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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Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were farmers and ranchers. A lamb/sheep fart is not all that gentle. They eat nothing but vegetables all day long, after all. And they are so stupid that they will eat alfalfa until the gasses it produces in them kills them. And if it doesn’t, they still need to, um, vent those gasses…
A better metaphor might have been a butterfly fart.
Sydney’s punches are like that. It didnt look that gentle.
Butterfly fart? Maybe better try something with a digestive system. Like an Ant fart.
They also eat vegetation, try a spider fart.
Cthullu fart!
Last I heard (or read), Cthullu is a carnivore…His farts wouldn’t be smelling like rotting veggies, I would think.
Cthullu eats what Cthullu wants.
Consider the effect of his eating 20+ vegans.
someone beat me too it…I used to raise sheep lol.
Despite their utter stupidity there are some advantages, right? Lamb in the spring and summer, mutton in the fall and winter. :)
Meh. Stuff like this doesn’t bother me. It’s just pedantism. Imagine if every little thing that someone, somewhere might not know or understand resulted in another scene (or even just another line or dialog) being added to explain it? If one starts insisting that they explain every little thing they do that someone might not understand the logic behind then suddenly you end up with a movie that’s 4-6 hours of science, psuedo-science, and historical exposition and 30 minutes of people actually doing things. That’s completely unreasonable.
Take Independance day. Every one laughs at it cause a computer virus infecting an alien computer is silly. But I had already guessed the moment the alien ship is revealed at Area 51 that they would be compatible because the movie universe had been researching and applying alien technology based on it. Then it turns out there was a deleted scene that actually spells that out.
Add to that that sometimes it’s not something the writers simply made up but rather a real-world fact the viewers are simply ignorant of. Take Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. In it he rides on the outside of a WWII era nazi submarine while it is submerged. What? Did he hold his breath for the hours/days the trip would take?
No. WWII era submarines used diesel engines for main propulsion. Diesel engines require air to run. When fully submerged a WWII era sub would switch to battery power but would move much slower and have to surface and crank the diesel eventually to recharge batteries. Standard Operating Procedure was to only submerge a little and run off the diesel full time unless making an attack run. To facilitate that the periscope was equipped with both an air inlet and an exhaust pipe allowing the sub to submerge but leave its periscope above water to get air for the engine. This is the reason nuclear subs were such a big deal when they came about. A nuclear sub can stay submerged for months and loses no performance when doing so.
Once again I already knew this (I know things, sue me)… I just assumed he held on to the periscope. Again… turns out in a deleted scene Indy used his whip to tie himself to the periscope.
In my experience the vast majority of so called plot-holes and science fails are actually the viewer not knowing something or not thinking something through. In almost all cases I either know something or can come up with a consistent in-universe explanation for it that makes the supposed plot-hole go away.
The Mass Effect 3 ending remains a sore point for me specifically because of this. Every single complaint about the ME3 ending was a case of some one not having paid attention to the dialog and background information given out in that and the previous games. I *loved* the ending. Then I had to sit through the s***-storm of people moaning and bellying aching about things that really just amounted to them not knowing what they were talking about.
No matter where I went, in real life or online, some one was always running off at the mouth about how destroying the gates was a bad thing (despite the entire first game being about how the gates are just a mind trick to enslave us to the reaper’s technology when we don’t actually need them) or how destroying a gate releases enough energy to destroy the entire system (but not if the energy has already been released another way as shown in the ending cinematic) etc etc etc. It nearly ruined the series for me. In fact I still haven’t gone back and played any of them since.
TL;DL: Don’t be an ignorant pedant. I ignorant pedants are lame.
So, where was the Normandy SR2 going at FTL speeds during that ending, and why?
I think that was a case of “Where are we going? Anywhere but HERE!”
I’m right there with you on the “easy to find internally consistent explanation” thing.
Except for the mass effect ending. I didn’t like it because it was an immediate tonal shift, the developers flat-out lied about many important details, and the catalyst opens up so many plot holes it isn’t funny.
It is also a sci-fi not fantasy series, so the “kill all machines” and “merge all machines and organics” endings come across a lot more like magic than anything even soft science fiction can pull off without breaking my suspension of disbelief, and Mass Effect was going for a something on the harder side of the McCaffery-Niven scale (Pern to Ring World. First examples I thought of on either end of the scale). The only real breaks from science are completely consistent. Mass Effect fields and eezo are the little black boxes, but other than biotics being able to manipulate those fields biologically everything is both internally consistent and quite consistent with a decent understanding of physics.
