Grrl Power #653 – Fly me to the moon… eventually
You know all those diagrams of the Earth and the moon where the moon is about 6 Earth diameters from the Earth? Yeah, those are wrong. As adults we all basically understand this, but the image is hard to get out of our heads. The distance is more like 30 Earth diameters. Mach 4 is pretty impressive on Earth, but it doesn’t count for much when you’re talking about lunar distances.
The Alari homeworld has a similar lunar situation to Earth, so Sydney’s going to have to come up with another plan.
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Teleport?
Indeed – how fast does the Lightbee move?
Although, that would mean dropping the flight orb.
Dropping flight orb would be fine if she can get herself into an orbit first. AKA not falling down to earth.
So plan should be:
– Get into an orbit,
– Drop flight mode as it isn;t needed then,
– Teleport to surface of their moon
– Make new plans from there.
All is assuming lightbee has much faster speed (aka speed of light levels)
That doesn’t work. She doesn’t get fast enough to reach orbit.
that mach 4 may be the result of atmospheric resistance. But in space it’s a new game – acceleration wins cuz it’s only opposed by gravity, not momentum-eating air.
…Which is a good thing for Sydney that her FOrb is a gravity-based power, yes?
;)
Yep! Im willing to bet that the fly orb might be able to do other gravitokinetic things as well with the proper pips filled in :) We know it has its own localized gravity already because of how sydneys hair stays in place no matter her spatial orientation :)
It might just be that the Orbs uses Aristotelian movement, as opposed to Newtonian.
Aristotle was wrong. He believed that there was no motion outside of ‘the four causes’ – material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. It was pretty much the reasoning behind the now debunked theory of the unmoved mover (ie, ether wind).
The unmoved mover was utterly disproved in 1904 with the Ether Wind experiment (by Rayleigh and Brace), although there were several other attempts to prove the existence of the aether wind as early as 1887 by Michelson and Morley.
Space does not have a fluid that is what causes all motion though. And even if it did, it would have nothing to do with Sydney’s method of flight. Sydney’s flight is based on some sort of localized gravity that the orb produces – which is why her hair doesn’t move around even when upside down or sideways, and why she doesn’t experience G-forces when accelerating.
Could she fly to a Lagrangian point, or would that not be helpful?
On the other hand, all she needs is to have enough time-to-re-entry that she can light-bee somewhere more helpful… it only has to be good enough, not perfect.
she could get somewhat stationary there. But the L-Points are technically not orbit. From where she is she would already fall for minutes. But I don’t thing light-bee is any faster then her.
Only problem is that the closest, L1, is about 85% of the way to the moon, give or take a few %
Well Earth’s is. We don’t know the configuration of this planet. Either way unless she has a gravity mapper on one of her orbs I don’t think she could find it.
If the moon is orbiting the planet, the L1 is closer to the moon than the planet. Unless something very weird like physics and basic math going “F*** this, I’m out”, anyway. Generally, if you can move between two planetary bodies in less than a day at mach 4, you don’t want to be doing so as much as you want to be getting out of the way of the impending collision.
I was thinking there might be more moons but I missed Dave’s undercomic comment about the system configuration.
Mach 4 is 1.372 km/s so she could orbit at a distance of 203,000 km.
She could get there in around 43 hours.
That’s assuming mach 4 is he top speed in space too. If mach 4 is just her top speed in atmosphere then without atmospheric drag she could accelerate indefinitely (well for half the distance) and cut that down quite a bit.
But what if the flight orb’s speed is dependent on a function of the speed of sound? How does it calculate the speed of sound in a vacuum?
When we say Mach – ie, the speed of sound, we are basing it on the speed of sound within air (based on an average of humidity, temperature, pressure and frequency). We’re just using mach most likely as a way to gauge the actual speed – it doesn’t mean her speed is variable. Mach 1 is roughly 768 mph (actually a teensy bit less but I’m rounding up for math reasons).
When Maxima said that she noticed Sydney’s TOP speed was topping out around Mach 4, it means her top speed is roughly 3,069 mph (or 1372 meters per second)
It doesn’t mean it’s 1372 meters per second per second acceleration. It means her TOP possible speed is 1372 meters per second. Because we’ve seen that her acceleration is neither instant nor unlimited.
Not sure why people keep saying it is when not only is it not shown in the comic, but it’s been shown the opposite in the comic when Maxima was testing Sydney’s ability to accelerate.
Technically, orbiting means that you’re falling, you just miss the ground because you’re going too fast.
Just remember that the direction you are falling in is quite important. Straight down tends to limit the number of orbits, quite drastically!
Impressively though, if done at an orbital-like speed.
Indeed – how fast does the Lightbee move?
Although that would mean dropping the flight orb. Still, shaving time off the 78 hours would be good.
The greater risk would be that she teleports, but the bubble of oxygen in the shield doesn’t.
Pop backwards is also pop!
But WOW upside down is MOM.
and a racecar goes just as fast forwards as backwards
Plus you drive on parkways and park on driveways.
And you have fingertips but do not tipfinger, and you do not have toetips but do tiptoe.
Plus your nose can run and feet can smell.
Dude, you’re upside down
A bird can fly
But a fly cannot bird.
Also, time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
And we send cargo on ships, and shipments by car.
And elevators can descend.
