Grrl Power #658 – Round 1 Fight!
Sydney should have known better. There’s no way that dude has just the one attack. If nothing else he could swat at her. She just doesn’t appreciate what she’s up against yet, even though it’s the only thing she’s ever encountered (in the week she’s been a superhero, lol) that’s strained her shield.
Yes when Sydney shoots her beam she starts falling. She complained about that on the previous page, but she can deal with that when she’s really high up. The quickswap wouldn’t work if she was chasing someone in between buildings at relatively low altitude. At best she could angle up before swapping and try and take the shot before her arc starts dropping her to low, but she doesn’t need that stress.
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Hmmm… looks like Squidward’s head is about 10 times the diameter of Sydney’s shield in panel 3, and its total body length is about 6 times its head in panel 6, and if we estimate her shield to be about 7 ft. in diameter here, that would make Suidward about 140 yards in height, or about 128 meters. Huh. I thought he was a lot bigger than that, actually. Though I suppose Sydney doesn’t mind he’s not that big.
Depends on how far back he is. Your numbers are a minimum size, but he could be much larger based on the perspective.
True, though it looks Sydney is right in front and slightly above him so they should be about the same perspective-wise.
The inverse square law is being molested in a back alley by the size of that thing.
The inverse square law goes out the window when dealing with aliens.
I’m sure you mean the Square-Cube law? the Inverse Square law relates to gravitation, while the square-cube law relates to mass for a given increase/decrease in size.
Yep! Thanks for the correction.
Ok, one point…
Since when do impacts on the outside of the shield *move* the shield? If that happened wouldn’t Maxima punching the shield when she was testing it back in the conference room when she first revealed her orb powers have sent Sydney flying in her little energy field hamster ball through the wall and bouncing halfway across town?
It might be because she was already in free-fall when they hit rather than flying or standing on something solid.
She was only testing the shield orb in the conference and desert- no flight orb needed.
It could also be that Maxima simply just doesn’t have enough power to affect it. See previous page where shield is put in the red by a beam. This creature is apparently designed to fight someone with these powers so it makes sense it may be able to affect them in various ways.
For a non-in-universe explanation, because its funny.
Well Maxima blasted her shield when they were doing testing and she had on all that blast armor.
It did not budge then either.
Well, remember also that maximum does not have enough strength to move orbs either, as proven in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/370
The shield also did not move when the squidly did the crater blast either.. Syd was still right next to the portal entrance.
We know external forces CAN move the shield, due to the pool testing incident where she discovered the use of the air-making-orb. Simple bouyancy was able to toss her and her shield around like a beach ball. Why did that not happen when Max punched her? Who knows? Maybe the orbs can recognize that she’s standing on a solid surface at add a function to prevent movement from outside sources.
Because the shield absorbs harmful amounts of energy, the bouyancy wasn’t harmful so no absorption thus allowing the shield to be moved. Maxima punching it is a lot of harmful kinetic energy thus absorption takes place and as a safety measure to prevent being bounced into the beyond, uses that energy to anchor itself in place. The nuke/orbital strike had a stupidly high degree of harmful energy, which the shield barely absorbed and anchored itself in place so not to be blown into the stratosphere…
McKree (my name for Darth Cthulhu there) had time to scan Sydney and her shield while she was frying fighters by the bushel, and has probably worked out that directly harmful attacks like plasma streams would be blocked by the shield so is utilising non-lethal repulsor or magnetic attacks so the shield doesn’t anchor itself, unfortunately turning Sydney into a human pinball.
Possibly to disorient her for capture and/or retrieval of the orbs.
She didn’t flinch because she was standing on the ground, and she’s always at the center of the shield.
The big crater-blast didn’t make her move, because she was holding her flight orb, thus creating her fixed position. The blast radius engulfed her shield but she held her air due to the flight orb.
The buoyancy was because of physic, just as this is because of physics: she’s falling, her shield moves along with her. It gets hit, she gets moved along with the shield. hence the pinball effect.
If she’d fly straight down, she would’ve crossed the beams, rather than bounce off of them.
So either the shield orb breaks physics by being immobile when Sydney’s standing on the ground and not moving, and reacts to physics and fluid mechanics when she’s not?
