Grrl Power #674 – Space cavalry
Psyche! I bet you thought that would be Sydney coming outta that wormhole, didn’t you?
Ag. So many double sized pages. Hand. Clawlike…
So this is Cora, a character I haven’t drawn for a very long time, probably since before I started the comic. She wasn’t a blue alien the last time. Actually a fair amount about her has changed, but she’s always been Dabbler’s friend.
The anti-mass driver is just a railgun that fires antimatter projectiles, in case you were wondering. I suppose it would be cool if it was a beam that disrupted the Higgs field. I have no idea what would happen if fundamental particles suddenly ceased to have mass. Probably it would be the same as disintegrating something, because everything would just fly off in random directions. Possibly accompanied by massive explosions and radiation? But no. Just antimatter projectiles. Still, that’s multiple levels of suck for whatever you’re targeting. Not only the Götterdämmerungian kinetic energy delivered by something going… let’s say 0.7 C, but also the mutual annihilation of everything in its path.
Okay, here’s a thought. What if you had an antimatter projectile that was multiple projectiles all matryoshkaed inside one another? Like each layer was sort of like a sabot round. The projectile hits something, apocalyptic explosion ensues, but the interior of the projectile continues forward until it hits the next significant piece of matter. Sort of like a 5 stage antimatter bunker buster?
Yeah. That’s what the anti-mass cannon shoots. Seems like bonkers overkill honestly, unless you’re bombarding the Emperor of Mankind in his bunker under the Himalayas.
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Blue skin, pink hair, a pair of fairly substantial assets… Yep, Kirk would do her. Of course given the quality of beefcake Cora has readily available, I doubt that Kirk would stand a chance.
So now it looks like the cavalry has arrived just in time to see Sydney take off for parts unknown. I can just see Cora and crew chasing after her, and she keeps warping out just as they arrive. Cue Boots Randolph and his Yakety Sax for the Benny Hill chase scene.
It’s not like Kirk is choosy in any way.
I believe female is a requirement. I don’t recall any episodes that he kissed men.
That was Sulu.
Sulu from ToS was straight. The reboot version is gay (or bi)
Maybe… in TOS Sulu ran around bare-chested and making the women swoon, but I don’t think he’s ever shown actually making a move on any of them?
Kirk has kissed (if not more) a few shape shifters and/or energy beings who could take physical form where the gender of the being could easily be seen as being quite ambiguous or even impossible to map to a human gender.
It would basically end up being interstellar phone tag.. or just regular tag kind of. Which leads into the next conversation with Dabbler when she basically runs Dabbler up the flag pole for not telling her Sydney had warp capability. Dialog hijinx ensue until Dabbler little more than screams at Cora that she didn’t know…. and then Dabbler and Cora take their leave to go “make up.” End page. :P
As I read through today’s update, my first thoughts were “Hmmm. Wonder if that’s Dabbler’s half-sister.” Followed rapidly by “Oh, man. Maybe Dabbler’s mother ..?”
Sadly, Dave immediately posted commentary that killed both of those wonderful possibilities. But, very delicious head canon for the brief moments it lasted.
* sigh *
Wouldn’t Dabbler’s mother have to be a succubus herself? Since apparently there are no male succubi (incubi).
I have faith that, if a succubus wants to impregnate a female, she will do so. If the method doesn’t already exist (which, it should because succubi are multiple and are bred & born in this multiverse), they are capable of inventing one. Magic + technology = Anything Goes. Just look at how the rest of the Grrliverse works.
Do NOT deny me my very delicious head canon !
If you want to get strict originalist on me, consider that Succubus is a unique, named demon. There are no others, just the one and always that was no more born than any of the unique angels and just as deathless. Succubi, as a class of demons, is a modern invention.
I can work with that!
Kirk is a prude compared to Commander Shepard who probably could do the whole crew here.
…Could?
Na, fam.
Would.
You mean “did” right? It’s Shepard… he/she has probably managed to screw every sentient thing in the universe at some point…. all classified of course though. Very hush hush…. saving the universe and all that.
In ST:TOS, Checov was way more of a womanizer than Kirk. Seriously. Go back and rewatch them and you’ll be wondering how Kirk ever got his reputation with Checov around.
Chekhov? I recall only two episodes where he had any kind of romantic interest. The OK Corral, where he was shot dead in the mind game where real death happened if you died, but then they pulled the “The only thing that was real to him was the girl” bullshit to bring him back to life, and the Space Hippies episode where one of the hippy chicks was an ex of his and used that weakness to help in the takeover of the Enterprise.
Uniting the galaxy against the Reapers take some serious “diplomacy”.
If you just count the Reapers, then they screwed everyone in perpetuity.
Captain Jack Harkness would do them all at once. Probably right there on the bridge.
Jack Harkness would do the spaceship.
Umm Didn’t Harkness “do” the Tardis?
He considers himself pansexual.
He does kitchenware.
He considers himself pansexual.
He does kitchenware.
More like omnisexual. Remember the playmobil robots? The cat nun nurse? I’m surprised he didn’t try to hit up The Master.
Who says that he didn’t? He had a few millenia off-screen.
It seems like Deus is a space slut in Shepards and Harkness league: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2791
Re: the cavalry, Sydney should have been trope-aware enough to know that they’d be coming 2 minutes after she disappeared through the wormhole. She should have opened it, gone “yep there’s my way out”, and then closed it and waited 10 minutes.
Um… Kirk would probably not do her. I challenge you to watch the Original Series and keep a tally of how many times Kirk rebuffs a woman after she tried to seduce him in some way vs how many times he tried to seduce a woman… Also make sure to take note of when those seduction attempts of his were genuine as opposed to ordered by starfleet or just to try to manipulate her so she’d help/let him get back to his ship. Hint: every time he tried to seduce a woman it was not genuine.
Also keep a tally of how many times he was willingly in bed with another woman… Hint: it’s 2 times… Every other time he was either brainwashed or physically forced.
Conclusion: Kirk is as much of a horndog as he has said “Beam me up, Scotty” which is to say… not in the slightest.
Side note: Riker, however, would definitely bed her in a heart beat.
Remember the horrifying episode that he tried to bed an individual from a species that doesn’t have gender, mating, or pregnancy?
And yet was an obvious female actor…he also is a gourmand and even ate and liked Klingon food.
“Beam me up, Scotty”, this was actually said, in The Voyage Home, when they had to go into the past to pick up two Humpback Whales.
And the android double doesn’t count.
Girl? She’s in command of a starship and she’s still ‘girl’?
Every starship crew has to have its resident misogynist.
What is wrong with you :^)
He actually strikes me as gay if you take what he said and apply modern day western earth manerisms to a green, possibly scaled, possibly reptilian, very alien creature of indeterminable gender.
Or he could be a misogynist. Makes perfect sense.
I read it as more “green is the stereotype space version of black” – nothing to do with misogyny, he’s just speaking jive.
“Jive?” What the hell racist 1970s world do you live in?
“Jive?” What kind of racist 1970s world do you live in? And black people don’t say “giiiirrrrl” except as written by racist writers who don’t actually know any black people. Most of us can actually speak English.
I think britchens was just pointing out the trope.
Precisely, thank you, that was just what the character reminded me of, not my world view.
As in “Hey, I’m the cool guy, as established by my slang, different coloring, and casually familiar attitude. Please don’t leave me alone once the action starts.”
Wow, Beejay, you live in a very small world. Across the last twenty years, I’ve personally known at least five black women THAT I COULD NAME OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD who called their close female friends “girl” or “girlfriend”. I suspect that the real number is dozens.
And this behavior that you claim never happens was natural and common in a professional and public setting. When I observed it, it was usually merely a friendly term of moderate intimacy.
I find it hilarious when people insist that no one does X except characters written by Y (type of person that they don’t like). In this case, that verbal tag became a cliche/trope because it was so common in real life as well as fiction. And, yes, when I lived around Monterey, I knew at least three gay guys who used the same terms with female friends. On the other hand, in the last twenty years, I cannot recall ever seeing a professional straight white guy use “girl” that way.
Two things come to mind whenever I hear the word Jive: The scene from Aeroplane and Willie and the Hand Jive
Or the ship has a very casual atmoaphere because everybody’s sleeping with the captain, as Dave implied. Because you know, if the captain is female the ship will not retain a misogynist crewman long.
Girl’s gotta eat.
That seems quite likely considering that the captain is a friend of Dabbler.
“Every starship crew has to have its resident misogynist.”
So, every time someone says “You go, girl!” to an adult female, they’re a misogynist? Nice to know.
Sure are a lot of female misogynists out there.
(And if you say it doesn’t count if they’re a woman, that’s treating people differently based on their sex. Which is sexism.)
It’s probably a gurl
Yes, calling her” Girl”, is accepted by feminists.
According to #6, is not.
By the way, ¿is there any manual to know how a person should behave according to feminists?
No.
What the rules are changes constantly from person to person depending on who you ask and from day to day (optimistically)
Also, different rules apply to different people, see; Argento.
Popular feminism *as it is practiced in current year* is an ideology centered around gaining money and power and has nothing to do with equality. If the Patriarchy ever existed as an actual structured entity then it would have looked more or less like modern day feminism.
As a Feminist since 1970, ask me. See previous reply!
That’s because you’re a 2-d wave feminist. AKA the sane kind of feminist. Sadly the rare endangered kind too.
Endangered, maybe, but we aren’t *yet* as rare as you might think.
Not rare at all, you just have the misogynists making sure to amplify and repeat any of the ‘crazy’ ones until they become the face of feminism and then feminism gets discredited.
Also 2nd vs 3rd wave has nothing to do with it, that’s a common misconception. Those waves just describe where the focus is and there’s a huge overlap in them, most feminists are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave feminists.
to sum it up:
1st wave was to change the laws and get equal rights on paper. That’s mostly done in the west.
2nd wave was to protect against bigotry (eg anti-discrimination laws) that’s still in the works.
3rd wave (which some people on the internet love to use as code for ‘crazy feminists’) is changing society’s attitudes and such (ie making it so that there isn’t a need for laws and protections). Or in other words it’s making it so that the rights people have on paper are actually the rights they have in practice. It started around the 1980’s along with a pile of other social level fixes for acute problems (eg reducing crime by reducing poverty).
