Grrl Power #693 – Someone forgot to file a flight plan
Sydney is one of those heroes who will probably wind up saving the world on the reg, but there is a price to be paid among the inhabitants. In the form of general collateral damage and surviving groan inducing puns.
Do starships have horns? Like, if they’re in the atmosphere, do they have some kind of airhorn for tooting at smaller ships? Or a bell? Or maybe they all have an open comm channel and the only thing that anyone can transmit on it is honks. That would work in space. That makes more sense.
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Ouch – I’m a bit surprised she did that. Think she’d know better.
Considering that Sydney is the type of person who would ask directions from a helicopter pilot while in mid-air, could we really expect anything less than this?
;)
Think her meds are wearing off.
Unless she had multiple doses is it her utility chipped belt what have you I’m pretty sure she ran out on the Atari home planet which sheep basically started what could be considered the whole warning don’t mess with Halo movement
She’s bena ctive for a day and a night by now, training, searching and fighting Sciona, being stranded alone on an alien planet, fighting hundreds of alien drones (probably) and four skyscraper-sized kaiju; she’s been avoiding nuclear bombardment, travelled to a place with more aliens than any show she’s ever seen AND her meds have probably long run out, even if she thought to take her spare (which, knowinfg Sydney, she probably forgot in all the confusion). So yeah, right now she’s not safe to be around!
Throw in the complete lack of environment signals for time passing (no night/day change etc) and it’s very likely she lost track of time and didn’t take her next dose.
Has she even SLEPT? I know I get loopy the longer I stay awake.
A day and a night is hardly enough for her to be out of medication, unless she only packed a few. ADHD medications vary, but she’s not likely to have taken more than 6, or less than 2, at least by the types I’m familiar with. A small bottle should last a week at least – her forgetting, and this being a possible plot point soon is a more likely alternative.
Or more time has passed than anitpicking festival read.
Well one thing about that is that right before she took down the Kaiju she called Squidward she was sheltered trying to dictate to either her phone or her wrist thing we see her phone laying on the ground next to her lit up suggesting that is still here power because of that the chances of her having a splendid the battery life and either her phone or her wrist-mounted Communicator at that point would be slim. Another thing when she told that one person at the food store is she been wandering around for days we got authors note that she had only been going wandering around there for 45 minutes which also suggests that not so much time has passed for her natural drama ability aside..
We also saw her use her phone to take a few pics of Fracture just after she used her portal but before she landed on Fracture.
I wouldn’t be surprised if her com equipment, both the phone and the wrist unit, has very good battery life. If I remember correctly both were provided by Archon.
If you do a bit of searching you can have a smartphone with at least three times the battery capacity of the current Apple or Samsung flagship products. And using low power SOC they can provide up to a week of normal use, or at least three to four days of hard use. The drawback is that they are slightly bigger and heavier then what’s currently considered fashionable. But as Archon is supposed to have the best of the best when it comes to technology I think the odds are good that their com equipment has some impressive battery life.
“on the Atari home planet”
Well, she did just fight off some Space Invaders.
Maybe next time she can visit Irata and meet some M.U.L.E.s :D (loved that game)
Excellent hilarious response to a typo :)
Since Dyd has been in combat, she is probably better off without her meds. ADD provides a combat bonus.
Anyone else think that she seems a bit “high”? Maybe there was something more in those alien food flakes than “spicy”… the odds that there was something borderline toxic, that her system is now purging, seems awfully high. (Just like you don’t ingest random plants in the forest; it might not kill you, but it can @#$^% you up pretty good.)
I’m waiting to find out that Earthlings are the descendants of Grazlak intolerant humans who settled on a remote planet, to avoid the evils of that intoxicant.
Is… is that, The Orville? o_O
Yes that’s The Orville getting rammed by The Protector from Galaxy Quest.
The Orville really is a nice ship design.
Shouldn’t that be “was”?
^_^
It looks like a bottle opener.
But then again – NSEA Protector looks akin to IUCD, so your point stands, I guess…
No, that’s the Protector from Galaxy Quest getting rammed by the Orville as it just did a small “Hug the donkey” manoeuvre to avoid Sydney!
Details.. We’ll just let their insurance companies sort it out.
what strikes me as odd, is that both ships are EARTH starships (granted, the protector was built by aliens, but it’s based on an earth design).
From the future! (granted, the Protector is possibly very contemporary)
The anachronisms are high!
Still love the shoutout though! :p
Actually, both are based on TV show spaceships, so it could be they were both built by aliens. Except one was a fictional show and the other has actually been broadcast, but really they’re both “fictional” by subject, and both appearing here in another work of fiction… Head hurts…
Galaxy Quest (the movie, not the show in the movie) has also been broadcast.
one is a fictional ship the other is a fictional^2 ship, it is a fictional ship that was made to be like a ship that was fictional in that fiction.
Me make brain not go now. Me watch Inception, simpler movie…
So I take it you didn’t notice the galaxy class federation star ship silhouette on the left of the last panel here? https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2997
and it is a good point that these shows have been floating through space for centuries so another race might be a fan…
It’s only been a few years for either show (or fifty for Trek)
And a Battlestar (Galactica probably) and a Goa’uld Pyramid ship. And the top triangular ship looks like a dark Grey (in shadow of sphere perhaps?) Super Star Destroyer, with the bottom 2 being Star Destroyers. Maybe.
not to mention the Lexx. One wonders if its weapon is as powerful as the Lexx’s Occular Array.
Could have been an Eagle from Space: 1999 rather than a Battlestar
It’s a good show, but when it comes to Religion it doesn’t really say more than “it’s stupid” in a strawman fashion.
