Grrl Power #564 – It’s time to play Beat. That. Deathtrap!
This whole time the Black Reliquary thinks it’s alerting the Council’s authorities there’s a party going on. I guess no one had invented parity checking when they built the vault. Not that it would have done any good in this case, other than the Vault knowing the alarms weren’t going through.
Ancient death traps always make me wonder how they tested ancient death traps. Really I guess the only way is to trigger them, clean up the carnage afterward and reset everything. Indiana Jones and the Goonies and other 80’s movies made those a big plot element, but so many of them weren’t just a trap door, they were shit that brought down the house. One Eyed Willy set up a Rube Goldberg that caused the wall of a cave to collapse and his pirate ship to set sail. That would be a real pain in the ass to test. And presumably One Eyed Willy was the Einstein of Engineering to set all that up in the first place without access to a laptop. (Let’s all ignore the fact that the hemp rope or twine and wooden gears he used to pull all that off would probably have rotted beyond usefulness in that wet cave.)
In fact any base or tomb or prison or whatever that self destructs at the end of a movie (that doesn’t just involve a bomb or a reactor melting down) somebody rigged that to happen, and in almost every instance they did it without computer aided engineering, and probably couldn’t test it because they’d have to rebuild the whole base if they did. That’s putting a lot of faith in your masons. Also, wouldn’t it make you nervous walking around in a base where the whole thing was rigged to could come down at a moment’s notice and the self destruct mechanism was a bunch of ropes and gears that a rat or termites could fuck up without any warning? Evil Overlords aren’t probably super in to hazard pay, but man, henchmen should really unionize.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Ah, I see these vault makers went to The Indiana Jones School of Trapmaking.
Or the creators of Indiana Jones and the Goonies were unknowingly influenced by some of the vault makers during the writing process.
“Or the creators of Indiana Jones and the Goonies were unknowingly influenced by some of the vault makers during the writing process.”
I’ll go a step further, & speculate that they were HIRED, & their (human) names appear in the film-credits.
Now I can’t stop imaging Achilles just walking in there, taking a few shinies and leaving, while completely ignoring anything going on around him.
While Achilles will not be harmed by the active defensive system, the shinies might be, so he would end up with less than he started with, as his clothes would suffer severe damage.
The kill floor wouldn’t hurt him, save for the explosions that would still ragdoll him around, but a closed door would still stop him.
He doesn’t have any form of super strength after all.
Same with the ceiling being dropped on him. He’d survive, but he’d still be buried and unable to move.
Yeah, look at how easy he was taken out of the fight during the Restaurant Rumble
It does kind of pose the question of what would happen to the ceiling in that event. If it’s on a gear based system at all, could he simply strip the gears by curling up in a ball and forcing it to ether stop early or does it have some sort of safety stop mechanism?
a safety stop in a death trap? wouldn’t that be self-defeating?
it does make sense, if your working at the back of the vault, the last thing you want is some idiot setting of the traps at the front. of course having built and install the traps, how do you get in?
The lava floor is de-feeting. Then de-legging. De-Torsoing…
Besides a safety stop with a ‘time-out young man, goto the corner’ message for 60 seconds would be hilarious. Just enough time for the trap owner to make popcorn.
I don’t think that lava floor was a death trap. I think that’s left over from the explosion.
For simplicity you pull the stops, and let gravity do it’s thing. Remember: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest “son of a bitch” in everytime.
Even if he could strip gears or otherwise fould the support mechanisim, chances are, the ceiling is far heavier than he can lift. Usually ceiling lowering traps are gravity fed, with the sheer weight of the celing being the mechanisim to cause it to fall once supporting mechanisim has been removed.
And that’s not even to mention what they’re doing right now with it. I have to wonder what kind of safeties are actually supposed to be built into such death traps.
Eh. He sort if has super strength, in that he doesn’t have to worry about hurting himself from overexerting, which allows him to push further and harder.
I mean, not enough to escape the Vault, but still.
Actually Achilles has mild superhuman strength. One dot’s worth, going by the old cast page. It’s a result of never having to worry about straining a muscles or throwing out his back. Still not nearly enough to deal with a ceiling falling on him.
He also has mild mouthfeel and mildly out-of-date fashion sense. When compared to Ingsol anyhow.
Well, *of course* Sciona is a dick — Someone specializing in blood magic who doesn’t hesitate to kill lots of people to get raw materials for magic is going to be a dick no matter what…!
Sci-fright confirmed trap? Or just the body is that of a male orc?
Well, the explosion Cooter made was super-strong. Does that count?
i’m going to miss cooter. i still think it would have been funny if he was a super redneck who couldnt be harmed by females…
Seeing how the actual kill system here is the inevitable wall of rock, I feel like those spikes are a little useless.
Bonus aesthetics I guess.
I disagree.
Unless you brought columns with you, like these guys did. Catching that with your bare(bear?) hands, super strength or not. Looks like it would hurt(since it cut through the steel pillar.