¿uɐıןɐɹʇsnɐ buıdʎʇ ʇɹɐʇs pןnoɥs ǝʍ sʞuıɥʇ oɥʍ ǝɹǝɥ ǝuo ʎןuo ǝɥʇ ı ɯɐ
And you can Tune a piano, but you can’t tune a fish. (but the album is still great)
Less of a risk than you might think. Let’s go with the Wikipedia article, 9-12 seconds until unconsciousness is plenty of time to grab the air orb. Or, you know, she just drops the shield orb instead, and hopes that there’s no micrometeorites in the few seconds it matters.
Well there is the risk of hypoxia if not using the shield (or theoretically the life support orb).
I envision Sidney teleporting into the orbit of earth, but failing to account for the difference in velocity, going *splat*.
The lightbee doesn’t work that way. She has to scout-and-peek through her mirage-projection before teleporting there. I doubt she’d (purposefully) teleport if her destination was whizzing past her at several hundred miles per hour.
some numbers mach 4 for a 1meter sphere (shield) would mean a output of 256Kn according to wolfram alpha.
Absent of drag assuming sydney weighs less then 50 kilos would give an acceleration of 5120 m / s2
so to the moon at 384400Km would take about 6.5 minutes, however you’d then arrive at a huge speed.
To decelerate you need to accelerate for about 4 and a half minutes and then turn about and decelerate that same amount of time.
Yes, unless there’s a speed governor on that thing, acceleration in empty space just builds up. Nobody seems to have noticed yet that there has to be some kind of acceleration cancellation too, she speeds up and slows down way too quickly to not pass out from the gees she’d be pulling. She’d certainly be passing out in a sharp turn.
Hell yeah, do you think you could handle 500G acceleration? That seems to be the level of power we’re talking about here. no wonder maxima told her to stay away from airports…
Barring some absolute speed limiting factor(speed governor), sure, I mean it’s all based on assumptions, weight, size of the shield orb etc, but all conservatively, she might be quite a bit quicker.
Her flight orb is clearly gravity based, so she doesn’t feel her acceleration. Given this fact she could, indeed handle 500G acceleration, or 1000G acceleration, or 10,000,000,000G acceleration, since if gravity is the only thing acting on a system, no forces are felt within the system.
Odd, the previous comment didn’t go through.
Since her flight orb is gravity based, she could handle ANY acceleration, without limit, since if gravity is the only thing affecting a system, no forces are felt within the system. This means the flight orb has no need of an “inertial Damper” since its gravity based movement renders inertia moot. There is no seat “pushing” her to high speeds, just gravity based acceleration.
To be fair the flight orb seems to operate with antigravity rather than with propulsion, so she would probably not feel the acceleration
The flight orb (and/or the author’s reluctance to get into the math/realism weeds) probably has a lot of magical/technological/whatever inertial damping capabilities. Because even at ‘just’ Mach 4 Sydney could easily knock herself out just by turning. Note that Sydney isn’t wearing any kind of flight suit, and modern ones include devices that compress the pilots to try to keep their blood from exiting their brains during sharp maneuvers. Literally squeezes them to help them remain conscious during high-g turns.
Further supporting this inertial system is the fact that she apparently isn’t gaining any speed outside of the atmosphere even in the absence of air resistance. So in response to your prior post: She can’t just do a “full burn” half the way to that moon, then reverse and do a “full burn” the other half of the way, in order to avoid arriving at incredible velocities. She just gets to go from 0 to Mach 4 and then from Mach 4 to 0, and that’s it. No further acceleration is possible, barring more XP gains of course. She just can’t arrive at “incredible velocities,” not unless you consider Mach 4 to be an incredible velocity.
You’re assuming the orb obeys conservation of momentum.
As it hasn’t been shown ejecting reaction mass now that it’s been tested outside an atmosphere, it probably doesn’t.
Nope, I’m only assuming the flight orb conveys a movement force on her and presumably people/air in her shield bubble, if it did not she would be have gone splat, or stopped flying/keeping up with maxima in extreme pain that first time.
How it applies that force, be it gravity or some kind of dampening field as in some sci-fi I don’t care, the laws of Newtonian physics (we’re not getting relativistic just jet (0.005C)) mean this has to be approximately right, barring a serious case of comic book physics or some kind of limiter.
There doesn’t need to be any acceleration cancellation if flight orb works on her entire body, accelerating every single cell in her body at the same rate. Astronauts, pilots, and racecar drivers have to worry about G forces because their craft is pushing only on the outside of their body, the insides of their bodies and their blood have to depend on structure to also accelerate in the appropriate direction. A force that acts on every cell in the body at the same rate would effectively render G forces moot. That’s why astronauts in space or passengers in the Vomit Comet don’t feel any forces even though they are accelerating at 10m/s/s towards the Earth.
You mean every particle, not every cell.
How would a speed governor work? Once you’re in open space, the question “relative to what?” becomes increasingly important when it comes to measuring speed. Acceleration is universal, but speed is just a matter of opinion.
In a dense medium (like air), it makes sense to use speed relative to that medium (really strong winds would then represent a change of a few percent in Sidney’s maximum groundspeed – the highest measured speed of the polar jet stream is under 250mph – or a bit over 8% of Mach 4 (at ground level))
Near Earth, the interplanetary medium is dominated by the solar wind, moving at around 300 km/s or 670,000 mph, or more than 200 times Sydney’s notional maximum speed – so if her top speed is ~3000 mph, relative to the local medium, then, the moment she emerges from the planet’s wake, she’s going to be swept away from the planet much faster than she can hope to return as the flight orb matches speed with the stellar wind…
Though sydney is correct mach 4 means nothing in space as the absence of oxygen/gas means the absence of sound and thus also any speed limit based upon sound.