As a Religious person myself, I find myself kinda put off by this. I don’t have anything against criticism of Religion as long as criticism is actually based off something and isn’t just made to hate on a Faith i.e. The person making the criticism is willing to accept correction if they misunderstood something or were just misinformed
i can see what you are coming from. As an nonbeliver, it always pisses me of when they make the “can’t-belive-it’s-not-Jesus” religion come across as more valid than anyone, and more moral…. no mater what the in universe reaction actually ought to be.
One of the worst things that comes to mind is an old Xena episode, where they are STUNNED by the implication that god himself spoke and stop can’t-belive-it’s-not-Isak from being sacrificed by his dad.
Bitch, you slapped a godess in the face last Thursday, and another god keeps hitting on you. Now you are stunned by the existence of a god that didn’t even bother to show up, and instead yelled out his instructions? sure, this gy seems nicer than some of the asholes you deal with, but still, you have gods that you are on god terms with. Hell, you have screwed gods yourself, why does this couch potato screaming from his sofa even register on your holy shananigans meter?
either treat all your religions inverse with respect, have them all have valid points, or non of them. exept for the Evils-R-us churches, but those are bad and should feel bad anyways. and are better if they are somewhat rational in what they offer over the goody two shoes churches
yeah, I generally agree with your points here. All religions have a lot of good and bad mixed together, not to mention a lot of poor choice over the years making them worse… but most of the message isn’t that wrong… IMO
It’s like religions reflect people. Who could have known.
I recommend Babylon 5.
Normally because it’s the show that proved a 5-year Myth Arc could be done (mostly) according to plan, but in this case because it treats religion intelligently. S1E5, The Parliament of Dreams, revolves around a cultural exchange between the various species present on the station – each of the major races hosts the others at one of their religious observances, demonstrating their major religious beliefs, while the human station authorities worry about how to meet their end of the bargain. I won’t spoil the resolution – it’s worth discovering in context – but the show acknowledges the diversity of human religious belief, including atheism.
The show does dance around the question of souls for a while, and never actually explicitly comes out and says “yes, souls are a real thing”, but it does strongly imply that they are – there’s a spin-off TV movie, River of Souls, which revolves around an orb that contains the captured souls of an entire planet. In S3, a group of Cistercian monks set up shop on the station, and are significant to a few episodes, and background elements in quite a lot of others.
So far as the show has a view on religion, it tends toward a sort of fuzzy agnosticism – the idea that no one faith has all the answers, but that most (if not all) have some of the answers – and the important part is not the God, but the quest for Truth.
This is despite having Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, including the literal (at least if you can believe his testimony) first sentient being in the galaxy, around to offer a plausible explanation for sightings of divine beings throughout the history of the younger races…
It’s been forever since I have seen B5.
Wasn’t there an episode where the Ambassador exits his robotic environmental suit and everyone saw it as an entity from their species religion? Humans saw it as an angel, aliens saw something else, etc. Only there was one alien that couldn’t see anything at all.
Spoilers:
Yup, and in subsequent episodes it caused lots of religious pilgrims to come to the station.
The one who couldn’t see anything was the one that had made a deal with the figurative (and, arguably, literal) devils.
And when people started figuring out that they saw an angel (or whatever equivalent) because those aliens had interfered with their societies in the past in order to manipulate them…. well, that got a bit sticky.
The Vorlons.
One of their ways of controlling other races and “guiding” them, was to implant not just psychic potential in them (specifically the kind that is anti-Shadows), but also an inherited perspective that what ever they believed in/worshipped (AKA: held a sense of veneration for) this part of their brain would signal when the pure psychic light of a Vorlon was present and they’d see the object of their worship instead of the big glowy snake thing a Vorlon really looks like.
Oddly, early on in the show…pilot episode, it was implied Vorlons had actual physical bodies *as in could be poisoned*, and in some episodes that they were actually winged angels under those suits and had visited many races so everyone would recognize them.
I think they dodged that just near the end as “too close for comfort with their audiences” and made it the (we just LOOK like what you worship) rather than (we manipulated all your ancestors and actually are winged glowy beings).
I thought they verified souls in the second episode. That soul hunter clearly had something in those orbs.
That doesn’t prove the existence (or lack thereof) of Hyu-Mon souls
And, unless one was able to communicate with the contents of that orb, similarly doesn’t prove the existence of alien</I souls
Communication is hardly a good criteria for souls. Other aspects will do. In the film “Frankenstein Creates Woman” he isolates several souls after finding out that it takes at least 4 hours for the soul to leave dead body. By the use of force fields he captures them then puts them into resurrected bodies. But our whole concept of biology will be changed and there would always be those who would scoff at science and their findings concerning a soul anyway. If you take the entire soul out the body dies. Another is that you become less than yourself and eventually succumb to homicidal tendencies. Several civilizations speak of the parts of the soul both in Egyptian and Chinese sources. That you can keep a corpse moving if you leave the animating part of the soul in there as a bokor supposedly does. So far souls have no room in our current science. Only in our minds.
Not in our minds, servitor – in our souls. Which does not exist in any way any of ancient Dirt civilizations described it, nor would it ever be found in any way contemporary mystics (including abrahamic sectarians, regardless of the term they chose for themselves) describe it.
What keeps human body moving – is a prolonged series of self-correcting patterns of adjustable feedback loops of codependent chemical reactions and electric impulses. Which can be de- and re-coded by a bokor, a skilled business owner, or an ideologue – producing your average “walking dead”, a mindless consumer, or a liberal democrat respectively.
Such a pattern – given a suitable equipment and hardware – can be copied, with chemical parts emulated with a spread of pure data patterns; and consequently imprinted upon another hard- and/or wet-ware installation, colloquially known to contemporary humans as “body”, or – say – even a metastable electromagnetic construct a-la ball lightning. Whenever such being would be considered “human” – or, indeed, sapient – is a question for future philosophers and slave owners.
“The Measure of a Man” and “Author, Author” comes to mind – and mister Asimov, with his question about quantity of prosthetic one need to have before ceasing to be a human.
