Grrl Power #565 – Thermal shock knock knock
Sciona can reactivate the portal, but until then they’re trapped in the vault, which is why it was imperative they got the jacks in place right away. Also once the ceiling is down, there’s no empty space to pass through the portal into. Of course the first question anyone might reasonably ask is why isn’t the collapsible ceiling pre-collapsed in the first place? And that’s a good question.
Honestly if I was in charge of the place, that would be my call. The two best reasons I can think of would be the one, no one thought of it. The vault was built before movies and TVs and even adventure novels. They weren’t saturated with all the tropes yet. Plus the Vault is heavily warded against teleportation. It took Scion a long time to figure out a way to bypass them, as will be hinted at on a future page. Two, they could have just been so enamored with the idea of a deathtrap that they figure it was better to let people who could breach the vault do so, then let the array of deathtraps within the Vault trap or kill them, and of course, under normal circumstances, the Vault would have been blaring alarms to the Council and deadly deadly agents would have been dispatched.
The other problem with having the ceiling down in the main vault… uh… lobby area, the antechambers where the actual artifacts are kept would still have open space in them. The reason they started off in the lobby was, as you can see on this page, they need to get into multiple antechambers. If they started off in one antechamber, they’d have to break out of it into the lobby, deal with all the defenses there anyway, before breaking into the other rooms. Plus each antechamber has its own set of defenses unless they’re deactivated from the lobby.
You know, I designed Sciona’s hot/cold drill basically with the knowledge I gained from watching the old D&D cartoon, where Tiamat (whose name I thought was T.M.X. for some reason) used her red and blue dragon head to freeze and heat a door to something and eventually shatter it. Like a dummy, it didn’t occur to me to check if that’s a real thing until I was trying to come up with a title for this page. Obviously with stone, repeatedly expanding and contracting with temperature variations will cause cracks over time. That’s what most of the cracks in anything made out of concrete comes from. (That and roots messing up sidewalks) But with metal, well, it seems to depend on the metal. With some metal that actually makes it stronger. I mean, why else would blacksmiths plunge their glowing hot swords and what have you into a vat of whatever to cool them off only to reheat them again? It’s called cryogenic hardening. Also it helps add carbon to the blade. Still, I’d think that repeatedly heating and cooling almost anything, especially if it was wedged into a wall for instance, and had nowhere to expand, it would eventually become quite detrimental to its overall structural integrity. Plus this stuff regenerates so who knows what the hell kind of metal it is.
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Personally if I were a villain, and standing next to the fall-guy using blood mage, whilst covered in blood, I would be …
actually I would not be in that situation. Sounds too risky.
Sciona seems like a pragmatic villain. She won’t just betray her allies for whatever reason.
Besides, there’s blood inside you. That little extra on your clothes won’t make much difference.
Depends if the body acts like a natural barrier against random attempts to influence internal organs. But yeah, Sciona probably knows ways around that too, or she’ll just create an opening.
One good punch to get things flowing
In most of bloodmage cheats, living blood and… deadblood have diferent… tipes of energy. Like trying to power a steam engine with electricity.
Some even consider blood as a magic material. In a body, is like an ore. You have to refine it. Eather by training the person or by alchemy.
I always thought that living blood is better, and anything that has been outside circulation for longer than a few hours is useless for magical purposes.
Pragmatist of the old waste not want not school would not let that deter them.
Heck, look at traditional British and French cuisine. They cook and eat everything from tripe, and offal to that focus of Glaswegian martial arts – the deadly Black Pud.
Stop trying to scare Yorp away (from Sciona).
Not that you’re wrong, because you’re not.
Sciona can do that on her own.
Also, I doubt Sciona could “just up and destroy them”.
They all seem very powerful in their own right.
Mr. Freeze in Batman (1966 – 1968) used first his freeze gas then LASER to open a safe in the tv series the first one and best version with the coldly logical George Sanders.
From Japan they have hot soup/cold soup routine that would eventually break their teeth.
apparently Cthilia has more tricks up its sleeve than we thought
Was about to mention that, but had to make the comment about the door first
Yeah, Lia can do more than look you to death
If you can stare at someone hard enough to hit them like a bullet train, that’s still looking you to death.
Except, she does more than just look at you and convince your heart to go on strike
Dead or more dead is still dead, right?
More dead there’s only one thing you can do. Look through their pockets for loose change.
You let them keep their pockets? That is some low quality more dead right there.
And the mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, because bacon isn’t quite kosher.
Its the difference between being mugged by a rogue – lots of tiny little holes through which vital fluids will leak – and a Nova Missile fired into the local solar mass – your being reduced to plasma and your constituent atoms scattered by a solar wind across several parsecs.
The only real difference is the certainty of your demise and the resulting collateral damage.
No, the point is, she has at least two, different, eye-based attacks
She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she’s always Cthillia to me.
Aww. Gets the confetti and engagement rings out. Go on bud, get down on one knee and pop the question!
TIL Cthillia has different jackets.
Or is this one of those cases where they are all identical, but for some reason, the owner can tell them all apart?
I have 5 completely black t-shirts and I can tell them apart. There are small, identifying stains here and there and the fabric feels a bit different in each of them.
Wasn’t this listed as one of Hiro’s undocumented superpowers?
It is one of the more common superpowers. Mass production has almost made it necessary.
