Grrl Power #655 – The Robotech
Given how powerful those orbs are, the screw ship aliens might actually have good cause to attack Sydney. Imagine them in the hands of someone who was out to actually cause a bunch of mayhem. And presumably had 4 or more hands.
For those of you unaware of Sydney’s reference, there was an amazing show called Robotech, which more or less introduced me to proper anime. I had seen G-Force and Speed Racer and Voltron, but that stuff was much more childish. Robotech had a serialized story, dialog spoken at a regular human pace *coughspeedracercough* and amazing music to boot. Hearing the opening theme to this day show gives me a serious nostalgia boner. Some of you will know it as Macross. Robotech was apparently three different anime series bought by Harmony Gold and then translated and dubbed to make them all one long story. Purists of course hate this but I didn’t know any better when I watched it and I thought it was incredible.
ANYWAY. One of the things Robotech was famous for, especially the first season (Macross) was these panoramic shots of distant explosions ripping across the sky, just like Sydney has managed to pull off here. Hence the reference. The last time I checked, Robotech was available on Netflix, and is worth checking out if you’ve never seen it. Imagine that you’re 12 and this is the first thing like it you’ve ever seen. It was pretty damned amazing.
A lot of people have questions about the physics behind Sydney’s flight capabilities. The short version is that she’s currently limited to Mach 4, which granted in most cases is like being limited to only having $4 million dollars in your bank account, but an important factor is that she is immune to gravity while using it, so things like escape velocity aren’t a factor for her. She can just fly straight up and doesn’t have to worry about slingshotting around stuff.
I say “immune to gravity” but of course, she’s only tested it out against 1G. (We can assume the Alari homeworld is within 10% of Earth’s gravity.) If I were her, I wouldn’t go buzzing any neutron stars quite yet.
Thinking about that more, I had originally thought that her speed was fixed once she tops out at mach 4, and it’ll definitely stay that way in the atmosphere, (unless she buys a speed upgrade, obviously) but in space… maybe it makes sense that she can accelerate indefinitely. 1G of acceleration is pretty fast, according to some math I found after a quick google, you could get to the moon in like 3.5 hours, half of it spent accelerating, and half spent decelerating. With 4 dots filled in on her flight tree, I’d actually give her 16Gs of acceleration, which would almost be like that scene in Futureama where Leela flies to the moon before Fry can finish counting down from 10. Ok, not actually that fast, but still pretty god damned fast. It makes me appreciate those Honor Harrington books with ships that could accelerate at 450-500 gravities.
Max never tested Sydney’s Extrosphere flight capabilities. That’s a word, right? It should be. Anyway, maybe Sydney’s speed does work like that, in which case it would probably make more sense for her to Mach 4 straight up till she hits space, then G-boost across and back down, if she ever has to make a cross country trip. Even with that kind of speed, I think the previous page holds up. Sydney wasn’t headed toward the moon long enough to close appreciable distance to it.
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A velocity limit really only makes sense in atmosphere, unless it is artificially imposed by the orbs rather than being a function of force applied to her flight. Velocity is… it’s not really a “thing” in and of itself (which is still horribly misleading) so much as it is the descriptor of what reference frame you, personally, are in. Your velocity is always zero in your own, personal reference frame. Your delta-V (i.e. relative difference in velocity) between your own frame and any other frame (say, that of the object against which you’re measuring your speed, like the ground) is a real thing, but it isn’t constrained by anything except the speed of light.
Changing reference frames – and thus changing your velocity relative to everything else – requires the application of force. That translates directly to acceleration. This is what makes sense to have be limited by the power output of the flight orb.
In an atmosphere, as you’ve hinted you’re working with, a maximum speed determined by maximum force the flight orb can generate makes sense; it’s balancing against air resistance. (This means, however, that modulating the shape and size of the shield should actually change that maximum airspeed, and that she should be slower in water than in air.) In space, her velocity is not limited, but how quickly she can change it would be. The more acceleration her orb can generate, the faster she can change velocities.
She is capable of the most optimum form of non-FTL acceleration, though, since she’s immune to the forces it generates on her body: she can accelerate halfway to her destination, then decelerate the other half (or, rather, accelerate in the opposite direction). She has to do this, though, or she’ll shoot right past her destination. Or smack into it like a super-speeding bullet or extinction-level asteroid.
…hah, wouldn’t that be a funny (as long as we don’t think too hard about the calamity) reason why the aliens are out to kill the orb-bearer? Some reckless teenaged alien on an orb-joyride didn’t know how to use the brakes properly and wiped out a colony world or something. So now they think the orbs are planet-busters.
Anyway, her biggest problem after speed (because if she can get sufficient acceleration, the relativistic effects will make the trip seem only a few years to her, most likely…though she’d then come to an Earth centuries in the future) is food/water. She has air, but…a few years in space is more than enough time to dehydrate and starve to death.