Using physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, would mean the shield either generates an equal force to match any incoming force to protect the user inside it, thus negating it so it doesn’t move; or the shield would be pushed back by the interacting force, basically sending Sydney flying away (yes, she would be safe and sound inside it, but she’d still be thrown).
Every time we’ve seen the shield not move is when it was subjected to a harmful attack, such as Maxima’s attempt to break it to test its limits, or the nuke blast from McKree. The times we’ve seen it move without Sydney’s input is when a non-harmful force works against it.
Or maybe the shield orb doesn’t break physics at all. When Sydney is on the ground, what does the bottom half of the shield do? Presumably it interfaces with the surface she is standing on and thereby holds her in place. When she is airborne, or in water, then she becomes mobile unless she is using the flight orb. Before now we have never seen anything hit her solidly while in the air without the flight orb.
There was only one instance of non harmful force moving her and the shield, and that was the buoyance… BUT!!! She demonstrated that by LETTING GO of the flight orb.
So she was basically mid-air surrounded by water, so she had no way of standing her ground.
In all the other instances she was either sitting against a wall, standing on the ground, or holding the flight orb.
I was gonna say after I typed all this: “She’s not holding the flight orb now”, but then I went and take a look at the 2x version on Patreon… and she is holding it.
So it’s just back to rules of comedy.
I’m not sure where to put this…the times that we have seen the shield active while being attacked previously the full circle was partially embedded in the ground. In the conference room and on the battlefield around the block and even at the tank demonstration a large portion of her Shield was underground completing the full sphere. You saw later on where she’s reacting to the tank attack and falls down and Scoops up part of the ground which she is flying around with.
The Shield cuts through anything. Presumably she could use it to take chunks out of whatever she is attacking. But the downside is the pieces would end up inside the shield with her. we know the light hook has like a 16 ton limit. We have no idea what kind of weight she could lift if she tries to fly up with her Shield embedded in the ground taking the large lump of Earth with her. This could have done been dropped on Squidward. She really would have to watch out for the half a worm problem if she is trying to use that method to take somebody out.
She isn’t always at the center of the shield. During the Wars fight she fell against the shield and her rebreather bruised her derriere. That was when the robot knocked the roof out from under her after it learned that it could not harm her directly, so maybe there is some logic behind the sometimes-immovable-sometimes-not-so-much aspect of the force field. Maybe…
Additionally to that Oberon she also fell back against her shield wall during the final phase of the Restaurant Rumble when she blocked Vehemence’s aggro field. It could simply be the default setting is she is the centre but moves a glyph while in it and can move around it.
If her Shield is heavily anchored on the ground she can walk around within it. I imagine in that case and in the case of the tank demonstration it just means that there is more Earth inside the shield then her lifting capacity with flight. We also saw from that series though that a small amount of Earth can be carried with her while she is flying if she chunks it right as she gets to the ground. Presumably she could take chunks out of the robot this way.
Also has anyone noticed that the tendons and the arms of this creature are very similar to that robot that Sciona built?
Oh and nobody is mentioned this that I’ve seen But sent her Shield cuts through anything and she could conceivably take bites out of the robot she shouldn’t use the shield scooping power to excavate anything where she might run into a half a worm problem. Earth probably isn’t impacted too much by her cutting it into little pieces with the shield but if she were to take a chunk out of the robot and then get it to move the trunk inside the shield should stay and it probably would fall apart if she used it to dice up squidward.
Think of the shield as a molecule knife. Up until now she’s been very careful on what objects intersect with the shield. And if you think that her using it on the roof would cause a problem it actually wouldn’t because the lower half of the Shield basically makes a keystone of whatever object and it wouldn’t fall through unless it lost all structural stability.
if the shield is smart, which it looks to be, it may just conform itself to base objects.
The ‘slice of ground’ that ended up in the Shield during the anti-tank demo wasn’t a coherent piece scooped out of the ground, it was dust falling to the bottom of the spherical Shield. She shot the tank using the Beam orb while Flying, i.e. while not using the Shield. After it kicked up a lot of dust, she quickly switched from the Beam to the Shield – but not before there was already enough dust within the volume of the forming Shield to be visible when it settled.
Yeah, Sydney being bounced around while inside her force field seems to fall into the “rule of cool” rather than the “let’s at least attempt to maintain continuity” set of values.
This implies it is the force field that protects the occupant from g forces, not the propulsion system as you might expect.
