Grrl Power #670 – Orbital bombardment obstacle course
Sydney’s speed upgrade was significant. She didn’t go from mach 4 to 5. I’ll leave the actual number for a fun reveal later when she challenges Maxima to a race or something.
Okay, it’s mach 16. I didn’t want to wait to tell you. She went from 4 to 16. It’s really fucking fast. Honestly it’s too fast for Sydney, because she may not have the reflexes she would need to avoid things like planes, buildings, other supers. Not an issue on this world so much, but still, it means she can circumnavigate the Earth (let’s assume this planet is within 10% of the same size) in about 12 minutes… assuming I did the math right. Historically I haven’t been great with that. But you can see how it might be a problem for her resolving something on the horizon and reacting to it before she’s on top of it, (or blowing through it) and near misses don’t count when you have the sort of wake she would generate.
Edit: NOPE! I screwed up the math as per usual. It would take her roughly 2 hours to circumnavigate the globe, not 12 minutes. Gah.
Honestly, come to think of it, mach 4 is a lot faster than she should be traveling, even with her map of air traffic.
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Upper Management to all MechaChulthu : Bounty for LFBD is now at 30days paid leave and one week unrestricted feeding at Captains personal trough.
(LFBD- little f***ING ball o death)
I like that.
Swanky!
*Addendum: Cluthu-Arianna has proposed a Triple bounty on successful conversion to THE ALMIGHTY CTHULHUIAN CAUSE
+1
Also Maxim 45: “The size of the combat bonus is inversely proportional to the likelihood of surviving to collect it.”
LFBD and Halo both have four letters.
Nice symmetry. Just saying…
Yes! Symmetry achieved!
For my next trick, Super Sydneytry!
(All puns are temporarily suspended until Luane has her braces adjusted.)
Addendum: All future references to the LFBD are to be filed as LFBD. Please stop trying to find language that we normally use for discussion of what we are doing to things in it’s presence as rumors of it’s ability to out language us is already confirmed.
The secondary powers of the orbs are quite impressive – taking a turn like this at mach 16 should’ve liquified her.
Because the fly orb has its own gravitational force, it makes perfect sense that Sydney would not be affected by g-forces on sharp turns at high speed. It’s not exactly a secondary power necessarily. The reason she can fly might be BECAUSE the fly orb has its own gravitational force. That might be the primary power :).
The secondary power we know about, though, is that it cancels out vertigo (and I’m guessing it also speeds up her reaction time while flying at fast speeds).
I suppose it MUST speed up her reactions, since she just noticed the light from an explosion she wasn’t facing, and still had time to turn around and dodge it at MACH 16.
I have to ask – Is anyone else seeing:
ef oh ar cee ee spelled instead as Ach oh ar es ee??? I’m seeing this and other substitutions all over the place. Has my confuser got a virus?!?
Liquified? Are you by any chance Suzie News? Refer you to the mini comic on page #172.
She’s a Spaceship. The orbs give her similar abilities to that of a space craft meant to traverse Space, since the user of the orbs isn’t exactly a spaceship themselves its possible the leveling is a way to familiarize the user with the features and effects.
Idk for sure since I’m not the author obvs but like, it was mentioned on a previous page in conversation between Max and Sydney on page 542.
https://www.gaiaonline.com/gaiaevent/engine/gamelanding/kindred_origin
So I’ve basically been going off the assumption she’s a one man interstellar space exploring ship. and while she SEEMS overpowered, the drawbacks lay in how her abilities aren’t exactly useful for close or non-lethal combat. Her usefulness to the team on Earth is mainly civilian evac, tactics and shielding.
That’ll teach me to double check my links… (can’t edit comments ohno)
https://i1149.photobucket.com/albums/o587/0mnicrex/page%20542_zpstnthyrwx.png
I have long suspected that theory is wrong.
A race that can program on a level that creates the orbs could make a much better spaceship. For example, one without artificial limiters on its functionality.