But even leaving THAT aside, she’s looking at an issue of navigation! Not only has she no idea where Earth is, even if she could find it in the sky, she would actually have to point herself at where it’s going to be when she gets there. I don’t know of any function of the orbs that does that.
Finally, I wonder if she can use the telepresence orb to put a hologram on Earth. Does it have a known range limit? (…and she discovered a means of using that to teleport, too, IIRC. Hmmmm…)
Considering how the rest of her orb abilities are all artificially limited by her level and which skills she’s unlocked I’d say it’s quite possible the orbs are artificially limiting her.
Especially in atmosphere, hypersonic flight requires some experience and training so you don’t want the user to do that right off the bat.
Considering that the extra Harems suggest that Sydney is in another universe I think the point is kinda moot.
Well, In an atmosphere is the only place “Hypersonic” has any meaning at all, given that the speed of sound in a near vacuum is undefined.
Or the speed of sounds is perfectly defined. And it’s zero.
Well you run into a divide-by-zero error when trying to compute a mach number, thus, undefined.
Oh jeeze, I wonder just how fast she can hit a thing with her shield up, we’ve seen that she can take Maxima’s beams without even going yellow, and that this things, presumibly OP, first strike did scratch, but didn’t penetrate.
Suggests to me, that she is actually fully capable of proper Kinetic Kill Weapon impacts. :D
Up the Flight Orb Sydney, then we can see you destroy planets by flying into them.
I would have considered her first problem after speed to be exhaustion. If she falls asleep and loses her grip on a ball, she’s done for.
Ok based on rough gestamates her terrestrial acceleration is around 3.7 4.2 G
If sydney gets up to .2 c relative, and weighs 100 pounds us, her peak terminal energy is 84064203286 MJ
Or about 20 megatons.
Fun fact: Going by the number of filled blips on Sydney’s skill tree, she is currently level 37. There might already be some points pending, with everything that has happened here. I’m betting on a level 40+ Sydney returning to Earth.
Presumably, the 4/5 points on her shield orb are for durability, hence why it isn’t totally invincible… yet. Also, the last point for flight speed was supposed to be a priority.
the last blip on that shield line could also be for the size/embigener.
But for the sake it COULD be a final blip in the shield’s durability, I think it should be where she puts her next blip first… just in case it’s durability and it saves her arse at some point in all this grinding.
I’ll point out that it would be a gradual transition from a max speed to a max acceleration regardless of speed, since the atmosphere has a steady decrease of pressure with altitude rather than an edge.
I’ll also point out that if she can get 16 Gs of acceleration out of that orb once she upgrades it enough, I really hope it’s got inertial damping built in; it’d be a shame if she blacked out or started hemorrhaging because she pulled 16 Gs in the wrong direction.
We know from the fact that her hair stays still that when it accelerates it applies it evenly to every atom in her body so g forces aren’t a thing.
The only reason acceleration normally hurts people is that it isn’t applies evenly. Your seat pushes on your back but not your front, internal organs, or blood so they get force on them only indirectly and that’s what causes problems.
It is neither a Macross Missile Massacre, nor Roboteching. She is clearly performing a Kamehameha attack.
This is the other thing that Macross was known for.
actually it looks more like she’s running a beam over a bunch of ships and then they’re exploding the Kamehameha is more or less stationary.
It’s more like this from evangalion
https://youtu.be/7HbdLjOmLmo
You’re right. That is exactly what Sydney is doing here.
Oh, sure. Xellos of the Slayers anime did that to a horde of dragons, once. Second, maybe third season (can’t remember if it was in NEXT or TRY; I should really rewatch them…). Granted, it was a flashback and he was using whatever magic he has, but same idea.
Either way, yikes! At least she doesn’t have to worry about civilian casualties? A-heh… ^^;
Yup that’s the scene with Xellos, that I first recalled.
There was also the miles wide beam cannon built into the crust of the Earth just called the ‘Grand cannon’ that did it near the ending of the zentradi invasion (1st trilogy arc)
All very cool as it was to me ‘serious’ sci-fi animation that ran an entire summer on broadcast tv (1985)
It was the first space opera that was not just aimed ad kids and after Star Wars: New Hope(1977), I certainly was itching for something in the same genre.
Ah Robotech. I still have the first 4 VCR tapes even though I no longer have a VCR.
So, is Sydney in free fall as she is grinding away at the robot? That’d be freaky for me.
in the 5th panel the PPO is orbiting her head while she’s firing it. also she has her shield up but isn’t falling to the ground
I suspect it is just a mistake, but some other forum-goers suggested on previous pages that in Sydney’s skill tree, she had a link filled in between the , and that perhaps she had discovered a way to link the two, use the powers of the PPO while flying.