So, no – souls as you wish them to be never were, do not, and will never be in any universe where physics is a thing; and if only criteria you accept is whenever the thesis supports your silly misconceptions – that by no means will ever lead to a change in the core concepts of biology.
Dixi.
The anime Ghost in a Shell, Stand alone Complex, Appleseed and Battle Angel Alita also explored these concepts as well. eg alive? human? Karma etc.
No, it was shown that souls exist and the Mimbari knew all about it.Why the human became a Mimbari for the previous war a thousand years before as as part of their prophecy.
I’m sure as, as soon as they get any proof to contradict what they have said, those making comments about religion will apologise.
What do you want them to say?
“Like every other cult in the history of ever, there is not a single shred of physical evidence to support their claims” ?
Christians and Muslims get treated seriously because there’s lots of them, not because their claim is any more credible than Thor or Zeus.
But one set of Gods we make fun of and the other we’re supposed to respect?
You don’t think in another 400 years we might be looking at Christians the same way we view the worship of Zeus now?
All religious are equally silly, some of them just bitch a whole lot more about it when you say it.
You bring up a very good point that bugs the crap out of me in sci-fi and fantasy (western mainly, anime and other Japanese media has a better track record of…who cares what people worship in the real world, here are the chousin, Omni King Zeno, and the Lord of Nightmares)…and Inbetweenaction above brought this up about Xena too…one of the reasons I was so annoyed with later seasons of Xena and Hercules…aside from the incredibly bad idea to try and bring in historical dates we know the dates of and screw their whole timelines up…but they also for some reason went all Abrahamic faiths are the superior ones route…despite the first season of Hercules establishing the Hellinistic thelogeny being its basis.
On this same note while seeing lots of talk of Star Trek and Babylon 5…there is one sci-fi series that deserves special note on screwing the pooch on cow tailing to western Abrahamic faiths.
Star Gate.
the series whose whole central premise was *the ancient gods were aliens*…all of them, the Aesir were “Asgard”…the little grey guys, and everything from Mesopotamian gods to Egyptian gods, to the Chinese gods, Shinto Kami, and….while only mentioned once…likely because someone on staff pointed out is a living major religion and might raise hell about….the Hindu pantheon were also Goa’uld in this show.
We see all sorts of Ascended beings, and advanced tech, but then have garbage cow tail lines like Tealk saying, “I’ve read your bible, I know of no Goa’uld that could copy those miracles”….and I’m like…I read it too…and yes they absolutely could pull a fiery cloud that talks, raise the dead, fire from the sky, blast down walls, ect…stuff. and even if not the Goa’uld the Nox and Ancients sure could.
even later on with the Ori *as close to saying all religion is BS as the show ever gets* we have protect themselves lines like “Just because they live on a higher plane doesn’t mean there might not be an even higher plane than that”
I mean sure, super ascended, megaverse, gigaverse, hyper dimensional, Omni-beings, ect….are always an option in Sci-fi, but he was meaning specifically GOD and angels, and what not…the same show where season 1 or 2 actually had the balls to have a man say God would protect the Earth from the Goa’uld only for Daniel and Tealk and crew to say nothing has ever stopped the Goa’uld before, and they saw alternate realities where Earth was defeated, so shut up and get prepared.
There is no god but Azathoth, and Nyarlathotep is His Messenger.
Azathoth is a super sized black hole called A*. Nyarlathotep was created by the Cthulhu species as governor for their space-time-vug program they put into the vortex called Yog-Sothoth. Nyarlathotep was the interface. Then the Cthulhu device called “Quantaplex” malfunctioned destroying their galaxies wide empire. Killed countless numbers, sent more into other dimensions such that very few were left including a few low level scouts on Terra. They created a from of near humans before they expired. Half went under ground, the other half of them went to Yian-Ho to live. Suffice it to say they are all over the place, their ruins and “hauntings” to plague the beings that came after.
Spewing some hot verses from the Scripture, servitor.
Good.
Spread the Word further, for – as the People of the Word know – everything is canon, not everything is true.
That’s gotta be more of a hump the donkey than hug. Think it is more Orville hitting the Protector. Regardless though they are both excellent ship designs. Personally I find the Orville is more aesthetically pleasing than the Trek ones.
Everything about the Orville is more pleasing than the Trek shows :P
The Orville is ST:TNG if Starfleet and the Federation were run by normal people who weren’t completely up their own asses about how awesome and enlightened they are.
Zack Tilly :D
>normal people
So, by a bunch of aggressively ignorant senselessly greedy egotistical simpletons without even a shred of wit, honor, or integrity?
In sooth, I dare to dare that The Orville is a smidgen better than that.
It could be even better if Seth stops trying to be funny. Seriously, the gag subplots fell forced most of the time.
Sydney is to peace, tranguility and airspace control what the hurricane Hugo was to beach parties :-)
A breath of fresh air!
Sydney is Air Traffic Uncontrolled.
…Uncontrollable…
Sydney is an UFO: Unidentified Flighty Object.
Unexpected Flying Obstruction.
It’s all fun & games until someone loses an external sensor array.
Then it’s just FUN.
Captain: There was an UFO!
Insurance inspector: No shit sherlock, we’re on a space station
Well, Dave, as long as she doesn’t start a ‘Lovely Angels’ theme by herself the price shouldn’t be too high.
She is approaching Lovely Angels levels of inadvertent chaos and mischief, especially the Adam Warren incarnation.
At driving school I was taught: When a deer jumps in front of your car, brake but don’t steer away from it, because otherwise you might hit a tree or another car on the other lane or you might spin or flip over etc. etc.
Apparently spaceship pilots didn’t learn that and tried to dodge Sydney. It was fun to watch, but ultimately it’s their own fault for swerving because of a tiny object.