4th wave (which started recently) focuses on justice and protection for sexual violence (some people argue this isn’t feminism since it’s not just women who are victims but that argument can be made for the 3rd wave too).
As you can see the waves have huge overlap and advancing one generally advances all of them.
Google womxn (this is a thing that happenend this week)
Also look at the reaction to Argento, since you bring up 4th wave (metoo).
Multiple similar things every single week.
I’m sorry, but the crazy train has long since left the station and there is no breaks. Enjoy the ride.
The crazy train needs to park itself. Or is that “check itself before it wrecks itself?”
There’s a simple rule of thumb that I find helpful in almost all cases: If I am introduced to someone and I’m not given a pronoun to use, I will address someone using the pronoun that seems to fit. If I am corrected I will apologize and use the one I was corrected to use, and hopefully during the process of pointing out that I’ve made an error I will receive the courtesy of being given a different pronoun to use instead.
If someone chooses to be offended, that’s all on them and I am likely to stop caring quite a lot at that point. I am quite happy to refer to someone by whatever pronoun they choose to be refereed to as, but I am not happy to deal with misplaced or even faux outrage or anger over a simple and honest mistake.
I am also not terribly willing or happy about needing to tie my tongue and grammar around invented and possibly very transient labels that are in no way standards and where I will need to try remember the rules for each individual rather than a few simple classes. I mean, I’ll try, but not very hard.
That’s just the internet amplifying the crazy. The crazies are interesting and get people riled up so the stories about them are what get told and shared
So basically first and second waves were about equal rights, and the third is about equality and social engineering. Which still makes them crazy in my book.
Your sentence structure indicates that you find equal rights, equality, and social engineering to all be ‘crazy in your book.’ Was that your intent?
Because I’m not seeing anything crazy about equal rights or equality. And social engineering also isn’t necessarily crazy and would need some qualifications on a case by case basis ‘in my book.’
Oh, equal eights is fine, dandy and beneficial. Equal rights is where things had to stop. Because total equality is a tyranny, as humans aren’t born equal, and tabula rasa hypothesis is proven false more times I care to count.
Attempting to forcefully equalize people would do more harm than good. We know this because communists already tried, and death toll was in 8-digit numbers.
You’re funny. First because there has never been a true communist social structure experiment large enough to actually test the validity of the concept (which might be considered a decent amount of evidence that the system simply cannot work, but I disagree). Second because the Communists you reference didn’t try at all to forcefully equalize people. They just tried a slightly different way of forcefully imposing an authoritarian control over people. And then forcefully killed that 8 digit numbers of people you reference who either:
1) Disagreed with them;
2) They thought had the brains/education to see through their bullshit and not just follow along like good little sheep;
3) Were a rival in the various internecine struggles for power;
4) Simply got in the way i.e. Had the misfortune to require food to survive while their leaders were busy tanking the economy, destroying production, disrupting commerce and trade, and taking everything that wasn’t nailed down to enrich themselves.
>First because there has never been a true communist
Yes, yes, no true Scotsman.
> Second because the Communists you reference didn’t try at all to forcefully equalize people.
Ever heard of the Red Khmers? They did exactly that. And they actually succeed at forcefully equalizing their people. Which was so inhumane and horrific, Nazis look downright angelic in comparison.
Don’t try to pull that bullshit, it won’t fly here. How many times do I have to tell you that words have meanings? When I say that communism has never been tried at a meaningful level, I’m not referring to authoritarian forms of government which called themselves communism while never even attempting to follow the precepts of that form of government. Even your initial premise disputes your “true Scotsman” bullshit, as a government where property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs isn’t going to create an 8-digit death toll. That is a direct contradiction, and you’re trying to work both sides of the street to make an unwinnable point.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
You’re still trying to say that the sky is green and that it’s true because you believe it to be true.
>Don’t try to pull that bullshit
The only bullshitter here is you, trying to sell pretty tales of a nice communism, while every time it was attempted it quickly devolved into totalitarian hell that kills millions of people. Maybe after dozens of tries and hundreds of millions dead we should take the lesson and stop trying to implement the system that obviously does not work instead of foolishly hoping that “this time would be different”?
>as a government where property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs isn’t going to create an 8-digit death toll
Such government indeed existed in Cambodia. It only created 7-digit death toll because Cambodia didn’t have that much population to begin with.
“Not rare at all, you just have the misogynists making sure to amplify and repeat any of the ‘crazy’ ones until they become the face of feminism and then feminism gets discredited.”
No misogynists required. The “crazy” ones CLAIM they are the face (and speak for all women), and the supposed pro-women groups are quite happy to go along with that. Unless you are claiming that NOW, etc, ARE the crazy ones?
“2nd wave was to protect against bigotry (eg anti-discrimination laws) that’s still in the works.”
No, it’s been a done deal for literally decades, at least in the US. Most areas of law are blatantly pro-woman, at this point, at least in practice, and quite a few are actually pro-woman in literal wording.
(Of course, I think that in all but the most necessary, biological senses, any form of sexism is detrimental to BOTH sexes – the one being “helped” in perpetuity is like a toddler never allowed to walk and thus effectively crippled for life. Same for racism.)
“3rd wave (which some people on the internet love to use as code for ‘crazy feminists’) is changing society’s attitudes and such (ie making it so that there isn’t a need for laws and protections).”
In other words, completely crazy. “laws and protections” will be needed (for all people) as long as free will exists. People have free will, and some of them abuse it. Protections of law are for everyone, equally – or at least, they are supposed to be. Some animals are more equal than others in today’s society, and it’s not the whites or the men (legally speaking, at the very least – check the actual laws before you even attempt to contest that).
“Or in other words it’s making it so that the rights people have on paper are actually the rights they have in practice.”
In practice, that’s almost always counter-productive. Example: when you can’t check criminal history because that’s somehow viewed as racially discriminatory, employers will actively avoid whichever racial group (or groups) have a disproportionately high number of criminals in it. Completely rational (for anyone wanting to avoid criminals, even for those who aren’t racist themselves!), and completely counter-productive (for those wanting racial equity).
In practice, right now, there is only one racial group you can demean and insult in public (even in headlines from major newspapers) without losing your job or otherwise being subject to severe social repercussions. I still don’t want the government to do anything about that – legally, free speech allows it, and using the government to try to do anything about it would be counterproductive. (Well, individual cases could make better use of libel and slander laws, but that’s existing law that applies to everyone equally.)
The government trying to change thoughts and beliefs of its people is tyrannical – it should not try, for any reason, no matter how good. It should not have the *power* to do that, because those who wield that power will vary over time. The group you agree with using that power today will be replaced, eventually, and you might REALLY not like what they do with it. The only way to prevent this problem is to keep the government out of it entirely.
I believe that was the single biggest fault of the Civil Rights era people – they didn’t dismantle the power of the state over racial issues, they just tried to point it in a different direction… and if they could change it, so could the next generation of people. Get rid of it entirely! Free people, unencumbered by government mandates on the topic, will get closer to an actual good place on the issue than government mandates would ever get them. (Nate: perfection isn’t one of the options. Never has been, never will be.)
What the people believe should influence the government, NOT the other way around. EVER. That’s the whole point of having a democratic style of governance.
as to the last point, i doubt it.
the idea of the patriarchy is that “men are superior, therefore they rule”
the modern feminism (as opposed to the old one, yes there is distinction) is based on the idea that women are opressed.
One is a way of ruling, the other is a way of bringing everyone down.
these two ideas are nothing alike. patriarchy would at least be capable of honesty, if not necessarily compasion.
It’s clear you have no concept of actual feminism, just whatever fauxminism you’ve been spoonfed by toxic patriarchy.
You probably won’t read this (or if you do, you’ll probably disparage it instead of learn from it; feel free to prove me wrong, btw), so this is aimed more at others reading it than at you…
Feminism isn’t just about women being oppressed, and it is NOT about “a way of bringing everyone down.” The only ones who view it that way are those perched on the peak, watching those shoved down below them attempting to lift each other up, and requesting a hand up.
To think that people wanting to come up there and be equals with you is the equivalent of bringing everyone down is like believing that if you climb up the stairs in a house to the second floor, that somehow magically pushes the second floor down to ground level. It doesn’t, and it’s sad to see people so brainwashed in their privilege that this is the only way they can make sense of things.
Modern feminism is striving to be intersectional, to lift people up to a better “floor” of life, above the floodwaters of oppression. It isn’t about casting down all men into those floodwaters down at the ground floor. It’s about acknowledging privilege exists, that prejudice exists, that the prejudice part is stupid, that the benefits of privilege can be applied to everyone, and that the world is bettered immensely when more people are given advantages to learn, survive, thrive, and enjoy enough stress-free leisure time to be able to create.
Every single time that women have been given more education than oppression–even if it was just half the eduction of men instead of one quarter–technology has leapt forward within a decades. Imagine what we could do if women were given full support for education, opportunity, and relief from the stress of being denigrated, disparaged, called crazy, oppressed, etc. Imagine if we listened to the concerns of those who aren’t just the privileged white males at the peak of civilization, and didn’t listen to the ones who constantly shove down others out of fear they’d be displaced. They could be making room for others–and there’s plenty of room up there!–but nope…
Imagine livign in a world where, instead of drowning in literal floodwaters caused by the privileged refusing to make those 100 companies causing 71% of all global warming problems, we could have been sequestering carbon dioxide in new basalt formations. Within 3 years, studies have shown that the carbon dioxide is permanently locked into the bedrock through chemical interactions between the gasses and the stone. It doesn’t matter who or what caused the CO2 to rise; the fact is, it’s rising, and we have the knowledge and the technical know-how to get rid of the excess amounts…but those 100 companies and their pinacle-clinging masters are so focused on trying to oppress everyone, we’re now having massive hurricanes, tornadoes, fish die-offs, coral reef die-offs, hundreds and thousands of birds just dropping dead, caribou dropping dead, animals and plants going extinct because this climate change is all too damn fast for nature to keep up with. (Yes, temperatures have risen higher in the past…over several centuries, not mere decades.)