I’m glad someone else on here understands what Mach numbers are.
The flight orb probably translates “Mach 4” from Sydney’s limited understanding of the term to the actual velocity that it represents in the only environment Sydney’s familiar with. If Sydney ever realised that subconsciously she’s limiting her speed due to her experiences, she’d be able to travel much more rapidly.
It’s like news reports of subsonic aircraft making transatlantic trips at supersonic speeds, when they don’t actually understand the difference between groundspeed, windspeed and airspeed.
Yeah if you get in a jet stream your air speed can be quite a bit lower than your ground speed.
This is why I hit the comment section. Looking to see if anyone else had noticed that.
Is her orb top speed based on speed of sound in the particular medium or does it work at a fixed m/s value?
If it’s fixed then it’s a heck of a coincidence that the speed levels match the mach points of Earth’s atmosphere.
Or maybe non considering they could also breath Alari’s atmosphere so maybe that’s the common type.
Time progressing in comics is hard to gauge, if she’s just flying/flailing about for a half a minute to a minute then the drawn distance would better match up with these numbers then the absolute speed of mach 4.
So I feel like this bit of napkin math stands.
If this was a movie we could go frame by frame and get average sizes of the planets, assume they were earth/moon sized and extrapolate…
Well, hope she brought snacks, and perhaps she should go back and see if she can not wise a spaceship.
I’m guessing you mean “Hotwire”.
I blame those annoying spill chuckers that try to Otto connect what you write.
The vast reaches of outer space – “normal” travel speeds will get you almost nowhere. Either she discovers faster Travel or she will have to turn back and maybe face the scree guy. Looks like other destroyed cities on the surface. Maybe go there first and look for shelter and useful stuff like food and water.
“Almost nowhere” = just enough to screw up high precision inertial navigation, but not enough to go anywhere.
Except Sydney has an infinite accelerator. Mach 4 doesn’t get you far in space, but her orb is capable of keeping her *at* Mach 4 when you take into account pesky atmospheric things like ‘drag’ and ‘gravity’.
Space has neither, so her orb should be constantly accelerating her as if she was needing to maintain Mach 4 on Earth. She won’t get there immediately, but she will slowly accelerate to lightspeed. Of course, even light speed is massively too slow when you’re talking about interstellar distances, but it’s a start.
It actually has both… they’re just less. Orbits don’t work without gravity (the weightlessness seen on the space station is just everything going at the same speed – it’s only relative weighlessness; for something like escaping a solar system, you still need to overcome the gravity of the star – and the planet you started from), and while atoms are few and far between in deep space, they’re still there.
Exactly, she needs to orbit, then Hohmann transfer to the moon.
Going straight uo leads to massive gravity losses.
Was KSP released when this happened (still in flashback)?
Where are you getting that she has infinite acceleration? So farcall we know is her speed tops out at mach 4 or so. Not thet she can keep increasing her acceleration by mach 4. There has bern nothing in the comic about that yet. Mach 4 is her hard limit, not her acceleration. At least for now.
we know she can maintain mach 4 in atmosphere which means there is some serious acceleration going on just to counter the drag so unless the flight orb is automatically maintaining her speed (ill admit a automatic hard cap on atmospheric flight does make an amount of sense) sydney might be speeding up faster then she (or we) realize
of course it could be the case that the halo just tells the laws of physics to take a flying leap.
also iirc the mach 4 thing was only a guesstamate
“we know she can maintain mach 4 in atmosphere which means there is some serious acceleration going on just to counter the drag”
We actually saw what her acceleration was- it was not instantaneous at all, and she in fact has a meter on her orb which let her know when she was going to break each Mach level. And we know it TOPS OUT at Mach 4. There is absolutely nothing in the comic to make the assumption that she has infinite acceleration like some others have been trying to say in order to say that mach 4 can still mean the speed of light is within her reach. It isn’t any more than Voyager 1 is going to be going lightspeed just because it’s been travelling at 38,000mph, and it’s currently 11.7 billion miles away.after having travelled at that speed for the past 41 years. 38,000mph (waaaay above Mach 4) and after 41 years it still hasnt gone a single light year, which will take it roughly another 20,000 years. That’s for ONE light year, for something going almost 10 times faster than Sydney can go. For Sydney, it would take at least 200,000 years at mach 4 to go the distance of one light year, unless her fly orb’s other string of pips does something to exponentially increase her speed (which I wouldnt be surprised if it did do).
For people to say that someone travelling at Mach 4 in space can achieve light speed from that would mean we already would have, since most of our spacecrafts have to achieve WELL over Mach 4 to break free of the Earth’s gravity well (17,500mph). The only reason Sydney doesn’ t need to generate that type of speed to break free is because her flight is APPARENTLY not from thrust – it’s from localized gravity which renders her immune to stuff like inertia and outside gravitational pull in the first place.
We’re also not sure if there’s any drag to begin with – since we don’t know if the force field generates any friction against the air, although it doesn’t seem like it does from what we saw when she was flying at mach 4.