Some targets will not be harmed by bludgeoning damage so including piercing and slicing damage ensures greater coverage of ouchiness. However, the spikes should be crushable so as not to prevent the ceiling from meeting the floor.
More like they get pushed back into the ceiling (and thus re-arm) when the block meets the floor. A slow moving deadfall has the advantage of not cracking itself, the floor or otherwise compromising the structure of the room when it’s set off. Resetting it is just a matter of winching it back into place.
It also explains how Sciona & friends got in in the first place. They’re coming up through the floor drains that you’d need after a 500-ton block suitably liquefies/pulverizes whatever happens to be under it.
Wait, is the Who’s Who spoiling? Or am I forgetting something or getting confused?
Gunnhildr confirmed council traitor?
She was there when they were introduced to Cooter.
Yes, you are forgetting something: both Gunnie and her vampie partner were both with Sci-fright when Coot was introduced, whether she is a traitor or counter-spy is yet to be staked out
counter spy for who? because i think “they are planing to raid the vault, pls udate deffences” would be message important enough to deliver.
just what must she be expecting, to not mention this?
That would tip off Sciona, though. When it comes to ancient doomsday artifacts, you need to know not just what a person is using, but why they’d go to all this trouble to get them.
After all, anyone who plans to use a doomsday device to actually destroy the world is an idiot. Sciona is clearly not an idiot.
*Pulls hand away from big red doomsday button*
Phew, that was a close one.
*beat*
Why do I even have this thing? And why is it installed next to the light switch?
:-D
NO! Not that button, you’ll kill us all!
She did. The defenses now include Maxima, Dabbler, and Halo.
I see what you did there.
and I c what u did there. ;p
And icy only creates mild freezer burn (it is on the fritz).
Anyone else read Matthew Reilly?
He covers self resetting traps in this Seven Ancient Wonders series.
Did that spike go through that jack? o_O
And why are they at odd angles?
That potion possibly did give Coot Super Strength, shame it didn’t help with the first line of defense: again, no lie
Well, this is a decent failsafe. However, it isn’t clear how fast the ceiling is going. If it is really going slowly, then the designer must be sanctioned for overuse of deathtrap tropes.
If you’re going to crush someone with a large stone, you just drop it down, you don’t create a complicated contraption with lot of mechanisms that could fail at any time to make the stone fall slowly. Sure, it’s nice to be able to reuse the stone afterward, but this is supposed to be a last resort defense. If the stone is really hard, it might survive the fall, if it is not, then it is cheap to replace.
Also, either I’m underestimating the solidity of these jacks (that hold the ceiling on a few screw threads), either the mass used was really too small.
Well, there are at least four confirmed jacks, and possibly made of extremely high tensile material
Tensile strength is not so important here as compressive strength. A concrete pillar has great compressive strength, but not so good tensile strength; pull on concrete and it falls apart, compared to how much push it can take. A steel cable has high tensile strength, but, well, “Don’t push a rope” applies; a cable can not readily transmit compression.
It would still be a good idea to just let the ceiling drop quickly, sure…But you’d still want to have the mechanisms in place to reset it easily too. If you have to use gears to crank the ceiling back up into place, then make sure that, when it IS in place, you set the mechanism to “neutral” so that it falls freely, but then you can engage it for resetting later.
Actually, a good way to build a secure vault (provided you don’t need quick access to the contents for any reason) is to set it up so that the form-fitting 500-ton crusher block is in the DOWN position when it’s closed. It’s difficult to break into something if there’s no physical space inside to break into.
Oh that is genius and I’m totally stealing that.
Yes, leaving it down while the vault isn’t in use is a good idea…Unless you urgently need something quickly from it & find out that the lifting mechanism has broken down.
Even with regular & thorough maintenance, there could be breakdowns. Every single use of it will add a little bit more wear-n-tear on the parts. Regular maintenance can prevent most breakdowns by replacing parts that show signs of wear, but not all such flaws are easy to spot. Just having to perform regular maintenance makes a bigger hole in security…If you rely heavily on secrecy, even for the specific location as the Council does, there still has to be the technicians & repair people who not only know where it is, but every last little flippin’ detail of the security measures going in & out on a regular basis! This doesn’t even include the fact that spare parts for replacements have to come from somewhere, but a bit easier to cover up with paperwork to prevent an “interested third party” from learning what you need & where it goes.
It doesn’t even have to occur because of lacking in regular maintenance. Maybe the original supplier of the materials was unknowingly using substandard materials. A bolt that gets sheered, a screw trips its threads, or a spring snaps…The next time you use it to lift the obstacle could be the last time.
Over the long haul, it’s likely better & less of a security risk to use the mechanism only when it’s needed, especially if it’s a mechanism that blocks even your own authorized access in any way.
You can’t urgently get it any way, when you need 7 people in a room deep under the ocean, to press their hand on a panel, wait for a door to dramatically open, then enter a code, wait for a giGANTIC vault door to open, and then enter the kill room… etc
Also as you are deep down in the ocean – FLOOD the chamber. If you take a little bit of sand and add it to the inrushing water it would make a very nice cutter.