Hah, whoops. I should fix that. She does start falling while not using the flight orb, but she’s like a mile up, she has some time before impact.
…unless the shield orb makes the air around her fall with her.
At high velocity, “falling” is a nearly optional item. Orbits are nothing but falling all the way around a planet, without hitting the atmosphere (or the planet) in the process.
Moreover, “Mach 4” is a variable dependent on density and other factors.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/elevation-speed-sound-air-d_1534.html
At a couple of miles up, on Earth, Mach 4 would be about 1300 meters per second. If Sydney was flying straight up and dropped the fly ball, she’d “fall” upwards for more than two minutes before she started falling (ignoring air resistance).
I’m assuming she does maintain momentum. Shielding out all those distant galaxies would be a bit much. (Mach’s Principle – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle)
Realize that she also gets vertigo immunity when she has the flight ball, so I can see her falling, with this horrified look on her face.
Sydney is like the worst fighter jet in the world. It has to stop maneuvering in order to attack. In fact, Sydney should be shown in free fall (hair floating around her head, etc.) as she launches the PPO attack, instead of how it is shown with her bangs hanging down as if she was not falling, but she is. Perhaps she can toggle between the flight orb and the PPO rapidly, but she’s still going to be falling (arcing down if her forward momentum is preserved) any time she is shooting. But she really doesn’t have a better option, because dropping the force field for any amount of time while engaged in combat would be a Darwin award moment.
Also, launch fighters? Really?
Take off every ‘ZIG’!
Yeah, her hair should be flopping around when she’s not using the flight orb. I’ll have to keep that in mind
Well, The shield would also have to have some sort of absolute dampener, otherwise the team would have been permanently deaf or dead after the first explosion on Aleri. I’m sure an alternate explanation will come along.
Sorry about being rude or pushy, but it seemed to me that it might cause a bit of canon break and a huge shield nerf. Also; the idea that the flight and shield / PPO share similar protective properties (Syds hair – independent environment etc) sorta makes sense in the fact that dynamic kinetic changes would be accounted for in ‘safe mode’) other wise the non-superhuman pilot would get beat up etc just by moving around, explosions etc
Also, the PPO is still orbiting her head as she fires it. That should be the flight orb.
actually, since she’s technically in space, her hair has no gravity affecting it so shouldn’t flop around at the moment..i think. I could be wrong
I don’t think she is in space any longer. When she realized that a trip to the moon was a lot more than she had bargained for she decided to go in guns blazing instead. When last we saw the ship it wasn’t too far above the surface of the planet. Certainly it wasn’t in orbit.
Inertia dampening should be part of her shield or else she would be dead in many situations. What if she is flying very fast towards water and would let go of her flight orb – that splash on the surface would kill her if the shield did no dampening. But that would be the same if she is standing somewhere and a big splash of water (Dam break) would rush in. Since the shield can float is should still limit the inertia and amount of force that can pass by falling / bouncing to a safe shaky level.
Actually, no. Sydney’s hair shouldn’t be flopping around whilst Shield orb is active. We know that air doesn’t pass through the shield, so the air around her inside the shield will be falling at the same rate as Sydney is.
Right on one count – all the air is moving with her, and your hair doesn’t blow around in the car just because you go from flooring the gas to coasting (or in a hybrid, even having the engine turn off).
However, she’s still close enough to the planet that gravity should be pulling her hair straight down, instead it’s hovering in place.
ah. yes. she is the worst fighter jet in existence because she cant fire, maneuver, and be nigh invincible at the same time. Mach 4 speeds, kill anything laser, and immunity to all conventional weaponry cannot the insurmountable handicap of NOT BEING ABLE TO MOVE AND SHOOT AT THE SAME TIME,
With Syndey’s ADD she probably only flew toward the moon for like 30 seconds before she got bored.
Also, her speed limit should change as she gains altitude. As the air grows less dense, she will be able to accelerate faster and to higher velocities. To complicate things further, mach 3 at 50,000 feet is much faster than mach 3 at sea level….
So I’m going to go with ADD, not an inherent speed limit, is the real problem here.
It depends on how you define mach 1. If mach 1 is the speed of sound at sea level, then mach 4 is the same no mater what. If mach 1 is just the current speed of sound, then mach 4 gets slower the higher you go.
Actually, Mach numbers are explicitly defined as the speed of sound through the medium in which the vehicle is traveling. In other words, Mach 1 is based on the altitude of the aircraft. It’s not an absolute, and never will be, because Mach has an explicit definition that’s based on the medium.
Since we don’t know at what altitude Sydney’s top speed was measured, it’s hard to make any accurate guesses about the flight orb’s actual power output.