“unless the flight orb is automatically maintaining her speed”
In one of the close-ups of the orb while she’s flying on that page, you see that there is, in fact, a ‘gauge’ that Sydney sees to know how fast she’s going, roughly.
“also iirc the mach 4 thing was only a guesstamate”
Yes, but Maxima’s probably pretty well versed in being able to tell that sort of thing, given that the whole point of the test was to find out Sydney’s upper limits. Maxima’s been capable of flying at incredibly fast speeds for a long time now, and she’s probably been through quite a bit of testing herself. Not to mention they do both have monitors on them which could clock the speeds. :)
Hope that didnt sound too adversarial btw.
Also, since it’s apparently a localized gravitec effect, it’s possible her acceleration is actually reduced in space – so she’s going mach 4 now, but slowing down will take longer… Except somehow I doubt Dave would go there.
We don’t actually know that. It may be that the flight orb is a ‘movement’ orb instead of the equivalent of a thruster. The orb may simply top out (with its current points) being able to move her any direction she likes at 3,000 MPH in an inertia and gravity agnostic manner.
This is most like how the orb/shield combo behaves in the comic, and I was confused by people who thought it accelerates.
Yeah me too :) I thought DaveB wrote it pretty clearly that the Mach 4 was an uppermost limit while she has the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pips filled in on that string in the fly orb.
The problem with having a “movement” orb with a fixed speed, is speed relative to what? Within Earth’s atmosphere, the difference between “nearest large chunk of rock” and “local medium” is only up to ~250mph, and often much less – which is still ~8% of (ground level) Mach 4. Get into interplanetary space, and the solar wind around Earth-orbit is ~670,000 MPH or more than 200 times Sydney’s notional maximum speed, so it makes a big difference whether her fixed maximum speed is relative to Earth or to the local medium – and if it is relative to Earth, it also makes a big difference at what point the reference object changes – aside from anything else, if we say that Sydney’s at 800km above the ground (5 times the 160km altitude at which the sky is completely black) then she would be moving at around 500m/s to stay above a point on the equator – or a bit over a third of her notional maximum speed – just due to the planet’s rotation (assuming it’s highly Earth-like). Getting more than about 2 planetary radii from the surface would make the rotational velocity exceed her notional maximum speed…
What’s up with Panel 9?
It is basically the same view at panels 7-12 due to matters of scale. When travelling between solar system bodies (like a planet and an orbiting moon in the light-second scale distance), you have very little in the way of a local field of reference (except for a damaged Protoss Pylon in panels 1 and 2) and you aren’t travelling fast enough to notice the far-away body taking up more of your sky as your viewing angles increase. At this rate, Sydney should reach that moon in about 3-4 days, assuming it is about as far away from its planet as our moon is from Earth. So I guess that she is going only slightly slower than the Apollo missions.
If by ‘Panel 9’ you mean the middle panel in the bottom row (aka Panel 14), then that is showing just how far Sydney has come (and how small she really is compared to space)
So did Syddles just whip past an Alari orbital station ?
And how dare space not be impressed !?
That thing is the many miles high invader alien ship that showed up and beamed down the tripod with the face based light bullets.
I think he means the burning/destroyed crystal thing visible in panel 1 and 2.
That is in fact to what I was referring. B. Adams had a great explain that Sydly should know.
That’s the ground, where she just flew up from, as in the giant burning crater. Or another burning crater on the surface, there are a lot of them. Planet’s being spherical, as you go up the curve makes it look like that.
If you’re looking at panel 15, at highest magnification (on a tablet), it looks more like a nuke type cloud than a spaceship.
Also, considering the several smoking hot spots on the continents, this cloud should be from a recent explosion.
It’s the spaceship from here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2888
“Hey Grognak, I’m reviewing the anthropology briefs* on this ‘Earth’ that hazardous portal originated from, and they have face-based technology too! Nearly 2/3 of the entire population apparently spends much of its day reading or writing in something called a Face Book.”
“Perhaps they are a philosophical society of thinkers then, and this incident is merely an accident after all. Shall we try to establish relations with them instead of eliminating this blasphemous explorer?”
“Um… no, it’s not nearly as intellectual as that. Sadly, 80% of their global knowledge sharing platform appears to consist of light and sound recreations of small furry animals with pointy ears, falling off things or into containers. My real point is they have no FaceSkweens or other Face weapons, and therefore will be unable to resist their cleansing.”
*recently expanded from “Mostly Harmless”
“Plus this Face Book was apparently designed by a clearly artificial lifeform called the Zuckerberg. PrimitivecAI which doesnt pass as organic life but for some reason most Earthlings seem to think he is one of them despite how peculiar and clearly robotic the Zuckerberg’s mannerisms are.”
It looks like Alari design.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2880
Now is the unknown sphere a cargo hold or is it a space fold engine? Traveling without moving. :P
Both would involve space folding so it might make sense to have them in the same orb that way.
She is still moving in space just not much compared to the distances.
Hey Sydney, don’t feel down. You’re only marginally slower on getting to the moon than the Apollo missions were.
She is actually faster in getting to the moon then Apollo. Strait line earth moon at mach 4 takes ~78h. https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_11i_Timeline.htm Apollo 11 toke ~103h from start to moon surface.