The catalyst though… brings up nothing but unanswerable questions. Comes nearly completely out of left field (tell me where an overarching/controlling AI for the reaper race is hinted at in any point previous in the series), and then tell me how an energy wave can implant cybernetics and organic components into beings?
Also it’s a 100% tonal shift from the entire rest of the games. We’re given choices and branches and all those come down to three colored lights. You’ve saved the galaxy now choose A, B, or C. Which renders your thousands of choices through the games almost meaningless. Which the developers specifically stated they were not doing with the ending. In those words even!
You forgot something very important! The cycle continues ending.
Pick it if you don’t want to save the Galaxy with colored lights. :)
I wonder what would have happened if they had given the player the HALO option. Kill all organic life. The cycle ends, the reapers are wiped out because of their genetic components and the Geth become the masters of the universe. With EDI as their Queen, because why not.
The middle option of course would be kill organic and synthetic life, and let the universe sort itself out.
…
Wow. That seemed way less morbid before I typed it all out.
I refer to that as the “Go pound sand you childish AI” ending, This is because developers have never made story telling the strong point of games it is about the action and pretty pictures. Some of the concepts if you read the white papers would make you bet your head into your desk. When a developer does make story telling the strong point you get a real writer to do the script not some hack who thinks he is a writer and you actually follow the script.
I like that ending it is the only one I do like it is the most realistic out of the four endings. Also always me to stick my thumb in the eye of the childish AI. I don’t play the game any other way now when I play it. Good bad doesn’t matter I’m going to go tell the AI that hasn’t figured out that if you let folks work out their differences they will. To go pound sand. Crazy the act of repeating something over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
I still say the ending is all in Shepard’s head because he spent 90% of ME3 having indoctrination hallucinations. The ending is another one, and only by choosing the “renegade” option can Shepard overcome indoctrination.
After all, the other two options are the goals of Saren and the Illusive Man, respectively. And since they were under the Reapers’ control…
That’s still completely ridiculous.
The Linux box I’m posting this from and your typical Windows box aren’t merely based on the same technology, they use the exact same friggin’ hardware (this box actually had Windows XP installed when I acquired it, in fact), and Windows viruses do absolutely jack to my Linux box, and vice versa. Hell, Linux viruses do jack to my Linux boxen, because I keep up with my security patches, and Linux malware is typically targeted at distros more common than mine and/or software packages I don’t use.
So malware designed to infect a slightly different version of the same OS on the exact same hardware doesn’t affect my computers, but you expect me to believe that systems that are merely based on the same technology (whatever that means), that diverged back in the ’60s, are compatible? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
I’d find more believable the hypothesis that Steve Jobs was an alien double agent and the apparently irrational and inflexible whims and resistance to accepted standards that he pushed on Apple were a long-term plot to develop a computer compatible with alien systems specifically so that Jeff Goldblum could use it to save the Earth.
I’m not an ignorant pedant. I’m an knowledgeable fucking professional pedant here.
That of course assumes that they would diverge. If they aren’t capitalists, and don’t have hackers, as generation ship occupants, they have no reason to engage in change for change’s sake.
It takes two to not diverge, and whatever the aliens may or may not have been doing, Earth’s computer tech has been changing rapidly and diversifying, diverging even from itself, for the last five or six decades.
That Powerbook wasn’t virus-compatible with somewhere around 97% of the personal computers on Earth at the time. There are ways to explain why it’s more compatible with the alien computers than with a friggin’ Dell – like the “Steve Jobs insisted that Apple do all that ridiculous shit not because he was an egomaniacal lunatic with a cult following, but because he was secretly deliberately producing an alien trojan horse” theory – but saying it’s because it’s all based on the same technology isn’t one of them. Those other 97% of the PCs on Earth were based on the same technology, too…
Actually the way it probably worked was, Goldblum’s characters computer was enabled to interface with the alien ships computer
Through which the virus was sent to the mothership’s computer.
And as the aliens had no viable reason to expect an attack of this nature they would not have had any reason to have firewalls, malware detectors, or anti-virus software running.
I laughed at it because they basically just modernized The War of the Worlds, making a computer virus be the solution instead of an actual virus.
I still enjoyed the movie, and have even re-watched it a few times. I even predicted after the first time I saw it that the President would be the very first, and maybe last, President for Life. Screw the Constitution, when a good dozen or so US cities have been blown off the map (and plenty in other countries, but American’s seem to ignore things outside their borders a lot*) and the President himself flies a jet fighter against them, and wins, he will be President for Life. Sure, he had a lot of help, but that’s what leadership is all about.
I found this comment hilarious.