There are creatures that can do just fine under water. Not so much in solid rock.
Bulette
No, no, he is telling the truth. He is not talking bulettes.
:D
Just the response was hoping for :D
DaveB: “…they did it without computer aided engineering.”
Aw c’mon DaveB…Complex engineering was happening long before computers, even in the real world. People could work out problems on parchment/papyrus/vellum/etc. ever since the invention of writing; for example, look what the Egyptians did with huge stone blocks! The architecture among Mesopotamians is equally complex! And how long have chalkboards also been a thing for calculating mathematical formulas?
It’s surprising how many people fail to recognize how sophisticated “the ancients” really were. They were the people who set the foundations (literally) of everything that later generations could build up from.
O_o
Oh yeah…Sciona really is a dick.
To be fair, the first skyscrapers were built before computers.
Technically, since the word “computer” means “one who calculates”, one could argue that they did not make the pyramids without a computer.
Before computers, the US Census Bureau hired a LOT of people with calculators & paper to write on just to correlate the Census data once every ten years. As population increased, calculating the data took longer & longer to the point where the calculations would have taken them more than the 10 years they had in between the surveys being issued. Fortunately (for the government anyway), the computer was invented at a time when there was only 4 or 5 years to go before they reached that break-over point…
… aren’t calculators computers?
No, not until we got re-programmable ones. That was the significant change that signalled the introduction of the computer age. If you have to manually enter calculations it is a calculator (or an abacus). Whereas if you can give it a program to follow, and can replace that with varied other ones, on demand, then you have a computer.
As for ancient Egyptian engineering:
Scribe: “My lord, I have come up with a ingenious new use for stone blocks. I call it ‘the pile’.”
Also, it may have not been the brightest idea to fill it with treasure then cover it with a gleaming white stone covering telling the entire world “Hey everyone! There is an enormous stash of wealth inside for anyone who wants to dig for it.’
I am just being a dick. But that is today’s theme anyway.
In a way, that was the point.
The Pharaohs of the pyramid-building dynasties were not noted for their subtlety, especially when it came to showing off.
Hell, STONEHENGE is a pretty impressive feat of engineering, given that some of the stones come from over 200 miles an hour, at a time before ROADS existed. A lot of engineering isn’t actually as complicated as people think it is. Even trap engineering, which arguably predates engineering of housing.
I mean, really. The first false-floor pit trap? Built by a hungry dude who had to hunt by himself, probably. Dig a hole, cover it with sticks, chase animal, watch it fall. Reset? Pull the animal out and get fresh sticks. It’s not super-hard to scale that up. First deadfall trap? “Heeeeey, that last landslide came down when ONE rock got kicked. I wonder, if I put a stick up and pile some rocks on it….yep, that works, let’s go bigger! …oops, sorry Rodney.” Pressure sensor traps are based on simple scales and tensile strength–ie, the same thing as measuring your grain or building a rope ladder. It SOUNDS all kinds of complicated, but the truth is….by the time they got to the “monuments” stage, traps had been around for thousands of years.
Also, most of the Hollywood “ancient traps” stuff is total bullshit. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, didn’t particularly use a lot of traps–they just sealed the shit up and left. That’s why grave-robbing was such a SUCCESSFUL enterprise. (That and likely tip-off from the engineers and overseers.)
200 miles an hour?
That’s…an interesting spellcheck screw-up.
Bloody impressive mind. Makes the archaeologists look like fools mind, thinking that it was a sacred site. It was actually a transportation hub.
“Hi, I am looking for the lunchtime obelisk to Wales?”
“Western side of the henge. You better run though lad, they will be taking off any minute now!”
And now I’m thinking of a very early Discworld book, where Rincewind and Twoflower ended up accidentally hitching a ride with a druid who was levitating a huge stone block to a sacred circle.
Yeah, I think it would be hard to build a stationary tomb out of stone blocks that are still moving…
To be fair… the grave robbers of the ancient eqypt variety just dug around most of the traps to get in. Those projects were of such a huge scale and had so many people working them its not like it was hard for the robbers to find out where the traps were.
I think the robbers used a device known as the ‘Ackbar’ indicator that told them if they were near any traps.
Stonehenge may have been in use for couple thousand years, but the stones themselves were only erected about 200 years ago
Out by over four thousand years I am afraid. The earliest stones were erected at least 2,200 BC. Maybe as long ago as 3,000 BC.
No, check your facts again, the Stonehenge we know now has only been around for a couple hundred years
Like said: the site may have been in use for thousands of years, the current circle is only a couple hundred
I used to live near Salisbury, so this was a local monument for me, which I have visited a number of times, and am very familiar with the history of it. Other than some stones having fallen over, the monument was pretty much unchanged since pre-history.
The only activity there, in the period you are referring to was excavation work by a pioneering archaeologist, who did not disturb the stones themselves, just the surrounding barrows.
It was not until 1901 that any alterations were made, and that was just the straightening of a single stone, that was at risk of falling. Since then there have been a few more restorations but less than a pawfull in all.
