 2 so she can fall the same distance but still maintain a larger safety margin for step 3.
People can and do die from falling ten feet (my niece, as I mentioned earlier, got seriously concussed recently; that was just from falling down, not any distance), and twisted ankles or the like aren’t all that unlikely… and from that height Harem has less than 8/10ths of a second to react before she hits the pavement. From a hundred feet, she’d almost certainly be killed if she hit the ground… but she’s got 2.5 seconds to realize what’s happening and engage vorp engines, so it’s a lot less likely that she actually will hit the ground. Forty feet is the worst of both worlds; death is not unlikely, serious injury almost certain, and only 1.5 seconds of reaction time.
Maybe, if she was dropped unawares from forty feet, but she was ready is experienced
Going lower however ALSO reduces the damage a fall will do if something goes wrong. Dropping Harem from 1000 feet would probably end up with a corpse where as from the showed 40(ish) feet it likely would have been a broken leg at worst. So its a balancing call, and Sydney chose the option that didn’t risk death.
*cough* Gwen Stacy *cough*
“Lamb farts.” – part of the International System of Measurements since 1960. :P
Right next to ferret balls.
So there’s a reason why in Star Trek that Momentum is NEVER an issue:
The teleporters don’t really work like the Teleport power. They don’t really move in a convention sense.
Instead the body is destroyed and then re-created inside the teleporter machine. Your body is turned into a Digital Signal, and then reappeared.
They show this in Star Trek: The Next Generation when it showed that due to some specail circumstances, a teleporter accidentally created TWO William Rikers. One of whom got stuck on the planet, and the other got teleported back successfully to the ship.
Personally, I would much prefer the type of teleportation shown here than the startrek one. I prefer transportation devices that don’t kill me, and replace me with a perfect copy.
Nice to meet you at last, Dr. McCoy. :P
Some of the later Trek fiction/novels had a religious sect that would not use a transporter because they thought only the original body had the soul and it was lost in the process of of scrambling and reassembling the person during transport.
Anyone care to guess/comment on Whitey’s tat? Google says “Extrahis” is Latin for “to pull out”, “drag” or “draw forth”. Since the whole tat is centered on her “behind” I would lean toward “Asinus”…
As in “Pull it out of your ass”
Knowing Harem it would be something more sexual like pull out AND push in here.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the latin on her tattoo right only to discover that if I put it high enough on her back to see the whole thing then it wouldn’t be a tramp stamp anymore. I’m sure it’ll appear in its entirety later.
And you are going to make us wait until then to find out what it actually says, aren’t you?
You evil, evil man…
I like you. :)
This comment thread goes very well with your Nana Chan avatar.
LOL, it does, doesn’t it!
So glad you recognized her. If you are a reader, next chapter should be ready by the weekend. More drama! Which is odd for a Rom/Com.
Her name is Abbey, not ‘Whitey’
Oh and DaveB, you may want to catch the movie “Jumpers”. Admittedly the special effects blocked much of the physics of the book version, but they did tend to conserve momentum. Jumping with a car in motion, a bus, a freaking shark! It’s just the main character –like many of us– thinks mostly 2 dimensionally. It even gives a nod to earth spin when he goes form high longitudes to equatorial –though it is treated as a jolt rather than a toss across the room.
He should also watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASUUN0W4_JY
Though, I suspect he has watched it before.
I see you used (at least part of) the tramp stamp @cnoocy came up with. (I’m @DenisMoskowitz.)
Let that be a clue for the people who are asking about it :)
Ah, never mind – not actually a match.
The under-comic comment about Harem cheating makes me think that back in middle school gym class Daphne was the all-time champ at dodge ball.
It would probably easier to list the sports in which such an ability wouldn’t be a major advantage than to list the ones in which it would. Golf, tennis (and similar sports), and racecar driving (unless they allow her to “drive” a “car” that’s under her vorpable limit) are the only ones that I can think of all the top of my head.
SO does this mean Harem in ice skates can do a vorpal move through attack?
Nice tattoo. Once I got past that, however, I notice some odd blue line in panel 5(?)
Its showing her velocity/momentum slowing as she “falls” upward.
Who bets she’s got a parking ticket?
It’s only been a day, and there were no parking meters, so probably (possibly) the banks own carpark
Hmm. It occurs to me that lower would actually be more dangerous for Harem. The distance she falls has no effect on her ability to perform this trick, so dropping her from lower just means she has less time to react and ‘port out before she breaks an ankle.