* How many Americans are aware that after 9/11 every single bridge between the US and Canada had piles of flowers placed at the mid point, spontaneously, by Canadian citizens? I was in Canada at the time and caught it on their news coverage. When I got back to the US just a few days later I didn’t see a peep about it on US news coverage. And by the way I was shocked by how easy it was to get back into the US only ~5 days after 9/11. No difference in the Border Patrol at all. Driving past NYC was eerie, as the smoke from the towers was still rising into the sky.
I was not aware. Thank you, Canada!
Even though I didn’t get here until the comments were already on the 3rd page & I have yet to read any of them, I just gotta say:
Mentioning Harem’s teleporting in the same way Nightcrawler has to in order to avoid a hard impact from a fall…I NAILED IT !!
:D
Is it only me that thinks that Harem’s attitude to falling is sort of blase? I mean, it’s a neat trick, but even with practice it seems like it would take up a lot of a particular body’s attention span to get it right, and what if somebody distracted her right at the last moment? Isn’t she concerned that splatting if she didn’t stick it would, like, hurt a lot?
Actually, the trick (or knack) to flying is that you get distracted away from how much the landing is going to hurt when you hit the ground.
~Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Isn’t she concerned that splatting if she didn’t stick it would, like, hurt a lot?”
Probably not, since she doesn’t actually need to be anywhere near the ground to preform the actual momentum bleed.
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Just going through the archive will keep you busy for days, let alone reading the comments..
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.
woops, ignore. Was meant as a reply
I’d like to point out that there’s no reason Star Trek transporters would conserve momentum, since you can make a good case that they kill you and produce a perfect clone at the other end (as evidenced by that one time Riker survived through a freak accident and his clone went on to have adventures while he got stuck on the alien planet and left behind). Why would a clone have your momentum?
They don’t need to compensate for the difference between ship and ground momentum, because they’re not transporting you at all. Just destructively analyzing you and then making a copy, one so good no one even realizes you’re dead.
Well, possibly, anyway.
Plenty of other transporters, like Nightcrawler can be inconsistent on the momentum transfer, though.
Agreed. This is what I have always assumed about how they work, from what information we are given about the transporters. They take a “snapshot,” essentially, of an instant in time, then at BEST atomize the body, suck up the atoms, and put them back together like a puzzle in another place. That puzzle isn’t going to include momentum, anymore than something that was falling when you took a pic with your phone is going to smash into the edge of your phone frame and break it.
But that’s why it DOES bother me when the pose of the person before beaming and after beaming don’t match. ….and let’s not even get into Barkley and MOVING INSIDE THE BEAM. Good gad, what was THAT crap…
Actually every episode with Barclay was pretty much crap.
His holodeck fantasy with all the female leads as his harem and Riker as a midget was pretty funny though. I’d expect that the holodeck would need to use its transporter capability for “cleanup” after quite a few crew members made use of it…
It does make a lot more sense that way, since that would make transporter technology simply an extension on replicator technology, (presumably it takes a lot more power and computation than normal replications, what with the working from a range and perfectly duplicating biological lifeforms) the real question is why nobody ever abused it. I mean seriously if you have the ability to have 100 of your top scientists working at the same time why not take it? maybe there’s moral concerns but that still doesn’t explain why nobody ever just clones THEMSELVES when they need some extra help in a crisis situation, (maybe the federation suppresses knowledge of how transporter technology works so as to avoid the panic of trillions of people realizing that they have been killed and duplicated hundreds of times) maybe having two of the same person at a time always makes them into an ‘evil twin’ due to lack of soul? although star trek doesn’t seem like the kind of setting that would have confirmed souls anyway, maybe Q just makes clones evil to fuck with people? it seems like something he would find entertaining.
The Federation has really heavy social stigma about genetic engineering and cloning combined with restrictive laws. This and preventing people from realizing how the transporters really work probably are the largest components behind a lack of deliberate transporter duplicates. Remember when that society of clones tried to clone Riker without his permission? I agree that that’s a gross violation, but Riker’s response was to go murder the clone just before it finished incubation and no one bats an eye at it, even though that was basically a sentient being.
Your ‘evil clone’ theory doesn’t work because of the aforementioned Riker example, where he was just really bitter about being stuck on that planet but not evil.
I’m fairly sure other science-oriented people than me have shot this fish in a barrel but just for fun…
Harem would have to be able to change only her velocities relative to her frame of reference, or re-orienting her falling velocity would also re-orient her velocity imparted by the earth’s spin, the earth’s orbit around the sun, orbit around the galaxy, and movement of the galaxy through space.
Which would get messy fast, but could create a city-destroying impact crater if Harem ended up aimed down or turn Harem into a ball of plasma as she leaves the earth’s atmosphere for parts unknown at speeds anywhere from hundreds of thousands of miles per hour to millions.
