Grrl Power #654 – Dejectory
It’s easy to take for granted that smart people in comics (and books, tv, etc) are smart because we see them standing in front of a big board of math – usually a clear board, which looks fancy and futuristic but would probably give you a headache trying to not focus through it. >cough< But the actual smart stuff is always off screen. We never see the process because the writers aren’t as smart as, for example, Reed Richards, who invented a time machine in, like, issue 2 of the Fantastic Four. But even if the writer wants to do a bunch of research just to even have the right equation on the big board for the 0.03% of the audience that would even notice, it’s not like an averagely intelligent character like Sydney would even be able to utilize information like that. (Okay, Sydney has exhibited above average intelligence on occasion, but not “inventing a dimension hopping portal gun” intelligence)
I mean think about it, do you really know what E=MC^2 means? Sure, you know E=Energy, M=Mass, C=The Speed of Light, but without googling it, do you know what the units are? Is E joules or newtons? M=kilograms, probably? And really, if you were on an alien space ship, and you had to program your confiscated railgun with just the right amount of power to punch through the door in front of you, but too little and it ricochets back and kills you, too much and the projectile rips through the bulkhead into space or into the reactor and kills everyone – could you do it? Using E=MC^2. You can’t fire a bunch of shots till you get it right, messing it up kills you at best or everyone at worst, can you tell me you REALLY understand E=MC^2?
Anyway, that’s why I thought this page was funny, because for the briefest flash, Sydney tried to actually mathematically work out space travel in her head. Dabbler would be all “Yo I got this.” but have you guys seen Hidden Figures? NASA had buildings full of really fucking smart people and it took them months to figure that shit out. (And a computer that could do over a thousand computations per second, watch out!) Sure, they were concerned about fuel and oxygen and angles of launch and reentry, and Sydney doesn’t have to worry about any of that. But STILL.
BTW, I know Sydney says it took the Apollo missions took three days to get to the moon, comments on the previous page mostly said four. The point is, Sydney doesn’t have access to the internet and she’s mentally breaking down already.
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She’s taking this very well.
Also, the Apollo flights – man’s greatest accomplishment in my opinion – flew the minimum energy orbit, not the fastest one.
Neither is Sidney. The fastest past would be a direct line to where the moon is going to be when she arrives. Not where it is right now.
DaveB’s blog: “BTW, I know Sydney says it took the Apollo missions took three days to get to the moon, comments on the previous page mostly said four.”
This is presuming that the orbital distance of this planet’s moon is even roughly equivilant to our moon’s orbital distance…If their moon is bigger than ours, it would have to be further away to look like the same size as ours. Does Sydney even have a way to estimate the mere distance for calculating it out?
He said last update that the setup is similar to the Earth/Luna system. And Sydney probably could make some measurements with basic surveying equipment… if she knew how… which she doesn’t. Also, it would take more time than she has battery life on her bracer, so probably not worth it.
That little device is probably using GPS to determine location. Those satellites are a little far away to be useful here. I don’t think battery life is going to be the overriding problem here.
Hmm, could you use GPS on our moon? The signal propagation should be okay (only 1.1 light seconds away), but will the angles be so small as to give large positional error? Mind you, you should be able to see a large number of satellites to reduce that error.
Small angles aren’t the problem. GPS from Luna is a bad idea because our moon is not in a geostationary orbit. Positional beacons that move aren’t really that useful.
And no, the GPS function wouldn’t be that useful, but having comms and a locator that Max and Dabbler and company can access when they put together a rescue would be.
With the current system we have? Yes – with provisions.
– since there are more than one satellite in orbit that supports GPS, you would need: at least 4 of them. to determine if you were on earth or the moon. (triangulation etc) you need four to identity objects in 3d space, the satellites it picks for reference would have to form a 4 sided pyramid and have non zero volume – it’s how we determine the altitude you are at now. cell-phone tech
– Decent hi-res maps of all the moons surface that can be referenced by some specific point (MC) on the moon (example: reference from certain edge point of one of the craters ) topography maps would also help. this set of data I call MC
– some reference info on those moon MC compared to a similar set for Earth (EC) plus a date and time (eg angular, rotational, distance etc) (to tie the moon coordinates to the Earth at some specific time) – sets up a reference (initial set of EC-MC – would probably be a bit crude but could be updated over time.)
– software updates to support it – mostly to calc the math
– see if Google earth and google space could help locate the moon for you
– how how accurate would it be at any one time?
— well it would not be ‘live’
* Fascinating thing to try thou – would be an interesting experiment for sure!
– problems?
well for one reception of the GPS signal on the ‘dark side of the moon’ – for the most part the same surface of the moon faces the earth
You could write the software to get a crude version of this right now for a cell-phone. So… who wants to be my guinea pig tester for this? >:P) *Pokes NASA*
improvements? oh yeah.
– Quantum Entangled routers (QER) in GPS satellites- for both atomic time reference and data networking – they are probably thinking of doing this right now – maybe toss a few around our solar system – toss one on a voyager (last+1) probe too – I would also toss in few useful sensor(video/radio/etc) systems as well
– A few (QER+)GPS satellites around the moon.