I’m honestly confused about how a spaceship is supposed to do either. Slowing down isn’t exactly easy, and neither is swerving. Spaceships would logically just ram the thing, and hope it splatters instead of them.
This story have some extreme kinds of technology, such as gravity manipulation and force fields. Something like warping the space on the side of your ship should help it make a sharp turn right?
What surprises me is the fact that spaceships need some kind of manual assistance. Considering the vast advanced technology they have at their disposal, spaceships should be piloted automatically.
But, well, space-operas.
got that right. Androids (*cough*Data*cough) piloting starships is just plain stupid. If they can put that tech into a soccer ball (Data’s head), they can fit it into an aircraft carrier (NCC1701-any).
While we’re at it, guns should be self-aiming, once a target is chosen.
And don’t get me started on droids using hand weapons and missing their targets
Another Trek A.I. issue that bothered me was declaring certain simulations in the Holodeck as sentient beings, and deserving of rights (Moriarty on TNG, The Doctor on Voyager). If they are part of computer, and the computer is part of the ship, then isn’t the ship itself a sentient being, and equally deserving of having a say in what happens to it? If they went to the trouble of pointing out that DATA is not to be treated as a slave, then shouldn’t the ship be given the same benefit of the doubt? I think this is the main reason that the computers in the Trek-verse were not given more than rudimentary voice interface capabilities.
In Voyager they said (and in other series they implied) that the holodeck computers (and even power supply) are completely separate from the ship and work in very different ways.
Probably because the Federation got fed up with the model used on the Enterprise Basicaly taking over the ship and making new life. Which it did at least twice.
Also they needed to explain why they were using the holodeck when power was being rationed to the replicators.
Basically, it’s not the ship’s hardware that is sentient, so much as the fact that it is sufficiently capable to run sentient software. It’s the software that is sentient; if it can transfer to a different sufficiently capable substrate, then the entity can move (or perhaps copy itself) there. Whether you’d expect there to be also a default sentient entity on such hardware is a separate matter; the shows are played as if the hardware is set to not do that normally, despite being able to. I don’t know that I’d set things up like that, but such systems are really quite alien to how we operate as we’re extremely bound to our physical substrates…
Insofar as I ever thought about it, I just assumed the Federation probably would have had a policy of limiting their shipboard computers to something less than full self-awareness. This would sidestep the ethical problems and also soothe any fears about fully sapient ships going rogue. Or maybe true AI is just really hard to achieve, and that’s why we saw only a few examples. (Admittedly, Geordi initiating the creation of Moriarty through little more than careless instructions does tend to undermine this theory.)
Or since it’s Trek, we could just sort of overlook the fact that it doesn’t always make sense.
I don’t think they’ve out-right said it but there seems to be a similar attitude towards AI as there is towards genetic engineering. If some machine becomes a full person they are given all those rights but if not law then there’s strong reluctance to actually work towards intentionally making true AI.
It might have been one of the out-of-canon books but I remember them talking about the things that almost wiped out Earth just before First Contact being AI made by humans.
We now have a Constitution Class Transformer named Tyberious who is, de facto, a female transformer, please do not stare at her Bridge her eyes are up there…..
https://comicbook.com/startrek/2018/12/17/star-trek-transformers-enterprise-fortress-tiberius/
Seriously I don’t know if I hope they make her a action figure or dread it.
What you should dread (or hope for, depending on your degree of perversion) is Rule 34: No Exceptions ;)
You might recall the episode, “The Ultimate Computer” where we are shown a weak A.I. in action. M5 was Dr. Daystrom’s own neural pattern impressed on engrams so it is a human mind with the powers of a computer and yet it messed up royally.
My point was, if an autonomous android is manually piloting your ship, then you already have all the risks associated with allowing unfettered AI controlling a huge war-capable ship. The fact that it’s in two pieces is kinda meaningless.
huge computing power does not imply advanced AI. It’s just software, after all. I wouldn’t want self-aware or semi-autonomous sw in charge of all the systems of a ship. They are more alien than biological entity. We can’t know the motives of an AI that’s only be trained to do things if we don’t control how it builds its neural nets.
Sounds like the ships from “Too Much Information”, in that webic, they are referred to as ‘Awakened’
In Star Trek, the ship’s computer as I understand it is basically piloting the ship on auto-pilot, the helms man just designates where they want the ship to go (or where the cpatain told them to go), verifies the plotte course, and starts the autopilot on command. Then the helmsman babysits, making sure everything is doing what it is supposed to be doing. There were a couple of times where they did take manual control of the ship.
As to the Holodecks, they ar elinked to the main computer system and power grid, but they do have thier own dedicated computers and systems just for that task. The Doctor from Voyager definatly was sentient software that was not tied to specific hardware. He was transfered around multiple times betweenhis dedicated computer suite in Sicbay to the mobile emitter and once to another ship entierly. Moriarty was eventually transfered out of the ship’s main computer to a portable computer unit.
AI that is strictly software based and can move from one computer systme to another is not exaclty new in fiction. Andromeda was one place where is seamed the AI was mostly tied to specific hardware. They never really go into to much detail on that through the show.
I’m guessing that in these docks it’s considered ‘impolite’ or even bloody irresponsible to have force fields activated. ‘Oops’ my field interfered with something and now the dock’s atmosphere is venting to space…
And gravity manipulation…
Maxim 24 comes to mind. The locals probably doesn’t approve of that kind of tech used by large ships.
What? I’m pretty sure they are beyond areobraking technology. They should be able to use the same technology that they use for acceleration to decelerate or swerve. If you accelerate for long periods of time, then you could buildup enough velocity that you wouldn’t be able to slowdown or swerve quickly. But presumably you wouldn’t do that in busy airspace. Don’t want the station to give you a speeding ticket.