What is the blue scale for? I cannot figure it that measuring her position during the teleporation or how she fell.
It’s supposed to show her decelerating as she falls upwards. It’s not literally appearing next to her, it’s like a “this moment in science” overlay. :)
Not sure I don’t remember the comic if it was X-men or his stint with X-calibur, but Nightcrawler was falling from crazy high up and he had to try and find an updraft to break his velocity then at his slowest point falling, he teleported about 15-30ft above a body of water an dove into it. He couldn’t chage the directional velocity of the momentum. Down was still down, if thorn west, when he reappeared from the teleport he would still have westward momentum.
The Star Trek teleporters aren’t just opening a portal or moving a person as-is; don’t they actually deconstruct a person to their constituent parts and reconstruct them on the pad? So if you’re really lucky, you can copy Riker or keep Scotty in buffer for 150 years. No momentum involved, because you’re just placing each atom in it’s spot relative to the initial scan.
Ahh, geeky arguments. I look forward to being corrected a hundred times!
and because you can do things like copy riker you’re just creating instances of the individual and destroying the original to “move” them. nothing should be stopping you from making 10000 rikers and permanently saving a backup of scotty. and theres also no reason you’d have to rematerialize anything “teleported”(if anything its easier not to) so you could basically snip people with it too
its kinda like how gravity plating makes the engines more or less pointless. they use technology oddly in startrek, almost like they picked something up on an alien world without understanding it was an engine and upon starting it up blasted a hole in a wall, labeled it “turret with insane recoil” and started working on “fixing” that and shooting stuff with it.
Well, here are my 2 cent on Teleportation, Gateways and Momentum;
Through a Gateway I would agree that momentum would carry over, since you are literally walking through a rift in space-time from 1 location to the next, I can agree to that.
Now Teleportation…. no I can’t, in fact the ability to carry over momentum should, for all intents and purposes, be impossible when teleporting.
The reason for this are the simple explanation on HOW teleporting would work, which is as follows, when you teleport you disassemble yourself on a sub molecular level, travel at speeds faster than light to the desired location and then reassemble again from the ground up, in fact the best showcase of correct teleportation in any franchise to date are actually Borderlands’ fast-travel system, which correctly shows that teleporting would basically cause you to become suspended at your target location for a few moments while reassembling.
Obviously such a way of traveling also means that any momentum you had prior to your teleport are basically null and void, as your molecules where traveling at speeds WAAAAY above terminal velocity, and would be reassembling at 1 single location, meaning any momentum you had would need to dissipate before reconstruction, or your reassembled body would slam headfirst into the nearest object at speeds higher than the speed of light upon reassembly.
I think she actually could add or subtract any amount of momentum on her position without doing more than port a few inches. It really isn’t any more or less power intensive than tearing yourself apart and recreating it again somewhere else –just add a little energy. But she has a mental limitation on how her power works that prevents her from doing so because her own understanding of the power says so. Her power had no better documentation than Sydney’s so she worked out a theory. Someday she may realize that a micro-port could impart a huge boost to a punch.
At least that is how my own Champions character had his powers setup: Elemental pool with teleport, a no range killing attack, an entangle (port with coil of rope to same position with rope coiled around person), strength limited to one direction only with a skill roll (to prevent breaking an ankle or wrist from “catching” something heavier than he could carry realistically).
DaveB: “Like the first Star Trek reboot when Kirk and Sulu basically fell from low orbit and Chekov transported them the instant before they splatted, and all that happened was they fell over in the transporter. I think a grating on the floor broke. Edit: As discussed in the comments below, that may not be the best example since transporters would have to compensate for the difference between the velocity of a ship in orbit and the surface of a planet at the very least. All I’m asking for is one line in the movie which explains that, especially since it was pivotal to the scene, and I don’t recall it ever being discussed in any movie or episode of the series. It’s one of those refrigerator logic things that fans think about but I suspect the show creators never did. ”
Two words – Heisenberg Compensators :)
Also there is a difference with no momentum transfer in Star Trek because the teleporters are not actually “teleporting.” They disassemble you to subatomic particles, store it in memory, then teleport the data to the arrival area where the subatomic particles are rebuilt. And it’s actually been shown that subatomic particles can travel at near instantaneous speeds. I think that some scientists in France even posited the existence of subatomic particles going ftl for incredibly small distances from a series of experiments (need to look up details on that)
There is something wrong with this comic. I keep clicking the Next button, but nothing happens most days of the week!