Regardless, it’s still going to take less energy to accelerate to mach 4 at 50,000 feet than at sea level, and as she gets past 100,000 feet or so, the air basically becomes a non-issue, and her acceleration will pretty much be constant, to whatever velocity she wants.
I just realized that Sydney shouldn’t even be attempting space travel yet, since she only has access to two orbs at a time, while she needs access to three bare minimum for safe travel: Air, Shield, and Flight. These panels show just how wrong it could go, since either she dropped her shield, as it seems in P4, thus releasing all of her breathable air into LPO, or she dropped her flight as shown in P5 or P6, thus entering free-fall until she’s done exploding things, and probably inducing considerable vertigo.
In space she can easily just let go of the flight orb, refresh her air, then grab onto it again. She was shown doing this very thing like one or two panels ago even. I don’t really think that’s a problem at all.
I would say that it’s a problem while dog fighting other aircraft though – her shield has to be up at all times, so she has one hand free for moving, shooting and air refresh – two hands are definitely too limited in this situation.
I do think she missed a sterling opportunity to test the unknown orb in a new environment. And even after staring at it and hoping it was “Stellar Cartography.”
Poor Sydney, distracted by something she hates.
Also, did the PPO orb get an upgrade? ’cause that seems awfully effective against fighters belonging to a race that also uses atomic hand grenades.
The PPO is upgraded just as much as the shield that is able to easily withstand atomic handgrenades, possibly more.
Remember, the atomic handgrenade didnt break the shield and any damage recovered within seconds, the shield pretty much just REGISTERED that it got hit. It was pretty much the equivalent of maxima’s
“you made me take a step back, you ARE strong”
Am I the only one that is surprised by her immediate switch to “kill them all”? No idea if any of the ships have crews or completely automated. But wiping them all out like that seems like it would leave some psychological trauma later.
The long distance lowers the emotional impact… If she needed to snap the neck of an alien with the light hook she might actually see it’s not a video game. THEN we’d see the “I’M THE MONSTER!!” reaction that you’re alluding to.
She probably isn’t thinking of that aspect of things. She’s coming at it from the experience of video games and movies and is just thinking “enemy attacking, time to destroy it”.
We’ll see if she catches sight of a body in the wreckage and that changes for her.
I think it is necessary to point out that, for all she knows, these people just eradicated an entire planet’s population and launched something like a nuclear attack on her just because she was there.
The fact they don’t try to negotiate afterwards, clearly launching fighters after her, would probably be another reason to immediately class them in the “complete assholes, huge threat, EX-TER-MI-NA-TE” category.
…Sydney has been attacked with intent four times since the bank- Steakhouse fight, Mars warehouse -twice, and now on the Alari homeworld. What part of any of that or the “oh the humanity” police report on her attempted mugger gives anyone the vibe that she would ever even go the “I survived, so I’m a monster ” route?…
That struck me as out-of-character. I don’t think she’s seen enough training or field action to casually mow down a large group of enemies yet. At best, she may just assume that the fighters are not sentient.
I am a bit surprised, but mostly because in the last comic I said that attacking was an option for her, just not a very good one. And I stand by that assessment. Even if she finds out that she has the power to destroy the enemy that doesn’t necessarily make it a wise decision.
Success doesn’t make the plan a good one, and failure doesn’t make the plan a bad one. What is important is the validity of the plan. She had just immediately prior decided that bugging out was the way to go, and she should have stuck with that plan unless it was proven to be flawed. But instead she:
1 – Decided to bug out and avoid combat
2 – Tried to fly to the moon
3 – Got frustrated when she discovered that the moon is a long way away
4 – Abandoned her plan to bug out before having it proven to be a poor choice
5 – Went in guns blazing
Really it mostly looks like she got frustrated by not being able to fly to the moon, got mad, forgot that she had decided to just fly away rather than fight, and went in for the kill. Not a very sound series of decisions, just one knee-jerk after another.
Yeah, after the last episode I expected her to touch down somewhere on the planet at a nice safe distance from the mega space ship to find shelter and consider her situation. After all, the aliens didn’t seem to follow her once she decided to fly away. I didn’t expect her to go all kamikaze on the mother ship. Either those fighters are all glass cannons, or she could be in for a nasty shock when the dust clears.
you don’t seem to understand whats going on here at all.
these aliens come to this planet after an alarm about Sydney, they then fired on her with no warning. they’re not just going to leave Sydney alone if she runs away, they didn’t react to her little space odyssey because it was only a few minuets long and they may not have been able to track her that well.
she has no other option but to fight.
also those fighters don’t have to be glass cannons Sydney is meant to be god tier level here already. she just doesn’t have any control yet and that’s the only reason she seems weaker then max or any of the other supers.
that handicap does matter here.
there are no innocent bystanders to get hurt here and it doesn’t matter what happens to the planet. so for the first time in the comic we are being given a chance to see Sydney to go all out with no worry of what could happen.
its going to be a massacre.