“same technology”: You’d think that, but you’d be wrong: Why do large ships berth at Port of [LA,Seattle,Houston,NY,Savannah,Charleston] or transit the Panama Canal with the assistance of tugs? Because the confined nature and traffic density are too much for large ships to not squish or ding something important or expensive. One mistake (bump the throttle, lose a rudder, whatever) and end up taking out a dock, your ship or someone else’s ship and closing things for a few years while they refloat whatever sank or repair facilities. Oh, and coincidentally tag you with a couple billion dollars in lost revenues and cargo.
It’s too much to risk *not* to have tugs or harbor pilots or whatever in positive control..
… Tugs _are_ the same technology. They are still using propellers and rudders. It is just a slightly different application for a slightly different purpose. Furthermore, even if they didn’t because it was more efficient to use a different technology, the point still stands that you could use the same technology.
Scale might be an issue. it’s one thing to scale gas engines from tank turbines to rc hobby planes, but if you’re manipulating multiple fundamental forces, the range and strength of the fields might have limitations on how much you cam ensmallen your engines.
Fair point. Although all that means is that you’re taxiing engine needs to be different from your main engine. Whatever you use for fine acceleration adjustments can be used for fine deceleration adjustments. A la tug boat.
Most large ships (at least for earth) would have probaly 3 propulsion systems in play. You have your faster-than-light system, your normal cruising system, and then your menuvering thrusters. Menuvering thrusters are typically the wekest system on the whole ship but can fulfill the roll of space tugs, moving the ship in slow small increments as needed.
A minor piont, the tugs used in the actual locks are actualy Locomotives. And they are used to help keep the ship in control. Not for propulsion, that’s still primarily provided by the ship.
Yes that is nice theory. But if you if you scare off, all theory goes out of your system and it just comes down to experience. So if you do not have experience with unexpected things on your flight then you get this.
That’s what training is for. Imagine any plane pilot in our world swerving because of on a sudden eagle. Anyone trying to justify it with what you just wrote would get yelled at and then sued and fired.
No one can train for a Sydney-moment, and when you are taxiing or manoeuvring like those pilots most likely were, they are working on auto-pilot themselves, they are not prepared for something like a Bubled Sydney to suddenly appear in their flight path
I was taught you should always be aware of what’s beside you (and keep at least one side open) so you can swerve safely if needed (that saved my life when someone in the oncoming lane decided to pass when I was there and I needed to dodge to avoid a head-on collision at highway speeds). Often you can’t brake in time (especially if you have a large vehicle behind you that can’t brake as fast) so you need another way out.
Either way though yes you’re right the pilot is at fault for swerving into another craft no matter what obstruction comes up.
Whew glad to hear that you were able to keep your cool in a life-threatening situation. At highway speeds, if you swerve too sharply the vehicle flips over and you’re dead anyway, so it looks like you’re a lot more competent than that spacecraft pilot.
I see this space crew follow the Star Trek tradition of don’t using seat belts on the bridge.
That’s not as bad as the Galactic Empire, that combines bottomless pits with no safety railing, a la Star Wars.
to be fair, if the dampeners where working, they shouldn’t need them. And no shots hitting them should effect the crew, since that inertia is dampened to next to nothing by the dampeners. (the difference in inertia from a bomb exploding and a ship going 0-200.000 km/h is not in the bombs favor. the Dampeners should be able to soak that just fine)
the dampeners never work properly, probably serviced by the same genius that re-rigged the shields power conduits to run behind important bridge control panels.
The inertial dampers do work. They cancel out acceleration. That’s easy to calculate when you know which way the acceleration is going to go, like when you hit the engines. When you get hit with weapons, it takes a moment for the dampers to figure out what to cancel out, hence a relatively small jolt.
Bit difficult to use seatbelts… when you are standing!!
I’m a bit surprised those spaceships are not on autopilot. Here on Earth we’re all about self-driving cars and our rockets are all computer controlled but in this world spaceships are piloted manually in the air traffic?
Presumably, these vessels are from different worlds, governments, and even different species. I doubt they would all trust anyone taking control of their ships to organize the automated choreography of near station traffic. But then, why would the big ships even be moving about that close to the station?
Also, there are a lot of rolls on ships that should be automated but aren’t because viewers would rather watch a person overcoming challenges rather than have a system that already solved those challenges.
One is an Earth vessel and the other designed by aliens obsessed with an Earth TV show and crewed by human actors who thought it was an acting gig. Or in other words, a joke panel not to be taken too seriously.
Anyway, one of them has a 13-second retrograde temporal displacement device (aka Omega-13) that can be used to fix any whoopsies.
Can only be used once, and that’s if it hasn’t been broken or already used
But that is the beauty of it. If you use it you go back in time to before you used it so now it is unused and can thus be used again and again
Honestly it doesn’t make sense for ships as large as aircraft carriers at least, to be moving around a volume of space as crowded as The Fracture is, at the speeds those ships are capable of even under station keeping/manuvering drives, using meatbags manipulating physical controls.
You don’t swerve to dodge a bug on a crowded freeway.
I would agree. Generally for ships of that size, you want kilometers of space between them and near a station, operating under thruster power only. Orvill I think has computer controls so helm could set parking orbit and leave it at that. Not sure about the Protector.
Autopilot is an internal system; each one is designed independently and operated by the pilots. There is no central control for them. I would expect the same here.
Air traffic control should be keeping greater separation between aircraft to avoid this kinds of interactions, among other things, like wake turbulence. 1000 feet vertically and 3 miles horizontally is typically used with commercial airliners
I’m rather concerned about the “SPLAT” onomatopoeia..
Some of the ships are organic.
I was also concerned by ‘SKREE’ for a moment, but figured it’s almost certainly metal-on-metal grinding and not the Squiddies.
Hey look, it’s The Orville! Probably going on another adventure where they call Religion idiotic and primitive, while not actually making an sort of substantial point about it
It’s a good show, but when it comes to Religion it doesn’t really say more than “it’s stupid” in a strawman fashion.