So to claim that feminism wants to push people down…is literally reactionary fear from guys who aren’t accustomed to the concept of sharing knowledge, power, privilege, and who are so afraid, they refuse to see the benefits of more people being ABLE to contribute to a better world.
The idea that “men are superior, therefore they rule” is at best a tautology: It relies solely upon its own internal logic for proof. To claim that “women are stupider than men, history proves it!” literally ignores the fact that men have in most eras refused to give women not only equal education, but equal opportunities to voice new ideas, and equal respect and weight to those ideas. Even today, girls aren’t given the same level of education in school–we see it in the way how girls are constantly targetted for “clothing that sexually distracts boys” and the constant repetition of the myth “girls aren’t as smart as boys”…which is weird, because girls are expected to BE better at school than boys, usually are because of that societal pressure…and then when they get old enough to get into college, they’re slammed with derision, denigration, and “go be a mother, not a mathematician!” etc, etc, etc.
Men aren’t superior in any way other than literal tendon/muscle/bone/joint configuration for raw strength in SPECIFIC body movements. Male physiology is designed to deliver an overhand blow very powerfull–starting up high and crashing down low. But even that isn’t proof enough of any “superiority” because female physiology is STRONGER than male ligature when delivering a rising blow, such as starting down low by the thigh and rising upward in a curling motion. Men have more white meat muscle, which means great big effort…but only briefly, with fatigue setting in quickly after that big burst of strength. Women have more red meat muscle, which delivers less power per use, but is capable of being used repeatedly over and over many times before fatigue sets in.
And even with all that? FORCE MULTIPLIERS SMASH THAT ARGUMENT TO SMITHEREENS. We’re not primitive cave lumps relying solely upon musclepower to kill an attacking bear with a club and a spear. We have bows, crossbows, guns, rifles, and things like that, all of which women can use (amusingly enough, women tend to have better hand-eye coordination, which means when they have had equal amounts of time & encouragement to practice shooting, and share the scoreboards with men on the shooting range, they tend to crowd into the upper scores due to this evolutionary quirk). We can set traps, whether mechanical or even simple pit traps with stakes dug into them, and lure the bear into that trap. Hell, we can drive semi trucks and pulverize the damn bear at highway speeds. (Which admittedly will ruin a bit more than the fender, since a bear is way bigger and heavier than a deer, but hey,the bear ain’t nearly as likely to walk it off as the lady driving the truck!)
So that argument blows the belief of men’s physical superiority out of the water, because we’re tool users, and can use force multipliers to level the playing field on that front. The irony of misogynists trying to claim women aren’t capable of being equal with men, by using computer programs and internet accessing methods, is highly ironic. The first computer program ever was made by a woman. The first computer programmers and operators were a whole wave of women, before men realized computers had a great deal of force multiplication power, and shoved them out of those jobs, being power greedy. Bluetooth is something a woman created. There are women who created a whole truckload of things that men decided to kick them out of the cab and take over in the name of “superiority”…but that’s just flat-out bullying.
If you’re so afraid of being dragged down by those who are drowning down below you, then you should be making more room up above the floodwaters, instead of stomping on faces and fingers and claiming that those trying to climb up the rungs are somehow grabbing onto you. We may be pointing out that oppressors are being asshats, but you have the choice to continue being an asshat once it’s pointed out, or switch to being a decent person.
It’s a pity you insist on being an asshat. All that energy being put into mocking, denigrating, and oppressing others–not just women but disabled folds, people of color, on and on and on, I’m sure–could instead be put toward fixing the world’s problems.
You can literally choose to change the way you talk about women and other non-white-male-pinnacle-clinging people, the way you think about them, the way you treat them, the way you talk about them to other people. You can literally choose to be more useful to the progress toward a better society overall, better technology, better environment, better health, better educational standards…better for everyone, period. You could literally chose to be heroically hepful, instead of…this. It’s always been your choice. It will always be your choice. Try to choose better, next time?
Thank you. Reading their misconceptions was making my brain bleed.
Now that was a good read, whether it will fall on the deaf ears of people who can’t get past their insistence that losing a state of unearned privilege is the same thing as being persecuted remains to be seen.
“When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Thank you. Thank you for writing this.
I’ll just add one more thing. The heads of the 100 companies that are killing the planet, the ones living on the third floor. They know what’s going on. They are building walls around their countries, they are dreaming up plans about fleeing to mars. Literally. Because they’d rather see the rest of humanity drown from afar with just their slaves keeping them company than being just a tad less far above them.
To cite Warren Buffet: “There’s a war raging between the rich and the rest. And we [the rich] are winning. [laughs]”
And they win by turning the heads of the people on the second and first floor away from themselves, towards the lower floors.
As a cis white male I agree that we need all the help we can get “up here”. And I’m sorry that so often we make the ones “below” do the majority of the work. We better learn how to lend helping hands, and fast. Not because of morality alone, but also just for selfish self preservation.
They may know what’s going on, but that’s debatable. If they think that a wall, any wall, will stop an influx of refugees after a natural disaster or an economic collapse, they are wrong.
If they think that teraforming Mars to be livable, or even just setting up a sustainable colony on Mars is any easier then terraforming Earth to be livable or setting up a sustainable colony on Earth, they are wrong.
I believe that it is more a matter of short term gains overriding any long term thinking. An old and wealthy man might claim that he loves his grandchildren and would like to do his best for them by leaving them his enormous wealth, but money cannot buy everything.
Today that saying is is typically limited to non-material things such as happiness or love, but at some point it will grow to include the very material things such as a viable environment and an ecosystem where human life is sustainable. And at that point no amount of money left to your grandkids will be enough to keep them alive, and you should have been planning to pass along an environment in which they could grow and flourish instead.
>If they think that a wall, any wall, will stop an influx of refugees after a natural disaster or an economic collapse, they are wrong.
*Laughs in Hebrew*
*Laughs along with you, but watches the clock ticking as he does so*
Almost anything can be done for a temporary amount of time. Especially if propped up by outside support. It will end or change dramatically. If it ends the end will be very, very violent. If it changes it will probably also involve a large amount of violence. But either way, its time is both limited and being borrowed against heavily.
1970, first wave.
“Modern feminism is striving to be intersectional, to lift people up to a better “floor” of life, above the floodwaters of oppression.” Not if you are talking about a minority of feminists, called Trf’s who claim that Transgender, is oppressive to women.
Eh. I had a good friend murdered when I was fifteen years old. I knew pretty much every single person connected with the trial in any way except the judge, and I knew his daughter pretty well a few years later.
Yeah. Her husband, in a fit of possessiveness, shot her in the back, he was standing in front of the town post office, in front of many people, including their three children, then walked across the street and delivered the finishing shot in her head in front of a little hotel. He got five years and three months.
Apparently, the jury thought he was “right” somehow, but not totally right.
> Modern feminism is striving to be intersectional, to lift people up to a better “floor” of life, above the floodwaters of oppression.
Stopped reading here. You need a quick glance on the policies modern feminists suggest to realize their method of “lifting” “oppressed” people basically boils to oppressing the “privileged” people, like fighting discrimination with more discrimination pointed the opposite way is a fair and reasonable thing to do, and not the go-to method of getting people at each other’s throats.
i read up to “Imagine what we could do if women were given full support for education, opportunity, and relief from the stress of being denigrated, disparaged, called crazy, oppressed, etc.” because it was just too long. i will try to keep my response short and to the point.
starting with technicality.
If you believe that everyone should be equal, then you are not focused on women specifically, and so it ceases to be feminism. its called egalitarianism. and for some reason, all “modern” feminism despises that word. As far as i know.
That aside though, so far you have not contradicted anything i believe. if anything, you only gaveme an affirmation.
The problem i see, is not lack of “good will”, but the disconnect between the “ideal” and “reality”. The “goal” and the “means”.
I have seen some of the bad things feminism had done, and none of the good, except maybe by accident.
If you want to prove me wrong, there is a simple way. give me an example. A link, (or a keyword so i might try and google) to when feminism actually ACHIVED something good.
As example of what i’ve seen “feminism” do.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213819/your-bowling-shirt-is-holding-back-progress.
A man responsible for landing on a comet, had been wroth to tears because of a shirt.
what do women around the world gain from that.
and yes, that’s an old one, so here is something fresher.
A man had been convicted, because he made a distasteful joke.
Again, how does that help anyone?
Uhm, the convicted man was count dankula. the joke was about his girlfriends pug saluting to him saing “sighail” however it’s spelled.
Funny thing is in 40-s Finland one man also taught his dog to give a salute to “sieg heil”, and Nazis (who were Finnland’s allies allies in WW2) took quite an offense to it and demanded from Finnish authorities to arrest the man.
How are people not just embarrassed to admit that 15 moderately sized paragraphs are “too long” for them to read? That’s maybe a page and a half of a book.
A. Page. And. A. Half.
And yet I see declarations that blocks of text of that size are too long to read made on a regular basis by people who seem to think they’re the ones scoring points by saying it.
your out rage, you trying to make a opint, your job to make it understandable.
its one thing if its interesting, its another if all i see is garbage. will there be something interesting if i continue reading? well, if you were going to say something interesting, you would have started with it, but all i see is garbage, therefore not worth my time to read it all.
The irony of this given your grammar, spelling, lack of proper capitalization and punctuation is legend. Even two sentences from you is a shit post not worth reading.
ok, not yours. still, point stand. if the lady wanted to be understood, she would try to be tot he point, instead of bloating with useless preaching.
15 paragraphs of bullshit are harder to read than 15 paragraphs of coherent thoughts. I once tried to read Mein Kampf but barely went over introduction.
Limitation of the medium.
This is a comments thread on a graphic novel site, not a political diatribe thread on Quora/Medium/Reddit.
(Thus, remainder of my comments were deleted before posting.)
i read a little bit more on, holly shit.
i never said i agree with the idea that men are superior, i only said that that’s what patriarchy seems to be based on. and now you are trying to explain to me that they are not?
Just how much are you assuming here?
Yeah, i am not gonna dispute that a bit more streangth doesn’t mean you are more worthy of being a leader.
ALso… what the hell?