Actually Apollo 11’s speed while escaping the atmosphere was 17,500 mph, which is significantly faster that Sydney’s Mach 4 (3072 mph). Even at Apollo 11’s slowest during the flight portion (5000 mph while approaching lunar orbit) is faster than Sydney’s Mach 4.
yes apollo is much faster. But it also flies a even longer way. The question was slower to get there. Not slower in actual speed. Sydney doesn’t have to do orbits, so she can go straight line.
Well, at least she can safely refill oxygen while in space, no gravity means no falling without flight.
Though I wonder if she’s a satellite herself now – Mach 4 is nowhere close to escape velocity, though I’m not sure you really need to achieve it and how it works, especially since she is “magically propelled”
there is plenty of gravity up there. For the appearance of no gravity in orbit, you have to go fast enough around the planet to even out the gravity with centripetal forces.
Also known as, “You are always falling toward the planet, but because you are travelling so fast horizontally that you keep missing.”
Insert hhgttg quote here
Best explanation of how an orbit works ever.
+1
Escape velocity only matters if you’re dealing with things like rockets, that can run out of thrust.
If you could go forever, without ever falling back down or reducing your momentum, you could walk to the moon. It’d just take a really, really, really goddamned long time.
Assuming a brisk walking pace of 5 MPH and never sleeps 5.707 years.
https://youtu.be/Fa0b2Kd2xhU at ca: (12:55) protip for Sydney.
Damn Syd learn some fucking patience.
You’ll get there sooner than you think.
Take the time to enjoy the …
stupifyingly amaze-balls,
LIFE-CHANGING view of space.
From orbit.
For the first time in her life.
Ever.
Definitely worth a 2 page splash panel, Dave B.
Maybe a Desktop resolution pic that a substantial portion of the readership would totally buy for a dollar
Too bad Syd hasn’t learned this nugget of wisdom from yesterday’s comments
RobK
July 27, 2018 at 6:07 pm | Reply
You can get to a significant amount of the speed of light, within a relatively short time if you can maintain constant acceleration. Even if the acceleration itself is very low.
The main problem for spaceships is bringing fuel, which Sydney doesn’t have to do (for propulsion).
When accelerating at 1G (and the human body can handle way more), you can get to the moon in 3 hours.
Not interstellar speeds, but within the same system, she can get everywhere FAST.
Is she actually accelerating or is she maintaining a constant speed vs the point of origin (or whatever).
If Sydney has a maximum velocity of Mach 4, she will never be able to reach the moon s she would never be able to reach escape velocity, which is around 7 miles per second or 25,000miles per hour; quite a bit faster than Mach 4. Maximum velocity means she cannot accelerate any further, so she’d just end up in orbit at some maximum altitude. For example, the International Space Station moves at about 17,000 lies per hour at around the 160 miles above earth range. She would need a source of continuous acceleration, at least to the point of reaching escape velocity, breaking free of the plnet’s Gravity well and then ‘coast’ u til she can decelerate to be caught by the moon’s gravity well.
Depends. Is she producing thrust, or being pulled along? Escape velocity is a mass/body needed thrust to push away against gravity. If the order is actually ‘pulling’ her at that speed, then it may not actually need escape velocity. It just pulls her out of the gravity well.
Another point to make is that the moon is in orbit around the planet, so is still in the gravity well of the planet. Sydney does not need to achieve full escape velocity to reach something still inside the well. Also, escape velocity is assuming you are not providing any additional thrust after leaving the surface of the planet, which is not the case for Halo. As an object moves away from the planet it loses kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy, and thus would slow down as she goes away for the planet’s core. Sydney is keeping about the same speed so she is replacing the kinetic energy somehow.
We dont actually know her top speed, we only know her low altitude top speed, we dont know if atmospheric conditions affect her speed, we dont know if gravity does…. If gravity does not affect her speed, then escape velocity is meaningless, if she can maintain Mach 4 she will leave the planet.
If you can maintain constant vertical velocity (normal stuff cant) then escape velocity is meaningless… Try not to apply too much logic or science to a “super” comic… the brains hurts very quickly…
This is correct for things bound by physics and the rocket equation.
The orbs aren’t.
The flight orb is capable of near-instant acceleration up to its maximum velocity. It will then maintain that velocity until dropped, whereupon physics will regain control. If Sydney is limited to Mach 4, then to get to the moon she simply needs to keep going towards it for about 3 days. Then she can release the orb, get captured by the moon’s gravity, and grab the orb again to slow down to safe relative speed. You don’t need escape velocity if you can just keep going up at a constant rate.
It’s an illustration of a fact that’s been bugging me for a while – the Orbs are clearly FAR more powerful than Sydney can access. The FOrb, for example – anything that can accelerate that quickly, and manipulate gravity like it does, should be able to accelerate to near-light speed in a matter of minutes, and clear the moon even faster. Sydney’s leveling tree isn’t a measurement of how powerful the Orbs are – it’s a measure of how much of their power she is ALLOWED to use. Her current Mach 4 speed limit is an IMPOSED limit, not a natural one. No matter how long she ‘accelerates’, she won’t be able to go faster.
The flight orb seems to work via some sort of anti-gravity effect (notice her hair isn’t being pulled down when she flies upside down in other pages). Since escape velocity is about the speed needed to escape a gravitational influence I’d say that any speed she wishes to go at is escape velocity for her. How long it takes to finally be free from the gravitational influence completely is another issue.
Unlimited fuel and continous thrust means escape velocity isn’t required to travel between the planet and the moon.