The size and distance of Alaria’s moon is irrelevant, since Sydney mentioned the Apollo mission, and fairly sure they were going to Earth’s moon, which took them three or four days, even one day is more than Sydney has to spare
Grind like a barista and serve a “Hot cup of kicking their ass”!
Well, maybe she’ll get enough XP for another Ord upgrade?
;)
She’d better get to a safe spot though, since she can’t use her orbs while the skill tree is up.
That is a good point, but I don’t think the skill tree will pop up while any of the orbs are in use. If it is true then she could prevent surprise “pop-ups” by maintaining use of at least one orb at all times. Not that she wouldn’t anyways, in this situation. So it’s probably going to be a seiries of strke, retreat, and upgrade.
It feels kind of convenient to have one gigantic ship’s worth of exp lying around to finally see some significant progress on Sydney’s skillsheet, but it beats waiting another year I guess. If things were boring enough for her to get some actual training in *before* the bad things that require that training happen, it might be too easy.
Convenient in the sense that:
– No innocent bystanders or infrastructure.
– Target not protected by Earth law and have proven intent to kill anyway.
– Actually requires her to test the limits of her powers.
– Occurs in a space large enough to give her ample space to fire her weapon with few obstructions.
– Set in an unusual enough situation that is more likely to reveal secrets about her power kit through experiencing unique dangers and other events.
Wonder why that ship is just stupidly floating there – I mean, it dropped this monster on the planet to apparently ‘kill the intruders’ or whatnot, it apparently is much taller than the planets atmosphere (100+miles?) yet it’s ignoring her, and she’s not exactly hard to spot with the sort of tech they’re packing. (or… with say a normal telescope..)
She’d be visible with a normal telescope but finding her in the first place would be hard. To see a satellite in orbit that’s twice her size you need to know the exact position and distance (for focus).
If spotting satellites you don’t know are there was easy then spy satellites wouldn’t be a thing.
Spy satellites do not rely on not being detected, they rely on two things…
1. Not being *recognized* as spy satellites by disguising them as different satellites.
2. Once they’re up there even if countries realize they are in fact a spy satellite and not a weather satellite or communications satellite or whatever the people who put it there are claiming it is what are most countries going to do about them anyway? There are a relatively limited number of countries with the capabilities to shoot a satellite down and they tend to avoid doing it because anyone who could put a satellite up there in the first place has the capability to shoot back at theirs too.
Just detecting satellites is pretty damn easy…. because radar.
The “what are you going to do about it” answer is they time they activities for when they are out of sight.
Depending on their alien motivations they might be freaking out over finding an orb user, or they might have exhausted their Odin force taking out the planet and are trying to hold off a 600 year hibernation that they were going to take before whacking the next galactic power.
She doesn’t need to use her weapon, she is a weapon. Just go to ramming speed and punch through that ship, her shield will protect her.
You want to bet your life on that? So far, the only thing she has hit was a roadside sign, and she wasn’t going very fast
Going at the speeds you are suggesting could see Mr Buble come to a dead stop with Sydney becoming a greasy smear on the inside (for as long as it takes for her corpse to drop her balls)
Well, from what I just saw, her shield was hit with a near planetbuster nuke and survived, albeit complaining about it, and the shield function also appears to have inertial dampers. Far more energy than she would experience punching through that ships hull.
It wasn’t exactly a planetbuster nuke. By the looks of the crater it left, it was probably an antimatter explosion with the power of a handful of kilotons (aka a few grams of antimatter). I say antimatter because nukes don’t tend to leave craters unless deployed underground.
While it’s definitely the sort of explosion that’ll kill a city’s population with its shockwave unless they’re sheltered, it’s hardly a planetbuster, and it seriously damaged her shield.
So let’s say, for the fun of it, that a megaton-level explosion would overwhelm sydneys shield completely. That’s her current limit. What sort of shielding does that ship have? One of its deployable units can hand out kiloton explosions, so its shielding will likely be able to handle multiple of those at once with ease.
Since they recognized her orbs (or at least that they’re a danger), it’s safe to assume they’re on a comparable level of technology. Meaning they likely have more power in their shielding than Sydney wants to ram.
Worse, Syd’s grinding but only has a vague idea of what to focus said grinding on (Flyball), since she doesn’t have the cheat sheet for her orb chart. (She’ll need to probably improve PPO, and Life Support for food/water/sleep, and Shield…)
The problem with game grinding is that it’s essentially killing the same set of A.I. enemies over and over again with them responding the same way over and over again. They never learn and change up their tactics in response to what you’re doing to it’s frustratingly boring.
However there’s nothing to suggest that Nega Squidwad or it’s home ship are unable to learn and change up tactics.
If she gets in a gamer’s, grinding mindset of repeating the same tactic over and over again, it could get deadly fast if they can perfectly predict what she’s about to do and develop their own counterstrike at the critical moment.
Ok, jokes aside; Syd needs to trust herself. the human brain/mind combo is capable of amazingly complex computations. She has demonstrated time after time being able to intuit correct actions from scant available facts. Syd needs to act, not ponder. Her first instinct will most likely be the best choice.
The fact that she recognizes hostiles as potential resources is already a good sign that she can handle the situation.
Uh, no.
