Grrl Power #678 – Grrl Power SG-1
This thing looks a lot more like a Stargate than I’d intended. I mean, it’s a circle with some crap attached to it, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, I hadn’t finalized the dialog for this page until after I had all the pencils done, so I thought I would preempt the comparisons by having Vale bust on Deus about it.
This is one of those pages I wanted to compress this and the next one into a single page, but I recently spent two hours recently one night rereading a chunk of the comic, and while I generally enjoy reading my own comic, the two things I thought could be better, (besides the odd panel that desperately needs some new art) was honestly, I think the font is a little small. Part of that is the size and resolution of my monitor. It’s 27″, but the res is 2560 x 1440, so everything is a bit smaller than on most smaller but lower res monitors.
The other thing I noticed was that there are definitely a few places where I didn’t really visually show what’s going on as well as I could have. A paper comic has a bit more space to take the time to show the steps in a sequence. Mangas especially, because they’re trying to fill something like 10-12 pages a week. I’m usually trying to fit a… I don’t quite know what to call it. A complete thought on a single page because of the wait between pages. Not a whole scene, but I really want each page to be its own… clause?
Anyway, I thought instead of trying to cram this page and the next onto one, I’d take the time to space them out and have a few larger panels. Man, I really packed the panels in on those earlier pages. I think my record is 17. That’s just nutty.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Always remember the UX, Dave.
Far too often I find sites that don’t appear to have had any thought gone into the end user’s experience. Mostly, it’s garish colour schemes, a lack of contrast between text and background, and then there’s the whole volume of sites still using ’90s schemes which mostly involve an overabundance of low-res animated gifs.
I think I’ll start a big argument. Wikipedia is dissed by many on account just about anyone can edit the thing, even if wrongly. The Power Tower is an example–it should be wider at top than at bottom (not counting greenhouse field). That way air can expand/cool as it rises. As is, it MAY work, just not as efficiently as if the top was wider. Also, the whole thing needs to be painted black, not just part of it.
What does Wikipedia have to do with the tower design and what does the tower design have to do with UX design?
Also anyone can undo damage done to an article, mark lack of references and the like. And when in doubt, a article can be protected agaisnt defacing by requiring a Wikipedia account with enough brownie points.
Sorry, but couple issues. First, air (and most other forms of matter) contracts as it cools, not expand. Put a sealed, empty plastic bottle in the freezer to see it. Second, DaveB was likely just making his tower based on the examples on the wiki page. None of the diagrams or pictures of the prototype in Spain show anything other than a more or less uniform diameter tower and there is no mention that I could find about needing to be wider at the top. The prototype is also white with red bits, no black at all.
I will be pedantic and you will like it! Or not. Whichever really.
Now all you need do is explain why a funnel cloud has that shape (wider at top). Good luck! Back when this gadget first made an appearance in the comic (archive 2956) the author pretty clearly stated that Wikipedia was the source of the Idea.
I say that wikipedia is wrong (and so is the article on which the Idea is based), entirely because air is known to expand/cool as it rises in a funnel cloud.
A funnel cloud is wider at the top because the air is pressure differential between the top and the bottom is being equalized with maximum efficiency. (aka slowest maximum wind speed). An updraft tower has the opposite goal and hence the opposite shape; it flares at the bottom with the wide almost flat glass roof surrounding the base of the tower.
…. Okay. The thing you have to understand is the air around you right now is under pressure. One atmosphere of pressure, actually. It’s called “one atmosphere of pressure” exactly for the reason you think… because it is holding up the weight of one whole Earth’s worth of atmosphere. Imagine a column of air extending all the way to the edge of space. At the bottom of the column the air is holding up all the rest of the air in that column. This puts pressure on that air… one atmosphere of pressure (give or take depending on altitude and weather). This pressure forces the air around you to fit into a smaller space. The air at the bottom of our imaginary column is denser (less expanded) than at the top for no other reason than there is less pressure at the top than the bottom. There are ways to make air expand while still carrying the weight above it… the most obvious is heat. By adding heat energy to the air it is _forced_ to expand _in-spite of_ the weight of the air around it. That is, the heated air’s internal pressure increases while the ambient pressure pushing down/in on that air remains the same. Now here’s an interesting thing… if you reduce the ambient pressure on a volume of air… the air will cool. That is the air will expand but get colder. By adding energy to a given volume of air you make that air work harder against the ambient pressure around it… that’s why it expands when heated. But by reducing the ambient pressure around a given volume of air you make that air work _less_ hard… which causes it to get colder. More heat -> work harder… work less hard -> less heat. Expanding or contracting is simply a factor of how hard the air with working against ambient pressure and, in truth, isn’t directly related to it’s temperature at all. This is why air is colder and less dense at higher altitudes… it isn’t having to work as hard against the air above/around it because there is, in fact, less air above/around it (less ambient pressure). And, in fact, you can swap pressure and heat interchangeable. If you put air under more pressure (make it work harder) it will heat up. And if you take heat away from the air (remove it’s ability to work as hard) it will contract. Cold air contracts… not expands. Understand?