The earliest of those stones were transported from Wales, over 150 miles away, by neolithic Britons (about 4600 years ago). These are generally accepted facts amongst archaeologists, so whatever your source is must be a fringe idea and I doubt it will have passed peer review.
Reader’s Digest, so yeah, totally fringe and catastrophically failed peer review
Just remember, it is also ‘generally accepted fact’ that Atlantis was located in the Atlantic Ocean :rolleyes:
Yeah it always amazes me when you see crazy engineering projects from the pre-computer area. Like looking at photos of the Titanic being built, or the Hoover Dam or the Eiffel Tower. That’s a lot of math to work out using only slide rules.
My personal favorite example is when they ran the plans for the SR-71 Blackbird through a computer. The computer agreed with where they had placed every weld and rivet. A link to some info on it.
https://frontlinevideos.com/blogs/videos/researchers-ran-sr-71s-hand-design-through-a-computer-got-their-minds-blown
I’ve held onto a nice line from… I think a Schlock Mercenary footnote. “A lot of those Wisdom of the Ancients stories were started by people literally living in the shadow of Roman aqueducts that they had no means of reproducing.”
By which I mean to agree, not contradict. I’ve been to one of those aqueducts, it’s completely awe-inspiring.
Even the Giza Pyramids were already ancient news in King Tut’s time, and he was part of the 19th Dynasty. Those pyramids in particular were built in the 5th Dynasty. And they weren’t even the first pyramids being built…
A perspective I like sharing is that the ancients were smarter than us.
No matter how smart any of us are, we can only come up with exaggerations or combinations of things we already know of.
Cavemen had to come up with the original, with no frame of reference.
I’m pretty sure those “ancients” had no idea about lot of stuff we came in with first, including computers … or theory of relativity and anything based on it. On the other hand, it’s true that we still can’t make as good swords as they could.
A generally reasonable argument. But there is another angle which would support Viirin, to a degree. Consider there is no substantive difference between modern man and a homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. One of their babies, brought up in a modern environment would likely be indistinguishable from her classmates.
What they lacked was the education and the spare time. Even today though we can see that hunter gatherers do not spend all their time surviving. So some of their time could be spent on contemplating existence and speculating on what the future might hold.
Then look at Leonardo Da Vinci. He was able to conceive of helicopters, as one example amongst many, which have only been developed within living memory. Yet he only did that by examining birds (and looking at their anatomy).
Those are things that a cavewoman could have done too 200,000 years ago. We simply lack any record of her achievements. But that does not mean that Leonardo was the first theoretical helicopter engineer.
Then add into the equation that we have now discovered that Neanderthals may have actually been smarter than us. All of a sudden we can now contemplate another branch of humans, with an even more ancient history, than homo sapiens. Being smarter, as a baseline, could mean that they would have more geniuses in their populations (per capita) than modern humans.
Let alone that their top geniuses may have outstripped even our very best. So they may have contemplated matters that have never even occurred to modern humans, to this day.
Before anyone goes on about ‘well we are here and they aren’t’, do bear in mind that evolution favours the most adaptable, not the smartest. Just because homo sapiens were better at surviving does not prove that they were cleverer. There are a whole host of other aspects which could have allowed H.S. to out-compete the neanderthals.
I remember reading somewhere that our ancient hunter/gatherer ancestors did have slightly larger brains than modern humanity. The theoretical explanation for this is that in small, primitive bands, everybody had to know many skills, since there was little redundancy or division of labor. In modern society, far greater specialization is practical, since an individual can concentrate on , say, accounting, while relying on others to make his clothes and prepare his food, etc. Basically, because we’re so much smarter collectively, we can afford to be dumber individually. Smaller brains could offer an advantage, since our big, fat human brains soak up a whole lot of energy.
or aliens taught them?
What will Sciona find in that vault?
Her real body
The reason why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
The recipe for original Coca-Cola, KFC’s 11 herbs and spices, A list of the 23 flavors of Dr. Pepper, the aforementioned CTC reason, and Victoria’s Secret.
Waldo.
Carmen Sandiego.
Hostess™ Brand Delicious Snack Cakes© that villains just can’t resist.
*sigh* I hate having to correct people about this.
It’s Justice Fruit Pies!
The Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
A plover’s egg the size of an emerald.
How about the three catalytic elements for a M.A.S.S. device
—or—
Three fragments for Sciona to build a weather dominator???
Another set of Orbs, with totally different powers.
the Release of Half-life 3
One eighth life?
*cries*
Another evil genius lost, before she was able to fulfil her potential!
An orb that when activated destroys all porn in the world.
Which world, now?
The Grrl Power world, not ours. Thank God for the 4th Wall, huh?
:D
The reason Capcom won’t make Megaman Legends 3.
The cupboard from ‘the Indian in the Cupboard’.
An omnitrix.
A functional yu-gi-oh Fusion card.
Clow Reed’s book.