Expanding and contracting a metal door won’t do much to the door itself, the door frame and surrounding wall on the other tentacle…
Buy melting and flash-freezing the metal might restructure it into smaller crystals that are easier to break apart. Sort of like perforating the door before Cthilla’s hits it in the centre
I’m amazed at how much blood magic can do in this story. Think about it: “teleporting” into a place by being turned into blood, seeping in, then being reconstituted. But one would think that such would work only on beings who had blood running in them. Clothing and small items are a stretch for this concept of magic, but the willful of suspension of disbelief (as far as it applies within the fantasy and superhero genre) can be maintained…
… But a custom-built, high-tech, high-magic, high-precision and LARGE heat/freeze/etc. cutting laser machine? Whoa.
In several universes that I know, blood magic is just regular magic, but stronger (by using blood as a super powered form of mana)
Also I don’t think they so much turn into blood, as that Sciona made a portal made from blood.
And anything coated in blood can freely travel through the portal
Good points. I was thinking of blood magic using blood itself as the medium and method (a thus its own limit) of what it could do, rather than as something that used blood as fuel to access the full breadth of reality alteration that magic in general does.
This might be the reason why Sciona and Gunnhildr are wearing these hazmat suits. The blood magic messes with their own magic (Whatever holds Sci together and what lets Gunni be a vamp) or would suck them dry, if there was no barrier between the “sacrifical” and the “payload” blood.
No, those suits were to protect them from the flames when they entered
They wore those suits because of the molten floor.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2634
Blood magic as you described it could have easily made Cooter clones by accident.
How could what I described be used for clones?
That would be the “reconstituted from blood” part.
I specifically said that I think they DON’T turn into blood and reform.
It’s probably powered by Legend’s blood. Next thing you know it’ll fire lasers around corners…
Imagine if she had some of Manton’s, Alexandria’s, Crawler’s, or Grey Boy’s blood. Or since she is a blood mage, both Panacea’s and Bonesaw’s blood.
Want to get into any vault undetected? Contessa + Imp + Doormaker + The Clairvoyant.
Those 3 are a near-perfect combo. Contessa plans the heist, The Clairvoyant cases the joint and provides lookout, and Doormaker just sticks portals wherever they’re needed. Now all you need is someone who can get around undetected, and your victim might not even reali… Hmm, I could have sworn I had my wallet when I left the house this morning.
Anyway, Contessa + Doormaker + The Clairvoyant. Cauldron’s got it made.
I think the blood is more like a focus point for the teleporting. Otherwise there would have be an unbroken stream of blood between begin and endpoint. That would just be the transporting part though, doesn’t mean the entrance and exit of the blood-portal don’t first convert the objects to blood and then reconstruct them on the other end. It would just be a ‘break apart and put it back together’ process at that point.
I can’t say if it is true for here too, but in other works of fiction blood magic often has more to do with some innate potential within the blood instead of the blood itself. That is why blood from a more powerful being is more potent than some random human.
If they were converted to blood and back, the excess would be inside their clothes and not just coating the outside.
When they take the helmets off their suits, you can see the outline showing it was more like being dipped in blood.
Don’t forget: Sciona had weeks of prep time to work with. Any decent mage could make human magic seem vastly overpowered given that time frame.
More like years.
Depends on the human mage.
If you look at the laser, you can see that it has a row of blood batteries that power it. About half way through the heist Sciona may think “The power cells are running low. I will need to to refill them somehow.” At which point she starts eyeing the people around her. Her companions already know from ‘the Cooter incident’ (kind of like a noodle incident, but we DO what happened) that she is not too loyal to those that work for her.
Cooter worked for Sciona the way a bag with explosives works for an action movie hero. It is just a thing to hold the stuff that goes boom. Cooter was ‘recruited’ as a meat shield and vessel for the exploding tentacles.
cooter was recruited for the purpose of being exploded and her other actually useful people know that. maybe they think about if they where also recruited for some purpose, but they seam more like allies then tools to be used and discarded.
Nicely spotted. I suspect that Sciona is not actually the one creating the physical form of the golem, nor putting together the mechanics of the laser. Behind the scenes she probably has a gadgeteer minion, working for her (perhaps for pay, or under duress, or controlled by blood magic).
In the case of the construct(s) Sciona’s power was used to animate them, giving them the movement capabilities and skills of people she sacrificed using her magic. Here the laser would hit a technical barrier with our currently limited technology, where the gadgeteer would indicate that ‘I cannot make a laser that hot so partable, let alone generate a refrigeration effect. Not without a far greater power source’. At which point Sciona could step in with her blood magic again.
If you think about it blood is our power source. It carries the energy around the body, to be delivered to the cells and organs which need nourishment. In this case the laser has been set up to draw energy in a similar way, and Sciona has obviously vastly magnified the normal effectiveness of such energy supply.
Actually, the common reason for quench and tempering is to reduce the brittleness of the steel. The initial heat and quenching austenitizes (not common across all metals), but leaves both a tremendous amount of residual stress and a brittle material. Tempering (reheating at a lower heat) undoes some of this, allowing the stress to relax and making the material a bit more flexible.
Agreed, and having watched all 4 seasons of Forged in Fire–it’s also a treatment that can do a serious number on the metal in question. Contestants have wound up undoing their hardening, and causing stress fractures so the blade breaks, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s being talked about here, right?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I’ve watched some of Forged in Fire and a lot of Man at Arms: Reforged (Ilya from that was the winner of the Spiked Shield episode of Forged in Fire). And if those two shows have taught me anything it’s that rapidly heating and then cooling steel will make it as brittle as all get out.
always figured that’s why they usually used oil to quench
We also use it to ‘steer’ the heat. If there’s a smaller area I want to shape, I quench the area around it, to cool it and drive the heat just to the small area. It being hot, it responds to the hammer, the nearby areas being cooler, don’t.
you use the oil to cool it slower then you would in water.