As a Religious person myself, I find myself kinda put off by this. I don’t have anything against criticism of Religion as long as criticism is actually based off something and isn’t just made to hate on a Faith i.e. The person making the criticism is willing to accept correction if they misunderstood something or were just misinformed
Having not seen the show, from your description I would assume that they were merely attempting to show that they were explicitly trying to show that they were not making religious statements.
People have read religious statements out of many books and TV shows not intended to say anything of the sort.
This is probably a not so subtle way if saying “we don’t want to do religion here”
Most of the episodes are directly talking about Religion. In episode six they go to steal a copy of an Alien Holy Book
Now that is an incorrect blanket statement. I count two episodes that mention it.
Was it ever mentioned in the social media episode? The time traveller from the future one? The return of the blue alien guy?
Actually when they found that a race that is their enemy has very strong religious convictions and has incorporated it into their whole species directives in the first season. So no they didn’t shy away. They confronted it head on. Something Star Trek shied away from.
I’ve never seen the show, but it’s probably not in the show’s best interest to delve too deeply into the philosophical even if the creators are capable of it. You are gonna lose a lot of viewers if you get too heady. Also, I can appreciate the frustration of strawmen, but the fact is there are so many different beliefs that most attacks on religion are going to look like strawmen to the majority of religious people. I remember being shocked in college when my philosophy professor said that the majority of religious philosophers don’t believe that God is outside of time. I thought that was universal. After all, if God created time – why should he be bound by it? I fancied myself as an intelligent believer. It showed me I still had a lot to learn about the different schools of thought. But before that moment, I would have assumed any attack on religion based on God being bound by time was a strawman.
I’m sure, as soon as they get any proof to contradict what they have said, those making comments about religion will apologise.
No they won’t
I’m talking actual proof. Real scientific proof. They have to prove it is all real first.
Allow me to present “Exhibit: Flat Earth Society”
Let me say again: “No, they won’t apologise”
From the look on her face in panel 2, I think Sydney ran out of her medication some time ago.
I feel like the space ship pilot probably wouldn’t have swerved to miss Sydney any more that an airplane pilot would swerve to miss a bird.
The pilot may have mistaken Sydney for a missile?
Now there’s thousands of Yeets in damage to both ships,
An official report, dashcam footage of the incident….
Hey! Isn’t that the person eating grakz?
Sydney’s departure may be delayed….
There goes her being home for Christmas!
Yeah Sydney this is why Maxima put a GPS and flight sensor warning in your arm Gauntlet. It looks like they’re going to need to have dabler update it for Intergalactic travel though
So how long has it been since Sydney has seen a recharging station with a compatible socket for her power-cable?
Right…I thought so.
Actually that’s not known even though from dabblers point of view is probably been a couple of days from Sydney’s point of view it’s likely been at least six to eight hours possibly a full day considering how time gets wonky when you’re traveling faster than light or other than light Crossing vast distances of the universe what would be considered the instant to others
Pretty sure time passage is consistent. Sydney didn’t use faster-than-light travel. She used two separate portals, one made by the Brane Ripper, the other made by her upgraded flight orb. Neither one created any obvious gravitational anomalies or time distortions in their immediate vicinities, although the broken portal from the Brane Ripper did distort space.
Well space and time are interconnected I can’t really go into the details of how because I don’t understand them well enough to explain. But you cannot move in space without moving in time. And as it was stated by harem when they went through the portal and landed on the artery Homeworld she was disoriented because there were too many instances of her physical form rather than anything to do with the distance. This suggests that the distance covered also he had some sort of influence with the time as well. Whether the time was forward or backwards we don’t know. And dabbler suggested that because of the time Factor it might actually be easier to rescue sent me then without when she was talking about calling up a friend to rescue her.
We still don’t know why Harem was disorientated, everyone has been throwing out wild speculums ranging from “Time Travel” (future or past) to “Alternate Dimensions” and fairly much everything else in between
The reason why Dabbles suggested getting a friend to rescue Sydney, is because Dirtsiders don’t have FTL ship travel (at least not officially) and with the loss of the Cosmic Canopener (they just believe it’s still buried under what use to be a mountain, they don’t know it was stolen… yet) having someone travel by ship was deemed the only way
After they got back a harem was feeling herself again she literally tells Maxima and dabbler that the reason why she was disoriented was not due to distance but because there was too many of her at that point in time his why people with were saying that it was either time travel forward back doesn’t really matter or alternate dimensions. Why we the audience may not know the exact reason after hearing harems explanation made dabler say that maybe this incident will make it easier to rescue Sydney because harems explanation of there being too many of her making her disoriented.
To be fair, we can posit that any gear ARC uses doesn’t rely on ‘off the shelf’ battery tech. Its no great stretch to give Sydney’s gauntlet a few days of battery time.
We know the GPS handheld only has smartphone-like battery life. It died approximately 24 hours after Sydney got it.
After the press demonstration Sydney went home to bed. The next morning it was dead so she wasn’t able to use it to find her way to the comic shop or Archon. When Harem came to pick her up it she specifically said she forgot to charge it and it was dead.
We do know that immediately before her teleporting into and eye tacking Squidward / killing him her cell phone was still functional it was actually let out whether she was dictating to the cell phone or her wrist thing that isn’t quite clarified but since her cell phone was still Juiced up at able to go it’s entirely possible that her wrist Gauntlet was Juiced up and ready to go. Also because of this is suggest that far less than 24 hours has passed since she got ready for the mission to the point where she was before dealing with those Kaiju. Another thing is that when she unlocked her new flight or power she stated it was filled with four dimensional man suggest you not only transferring through space but through time as well.
Even if her pip-girl, or phone, was fully charged, there is no way it would be compatible with the Fracture’s GPS system (or any other system)
No it would not be compatible as is hence saying the dabbler needs to update / upgrade to be compatible with systems outside of the Earth’s solar system.