At least it would be over quick…
Her velocity relative to her frame of reference is zero, by definition.
What she’s changing here is her velocity relative to the ground’s frame of reference.
Fun with portals, now without Aperture Or the gun required!
Star Trek uses replicators… NOT teleporters, so the molecules aren’t moved. What it does is disintegrate you and then recreate you somewhere else.
And yes, this is *murder*, every time it’s used, which has given various characters moral issues over the years (specifically Bones who thinks he died the first time he used it).
… That’s not how transporters work.
Transporters scan your pattern, which is a complex map of molecular/atomic composition, as well as the quantum level, where it identifies specific patterns, waveforms, and other identifying quantum positioning (hence the Heisenberg compensators, which are established parts of the transporter buffers). It then disassembles your molecules with each and every one catalogued, and projects those original molecules (moving them) along a confined particle stream to its target, where the quantum data from each pattern is used to return those molecules to the same configuration they were in on the transporter pad during their initial scanning.
This is explicitly not murder, primarily because it provably doesn’t disrupt a person’s consciousness. People are conscious and aware DURING transport, and their synaptic patterns (the unique neural pattern that shows both that a mind is active and is a biometric identifier of who that mind IS) is active and not disruptive.
There is a better argument that SLEEP is murder than there is that TRANSPORT is murder.
there was an episode of Star Trek the next generation where the away team beamed down while the ship was at high warp, and a member of the team said “for a minute there I thought I was materializing inside that wall” and the response was “for a minute, you were. that’s why we normally drop out of warp to transport.”
One of the biggest “plot holes” I see with using the replicator/transport is that they don’t store the patterns somewhere other than a buffer for crew members (or even visiting friends/enemies) who do not use it for a period of time.
If it is actually recreating someone, then why not keep a copy of their patterns stored somewhere else and recreate that individual. Great for Klingon’s who want Kirk dead..repeatedly. Great for recovering red shirts who die on missions. Great for cloning copies of yourself just because. If they have the ability to actually copy every nuance of an individual that way, which is how they also use holodecks, then they should be able to recreate lost characters, albeit with memories of when they were stored. Of course, that doesn’t make for exciting episodes. “We lost someone again? Sigh..bring him back from last week.” etc..etc.. It SHOULD be a moral quandary for some people.
One question I have here. If Harem can undo one of her copies, and she is injured, when she recovers the copy, does it have the injuries? It seems like a self-evident answer that she would not, but I am wondering how Dave’s reality works here and it made me think that maybe she still shares injuries. Just curious.
If a copy is un-ported it rematiaralizes in the exact same condition it was in at the time of the un-porting, no matter what has happened to any of her other bodies.
The TOS explanation I heard was: The data is so intricate it starts to degrade right away, and there is a very short window to hold someone in the buffer. With the exception of Scotty in that 1 Episode of TNG, the limit is in minutes. The Riker clone was due to 2 confinment beams being used at the same time, and one of the beams reflected back. You can’t hold someone indefinetly in the Pattern Buffer to make living copies.
But in the ST:TNG episode Relics Scotty put himself and one other person into a sort of suspended animation by storing himself in the transporter buffer. And they were able to recover him, but not the other, and this was after 75 years. So a 50% recovery rate after 75 years should mean that the pattern buffer for a 5 day away mission should be nearly 100% recoverable.
Red shirt #3 died on this away mission? Ok, pull him back from the pattern buffer. Sure, he loses those 5 days, but that’s better than death, right? And the Captain doesn’t even need to write a letter to his survivors. Win/win!
The Scotty TNG was the exception, in all other cases I’ve seen and read the buffer is limited to minutes. I was big into trek in the 90s, and was really into the tech manual. Kind of grew out of it I guess…
La Forge discovers that the transporters have been reconfigured in a strange manner – power has been drawn from the auxiliary systems (they were a regenerative power source) while the rematerialization subroutines have been intentionally disabled with the phase inducers being connected to the emitter array and that the pattern buffers have been locked in adiagnostic cycle. Furthermore, a pattern is still in the buffer and, amazingly, it has suffered almost no degradation
I guess Scotty just didn’t like that other guy…
No, it’s just that the universe loves Scotty.
Scotty was a “Q” who didn’t realize he was a “Q”… Because if Scotty touches it, it will work! ;)
And the other guy was just a red shirt.
You apparently haven’t checked out the original TOS novels, two of which dealt with the uncreatively named Phoenix who’d basically discovered how to use Transporter technology to recreate himself in a nice fresh body anytime the existing one died, making him effectively immortal. He also used it to create a copy of Kirk to enslave. Then again given the heavy dom/sub (with KIRK as the sub) and homo-erotic subtexts it was so undeserving of being a Star Trek novel (How Much For Just The Planet was better, and that’s saying something) I I really wish I’d never seen or read them so if you haven’t be glad you haven’t.