Only water expands as it freezes because it interlocks into matrices taking up more space than when it was liquid. But then water is a peculiar substance.
Sorry @Lydialeera, air (or any other gas), does change in PRESSURE due to a change in temperature. Specifically. PV=nRT, where P = pressure, V = volume and T = absolute temperature, and R = Rankine constant (IIRC). The plastic BOTTLE collapses because the bottle’s fixed volume of room temperature air loses pressure as it cools and is crushed by the constant atmospheric air pressure.
Flares at the top of towers let the higher pressure gas expand as it exits, decreasing back pressure and increasing the flow rate in the tower.
Dropping the pressure on a gas also lowers the temperature of the gas. The tower doesn’t expand at the top for the same reason that other chimneys don’t, it would slow the draw (updraft) of the chimney. All of the power for driving the t system comes from the differential at the very top of the chimney, where it meets the cooler air.
Another neat thing about gasses…
As a gas in motion speeds up, it’s pressure drops …
Widening the tube at the top is going to do quite a few things…
Increasing volume per height … dropping pressure?, cutting speed->increasing pressure, crfeating more targetable area for light, allowing gasses to cool faster (more surface area) … ugh, making my head hurt.
Water Ice, expands as it gains more volume, as it gets colder.
Water is almost wholly unique in that factor though, nearly every other element/compound contracts and condenses as it gets colder. Air included. Take a balloon for example fill it with air and toss it in the freezer. In an hour it’ll be significantly deflated, the reverse is also true, fill a balloon with cold air and take it outside on a hot day and it’ll burst
Water to ice expands due to the crystalline matrix of the ice taking up more space… for a bit. As the temperature continues to drop, so does the volume of the ice, just like any other substance. Take that same water balloon and stick it into a cold enough freezer, and it will be smaller when you take it out. (If you had a time lapse camera on it, you’d see it shrink as the water got cold, then swell as it turned to ice, then shrink again.)
Alternatively, a gas cools as it expands. You can observe a brief period of sharp cooling generate water vapour when you open a (pressurised) can of beer or fizz.
I am pretty sure that Anon Y Mous’s argument is the opposite of what you think it is – they are saying that they need to have the upper opening wider so that the air will expand, which would cause it to cool (as per Boyle’s Law, IIRC).
However, I think this argument is still flawed. While a gas will cool adibatically when it expands in a closed space if no additional heat is added, this system by design is not a closed one. If the air toward the stack’s outflow port were to drop in pressure relative to the air near the outflow, it would just lead to the surrounding air rushing back in, reversing the flow and causing the system to halt.
One could argue that decreasing the diameter of the Solar Updraft Tower as it approaches the outflow would make more sense than increasing it, though this doesn’t fit, either; it would disrupt the pressure differentials that the stack effect relies on, as narrowing the stack would cause a buildup in pressure towards the outflow. Since the whole purpose of the SUTPP is to drive the turbines from the inflow, and the greater internal pressure would cause the inflow to decrease, that runs counter to the purpose of the towers.
I’m really not sure how this relates to Dave talking about the font size on earlier strips being too small.
Because some people comment on what is in the actual comic (namely, panel one)
DaveB, you aren’t allowed to draw anything science related until you go out and get at least an associates degree in that field! Because!
I think you’ve misunderstood how this would (supposedly) work. The tower itself isn’t heated; indeed, heating the tower itself is counterproductive, and in any case it wouldn’t present a significant cross-section to the income solar radiation.
Rather, the idea (IIUC) is that you have a wide solar heat collector around the base of the tower.
The collector itself should be black, though, or at least appear dark from the outside. As I understand it, the collector would consist of a large, shallowly conical (with an angle of around 5 degrees), heat-transparent upper layer over a series of pools of water (you could use anything that has a high heat retention, water just happens to be convenient and useful), which would ideally have a bottom and sides that would absorb heat by day and reflect it at night – a simple black coating would work, but one that becomes white when there is no light falling on it would be better (there are a number of ways to get this effect, though it does
In principle, the conical shape of the collector will mean that the rising air (rising because warm air is more buoyant than cool air) will differentially move towards the tower (and the turbines) rather than out the narrower peripheral intake, causing the warmed air to be move up and out through the tower and cooler air to be pulled into the peripheral intake.