Just lots of time.
Mach 4 ~ 30 miles a second or so….less than 100 hours.
She was capable of reaching that speed at the ‘bottom’ of the gravity well, so the question now is do the orbs have any kind of delta-v. Because if they don’t then, provided she can accelerate at all, she can achieve escape velocity by just moving up the gravity well to where escape velocity is less.
That is not correct. She can’t reach orbit, for that she is to slow. But since she does generate more then 1G acceleration, with a top speed, she will get there eventually. the IIS could be a slower if it would have a engine to replace the centripetal force.
Actually, she can reach orbit just fine. Fly up to a high altitude e.g. GSO where the orbital velocity is less than her top speed.
Hmm. In what reference frame is her speed limit defined? What would happen if she tried to fly in a hypersonic aircraft? Or deep interplanetary space?
This is a really good question. As other folks have noted, if the Flightball can impart constant acceleration, Syd can get some pretty serious velocity if there’s no air resistance to act as a brake. So if that’s *not* happening, even when she seems to be givin’ ‘er all she’s got, the velocity cap sounds like it’s a safety feature built into the sphere that she doesn’t know how to disengage yet. Presumably, to make it difficult to engage engines while inside a planet’s gravity well that would do (say) lots of property damage.
There must be a way to turn off the safeties, because presumably whoever built these things didn’t just fly at Mach 4 for three days until they were at a safe distance from the planet’s surface before engaging FTL. But she doesn’t know how, or doesn’t have the ability yet. She’s likely due a skill point to spend, of course, but this would be a *really* bad time to get it, as I believe the spheres deactivate until she applies the upgrade.
Yeah. the flight ball probably has a speed limiter ‘while in atmosphere / planet’ for safety. if you flew at say 0.9c speeds through said atmosphere she would have a running fusion explosion behind her. Not the best of things to habitation. there was a post w/link to what that would cause.
We know for sure it has independent inertial dampening – examples: the explosion / Max hitting her shield, how fast she can accelerate. etc. which probably means she can make right hand (90 deg) turns. I am not sure which orb gives her this as a ‘side feature’ it could be both.
Because it’s always an awesome read, here’s a good explanation of what going near the speed of light through the atmosphere would do, as explained by Relativistic Baseball.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
Yup, XKCD has been a favorite of mine for some time now.
This one is also cool too. might be a bit more relevant re current.
Darn, link did not work -addendum
Taking a fire pole from the moon to earth.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/
RobK
RobK
July 27, 2018 at 6:07 pm | Reply
You can get to a significant amount of the speed of light, within a relatively short time if you can maintain constant acceleration. Even if the acceleration itself is very low.
The main problem for spaceships is bringing fuel, which Sydney doesn’t have to do (for propulsion).
When accelerating at 1G (and the human body can handle way more), you can get to the moon in 3 hours.
Not interstellar speeds, but within the same system, she can get everywhere FAST.
The real problem becomes the fact that, even at light speed, Earth is more than a few light years away. If she knew where to go, she could probably get reasonably close to the speed of light in just a couple of days of her time; but by the time she got back to Earth, everyone she knew would probably be dead from old age.
One of the issues using constant G travel is not just getting there, but arriving in one piece. You have to know what is the half-way point between the two locations. You then accelerate at 1 G to that spot, flip around, then decelerate at 1 G until you reach your destination.
An alien tourist service made this mistake about 65 million years ago. They were offering trips to see the dinosaurs on Earth. The pilot accidentally requested the ship to get there in the shortest time and the auto-pilot accelerated all the way. They made ‘landfall’ somewhere in the Yucatan. I believe you know what happened after that.
So it’s intereting that the orbs work on Aristotelian Physics – under a more modern (read 17th century) understanding of physics it’s force that is applied and by F=ma would result in an acceleration. The speed limit in atmospheric flight would then be due to the force of air resistance equalling the orbs ‘forward force’. In space there is no air resistance so Sydney would have a maximum acceration (depending on the force the orb exerts and Sydney’s weight). A maximum force that gives her Mach 4 in the Atmosphere would actually make her pretty fast by current spaceflight standards (especially since she can continue to apply it vs a rocket that runs out of fuel). Of course that still leaves her many hours away from the moon in the best circumstances. But Aristotle was cool too!
I remember someone commenting on how the magic of flying of brooms in the Harry Potter (and other stories) seem to use the same logic. You think forward and you and your broom go forward. You think stop and you and your broom stop. You think turn and you and your broom turn together. None of that silly stuff like inertia or centripetal forces to worry about.
Welp I should of seen THAT coming that her flight orb can’t take her into space, she is pretty high up in the atmosphere BUT can’t escape into space.
It actually IS taking her into space. If we assume she tried for 5 minutes, at Mach 4, then she would only be approximately 250 miles up, which is how far she looks like she is at that point. At 10 minutes of flight, that would only be ~500 miles, which is still within the distance she appears to have moved, depending on our perspective.
Either way, at that point, she’s technically IN space
Hold on. This is a momentous occasion. You need to pronounce it properly. She is (takes a deep breath) INNNN SPAAAACE!!
Comments like this are why this site needs an upvote system.
So much for being a spaceship (at least until she puts a few more points in flight speed).