Well, calling what Harem does conservation of momentum is complete gibberish; momentum is a vector quantity, so 10m/s down and 10m/s up are in fact different. On the other hand, it’s comic book physics, as far as can determine whether it works depends on the ability of the person using it to convince him/her self that it makes sense.
I believe the idea is that she keeps velocity, but can reorient the vector as she teleports.
I never worry bout it much – once you accept that teleportation is happening, things like momentum are just details.
I like you, so I shall kill you last.
Watch out for this guy…Just like Arnold Schwartznegger in The Commando movie, he lies (if given the opportunity, he’d kill you first).
“Turns head slowly to look at MidnightDStroyer.”
“EVIL grin.”
You I shall kill next to last.
Velocity is also a vector. Perhaps you mean speed. In any case, I wouldn’t bother analyzing the issues except for an ‘explanation’ being introduced in-comic.
Indeed. Even a large enough (long enough? I’m talking distance here) teleport North or South would involve enough change in momentum to have the teleporting individual arrive with a significant velocity even were they standing still when they teleported. Simply due to the differences in rotational speeds of the Earth at the various longitudes.
*ahem* Disclaimer: I may have the description all wrong, but the thing is still a thing. I’m not talking completely out of my ass…
But in any event it’s simple enough to just say that the power to TP also comes with the power to shunt momentum elsewhere. Or to use it to your advantage, in the example given of the Chuck Norris style roundhouse kick. Hmmm, perhaps Norris can TP, and that’s why he is such a bad ass in the meme?
Maybe Harem teleports by dismantling herself and traversing one of the wormholes in the quantum foam? She then uses the wormhole itself as her frame of reference with regard to the whole momentum thing, hence why she can “think with portals” in spite of not using a portal–because she is actually using a portal, just one we can’t see.
Her “vorping organ” can sort through all the bajillions of wormholes available to her in every cubic millimeter of space for the one that goes to the proper location with the proper orientation. Maybe the universe even makes this easy for her–the Visser effect preemptively removes any wormhole that would have allowed her to travel a million years into the past (or anything much over 0.04 seconds, assuming she’s jumping to the opposite side of the planet), and maybe gravity affects them enough to keep them close by, meaning the vast majority of the wormholes Harem has access to will be to other locations on the Earth (and the vast majority of the remainder will be to locations in the solar system, and the vast majority of that remainder will be to locations in the Milky Way, ect….not that it matters, as Harem has never been off-planet).
Hmm, I like the quantum portal idea, since it helps explain how she can redirect her momentum.
Thus making her able to take Nightcrawler’s signature move to level’s he never could. Knowing her, she probably already mastered western swordplay too.
I read little of the other comments but just in case be aware that portals do not solve the problem of overall momentum.
The game Portal does it wrong. When Chell jumps into a portal, she is moving toward it (say to her feet), but she is also moving with Earth movements(*) (say to her right), it is not noticeable because everything else in the room also is, including the portals.
When she comes out the other portal in a different direction, she keeps moving toward her feet as she is oriented now, which means away the exit portal, but she also keeps moving toward her right as she is oriented now, while everything else is still moving toward her “old right”, so she should drift laterally in relation to the whole room. (**)
Harem would have the same problem. If you want her to use quantum portals it’s okay, of course, but her ability to redirect only the “convenient” part of her momentum will remain unexplained.
(*) Rotation, traslation around the sun, traslation due galactic spin, et cetera.
(**) Since the lateral movement is crazy fast the game would be pretty short if it were included.
So how does she store herself?
With Tupperware.
Her Tupperware Parties must be out of this world!
Literally out of this world. Out of this universe, in fact.
I think it’s just a bit pervy to be discussing Harem’s “vorping organ.” :-P
But it’s so much fun…
THANK YOU. Teleportation to stop a fall has always been a thing for me, but I also have never ever seen it used, in movies, comics, or much of anywhere. The game Portal sorta kinda touched on it, but not really to stop a fall.
You knoe, DaveB, for a while I actually imagined an insert character for this comic who was a teleporter who, instead of either ignoring or conserving momentum, could actually absorb it, and either use it in the same fashion that Anvil absorbs and uses kinetic energy, or redirect and expel it again on a teleported target of her choice (this teleporter did not need to teleport herself with her target, nor even touch her target to teleport it). I ended up abandoning her when I realized I’d made her too powerful (Arch-villain who grows stronger the more you fight him giving you problems? Anchored himself to the ground so super-strong folks can’t throw him into space? No problem, just teleport him, and the section of ground he’s standing on, into the sun.), but you bringing up momentum in teleportation reminded me of her.