*meant a yu-gi-oh Polymerization card.
two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree (all immortal and there to F with thieves minds)
(pssst, did you know if you tally up all the gifts in the song it equals the number of days in a tear?)
year
How many years are there in a tear? Is this like ‘the number of angels on the head of a pin’ type thing?
DaveB, who’s to say that the minions were told they were in a base capable of self destruct? I wouldn’t tell mine. One disgruntled toady & I’d have heroes activating it or the toady themselves doin it.
A good point. Doesn’t need a disgruntled minion though. A clueless / incompetent one would be more than sufficient
I have to wonder – for how many Evil Overlords (with Deathtrap fetish) have the last thing they ever heard been the new minion saying “Hey, what does this button do?”.
More than you would imagine, but less than you would believe :D
They might get curious about the big red “Do Not Push” button in the operations center eventually.
PEOL:
I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.
The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord.
#65 If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.
I like that idea.
You could still put a label on it that says it’s the “self-destruct” button. Whoever activates it will certainly self-destruct…
that makes one of three things happen
a sign to pop up with a message about pressing buttons
a trap door open and they get hit by a boxing glove on a spring
a trap door open below them
or maybe all of them
Is it jolly and candy-like?
This vault with all its magic and the like? Not worrying about how it stays functional.
Other ancient tombs however. How many death traps turned into new ones when they broke down?
Why did all the darts fire, we were not even on the pressure plates? The trap failed due to age.
How do you get some longevity out of your traps? Widen the tolerances a bit. Gears that don’t fully mesh can still turn. Holes for the pivots wider than the bars in them mean they are less likely to jam.
And the launch a ship at sail? That was not an escape measure. It was one last kept my treasure from you. Because that ship had no crew. You have to catch it with another sailing vessel before it wrecks itself. In the movie it was probably seen then sunk in less than an hour so the contents of her holds would be lost to the looters.
The only mechanism I have found that should not work was the light trap at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. . . Seriously how do you make that work mechanically?
In the movie, Willie’s ship did have a crew, well, Sloth counts as the new captain at least, doesn’t he?
I’d imagine it would involve mirrors. lots of mirrors.
Speaking of deathtraps…1955s ‘Land of the Pharaohs’ had one using sand as a low tech hydrolic fluid.
YouTube has the ending/burial so you don’t have to watch the entire movie. Yes…no reset on that one, but that was the point.
Did anyone else thing she was crushing a fairy or something in that last panel at first?
You saying she wasn’t? o_O
So who is the boss in this operation? Is it Sciona or is Cthillia pulling the strings?
can’t they be both?
I tihnk sciona might have a bit more authority, but otherwise i am fairly certain they are partners in this.
In regards to the Goonies, I had to wonder what the point was at the end of the movie with setting sail. Best case scenario, it would have been an easily spotted derelict ship floating around. It would have easily been boarded or sunk just so anyone involved could run off with the gold. Worst case scenario, anyone would have been more than a little suspicious of the traps and disarmed them with out freeing the ship or anything and also ran off with the gold and presumably a ship too. Only high point in the plan was the actual hiding of the ship and the difficulty getting to it.
I’m kind of wondering how 4 steel jacks are holding up 500 tons of material. That’s one million pounds…I don’t think we have the jacks to do that. If they’re magic jacks, wouldn’t the stone to this uber vault have a magic canceler?
100 ton hydraulic jacks aren’t uncommon. Something like what they’re using runs about two or three grand each.
Well, it’s more than 4. I figure they have 10 in there at least but I didn’t think you guys wanted 4 more panels of them setting those up. I’ll probably have a shot from a different angle showing more of them.
Thought that other individual was new, but wasn’t sure, and figured if they were then there was a good chance there would be others
And they don’t need to hold all the weight.
If the descending block fits the room perfectly (you don’t want gaps at the edge for someone to slip round and not be crushed) then by forcing it to come down at an angle, it will jam against the side walls.
One carefully positioned jack may be enough to throw it out of alignment.
Hence the phrase “throw a spanner in the jack’s beanstalk”.
the ceiling stops when the floor registers the ceiling’s weight on it. the jacks distribute the weight and the floor doesn’t know the difference, so as far as the sensors care, the ceiling is touching the floor
soooo lessons learned from this.
1) install a “scatter” mechanism, that will send the artefacts to multiuple predetermined locations, and can activate only if the place suffered sufficient ammount of environmental damage.
phusical blocs will prevent it being triggered thourgh hacks.
2) install a nuke that will activate 1 minute after intrusion. not a big one, but enough to flash fry everyone present.
3) HAVE A DAMN PRIVATE BAND INSTEAD OF USING THE COMMON LINE!! but we alredy knew that one.
did i miss something?
1) The the enemy could propably predict wich lighter defended position the item would end up in.
2) Destruction of the Artifact was explicitly not possible.
3) Then Sconia would have used the Chaos to disrupt the private band. You know, like every Burglar defeating a electronic alarm system ever.