♥♥
Here Dave someone who was thinking about inertia too: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2001-07-14
Oh and what goes unsaid there is that their teraport can burn any mass to fuel itself. The first version stole the main character’s dirty magazines.
So that explains how she can deal with that whole ‘relative momentum from *vorp*ing from half way around the planet’ thing
Wonder how long before she realises she can skip steps two and three?
ARGH
Dave – PLEASE add a NSFW tag to that “unbelievably bad” link!
Now please excuse me while I go talk to our IT external proxy team about ‘certain issues’ in my browsing history. Grrrrrr.
Hope you’re also planning a discussion with your human resources regarding surfing and posting comments on webcomics and how that’s ‘related to work activities.’ NSFW applies to GrrlPower in general just due to Sydney’s artistic language skills, as well as the cheesecake and beefcake. So, visiting this URL at all from such a tight-ass environment is every bit as problematic as following that link.
Unicorn Butt Cops is as legit as any link you will follow on Amazon.
Maybe dial the homophobia and drama back a bit? It’s just making you look fabulously silly. The browsing history “problems” you are whining about probably extend vastly further than mere “GrrlPower” and “Unicorn Butt Cop” titles. If you are spending your work hours complaining in comment sections of webcomics that the Internet doesn’t comply with your work proxy rules, you have much greater issues than being perceived as a Butt Pirate by your IT department.
I’m just sayin’, y’know. As a person that avoids proxy issues with my browsing history at work by surfing websites like this on my personal time and with my personal computing equipment and Internet connection.
It’s a nifty trick, but it makes no sense that her momentum would be carried over like that. It worked in Portal because objects traveled through portals, but she’s completely re-writing her energy.
Yup, that’s why said she could skip steps two and three: she could go from a standing *vorp* to dropkicking someone in the face in a single step because the energy (and momentum) comes from the *vorp* itself, not what she was doing prior to the *vorp*
Given the inability to change the vector of travel she could still pull this trick off so long as she teleported to the opposite side of the Earth. Potential energy would be conserved, so long as she was the same relative height over the planet’s gravitational center. Of course you’re still cheating potential energy unless you don’t plan to land at some point.
The momentum loop attack would be limited to local terminal velocity. Which is probably good, cause that looks hard on the knees. Better to dive bomb with a pocket full of ball bearings, bang-snaps or rotten eggs, what have you.
How exactly does reabsorbing her clones make her tougher? Same thing with Max’s speed dump. No matter how much some move should hurt the user they always have that durability buff. Seems kind of conveniently cheep to me.
It’s more that each body out reduces her slightly (so really hoping she doesn’t get a lot more bodies, or with all of them out, they will be too weak even to stand)
She probably doesn’t make a new clone till she has grown the strength to maintain it so I bet that when she could only make 2 clones and had them both out they were of normal human strength, when she could make 3 clones and had 3 out they were of normal human strength, and so on till she gained the ability to make 5. When she gets 6, if she gets 6, I think it means her overall power pool is now larger by one so when she reduced to 1 body she would then be stronger than Anvil’s base strength.
Like that idea: it means that she could get stronger, now it raises the question: does she *vorp* out a new body automatically to prevent her from getting too strong? Sort of like, once she reaches ‘critical mass’ another body *vorp*s into existence
It was probably like an irresistible itch when she was relatively new to her own ability that when she tried to scratch led to the first clone. Now she’s such old hat she will probably have all 5 out and realize she “feels” like she has one waiting in storage only she doesn’t or if that doesn’t work (its possible if she puts one of her currents in deep storage she could make a new 5th? Maybe she already has an alternate like this? Could come in handy for super fast fancy wardrobe and makeup changes when all other clones are occupied) then maybe instead it she would just suddenly notice that all 5 of her are out but she is now stronger than normal levels as if she has only 4 out. Given all the details of her power it would be surprising if she didn’t notice – automatic vorping or no.
I doubt there are any “critical mass” issues since we know the extra energy of ‘stored’ bodies goes back into those that remain I’m assuming the new level of juice would do the same (why doesn’t she get stronger bit by bit as she gathers the strength or whatever it is to make a new clone body? Cause Dave likes video games and other types of games with levels and anyplace he’s not going for realism or comedy he immediately goes gamer I guess.)