Regarding Poser book covers: To be fair, most people doing book covers aren’t using the most recent version or aren’t properly using the software.
You can fairly easily get renders that aren’t “obviously Poser” with the more recent versions and a little work.
Yeah, I felt kind of bad reading that, considering my own artwork is in that medium.
But I think it’s a matter of how people use it thinking it’s an easy way to create art, and do sloppy work. Poser art has come some way from the early stuff, if you look at the serious artwork.
Yeah unfortunately it can still be seen as a shortcut for people who can’t draw, but obviously there’s a huge difference between people using older versions of the program and stock props and someone using the best renderer and high res models and textures and actually knows a thing or two about composition and lighting. Some of them are so advanced I’m assuming they’re not even using poser anymore but something like 3D Studio
Could you take a moment to cover why Harem doesn’t have the classic teleporter limitation: line of sight vs the hazards of “blind” teleports?
Dave actually has covered it! I’m too lazy to link to it, but indeed it has been discussed ;-D
SPOILER ALERT : I intend this comment to be a humorous observation, not a direct attack on anyone, including the author of this comic.
It is a very ironic request that you made, asking for an explanation of one aspect of Harem’s ability. The answer is: you should go back and re-read the previous 1,688 installments of this comic plus all of the comments that Dave made when he posted each new page, plus all of the comments and discussion that all of the readers made in the comments sections of each page.
Explanations of Harem’s ability (and a great deal of related speculation) has occurred already and answers your question clearly, as far as canon details have been revealed in the storyline to date.
Oh …. What’s that you say? “B-but … that would take a lot of time. A-and I d-don’t wanna do that! Just explain it again to me! Now! Today! To me personally.”
Now, I’m being a sarcastic asshole on purpose for comedic effect, not because I really want to dump on you. I just want to make a point that your request is impossible to honor amongst the thousands of people reading and interacting with this comic. It is the obligation of the reader to be aware that this answer has already been given, and to use their own powers of reasoning, within the universe of this particular story, to deduce such an answer from all of the information and hints already given.
That said ….. and now the thermonuclear irony bomb detonates ……
This is exactly the same answer that Dave deserves for his complaint that Star Trek transporter technology isn’t explained in exposition each time a transporter is used during the course of a Star Trek scene.
“The answer is: you should go back and re-watch all the previous Star Trek movies and series installments of th Star Trek universe plus all of the comments that the writers and producers made when they published each new movie, book, blog post, weekly series installment, plus all of the comments and discussion that all of the Star Trek fans over the past 5 decades have made in the comments sections of each Internet page and magazine and fanzine dedicated to Star Trek.
Explanations of transporter technology (and a great deal of related speculation) has occurred already and answers your question clearly, as far as canon details have been revealed in the storyline to date.”
With all respect and courtesy, this is hardly intended to be insulting or asshole-ish for the sake of assholery.
Just making a point that when you join a story in an already, highly evolved universe, it gets a little ridiculous to expect spoonfed explanation after spoonfed explanation.
As per another example: it’s not unlike reading the last three or four chapters of The Return of the King and then asking “So, explain to me who this ‘Gollum’ character was and why he was in this story. What made the Ring so important to him?”
I will now direct your attention to a book called The Hobbit, and begin reading at the part that starts with “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell …..” and continue until you re-read the chapter called The Grey Havens again. It should all make a great deal of sense by then.
;-)
Well when you put it that way, I guess it is a lot to suggest he read the comic! How silly of me.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1302
It was a Dabbler Science Corner.
And yet people still make superhero origin movies.
Because they know other people will pay to see them.
Harem is thinking with portals.
this.
Scotty, learned how to teleport at warp speed from Spock (Nimoy).
Who learned it from Scotty.
Well, why not? Scotty gave the formula for Transparent Aluminum to a manufacturer in the late 20th Century…Which was well before Spock talked to Scotty about teleporters.
Now Harem’s thinking with teleports.
As far as Star Trek ‘transporters’ go…They only transport the info, your old body is reduced to component atoms, and a new one made up for you, so the momentum would have stayed with your old body…and that’s why I’d never want to use a ST transporter ;) It’s essentially making an exact duplicate of whatever it scans, is my understanding…and then disintegrating the original ;)
Which is why I’d never, ever, EVER use the transporter. I’d totally Polanski it up.
But she did use it and all it takes is once.