Of course she doesn’t appreciate what she’s up against; she’s an arrogant fool being trained by an arrogant fool.
Seriously, what sort of military commander puts a person,who hasn’t completed boot, into action? Then blows up a bridge. Then blames everyone, but herself, for what are clearly her fuck-ups.
The kind that doesn’t want to be the only Superman to be stuck defending an entire nation of Metropolises. Maxima has to appear fallible, even when she’s not, or her status as the super-est super will push everyone else out of the limelight…and then every punk packing some powers will try to beat her. Some small percentage of them have enough power to at least come close to actually beating her, such as the Arabian dude mentioned early on and Vehemence, so she’d have to roll for a 1% chance of dying and leaving the nation defenseless, at least 100,000,000 times. She needs backup in case the lucky one-in-a-billion shows up.
Plus, Arianna wants to merchandise those orbs. Probably equally important.
To be fair- This is not a “military” outfit. It is a paramilitary police gig designed to be an anti-super measure. Realistically, I strongly doubt that any real US branch would allow a super in- for the same reason overly wealthy cannot join or stay in without locking their assets. They can’t punish someone like that. You NJP or Court Marshal a super and tick them off, where does that leave you? Can’t lock them in prison, and kicking them out is basically handing them to the enemy… Real supers would be a nightmare from a military standpoint. Something like this is almost certainly exactly what would happen with real supers- the government would hire them into an organization for ludicrous amounts of freshly printed money, in the hopes of keeping some or most other supers in check. I can only really speak for one US branch, and then only what I have personally observed. Supers =/= military.
We already see some of that with Maxima. Some of the things she has done and said would probably be considered insubordination in a non-super officer. Basically, she is part of the chain of command because she wants to be. If she ever decided she didn’t like her orders, who is going to make her obey them or punish her for disobedience? Or imagine the president was going to sign a law that Maxima REALLY didn’t like – say something she feels to be detrimental to women’s rights? I can see it now:
Maxima: “Mr. President, I would SERIOUSLY request you to reconsider signing this law. *cracks knuckles* I don’t think you have considered all the consequences. *crack!*”
President: “Ulp!”
I can see her thinking/fantasizing about that, but never actually doing it.
Threatening the president? Nah. Max believes in the rule of law.
If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have joined the military and submitted to the chain of command.
(Also, the mere fact she exists is kinda a deterrent for some of that stuff.)
She may have flaws, and even do some questionable things in the heat of battle/pursuit, but doing that would basically leave her as a supervillain. Not the story Dave’s telling.
Not supervillain- more superantihero.
ARCHON may be more police slash security than military (although it does seem para-military, like the National and Coast Guards), butt Maxi is military, and ARCHON is set up to resemble a branch of the military
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/358 Panel 8
Maxima says ARCSwat is a new branch of the military. A domestic military police force to be precise.
Yes, Archon is a walking, talking violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Yes and no.
As Ariana points out, the Posse Comitatus Act specifically only names the Army and Air Force, while the Navy has internal guidelines that function in a similar manner.
Similar to the National Guard, ARCHON does not, and quite honestly, should not have such restrictions.
The National Guard has the loophole of being nominally under state control. Archon cannot claim that same distinction.
But at least they are not a violation of the Possum Comatose Act.
I second that exclamation.
A commander who was using the personnel immediately available to her at the time, including the rookie. She would have been remiss to abandon the untrained rookie who has the ability to transport the ENTIRE team at Mach 4 in pursuit of a hostile party.
Yes, Maxima hit the bridge due to a miscalculation of Sciona’s aerial agility, anyone could have done that, and yes, she blames Sciona for that impact, but she also stopped long enough to perform an emergency repair to prevent the bridge from collapsing.
As for accepting the blame from the bridge damage… when has she had the time to admit it to ARC?Given she fell through a rip in space (and possibly time and dimensions) twice, and has missing personnel to recover (Sydney from the Alari Homeworld, and finding and digging up Achilles).
Umm, Maxi had the time to accept blame when she told her team that it was damaged, rather than put the entire blame on Sci
And risk getting called back by Ariana for disciplinary action during an operation. A military trained person would wait til after the operation is over before filing a report on it, as the threat of disciplinary action could have a psychological effect on the team. And we all agree that Maxima is military trained.