The oil is also heated to just below boiling.
If you want to see a blacksmith cry, show him the opening credits to Conan. The bladesmith plunges the sword into a snowbank, there’s a huge cloud of steam on which the credits roll, and you end up with a blade that will shatter like peanut brittle the first time it hits armor.
You get a huge cloud of steam when you use a bucket of water
Depending on the metal in question, the internal stresses can cause serious damage during a quench, which the cooling is. Then it goes right back to hardening temperatures. Although, extremely rapid temperature changes in a localized area can also cause stresses purely due to therm expansion/contraction, although this isn’t as reliable.
You’ll also see warping during both a heating cycle if there’s residual stresses from forging/casting/whatever process was used, or uneven heating/cooling. Stuff goes in straight and comes out curly all the time.
Also, the more a metal is hardened, the more brittle it becomes. Then when it’s hit by a blast of some kind, it’s more likely to fracture & break free. Which is consistent with the visual “evidence” above. Well done Dave!!
From what I understand of my college chemistry classes, depending on the temperature difference between the two “beams” being used (I’ll just spitball a 2000 degree laser cutter and a -40 degree precision dry ice cannon) you would not only have to worry about warping, but of shrapnel as the atoms begin to recoil away from each other due to basically a very cold section of metal rapidly contracting away from a rapidly expanding section of very hot metal (it is a way to make metal explode). If I understand correctly (and I could be very, very wrong here) it is one of the reasons why you don’t do welding in the very cold.
Edit:
Okay, so the first bit is what causes massive amounts of warping and peeling. What causes the metal to explode is gasses getting in-between the metal atoms as they are expanding (or pockets of space being created from the warping) and then trapping the gasses (like 02 and N2) behind a wall of condensed metal. When you rapidly reheat everything, the gas atoms expand faster than the metal does, forcing their way out. Either way, rapid heating and cooling using industrial-grade tools is considered a big no no due to danger and cost of repairs.
Forged in Fire? So… like The Great British Baking Show, but for swords. I… think I could watch that.
It is a History Channel show it isn’t bad they make some interesting blades.
I also recommend the youtube series Man at Arms at the Awe.me channel. As I said, one of the smiths from that was on Forged in Fire in the second season and their specialty is weapons (not just swords) from video games, movies, literature, anime and some historical builds (their Ulfberth is a thing of beauty). A lot of the times, especially when Matt and Ilya are leading the builds they will go all out on some of their techniques on the grounds of “Why? Why not!”
I thought that it also had something to do with the carbon atoms and how they are in the steel. If you cool it down quickly, the iron atoms don’t have time to push the carbon out from between them, thus making the steel more brittle (it would crack along the carbon seams), while if it was left to cool down slowly, the carbon atoms would be pushed outside the steel and make the inside more soft and iron-y.
Correct, that’s the basic process of austenitization and quenching. Here’s a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FTC1RTnPF0
I thought that was called ‘annealing’ or cooling the metal slowly to reduce internal stresses.
There’s various different techniques depending on various factors. Annealing will remove almost all stress, but is done above austinization temperature (~1700 freedoms) and then is allowed to slowly cool. There’s also a practice commonly called ‘normalization’ which involves taking it up above austinization temperature and then air cooling, this is mostly to make sure that all the stresses are the same in a batch of material, as it frequently comes out of a forging shop with irregular stresses depending on how many hits it took, how long it needed to be heated, and whether or not it was allowed to cool alone or in a pile of hot material.
Then they’ll do the austenitization quench and temper (commonly referred to simply as a quench and temper). Some material is fine after a quench and tempering is optional, others are so stressed that not tempering them within a few minutes can result in fracture or explosion of the material. Aust is usually 1500-1650 freedoms, temper is usually between 900-1200 at double the time, although I’m mostly familiar with variants of 4340 and 4140 variants.
Last is what’s referred to as a ‘stress relief’ which is done at an even colder temperature than tempering for about the same amount of time and then allowed to cool fairly slowly.
Annealing will ‘reset’ the grains from any work hardening, making it softer and weaker but tougher (all of these terms have specific meanings in material science). Cold rolling, turning, knurling, pressing, stamping, swagging, and even forging will require annealing if you want the full toughness available.
Looks like Sciona is quite the Jill in all trades, too – Dabbler needs to up her game.
*Jill of all…
I also like how her Body is all “Franken-stein-y” when she is standing there being idle. Might be a sideeffect from … well… being exactly that.
Not sure what you mean by “her Body is all “Franken-stein-y*” when she is standing there idle.”
*the doctor’s name was “Frankenstein” by the way
Maybe Adam’s father tended to loom quietly, too, you know?
And the monster, being his creation, was technically his child and so carries the family name.
Speaking of doors… told ya the ‘teddies’ were doors :P
This is why I install my manse’s in Elsewhere. [Hammerspace] The vault needs a especific and coordinated signal to make the walkway to the next room. ¿You break the wall? You end up sucking all the time out of the room.
Oddly that’s a similar reason my place is on an asteroid on the DSOTM.
Pocket dimensions – all the rage with today’s arch-mages.