No, the orbs are dangerous because they are an immoral alien game. A game that literally turns the wielder into the dangerous protagonist, and everyone else into pesky NPCs and experience fodder. Why else habe the customizable level-up system? The restriction that they can only be used by hands? We’ve been running on the assumption that they were designed by a species with enough hands to use them all at once, but then why have the hands-only clause at all? No, to me it seems like the hands-only restriction is a deliberate limitation to add a tactical element to the “game”.
These orbs are sinister. They were created by something so out of touch with humanity that they treat the eradication of other races as ‘a pretty good way to level grind’. If they allow the wielder to function as a spaceship, it’s only to expand the user’s options for where to go in this devastating “open universe game” in which everyone who isn’t playing is potential exp fodder.
Nice.
Very, VERY scary.
But NICE.
I still think my idea of a Training Tutorial is better than the idea that the orbs are literally a game with level ups. Each upgrade chance seems to come as soon as Sydney masters the previously chosen upgrade by using it in combat at least once.
Didn’t level up after using her rapid fire upgrade repeatedly though. And that still does not follow the course of a training program, which would successively unlock higher functions of each orb as lower functions are mastered. With this you could master a PPO ability and upgrade flight, which makes no sense from the training perspective.
Proposed this theory myself some pages back. That they feel like the toys of very powerful and bored entities that would think of using artificial limiters and treat reality as a game.
Also, that monster is gripping his head, clearly still alive. I guess the brain was located on a diferent floor.
Hmm,
past a certain size a central nervous system becomes more a hindrance than it would be otherwise. Distributed intelligence, server based, or Mind and body are one types might work, and make the idea if a head shot nearly impossible, requiring literally being cut to pieces to actually kill, and even then some parts may still crawl off to regrow later.
That sounds like it’s the case here. Remember, Squidward didn’t stop fighting until he was in pieces on the ground.
We don’t know that, Squiddly could have stopped wriggling long before, butt Sydney was in a ‘mode’ and simply didn’t stop
That would be just like her, agreed, but we did see Squiddy keep on fighting with large chunks of its body (and head!) missing.
No we didn’t, we only saw one leg missing and cuts all over its body
Actually, I should have said, it kept fighting with a large chunk of its head missing, so it’s unlikely this will stop Cyclops.
Yeah, worms can be hard to kill. Hunting them is great way to get a reputation though.
https://thezombieknight.blogspot.com
It occurs to me, She’s still rated as a power 6 “Ultra” in the character sheet is that base or fully specd out? Does it take into account her recent upgrades? If not has she increased in power enough to go up a level (or more)?
Also mach 16 is a shade under 5.5 Km/s. To put that into perspective, she’s flying almost 3 times the velocity of HV anti-tank shells. Assuming that she has average human reaction time (250 miliseconds) with no upgrades, she’ll cover over 1.3 Km in the time it takes for her to see and react to something.
Assuming it takes a second or so to say a drawn out “Baaaaank”…those are some huge fu**ing fire balls
I’m sure the orbs have some sort of reflex-enhancing perk… somewhere.
…
Yeah. Sydney is never going to find that one.
Since the fastest bullets can travel 2600 feet per second (1800 mph), and since Mach 1 is 768 mph, Sydney was already faster than a speeding bullet :).
She’s not quite as fast as a space shuttle while in take-off and re-entry though, which goes at roughly Mach 25 (almost). Definitely not faster than the Apollo was when getting to the moon (24,000 mph, or Mach 31.25-ish). Although now she has that new line of dots open, so… we might be seeing a whole new level of speed that can’t be gauged in just multiples of speed of sound. :)
It’s time to get worried when those wake-ripples are light instead of water…..
At some point it’ll be dangerous for her to fly in an atmosphere because she’d just fuse air in front of her shield and leave plasma wakes behind.