The two ships were already dangerously close. With modern aircraft, I think if two commercial jets or two ships are within 1,000 feet while under normal power (ie not taxiing or being rugged in port) that is classified as a near miss. If ships that size in space were close enough to collide because of a 5’4″ object, they were already dangerously close and the helmsman incompetent to let that happen.
This probably counts more like taxiway and staging area for an airport, and all traffic should be at a very low speeds.
Also, why would they try to dodge something so small? An oil tanker wouldn’t try to move out of the way of a speed boat. All a ship can do is keep moving forward, and I know space is different than the ocean but if its trucks, tankers, or massive spaceships, its probably best to barrel through the smaller object than try to swerve to avoid it.
For the same reason most normal humans duck or attempt to swat when a fly gets too close to their face
Sydney’s orbs are unreadable,. But I’m betting the energy signatures of the effects they produce aren’t. Sydney’s shield is capable of deflecting low grade nuclear weapons, so it probably has a pretty high energy signature. So if something the size of of a person with the energy signature of a starship darts in front of your starship, you’re probably going to swerve to avoid it.
Ships as big as these probably have their own collision avoidance systems pinging nearby objects continuously to keep a helmsman aware of potential collisions.
So the only reason I can think of why they were that close to begin with is if they were attempting to dock with each other, and in that scenario you wouldn’t do a hard swerve because you have to very closely match velocity to even get close enough to dock – so, their velocity relative to each other would be very small.
Instead of a hard swerve you would probably tap the manoeuvering thrusters. Changing your velocity vector by just a few metres per second is easily enough to avoid an oncoming Sydney, unless she’s moving really fast, in which case the helmsman wouldn’t even have time to react.
I thought it was routine for ships to get uncomfortably close in order to maintain foreign relations.
To be fair that’s still not Jita 4-4 at Peak trafic ship furball crowded. There were times when you would swear that a Corps freighter fleet mass undocked just to be a dick.
There’s a port in the real world like that. Yokusuka Japan is extremely crowded. A US cruiser collided with a freighter last year there.
If you really don’t want every wannabe evil alien overlord to know about your nth tech power balls, this is exactly the last thing you want to be doing. Sydney better hope that neither ship’s sensors got a really good look at her.
“Do starships have horns?”
Screw the horns. How about that insurance? What’s the premiums like on a ship like that and who’d even agree to insure one outside of their own home government?
“I’m sorry Captain but we are not insured against damage caused by manic superheroes from Earth.”
For the Protector, we have scratched, possibly dented hull plating on the portside dorsal. nose section. And for the Orvill, we have damage to lower engine ring. Do not think I want to see the repair bills on that one. Even assuming thier own crews did the work, there is still material costs for parts.
From my hazy recollection of the first season, the Orville seemed to lose chunks of the engine rings on a pretty regular basis. They’ll be fine.
Sydney causes disaster no matter where she’s at….!?
She may also have the superpower of causing chaos everywhere, often without even trying to.
I shall now bestow upon this comic the greatest compliment I can think of.
This comic makes my Mondays not completely horrible.
On an unrelated note this is now the third complement I’ve given in my life. The most common and often used would be “Good Dog.” The second being in a restaurant called Nero’s in Australia about 15 years ago I said “This is a good pizza.” it was a good pizza, Meaty BBQ, Extra Thick, Extra Meat. My family had the “Everyone froze and stared at me” reaction that you see in movies some times, I didn’t know that was a thing people really did.
*Freezes and stares*
Does Sydney now counts as a UFO in that situation?
At the moment I think she prefers to remain a UFO so as to avoid the repercussions from her foray into active flight paths.
Like I said, Sydney wouldn’t come back to Earth without causing AT LEAST one intergalactic incident.
Everybody notices the Orville, nobody has time for the NSEA Protector from the second best Star Trek movie…
I’d expect starships to have something similar to modern airliners’ TCAS – a short-range data transceiver in each ship, and they all talk to each other about their position and velocity vector and notice potential incodents in time to warn their respective pilots and give avoidance instructions. Of course, if they did have that, it would’ve been screaming about the proximity of those two ships in the first place – one doesn’t just cavalierly zip around in multi-kiloton starships as if they were hang gliders, no matter how nimble they might be.
Yes they probably would, bud Sydney isn’t broadacting any such signals so is a completely unknown element that just appeared in the Protector’s flight path in view for the helmsman. Definatly human error on his part for swerving without a gland at his situation display to see which direction was a good way to swerve.
Are those humans on that ship? And the other one has English writing on it? Are there secret human civilizations out there?!! What are they hiding from us?! ;)
Have you SEEN Earth?! If I were a secret human civilization, I’d hide from us too!
I was thinking exactly this. Maybe they aren’t human but aliens who look like human? But some pages back in the restaurant, there is an alien talking on the phone about human eating super spicy food… Okay Dave, you’d better make a page where Cora of Dabbler explains things.
Good idea! The Halo-verse already has real aliens, vampires, werecreatures, fae, superpowers, stargates… a couple of secret human civilizations would be nothing weird. Though I would really like to see the explanation for the Engish writing on the Protector. If everything on the Fracture was written in English it might simply be ‘English as a stand-in for Alienese’ trope, but we’ve seen enough real alien scripts to know that’s not the case. DaveB usually pays meticulous attention to details, so I wonder if there’s more to it than just a cameo.
That is actually Latin and those are Space Romans. They got kidnapped somewhere line 100 BC and made there own civilization since then.
That… actually makes a lot of sense, given what we’ve seen of alien-human interaction in the story so far. Perhaps some alien civ wanted to import real Romans to learn how to throw an authentic orgy? Considering that Earth and humans seem to be associate mostly with sex by aliens…
I recommend you to read Ranks of Bronze written by David Drake. Half of your description fits on that.