“because girls are expected to BE better at school than boys, usually are because of that societal pressure…”
So… are they expected to be better, or are they expected to be babymakers? pls, at least get your story straight.
I am willing to give feminism a chance to deffend itself, but you are sadly not doing a good job of selling it.
“It’s clear you have no concept of actual feminism, just whatever fauxminism you’ve been spoonfed by toxic patriarchy.”
It’s clear you have no concept of actual feminism, just whatever fauxminism you’ve been spoonfed by toxic matriarchy.
See, I can argue as usefully as you. All I have to do is tell you that everything you know is BS and was clearly “spoonfed” to you, not at all based on your life experience (and speaking with hundreds or thousands of other people about theirs) and long periods of deep thought and research on the facts in any way, and BAM! Now it all makes sense.
Talk down to us some more – it’s really convincing!
” It’s about acknowledging privilege exists, that prejudice exists, that the prejudice part is stupid, that the benefits of privilege can be applied to everyone”
Which is why feminists spend so much time preaching at western countries, with the best standards of living and most “privileged” women in the *history of mankind*, instead of putting even token efforts into areas of the world where women actually ARE oppressed, by LAW. Heck, even in western countries, if you want to cherry pick, you can find some women who have it bad (you can find men who have it bad, too, but eh, —- them), but those aren’t the women who actually get championed by feminists!
Privilege absolutely exists, and most “feminists” are SOAKING in it, while pointing the finger everywhere else.
“So to claim that feminism wants to push people down…is literally reactionary fear from guys who aren’t accustomed to the concept of sharing knowledge, power, privilege, and who are so afraid, they refuse to see the benefits of more people being ABLE to contribute to a better world.”
Keep telling yourself that. It couldn’t possibly being anything but fear and evil that oppose you. There are no reasonable disagreements with you. Your opponents are just bad people. Never try to actually understand them at all, as you might soil your own wonderful purity. Their examples of what they are talking about are all lies. Yours is the side of the angels.
“You can literally choose to be more useful to the progress toward a better society overall, better technology, better environment, better health, better educational standards…better for everyone, period.”
I do choose that, literally “better for everyone” (except the people immorally exploiting people in the current system, of course).
Which is why I disagree with most of what you wrote, as most of it makes for “worse for a whole lot of people to the benefit of a few, just a mildly different few than historically normal”.
Oh, goodness, I forgot to mention one of the most ridiculous parts!
“Men have more white meat muscle, which means great big effort…but only briefly, with fatigue setting in quickly after that big burst of strength. Women have more red meat muscle, which delivers less power per use, but is capable of being used repeatedly over and over many times before fatigue sets in.”
Which is why women have higher speed records than men in…. uh, any distance thing, anywhere? I mean, it couldn’t be complete and utter BS… (Narrator: It’s complete and utter BS.)
Women are better at making babies than men. That’s not meant as an insult, in the slightest – it’s a vital and amazing thing. They pay for that ability with lesser physical ability in nearly every other aspect – height, strength, speed, endurance. (Interestingly, women, generally, have MUCH better color recognition than men, along with a few other things.) No person CHOSE this, there’s no person to BLAME, it’s just biological reality.
As you point out, that doesn’t matter all that much today. I don’t disagree…. but I don’t make up stupid crap on a point that I then argue doesn’t matter, either. Seriously, your point about physical strength being less important today is completely fine on its own – it doesn’t need stupid and transparent lies to bolster it.
There are jokes about how feminists think men and women are just the same AND that women are superior to men. You just supported the accuracy of those jokes quite a bit.
Here’s the thing, though – *I don’t care*, one way or the other. If I’m hiring someone to move large, heavy objects, I’m not going to care if it’s a man or a woman, as long as they can do the work. Reality being what it is, I’ll almost certainly get a man, but I don’t actually care… as long as they can do the work.
That same logic will apply LOTS of places (and some of those places will be because of secondary effects – women being 99% of elementary school teachers (because men rationally avoid any place someone could ruin their career and life with an allegation no matter how far-fetched) means that AT LEAST one other career group is going to be short on women because MATH).
You can’t state that patriarchy equals honesty in the same post as “Men are superior, therefore they rule” and expect to be taken seriously.
Lie, is an intentional misinformation.
If they believe their own words, its not technically a lie.
Just because someone believes in something untrue, doesn’t mean they have to say something they themselve believe is untrue.
If you are at the top, and everything exists to serve you, there is no reason to lie about that. what’s true is true.
On the other hand there were numerous false rape accusations generated by feminism, because they needed to score opresion points, and had an oportunity to put down someoen they didn’t like.
i am not saying someone with patrialchal views would absolutely never lie, but it would still be way less that feminists do.
Truth is what is true, not what you believe is true. If you actually believe that you are speaking the truth then you’re not deliberately lying, but you are still lying.
By your “what you believe matters” definition of ‘truth’ Trump never lies because he is self-delusional enough and uninformed enough to believe all kinds of absolute nonsense that is constantly disproved and then defended anyway by Sanders during the next press conference.
You are a very angry person. Dit someone you know died becouse of misinformation?
I’m not angry. Not at you certainly, and not in general either. If you’re reading that into the printed word you may be projecting your own emotions on to me. Try to not do that.
Ok lets put it this way.
If i say “the sky is green”, that’s obviously untrue.
But if i were to say that “i believe” that the sky is green, who are you to call me a lier? You don’t know know what’s in my head. maybe i have some eye disorder and confuse colours? or maybe i speak a simmilar sound language, yet where words have swapped meaning?
If a person believes something, then the truth is that the person believes that. that’s why, its not fair to call it a lie, just because the person forgets to say “i belive” in every sentence.
Your semantics does not change what I posted earlier, and there’s no need for me to defend it any further than I already have. You may not be deliberately lying, but you are still lying. Who am I to call you a liar? I’m the guy who can look up at the sky and see that it is not green.
Words have meanings, and if you for whatever reason are confused about which colors have which names that does not make your confusion a truth. It’s not true for me, because “the sky is green” is a very simple thing to test and discard as being truthful.
Your ‘confusion’ or ‘disorder’ are also words which have meanings, and neither of them allow you to escape the fact that the sky is not green. It is perfectly fair to call out that lie, even if you’d prefer to protect the feels of confused and disordered persons by what you may consider a softening of the blow, and so instead of using the word lie you use words such as ‘confusion’ or ‘disorder’ to describe their lies. You’re just inventing different labels for the exact same meaning.
But you can’t know if you are causing more harm than good by your attempts to coddle the confused and the disordered. Harm to the confused and the disordered by choosing not to confront and correct their lies, and harm to any others who may listen to them and similarly become confused or disordered. So you have no moral high ground here, although it is clear that you believe that you do. Truth is not a matter of perception. Truth doesn’t exist just because you add “I believe” to a sentence.
I never said that you cant point out that they are “untrue”, but how how you go about it changes.
there is a phrase “do not ascribe to malice, what could sifficiently be explained by stupidity”. Or something like that it goes.
yeah, person believeing the sky is green, does not make the sky green.
But even if a person believe in something that is incorect, then it is still true, that the person believe in something that is false. It means that they themselves were misinformed.
If a person says something they themselve believe in, that’s honesty. If the information is incorrect, then they are mistaken.
If all of that still fails to perswade you, then i’m just going to point you tot he chryctians and muslims, who “trully believe” in their god, and then i walk away.
i am not going to go back here again.
Are you trying to say we live in a matriarchy?
Ah so that’s why modern women look more and more like Neolithic fertility goddesses.
We can only hope, unless you want all of the fat-shaming progress to go down the tubes and force more women to starve themselves to meet your ideal.
At that time, a plump woman was seen as the ideal!
Rubinesque
There’s a difference between healthy plumpness and a “human zeppelin” fat level, and shaming walking baloons for killing themselves with dieabetes is for their own good.
What?
I’m just trying to figure out what this, “If the Patriarchy ever existed as an actual structured entity then it would have looked more or less like modern day feminism.”, even means.
If he isn’t talking about a matriarchy; Then it’s unsubstantiated word-salad.
We do live in a gynocentric culture in the west yes.
You talk like a misogynist, It makes me wonder, why you internet name, is force User. Sorry,that is just how I see it. However, since I don’t know you personally, I can only speculate.
likely he’s a star wars nerd whose entire experience with women is his own mother.
You really don’t want us to analyze your internet name, mate.
{waves hand wildly} Oo, oo, do mine.
“You talk like a misogynist.”
And you talk like misandrist. There, now everyone has been called a sexist equally. Yay. Can we actually discuss the issue now?
Oh wait, flinging the insult is apparently all you have. Pity – it’s a topic that could use real discussion.
Different women react differently to how you treat them? Wow! It’s almost as if they’re real people! But that couldn’t be true, could it? No, it must be some crazy conspiracy to gain wealth.
Maybe instead of just “using force” as the user name implies (i.e. ignoring other people’s wishes) and asking for simplistic rules to be set in stone, it might be smart to listen and try to understand first. If nothing else, the more you understand the less force you need. #amazingLifehack
ForceUser, as in a Force User, as in STAR WARS. Ever heard of it? A little franchise from a place called Hollywood? They released some action figures? Was recently run into the ground? No? Oh, ok.
Seeing mysogeny around every corner are we? What a joke.
Please cite the line where I mention “mysogeny”. Do you mean “force” implies “mysogeny”?
That’s not a reading I’ve seen yet, so if you could be so nice to elaborate?
And yes, the source of the name did not escape me. But it is such a freaky coincidence to see someone with both a viewpoint like the one you’re presenting and a name that seems to imply using force instead of brains. Such a double meaning is one of the exact tactics true “mysogynistic” trolls are hiding behind. But if you insist, I’ll just interpret it as a tiny narcissistic streak. Which can’t be bad because Iron Man is a narcissist and he certainly can’t be called a feminist, so he must be good. Oh wait. He’s rich. He must be a feminist. Just like Ray (from Star Wars). Just like so many rich women in the real world in mayor positions of power. All six of them.
you equated his name to being violent as a default response.
and since “everyone knows that straight white males are a hivemind” it naturally had to mean “against women”.
am i wrong? then what was your thinking process behind that acusation?