In the good ole days it was a nice sturdy tower away from all those annoying [and smelly] local self-important types … the peasants at least kept their distance and left the deliveries by the servants entrance.
Covered in blood,someone must’ve seen the movie Carrie(the 1976 film…)
“Honestly if I was in charge of the place, that would be my call.”
Did anyone else have to read that twice to convince themselves he actually wrote it and wasn’t being ironic?
Course he wasn’t being ironic: he wrote it, but he’s not the one in charge of the place
I didn’t have to read it twice, but I had similar thoughts while reading it the first time. I had to convince myself that he isn’t in charge of the place, he’s only in charge of whoever is in charge of the place. His underlings just have their own minds (personalities / in-character choices).
Zack Tilly, most writers (the good ones anyway) eventually find their ‘creations’ start doing things they hadn’t intended
Lol, while I agree (courtesy of a barbarian character of mine who has completely taken on a life of her own) I still find that the _environment_, at least, will be and do what I tell it to. And even said barbarian is still, on some level, an extension of my own wants and views… unconscious though they may be.
I just had to chime in on this, that heat-freeze duo-laser thingy would actually be rather effective provided that the rate of change is high enough. Though considering that it goes from hot enough to glow down to cold enough to make moisture in the air gather as relatively large ice crystals, and on a very limited area to boot, I’d say the rate of change would be enough.
The rapid changes in density due to the temperatures conbined with the door frame keeping things relatively in place would build up a lot of stress in the area. Combined with a hard enough shove, like that kinetic eye-laser, and you’d get what we saw.
The technique might actually backfire on her. Melting then rapidly cooling metal can create amorphous or ‘glassy’ metal. Tests have shown glass steel has 3 times the strength of regular steel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_metal
And that’s my “Interesting science fact” for the day. Thanks
They used a similar tactic in the new expansion of Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood to breach the gates of Ala Mhigo. Alternating fire and ice barrages by squadrons of black mages, followed by cannon fire to force open the gates.
Good thing, too. That was the first thing the Coco brothers had done in 40 levels of storyline!
ANTIPODE. Why didn’t anyone above me say ANTIPODE??
Cuz it’s on the other side of the planet?
No it’s not, you are :P
If you want a fun little visual on what happens when you mix fire and ice, you might want to look up what happens when you put a bucket full of lit thermite atop a big block of ice, or for that matter what happens when pouring molten copper onto ice. Turns out the sudden expansion causes things to go boom, which – in the case of thermite – results in the whole bucket going thermobaric. It’s really quite spectacular to watch.
It just so happens that I saved a counter-example, wherein the two get along far better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLwaPP9cxT4
All those idiots who don’t know science
Whereas the guys who mixed thermite and ice have actually contributed towards science (thanks to Mythbusters checking it out and confirming it). Albeit putting the reaction into the camp of ‘things that science has yet to explain’.
For shame! Red and blue??? Minus ten nerd points for you.
https://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Tiamat_(D%26D)?file=Tiamat.jpg
In D&D, red=fire, blue=lightning, green=poison, black=acid, white=cold.
Ha! You are BOTH fools!
That wasn’t Tiamat in that episode! That was Venger’s custom made monster, Demodragon! Which only had two heads, red and blue, for shooting fire and ice!
No one appreciates the classics anymore.
The other door? Oh boy, Sydney might be right about the Warehouse 13/Friday the 13 The Series shit going on. In other news, Cthillia has another power, which still counts as having the look of death. Cant wait when she betrays them all, I presume, to get a magical item for Deus.
…Deus must have had a very good reason to break up his strike team- or he just paid some supermercs for that one operation+ kept/previosly imployed Val as his bodyguard(way back whed Deus did the tv interview, it was never timelined when the takeover happened aka before or after the semi-fling w/Max). You may be on to something…
What rich person WOULDN’T want to get their hands on some cool artifacts of ultimate power? Also, the whole thing with Vehemence seemed more like an accident rather than on purpose, but ya the strike team may appear a lot, which might hint at a big scheme in the future.
…Considering Deus’ Trophy wall+ possibly giving Val an edge(we don’t really know what Val can do combat/powers wise)…
I bet backstab is one of them.
Huh. Cthillia is a she? o_ò
And for once, we have an author that does not include boobs on a non-mammalian female life form. Kudos. Which, however, does make it more difficult to invoke rule 34 for these characters.
Which is exactly why it must be done.
What must be done? The rule 34, or the lack of boobs on non-mammalian females? Note that the lack of boobs does not prevent rule 34. Sadly, rule 34 makes no exceptions.
She might just have very small ones. Assuming of course she started as a human before her powers were discovered.
Pretty sure it’s come up before.
“That’s what she said.” (see rule 34)
… vault was built before movies and TVs and even adventure novels. They weren’t saturated with all the tropes yet.
Everything we “know” about death traps is about the crappy ones that adventurers to survived to tell their yarns about in exchange for mead and wenches.
That kind of reminds me of the old ‘dolphins push drowning swimmers to shore’ claim. Maybe. But it could be just ‘dolphins push swimmers’. The ones randomly pushed towards shore get to tell their story. The ones pushed away from shore don’t.
Dolphins also like to ‘hump’ hyu-mons (who said bestiality only went one way?) and the swimmers who survived just happened to be facing the shore
Just me, or does the ice/fire laser apparatus also seem to be powered by vials of blood? I suspect if so it works similarly to her constructs and the device is mimicking powers present in the blood via her own special voodoo.