And Guesticus, I know you have a boner for Sciona and can’t see her doing any wrong.
Called back by Ariana? Huh? In what alternate universe does a civilian lawyer and head of PR get to issue orders to a commissioned field commander? None, that’s which universe.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads the comments that I rarely agree with Guesticus. But in regards to the bridge incident I am in complete agreement with her. Maxima damaged the bridge due to a combination of overconfidence and incompetence and in her first communication to her team she placed the blame fully on Sciona for the damage to the bridge. It was Maxima’s own lack of good judgement which endangered the civilians on the bridge, not Sciona.
So I got the wrong person being the commander, you didn’t need to be a dick about it. And you’re wrong about a civilian lawyer not being able to issue orders, if that lawyer is also a politician.
Civilian control of the military is a doctrine in military and political science that places ultimate responsibility for a country’s strategic decision-making in the hands of the civilian political leadership, rather than professional military officers. The reverse situation, where professional military officers control national politics, is called a military dictatorship.
So this universe.
You ask me not to be a dick about pointing out your error, and then you go through the most convoluted exercise in finding an exception that you possibly could just to try to make me look wrong. That’s being a dick.
First, Ariana is not a politician.
Second, the vocation of a politician who is in one of the very few civilian positions allowed to issue orders to armed forces is irrelevant.
Third, if you can’t take having your errors pointed out you may want to simply reconsider posting entirely. Because snowflakes like you melt when they take a little heat.
Have repeatedly said that Sci is a nasty piece of work, show me just once ever said she can do no wrong? She does wrong all the fucking time!!
During her report to her team, all she needed say was “The Bridge has been damaged! Get here NOW!!” instead of her actual report “Sci damaged the bridge! Get here as soon as you can. Going in pursuit!!”
And you defend her when she does.
I also remember what you were like in the comment section of YAFGC, where you would regularly try to bully and cajole people into seeing your way and being very aggressively vocal when the artist and writer of that comic pulled a twist that you didn’t like to such a point Rob called you on it and you had a hissy fit and left.
Didn’t happen, never bullied anyone or tried force views on anyone, simply didn’t like The Cad and would keep calling him that, by the way, never left
Maybe should get your facts straight next time
I was there, I saw the post. I remember Rich getting really snarky that you would refuse to call the characters by their names, which you’re doing in this one by the way,
And you pouted that you had been driven away from other comics before. And you left.
Quite a few people were happy that you had gone incidentally.
But then again, you could never accept being proved wrong on that comic either.
Umm, you do know that The Cad’s full name is ‘Cadugan’, right? ‘Cad’ is his name, just like ‘Sci’ and ‘Maxi’ (will admit about SmugD though, although a minor few have also started calling him that)
And have always admitted to being wrong, if it has been proven
One thing have never done, is start a personal attack against anyone
That is a fiction.
Note that it has to be proven, not just someone saying so
Wait, who is Rob? The Creator of YAFGC is named ‘Rich’
Technically, Maxima was not wrong that Sciona was the one to damage the bridge. Maxima specifically took the shot at her because there was water beneath her and she calculated there would be no collateral damage. She was not aware that Sciona could deflect her shot, and had no reason to believe otherwise. In fact, she was specifically trying to stop Sciona from getting to the bridge. Sciona was the one who deflected the shot into the bridge. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2811
It was Maxi’s kill-shot that damaged the bridge
And, again, Maxi didn’t have to say who hit the bridge in her report to her team, simply that the bridge had been hit and the team needed to be there now!
Max’s kill-shot damaged the bridge *because Sciona deflected it towards the bridge*. So Sciona is the one who hit the bridge. Besides, what Max said was “Sciona hit a bridge as a diversion”. She clearly believes that Sciona hit it intentionally, so it’s not like she was trying to deflect blame. And knowing what we do about Sciona, Max is probably right, and even if it turns out she’s not, one can hardly blame her for making that assumption.