1) then less predetermined mechanisms, and more “out of a list”, the artefacts are still far apart, so the perp would have to breake into each of them, to get more than one or two.
additionally, some artefacts could be send through long but thin vertical shafts, with some locking mechanism. you cant just grab them by hand, and you cant just fish them out of a fishing rod or lift magic, because the second lok is in the way and no room to part through.
2) what do you think the 1 minute delay is for? exactly the same thing as the ceiling trap!
if anyone survives the initial traps, they are either super durable or had send an explosive decoy, not exactly an unheard of strategy, even if execution was interesting.
3) cant hurt to try, and if that line went down, that alone would be abad sign.
if you have to use the ceiling crusher have a series of supports holding the ceiling in place and once flatten it all protocol is initiated the supports holding the crushing ceiling are destroyed let gravity and water pressure do the heavy crushing (and a escape / place for for the o2 to go cause i’m sure the water pressure where they are is enough to turn those jacks into penny’s)
i was more going for some flash frying, but i guess your way works too.
except that i am pretty sure they were going up at some point, so the water preassure might not be as great.
2) That’s what Matter Eater Lad is for! Dude made a career out of disposing of the explicitly indestructible.
(Best part: It wasn’t even really a superpower. Everyone on his world could do it. He was just the only one of them who decided he could make a superhero career out of “eat literally anything”.)
Yeah, something about Matter Eater Lad that’s always bugged me…Yes, he can safely digest anything, but how strong were his jaw muscles & the structural integrity of his teeth? Kind of hard to swallow & digest something that’s too tough to take a bite or chew it…
the answer is simple…. vomit on it.
HAVE A DAMN PRIVATE BAND
Why? So they could play dramatic music while the ceiling slowly lowered down onto the intruders?
Obviously. You always need a dramtic music for everything. Thats just common sense.
on a completely unrelated note, what word should i use if i wanted to suggest some form of communication?
How about channel? Could mean a ditch too, but that’s not a very common usage.
Mission Impossible theme?
When dropping a ceiling, make multiple bits drop freely from each other.
Well sometimes dicks get the job done better than the ‘nice guys’
What was in the vial in the last pane?
A de-bloodinging spell (but the thought is it was captured Fairy, not a vial, more ironic that way: crush your enemy to clean yourself of the blood on your hands {and everywhere else})
See Switzerland – https://io9.gizmodo.com/5919581/how-switzerland-camouflaged-its-ready-to-explode-architecture-during-the-cold-war
Practically the entire nation was rigged to blow in the event of an invasion after WWII.
“henchmen should really unionize”
Personally I would push for
1) Installing guard rails on all walkways across big vats of hazardous chemicals (or piranhas).
2) Eye exams and glasses for all armed guards so that they could actually see intruders and them aim properly at them instead of randomly spraying machine gun fire across the room.
Guard rails didn’t stop Red Hood from falling into the vat of Joker-transforming chemicals
Man, The killing joke is such a good movie.
Shame about the thirty minutes of sex-with-a-minor at the start though
They don’t need glasses, they need firearm training. Terrorists do the same thing; it’s referred to as “spray and pray” by the troops.
honestly, if you were required to have actual firearm training to own a gun period everywhere, there’d be a lot less gun accidents.
Problem is most really evil villins would have a very nasty and simple solution to a Union.
Rep: “Hello overloard so and so, I am the new representative of your henchmen union.”
BANG. Dead rep.
Overloard: “Any one else want to become a union rep? No. Ok, end of the union. Now onto business.”
Unions are actually illegal in Latveria…By royal decree from Dr. Doom.
The Guild of Calamitous Intent on The Venture Brothers is literally founded on the bindings of an Elder Evil and is a Trade Guild that sets standards for henchman treatment, acts as a thieves guild and vets superheroes for their members
Henchmen HAVE a union… it just happens to be run by a hamster.
https://68.media.tumblr.com/13fd2eb120a77757c12ea1b16c7c8068/tumblr_mmgp3gm02C1rt1ivno4_1280.png
Even more puzzling is who resets the traps in ancient tombs and such? In movies and games the heroes will come across some bodies of previous explorers that were killed by the ancient death trap and so they have a clue how to avoid it. And when the trap is revealed very few of them are “self resetting” sorts like revolving floors. Maybe it’s the same people that go through these places and make sure that there are either burning torches to light the way or at least torches ready to go in convenient holders everywhere.
the same person who draws the maps to those forgotten tombs, ancient temples, etc, “no one who’s entered has survived”, yet they’ve got a map of the place
The Goonies always did strike me as a stupid movie, starting with the way too easy prison break.
Who is to say the gears and whatnot of the traps were made of wood and hemp? The could have been made of stone and steel. Further, while the cave is damp, it is also very, very cool (in temperature), and the water in the cave has a very high salt and mineral content. Fossilization, like the Petrified Forest of Arizona, would have been a greater danger than rotting.
And yeah, There were A LOT of marvels and wonders of engineering whose techniques are lost to us. We can’t build the Pyramids today, even with advanced CAD software and heavy construction equipment. The Egyptians did it with only lots and lots of manual labor to help them.