Your premise has no internal consistency. If the enemy can’t track her well then flying away is still a valid option.
Her shield took the strongest hit it had ever taken, including looking all fractured and picking up a nasty glow. Things that Maxima’s shots didn’t manage to do. Sydney made the wise decision that sticking around to allow the enemy to test her shield more thoroughly was a bad idea, and she should have stuck with that decision.
Sydney had solid options other than fighting, but this is a superhero comic and so I suppose it was inevitable that fighting becomes the default option.
@DaveB: the phrase you’re looking for, for accelerating halfway there and then decelerating until you get there, is a “brachistochrone trajectory”.
brachiosaur trajectory?
Straight towards the T(x)
I think there are problems with a straightforward meaning of “immune to gravity”. Namely, the Earth is constantly orbiting the sun at about 30 km/sec, and the whole solar system is whizzing around the galactic core at about 220 km/sec, not to speak of the entire Milky Way galaxy hurtling toward the Great Attractor at nearly 1000 km/sec. With respect to the “universal reference frame” of the cosmic microwave background, the Earth is moving at 390 km/sec. In any case, it’s only gravity that drags us along with this motion, so if Sydney were really “immune to gravity” (insofar as that makes any sense in general relativity) she would be quickly left far behind; the motion is accelerated (e.g. rotational), so simply continuing with her own pre-flight inertia would not be enough to keep up.
I disagree. Inside the sphere, she could be immune to gravity, but the sphere itself would be moved by the surrounding gravity fields.
If you really want to nitpick (and I’m not one to blame you for that), you could say that everything inside the bubble is subject to a specific gravity, that of the sphere, and immune to any outside gravity field.
This is why I’m thinking that the propulsion method of the flight orb has to be something way more exotic and that it doesn’t actually generate thrust or obey inertia as we would understand it.
ahhh, but gravity is not only force acting on sydney, there is the air itself, which is like a less dense version of the ocean. and cancelling the effects of gravity is not the same as gravity repelling her, like magnets pushing each other away
@DaveB – After you mentioned the Honor Harrington books I immediately also thought of the Kris Longknife books by Mike Shepherd. Another wonderful series to read if you haven’t already. I enjoyed his take on ship to ship combat.
If you like kickass women in combat & military scifi series, try Jean Johnson’s stuff, she’s got a 5 book milSF series out that I know lots of others have also really liked, and it’s been favorably compared to the Honor Harrington stuff, Myke Cole’s stuff, Kris Longknife, and apparently military personnel like it, too, so there’s that for a recommendation. First book is A Soldier’s Duty, and there’s a related political/first contact trilogy as well.
I keep getting recommended her books but hadn’t had a chance to hunt down some reviews.
I guess she’ll finally figure out her attack abilities there haha.
Though.. i guess she’s just hoping she’ll level up and can randomly pick the right choice for getting home?
That might be what she meant by “I hate grinding.” I didn’t really understand that bit. Killing one mob and one boss mob, and now a pile of trash mobs, is hardly grinding in the traditional sense of a MMORPG.
If you could just increase your speed limitlessly by continuing to apply force in space, we would have literally no problem crossing vast distances in space. The atmosphere does apply some friction and reduces your max speed to an extent, but in space you still have a max speed.
The faster you go, the more energy is required to accelerate. 500 units of thrust has more of an impact on your acceleration when you are traveling 10km/h, than it does when you are traveling 100 km/h. Eventually, even in space, you will hit a point where your source of propulsion will generate less energy per second than it requires to increase your speed by one unit per second. Your acceleration will stall at this point, growing slower until you hit a point where even hours of propulsion will fail to have a noticeable impact on your speed.
This should apply to Sydney’s orbs as well. She would be able to go faster than Mach 4 in space, but she would not be able to achieve infinite acceleration.
Yes, her relativistic mass would increase to the point where whatever energy outlay she is limited to would be unable to accelerate further; her 16g of acceleration would eventually drop to 0, UNLESS her flying works more like an Alcubierre drive, in which case the orb could effectively move faster than light by contracting space in front of her and expanding the space behind her and she wouldn’t be exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame, and she wouldn’t experience time dilation effects either.
As far as you’re concerned, you can just increase your speed limitlessly by continuing to apply force in space, though it doesn’t look that way to anyone watching. The main issues are reaction mass and anything in front of you hitting you really, really fast. Also, there’s the issue of potentially wanting to go back and not it being in the far, unrecognizable future.
That’s not really true. Acceleration never stalls out, not even at relativistic velocities.
If you had a way to create 500 “units” of thrust continuously, with no change of mass due to fuel use, the ship would continue to accelerate at 500 units of acceleration for as long as your fuel held out.