One sci-fi story took it to a different horrific level, an alien race finds earth, one that has ubiquitous transporter technology that they intend to share with earth once they properly work things out. The original group that goes through feels terrified at first (including the viewpoint character, a reporter) only for the terror to go away after being transported. The true horror is revealed by a psychic that the alien went to check out while of course completely disbelieving they exist: anyone who’s transported has their soul permanently torn from their body and in losing that spark is little more than an organic machine never again to be truly creative. This explains why the aliens had become culturally and technologically stagnant (their space warp technology to travel between systems gave off radiation levels lethal enough to sterilize a planet from millions of miles away and they hadn’t solved the problem in centuries), leading to the alien removing the information about earth from their ship’s records before it could be updated to their net and destroying the ship to give humanity time to grow without their destructive influence and ends with the reporter wishing he could do a more creative article but knowing that sadly he never will writing anything creative again.
The table top SF Role playing game “Traveller” has psionic teleportation. The rules make a big deal about not teleporting too far up or down in a gravity field. Doing so raises or lowers the temperature of the person doing the port, possibly to dangerous levels. That being said, Harem’s trick, if kept with in the +/- 500 meters ‘safe’ range, would be legal, and would add an interesting physical attack to the Zhodani elite guards wearing battle armor. I fully plan on stealing this for my game.
I suspect my players aren’t going to be happy the first time they get dropped kicked as part of a teleport arrival of the Zhos
The Known Space setting also had that problem with earlier teleporters (you’d find yourself freezing or roasting depending on how high up or down you teleported) until they developed compensators to balance things out.
Does Sydney have some Australian in her family tree? I mean given her name I would tend to suspect her Dad, but you know. It’s just I’ve never heard anyone but an Aussie use the term “Bloody hell” in that (casual) context.
I have heard it used by non aussies , it was something that was picked up foe whatever reason.
She watches a lot of British comedy.
Ok, question for the author: how does momentum conservation act when Harem compresses? What happens if she teleports+compresses two or more of her that have very different momenta?
Transporters in Star Trek don’t need to compensate for velocity as they only disassemble, transport and reassemble matter, the fact that the matter has to be reassembled upon transport means that any momentum that matter was under before transport is no longer in effect.
However the reassembly assembles you in whatever position you were in when transported, therefore it makes sense that they fell over after transport because they weren’t in a proper standing position.
Page 98 harem won beat math… Kinda.
Larry Niven, in his stories that involved transporter booths, postulated a “momentum absorber” as part of the infrastructure. It was a lake, and portions of the lake equivalent in mass to the transported object absorbed the momentum. The lake was continuously in motion with random waves moving to and fro.
Don’t mind me, just trying to see if I can use the spoiler tag correctly.
Too late. You’ve just been minded.
…do lamb farts sound like “Vorp”?
…and now you are thinking with portals
Everyone is obsessing over the redirection of kinetic energy from someone teleporting. And yet I have not heard anyone complain that another member of the same team converts her ENTIRE body into energy when she travels. To put that into perspective, 1 gram of matter when converted into energy is equivalent to the yield of a 21 kiloton atomic bomb. Assume she weighs 58 kilograms. This gives a total of 1.21 gigatons of energy. (and yes, I did pick 58 kilos to get that number)
That’s 1.21 jiggatons, or course. :-P
Then she fits right well as one of the WMDs on the team : Women of Mass Distraction
Destruction Distraction –for once the spell check picked one that makes sense….
As Vehemence learned, the primary WMD of ARCSwat is Dabbler…
Also not commenting on Harem ignoring conservation of mass. The difference is that, by introducing an explanation, it’s lampshading the fact that the explanation doesn’t make sense.
Nah. Converting your body into lightning is physical nonsense; at the point where you’re pulling that level of Clarktech, you can throw around any amount of extradimensional batteries or handwavey nonsensoleum.
Really, look at what relativity sounds like to Newton. “You’re telling me that by moving faster, I weigh more. Right. Pull the other one.” There’s not a whole lot of point in applying modern physics to comic physics, and I say that as a physics PhD student. So long as you leave yourself a loophole – Clarktech usually works – I’ll forgive it, at least.
Ok. I Know, I am probably not the best candidate for this, since i have the opinion that Superpowers should be exempt from the laws of physics on account of their being impossible anyway.
But since i seem to be the only one with that opinion:
This, Mr. Barrack, is Bulldroppings.
While i´m not a physicist, i´m pretty certain that downward momentum does not become upward momentum, just because you turn around. Otherwise Bungee-Jumpers would be very unpleasantly surprised every time they try out their hobby.
If you use the “But this is because of her teleportation” card, sorry, but no.
Killing momentum is a far better use for this card.