“Such a double meaning is one of the exact tactics true “mysogynistic” trolls are hiding behind.”
ah wait, you just proven me right. nvm.
and it only devolves from there.
Nothing is accepted by the modern feminists. In the absence on Evil Misogynist Men they eat each other for “internalized misoginy” or some other bullshit. I miss the times when feminist were actually fighting for female rights rather than running modern Inquisition…
I doubt a comment calling a fictional character a misogynist is helping any kind of inquisition.
Normalizes modern witchunts
What witch-hunts? I can think of maybe a few times someone was called a misogynist and that hurt their reputation, but that’s it; It’s hardly a prevalent or anything you could call a “trend”.
#metoo is a modern day witch hunt. It has actually resulted in a large number of innocent people’s lives being ruined by unsubstantiated and unproven claims. Irony being that one of the founding members themselves have raped an underaged kid and many feminist supporting her.
It was quite common for people running witch hunts to actually themselves be guilty of crimes.
We live in a society where you are guilty with no chance to be proven innocent.
What makes you think, they are innocent? 90% Violent crimes are committed by Straight White Men. (FBI Statistics)
But you’re discounting the fact that a wide majority of “Straight White Men” don’t commit violent crimes at all. By labeling “all” masculinity as “toxic” then you’re only discrediting a wide majority over the sake of a small minority that actually are “toxic.”
Besides, were you even aware that there are proven, documented cases of women raping men? Granted, it’s a relatively rare statistical occurance because even low estimates place about 70% of cases don’t even get reported.
It just goes to prove that no gender has a monopoly of violence, bigotry, or misogyny. But then again, there is no case where either gender has any more than a small minority of those negative traits. Positive or negative traits are according to an individual person, not by any specific classification.
Ascribing 90% of violent crime to straight white men specifically? Exact sources please. That sounds patently false. And I don’t think you understand the implications of assuming someone’s guilt based only on their demographics…
Some nice sexism and racism (and probably “heterophobia” if you will) we have here…
“90% Violent crimes are committed by Straight White Men. (FBI Statistics)”
You know, some of us actually CHECK the FBI statistics, and thus know that to be laughably false.
Also, for bonus lying points, the FBI stats don’t identify the sexual identity of the vast majority of criminals.
(Interesting side note: highest rate of domestic violence by demographic group? Lesbians, by a LOT. But don’t let facts and such silliness get in the way of your fantasy. Reality sucks – you really don’t want to hang out there.)
Limitation of the medium.
This is a comments thread on a graphic novel site, not a political diatribe thread on Quora/Medium/Reddit.
(Thus, remainder of my comments were deleted before posting.)
You do get that a “witch hunt” is supposed to be a hunt for that which does not exist right? An organized persecution of a non existent enemy in order to whip up the mob?
Those modern “witch hunts” by feminists you refer to are sure catching a crapload of witches…
If by “witches” you mean innocent poeple merely accused of a crime, then yes. they are.
count dankula is just one example.
i find people like you insane, honestly your view of the world is not based on a factual representation of reality. it more based off of internet troll Eco chamber BS which is just laugh able.
there is no witch hunts going one, there hasn’t been one person accused of rape/bad conduct has been found guilty of doing that. the bigger joke being we all know that they were before hand because we all know that’s how the system worked.
You have a choice here.
Calling people insane instead of trying to understand why they have certain opinions tend to not help anyone at all.
There are witch hunts going on, usually not very actually severe, but if you actually are on the receiving end, it tend to be unpleasant, no matter if you are a feminist with strong opinions, or a white hetero male.
Most of it is hot air from people that are trolling, but there are indeed a few injustices here and there … and some of those are indeed directed against whites, males, and heteros.
Personally, i’m a bi or pan-sexual transgirl with a fancy for dickgirls, … yes, i just used a word that some calls a slur … that i myself might fit, by the way.
My point is, discrimination still happens, and that is clearly worse than the use of slurs, as people that discriminate will ALWAYS find other words to use as slurs, so removing slurs are futile…
I might be digressing here.
Anyway, there is still issues, still problems, and being a “keyboard warrior” is … not the best thing to do.
Meet people, try to understand them.
Also, most of the witchhunts are really only hunting strawmen … >.<
I was assuming the green alien was female – not all species are going to differentiate between sexes like humans will – heck, like Terran species will.
If we’re going there, not all species would have sexes.
Although it may be as convergent evolution – the dual sex spread is so useful evolutionary, every advanced multi-cellular carbon-based species would have it.
You say that like we’ve encountered enough aliens in IRL to make that assumption.
We colonized Australia. Does that count?
The law of fan service demands alien hunks and babes compatible with human. It’s very scientific.
You’re assuming that the advantages of 2 sexes wouldn’t work the same with 3 or more sexes as well.
For all we know, Greeny there is actually Sthum, and so isn’t really interested in anyone that isn’t Karker or Horph, but Cora is close enough to Karker that Sthe can pretend.
2 sexes allow to shift the caloric burden of procreation on one gender and shift the brunt of natural selection and other risks on another which is not as vital for procreation. Hence why MVH is true for most animal species on this planet. What potential evolutionary benefit would be adding the third sex have, and what would that sex’s role?
Perhaps the third sex is infertile, and their role is to raise children?
So basically ants and bees (or wasps / hornets).
Queens are the Egg production machines.
Workers are the ones who are gathering food, nurturing the young and other labor.
Soldiers are the ones who do all the defending the hive (not really much different then the workers except for their size).
Drones are the DNA carriers and pretty much useless otherwise.
That is one of the excuses, for claiming Gays are not human. LGBT people are not always infertile.
I fail to see the chain of logic that brought you from the topic of alternative alien sex spreads to the topic of human gays…
fact (for now): reproduction requires both sexes (at elast untill cloning is finalised)
question: would you have sex with someone you are not interested it?
as far as i know, noone claims thathomo CANT have children if they paired with the opposite sex. the question is, what incentive do they have?
Ah yes, the “I can’t imagine how that would work, so therefore it wouldn’t” hypothesis.
I can imagine a lot of scenarions of 3+ sexes, just non of them provide more evolutionary advantages than the 2-sex spread. After all if there were any viable variants, evolution would ensure some species would eventually pick them.
In the early 80s Piers Anthony within one of his stories proposed a way that a triple sex species could work. The role taken by the participants was based on the order that they came together, but all 3 were required and parenting duties were assigned by the order that they came together.
It was part of a trilogy called the Tarot Cycle, which had very little to do with tarot other than using it as a soperficial framework to explore other issues.
That’s quite complex for absolutely no reason.
Evolution does make sub-optimal designs if they work, but it rarely does over-complicated designs if simpler ones can do the same job.
Any more than 3 sexes and it is illogical as Nature functions. A 3rd sex is the gestater can work. But no more then it gets needlessly complicated and would not survive. Budding is much easier, but would need a means of mixing genes to not have too many replications of the same genome.
See: Traveller SFRPG – Hiver handshake
I assume they’re not actually speaking English.
And we have no idea how whatever word they’re actually using is used or accepted in their language. Heck, they may have 372 words for “girl” with various nuances.
Just like the Yupic Eskimos have dozens of words for “Snow”
Canadian English also has a dozen words for snow.
I think the most common word for for snow here is akin to BLEEPING!!!!
Maxima was “babe” during the Vehemence fight. But — and this is important — only because it was Anvil saying it.
Might be a really informal ship (judging by how the, er, first mate?, referred to her as “Cora”); might be that Cora and the weapons chief(?) have been kicking around the galaxy together for 300 years, and they get to say things to her that the rest of the crew can’t.
If a close friendship with Dabbler is a good indicator of personality, Cora’s ship probably has a really relaxed atmosphere with respectto things like rank, authority, chain of command, formalities, butt-touching, etc.
Girl can also be a term used between an elder and much younger person. Generally between long time friends.
I have utterly zero idea how old the green alien is.
Green sure don’t have the body of a older man. Then again this is a superhero comic and he is a alien.
It is bad enough in the past women were called “girls” which I would think is an insult. Meaning they are not adults yet. Same with “boys” to men. But I guess I just will do it my way and see if it is agreed to by others. And I am a male adult. I wonder which Feminists said its okay? And which did not?
…wait, does this mean that Dabbler knows where the orbs are from?
I think the only “Orbs” Dabbler knows the location of are attached to various female chests.
That’s just the half of the orbs she knows. If that…
I think she would also know where to find the orbs that are responsible for most male sexual function as well. As for Syndey’s orb, she is still trying to figure that out.
I think this just means that Cora knew where the Alari home world was. Dabbler asked her to go there and pick Sydney up.
That’s the sequence of events in my mind.
Same here. I am curious if this sequence clears up the time travel / parallel universe theories though.
Pretty sure if Xuriel, not knowing anything about the details of the portal spell, can call Cora and give her pickup coordinates, that means everyone’s still in the same universe. Time travel is a bit trickier – the crew member mentions “relative local time”, but that could mean a lot of things when you’re talking about intergalactic travel. Personally I think it’s ‘normal’ relativity here and not DeLorean shenanigans with the timeline.
There’s an Asimov story where a billiard ball losses its mass. Hilarity does not ensue.
I have read, alomost everything Dr Asimov has written, I do not remember that story, Title?
I have read all three volumnes, of his autobiography, all 3 volumes with ~1000 pages each.
The Billiard Ball
He mentioned that, in retrospect, he should have titled the story
Dirty Pool.
Yes. I remember that story. However, the game in the story was billiards, not pool.
While Fred Pohl suggested it (and Isaac rejected the change due to consistency), pool is a very much different game than billiards (even though both are played in a pool hall).
That one always puzzled me a bit. I could never understand how it was supposed to be holding together. Be more like a swarm of disconnected particles, IMHO, and if that’s the case, why are they all going in the same direction? I’d have thought it would have been more like a sudden flare of cherenkov radiation that fried everything for a good sized radius.
Objects are held together by electromagnetic and nuclear forces, not by the gravity.
Yes, but the acceleration that the particles experience due to those forces is based on their mass.
Well, I guess a weightless object can bounce around at supper-speed if you kick it, but because it’s weightless it would not affect things it bounces off.