She must be pretty close to that point already. The Shuttle produced a plasma trail on re-entry, with the leading surfaces hitting 1600°C from pushing through the relatively-thin upper atmosphere at Mach 25. Sydney isn’t going quite that fast, but she’s doing it in the much denser air at sea-level, and she’s not slowing down.
“2600 feet per second”
3000f/s, have been made.
I believe you are correct.
The bio still shows that two orbs are unknown. With the teleport, PPO add-on, and now ludicrous speed… She prolly went up a level or two.
Only that reddish orb with the white cloud in it is still completely unknown now.
Didn’t we learn that one of them had a life-support function or something? (Too tired to go lookie right now)
Right. I had a stupid. Her character-card right there on the side of this page says the green one “Makes air?”
I had a stupid. The character-card that is *right freaking there* says the green one “Makes air?”
So that’s half escape-velocity on Earth. What’s the gravitation where she is now?
Apparently somewhere between 90% and 110% of Earth.
You don’t need to reach escape velocity to escape a planet’s gravity when you are using localized Gravity to fly. She is creating a personal gravity field, which while it clearly operates in a relative to planet capacity *so she isn’t thrown off the planet as a separate body*, it allows for a relative distance/relation with the planet. In other words as she flies her hair is always pointed towards her feet regardless of her angle.
She can just negate the planet’s pull as her speed is an absolute value rather than a thrust against gravitational pull.
You only need escape velocity if you are attempting a straight-up direct path, like the space rockets
It´s more of a push thing – If you want to push a object out of earth gravity you need to accelerate it to escape velocity or beyond. Then it will escape the gravitational pull gradually slowing down but always staying above 0 velocity. If you can accelerate indefinitley/keep your velocity constant you don´t need to “reach” that velocity.
dang, exponential upgrades? heckin sweet.
1×1 = Mach 1 * 1234.8 kph = 1234.8 kph
2×2 = Mach 2 * 1234.8 kph = 2469.6 kph
2×2 = Mach 4 * 1234.8 kph = 4939.2 kph
4×4 = Mach 16 * 1234.8 kph = 19756.8 kph
16×16 = Mach 256 * 1234.8 kph = 316108.8 kph
256×256 = Mach 65536 * 1234.8 kph = 80,923,852.8 kph or about 0.075c
65536×65536 = Mach 4,294,967,296 * 1234.8 kph = 53,034,425,617,100.8 kph or about 4910c
Hmmmmm
First “2×2” should be “1+1” – proofreading skills are stinking today…
Mach is not an absolute speed it depends of the altitude for exammple the fastest commercial airliner ( until 2003 ) the concorde have a max speed of 2 369 km/h ( mach 2.23 at 18 000 m ) but these speed at sea level is mach 1,94.
Mach is a relative speed for comparaison the concorde as the speed of a rifle bulet about 660 m/s
I believe the Dreadnought novel series deals with this, but the way to avoid Earth’s aircraft but still travel around the globe with high speed flight capabilities is to find a higher altitude that doesn’t have anything that needs to be protected from the shockwave generated from that flight, then traveling along that path using computer guided flight navigation to ensure that you don’t go offcourse by thousands of miles.
MACH 16? Someone mentioned that banking at that speed would liquify her but… could those explosions be the result of her moving that fast?
It wouldn’t liquefy her. Her fly orb has its own gravitational force exerted on Sydney (it’s why Sydney’s hair doesn’t go flopping around when she’s upside-down or sideways), so it also negates any g-forces exerted on Sydney.
It seems to me that, in addition, the shield orb probably shields against g-forces as well, which is why the people in the shield bubble with her when testing Sydney’s use as a transport (Gwen, Dabbler, and Harem) were not succumbing to g-forces.
Presumably the Fly Orb affects everything inside the shield (Note that the Fly Orb and Shield orb have the direct connection link selected in the Skill Tree, and that’s probably what that link does) and when only gravity (or the “Gravity like” effect of the flight orb) is affecting a closed system, no forces are felt within that system, thus no G-forces within the shield while the fly orb is in effect.