She might have the conscious choice either to kill her momentum, or not, but your explanation is not only lame, it renders her Teleportation almost impossible to use, at least in dangerous situations.
Teleporting out of a burning Plane? SPLAT!!!
Teleporting out of a car to avoid being riddled with bullets? SPLAT!!!
Speaking of: A girl that is concerned about snipers in the vicinity of a comic shop should not call something that gives Snipers the opportunity to figure her so full of holes that she could win the next “Ms. Swiss-cheese” contest while she is completely helpless hanging in the air, a “cool trick”.
By the By. Even if Star trek transporters were teleporters (which they are not), of course they would kill momentum.
I mean, come on!!
Two Ships approaching each other with 250.000 Km/sec (which is below warp but relative to each other still FTL, don´t argue with me on this one. Chuck Norris tried. He Failed.) One ship beams someone over, but the transporters don´t kill momentum. Yet again: SPLAT!!!
Indeed probably so much splat, that it would destroy the target ship.
Why doesn´t it stop human circulation then? Because that has nothing to do with momentum and everything with muscle action.
Why were Kirk and Spock (or whoever, saw it only once) falling over after the beamout?
Because their inner ears still thought they were falling.
Pet peeves are a nice thing to have, but sometimes they can cloud judgement.
You’re right, you’re not a physicist. But you don’t seem like you’d listen anyway, so I’ll stop right there.
Hey, no need to be condescending (that means “talking down to you”), just explain what you think needs explaining and let the audience decide.
If you are a physicist please explain how teleportion works.
Outside of comics, it doesn’t. That’s kinda the point of comics.
Mm. I wouldn’t be so sure. True teleportation is probably impossible (probably; I don’t feel confident placing restrictions on the entirety of the rest of time), but arbitrarily short wormholes are a different matter, if energetically expensive.
The point that it seems I failed to make on this page is that she’s not just turning around, it’s more like she’s gone through a portal that’s facing another direction. Her teleportation is weird like that.
I love your rants. That is all.
Halo: So what did you think of Portal?
Harem: The story was pretty great and the graphics were nice, but the puzzles were WAAAY too obvious.
I get why the ability to bleed off/manipulate her manipulation could have some interesting implications for combat, but when avoiding falls wouldn’t it be more practical to just teleport herself to the ground as soon as possible? I mean she should be able to do it before she falls more than ten feet, which is easily survivable without injury as long as she knows how to land right.
Sure, but she has both options.
Personally, I’ll just go with everyone thinking harem/halo just used the wrong words. Rather then try to work out “real life” physics, its just how Harems power works in this world. Note, Halo was smart enough to ask how Harem deals with the speed gain – NOT how physics in the world deals with it, but how her specific power works to deal with this problem (as a comic book nerd, and more, she would be curious). So rather then trying to explain how Harem’s description is wrong, just accept that this is how her ability works (anime/comic physics ftw!, no extra explanations needed!)
If you wanna get all anal retentive about it, then just ask DaveB to have Harem say “besides any other physical laws anyway.” on some panel in the future about it…
What does the Stone Fox say?
Ow my skull bone!
Mmmph yyrg aahd !
It depends on what questions you ask it.
So, if she has momentum and unteleports, the body that gains the mass gains the momentum?
I think there is now a way to do a power leap (before anyone says she doesn’t need it, she can’t teleport anything living.)
She can teleport at least 5 living things that we know of (and probably the requisite payloads of bacteria and such).
:D
If Harem unteleporting conserves momentum, then the momentum is also stored “in stasis” just like the rest of her, I would think. But then it might cause problems if she forgot about that momentum when she teleports again…
You know all this talk about Harem has me wonder how she trains to fight against other power users –being the most common thing a super group would fight. With weight limits she would probably favor a plastic handgun with rubber bullets –maybe with a sedative payload that absorbs through the skin.
Lightweight weapon, non lethal, cumulative effect. With teleporting she would be able to stay close enough for the shot but stay just out of arm’s reach.
She’s already been shown to use air injectors loaded with sedatives. That’s how she got speedy (Mach the Knife), although she got cut in the process. So a paint gun would make sense.
Mm. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually fix things; conservation of momentum is something attached to the universe, not to the object. For momentum to be conserved, Harem should teleport upwards, reoriented however she likes, and then keep her downward momentum. (Portal does it wrong. It’s fun, but it’s wrong.)
That being said, teleportation and portals break an absolutely ludicrous number of physical laws already – it doesn’t usually bother me, because I can just assume it drops out of some term in the exotic physics they’re using. Particularly portals, because a wormhole is a handy infinite-mass wall you can just dump momentum into or pull momentum from without anyone really noticing.