I present for your consideration, the laser-pushed lightsail. Bounces can’t happen without some sort of interaction.
Impacts are a feature of the electromagnetic force. Such an object would affect the things it came into contact with because it is not chargeless, and would repel the protons of things it went near, but without mass it itself would be unaffected by the forces it encounters.
> why are they all going in the same direction?
Because Newton’s first law? If they were going in the same direction, they would keep going this direction, unless some forces changed that?
This question reminded me of a heated argument I once had: the opponent claimed that since the force that the Sun exerts on the Moon is twice as large the force that the Earth exherts on the Moon, the Moon cannot possibly orbit the Earth, it should fly away instead, and so the Newton’s law of universal gravitation is bogus. Couldn’t changed his mind even after showing him calculations both in helio- and geocentric reference systems that showed that the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Moon could be 100x times as the Earth’s, it doesn’t matter.
I have this same mindest problem with people who insist that if you have a rigid surface Dysun’s sphere, you’d fall toward the star in the center, instead of being attracted to the nearest source of gravity many times bigger than you, which would be the miles-thick sphereskin right there under your feet. You’d still be attracted to the ground underfoot, because the immediate local gravity well is always going to be much stronger than a distant one.
Physics says the gravitational pull inside a hollow sphere is 0:
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/grvtysp.htm
weird, but true.
Never mind that the earth and moon are locked together, orbiting around a central point. (barycenter)
I (vaguely) remember another story about trying to cheat physics possibly by Asimov. A swimmer tries to cheat in an event by dousing himself with 100% anti-friction spray. He jumps into the pool at the start of the race and instead of cruising to victory he just stays in one place and flails his arms because he can’t get any pushback on the water.
Not a dig at O.B. Juan, just at the author of the remembered story.
The physics for that are flawed. Propulsion in swimming is achieved by forcing masses of water backward (a swimmer is essentially climbing a horizontal ladder made of water). The cheating swimmer would have
slowed himself down (friction provides a negligible boost), but would not have become immobiledone better (I just remembered friction over the bodyis a leading cause of water resistance, the other being non-hydrodynamic shapes). As a practical example: if propulsion was caused by friction, pushing your hand through the water like a karate chop would be as effective as the scooping motion used.
If, however, the cheater had a 100% anti-resistance spray, that could work depending on the pedantry of those involved (or work to have him completely unable to jump from the platform [no resistance from the platform when he pushed]). If you take this to its humourous logical extreme, he could win by talking to the jugs and meeting no resistance to suggesting he won. :)
Agreed. Friction only comes into play when you are considering lateral forces – normal force still works just fine.
The swimmer could have still tilted his feet to fall into the pool, pushing off the front edge at an appropriate moment, then scooped/pushed the water and turned around at the far end basically as normal. I imagine the exact motion would require some practice, but swimming still seems perfectly feasible. Getting out of the pool again could be a problem though.
Found it!
https://www.bickfordscience.com/13-Forces/PDF/Worksheet-A-Scif-Wet_behind_the_ears.pdf
Assuming it was an event like many where the divers dive forward into the water, the cheating swimmer’s forward velocity from his jump/dive should have remained his velocity throughout. I’m going to guess that this is faster than swimming speed, and so the cheater should have easily won.
Yup. Some Asimov and Clarke short stories all but namechecked. Good work Dave.
In case you’re wondering, the Arthur C Clarke story that’s all but namechecked is actually two variations of the same one, both referring to the Emperor (or Master) of the World in his Himalayan bunker.
and its later revised form .
Crap. The code format for links here always gets me.
That last line should read:
The Awakening and its revised form Exile of the Eons/Nemesis.
I think the Emperor in this case might be The Emperor from Warhammer 40,000. The Imperial Palace housing the Golden Throne is built into the hollowed out Himalayan Mountains.
Well, everyone has to get their inspiration from somewhere.
I think what he’s referring to here is The Emperor from the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The Imperial Palace housing the Golden Throne is built into the hollowed out Himalayan Mountains.
I’ve read that one. But I thought it was a Larry Niven story. He’s written a number of mystery type stories based around physics and science fiction, as has Asimov, so I guess my memory just jumbled that story of Asimov’s in with the ones by Niven.
I wonder if the power readings Cora is concerned about are coming from the Squidbilly screw ship, or if she’s picking up the power of Sydney’s orbs ripping open space/time.
Rule Of Funny says Sydney.
Blinking lights, skintight bodysits, yep we’re in SPACE
She certainly is a majestic mammaloid.
Just after the nick of time!
Is that a trope?
If not, it should be.
I don’t want to go to tvtropes and check. I actually need to get work done today.
TVTropes warning: The Cavalry Arrives Late
Yeah Sydney really should have seen this coming and waited 5-10 minutes to see if it was going to play out. Would’ve been awesome to have her say something and go anyways, but that would’ve been a huge telegraph for today’s page (although we already knew Dabbler’s help would arrive eventually) and lessened the ‘gotcha’ of expecting to see Sydney in panel 3.
But knowing how much DaveB likes to play around with tropes like that, Sydney could have thought about the trope, decided to wait anonther 10 minutes, leave, & THEN the “cavalry” shows up…Still too late.
Let’s face it: ONe of the Prime Maxims of the Universe is that if one tries to avoid a particular trope, the higher probability becomes in causing that particular trope.
ಠ_ಠ
Just AFTER the nick of time.
Either someone has managed to EDIT A POST or I wasn’t quite
awake when I read the above.
Yeah… I’m sure there’s a trope for the rescuers/reinforcements arriving
just after the people they’ve come to help have saved themselves.
Or in Sydney’s case, gotten herself even more lost. That is a constant worry for search & rescue operations.
or in the case of Callahan, the Mick of Time
Actually, his real name is Justin, even if he used “Michael Callahan” as his name. So in truth, he is Justin, the Mick of Time.
“The Paronomasia is strong with this one.”
Almost, but not quite, Darth Vader
I prefer “A Stitch in Time, Saves Stein”
cough I think you mean IMMORTAL GOD-EMPEROR OF MANKIND
Also acceptable: Immortal Man-Emperor of Mankind.
Side note: Anything moving that speed already causes nuclear fusion in any (earthlike, but presumably most others too) atmosphere it passes through just by shoving the air molecules so hard, and any normal matter not magically or technologically reinforced somehow would likely ablate within microseconds. Antimatter would do so too, but moreso. If the target’s in atmosphere, without some form of protective energy shield (that can just disintegrate on impact with a big thing) it’d be more of a ludicrously powerful shotgun with a tiny spread but instead of hot gasses and fragments of lead (?) shot, it’s explosions.
yeah, my first thought (after looking past Cora’s builtin turret estrogen cannons) was don’t use that antimatter railgun in any atmosphere you might wanna breathe in the next few thousand years.
It’s gonna rip a swathe that (at least temporarily) blinds everything for half an AU around. It could seriously be used for un-terraforming planet surfaces.
Ah, anti-matter railguns. Reminds me of the days when I flew a gunnery focused Caldari ship in EVE Online. (Worst decision ever. Should have gone for missiles instead.)
When you consider that most stellar-capable ships would be trying to shoot at each other over large distances (hundreds-of-thousands-of-miles, at least), then even lasers can be dodged IF they’re detected by the target soon enough. A projectile-type weapon (such a a chunk of anti-matter, for example) would be utterly useless. The better bet for anti-matter would be to put it in a guided missle, so that, as an added bonus, you wouldn’t have to worry much about anything immportant being behind the target…The missle would lock on & follow the target around to make a hit much more likely. This is why the idea of “railguns” on spaceships would be completely discarded.
A laser runs at light speed. When you can detect it, it’s there. You can of cause do random maneuvers with high g to not be there.
The usefulness of a rail gun depends on distance, fraction of c reached and how fast the target can accelerate. Slow big capital ships you can hit just fine over longer distances.
At C-fractional = 0.7, calculate for us now how much time would pass for an object moving at that velocity to travel through 25 miles of atmosphere.
There will also be a bow wave effect of some sort, which I fail to even imagine at the moment, composed of some sort of ultraplasma & other exotic radiation(s) combo that would keep most atmospheric atoms from contacting the antimatter. Probably only a few dozen (at most) atoms of anti-matter would annihilate against normal matter as the projectile began to enter the most rarefied outer atmosphere, and a portion of the energy & debris from which would accompany the projectile until it impacted something more solid and then proceeded to completely annihilate.
At 0.7 C-fractional, such projectiles would probably penetrate through the crust of an Earth-like planet just about as easily as it passes through atmosphere or ocean. Might even pass through a planet as small as Earth and continue through the other side with most of its mass intact.
the explosions of anti-m of the front end of the projectile would (from the unstretched newtonian view) expand in all directions – including backward at the rest of the projectile. It’ll be a helluva lot more than a few dozen atoms, even on first contact with air. then the heat released would vaporize more of the anti-m, resulting in a fireball.that could be seen from other planets. The resulting flaming fist of god would punch a hole in the crust the size of the Yellowstone supervolcano, and then, even if all the anti-m were consumed, nature would take over and change the tectonic history of the planet.
That’s assuming the missile is the size of most missiles. if the anti-m is the size of a sewing needle, the situation would be much more “confined”.
Exactly. Fast moving particles tend to pass unhindered through the spaces between other particles, or ‘bounce off’ if they pass close enough. It’s the slower particles that engage in interactions because they are within each others’ spheres of influence for long enough for the influences to have any effect.
Assuming earth-normal atmosphere the slug would plow through 14 pounds of air per square inch of frontal surface area on a vertical trajectory before it hit the surface. More if it comes in at an angle.
If it is made of antimatter and traveling that fast you can ignore sideways movement of the air. It will liberate 28 pounds of mass per square inch of cross-section as energy on the trip down.
Even at 0.7C that much energy would blow it into vapor long before it gets to the surface, and liberate the rest in annihilation with atmosphere. Basically an air burst supernuke.
Antimatter railguns might be a great weapon in space, but I hope Dave equipped that ship with other weapons too.
Cora: “Bring *the* anti-mass driver online, just in case.”