That is a huge stretch. Sciona only barely deflected Maxima’s shot, and from both the context and I believe the author’s notes it was pretty clear that it was an act of desperation. Sciona didn’t in any way aim the shot at the bridge, and so placing the blame on Sciona for the damage to the bridge is just as invalid as would be placing the blame on Superman for anyone struck by a bullet ricocheting off of his invulnerable chest. It is the person who fired the shot who is responsible for any damage done by that shot. This is the entire reason Maxima gave her little “look at what is behind your target, and assume that you’re going to miss and hit that instead” speech to Sydney.
to be fair, her suite of powers are waaay to useful for them to be sticking her in boot camp for six to 8 weeks, and the threats they face are way way above what a soldier, or cop faces, Teaching rote memorization and drills as they do in the Army does not lend itself to fighting magic, supers, aliens and extradimensional beings
I had this thought.
Does Sydney need to be physically holding an Orb with her hand for it to work or does the Orb just need to be in contact with her skin for it to work?
If the second path is correct, it could lead to some interesting and funny situations.
Actually, she’s already tried that. It didn’t work. See:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/589
What VGer47 said. Only her hands no place else. And she can’t cup two in one hand so that doesn’t work either. But what if someone else could? Can anyone use them or are they set only for Sydney’s body?
They believe no one else can use them. We are pretty sure that the lady who gets powers from touching other people can also use them while in contact with Sydney, but no one in universe has figured that out yet
Varia, the Aztec.
Vahriah, the Boston Ahztec
Man, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Sydney launch into a sweariloquy.
It’s nice to be reminded that not *all* of her superpowers were granted by magic space balls. :)
Squidward has a rebound shield? Play with splash damage Sydney concussive blast should ignore the shield barrier
Not a rebound shield, a deflector array
Funny, I often find myself in this position in modern RPGs/MMOs. You get to that point where advancement is caught between low level underpowered mobs that barely give any loot/xp and are just a grind with no challenge or the super high elite level GODBOSSSES that you can’t defeat without an army of likeminded players and five to twenty hours of free time.
Muy malo para jugadores solistas. :(
This has nothing to do with the comic at all, it’s just I finished making something of my own. I titled it, “Never Say I’m Not Lucky”. It’s here on my DeviantArt.
LOL, just saw this. You’re a regular Gladstone Gander or Teel Brown now!
Um… when did Sydney last eat? Last use the restroom? She’s still on her period, right? Also how long ago did she take her meds?
The inside of that shield is going to have some waste she can’t do anything about kinda quickly. Maybe that’s what the brown orb is for!
I kinda lumped those together as ‘stamina’, as she can’t keep this up much longer.
There’s probably a term for it but right now she has no ‘landing gear’.
No way to get to anywhere she can drop shields, use the bathroom and nap.
Good thing for them that they aren’t taking sanity hits like in a Lovecraft scenario when such entities are just so mind blowing people tend to start losing their minds. Maybe her energy shield is also doing that.
You can’t go crazy, if you are already half way there :P
By “doing that” I meant protecting her mind from the radiations of such things can can degenerate human neural pathways or cause lethal mutations of them.
By “doing that” I mean the shield may protect her from any radiations that could degenerate your neural synapses causing mental break down.
Odd random thought:
On a previous page I put forth the theory that these aliens could have been Builder class *don’t declare war or intent, but regard all other life like animals so just strip the area and build on it*,
but there is another theory, based on how this squid guy was just standing there watching until Sydney came down to fight, and when the scout alerted they sent down just one guy, only sending fodder drones relative to him *usually your weapons are stronger than your people*, so a bit odd unless…
Tournament Fighters: a really rare, and for good reason as its an insane concept. But super powerful aliens who decide to hold tournaments against each other on random planets *or chosen based on specific point system criteria for their contests* and fight each other (usually one on one), that way their insane power levels can ruin that planet instead of one of their own.
Basically, what if Sydney due to her orbs was mistaken by the scout as a contestant so another individual in the galactic tournament of power (or whatever) was sent to this “chosen arena”.
-also as a note: I still think taking Sciona’s word that this was a total genocide is a tad silly, as I doubt she can sense every drop of blood on an entire planet, although from above everything looked pretty messed up, but not in a deliberately aimed sort of way; hence the tournament idea coming to me, like the unfortunate locals just happened to be in the area of the blasts which weren’t aimed for either the intent to invade or clear away land to build on.
That’s… Actually, that’s a really cool idea! I kinda doubt that’s what DaveB has in store for us, but it would certainly explain why they simply let her fly away. Running away is a forfeit (is that the right word?)
+
Okay, that’s two webics to say “Roll for initiative”, any others?
where’s “vermillon”, Sydney?