No amount of natural intuition is going to enable someone accurately predict space travel and complex trajectory.
You are neglecting Savant Syndrome. Which is not something Sydney seems to possess, but other people have that ability. I just let the navicomp handle the interplanetary stuff when I travel outside the atmosphere, but even I can handle interstellar navigation “Where is the star going to be at the speed I can travel? Aim for that spot!”
The face she’s making on that last panel is rather sexy. I know it’s meant to be anguish (or distress), but yeah, I like it.
https://imgur.com/KKeREuC
just needs the Brazzers logo.
damnit! I can`t unsee this now lol!
It’s the Money Shot!
damnit! I can`t unsee this now lol!
Sorry for the double post. I know how it looked but my computer froze for a moment. Was my computer locked from commenting anymore?
Sorry for the double post. I know how it looks but my computer froze for a moment. Was my computer locked from commenting anymore?
So that’s what the brown mystery orb is for!
Reminds me of trying to maxing out all my summoning mako orbs, so I could fuse them in Final Fantasy 7. The hostile army wont know what hit them, nothing is more serious and dedicated than a nerdette who decided it is grinding time.
Assuming that Sydney moves at her constant maximum speed (which is a completely nonsensical concept but okay), the “complicated math” there is a single simple division operation. Divide the distance by the speed, and that’s the time it takes.
Assuming that this moon is the same distance from the planet as Luna is from Earth (call it 375,000 km, and no I didn’t have to look that up), and round Sydney’s Mach 4 (which is a meaningless term in space) to an even 5000 km/h, and the time it’d take her to get to the moon is:
375,000 km / 5000 km/h = 75 hours.
Or three days and change, near enough for a first approximation.
Leave some time for sleeping and so on (with the life support and shield balls duct-taped to her hands, presumably), and she could make the trip in a week, easy.
What confuses me is what she thinks she’s going to do when she gets there.
Well, she’s got an arts-and-crafts pouch, so obviously she’ll make a tiny Sydney flag and claim the moon for Sydneytopia. Because of course Sydney would do that.
…. what confuses me is how she plans to plant the flag without dropping the shield.
We don’t know how coherent of an area the air orb makes, since it just made a solid-ish bubble underwater. It could keep her breathing as long as it’s active, shield or no.
If she was measuring the distance along the surface of the planet, yes. However, from where she is in space to the moon, she has to factor in the moon’s relative velocity. Sure, the moon looks like it’s standing still, but it’s actually moving at an incredible speed in an arc as it orbits this planet. If she moves in a straight line, she’s going to overshoot it. Furthermore, a straight line is not the fastest way to get there. As Syd herself mentioned, the “slingshot” maneuver is the best method she has of gaining the requisite acceleration to get escape velocity and plot an intercept course towards the moon. And yeah, that takes a hell of a lot of math to get right.
The reason non-straight paths are “fastest” for real spacecraft is that they have limited thrust to work with. For something with a fixed speed (relative to some agreed reference point), a straight-line path is the fastest (and shortest).
Also, a “gravity assist” doesn’t change your speed relative to the body you’re making a flyby of; merely your direction. It’s your speed in a frame where that body is moving that changes. For a trip to the Moon, it’s your speed relative to Earth that matters, so non-powered slingshots around Earth aren’t going to help at all.
For a conventional spacecraft (with a fixed acceleration relative to free-fall, not a fixed top speed) acceleration deeper into a gravity well has more effect, but that also doesn’t apply to Sydney since if she’s moving in free fall starting from her fixed top speed, she can’t use the flight orb to speed up anywhere lower than where she entered free fall…
The Apollo missions used a minimum energy path from Earth to Moon, not a minimum time one – with the ability to maintain a constant acceleration indefinitely, the best path is a lot closer to a straight line…
Doesn’t matter. If Sydney uses the simple method of flying directly towards the apparent position of the moon, her ultimate trajectory will be a somewhat longer arc rather than a straight line, but given how loose the precision of the numbers we’re working with here is to begin with, it doesn’t have a real effect on the answer.
The big difference between what Sydney’s considering and what the Apollo Program did is that Sydney isn’t working with a limited amount of delta-v and needing to get her initial trajectory exactly right to arrive at her destination with the fuel remaining to enter orbit, land, take off again, and still get back home, on hair-fine margins. She’s in powered flight all the way, with no fuel concerns that we know of. If she finds she’s headed the wrong direction, she can just fly in a different direction.
What the Apollo Program did was similar to throwing a baseball and getting it into the strike zone from two hundred thousand miles away. What Sydney is doing is similar to driving a car without a GPS.
Yeah, without an energy budget, it’s straight line to the predicted position.
The problem with analyzing it further is that her orbs break physics. She has a privileged reference frame (top speed) and doesn’t obey a bunch of other rules either. (Of all the suspension of belief needed to enjoy a superhero comic, I can’t believe that breaking relativity is the one that gets me! LOL)
Now for the nerdiness…
Railgun projectile speeds are based on the magnetic field generated by the current in the loop between the rails through the projectile…all all the ensuing nasty electric and magnetic field calculations….E=cM^2? nah won’t help you a damn with your rail gun application. And the projectile hitting with enough force to have an inelastic collision but not penetrating or having an elastic collision?