It actually IS taking her into space. If we assume she tried for 5 minutes, at Mach 4, then she would only be approximately 250 miles up, which is how far she looks like she is at that point. At 10 minutes of flight, that would only be ~500 miles, which is still within the distance she appears to have moved, depending on our perspective.
Either way, at that point, she’s technically IN space
That’s odd. It duplicated my comment on two different threads…
Since the “update” a few weeks ago the page has to be refreshed twice for your comments to be readable.
You can update and downgrade at the same time apparently.
Welcome to the wonderful world of software development, where you can fix one function and at the same time topple over a dozen others.
Fair enough. Not a very good spaceship though if it will take her that long to travel between planets. And she’s a little lonely to be a generation ship.
She IS a spaceship!
Just… not a STAR-ship.
She’d make a lovely sightseeing shuttle…
Lost in space light years from home. And maybe actual years as well. Now all Sydney need is a red spaceship and a cat. It’s cold outside…
there’s no kind of atmosphere…
Fun, fun, fun…
Because she generates her own thrust, escape velocity isn’t really a factor. From Wikipedia:
”
A rocket moving out of a gravity well does not actually need to attain escape velocity to escape, but could achieve the same result (escape) at any speed with a suitable mode of propulsion and sufficient propellant to provide the accelerating force on the object to escape. Escape velocity is only required to send a ballistic object on a trajectory that will allow the object to escape the gravity well of the mass M. ”
It’s not been clearly established, but presumably Mach 4 was her limit in an Earth like atmosphere.
In space, without an atmosphere to slow her down, she should just be able to constantly accelerate (although this assumes that her method of propulsion doesn’t require an atmosphere to work). If that’s the case, her interstellar limit wouldn’t be mach 4. It’d be a high fraction of the speed of light (because once you have infinite free acceleration you’ll end up there sooner or later). Of course, given interstellar distances, even that wouldn’t be of much use to her (it’d take her at least years to get back home if she can’t exceed light speed). Of course, depending on how close to c she got, the trip might be somewhat shorter from her perspective due to relativistic effects.
Still, given that we know she’s around for the game that kicks off the series, she’s probably not going to return to Earth by flying (unless her unknown orb has a time travel function).
Just for reference, some distances around earth to scale:
https://eatourbrains.com/EoB/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/relativedistances.jpg
I wonder… Has Syd ever used truesight on her own orbs? Might shed some light.
Once she found out about that function, she did try it out on the other orbs back at the restaurant. Sorry, the FORMER restaurant. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1171
*Space Judgment Intensifies*
So the question is, does she have a speed limit or an acceleration limit? If it’s a speed limit of 1200m/s or so that means it takes her roughly 300 hours of getting to the moon (roughly two weeks). The next problem is that the moon moves at almost that speed as well.. so if she doesn’t aim in front of it she’ll spend most of her speed catching up to it.. well..
That brings us to the next question. If it is a speed limit, what is her reference point? The earth moves at 42000km/24h at the equator which is faster than her speed. So while on earth she uses the rotating planet as her reference system.. but the earth also moves at a speed of roughly 30km/s through space, way faster than Sydney, if it is in fact a speed limit.
Personally I’d be more comfortable with it being an acceleration limit and her maximum speed being limited by the air resistance of her shield, while on earth.
Oh, I forgot about the implication.. let’s assume we stay away from the speed of light in the realm of conventional physics, say, below 0.01c.
What’s her acceleration then? 10g (100m/s²)? She’d reach her maximum speed after 12 seconds or so, then, I think that’s not too unrealistic, even though she doesn’t look like she’s experiencing 10g but maybe that’s applied to every atom in her body so there’s no stress.
In that scenario, if she accelerated half the way and decelerated the other half she’d take roughly an hour to get to the moon. If she accelerated all the way it would take about 40 minutes but she’d impact at the speed of 244km/s. And even if the shield prevents her from touching the moon, she’d herself probably impact on the shield at equally fatal speed. She’s probably enough of a nerd to think about accelerating only half the way. :D
I see no reason to stay away from speeds near C.
Speed is relative. We always travel at speeds near C compared to Some heavenly body out there.
In space you can accelerate infinitely. You could reach near C speeds, making her reach her destination at approximately the speed of light, no problem. And to her the time passed would be a fraction of the time it took to watch her to fly. Of course everyone she knows would be dead when she got there, but it would only take her a year or so :P
There’s a simple, practical reason to stay away from speeds near C, at least for the moment. C is 300,000,000m/s. She accelerates by 100m/s². So it takes her 3 million seconds to reach C, from her perspective (acceleration would become slower and slower the closer she gets to C).
3 million seconds is a bit more than a month. By then she’d have either died of thirst, starvation, letting go of her orbs in her sleep, impact of a small meteorite (if the shield can’t protect against everything, impacts with relativistic speeds are the first things I’d assume to break it).
This way madness lies, the relative velocities thing anyway…
Just calculate a thrust needed to maintain mach4 on earth and apply that force to an acceleration in space with 0 air resistance.
see https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2918/comment-page-1#comment-690964
Perhaps when Sydney is contemplating her next move,that’s when Dabbler fixes the portal and drags her back home….
How does the flyball work though? Does it accelerate her in a certain direction until the friction accelerates her equally hard backwards?
Because in that case her acceleration should have a max range of near infinite, you can always accelerate more. If you have the fuel for it. And her fuel is magic? so without any mass. She should be able to fly really fast.