While the basic hydrodynamic principle it is based on (the stack effect) is well established, the engineering probably isn’t. Until some puts up more funding to build pilot plants – not a just one or two, either, but enough to test variations on the designs – we won’t know for sure.
I forgot to explain why you want the pools of water; that isn’t a necessary part of the design, but it is part of most of the design ideas (including the one in the Wicked-Pedo diagram) as a form of hysteresis (through what is sometimes called a ‘thermal flywheel’ effect).
Because the large bodies of water would absorb heat, it would even the heating of the system as a whole out, so that you don’t get surges in the turbines early in the morning, or big differentials between two different turbines.
It would also allow the collector to continue heating the air even when there is period of several hours darkness, as the heated water continues to warm the air.
You would still want some sort of additional power generation for later at night, or for extended periods of heavy overcast, which is presumably what the hydroelectric plant they mention is for.
‘[..] several hours of darkness’. I have been dropping both articles and suffixes today.
So Deus opens his portal and uses it to go to The Fracture. Once there, his portal fails because of the failure of Fan 9. Deus meets Cora, and gets distracted by his desire to add another page to his library of sexual conquests. Vale has to work with Sydney to acquire a replacement for Fan 9. Sydney then has to hump this replacement through the Atherium Causeway to Earth. The problem is finally solved when Sydney delivers…
Fan 9 From Outer Space!
But will Dracula be involved?
Yes – he’s going to address Sydney’s need for a re-entry vehicle.
No he is hiding on his secret based on the moon.
I did not consent to this Punishment, #6
Be seeing you.
And you.
And if they aquire the fan from area in control of a race of mustelidoids then it would be Fan Nine From Otter Space!
Where’s the button to upvote this awful pun?
+1
I love the long road puns :D My favourite is still the story of Nate the snake.
https://natethesnake.com/
send that one to callahan’s saloon.
please
Always makes you wonder, what where Fans 1-8?
Fan you say? I’ll raise you a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp0T6zYByM
What is the significance of Fan #9 being down for maintenance? How is that going to add a plot twist?
Because DaveB has shown that he is always willing to provide some ‘fan service’.
This deserves an up-vote…
Well, they’re pretty confident that there’s *no* likelihood of having a sudden power drop at an inopportune moment, and our attention has just been drawn to that confidence. So, I’m thinking, “power drop at an inopportune moment.”
Chekhov’s Gun argues for the failure of the fan to have some significance later in the story.
Exactly my point. It’s had big sign pointed at it, just as the explosives in the base were highlighted (and used to close the rogue portal shortly after Megasquidward #1’s blast). So what is going to happen here? Time to get your speculation hats on!
I predict Sydney will be knocked head-over-teakettle through the portal (possibly by a Fracture bartender?) and crash through the inactive fan – hitting the others would cause too much damage for the current pacing to deal with.
The emergency shutoff button is hit, closing the portal. Sydney dusts herself off and gets her bearings, and strolls over to Deus:
Sydney: “Sorry about losing your biggest fan, but… that’s just how I roll.”
Deus: “Hmmmmmmm.”
Vale:
Vale- Okay it’s not a Stargate then…what are you gonna call it.
Deus -Look at the shape. A monument of my skill. Think of how I managed to get this…and who I managed to get into bed…I think we’ll call this the ‘Big O’.
Vale- NO! You really need to delve into the anime subculture more to understand why…
Deus- What’s wrong with calling it Big O?
Vale- That would cause this to summon lawyers… the skeevy kind.
Deus- So? I have Rancors to feed.
Vale- Rancors? You know what a Rancor is but don’t know… ahh hell. Look I’ll send you some links…especially a Hentai Primer if you’re gonna be playing with portals full time looking for a profit.
And maybe look into a giant robot to protect all this from something trying to come through….
Deus- But I have you…
Vale- And how did I geto Earth?
Deus- Ohhh yeah… Giant robot you say? (Holds up hand) But watch some anime first so I know what to shop for out there or get made here to stop another you from coming through?
Vale- and remember what Harem said she just remembered when one of her just got back through their own portal…
Deus- It’s not that big is it?
Vale – Galactically…not even a pimple…
Deus- I just hope we don’t attract cats when it starts up…
Vale- I have catnip grenades just in case…
Oddly, this Big O doesn’t appear to summon any skeevy hentai lawyers.
I don’t think this one does either. Wasn’t the type of movie I was looking for tho…
Sorry Deus, there’s already a Stargate in Andorra:
https://www.nevasport.com/reportajes/img/reportajes/ordino08/image014.jpg
I was visiting Seoul and was happy to see a statue that kinda looked like a Stargate, by day 3 I had to stop taking pictures of them because I was up to a dozen.