Is based on the material properties of the projectile…again E=Mc^2 worthless…unless your getting that projectile to the speed of light…then it applies…
If your getting a projectile up to relativistic speeds… E=MC^2 is just going to tell you how horribly everything is going to go if you mess up. Actually no, it won’t because the you run into the relativity equations where stuff starts to distort. That equation exists more as a concept/short hand notation than as something you actually use in real physics.
To be fair, E = mc^2 is used quite a lot in nuclear physics, and a form of it is used in special relativity calculations!
I haven’t paid much attention to everything in the comments the last few updates so I’m sorry if this was thought up by someone else already but I had this interesting (to me) theory pop up in my mind.
So these alien invaders not only recognized the orbs via a scan (or recognized the pattern of 7 orb shaped voids in their scan) and their first reaction was to send something down there to nuke her position.
I believe the working theory is that the portal send them not only to another planet but also into the future.
What if the reason they managed to detect and react like this is because they encountered Sydney before? (Before for them, in the future for Sydney / us.) And their first reaction is overkill just because they know what they are up against.
“Oh Sh*t! It is that Earthling! Quick, quick, kill her before she can slice up our ship, again!”
I like/prefer that option to the ‘stuck in the past’ one. It would also nicely explain the ‘too many Harems’ thing. Maybe still another planet, but a future, rather than a current.
Or perhaps it’s just that the alternate ‘brane that the Ripper ripped into has a faster Timestream than ours, and Sciona miscalculated.
In Sydney’s defense, once it’s been done/discovered the first time, it’s not as difficult to work with what is already known and accepted as real. For instance, I fully understand “F=MA” and how that means that the force of my punch is equal to the mass of my body (or as much of it as I can put behind the punch) multiplied by the acceleration of my fist when it hits… but I didn’t formulate that equation, I read it from somewhere else. That’s why the force of said punch is rated in Newtons, because the genius who DID formulate the equation is the one who got to name the unit of measurement.
In this case, assuming I correctly understand what she’s doing, she’s being VERY intelligent. She’s tallied up her assets – which do not include the raw mathematical ability necessary to solve ballistics equations in her head – and solving the problem. Now it’s a matter of following through – she’s got orbs that “level up” with enough usage. She’s got targets and no innocent bystanders or fragile surroundings to worry about. Let’s see where this goes. :)
No, Newton didn’t get to name the unit of force, because “newtons” are a metric unit and the metric system hadn’t been invented yet. The metric system is a product of the French Revolution. The unit of force was, however, obviously named for him.
And on that note, newtons are not a unit of energy. To get energy, you need force/time. Also, E=mc^2 is a simplification. Technically, it’s E=msub0*c^2 + a whole bunch of progressively smaller terms, such that E=msub0*c^2 is a darn good approximation. It’s been years since I took physics, so I’d have to look up the complete equation.
E = m c^2 is an approximation of E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2, where E is the energy of the particle, m is its relativistic mass, p is its relative momentum and c is the speed of light.
For massless particles, it simplifies to E = p c, while for massive particles (i.e. any particles with mass, not just huge particles), it’s E^2 = m^2 c^2 + m^2 v^2 c^2, where v is the particle’s relative velocity.
Also, Energy is Force * Displacement. Or Mass * Velocity^2 (as used above), or Power * Time, or any number of other equations where the right side has Mass * Distance^2 / Time^2 as its dimensions.
Force/Time is Mass * Displacement / Time^3, which is better used as Mass * Jerk, very useful in rollercoaster design.
You are correct, Newton didn’t name them himself, but they were named after him. But I never said a Newton was a measurement of energy. I said “force,” as in “the force of my punch.” Force = Mass times Acceleration. Take the mass of the object in kilograms, multiply it by the acceleration in meters/second^2, and you get the total force in Kilogram-meters/second^2, i.e. Newtons.
No, units have absolutely nothing to do with it. The equations are valid and reflect physical “laws”, independent of units.
You could use the SI (MKS), English Absolut (poundal,pound-mass, foot) system or even the ancient Egyptian (deben, cubit) system (if they had had units for mass and time smaller than days)!
Physical law equations (F=ma, E=mc^2, PV=nRT, whatever), hold true no matter what measurement system you use (as long as you state the units). The numbers only make sense, however, when you use a consistent system.
Ayep. Numbers are almost never just numbers – but engineers and scientists have their tools to organize them anyway. First thing taught in my sophomore chem engineering class ages and ages ago was dimensional analysis: do the units match up, and if not, what do you need to do to make them match up? It’s one thing (out of many) that engineers do to make sure they don’t make calculation errors, and one reason why, when such errors occur (as with the Mars Climate Orbiter), such errors are considered both egregious and really, really stupid.
For instance, with E=mc^2, using SI units, E is in joules, m in kilograms, c in meters/sec. In English units, E is in foot-pounds, m in slugs (a slug is roughly 32.2 lbs of mass; basically, one lb of mass does not equal one lb of weight/force in English units), and c in feet/second.
Mach 4 is her top speed inside the atmosphere. In space, there is no “top speed”, only “acceleration”.