Crew member #3: “You know me girl. I brought ‘em *ALL* online.”
My interpretation is that they have multiple different weapons systems, one of which is the anti-mass driver. All of their weapons are currently online, because the guy in charge of the ship’s weaponry really enjoys his job.
Also acceptable: that corpse on the throne.
Damn. Looks like Sydney just missed her Uber.
Bet Dabbler’s still going to get billed for the trip,
The color scheme of Cora is disturbing. Are those mechanical legs? Flesh-colored skin-tight leggings? My eyes can’t correlate.
Since her facial skin is blue, I’m going to say that’s some form of uniform / combat suit.
I acknowledge I could be way wrong…
Everything except for the blue on her face is space suit (makes sense from a practical POV) also 2 of the other 3 aliens are also covered from the bits we can see and their suits come up over their cheecks similarly to Cora. The green alien has a bit more skin exposed so the suit can probably extend/retract a bit and can probably cover their entire heads for vacuum use.
I was looking at the neck/cheek covers as well and wondering whether it was covering gills or somehow related to the fancy/mechanical collars. Perhaps a padding / connective inerface layer for (auto-)deploy helmets for EVAs, to allow a tight fitting mask that doesn’t obscure facial features?
That was my interpretation as well, those are uniforms/spacesuits, the golden coloured arms and legs are armour or a weapon system, or maybe just an indicator of rank. The green person has lower neck coverages because he/she/it has gills. The collars can deploy a helmet/atmosphere containment when required, maybe some kind of wearable nano technology, which is why it is skin tight.
We know Dabbler was once a slave to a war mongering race that replaced a some of her body with cybernetics so her “friend” might be from that same period. The arms do look mecanical and it’s not too far-fetched to assume a four limb replacement. I’m guessing of course but there is precedent in Dabbler’s cybernetic replacements.
Wait, do you have a source for that? I don’t recall anything about her being a slave, and IIRC only one of her hands (and one eye) is cybernetic, due to her not being “as good a sword fighter as I like to think I am.”
Her origin story in Wereworld a webcomic now ended. Not sure if it is or isn’t part of this continuum but it is more than Dave gave us in this comic. And it actually confirms Dabbler’s comment a bit because they often fixed their slave-soldiers up with cyber parts. Cheaper then getting new slaves. Until Dave says otherwise I’ll treat it as canon or slightly altered canon.
Is the webcomic in question Wereworld.comicgenisis.com? that’s what came up in a quick search.
Wereworld is canon (including Dabbles’ extra set of bewbs and tail), it just was never explained when it was set
That’s from the webcomic ‘Wereworld’, where Dabbler was brainwashed by an evil species calling themselves ‘The Enigma’. Once she gets the brainwashing removed she decides to Take Care of the Enigma (the ones still alive after one of the main protagonists, a human whom was abducted and turned into a cyber soldier by them breaks free and slaughters every Enigma he can reach.) In the comic Dabbler has a (detachable) tail and four breasts to go with her four arms. She already has a cybernetic arm and eye at that point, though it’s unclear if the Enigma is responsible for that. Probably not, as Dabbler in this comic has mentioned that her cybernetic parts are the result of two different combat accidents where she basically overestimated her own prowess with the sword.
My headcanon is that the second set of breasts were merely add-ons, and that they kept getting in the way and causing other issues, so she decided to go back to two.
All of her limbs are mechanical.
Somebody beat me to it – predicting that the “ship emitting crazy signals” is Sydney..
Sydney left already I think, the ship is probably referring to the tentacle-dropping ship that attacked Sydney earlier
So, did they arrive immediately before or immediately after Sydney warped away? I’m hoping for the former. There isn’t anything wrong with what we’ve gotten, but I really just want to see the team back together before 2019.
I feel the same way. If it wasn’t such great work we wouldn’t be so impatient,, I guess.
If they were 30 light-minutes from the planet facing the side
where Sydney was earning her points, they would see the battle.
One of them anyway.
Not sure if they meant to time-travel to before the team ARRIVED
then wait until their prescence didn’t constitute a paradox to retrieve
Sydney.
Sheesh! How can you have a time machine and be too late for the pickup???
Like Shatner doing a spoken word version of a rap song; They found a way!
It thought of it as a parallel universe, not time shift. Sydney is in universe where Alari homeworld is a toast (even though Sciona communicated with our version of it a week before). Universe where there is already full allotment of local Harems (regardless of what their limit is, our Harem is one too many, that’s why she is disoriented).
Being able to travel across the galaxy in a few hours and to a parallel universe on top is still impressive, but not as paradox-prone as time travel.
That said, the quote about “local relative time” implies I was wrong, and there is indeed time travel involved. I’ll just wait for next page to hopefully resolve that, like I always do.
If it’s a parallel universe, no one would have any idea which one. How then did Dabbler place a call and have her friends from Grrlverse Prime arrive (we presume) at Sydney’s recent* location in whichever universe she’s in?
* I just realized we don’t actually know yet that she went into the portal
Also, it seems to me that the Alari homeworld was toasted VERY recently, considering the craters were still glowing and the fires were still burning.
They aren’t time travelling. They are late because they didn’t go in a straight line.
It is the fault of the Fel.
They went point to point, no lines involved.
Then what does the angle of departure have to do with them being late?
Antimatter fired with a railgun? Are the rails antimatter too? Because if not, boom.
Perhaps a coilgun might make a little more sense there.
A railgun’s magnetic coils don’t have to be in physical contact with the projectile, so they don’t need to be antimatter themselves. Mutual annihilation only occurs with physical contact.
Actually it would be rather dangerous to store antimatter projectiles in a normal matter ship. Any loss of containment and you go boom! What would be far safer would be a system where the projectile masses are ordinary matter, that somehow through mad science get converted into antimatter as they are launched from the railgun.
A railgun doesn’t have coils though.
It consists of a strong magnet and two electrically conductive rails that pass a current through the projectile, which in turn induces a magnetic field opposed to the big one
Both railguns and coilguns require contact with the projectile, or at least a sabot surrounding the projectile.
I expect he’s thinking of a maglev accelerator and calling it a railgun.
There is no “strong magnet” in railgun’s scheme – projectile is pushed by the interaction between it’s magnetic field and magnetic fields of both rails.
Also coil-gun can absolutely be contactless
They do however have to conduct normal electricity. AKA electrons. Which would violently annihilate with the anti-electrons in the slug. Basically this means you have to have anti-mater rails, wiring, capacitors and generators in order to fire antimatter from the railgun system. That is unless you cheat physics with some (maybe magical) bullshit our modern science isn’t aware of. In which case why didn’t you use that physics-defying mcguffing to launch the projectile in the first place?
Not really. while moving electrons and anti-electrons define electricity, there doesn’t have to be conduction BETWEEN the matter and anti-matter. The magnetic field generated by one will induce an opposing current in the other but the “connection” between the two is the contactless “non-matter” magnetic field. How do you think the LHC controls their anti-matter experiments? Not magic nor physics defying.
The LHC, and other particle accelerators, are based on the Coilgun principle rather than the Railgun. Both turn electrical energy into kinetic energy of the projectile, but they use very different methods to do it. Not magic, not physics-defying, but not the technology you were thinking of either.
Dangerous, yes, but ST has gotten away with using antimatter to power its warp drives for centuries, and its photon torpedoes use an antimatter warhead as well.
Those uses of AM are relatively tame, however- you can easily stick a few grams in a magnetic bottle for storage and transport, same with the warheads. Then as soon as the bottle is breached, you have the blast.
One of the biggest boons of a railgun is that you can have a relatively simple solid monomaterial projectile- that goes away when you’re firing a constructed mag-bottle warhead projectile from it.
I can imagine a potential problem with using antimatter projectiles. Does antimatter have a reversed magnetic field from normal matter? Trying to shoot it from your gun could just fire straight back into your face.
>Does antimatter have a reversed magnetic field from normal matter?
No, it have reversed electrical charge, which means anti-electrons would flow from – to +. Electrical field generated by this flow however would generate exactly the same magnetic field.
It has opposite charge. Just reverse the polarity.
As mentioned above, it is keeping the anti-materiel contained that is the problem.
Ah, The Legend of Cora is about to be added to.
viz AM rounds – using a mass driver to throw gas cylinders of compressed liquid anti-hydrogen that shatter and expand dramatically on impact has its entertainment value as an anti-personnel round (for definitions of personnel that include the big squid)…
Matroyshka bunker buster wouldn’t really work, because of a variety of things, but mostly Sir Isaac Newton – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth. Adding more energy to an impactor doesn’t really make it go deeper, it makes your crater wider.
All the penetrator would likely do is collapse all the ‘shells’ on the moment of contact – and a big problem with even the normal the anti matter gun is that contact means contact with any normal particles, so you’re going to have issues even penetrating atmosphere. If you had something that was powerful enough to protect, say, the matter inside your antimatter shell, then whatever magic super-stuff that is would likely be a better weapon.
Also, completely irrelevant in a world where teleportation is a readily accessible thing.
Not sure how it would translate, but the way I see it working is you have the container/shielding/etc. around the antimatter that acts like a modern day copper or steel jacket / casing around a gooey center of high explosives.
So yes, sometimes you want a solid depleted uranium shell and sometimes you want an HE shell. It’s all about what would do the most damage. IF you want to deliver a packet of antimatter to the soft vulnerable center of something then the ideal delivery system (if shielded form teleportation) would be some kind of magically and impossibly strong but extremely low friction shell to punch through anything smoothly and then pop at the right time (timed delay fuse) delivering it’s package.
Use buckyballs. The inside of a buckyball faces electrons in every direction. Stuff it with ionized anti-hydrogen, the anti-protons in the middle would be repelled by all the electrons with no opportunity to contact normal protons, thereby acting as a magnetic bottle for a few atoms of antimatter. multiply by ten zillion, you have a black solid object that safely encases antimatter. Smash it hard enough into any solid object and the outer layer of buckyballs is crushed through normally chemistry and kinetics.
The few released anti-hydrogen atoms go boom, and start the chain reaction.
no weird slien tech needed – just physics we know today and a helluva lotta tricky engineering.