From an outside perspective, it would appear that the rate of acceleration slows down, but from the point of view of someone on the ship, the acceleration is constant.
What’s actually happening is time dilation. As an object moves faster, time appears to slow down inside of that frame of reference. This creates the appearance of increased inertia, because the ship’s engines are also time dilated.
However, there is no line at which you can simply no longer go faster. Instead, the rate of time dilation climbs faster, and at around 90% of the speed of light, time dilation rises faster than velocity.
From the outside perspective, she’ll appear to accelerate more slowly as she goes faster, but from her own perspective, she will continue to accelerate at the same rate.
I figure that later on Sydney is going to use the light hook to use all orbs at one time. She would still have a hand free also.—- many levels later—-
Interesting theory, I like it!
We’ve seen though that they have to be in her hand; her nemesis is oven mitts. If that is a valid way though to dual-wield (well, already using 2 hands but you know what I mean), it takes the Lighthook out of commission. Completely dedicating a single orb to allow the others to activate together seems like a poor design choice.
MACROSS MISSILE MASSACRE!
Wait, if Sydney isn’t affected by gravity, then wouldn’t she get left behind by the planet in space, or even get hit by things on Earth as it rotates, since it’s gravity what pulls one down and lets us even walk? If you’re not bound by gravity at any point, wouldn’t you become a fixed point? Everything would be moving around you and eventually you’d be left off in space. I’m probably wrong about this but how would one be affected if they weren’t pulled by gravity while everything around them is?
She doesn’t have that problem because the orbs are thought-controlled, Sydney automagically assumes she’s stationary in relation to her local planetary surface–basically, the theory of object permanence, which normally we think of as “hide the cookie behind a sheet of paper, and the baby thinks it’s vanished, but the adult knows it’s still there” only it’s applied to how she relates to her surroundings.. It’s her “basic starting point assumption” from which all things she does are referenced. When she moves, it’s always in reference to the planetary surface, it’s always in relationship to the local star and planets, etc, etc. She’ll always assume (unless consciously thinking otherwise) that if she hovers with the flight orb, she’s always going to hover over where she was standing before grabbing the orb, and then she moves in relation to that point.
It isn’t just gravity that keeps up from being a fixed point, it is also our velocity. We dont really notice it, but all of humanity is all the time going at the same speed the earth, sun, galaxy, etc, is going. Even though Sydney headed “out” to the moon, she is still going the same speed in pretty much the same direction Alari is going (unless the moon was currently “behind” alari in its planetary cycle which would be pretty much the only case where that even starts to be a problems.
FYI the technical term is “exospheric.”
If you had one G acceleration, you could go anywhere in the solar system in one week. You could go to Mars in one week and you could go to Pluto in one week.
Let’s see… 1G is (rounded) 10 meters per second per second.
1 week is 604800 seconds.
So, assuming we want to slow down, we must decelerate for half of the time. This means we must actually measure 3.5 days, or 302400 seconds.
In 302,400 seconds, 1G of acceleration will get you to 3,024,000 meters per second, and you will have traveled 457,228,800,000 meters. Doubling that distance gets us 914,457,600,000 meters, or 9.14×10^11 meters.
Neptune orbits at 2.826×10^13 meters from the sun.
So no, not even close. Not by two orders of magnitude.
You could actually *reach* Neptune in 261 hours, or just under 11 days, but you’d splat into it at a speed of 9 million meters per second.
Looking at the skill tree, perhaps her flight orb is still in trainee mode? So it has a limit on maximum relative speed?
Thats what I t\hought anyway. cuz based on the diagram she has to get 5 dots before she gains acccess to another part of the flight orbs skill tree. Maybe each dot represents mach 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (respectivly) and then the next 5 dots either a, allow her to go faster than mach 5, or b represent “warp” speed :)
Just a thought here.
Also out of curiosity what does the fact that the PPO and the Flight Orb are connected mean?
We currently dont know. If it isn’t an art error, then this page would seem to indicate that it would allow her to use both the ppo and fly ball at the same time while only holding one of them.
Well a simple guess would be ‘stabilizer’ when the PPO fires (action vs reaction), or just a simple “stay on target’ assist. She does have more pips to go in both the flight and PPO category.
Some of might be ‘Particle /Plasma mass driver like related” with excessive amounts of recoil.
In relation to flight maybe effect of the PPO on shield would be ‘destruction of space junk in the way’
The double line connections, to me just screams ‘advanced usage’
I love how I managed to figure out the “duns” were “Flight of the Valkeries” on my own. I’m ashamed that I only THEN read the caption explainingwhat it was. I became so obsessed figuring out what it was supposed to be that I didn’t notice it was right there in the panel.