Not just you, whether it actually is blood or simply a red liquid of some other kind is something we may never know
Blood seems very likely though. Enough that I am willing to run with it.
Nicely spotted and deduced by the way Tarne.
Nobody noticed/mentioned yet that Cthillia is missing from the Who’s who?
Why doesn’t Cthillia have a who’s who box? She has a speaking line.
And with that optic blast power, my guess is that her full name is Cthillia Cthummers.
Cthute.
Cueen Cthute.
Was Cthillia’s gender previously noted, or was that all just dropped today with the dry cleaners comment at the bottom of the comic?
I think it was mentioned before.
Yup, and also discussion if she really was the one we saw previously in Africa
You know, the sheer amount of blood sort of makes it so that most dry cleaners wouldn’t ask anyways. I figure, it’s gone from ‘Suspicious’ amounts all the way around to non-suspicious again.
I mean, think about it. Having just little dots on your clothes… okay, maybe someone got a papercut. Having a significant streak of blood… who exactly was injured, again? Having more than 1/3 of your clothing covered, you probably murdured someone/something. But when your entire ensemble is drenched, that’s something that could only happen when you’re dealing with Industrial quantities of blood- like a slaughterhouse or bloodbank, and there was a leak (or you fell into one of the giant blood vats). Non-suspicious in terms of murder.
Ice laser noise? Wouldn’t that just be a regular laser noise?
Ice laser sounds more cracking. Like ice.
And ice lasers give off a faint smell of vanilla.
Really? Mine smells like butter pecan. I may need to realign the matrix again.
Vanilla?
Badum-tish
Baby.
Cthillia’s a girl? Sweet. How’d I miss that?
It’s irrelevant. So why would it be advertised?
I dunno once a month she will be more vulnerable to Sciona’s magic.
Well, assuming human-like biology under her reptilian exterior, anyhow.
Failing that, she must be very lonely as a ‘one of a kind’ and not being compatible with other people on the planet. That probably impacts on her past and thereby her present and future behaviour.
By not paying attention to the comic or the comments?
Heating and quenching (quickly cooling) steel does increase its surface hardness. It also makes it brittle. The harder, the more brittle. Really hard steel will shatter like glass!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78OOaJEyS98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CjKJ9v63Jk
And diamonds shatter like diamonds but no, everyone thinks diamonds are hard and therefore unbreakable.
I blame today’s modern school systems and teachers that somehow avoided science and math in grade-school / high-school.
Not everyone. Some of us have heard of diamond cutting. The key difference being that it is a lot harder to cut a diamond, than it it glass. You can break glass bare handed or just by dropping it. Whereas you need a very hard and sharp tool, given a strong blow, at a precise angle, to do the same with diamond.
The thing with hardening through heat treatment is that it tends to make things brittle – and not all metals harden that way. You’re fine using a cycle of cooling & heating as a way to get through the door, IMO.
Gee, it sure is a shame that the same metal wasn’t used in the construction of the weapons turrets which only required a single type of attack to eliminate…
Wyrmil mentions that an explosion could take the thing out in 1 go, not giving it a chance to regenerate.
And an explosion is what took out the turrets.
+1
Funny, explosives were also supposed to open up the door “in one go.” Seems like we have an explosive discrepancy here.
Not at all. The turret-destroying explosion occurred prior to Sciona and co entering the vault, so the squishy members were not at risk. Other than Cooter.
Plus the scale of explosives needed would be vastly different. Those turrets clearly could not have had very thick walls. Whereas the vault doors are many feet thick. So it would probably require transporting in an elephant-sized bomb to be able to penetrate that.
At which point you get the problem that Sciona’s blood portal looked to only be big enough for a human-sized individual to squeeze through it.
Plus even though Sicona does not mention it herself, we should not forget that they are underwater, deep enough that the pressure is about 100 atmospheres. An explosion that vast would risk rupturing the walls and/or disrupting the magic which counters the pressure.
There are limits to the list of problems which can be solved by making bigger explosions.
You can see how thick that door is. You’d need a shaped charge to get through the door, not the general explosion that was used to take out all the turrets.
And even if shaped it’d still need to be huge. Big enough to liquefy all their organs, as per Sciona’s remark.
“Just use explosives then. Do it all in one go.”
The turrets were either all “done in one go” or they were not. The sub-vault doors all managed to withstand that explosion, but Wyrm says they can’t.
Making excuses such as “You can see how thick that door is” doesn’t change what was said or what happened. We have an explosive discrepancy. Why not another strand of Cooter-cordite to the door you want to open? After all, clearly the turret-destroying Cooter-cordite was able to be targeted very precisely. So why not also the door they want to open, which Wyrm says an explosive would do, and Sciona is obviously not contradicting him in any way but is just saying why it isn’t a good idea now that they are in the vault which ignores the question of why it wasn’t simply done before they ever entered the vault, when there was already an explosives delivery system in place with perfect aim and able to strike a plethora of targets simultaneously.
Repeating a failed argument does not make it better or any more likely to work. An explosive only capable of penetrating one inch of strong metal will not be able to break through many feet of the same material.
A shaped charge can improve the penetrative capability, but not turning one inch penetration into many feet. Besides which it already was a carefully targeted explosion, so even with that ability the most it could penetrate was one inch.
And you cannot just blow off one inch and then try again for the next inch, as it will repair itself. Whereas the turrets had been destroyed by that amount of explosives so could not repair themselves.