We can build the pyramids today if we were to choose to do so. We just have better things to do than building a huge pile of stone over a single tomb; that’s a heck of a lot of cost for what could be done just as well by putting the ashes in a cheap urn over the fireplace.
We can build the pyramids today, has already been replicated.
Only in little, not a full-size great pyramid. I withhold my awe until they replicate a full-size Olympic Mons pyramid, with solid Egyptian stone blocks and capped in marble, next to the original.
*assumes a Sphinx pose and settles down for a long wait*
I think we could do it. The issue is cost. No one today wants to spend that kind of wealth just for a tomb. Even back in the day it was a costly venture, but the kings really wanted thier extravagent tomb.
There’s evidence that suggests that tomb-building was actually a full-time industry with infrastructure for tombs & pyramids constantly under construction. This was mostly for the people who weren’t of the royal family, who couldn’t afford the cost of having their tombs or pyramids built-to-order…The lesser classes merely had to choose & purchase specific tombs that were already in-the-works for something a lot cheaper. This would have been a better option for lesser nobles (those not directly working in the Royal Court) & Clergy.
Considering how she tricked Cooter, would it be too much on the nose to call her a troll?
Properly tarred hemp will not rot. That’s why you use tar. Several sorts of wood do not rot if not in actual contact with water. Mahogany and teak come to mind as often used in old boats and extremely resistant to rot.
Generally, teredo worms would do the damage to a mahogany or teak boat.
Something that’s been bothering me… was at least one of these guys once a member of the council? I’m just wondering how they had such detailed information regarding the location’s defenses. Did the council brag about how impossible it was to infiltrate their stronghold or something? I mean, Sciona and friends would’ve needed a lot of very specific information to get this far…
Is anyone else getting a flickering reload button and tab icon? Chrome says the page is trying to load scripts from unauthorized sources, but I don’t know what’s causing it.
Nothing unusual when using an iPad model 1, gen 1 running OS 5.1. But there can be too many people, besides me, doing that.
I should say it isn’t doing that…
I am using chrome too (windows 10) but am not seeing any such problems.
I am using Firefox with an ad blocker on Windows 7. I see no suspicious or unwanted activity.
Hmm, must be the specific ads being fed to me. That’s good anyway.
That’s the most likely problem…In a few places I visit, it’s the ads that screw up everything, not the site itself.
OK the vault does have some serious failsafes. No security is perfect, but they have made an effort.
you seem to be praising them, but for some reason when i look at the page, part of ym brain sais that you misspelled “ok, the vault has some serious failings.No security is perfect, sure, but they made it extra bad”
Show me any vault in the real world which has more impressive defenses and I will concede your point. Fail to and you leave us with the conclusion that this is the best-defended vault in the world.
As I say though even the best can be overcome. Especially when you have a traitorous insider supplying comprehensive details as to its defenses. Not to mention that we can see him actively assisting in countering its abilities.
The person who wins the silver medal does not get classed as being ‘bad at sports’. He is just not as good as the very best. This vault has significantly impressive defenses. Which have been overcome by someone with even more impressive capabilities.
yes, this might be the “best guarded vault in the world”, but take into consideration what evryone else has available, and what they need to prevent.
Normies don’t have teleporters to deal with, nor do they have anything that would attract a person capable of it.
Private wizards might not have access to advanced tech, or magitech, but they usualy dont have world breaking artefacts lying around.
To compare this vault, to any other, is like to say that your neighbour is a great at sports, because he/she won on paraolympics. If the person is crippled in some way, yeah sure “show them the disability cant stop you!” and all that, but if the person is at full health, there you cant really cal that a competition can you?
its a completely different standars.
think first, type second.
dude…. its the internet. noone does that.
The flaw is not in the vault design, it is external matters which failed:
1) Not restricting the design details to a sufficiently small and trustworthy group.
2) Piggybacking the alert system on to the Veil.
3) Forgetting 2) when Sciona engineered the crisis that would get them to disable the Veil.
Without these flaws Sciona would probably not have even been able to find the vault in the first place, let alone enter it! Plus would likely have been taken by surprise by this page’s countermeasure, even if she anticipated the various pop-up guns.
The council did a good job on their vault design. But a poor one on matters associated with it externally.
Err, I should have said “disable the part of the Sigil network that allowed spells long range capabilities”. The Veil itself has not been disabled.
What is she crushing in that last frame?
A captured fairy >_>
*clap clap clap*
I hope that will save it!
Some kind of air cooling and refreshing thingy (including a fairy with that kind of side-effect when crushed). This going by the relevant onomatopoeia.
It appears that Sciona is using a blood-magic version of Gate spell.
That is, one or both both ends of the Gate are pools of blood, and you
will be coated with a layer of blood when you pass through the Gate.
In order to avoid orientation shift while gating, the first gate could
be on ceiling, so you climb a ladder, pass through the gate at ceiling,
and rise through the pool of blood on floor at some remote location.