So is she still in space at this point floating and vacating her oxygen with the hole. Or is she free fallinging while firing?
SHe’s still in space, and the shield ring is just a heads-up display that’s doing a targetting circle so she knows where she’s aiming. The PPO is actually firing outside the still fully intact shield, conjuring the beam beyond its perimeter, so she’s perfectly safe…and yes, she’s in freefall mode.
Well that explains what she meant by grinding. If that’s the only ship, hopefully she dings soon… if not she’ll be stuck with killing tentacled proximity alarms which I’m assuming are all over if they just happen to find one where they popped in.
Silly question… is Sydney currently somehow using three orbs at once? 1. Firing the PPO, 2. Shield visible whilst firing the PPO, 3. Still floating/flying whilst shielded and firing the PPO. Can she ‘stand’ inside her own shield if she stops holding the flight orb? Or are other shenanigans at work here?
You’re conflating acceleration with speed. Think of it this way: She has a maximum bank account size of $4 million, but we don’t (yet) know how fast she can safely spend it. (9.8 Euro per second per second, easily, evidenced by the “flying in a really annoying way” But is the maximum can she really spend it at 10 Euro per second per second for safety reasons? 10 m/s^2 would be just slightly above the world’s fastest accelerating elevator, located in Shanghai. Accelerate too fast and it’s uncomfortable and obvious. Figure Syd accelerated at about that rate until she topped out because she didn’t notice Max slowly increasing speed until the end.)
Why US Dollars and Euros in the previous example? Simple: Mach and G aren’t really directly comparable: Mach requires assuming an international standard sea level atmospheric pressure of 29.92 inches of mercury (1013.25 hPa) So at mach 4, that’d be 1,372 m/s. Or 0.85 miles per second for the math on the previous page. Not even close to 7 miles per second. (Insert that bit about space being big from the Hitchhiker’s Guide) keep in mind that 1 light year is 5.879*10^12 miles. It’s why I held off commenting on the FFFFFFF- page. My thinking was “Good opportunity to systematically level up *every* orb, because leaving without a portal is doomed to failure, and it’s an empty planet with hostiles to practice the PPO on without hitting someone or something you’d care about.”
I’m waiting for when Max and Dabbler finally return and Sydney is standing on a mound of refuse laughing like a madman
And walks casually past them to the portal they’ve come back through, and says with a flat intonation,”Oh, and don’t ever leave me alone on an alien planet again.”
Can’t believe you didnt mention Starblazers. Might have been a little younger target audience than Robotech, but it had a seriously heavy serialized narrative for a show I watched as a 6 year old. And a killer theme song.
I always loved how the wave motion gun firing mechanism would go through all these Transformers-like changes and would end up as a pistol grip with a trigger. *bang!* And that’s how you fire a spinal mount canon, just like you would a pistol. lol
The orbs seem deliberately engineered to be relatively safe and simple instead of hazardous and complex. For example, there is some kind of safeguard that means the PPO’s beam cannon mode takes a second or so to activate, presumably to make it harder to accidentally blow up your house. Therefore, I think the flight orb also behaves in a similar, almost intelligent manner.
I think instead of being immune to gravity in a straightforward sense, the flight orb automatically uses a portion of the available thrust to vector the user in whatever direction achieves stationkeeping according to the source of the dominant local gravitational field, rather like a ship holding position in the open sea (nautical stationkeeping).
Under this hypothesis, when Sydney hovers near the earth’s surface, the orb applies a thrust vector equal to about 1g straight up to counteract gravity, and then a few other minor vectors to keep her from being tossed around by the wind and to keep her rotating with the planet, sun, galaxy, etc. She doesn’t need to worry about about the planet suddenly whipping out from under her (or pasting her across its surface) as it orbits the sun because her initial inertia is maintained when she grabs the orb. Indeed, it would be odd if she suddenly lost her initial inertia, since that would violate conservation of energy.
Most of the thrust used for stationkeeping will be taken up counteracting gravity. Imagine jumping straight up on a clear, windless day – you’ll be slammed straight back down, and land basically where you started, won’t you? Even if you’re (say) 5 millimeters off center due to the earth’s rotation or the moon’s location or the sun’s orbit or the galactic orbit or what have you – that’s only 5 millimeters. If you’re in the air for half a second, the lateral acceleration due to perturbations outside of gravity is easily approximated by kinematics:
d = v_1*t + 0.5*a*t^2
(v_1 = v_intiial = 0 (no initial lateral motion ascribed to outside perturbations))
d = 0 + 0.5*a*t^2
a = (2*d)/(t^2)
a = (2*(5mm))/((0.5s)^2) = (10mm)/(0.25s^2) = 40 mm/s^2 = 0.04 m/s^2
Meanwhile, earth gravity has applied a constant acceleration of 9.81 m/s^2 throughout this entire event. Thus, this practical approximation demonstrates that, when near a large body, the force of gravity is the dominant acceleration being applied to the object by natural forces, so the thrust needed for stationkeeping is largely determined by gravity.