Apollo 11 did it in 4 days (3?), but they only ever accelerated at the start. Sidney can keep on accelerating, and probably do the distance in a few hours (assuming she remembers to start decelerating at the half way point).
Then again, this is all probably just a ruse to show us the purpose of another orb, so…
The “there is only acceleration in space” only works with our normal physics. These orbs look like operate on a totally different principle. For example, I can imagine that they simply pin themselves down to the closest gravity well and move you using the planet as a point of origin – in such a movement you have a fixed top speed, no matter where you are. So they simply transform your position like you do in a coordinate system, with a maximum available velocity – they don’t accelerate, they put out a constant direction vector (chosen by the user)
So, on a trip from the Earth to the Moon, is the user stuck at “Mach 4 relative to the Earth” for the entire trip, or does there come a point where the user is instantaneously changed to being stuck at “Mach 4 relative to the Moon” because the Moon’s gravitational effect exceeds the Earth’s?
TL;DR: Yes I think so, but there seems to be a lot of exceptions, so the needs of the story trumps regular physics.
Yeah, I think that’s how the orb works. Once the flyorb is active it automatically puts the user into a geosynchronous orbit relative to the largest mass (normally Earth in Sydney’s case). As Sydney moves higher this compensation is increased to keep her relative to a fixed point on earth. Which means that if she flew to the moon, once she reached the L1 point the flyorb should switch to making her geostationary relative to the moon. This would also mean that she would no longer have to compensate for the moons orbit as the flyorb would do this automatically, and from her perspective it would be a fixed point. Unfortunately the L1 point is relatively close to the moon (CITATION NEEDED) so for the majority of her voyage she would need to head to where the moon is going to be rather than where it appears to be.
We’ve also seen that when Sydney is floating she can be moved by another person pushing her. So presumably the flyorb doesn’t lock her in place relative to her starting position but allows external forces to act upon her. Of course then we consider Sydney activating the Flyorb in a jet while it’s in flight and a whole new set of exceptions arise. So I reckon a general rule of automatic geosynchronous compensation with a s**tload of exceptions to make the story flow properly. So, like the Discworld runs on Narrative Causality I propose the Orbs run on Narrative physics. :-)
Actually, the L1 point is not the same place as where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Moon are equal and opposite.
The L1 point is where an object in orbit about the Earth-Moon barycentre will have the same orbital period as the Moon and the Earth do about the barycentre. G M_e / r_e^2 – G M_m / r_m^2 = v^2 / r_b.
The point I refer to is even nearer to the Moon. G M_e / r_e^2 – G M_m / r_m^2 = 0.
I forgot its name for the earlier post, but a quick search reminded me that it’s called the gravipause.
Yaay – I said last comic “She needs to level up her orbs” I was half right. Well not really. Probably not at all. Meanwhile – what Sydney has not considered is recon. I would fly around the planet once to see if there are any big cities or anyone else trying to mount a fight against this thing! safety in numbers.
Also @LordViking – I doubt time travel is involved. Dabbler and Maxima might still be around in the future but Harem is less likely. Unless it’s only a few years in the future which then what’s the point. More likely if they know the orbs it’s from the previous owner of the orbs before Sydney got the,
Harem is still young, early twenties I believe, so she easily has another sixty or more years in her as long as nothing really bad happens. ‘Send into the future’ is vague enough that it could be a few days, a year, several years, or several decades. All within Harem’s lifespan and would explain her issue with having ‘too many bodies’ and Dabbler figuring getting to Sydney suddenly got easier.
If with “what’s the point” you mean why would the portal only go a few years into the future? Because it wasn’t supposed to go to the future at all but it malfunctioned. They’re lucky it send them over somewhere else at all instead of vaporizing them on the spot.
Them having known a previous owner of the orbs, or another similar set of orbs, is a possibility, but doesn’t tie as neatly with the other events for my theory.
You are thinking future. Try thinking parallel.
it could only be a few months in the future. the flashforward at the beginning of the comic is only of about 6 months or so I believe. enough time for the team to prepare and send a rescue and be back in a reasonable time.
Okay if I understand Sydney right she’s come to the conclusion that she needs to power up her flight capabilities and let the most efficient way to do that is to go attack the critters that attacked her lovely her way up until she can defeat and destroy the mecca Nega squid hopefully she will have upgraded her capabilities enough 2 make her way out of the star system at speeds that won’t take her her entire lifetime to accomplish am I even in the ballpark?
Sounds right to me.
Sooo… Grind 3p1c m0bz, Syd! F0r t3h l00tz!
Better yet, a l00tz grinder farm!
Also, she may have just concluded that the fastest way home is to take control of the alien’s ship. It… could work.
Well, attacking the ship is probably not that dangerous for her. Since the ship recognized her orbs and sent that thing to deal with her, and that thing actually couldn’t get through her shield (came close to, sure, but couldn’t), they probably don’t have more effective means of harming her. And they most likely won’t shoot such destructive weapons inside, so, free exp.