What are they used for? I could not see any markings.
That’s because Human eyes are not as good as those of Sebaceans, or Luxans, or Nebari…
HUMANS ARE SUPERIOR!
also, crackers remain awesome!
The way we saw the Skybreaker working with Sciona, this reminds me of Arcanum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura) and its last cinematic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUvINC4b5GY&t=25m15s.
Deus, with all due respect, this seems like a REALLY BAD IDEA
Ah, relax. He’s already hammered out a contract with the Combine, including a promise of no headcrabs. what could go wrong?
Everything AND the kitchen sink?
Precisely!
Well there has been attempts to copyright basic things before. It’s only a matter of time before some corporation manages to force through copyrighting basic geometric shapes. We have already had someone try to copyright a shark a few years back as I recall.
Apple already did, they own the copyright for “square with rounded corners”.
Patent, not copyright.
… also, there is patent for wheel in Australia.
Yeah and it turns out they eventually did lose that patent in court.
So… when was this not-a-Stargate built? And how does Deus know how to use it? Because Deus only had knowledge of the items in the vault, of which the Brane Ripper was one. Remember that Sciona used the Brane Ripper as a component in her Skybreaker. And while Deus might have known how to use the BR, they only found the Skybreaker a very short while ago. And I don’t think there was a manual included. But this device seems to be custom designed and built to use not only the functions of the Brane Ripper, but the interface of the Skybreaker modification.
Well, that or it was originally designed for the Brane Ripper and he’s since modified it to work with the Skybreaker… Hopefully successfully.
Notice it’s Vale actually doing the “dialing”. Maybe they asked what’s left of Sciona how to use it in exchange for a much-needed favor. Or perhaps Vale was stealthily watching the first time Sciona used the thing…
Deus clearly did not think this design through.
Unless he’s trying to draw the Kzinti, Killrathi, and any other aggressive feline aliens to Earth, with his giant can-opener.
(All Kzinti perk up their ears)
It’s the Catsignal!
I don’t know why, but I find it endlessly delightful that Vale — eldritch abomination or not — watches a lot of TV.
She spends a lot of her time watching her favorite streaming service: Ct-Hulu
*slow clap*
Good show, sir. Good show indeed.
You know, Hulu should totally set up a second headquarters in Connecticut.
Deus, trying to deny it only accomplishes making you look foolish. Just own up to your obvious desire to build a stargate.
SmugD knows exactly what he built, and why he chose to build it like that
He gets a mini-chub from pulling shit like this, he’s only pissed that Valeur mentioned the StarGate before he got to say something stupid like “Chevron 7 locked” and then giggle like a drunk schoolgirl after sipping her first winecooler
Will be back next week, can’t stand that idiot
Sydney already said it first, so it’s not like he could pretend to be original.
And no, it doesn’t matter that she was many millions of lightyears away when she said it.
Don’t rush back! Take as much time as you like, as long as it is quite a lot of it.
*incoming off-world wormhole*
Vale: Close the iris!
Deus: But that’s my favorite bordello!
by the gods Deus is such a villain sue….
i know he’s most likely the main villain and the author was likely aiming for a “Magnificent Bastard” type villain. but for me he over shoot that by a mile and for as much as i understand he needs to be saved for later i can’t wait for someone to curb stomp his skull.
he just takes me right out of the comic every time he shows up.
+1 internet :D
Complete agreement with you
I am still hoping he is not a Villain. Just an overbearing Jacka$$, who is so very adorable when messing with our hero’s wardrobe. Does not cause damage or chaos, just mildly annoying in a charming sort of way.
Kinda like Tony Stark (seriously, he has pulled way worse than Deus and Iron Man is still a hero.)
Maybe he is the opposite of an Anti-hero, an Anti-Villain? No, no that sounds stupid.
Agreed, both in the comics and the MCU. And he always gets to walk, because he’s Tony Stark.
Any mathematician/physics experts out there who can compute Sydney’s flyball’s current thrust/acceleration? It should be a simple matter of taking the surface area of her force-field, computing the atmospheric drag at Mach 16, and that should give us her current maximum acceleration Force, which would let us compute things like her acceleration in a vacuum to see how long it would take her to reach relativistic velocity outside an atmosphere.
the problem is your assuming the flyball uses thrust to move and doesn’t move by some kind of absolute unit of measurement like [blank] number of mega units of the planck length per second. where she would have no acceleration as we know it she simply moves at what ever speed she wants to move at regardless of what she moving through as long as its at or below what we call mach 16.