The stationkeeping hypothesis also explains how she can handle gravity up to a certain level, but not higher (such as close fly-bys of neutron stars, as mentioned in the author’s note). Since the stationkeeping would actually require some of her available thrust in this hypothesis, it becomes impossible to maintain stationkeeping if the required stationkeeping thrust exceeds the local force of gravity, which would result in her slowly sinking into the gravity well. This also means that her max acceleration should be highest when far from a gravitational field (less stationkeeping “cost”) and lower when in a high-gravity environment (more thrust is diverted to pushing against gravity, and the stationkeeping cost goes up).
Basically, instead of messing with gravity or anti-gravity, this hypothesis treats gravity as a force and then says the flight orb can apply thrust forces to the user’s body, which are automatically adjusted to counteract undesired motion and generate desired motion.
Shouldn’t she be loosing air from opening that hole in her shield?
it’s not a hole, it’s an energy aperture, the shield opens only on the inside to allow the beam/blast out, but not on the outside to allow anything in
It doesn’t open anything, it just allows Sydney to focus her blasts, which are created on the outside
This is shaping up to be the first true test of Halo’s powers. Archon forbid her from using many of her powers on Earth, both for secrecy and for public safety, and Sydney was often afraid to fully unleash the PPO’s destructive powers. Now, in space, surrounded by clear enemies who seek her destruction, she will need every erg and ohm of destructive power she can unleash to survive.
Indeed, for the first time in a while, her ability to survive is really in question. Not only is space itself a hostile environment, but a mere foot-soldier of these aliens was able to sorely tax her shield’s capabilities. These fighters may be packing much more powerful weaponry. She cannot afford a direct hit from one of them, which means she MUST attack first, and with overwhelming force, in order to survive. Her ‘Robotech’ attack is a good start, but in that explosion, who knows how many she missed?
As I said before, her best option is to get close to that mothership. The closer to the ship she can get, the gentler any attack against her needs to be, for fear of damaging the mothership. Inside the ship would be best, if she can manage to make a hole, or find an open door.
…I don’t think that was a footsoldier.
It was NOT the same unit as the scout that Sciona stepped on, but was deposited from the Twisty Ship O’ Doom…and when we last saw it crawling over the rim of the GIANT GLOWY CRATER…it was HUGE. We know it was huge from previous perspective panels, because Sydney’s bubble was a pebble in the middle of a crater bigger than a football field, yet the skweeeebeastie (not to be mistaken for a wee beastie) appeared to be (remember, it’s in the distance behind her) the SAME size as her bubble…even when viewed from half a football field away. So it’s considerably BIGGER than Sydney n’ bubble.
So, I’m pretty sure that was a TANK dropped by the Twisty Ship O’ Doom, not a mere foot soldier.
Given she can go up to mach 4 in atmosphere I’d figure she could accelerate quite a bit faster than 1G.
High supersonic speeds means drag greater than the normal drag formula would indicate, but even that is still 0.5*air density*(mach 4)^2 *2 m^2 / 2 or over a meganewton. Enough to go at a good 1000G.
Unless her flight orb gets MUCH more efficient at higher speeds or has many tons of hidden mass (plausible) she should be able to accelerate at quite a few Gs.
She potentially could be very powerful in sense of projecting firepower. She used a orb to slice bunch ships at once. Thank you for that Robotech/Macross reference. ;) I remember the show at the same age, it was fantastic way to introduce kids to more mature Anime. I did get exposed to Space Battleship Yamato Aka Star Blazers as well.
I’m wondering how long she going be able to hang out in space until someone comes to pick her up unless her last orb is her key home. Or at least until hijacks alien starship.
Robotech reference! I love you man….
That was far and away the best thing on television when I was a kid. Beyond just the fact that it had an actual week to week story, people *died* when they fought wars. And not just nobody background extras, main hero characters like Fokker. It had actual consequences and they didn’t try to pretend otherwise or that only bad guys die and the good guys were always ok.
Try to appreciate how completely that clashed with everything else they tried to feed kids on Saturday mornings.
I feel like this is Sydney’s first real “awesome badass superhero” moment. But what a moment! I got chills.
For her next called shot to try the “Wave Motion Gun ” From Space Battle Cruiser Yamato. AKA Star Blazers.
Personally, I would have called it “The Gundam,” but I’m actually not sure which one did it first. Gundam predates Macross, but I don’t know at what point Gundam started doing the whole “massive beam blows up a bajillion mobile suits even if it misses” trope. I’m one of those plebs who has never seen anything Universal Century.