When maxima to sydney when the rescue party arrives in an ever greater wasteland than before : Leave anything for us ? ;) Syd : Just bodies ^^
Nice Commando ref there, Sarge.
i get the feeling that the halo doesnt work on kill “xp”
both of sydneys “levels” were gained after some form of experimentation with aspects of the halo maximas “shield” testing and sydney discovering aura vision and teleportation with the “vision” orb
You’re assuming it works on XP at all. Maybe it works on ‘approval’ – if she does something the Orb’s creators approve of, she gains a level.
If Sydney is in freefall wouldn’t her hair start to drift around when she lets go of the Fly Ball?
Not unless a separate force acts upon her hair. The entire system (Syd, orbs, shield) is in free-fall. If she shook her head or the green atmo-orb generated a breeze then her hair would move.
No. She is in space. And she is a small amount of mass relative to the planet. She wouldnt go into a quick freefall. She is currently basically space junk.
What I’m wondering is, did Syd generate enough lateral velocity to enter proper orbital free-fall? Ah, she is holding the flight orb again in the last panel, so she can probably maintain her position even if her orbital velocity is zero.
Well, she was going at Mach 4 straight up, outside the exophere, for several minutes. It’s more than believable that she’d be able to let go of the fly orb and have more than enough time before she actually is pulled in by the planet’s gravity enough to start an actual freefall. At least it’s within the suspension of disbelief, in any case. Especially since it seems like it was a very quick ‘refresh’ of the air, so she probably didnt let go of the fly orb for that long.
…have you MET Sydney’s bangs?
This is the Correct Answer.
As the ad says, “Physics? Bitch. I’m a superhero!”
Grinding… probably her best option, now that I think about it. Aside from waiting for rescue, her only realistic option is to unlock a new ability with her orbs… and that is one absolutely enormous pile of XP waiting for her down on the planet.
Although, it MIGHT be a bit much for her to solo. Guess we’ll see.
Yes Sidney, Mach 4 is faster than a bullet. I get the feeling that she’s going to want to learn some applicable navigation tricks when and if she gets back. She does seem to have the capability to travel short interplanetary distances, at least if she had the proper resources, anyway. Nothing that would get her home, of course, but being able to go into orbit in order to travel around the planet faster, for example, would be highly useful. (And yes, leaving the atmosphere in order to fly long distances (like from New York to California) is totally worth the time spent flying up. Any trip longer than several hundred miles Sidney could manage faster by going out of the atmosphere to do. Although for safety she REALLY should bring a proper space suit at the minimum. Vacuum is not fun.
What she needs is an astronavigation computer. And more arms.
Dabbler probably knows some way to do that for her ;)
I have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to game but
I thought ‘grinding’ was the point of playing.
In the first few Grrl Power strips it is shown as Sydney’s superpower.
She’s got this.
However…
Is ‘playing’ the correct course of action here?
She has a radio in her choker and pipboy…
Maybe those AND the commball can S.O.S.?
Grinding refers to a specific type of game play. It basically means doing a repetitive action to gain resources for your character. For example gold or experience to improve levels. Being that it is often tedious and repetitive it is not liked but often is necessary in many games in the RPG genre. Being her skill tree seems to work on a RPG style experience system Sydney has come to the conclusion that her best bet for upgrading her orbs so she can find a way home, is to defeat as many alien death critters as possible to unlock more of her skill tree.
Sydney definitely wasn’t saying that to Elric a few days ago
R.e bottom text, yep. I know and understand the equation.
Handy for KSP.
Sydney isn’t certain how many problems she has, because math is one of them…I know that feel.
Re: E=mc^2. All this stuff is in SI (international standard units, ie, default metric scale) of Joules, kilograms, and meters per second. NOT Newtons. Newtons is force. There is no force in e=mc^2. You definitely would not need it to calibrate your rail gun for close-range forced entry, and if you DO need it to calibrate your rail gun for close-range forced entry, your CO needs to take your rail gun away from you NOW before you kill everyone in a ten mile radius, which is what would happen if e=mc^2 came into play when you fired it. (Or maybe it’s nuclear-powered, in which case, probably shouldn’t be hauling a radiation hazard into a combat zone.)
Regarding travel to the moon, the math for Sydney would actually be relatively simple… if she knows how the flight orb works. If it’s constant speed (which would be WEIRD because speed is based on frame of reference and she’s moving away from one frame of reference and towards another, but comic book physics) then she’s got a chance, because our moon orbits at about Mach 3 compared to the flight orb’s mach 4, and we’re assuming a similar setup to our own Earth/Luna system here. However, Sydney doesn’t KNOW that, and has neither the time, nor the equipment, nor the know-how to make those precise measurements required to match course. It comes down to a two-part ordinary differential equation with 2-dimensional vectors as the parameter, which is relatively tame…. but still the sort of thing that mathematicians want computers to chug through a numerical solution for or, if they can’t have that, a week in front of a blackboard, a calculator, and obscene amounts of coffee.
(I don’t know when “Mach 3 relative to the planet” would switch over to “relative to the moon”. Obviously it would happen at some point, because Sydney isn’t still limited to Mach 4 relative to Earth… she CAN change based on frame of reference… but that’s the sort of wtf-ery that would drive physicists to obscene amounts of scotch.)