Based on the comic where Sydney was banking in long, slow arcs, we can conclude that her flight orb is neither inertialess nor does she achieve maximum velocity without accelerating up to that speed.
I did it for mach 4 back when she was flying to the moon, I could dig those up and do it for mach 16.
At mach 4 she ended up doing something like 500g’s acceleration in a vacuum.
OK here’s my original math: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2918/comment-page-2#comment-691124
Going to 4x the velocity ends up being 16x the acceleration (makes sense since the velocity is squared and everything else is multiplied).
So for mach 16 at sea level you get 93,040 m/s/s or 9488 Gs of acceleration (give or take the drag coefficient of her shield and how much she weighs both of which affect the outcome directly so if I’m 10% off on those guesses then the final acceleration would be 10% off).
I wonder if Sydney has a top max speed. Presumably the orbs would stop her before she hit c and ended up with infinite mass. The only significant place to do that much flying would be in space, so presumably it taps out at whatever radiation shielding the shield orb could, so increasing her shield could potentially make her go faster sublight.
Still, that kind of acceleration seems woefully inadequate at even the inter-system level if that’s her max.
May hint at whatever created the orbs or whatever they’re used for are meant to be at the planetary level, with the worm hole to get from planet to planet.
Mass increase isn’t the reason you can’t reach C. That’s a misinterpretation of relativity. What prevents you from reaching C is time dilation. As you approach C, your local clock slows down to the point where you would reach any destination in virtually no time at all, shiptime. Of course, to the rest of the universe, you would have been traveling for 10 million years if your destination was 10 million lightyears from your start point.
As you get closer to light speed, the more your mass increases, at light speed mass would be infinite, requiring infinite power.
Not correct. Your mass doesn’t actually increase, only your RELATIVE mass increases. You only appear to be more massive to something you are moving at a high relative speed to. Your actual mass is the same relative to yourself. This is misunderstood by many many people.
The difference is pretty much moot, as it’s just a matter of which reference frame you’re using. What looks like a change in mass in one frame looks like time dilation in another. It’s the same underlying thing, just a different way of looking at it.
No, I don’t remember which frame is which.
Considering that if you actually DID become infinitely massive you would collapse into a black hole, it’s pretty important to note that you’re not actually increasing in mass in your own frame of reference. So no, it’s not moot.
I think your drag coefficient is off by more than 10%. That is the drag coefficient for an air foil – a wing. A sphere – or something close to – it is very different.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/dragsphere.html
The drag of something spherical is tricky because it varies with reynolds number which varies with speed. So it changes quite a bit as she accelerates. But at least according to the plot in the link above, her drag coefficient is likely closer to .5 most of the time meaning you probably need to multiply your numbers by 5. She would actually need more like 2000-3000g to go Mach 4. Mach 16? Well it’s 4 times as fast and you square velocity so 30-40 thousand g? I think you’d hit an appreciable fraction of the speed of light pretty quickly in a vacuum.
Why do you assume that drag is the reason her speed is capped at mach 4 or mach 16?
Perhaps there is no drag at all – for example, perhaps molecules at the front of the shield are teleported to the back, so the shield never hits the air at speed – and the speed is limited because that’s what the orb allows.
Because it makes no sense for it to be “just the maximum speed the orbs can move you” because once you get out of an atmosphere, there IS no special frame of reference relative to which all velocities are measured. If this were the case, the instant Halo left the atmosphere, the Earth would instantly leave her behind and she could never catch up to it, since the Earth’s orbit is faster than mach 16. (I think it’s around Mach 89-ish?) Relative to the sun.
In his blog, Dave said her propulsion was based on some sort of localized gravity and that her speed would be unlimited in vacuum. I take that to mean that the limit on her speed in atmosphere is caused by atmospheric drag. Perhaps orb magic could get you to lower Gs, but it’s not without consequences. For example, her top speed in water would be the same as air. And she wouldn’t have a wake (which is obviously not the case given the art).
Even at his original calculation, it would take her only about 54 minutes to reach lightspeed at 9488Gs.
But I’m very skeptical of that 9488G number. Would the atmosphere at Mach 16 really counter that much acceleration on a spherical human sized object?
Because drag increases as the square of velocity, it gets pretty huge at high speed. And spheres are remarkably non-aerodynamic.
https://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/airfri2.html
A while back, I used the calcuator at the bottom of the above link to compute her terminal velocity and then used that to estimate the necessary Gs needed to go Mach 4, and I similarly got 1000s of Gs. But I was surprised at how slow her terminal velocity would be. Assuming her sheild is about 1.25m in radius and she is about 50kg, her terminal velocity is only about 40 mph. Enough to kill her sure, but slower than I thought.