Agreed. The very abrupt jump from Mach 4 to Mach 16 didn’t squish her, so I think a sharp bank or even quick 180 isn’t going to hurt her either.
My bad, it’s the Flight and PPO orbs that have the direct link active, but the Shield and Flight orb have their inner “not connected directly to the orbs” upgrades picked.
maybe that’s what the pip between them is all about – Kinetic damping/absorption/control/maybe storage and release?.- very similar to the powers that Anvil has.
We have seen both kinds of effects so far.
Nope. Those are from the aliens shooting at her. I really don’t understand how you came to that conclusion. The explosions are appearing in front of her, at a distance where she can dodge them.
“Honestly, come to think of it, mach 4 is a lot faster than she should be traveling, even with her map of air traffic.”
Given that the fastest manned jets on the planet have a upper Mach speed of Mach 6.8, it’s still within the realm of believabilty for Sydney to be able to handle Mach 4 with reflexes. Mach 16…. well… if she can handle that, one can assume that the Fly orb, in addition to cancelling vertigo, also speeds up the user’s reaction time for navigation.
Although Sydney can still mess that up by not looking where she’s going, like she did with the sign :).
It seems likely to me that she can in fact operate at that kind of speed. She noticed the glow from the explosion, banked at Mach 16 to avoid it while it was still expanding and she was REALLY close, and is now playing dodgeball with a massive series of explosions. And they’re not super far apart, either, based on the sizes of the orb trails between them. Someone up on that ship is probably mashing the “fire” button pretty fast trying to catch Sydney in a blast, and she’s still able to bank away from the first one and perform very tight turns at very high speed. Based on the behavior shown on this page, I think faster reflexes are probably a secondary power proportional to the first one. (Note that Sydney has very fast reflexes already, possibly a result of having four flight points put in already?)
The main issue I’m concerned about, whether or not Sydney gets enhanced reflexes, is whether or not she can stay focused at those speeds.
Serpentine… got me thinking of Metalocalypse! Brutal!
It’s actually a line from this movie…
https://youtu.be/A2_w-QCWpS0
… it’s The In-Laws
Serpentine is a fairly well known evasive maneuver. Trying to give a specific movie all of the credit seems kind of absurd.
Serpentine is fairly well known as an absurd evasive maneuver. It is noticeably absent from the tactical arsenal of soldiers and policemen because it gives no advantage over just sprinting for/diving into the nearest available cover. The In-Laws gets the credit because, I suppose, it was the first film to give it a specific name.
No, Serpentine is not an absurd evasive manoeuvre, what they did in “The In-Laws” was beyond absurd: Arkin managed to get back to the car safely, Faulke shouted “Serpentine!” so Arkin ran back to the corpse just so he could run five times as far to get back to the car doing the Serpentine
About time for Halo to do a Trench Run on the Death Screw (Put that ship next to the death star, and you would have a nice emoji for “Screw-Ball”) like the flag on the tail of the strange Flower Critter Daffy Duck gets turned into near the end of “Duck Amok”
Preferably BEFORE they decide to turn the whole planet into an ocean of lava. Which I bet they can do if they get despeerate enough. That ship may be the only safe(ish) place for Sydney. Unless they activate the self-destruct…
Well really she’d be past the horizon so fast that those keiju or whatever wouldn’t have an angle to hit her. Must be shot from that space ship or another third party to set off that many explosions.
My guess is the spaceship noticed the Kaiju aren’t cutting it and is trying orbital bombardment.
it even says when you hover over the picture “orbital bombardment obstacle course”
If Halo travels at a speed that will hurt her body, I wonder at what point the shield will snap on automatically, like the navigation deflector on starfleet starships?
It probably will not, since the shield comes from a different orb.