If instead the flight orb has a maximum force which was being limited by air resistance on Earth (which would imply that Sydney could fly faster on Earth by reshaping her shield to be more aerodynamic) things would change. In a lot of ways that would be saner… and a hell of a light faster for Sydney, since she could now exceed Mach 4 now that she’s out of the atmosphere. Far exceed it. Compared to her, Apollo would be slow, because reaction mass limitations meant they could only accelerate/decelerate for a tiny portion of their flight time, while Sydney can do so for the entire trip.
The goal is still to match speed and position with the moon, but now her trip would require an acceleration AND deceleration stage which you’d need to parameterize (probably a fixed acceleration vector for a fixed amount of time for each) and integrate across. It would be a bit more work for the mathematician and her computer, but not insanely much more work. Still relatively simple. The equation would look something like a system of differential equations of A*t-sub-1 + B*(t-sub-2)= M'(t-sub-1 + t-sub-2), and 0.5 A * (t-sub-1)^2 + 0.5 B * (t-sub-2)^2 = M(t-sub-1 + t-sub-2), where A and B were her acceleration and deceleration vectors and M was the position of her landing spot on the moon. You’d be solving for the relationship between A and B, which would give you a family of solutions because, yes, there’s more than one correct answer. That’s more annoying than it should be.
This is a non-linear multivariate system of differential equations. (Partial differential equations if you see the vectors as two components, which is a bit of choose-your-headache whether you want to do this or not.) It’s still relatively easy but still very hard… much harder than the previous scenario. You definitely wouldn’t see e=mc^2 in all this. You might, depending on how fast the flight orb can accelerate outside of the atmosphere, see t=t’ * sqrt(1-(v/c)^2), which would make the math…. even less nice.
(Actually, if we DID get up to needing t=t’ * sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) for more than negligible difference, and if Sydney misjudged her landing, we might be in an e=mc^2 situation. But that would be a result of doing the math wrong, not doing it right.)
I say this math is “relatively” easy, which given the alternative, it is. Instead of the gravity-immune reactionless drive of the flight orb, make her a slave to gravity and force her to accelerate with reaction mass. Give her a very limited supply of reaction mass, enough for maybe thirteen minutes of acceleration total, plus a bunch of booster tanks for getting started which she then throws away when she hits orbit. If she runs out of reaction mass her tank’s dry, she can’t accelerate any more, and she’s in free-fall. Also, every second she accelerates her mass changes (because she loses reaction mass) and that means the same force of thrust affects her more (because she has less mass that needs accelerating). THAT’S how NASA did it… yes using computers, but with computers that were abacuses compared to even a cheap cell phone and which needed a hell of a lot of coaxing, intuition, and set-up by human beings. The “corkscrews” where the best ways to transfer from one orbit to another, bearing in mind that orbit is just as much about velocity as it is about position and, of course, if you tug on one string, you tug on the other.
That math is really, really hard, but hey, it’s not rocket scie… oh, wait, IT IS. Those people were freaking geniuses.
And of course you can’t do any of this math until you actually know what numbers your propulsion system is putting out, along with exact position, distance to, and speed of the orbiting moon. Which would require a lot more time, equipment, and know-how than Sydney has.
In any case, Sydney has solved exactly the math problem she needs to solve. She asked how feasible it was to travel to the moon, and got the correct answer of “very much not”. She did this WITHOUT massive computers or weeks in front of a blackboard, and did not get distracted in solving the ugly ugly differential equations when her initial estimates gave her all the answers she needed. In my experience, this makes her smarter than most mathematicians and physicists.
Aaaaand I just reread what I wrote and half the technical details are wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be posting these things after a night of all insomnia and no sleep. Still, the basic gist of it is right.
the Best bet for Sydney at this point is to attack the aliens or use the star laser to destroy the moon and force the aliens to surrender, or get to that derelict space station or ship that’s currently in orbit, and see if she can salvage anything.
but yeah attacking the aliens and getting rid of the largest threat first is probably the best idea.
be funny if find out there as some may of said balls that are missing like 2 or 3 of them that these aliens stole and the set she found belonged to some one younger of the race that made them. or one starts translateing mecha squidward after using say the machinegun mini ppo blasts if she starts out with it and mentions they killed the last wielder or something.
I wonder what the range and speed of her lightbee are. If they’re high enough using that to teleport might be an option.
as far as I can tell.she can go as fast as she could if she was sprinting or normal humanely possible speed. and to say she teleports, I`ve seen a lot of people mentionining that, it not technically true.
its not that she teleport, its more like she substitute the image she is projecting of herself with her actual body or a reverse ninja “switcheroo” if you`d rather.
That substitution is instantly moving her body from one place to another without crossing the space in between. If that’s not teleportation, I don’t know what is.
It’s limited teleportation. She can teleport, as long as she can actually already normally get where she wants to teleport to, anyway.
teleportation implies a certain expediency in movement. if she has to “walk/hover’ or goes at anything less than instantaneous speed to her destination then it`s not technically teleportation since it requires her to do the actual trek before doing the switch.