Umm, nothing with non-zero (rest) mass can ever be accelerated to light speed with less than infinite acceleration. If you’ve got a crazy acceleration source like Halo’s orbs, you can get darned close, but light speed is still beyond you. That’s pretty much what the whole point of Special Relativity is. (A corollary is that time doesn’t elapse for photons in a vacuum. Neutrinos were discovered to have mass and to go at less than light speed precisely by finding that they oscillated between types and so had time elapse for them; this was a big deal a few years back.)
Of course, Space Is Big. That’s why even with hyper-acceleration, you don’t want to really use it to get around out there if you can help it, not when you can open portals instead (which act as a back door past all that tedious travelling between A and B).
I was going on the idea of an ellipsoid not a sphere.
https://www.engineersedge.com/fluid_flow/ellipsoid_surface_drag_14047.htm is where I got it from.
I also didn’t do any relativity work :)
Yeah, I read that link. That’s how I knew it was a wing. The description says a long symmetrical airfoil. It is unclear what the picture is supposed to be. A cross-section? A top-down view? Either way, if it’s a wing, it won’t be very bubble-like. If you think the shield elongates, which I’m not completely convinced on that point, it’s probably a prolate spheroid. A little googling suggests the obvious – the drag coefficient is highly dependent on the amount of elongation. The drag coefficient for spheroids seems to range from about .5 near spherical to .2 where the spheroid is twice as long as it is wide.
At any rate, we can certainly agree that it would take a lot of damn Gs to get her going that fast, probably more than Dave intended. So we will probably need some mental gymnastics to explain what we actually see in the comic.
Ellipsoids are 3D ovals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid
So it’s her shield shape in the comic where she was going mach 4. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1856
Maybe that page was using the wrong name then?
Both ellipsoids and spheroids are 3D ovals. The difference is an ellipsoid can have 3 different ovals for it’s 3 cross sections (x-y, x-z, and y-z). A spheroid is a rotation of an oval. So one cross section will always be a circle while the other two will be an oval, and they will be the same oval. So while a spheroid can elogate similar to Sydney’s shield in that drawing, it cannot flatten. An ellipsoid can flatten to make something very wing-like.
This has a pretty significant impact on drag. A spheroid will have a much larger area relative to the angle of attack than a similarly sized flattened ellipsoid, and will therefore have to displace more air.
Then again Spheres and Spheroids are quite different shapes so that might be enough to explain their bad numbers.
Wyrmcoot could just “slice the air” without any specific chants or magic scribbles and no apparent magic affinity or training, but somehow Deus needs Deus Ex levels of money and (electric) power to make it do its thing. Or does it need a recharge after use??? Or can the power make it run to permanently open a portal???
I’m pretty sure we need exposition here, beyond “hey we referenced stargates to let you know what people who paid at least half attention knew all along”
No, they need all this mess to open up a destination of their choosing, not just some random portal
He might also trying to go much further, sustain it longer, etc.
All that power and tech could simply be there for DEFENSE, just in case something comes from the other side of the doorway Deus just opened,
That was the Brane Ripper though, not the completed Skybreaker. The combination artifact does a lot more than either one alone can accomplish.
So how much of a time skip does this page represent. When Vale’s jet landed on page https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2956 we saw one of the towers just starting to be built. Now we see it completed and operational. My suspension of disbelief is not going to accept that it went up in only a couple of hours, no matter how much money and tech Big Bad has at his disposal.
in all honestly the construction of this tower should have taken years to complete. but we know that’s impossible as this is still in the “flash back” part of the story so this thing went up in less then 3 months which is just destroys the suspension of disbelief.
yeah Deus just brakes all logic and reason and can do anything he wants it seems.
Deus regularly hires supers.
So it was probably an afternoon job.
no its braking the laws of physics becomes the plot says so BS.
its the “its magic” of this kind of comic.
simply constructing the segments of the tower would take months with the best skilled laborers. supers are meant to be super rare in this world so there aren’t teams of super powered builders just waiting around to do it.
Not correct. At least one super eschewed a life of crime with Maxima’s demonstration on TV.
He was going back to construction. I assume they get paid a helluva lot more than normal labor. Perhaps on order of a Heavy Equipment operator and the rental of whatever vehicle they are using.
do you know how tall these towers are?
these would be some of the tallest structures ever made by humans, the tools to make them don’t exist. heck I’m not even talking about putting it together I’m talking just building the individual sections of the chimney. each one would be works are engineering magic made of 1000’s of individual part together with absolute precision to have any hope to not be crushed under its own weight.