So, the flight speed upgrade chain works exponentially. Good to know. Going from Mach speeds to space travel makes a bit more sense now, although it makes me slightly frustrated thinking about what the first two speed settings must have been. If we assume that each speed upgrade was the previous max speed squared, then the upgrades must have been:
Rank 5: Mach 16
Rank 4: Mach 4
Rank 3: Mach 2
Rank 2: Mach 1.414213562
Rank 1: Mach 1.189207115
It could be a simple x4 multiplier:
Rank 5: Mach 16
Rank 4: Mach 4
Rank 3: Mach 1
Rank 2: Mach 0.25
Rank 1: Mach 0.0625
That’s a lot more reasonable than a full on multiple of the previous rank, for sure.
Maybe it’s 2/3 speed of sound times x! (factoral)
2/3 Mach times 1! = 2/3 Mach (2/3*1)
2/3 Mach times 2! = 1.333 Mach (2/3*1*2)
2/3 Mach times 3! = 4 Mach (2/3*1*2*3)
2/3 Mach times 4! = 16 Mach (2/3*1*2*3*4)
2/3 Mach times 5! = 80 Mach (2/3*1*2*3*4*5)
2/3 Mach times 6! = 480 Mach (2/3*1*2*3*4*5*6)
If you square a quantity with units you have to square the units too. Squaring a length of 2 inches gets you 4 square inches, an area, not a length. Likewise you can’t square a speed and get a speed.
I know that. I just didn’t care about that annoying detail when typing my comment because everybody would understand what I meant, and carefully phrasing the comment to account for that would have been more effort than it was worth.
I wasn’t writing a formula. This isn’t a physics assignment. It really doesn’t matter.
You are correct. I hope that fact makes you happy, because otherwise we have both completely wasted our time.
Sorry, I meant no offense. My real point being that ignoring the units means the “squared” value ends up being arbitrary based on the units you use. Mach 4 = 340.29 m/s, but if you square both of those ignoring the units, you get Mach 16 and 115797.2841 m/s, which aren’t equal.
And you probably knew that too, but maybe not everyone does.
Once she manages to get back home Archon will need to discuss their future as a delivery service. Harem can get any package up to 50 lbs to any location (that she knows) instantly. Sydney has a lifting capacity up to 16 tons and can get it anywhere on Earth in about an hour.
Now that I think of it, she can lift 16 tons off the ground. We don’t know if can get herself off the ground while supporting that weight. And if she needs the shield bubble to protect herself during hyper-flight, then it drops to whatever the size and weight limit of the flight/shield combo is.
Troop drop/recognition/field analisis transport are more adecuate.
I post this at the wrong place. XD
If she lifts 16 tons what does she get?
Another day older and deeper in debt?
Arianna, don’t you stop her, ’cause she’s got to go!
At 7 orbs strong, she’s the Mighty Halo!
Ariana, don’t you stop her, cause she has to go
She owes three shifts to the comic book store
Hey, look at it on the plus side. It may take her two hours to circumnavigate the globe, but she can be anywhere in the US within 5 minutes.
As long as you don’t care too much about how messed up things get along the way :D
Yes she’ll have to be really careful from now on while flying on Earth. Imagine what the shockwave in panel 3 could do to a forest, or farmland, or worst of all, a large city!
People keep saying that her orb generates it’s own gravity and that would keep her from liquifying. They are incorrect. It’s is inertia that would liquefy her organs. Not gravity. We use g’s to measure force not to show what force is acting.
If the forces are gravitational, every particle is experiencing the same force so there are no inertial effects. From Halo’s point of view, she’s in free-fall relative to the flight path (not sure if Halo is feeling the planets gravity field when flying). Now if Halo was sitting on the bottom of a spherical shell and the shell accelerated to Mach 16 in fractional seconds, then yes she would be a jellied smear on the inside of the rigid shell.