There is an even better way… fire your rounds one after the other with enough delay that the initial splatter is thin enough for the next round…
I was thinking also of handy storage.
The ‘fun’ thing with buckyballs is that they don’t have to be solid, you can make a dust out of them so you have a fine powder where each particle contains some antimatter. That dust makes it very hard to break with kinetics but easy to crack open with heat so you can have the shell full of that dust punch through things without setting it off until you want.
Ah, good old AM-doped Boomex.
Fun times for everyone.
And they’re too late to stop her from traveling away from the planet.
Nice sexdoll in panel 7. :3
Ouch!
So the rescue parties arrived but Sydney’s already blast it opponents to death and ran yeah that’s going to be kind of scary
The nesting-shell idea makes me think about particle cannons. Basically an antimatter sandblaster. But there’s probably issues with warhead yeild that make the railgun preferable in certain cases.
In that display screen above and behind Cora’s head, I swear that looks like a Basset Hound in a Bathrobe.
Maybe one of the crew likes Hong Kong Phooey? Just guessing
And they’re playing team solitaire (cards beneath the hound). Or maybe it’s Michigan Rummy. hard to see.
Nahh.. that there is a genuine geek Easter Egg. That is the alien contact screen from Captain Blood. The ‘cards’ are symbols for various concepts, so you can talk with the critters.
Nope! That’s a vintage Easter Egg! That’s the alien contact screen from the old game Captain Blood. The ‘cards’ are symbols for communication.
https://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/8/83//captain-blood-1.jpg?itok=3zLauSZq
Nice to see that the Galactic community has adopted our innovative bridge design. Paramount should really demand royalties.
Yup all without seat belts, pillows or helmets in case of explosive decompression :)
The helmets are integrated into the suit design. They will automatically form around your head should there be a breach. The suits are all purpose survival capable for a time.
…nice skinsuit/uniform design, DaveB. Willing to bet the power readings are both the squidward ship and Sydney…
Hopefully we’re about to find out who Squiddly-diddly & Co. are and why they fired on non-Aliari lifeforms bearing mystery billiard balls…
I’m utterly shocked that events happened in this order. That Sydney would leave just before the rescue would arrive.
No wait. Opposite of that.
Still love it though!
Geeze, what kind of favors allow you to call in a space battleship to serve as a taxi for a friend?
Regarding the mass driver… launching antimatter at reletavistic speeds seems like it should be a bigger and better weapon, but in the end antimatter is too unstable to really work for that. It’ll make a big explosion at the point of contact, but the real value of a mass driver is penetration, and no matter what you do that antimatter can’t survive to pentrate deeper into the target.
John Ringo, in one of his space-based science fiction novels, had a ship with a massive mass driver, and it launched a round with a depleted uranium core, surrounded by a binch of steel, encased in a sheath of carbon monomolecule. The carbon was just there to prevent the shell from cracking on impact with random micrometeorites. On impact most of the shell would vaporize into a massive plasma wave that would rip a huge hole in the target, but the depleted uranium core, being denser, would survive long enough to fly deeper in until it hit something solid, where it would shatter into a thousand white-hot pieces that would burn their way through anything in their path.
“relativistic.” I can spell. Really.
Sexual favors, perhaps? It IS Dabbler.
I get the “fellow adventurer” vibe from her but considering Dabbler that would include sexual entangling too :D
Not necessarily, after all, she’s adventuring with Maxima as well, and it doesn’t seem likely any sexual entangling will ever come from that.
But not because Dabbler didn’t try.
Knowing Dabbler, it’d be sexy favors.
Cookie flavors er favors.
As to calling in taxi, i will point out that a (likely major) warlike civilisation, had just been wiped out.
It is not something that should be taken lightly. the taxi probably would have been more of a “and while your are there, might as well”
It all depends on the cost of travel – if it is very cheap for an advanced civilisation then maybe it is just a funny sidetrip comparable to a few hours car drive on earth… If Dabbler has a problem why wouldn´t her good friend help if it is not a problem to do so? If on the other hand it is a hassle to travel in space and very costly then there probably would be some kind of compensation needed…
UPCOM ACTIVATED
Their uniforms look like they are spray painted on.
So, they just missed Sydney? Are they going to chase after her? Or just report that they were late to Dabbler?
Stay Tuned.
I was getting subtle hints that the portal that brought them there in the first place went a bit askew and dumped them in an alternate dimension. Guess that theory goes out the window.
Oh, and because someone has to say it…
“That means SIR ISAAC NEWTON IS THE DEADLIEST SONUVABITCH IN SPACE!”
thus explaining why you do not “eyeball” ship cannons :D
And how you could be ruining someone’s day 10,000 years from now if you miss.
Nice that Dabbler has friends from space. Can’t wait to see Sydney’s reaction to them…!
Aww, only antimatter? The name had me hoping it was a negative-mass cannon; maybe not that boomy but fun in it’s own right, while vanishingly rare – antimatter might cause matter to explode, but negative matter effectively *deletes* matter, it’s just gone, like if mass is piles of stuff of a ground of space you’d be shooting holes, hit something and it just absorbs it’s negative-mass in matter. Negative energy freeze-rays, too; shoot a negative-IR ray and delete the heat. :p
Fun fact; the mass-energy of a projectile is equal to the kinetic energy of that projectile going about 87% lightspeed, so antimatter bullets “only” about triple the boom of the 0.7c mass drivers.
Antimatter is actually kind of disapointingly weak; “only” about 45 megatons per kilogram, so about the power of the Tsar Bomb test.
:) And that was the “flaw” Doc Smith denoted as one of the two he knew was present in the Skylark novels – the energy of matter was insufficient to produce the effects he was describing, at least using the quantity of matter he was burning directly to energy.
If you can make wormholes, it seems to me that a much more effective weapon would be to make a small wormhole to the core of a nearby star. Imagine fusing plasma of millions of degrees jetting out under a million atmosphere of pressure…
Isn’t that what Sidney’s PPO is doing? (*touching a star)
Of course Dabbler know a crew of sexy aliens.
I think we all realize that if Sydney miss getting a ride on the awesome alien spaceship with actual real spacealiens she’s going to heckle Dabbler from here until the end of time until she gives in and asks Cora to give Sydney a joyride around the galaxy.
Dabbler and Cora seem to have similar hobbies. My first thought was “cookies?”.
Dabbler: *Baking cookies*
Maxima: “Let me guess: Demon stuff?”
Dabbler: “Nope! Alien stuff!”
Maxima: …
Dabbler: *smiling*
Maxima: *sigh*
Dabbler: *offers cookie*
Maxima: *light facepalm*
Maxima: *accepts cookie*
Maxima:*eats cookie,later make contorted face*
Maxima:*spits out foul tasting cookie*
Dabbler:*makes quizzical face*
Maxima:”Where id you learn to cook,school for the blind?”
Dabbler: And now we know that what tastes good to me won’t automatically taste good to you. May explain why I can enjoy a mouthful of *redacted* and you don’t.
Maxima: *glare*
Maxima: …
Maxima: I’ll be in my bunk.
Dabbler: You want-
Maxima: Alone.
In my opinion, it might be better if the anti-mass drivers fired several smaller projectiles aimed at different places of the target’s hull. At 0.7c, the projectile wouldn’t have the time to significantly deform (much less disperse) by the time it gets to the other side of the target, therefore it would just leave a “puncture wound”, instead of the intended shotgun blast (assuming that the projectile was to annihilite with the internal composition of the target). Also given the projectile’s immense kynetic energy (some 40% of mc^2 at 0.7c) that the target would have to absorb (in order to stop it, so the projectile can annihilate with the target’s mass), the projectile better be VERY light.
In general, the projectile should overcome the target’s defenses (active defenses, shields, hull, anything else?), which would likely require a saturation attack in the first place. Depending on the nature of the target’s shields, it would either have to be very centered (if there is a singular shield emitter, to overwhelm that), or disperse it to several pre-selected points (if there are many shield emitters, in order to overwhelm those, but not to waste too much force in a single point). Considering the second one to be more likely, as it wouldn’t leave the ship defenseless in case one of the shield emitters fails, and many shield emitters allow for the neighbors of the failing one to cover the area of attack in its place.
Taking both into account, I would expect the ship’s anti-mass drivers to actually be highly agile anti-mass driver version of the GAU-8. Probably with much higher rate of fire.
1. In panel 3, is that … violet thing … a big orb?
2. If fundamental particles lost their mass, they’d fly around at the speed of light. All massless particles move at the speed of light, all others move slower. There’s a hypothesis that the current state of the Higgs field is not infinitely stable, and at some undetermined point in the future, that is exactly what will happen – google “big rip”.
3. Railgun: at 70% c, any projectile, upon encountering enough mass, will immediately convert itself and the mass it hit into hot plasma. So the exact inner structure won’t make any significant difference; there’s not enough time for it to do. If you shot with antimatter, then presumably you now have a plasma that’s a mix of normal and antimatter, which will then react further. But remember that the energy of a perfect anti-matter reaction is 2mc^2 (2 for the part of the normal mass that reacts), and the speed for a non-relativistic bullet is mv^2/2. It’s more when relativistic. I’ll guess that comes to maybe 0.7 mc^2, so antimatter gives you at best something like a factor of 3. I doubt that’s worth the significantly more complex engineering.
1. Nah. It’s a Chenzeme zero-point reef.
Considering the colouring my guess is it’s the ship’s portal generator.
I’d guess each Matryoshka sabot would be magnetically contained (or some other, more exotic form of energy containment—micro-tractor field or what have you), with the containment set to fail above a certain level of impact. That way if the round happens to smack into a random piece of tissue paper that’s floating through space for some reason—or, more realistically, space dust or even a cosmic ray—it doesn’t waste an antimatter layer on it.
My money is on squids contacting Cara to suggest an alliance against the alien threat (Sydney)
That’d be priceless..
It looks to me like Dabbler’s prosthetic eye color choice was an homage to her friend Cora.
Dabbler’s prosthetic eye is a much darker blue.
They’re going to be in for a shock when they figure out what happened, find the dead squids
“find the dead squids”
If I ever start up a band, I know what I am going to name it.
Squidmageddon?