Do you know how supers work in the Grrlverse? Because not even the Supers know
Maxi (and Archon) only believed Supers to be rare: Kevin painfully proved them all to be wrong when he orchestrated the Restaurant Rumble
Also, their world has magic as well as supers, and alien tech, just because Our World is hamstrung by idiots and committees and health concerns stopping huge construction builds doesn’t mean they would be
Especially in a country he basically owns. I don’t think he’d have any problem with red tape there.
No, we saw one completed and a second one half-built
With the proper equipment and enough monetary-motivation, things like those can be built in a day or two, not to forget: their world has Supers, and they would make more money working in the construction business than robbing banks
Maybe the half-built one was a 3rd (or 5th) one and these two are the completed ones. In both shots they are pretty closely cropped so more could be out of sight.
Lame attempt at giving lawyer info. :) It’s been a while and I was feeling antsy.
Is now a good time to mention that you can technically patent a shape, at least within certain contexts, like a design patent? :)
Apple did it with patenting a rectangle for the ipad (there was actually a lawsuit about that – Apple vs Samsung). And Apple even won the lawsuit in 2012. Fortunately it got overturned by SCOTUS in 2017.
To be fair technology patents are a sh*tshow. You’ve got people doing nothing but buying or applying for frivolous patents just to sue the big tech companies. And they always do it out of specific courts because those courts are friendly to the patent trolls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA gives a nice overview of it if you have 12min.
Given some of the fecal material Bill Gates pulled against honest inventors without the money to protect their developments in court during his rise to wealth, I no longer care if small time patent trolls stick it to the big names. What goes around comes around.
Just because someone did something bad doesn’t mean you can do something bad to someone else.
Also it’s not little guys going after big guys. The patent trolls are pretty big and they tend to go after little guys more because they don’t have the money to fight back.
My point is still that Apple patented (and trademarked, I would assume, since they were all about ‘look and fee’ and pictures of the iphone everywhere) a shape :) Not even a particularly unusual/distinctive shape, like the Apple Logo shape. And the courts let them get away with that for 5 years until it was overturned :)
Deus I think you put the ring on backwards. More importantly to us we now know that enough time has past for the second tower to be completed which given the existence of super powers probably didn’t take as long as it should. Deus did say that he was putting the finishing touches on the first one and Dabblers friend was delayed by something and if you knew something as big as a major planet of jerks being wiped out was coming wouldn’t you be ready to send probes the second you had reason to believe it had happened.
Given these observations I believe that less than 2 weeks have past but time is more than a day ahead of what it is for The Mighty Halo.
This one is WAY off topic. I know this comic has a wide group of readers from around the world. Maybe someone can answer this. I happened to be reading an article about New Zealand and it had some photos. Why does the New Zealand parliament building look like a giant Dalek? https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2230/2424168458_2ffab02a3e_b.jpg
(Dalek Voice): HE. HAS. DISCOVERED. OUR. SECRET!
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Drop Koala– “Yo Dalek, matey. Whut happened to yah accent, matey?”
Actually, it’s a beehive (in fact, that’s even what it’s called: The Beehive)
To borrow a line from Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
“It’s a FARgate, not a STARgate!”
Okay, I think it’s the ramp that most says stargate to me.
PLACE YOUR BETS!!!
(No winner last Thursday)
Does Sydney knock on the front door, introduce herself to the authorities as a stranded Earthican and collect the visitors’ gift pack.
*OR*
Bypass security and keep a low profile as much as possible.
*OR*
They say “We don’t care who you are or where you come from. Keep out of trouble or else.”
*OR*
Gets in trouble for not following the rules when landing because she can’t communicate with them.
I’m expecting them not to care.
It may be she has no need to sleep.
Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc.
Of course this comment was meant to reference Vale’s TV knowledge.
Instead of sleeping she binge watches the various cable and streaming services.
Looks more like a _Fringeworthy_ gate.
Okay, more info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy
There are differences, since the gates in the game are always open but to a fixed location. (I actually contributed some minor equipment suggestions they used, including a medical kit.) Fun game.
is anyone else having problems with posting comments ?
202 and only page 2 seems a bit short of average by the afternoon.
Clicking ‘first’ then ‘latest’ acts as a ‘Super Refresh’.
Nah, Kuraimizu was commenting on the lack of comments, probably going by how many pages of comments the last comic page ended up with
One hundred and eight, you say?
I’m sure that there’s no significance in this to that highly-significant-in-Japanese-Buddhism number, no sirree fnord.
(well, Buddhism in general, really, but I don’t know if Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc popular media use it to the extent that Japanese pop culture does.)
Prediction:
Deus opens a portal to the Fracture, he intends to bypass the tourism board (the only alien commerce on Earth currently) to contact other potential business associates directly in space and wants to make a deal with them.