What they are saying is that the orb is shielding her from external gravitational forces and the relativistic inertia generated thereby. In essence, everything inside the orb is maintaining perfect relativistic inertia to each other – a sort of inertial stasis, if you will. Only way to do that is to maintain some kind of perfect gravitational relationship to each other and to cancel out all external gravitational attraction.
Or, less concretely stated…
If they can rapid-fire that, it looks like they may have been pulling their (Falcon) punches after all. Is the real threat on its way, now that they figured out her pattern?
Hmm. Just a thought, but the sky we’re looking at in these pages does not look like the Milkyway. That bright dense patch of stars has way too much of an arc. Artistic license? Because if Syd is in a completely different galaxy no amount of speed upgrades is going to get here anywhere. Makes me think she won’t be getting back to earth on her own.
think about it from their point of view
they just lost two of their best generals/soldiers
to a fruit fly that can move 16 times faster than the speed of sound.
and it’s bullet proof, and can survive a tactical nuke
and it shoots plasma that’s as hot as a star.
The Question is why don’t they cut their losses and get as far away as possible?
You would also want to add some time for altitude… each kilometer you go up adds two to your diameter and roughly six and a quarter to your circumference. hmm.. okay, when you are starting with roughly 40,000 kilometers, adding another 13 or so for flying 2 kilometers above the surface it doesn’t mean much… It was bigger before I did the math…
They seemed to recognize her orbs and instantly panicked. Perhaps they have met the Orb Builders before and now their greatest fear is that Sydney gets to tell them they took a shot at her. So, running would only ensure THEIR homeworld could be the next ot be exterminated.
Who ever said those we’re their best? Maybe they were just their version of grunts on sentry duty
I’m still guessing that the final orb is medical in some fashion.
We fans would never forgive Dave if it were a Deus ex machina.
& I am thinking no spaceship is complete without navigation, while an upgraded life support orb (green) might have medical functions.
I thinking about the Lighthook, since she can lift 16 tons with it, would an upgrade be 16*16=256.256 tons,even the Hulk can’t lift that!!?? Only Superman, can the Silver Age Superman, could move an entire planet.
Heh, if Sydney keeps upgrading like this, she’ll BE Silver Age Superman – well, Supergeek in her case. Or Supernerd?
My understanding of the Hulk is that his strength is actually unlimited. He gets stronger as he gets angrier, and there’s no limit given to that.
Way back in secret Wars Hulk was shown lifting a mountain range ( listed at 150 billion tons) to keep it from crushing the heroes with them. On top of that he’s been shown to fight all sorts of cosmic beings
Now Hulk vs Doomsday?
Just a thought, since arriving on the planet, Sidney has been using the orbs pretty much constantly. Do we know for certain that they’re not going to run out of power at some point?
There should be a warning when they near their limits.
I was expecting Flight or Shield or PPO to get warm as a first warning,
hot as a second warning.
When she activated MAXIMUM SPEED on the flight orb, was that an audible ‘bip’
or merely for the benefit of the readers?
If it were audible, we might hear the orbs speak!!
(In an alien language which sounds something like Dutch in reverse)
“Warning…14% power remains. Weapons offline. Speed 3, 4 and 5 not available. Shield 42%. Shut down all orbs at your earliest opportunity.”
The Shield Orb DID give a ‘Failure Imminent’ effect when she tanked that first shot for the team and it took a few seconds to recharge. The orbs DO power down when Sydney sleeps and they did take a few seconds to power up when she first opened Mr. Tubey.
As to their potential limits, Sydney did say using the PPO was like ‘holding a star’. Can she burn them out/overload them? Probably, but I’m thinking that’s ZPM-level energy expenditures. (as in overloading an Orb would probably crack a planet in half… at a minimum. )
I doubt they have any limit on them that is not self imposed – they seem to work by a deep code in the universe (remember Krona / Nr. 506). The fact that you can “hack” reality would mean energy is just a state you can manipulate if your understanding/access is good enough. Maybe that universe is a simulation and the orbs are just cheats / debugging access for the developer…
Adding cause someone has to. She sang this last time she tip top speed, now it’s even more appropriate…
If she’s at mach 16, that’s about 5.3 meters per second, if reaction time is 2 seconds minimum, she needs to fly at an altitude of at least 9 meters for a 2 second horizon, 35 meters for a 4 second horizon, and about 140 meters for a reasonable 8 second horizon. She’d also need to be able to resolve obstacles at 42 km in order to be able to react.