Plus I already pointed out why there is a limit on how big an explosion you can make in an underwater vault, before rupturing it. Your route would require that Sciona also find some way to counter 100 atmospheres of water rushing in.
And even if you give her magical pressure resistant suits, have you considered the difficulty of trying to walk through a portal with one atmosphere air on one side and 100 atmospheres of water on the other? Even Stalwart might have difficulty with that feat!
That argument applies equally to your failure to recognize the discrepancy. It’s interesting how that works, isn’t it?
We have panels of comics with text from the characters backing up the facts of the matter. But you’re just a fanboy who refuses to see an error even when it hits you in the face.
You fail to understand logic. You are still in error, quoting my words back to me would only work if I were in error, I am not. Allow me to spell it out for you.
Wyrmyl: “Just use explosives. Do it all in one go.” Does NOT equate to “the amount of explosives used previously is sufficient to destroy this door.”
Sciona: “You may survive that but I like my organs non-liquefied.” DOES stipulate that the amount of explosives necessary to open the door would NOT be safe.
Oberon: “Gee, it sure is a shame that the same metal wasn’t used in the construction of the weapons turrets which only required a single type of attack to eliminate…”
This is stating WITH CERTAINTY that the same kind of metal was NOT used. This is NOT a logical certainty. You are in error. It may OR MAY NOT have been used.
Whilst an inferior metal would have resulted in the destruction of the turrets, the same result COULD also have occurred with a lesser amount of this superior metal.
All it requires is that the explosion was sufficient to destroy the turrets with the one blast. Then the regeneration Sciona mentions in panel 2 would NOT occur, even if it was made of the regenerating metal.
This does not contradict the comic. Your statement does.
The fact that the door is vastly thicker, than the walls of the turrets could possibly be, not only makes the comic’s continuity plausible it is highly credible. It would require a far far stronger explosion to penetrate the former than the latter. Easily giving scope that the turrets could be destroyed safely whilst the doors could not (for ALL reasons, both stated and unstated in the comic).
It is relevant because people are present now, or had that slipped your notice? As the author noted in his blog they are trapped here until they can open another portal. Which will take some time.
And those ‘perfectly targeted explosives’ left bits of Cooter splattered all over the chamber. So even areas other than the target are exposed to risks, despite your claim.
And that is with the smaller amount required for smaller targets. You are still failing to factor in the need for vastly more explosives to get through such a massive door. You are blatantly ignoring Sciona’s statement that such would liquisfy her organs.
As per your usual form, sadly, resorting to insults when your arguments fail does not advance your cause.
You claim this, but Wyrm tells you you are wrong. Do you think he is lying? Do you think you know better than he and Sciona how the vault works? If you don’t (and you shouldn’t), then stop inventing crap and use the comic itself to try to support your position.
Yes, you already pointed out that you like to invent things and pretend that they are canon. The irony is strong here, but I’m pretty sure you’ll fail to recognize it. Allow me to assist you: Repeating a failed argument does not make it better or any more likely to work.
If Sciona’s response to Wyrm’s suggestion of explosives wasn’t “We’d blow the whole vault and let the ocean in” then why do you think it’s fine for you to just pull shit out of your ass and then repeat it as if that makes it somehow more valid? Sciona’s response was an objection based only on being in the vault with the explosion which Wyrm suggests would solve their problem faster. Which supports the fact that it was a reasonable solution to opening up the sub-vault faster than using the heat/cold cutter. And I point out, based not on pulling shit out of my ass but based on what we’ve seen in the comic, that they’ve already had perfectly targeted explosions capable of blowing through regenerative vault-stuff in the vault that didn’t require them to be present. So yeah, we have an explosive discrepancy here.
White knight the author all you like, it doesn’t change the facts, and it doesn’t make your inventions and speculations anything other than the ass-pulls that they are.
Wyrmil does not say that. He stipulates “Do it all in one go”. You are wrong on this point too.
I am basing my comments on both his and Sciona’s dialogue. To whit:
Doing one explosion after another would be repeating the nature of the attack, therefore it would be regenerated and would be a pointless attempt. This is something Wormil recognises by saying “do it in one go”.
As I have shown in my previous post I have not invented anything. The particular point you quote though I made no claim of being cannon. That is simply a real world statement of logic.
Note that I do not stipulate that the explosion necessary to blow the door open would also be sufficient to rupture the vault and let in the ocean. However it is a risk. One that you are ignoring, yet one which Sciona would have to consider. It is a risk that is not necessary to take however, as she has the hot & cold cutter.
Points like this I presented it as a supplementary to the core argument, for interests sake. Whilst I know that it gives you something to argue over, when you have a bee in your bonnet, I am happy to do so to keep my comments more entertaining.
Indeed, However it would still result in Sciona’s organs being liquefied, whist Wyrmil may be able to survive that. Whilst Sciona was clearly addressing the explosion primarily, her statement does not preclude the pressure risk. Being a clever individual it is in fact plausible that she was covering the range of risks with her reply.
So I was just speculating within the scope of the comic, even for that option. There is no need to be offensive over me doing that.
Fanpuppy please!
*wags tail ecstatically*
By the way, in anticipation of your next complaint…
There is a limit. This is fact. Whilst lower intensity explosions will not be enough to rupture the vault, beyond the limit it will. Where the limit is has not been stated in the comic. However the risk is present. Should the limit be exceeded then Sciona will be at risk of her organs being liquisfied.