Meanwhile Sydney just walks by or Cora has the intercom system deliver a message for Sydney Scoville, much to Deus and Vale’s surprise, who just happens also to walk by the conversation between Deus and the local administrators.
Yup, perfectly natural to comment on it looking like the SGC Stargate, pretty much unavoidable with a circular entry point, if it is one you walk into. Unless you add unnecessary frills, purely to avoid that vibe.
It bugs me in movies when a culturally common thing like a zombie or vampire does not get alluded to, when one pops up. What, they have created a world that pretty much looks identical to ours, but nobody has ever heard of zombies or vampires? Fair enough to do the “but zombies/vampires arn’t real” thing. After all they don’t know that they have been sucked into a horror documentary.
But if they go down that route and then decide that they are going to call them something stupid instead, like “walkers” or “rotters”. These things are almost always apocalyptic movies, where society has collapsed. So just what mechanism is there for everybody in these fragmented groups to all spontaneously decide “these are not zombies, we shall call them ‘teeter totters'”?
At school, I once wrote a short story for Halloween about zombies, though I used medical nanotechnology called medichines to be the animating factor (wish I could find it again so I could post it on some of the site I haunt…might attempt re-write)… anyhoo!
I remember a scene of some survivors in the city where the outbreak happens, one of them is trying to pitch names for them, like “Shamblers”, “Corpse cannibals”, “Rots” and similar, only to be cut off with the main character looking at him and saying, “They’re bloody zombies. Let’s just call them that as people know what a zombie is.”
Since they had no “Zombie” sub culture they get called other things. And since zombies don’t eat flesh calling them such is wrong. Ghouls eat flesh but it must be putrid. Zombie’s they ain’t. Ghomzuls is a name I made up since no such creatures exist in mythology. The closest was the threat by Ishtar when she wanted to go to the underworld:
If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,
I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living.
Also Lovecraft’s reanimated corpses in Herbert West do eat human flesh.But zombies? They are not. At least it was done right in that episode “Zombie” on the short lived “Night Stalker” tv series and in an X-files too did them properly. They don’t eat. They just work like the y’m-bhi in “The Mound”.
I’d just like to point out that the ramp leading up to the gate is a bit low to be of practical use. The portal opens up in a circle using the skybreaker for reference, and probably doesn’t expand to fit the “stargate” which places the ramp just barely at the bottom edge of the portal. You can step through the portal, but you wouldn’t really be able to drive any vehicles through it. I guess it’d be reasonable to assume that the ramp is on hydraulics or something and can be raised, but it already looks pretty steep.
As others have pointed out: the Cosmic Can-opener is on a track, which means it rotates around the inner circumference of the stargate, which further means that, yes, it does fill the circle
As for driving things through it: cargo planes have similarly angled ramps and they can have vehicles driven into them just fine. And they did need the ramp to be longer, it is possible they could raise the end and move in another section (or as many sections as they need)
It’s the walkway that makes it look like a Stargate.
Yep, its one thing to have a circular portal, but the walkway, not to mention the four things holding the circle up really make it look like the SGC base’s Star Gate.
from the previous page having an archive number of 3000 I was planning to make a final odyssey reference, but instead it would seem an odyssey 2 reference would be more appropriate (Arthur C Clarke used the term stargate before the film)
question. is this the second time we have seen this page. i sware I have seen it before.
Probably thinking of panel one, we saw the twin towers before (the second one was still under construction though)
The other choice would have been the edgy triangle, the generic variation of square, the TARDIS hexagon, in the end the circle variants are the best for energy portals
I love it has so many Stargate references. I feel like it is one of the more underrated shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe_YpWcIeT8
And you just happen to call it the Embarkation Room, don’t you Deus?
Been wondering now for a long time …
If I take a column of air.
Heat the base, getting it to rise.
Insert dust.
Will I get cool lightning like volcanos do? Can I collect power off of that? How would it compare to more conventional power generation schemes?
If you get electrical discharge the amount you get will be vastly less than that from a volcano, simply because of the scales involved. The atmosphere is vast and volcanoes discharge a lot of heat and junk to perturb the atmosphere. Plus wind and other atmospheric dynamics will be contributing to the energy input into the system.
Whereas all the energy in your system is being generated by the heat source. Much of which will be wasted just heating air which does not get converted back into electricity that you can capture. So you will have a net loss of energy.
Although you could just ignore the heat input stage and wait for an incoming cloud and dump your dust into that. Which should help it to rain and, if you are lucky (or choose your cloud types well), you will get lightning with it too.
Then you just have the fun of trying to harness lightning strikes efficiently. Figure that out and you can power numerous cities around the world!