If she weighs approximately 100 lbs, that gives about 632 MJ of kinetic energy at mach 16, roughly 289 pounds of TNT.
Also side note, since KE scales linearly with mass, that means that any object traveling at mach 16 has a KE equivalent to approximately 2.89 times their mass in TNT.
you forgot to convert from kilometers to meters. it is about 5,300 meters per second
Mmm, I didn’t forget to convert buuuuut… I meant kilometers and… forgot to write kilo there.
An easy way to remember is: “Anything moving at Mach 3 is worth it’s weight in BLAM.”
That is to say: a 1 kg object moving at 3 km/sec has about same energy as 1 kg of TNT (~4 MJ).
KE scales linearly with mass, but as the square of velocity (2x speed = 4x BLAM), so our ~50 kg protagonist at Mach 16 would hit with about 5^2 x 50 kg or 1250 kg TNT yield, a little larger than a modern Mark 84 bomb.
I calculated the KE with the square of the velocity, 5.3 km/s. You’re in KG, I shifted back to pounds.
You calculated double MJ, KE is m(v^2)/2, and then you didn’t convert into TNT equivalent energy.
… Let me double check that just to be sure
100 lbs (~45kg) at 5.3 km/sec
637 MJ…. so I lost 5 MJ in my previous calculation.
1 metric ton of TNT packs 4.184 GJ
1 kg TNT packs 4.184MJ
152kg of TNT for 637 MJ
335.65ish pounds of TNT, so a multiplier of 3.3565ish. Crazy what 5MJ does.
Predicts for 45kg mass to 151kg TNT, so the multiplier holds up in metric and murrican.
for a 50kg protagonist however, we’re looking at ~110 lbs, so…
~700.778 MJ KE
~167.49 kg TNT
multiplier predicts 167.825 so, within my margins of error, anyway.
Will it be daytime soon?
it will be when she flies into the portion of the planet that’s IN daylight…
apparently, in less than an hour of flight time from all the math flying around lately…
i swear my posts seem to not show up the past few days
watch this post be the one that does…
For a ‘super page refresh’, tap the “first” then the “latest” nav buttons at the top of the page.
A refresh page alone is insuficient to show new posts.
Shesh, it’s been like this for months!
As soon as I posted this all my comments appeared instantly.
The problem is ive been on different computers checking they don’t exist,.
its possible they just glitched when uploading or some such but hey it happens i suppose.
I mean, I can’t be the only one thinking that with her attention span, anything faster than walking pace is too fast, and that with a chaperone only? :)
Going back to the linked comic it occurs to me: Does she have to HOLD the ball or just touch it? It either case couldn’t they rig up something to keep it against her palm? (while still making switching easy)
This page from waaaay back in 2012 covered this:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/589
Basically the answer is ‘no’, they only work when she’s holding them in her hands.
well one saying the other holding his eye could those blasts actualy be from that one loseing control of its beam? as it seems far to random of blasts to be aimed.
i did not read through all the comments, so it wouldnt suprise me if someone has said this before, but, even at anything over the speed of sound, you would get a shockwave cone forming around the shield as air is forced out of the way. At mach 16, the shockwave cone forming around Sydney would be no longer be air, it would be a superheated cone of plasma. Basically, think re-entry effects, that is the effect of an object going many times faster than sound entering into Earths thin upper atmosphere. At sea level, assuming planet is Earthlike, it would be a plume of fire many miles long. Again, think meteor right before it hits the ground. Sydney flying at mach 16 would look like a horizontal meteor.