Whilst the door-destroying explosion may not be sufficient to rupture the vault, equally it may be. This is something that Sciona would have to be wary of, and make certain that it was safe, before attempting. If she gets her calculations wrong it would result in her organs being liquisfied. Exactly the same result as with being exposed to the explosion.
Wyrmil however has given this no consideration. Therefore citing his opinion on the matter is irrelevant. Only Sciona’s conclusion that it is not safe is important.
This is speculative. Sciona is the explosives expert. Clearly proven by her prior acts. Wyrmil may or may not be, but he has been told by the expert that he is not considering the consequences. Something which a competent expert should do as a matter of routine. Giving us a pointer that he is either incompetent or not an expert.
Sciona has given Wyrmil one reason why his idea will not work. This does not mean that he is also wrong on other aspects too. For instance they are lacking another person to use as an explosive. And as I have stated previously that may not be sufficient even if there was one present. The door is many times thicker. Logic dictates this would require greater explosives than were used previously. Significantly greater.
Correct. They were not present previously. But they then had to come in fast, to stop the ceiling from collapsing. So they are present now. A point which the author even elaborates upon in his blog above:
Your point is that the explosives will be quicker. Well having to repeat their ceremony would entail a delay. We do not know how long that will be, but it did not seem like a quick one, when we saw the preparations for it before. At the very least there would be pentagram inscribing and chanting.
But lets run with it. They bring in a football team’s worth of sacrifices (or a white elephant). Do the ritual to open the return portal. Exit. Set off the explosion.
Have you considered that this will be in close proximity to the jacks? So you are proposing that the explosion will be precise enough to punch through several feet worth of super-tech-metal, yet the jacks standing next to them will be completely unharmed and have no chance of being knocked out of place?
Seems unlikely to me. But the sage Wyrmil did not list that as being a problem, so clearly I should not mention this, as it has not got a line of dialogue in the comic. So I shall just have to shut my eyes, and pretend that is not a problem.
Anyhow, time has passed, explosion takes place. The jacks survive. Now they have to start another ceremony to open a gate back into the vault. This seems like quite a lengthy process to me.
Eventually they get back in.
Or Sciona can use her fire and ice cutter. I think she has made a good call.
Please ignore my opening line above. It was tactless.
You also have to balance the amount of explosives.
Too little and you just scratch it.
Too much and you risk destroying the vault contents and having Michael Cane say “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”
Same reason people ask why planes aren’t made out of the same material the not-blackboxes are made out of: because they are idiots
I heard it as “because the streets are not wide enough”. (Airplane made from the same material as “black” box would be too heavy to fly.)
Planes travel by air not street.
*scratches head in mock confusion*
In addition to the density issue, their functions are different. One is designed to fly, so needs an aerodynamic shape whilst the other is optimised to resist damage. Boxes do not fly very well.
Mock sigh. The weight of a plane made of the same material as the security recorder aka black box would be so great the craft would not be able to leave the ground even if aerodynamic design is used (box shape is part of the resilience).
Yea, hkmaly did convey that point OK, I was just elaborating on another. To put it a different way though, even if you did make an aeroplane out of the black box material,* it would not survive a crash unscathed. Planes have wings, ailerons and other moving bits. All of these are exposed and vulnerable due to their function. They need to be flat and thin.
Which means in a crash they will buckle and rupture, even with the superior material. The black box survives because it is cushioned inside the plane, which absorbs a lot of the energy of a crash, like the crumple zone of a car. So it is never subject to the full force of the crash, in the first place. Then comes a nice rugged shape, without any exposed bits or weak points.
So, given that, to save weight, fuel is stored in wings (allowing them to serve a dual purpose), when the wings break, all the fuel comes out. Given the hot engines, in close proximity, this would very likely result in a fireball.
What would likely survive intact though is the passenger compartment. Unfortunately passengers are not made of unbreakable stuff and still have to disapate the energy of a crash. So unless the pilot had managed a controlled-crash, at low speeds, they would probably still all die inside the unbroken cabin.
And the low-speed crash survivors would still have to cope with being engulfed in a fireball.
But a black-box plane, equipped with UFO engines, would provide improved survival chances over a regular plane, even so. Especially if it has engines with a non-flammable power source (although anti-matter may pose a risk).
* A black-box-material plane could fly, by the way, if you had access to ultra tech engines that could lift the weight. That is how we could transition from fabric aircraft of the WWI era to the metal ones since. You just increase the power of the propulsion until it is enough to sustain aerodynamic flight.
I was hoping the mock sigh would convey that I was continuing in a joking manner the elaboration of the prior responces and try my wing at mansplanning.
The black box is not indestructible. Often parts of the recording is damaged due to damage to the black box. The forces that rip apart a plane are not going to stop at a flight recorder.
Besides, get an indestructible plane and crash it heavily at the ground and you will need a mop to clean out the liquefied passengers.
Ahh, I see you had already mentioned one of my points. I should have scrolled down further.
Did you just pronounce that ‘liquisfied’?
If whatshisname can survive an explosion to destroy THAT door I’m seriously scared of what put the scar on his face…
Being able to survive an explosion is not the same thing as a cut
Yeah I can chisel a gouge in a cement or steel wall that could survive an explosion.
Also “survive” isn’t “survive unscathed”.
Wyrmil survived the attack though. Which means that there is a good chance that whoever did the damage is now pushing up the daisies. So I think Wyrmil remains the one to be wary of, as the known quantity in the equation.