OR does it set her speed in relation to the nearest planet size object? So her max speed is always limited to a certain speed compared to that heavenly body. Remember space is relative. Us on earth are moving 460 meters per second compared to the sun for example.
Honestly I think her first concern with trying to fly in space would be sleep. She can go a few days without eating or drinking but when she falls asleep her orbs go dormant as well… from what we have seen anyway. Assuming she could even hold onto them while sleeping. a nap could prove fatal for her in space.
Time to see if the burnt orange one is a warp drive
So her hard speed limit is mach 4 in space too? So the orb just ignores gravity and air resistance while on earth? Except it’s somehow locked relative to the planet or it would just spin out from under her when she flies. That alien magic mumbo jumbo sure is something.
Even if her speed quadrupled in space the results on this page would be the same :p
Lack of progress is due to poor navigation. She should go two mushroom clouds to the left, then on ’til morn.
I saw the second mushroom cloud still on HER left.
That’s not a Mushroom Cloud, that’s the thing that’s been taking potshots at her.
Sydney figured out that the orbs basically turn her into a spaceship, right? What she really needs now is a towel & a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…” and so on.
If Sydney is going to spend a lot of time traveling in space, might as well have something to read, yes?
Dangit I wrote that in my post before I read yours.:)
There’s no shame in being ninja’d by a ninja.
;)
So far everyone has been discussing the physics of Sydney’s jaunt into space, but no one is mentioning the fact that’s staring us in the face:
ALARI’S MOON LOOKS LIKE A BOWLING BALL !
I feel that this must be deeply significant, somehow; and frankly, the implications are terrifying.
Yes, noticed it as well
That’s what happens when you have a different pattern of random events (asteroid impacts) than what happened around here.
In one Alari myth it is said that a drunk fuming god was bowling at his creations. . . The Alari’s moon is a gutter ball.
That’s not a moon… that’s a bowling ball moving at Mach 4
Even if the distance was 4 Planetary Units away, Sydney has barely travelled a tenth of a PU
Not impress it at all, Sydney. If that moon is as far as ours, at Mach 4, it would take roughly 78 hours. So, its angular size wouldn’t change visibly, even if flying that fast.
Sorry!
Yup, and just like when looking outside a moving vehicle at mountains to the side of you, Sydney’s best bet would be to pick a different object to focus on to gauge distance travelled (shame she didn’t pack the latest Neil Degrasse Tyson audio book, or even a Carl Sagan, in her futility belt)
Look at her. She’s heading for that small moon.
That’s no moon. It’s a space station.
DAVE! I’m reading Eye of the Tiger. Thanks for recommendation. To you I recommend Valens Legacy series starting with The Black Friday. Theme is much similar, but is about a werelion in urban fantasy instead of science fantasy (or whatever). Anyway check it out.
Heading to the Alari moon was just an experiment anyway. An experiment that has now failed. As far as survival goes, she’s far better off going back to the Alari homeworld and simply hiding from the big monster aliens. A planet is a big, big place after all. We already know the homeworld has breathable air and given how compatible with humans the Alari are, it likely has edible food as well. Time to play Robinson Crusoe while she figures out her next move.
I’m seeing other folks assuming this is how the Fl-Orb works, so I though I’d add my voice to the ones asking this: does the Flight Orb work by setting a speed to which she can then safely accelerate, and the max speed setting it has is Mach 4? Because that’s not how propulsion works… Normally propulsion works, as others have said, by giving you a certain amount of thrust or other acceleration, and the max speed becomes a balance between your ability to accelerate, the resistance of your medium, and the stresses of both on your vehicle (among other things, probably, but I’m not an engineer so those are the ones I understand). Sydney’s vehicle can withstand mega-alien-weapon blasts and Maxima fallout, so stresses aren’t really a concern here. Nor is resistance of medium. Acceleration that gets her up to Mach 4 within a short time-frame ought to get her to truly impressive speeds out there among the stars.
Sydney: Damn – this really is like an RPG. I need to spend more time levelling up my orbs…. Damn Minmaxing!
Do I get tired of being right on the comment forum with predictions and science stuff?
No. No I do not. :) Feels nice. Feels really nice.
And now I would like to quote Douglas Adams on the concept of distance in space.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
PS I apologize if I sound full of myself. I am taking any small victories I get in life lately.
soooo… how does the flight orb know, that it is at max speed? What is the reference frame?
We all know that planets spin at high velocity around their sun, the sun around the center of the galaxy and the galaxy itself is going even faster. (assuming she is in a galaxy, the bright line in the sky seems to suggest that) If she were anchored to the Center of a galaxy as soon as she leaves the atmosphere the planet would essentially be ripped out from under her with no way to get back to it at Mach 4.
Obviously the flight orb still considers the planet the frame of reference, next question is: How fast does the moon move. Internet says ~3,600 km/h. that is mach 3.
have fun sydney!
I ask about frame of reference, because dave should have done the math and I assume that sydney actually did accelerate for ~ an hour after breaking dense atmosphere. In that timeframe there should have been a difference in angular size of the moon from her point of view if the florb was accelerating.
Maybe it uses the nearest planet-sized gravity well as a reference point? And velocity cap is a safety feature, so it doesn’t accidentally hit a speed in atmo that will leave a wake of destruction behind it?
so… the most significant gravity well or the nearest planet sized one?
Shouldn’t matter after the next point IF that node is FTL drive :D