Maybe the shield comes with aerodynamics-altering effects. Make the shield adequately aerodynamic and you can minimize the size of the shockwave significantly. Or maybe the shield “eats” any air it comes into contact with, and that’s the air that comes out of the air orb. If no air is being pushed out of the way in the first place, then you won’t get a shockwave cone at all.
then you’ll just get a VACUUM at the trailing edge of the shield, that will then collapse as the surrounding air fills the gap, ALSO not an ideal situation for the surrounding areas.
Sooo…. If we say “Flight orb” is instead “Gravity control” might she get telekinetic-like abilities with later upgrades?
There’s another problem. At Mach 16 and sea level, the air in front of her capsule is compressed and heated to plasma. She’s effectively creating her own sun, a couple of inches away. I might believe that her magic capsule takes care of her, but she should still really be lighting up the night.
And she could destroy the creatures and most structures with a close fly by.’
Oops, my reply got detached, due to a glitch. I would rather keep it here though, so am repeating it in the correct spot. Sorry about the double-post.
True. If taking the ‘creating her own sun’ poetically, rather than literally. Although she would probably be glowing brighter than the sun we see in the sky, so you are not stretching the point too far.
We actually have ballistic missiles which exceed this speed, in their terminal phase, but the creation of a sun is dependent upon their payload, not the air compression in front of them. Fiery hot, like an object entering the atmosphere from space, but not making a competitor to Sol.
The orbs cheat mind. Something that can tinker with a fundamental force like gravity, amongst many varied effects, can probably counter the compression/overheating problem directly, rather than relying on countering the damage.
For example it has a teleportation power, so it could just teleport the air molecules ahead of the force field to a location behind it. This would even have a beneficial side-effect of building up a compression wave behind the shield, pushing it forward into the obliging vacuum ahead of it. Using a trick like this Sydney may actually be faster in an atmosphere than in deep space!
Yeah, when I first read this page, I thought, “she should look like a capsule on re-entry.” Not a star but definitely a fireball. Especially in the denser air of low altitude.
Orb magic is a convenient way to wave that off I suppose, and actually it’s probably necessary for her to achieve the speeds that she achieves in atmosphere. I looked up terminal velocities for spheres about her sheild’s size and her weight. In 1g, I think her terminal velocity was soming like 40km/hr. I don’t remember all the numbers, but I think it would take something truely ridiculous, like 8000g to make her go Mach 4.
True. If taking the ‘creating her own sun’ poetically, rather than literally. Although she would probably be glowing brighter than the sun we see in the sky, so you are not stretching the point too far.
We actually have ballistic missiles which exceed this speed, in their terminal phase, but the creation of a sun is dependent upon their payload, not the air compression in front of them. Fiery hot, like an object entering the atmosphere from space, but not making a competitor to Sol.
The orbs cheat mind. Something that can tinker with a fundamental force like gravity, amongst many varied effects, can probably counter the compression/overheating problem directly, rather than relying on countering the damage.
For example it has a teleportation power, so it could just teleport the air molecules ahead of the force field to a location behind it. This would even have a beneficial side-effect of building up a compression wave behind the shield, pushing it forward into the obliging vacuum ahead of it. Using a trick like this Sydney may actually be faster in an atmosphere than in deep space!
Could dabbler magic Sydney some extra arms?
Relevant XKCD
Completely failed to reply to the right comment.
You know, I just realised that those orbs have a major flaw – their streaking glow. I mean, seriously, as an orbital station gunner, you can watch the Tron-esque lines appear and predict fairly accurately where she will be when you fire.
Sydney needs Tubey!
If you look really close, you will see that the light trails are helixing, it’s just that at the speed Sydney is going the effect is extremely subtle.
and once again my reply has been disconnected from the comment I was replying to. Ain’t technology grand?
Aaaaand you can’t edit or delete either. Modern tech eh?