I stand by what I said. its not technically teleportation, its a switcheroo( eh. switcheroo, that`s a funny word)
The ‘switcheroo’ itself is still teleportation, as the change in position is effectively instantaneous. (It’s probably also independent of any physical barriers then in place, such as doors closing after the Lightbee goes through, but so far there’s no evidence either way on that.) The fact that it requires a (much smaller than Human) physical component moving at normal speeds to set up the teleport does not change the characteristics of the final action.
The key difference is in commitment: Sydney is perfectly free to use the Lightbee purely as a scout/telepresence without using the ‘switcheroo’. She is only committed to the teleport when she chooses to activate the exchange, which is when the clock starts for measuring its speed.
Who feels that Sydney will come really undone and Maxima considers replacing her on the team…!?
No.
gotta say i love the comments on this site. theres never any crap or nastynes or any of the mind numbing bilge you normally get on the rest of the internet. anyway, back to point…
working on the assumption that Sydney is gonna grind xp to level up her orbs… how does she know where to spend the points? she doesnt know what each dot does AND she doesnt know what combination of dots would get her home before she starves/dies of old age. even travelling at light speed (and you cant go that fast) thats over 700 years flight time. unless one of those dots is a worm hole/FTL drive shes screwed. could be what the last orb does i suppose, theres a safety mechanism on it to stop it working on a planet suface maybe…
Oh, and one more observation. When Mega-Nega-Squidward (I guess that’s its name? I’ll just call it MNS) recognizes the orbs well enough to know what they are and react to them… and its reaction is fight rather than flight… and a ship warped in AFTER being alerted about the orbs’ presence… and the MNS is strong enough to almost overwhelm your shield with one shot… you might want to rethink the idea you can take the super-ship above it that’s likely based on the same technology.
Just to clarify we don’t know that it recognized the orbs. It may very well be just going “unknown thing, scanners useless, quick destroy it with full force”
Alas, Sydney, you’re far, far off. I’m amazed a geek of your level doesn’t know things like what “orbital speed” and so on are. The Apollo missions exceeded Mach 30 (Apollo 10 was at one point in its return leg going almost 25,000 MPH), and the Moon is REALLY close by in. At Mach 4 it would take her over a century just to reach the Kuiper Belt about 3 billion miles out.
The other problem is navigation. If you don’t know where in the universe you ARE, you’d have to be able to figure out where Earth was. Earth’s Sun is a very unremarkable yellow dwarf star. Unless you are REALLY quite close by, it won’t even be visible; at 50LY it’ll be below the normal naked-eye threshold. The only good way of navigation is an extensive knowledge of the “landmarks” of the universe — Cepheid variables, pulsars, etc. and a way to mark and measure them.
Sydney needs a LOT of help or a god-level helping of luck.
mmmm, pulsars and quasars, universal signposts
Yep, Mach 4 is well below escape velocity. Assuming that planet has a gravity well similar to Earth’s, she’s stuck there without outside help.
Escape velocity is the velocity that a coasting object in needs to have in order to escape Earth’s gravity. An object that is continually boosting could be traveling at 1 m/s and still break out of orbit.
Sydney’s current predicament makes me think of the closing line from one of my all-time favourite movies (‘Midnight Run’):
“Looks like I’m walking.'”
Er… E=MC^2 isn’t gonna help you with your railgun thing. At all. This equation tells you the intrinsic energy of something which is not moving, just because of the mass of the thing. You use that to know how much energy you can get out of a nuclear reaction (where some mass is turned directly into energy), and that’s about it.
What, no! It was Doctor Doom who invented the time machine and it didn’t show up until issue 5 when he made the Fantastic Four go back in time and steal Blackbeard’s treasure, leading to the Thing actually becoming the historical Blackbeard because he thought he could hide being a big orange rock monster with a fake beard.
Man, I love comics.
Sydney, just look at the comment board and ignore the people who mistake max velocity for acceleration. The rest of us did the math for you and I did the speeds for Apollo snd Voyager :)
Panel 6 should also include under inventory:
Pipboy, choker, clothing, boots.
Under positive attributes:
Mad gaming skills. Encyclopedic knowledge of Genre Tropes.
Under negative attributes:
Medications and stamina finite and decreasing. Time constraints.
I almost complained about Sydney’s escape “velocity” being the acceleration under earth’s gravity, but then I realized it fit perfectly with the rest of the panel’s proof that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Well played, sir.
Just now noticing that Sydney’s utility belt only has 4 pouches. When she devoted one pouch to arts and crafts I sort of assumed that it was one of, I don’t know, 6-12 pouches. Knowing that she could have had a third more Batman approved stuff instead makes her arts and crafts decision seem more irresponsible than it did a couple dozen strips ago. Like, I bet she really wishes that she had a couple of days worth of ration bars and a survival filter straw instead. Or a foil survival blanket, or something. I don’t know.
Yeah, I don’t know what Sydney puts in her survival kit, but I know what I put in mine. It’s a pretty comprehensive list. I’m not saying that arts & crafts stuff is necessarily useless, depending on what it is. For example, my kit always includes a pencil, 6 sheets of waterproof paper, and a small sheet of ultra-reflective adhesive trail marker (this is the same glass bead impregnated stuff that they use on street signs. Cut into 0.5 cm squares and place them 50 meters apart, and you can mark about 5 km of trail.) I’m sure these three things would count as “arts & crafts”.