—
Sciona casts Blood Gate to the vault. (page 562, panel 3)
Scoot drinks the explosive potion. (mentioned at page 564, panel 8)
Scoot enters the vault through the Blood Gate. (page 562, panel 5)
Vault defenses are activated. (page 562, panel 1)
Scoot explodes, taking down the active defenses. (page 562, panel 10)
Sciona casts a new Blood Gate to the vault. (page 564, panel 2)
First team members enters the vault through the Blood Gate. (page 564, panel 3)
Other team members pass i-beam pillar jacks through the Blood Gate. (page 564, panel 4)
Enough jacks are erected before ceiling drops. (page 564, panel 7)
—
I assume that the vault is shielded from scrying spells, so Sciona would
need to get the exact coordinates for the Blood Gate spell from someone
who has been within the vault. For this she would need to recruit old
Council members, and after this the Councils members could be expendable.
Sciona probably closed the first blood gate after Scoot went through, so
that the blast wave from the explosive potion would not travel through the gate.
At this point one of her henchmen comes up to Sciona and says “Boss. I got good news and bad news. The good news is that the jacks stopped the ceiling a full seven feet above the floor. The bad news is that the doors open outward and their tops are EIGHT feet from the floor.”
That’s why they used jacks, they can jack up the ceiling.
I would expect nothing less.
*sniffle*
*proudly stands, for the National Anthem*
In a RPG I had to design a few deathtraps. I knew full well that the invading force had access to ‘other side of this door’ teleportation spells, so I made a few traps that exploited that.
A large and imposing door, which leads to a ten by ten vestibule. The entire floor is a trigger plate. This drops the ceiling – a ten-foot cube of concrete – onto those below. Bad guys teleport in, there is a loud *WHAM* and ex-bad guy shoots out from under the door like a ketchup packet. Furthermore, the doors cannot open into the now blocked room.
The secret? Open the very large door and walk in. The door will support the weight of the block and you can cross normally.
That is so evil Sciona would hire you in a flash.
Pfft.. that wasn’t evil. What was evil was the drawbridge.
I also included a few of the more practical traps from Grimtooth’s. Fun fact: Wanna know what the worst thing you can fill a pit trap with is?
Shaving cream.
Think about it. It won’t support your weight, in fact you’ll take full fall damage. You can’t breathe it, so you’ll suffocate. Your friends can’t see you, so they can’t target you with spells to get you out. YOU can’t cast spells unless you can do so without speaking. You can’t see anything at all, and sounds will be very muffled. A rope dropped to you might be too light to sink into the foam. If it’s not, you still can’t see it. Even if you somehow know they’ve dropped a rope, and fumble around to grab it, it’s too slippery to climb. As are the sides of the pit.
And did I mention the animated skeletons, which don’t breathe or need to see?
Acid and lava are options, but hard to implement. Spikes.. meh.
Acidic shaving cream.
They actually sell those in the stores
I would make it rubble rather than a solid block for purposes of trapping and blinding them, I would also put a set of exsplosives to clear out any struts, also and more importantly I would make several alert channels that would all need to be blocked in different ways, on the other hand they would probably be able to get around that too… Also that weakness aura generator, I would put stuff like that in the walls.
There was a book I read once where the dwarves set off a trap to seal the entrance to their city with several tons of stone. One dwarf commented that they’d never been able to test this, because once it was triggered, there was no way to open it again.
That sounds like something from one of the R. A. Salvatore books if I recall correctly…
If so he was likely referencing the ancient Egyptians. That was a technique they used to seal a Pharaoh’s tomb, according to informed archaeological opinion.
Yeah, the Egyptians favored a “block any further access” trap over the “kill the intruder” trap. If the “blocking” trap happened to kill the intruders too, then it was just a bonus. There’s not much more irony than tomb-traps that create more tomb-occupants, though.
I
We
… are Groot?
.. is good.
They
I’m pretty sure the ancients just tested their traps with scale models they could show off to the pharaoh or emperor.
I am sure you are wise to believe that.
I am a little surprised that all of the traps we have seen so far are mechanical. Apparently the interior of the vault isn’t full of antimagic, so some good old ‘polymorph to harmless thing’ and ‘you cannot move or think’ type spells would be standard, I would think, if available. But there is a lot we don’t know about magic in this world.
I think it is safe to say that the contractor with a flair for the dramatic got to build the (most recent version of the) vault. I wonder if he got stored in it as well?
But really, it doesn’t matter what defenses you set up when an insider who knows how to cancel them all is involved.
Self destructing lairs and complex traps were brilliantly parodied in “The Emperor’s New Groove” when Gronk pulls the wrong lever and then Eesma, who had gotten caught in the trap says “I don’t even know why we have that lever”.
https://youtu.be/sw2B9knw58U
There’s been at least one film which did death traps right, and that was Land of the Pharaohs. The whole system was driven by the movement of dry sand and triggered by a sliding heavy stone that broke seals on the sand system, and would have been simple enough to make reliable (someone had fun designing that in real life). Also, the henchman in the movie wanted to be sealed in.