So the Vault Raiders seem to be:
Sciona:
Chassis: Vampire head on troll body,
Powers: magic user,
Status: Criminal, wanted by the Council
Cthillia:
Chassis: Unknown, constantly shrouded in concealing clothing
Powers: Causes heart attacks by staring at people, also shoots eye lasers
Status: Works for Deus
Wyrmil:
Chassis: Nonhuman creature
Powers: Unknown
Status: Unknown ( I forget, was he in the Council? I don’t think so…)
Blonde Female Vampire (Gertrude/Brunhilde…something like that.)
Chassis: Vampire
Powers: Vampire
Status: On the Council
On behalf of a certain poster on this forum who appears to have slept in today I would like to say “Not a troll! Grumble Grumble.” (did I get the accent right?)
Not a vampire either (and was here before you, look way up near the top)
And not just a generic magic user, she’s a specialised blood mage
Lia worked for Deus (if it really is the same one)
The vamp is Gunnhilde (or something similar, definitely ‘Gunn’ in there rather than ‘Gert’ or ‘Brun’)
I can’t remember if Cthillia was mentioned by name in Deus’ story, but it was said she is (possibly) the only one of her kind so at the moment all things point to them being the same one.
Working with Deus was most likely a paid job, her working with Sciona is either another job or out of her own interests (or part of a collaboration between Sciona and Deus).
I seem to recall mention of Deus using mercenaries, so that would imply Cthillia is indeed up for hire by any super villain with the resources and connections to acquire her services.
If my memory is spotty on that point though, then it implies she is on loan from Deus (or has been magically subverted). The latter option would explain why senior diplomats from the vampire faction would be consorting with a known enemy of the Council. If that ever gets found out they will be fugitives for unlife. Probably a very short time, despite their ‘immortality’.
Why are they using their real names and showing their faces? Don’t you always have to assume you’re being recorded and call each other Mr White, Ms Black, Msgr Purple etc and leave the masks on? I mean I get trying to keep it obvious to the reader who is who… still it struck me as an operation security aspect it seems unlikely they would have neglected.
-S
Most likely they have very good intel on the construction of the vault, council members on the team, and know that there are no active recording devices in the vault or they know where they are and can retrieve/destroy them before leaving or they just don’t care.
+1
It helps when you know every feature of the vault. Especially given that it has not been accessed in 30 years, so cannot have any surprise upgrades that are not in the plans.
actually, cracks in concrete are more usually caused by water getting in any and all gaps, then freezing, thus forcing apart the concrete. it’s why we’re known for having terrible roads in michigan, our weather is in flux so much that we could actually dip below freezing, then rise above freezing potentially every day in winter, and in some cases, multiple times a day.
Also concrete shrinks when curing. And it cures pretty much forever.
Concrete cures piles. Check.
Concretia is a healer! That’s why she was after peggy, regrow the lost leg.
I am not sure a concrete leg would be a step up, from her current prosthetics. ;-)
That shot has insane accuracy in order to not wedge that plate. I’m talking accurate to within 0.01 inches lol
Ahh, but it is only a saucer, so there is more play than you think.
I dunno if you can call something that thick a saucer lol. More like a 45″ slug.
*gets escargot sauce out*
Didn’t mean that type of slug, but with all the artifacts nearly that could be a possibility lol
And here she just ‘eyeballed’ it!
Here, have a rim shot. :-P
I like creating seemingly unconquerable things then go about conquering them. This scenario seems like such a scenario.
Yea, as a games master, I had a knack for posing challenges that seemed impossible, yet were within the scope of the player’s abilities. There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth before they pulled themselves together and tried to overcome the implausibly difficult task. Which would make their ultimate victory that much more enjoyable.
Or give them a heroic death, of course.
I remember that episode of Dungeons and Dragons, loved that show! It wasnt Tiamat though, it was a hybrid creation of Venger called Demodragon. It only had two heads, one red on blue, wich fired fire and ice respectively. If you like the show you can get the entire thing on DVD included a radio play version of the last episode which was never animated. Its nice to see how the series would have wrapped up.
Clearly, the metal is TeddyBearium.
Geeze, do your homework!
:-D
Actually heating/cooling can cause things to shatter, even steel. Blacksmiths have trained to not exceed tolerances, and if for some reason they screw up, they have scrap metal as a result.
So that hot/cold laser rig, would actually cause a lot of damage to the integrity of the metal, so don’t discount it’s effectiveness. Now as to how you make a cold laser… it’s a super hero and supernatural universe, so those questions are kind of moot for the reader, but of interest to the engineers in that universe. :D
I hate to be a nitpicker, but actually it wasn’t Tiamat that used alternating fire/ice to breach the wall, it was Demodragon, a dragon/demon hybrid created by Venger to break into a city (I forget the name and don’t feel like digging out my Dungeons & Dragons dvds to find it. Anyway the city had a magical plant called dragonbane that was toxic to dragons. Venger wanted it to use against Tiamat and hoped the city would either use it against Demodragon after which he could recover it, or that Demodragon would breach the city walls allowing Venger’s forces to gain entry and acquire it.
Wow, I’ve got way too much useless trivia stored in my head.
You create it this way.
Oops. Guess I miss-clicked. This was meant to be in reply to Robert Rosenthal‘s post.
So who is hotter, Sciona or Cthillia?
*Tosses in a lit match* Let’s see…