Go the Tenchi Muyo route and Earth is a colony that for reasons never explained clearly was left to develop on its own till it reached a point where it could be contacted…I guess in a setting with human races with indefinite lifespans ranging from 200 to…..god knows when *even if Washu is technically a chousin turned human, Dr. Clay wasn’t and he was nearly 20,000 years old himself*, they can think it okay to just seed a planet with their own species and wait to see how they develop.
Their whole universe seems human races dominated with other aliens mixed in but not in the top empire ranks.
Spaceships don’t have horns. They have signal lights.
Focusable jigawatt radio transition means everyone within a few km in the direction you wish to be heard can hear you now
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MPSSuxXoVq4
Maybe not after though.
They have radios son. Or whatever the local tech equivalent is, lazer communications perhaps?
“Chief Weapons Officer Glornak, the Admiral is on the line for you, personally demanding a more detailed explanation than ‘routine laser communications’ for the angry phone calls he’s receiving about your encounter with the K’thorq ship just now.”
“Sir, I was transmitting a universal farewell symbol over laser, in response to the foreign pilot repeatedly encroaching on our flight path. I believe it translates roughly as ‘luck in your journey, until we meet again.’ ”
“They are far more upset than a simple ‘goodbye’ over laser can explain, they fled and immediately contacted the Embassy.”
“Perhaps it was the way I carved it onto their cockpit with half the starboard weapons bank, instead of sticking with the traditional communications array. I’m afraid I haven’t quite perfected the little flourish at the end yet on a moving canvas.”
Bells and horns on surface vehicles are used because human hearing can get direction and distance to the sound (sirens also yield rate of approach). Comchannels provide none of this.
Bells only work on slow-moving vehicles. Neither work on fast moving vehicles due to wind roar or distortion by air displacement.
And I wouldn’t want to be on a spaceship with an open cockpit. Closed vehicles use sonar if in dense fluids, but sound is insufficient at high speeds in an atmosphere.
Finally, what idiots allow manual flight of large vessels in conditions that crowded?
If you are going to get scrapes down the side of a spaceship, it might as well be The Protector.
Yeesh. A representative of a government organization from a planetary nation-state has just been the cause of a staggering amount of GPL worth of property damage.
Alien invasions? HA! Just wait for the alien insurance companies to show up with claims!
Hey, guys, th–there’s a red-uh thingy, moving toward the green thingy
What?
Red thingy, moving toward the green thingy. I think we’re the green thingy.
Re: Horns in space.
Well obviously sound doesn’t travel (well) in space, but there’s an easy alternative. Starships would almost certainly employ radar, and would have masts capable of detecting radio signals. Light is pretty much the fastest way of tracking an object that might collide with you as well as the fastest way to communicate. (Barring magic. We don’t know enough about how magic revolutionizes the setting.)
So you could radio up the other guy and say, hey, idiot, watch where you’re going…. but that would require the comm officer to receive, listen to, and bring the captain’s attention to the comm call, assuming an officer on the offending ship was even monitoring comm traffic at all. That’s both too slow and too polite for the equivalent of a car horn.
A radar emitter emits a signal that is much more powerful than what returns to its receivers, in much the same way that when you shout “echo” in a canyon what you hear back is much quieter than the original shout. (Only a better metaphor would be a wide open field, because space, being space, is empty and doesn’t have walls. There’s still an echo if there’s something for the sound to bounce off of, but it’s a QUIET echo.) That means radar emitters have to be built powerful, and that radar receivers have to be as sensitive as you can make them.
So the equivalent of a horn in space would be this: Focus all your radio emitters save a couple on the idiot (you want a couple to spare just so you’re not completely blind for the few seconds this take) and go to full power with them.
This is completely justifiable in that the idiot is clearly an immediate navigational hazard that you need as good of a track on as it’s possible to have, so of course you’re going to focus radar on him. (A post-incident review board would probably compare the track you had previously to what was needed in the situation, see that you didn’t actually need to go full power to track him, realize what you were really pulling, and agree with you anyway.) Given how sensitive his radar receivers will be, it’s also a total dick move. Every single navigational alarm he has on his bridge will all go off at the same time, and you might take a significant chunk off those receivers’ expected lifespan. If emitters are powerful enough and receivers are sensitive enough (and you want that if you’re going to detect a micrometeor in your path in time to evade or destroy at 0.1c), you might even cause them to melt a bit.
I mentioned earlier that sound doesn’t work in space. That’s not entirely true. Space isn’t a COMPLETE vacuum, so sound does exist there. But it’s such a small distinction as to be utterly impractical for communication. Still, for ships designed to enter air traffic, horns might make sense… though probably not, for the same reason that airplanes typically don’t have horns. You’re likely at such long ranges (prior to last-second before collision) that the horns would be extremely faint at that range over the rumble of the engines, the medium through which the sound travels would be super-turbulent around the vessels making it hard to figure out what that sound is, and the doppler effect will make it worse, assuming you’re not going supersonic. Radio’s the better option even in atmosphere.
That said, I looked at the ships in Panel 6, and it does appear that the lower one has horns.
Horns in-atmo makes me think of Battleship and the exchange of sonic discharges… spoiler: the alien’s were better…
I wonder if they have med-units that could be strapped to Sydney’s wrist that could provide her constant medical care, and keep her ADHD in check if it couldn’t cure it.
Sort of like an artificial pancreas, but for medication levels instead of glucose? Interesting.
Sadly, Halo is probably the absolutely worst person to use for designing/testing such a system. She’d either make it’s little CPU explode in confusion, or replace the meds with capsaicin.
Not to criticize Dave’s choice of sound effects, but what that really needed at the end was a can scream (“rowr!”) and a wong-wong-wong-wongwongwoonnnnggg of a pan lid doing that spin-down thing on a kitchen floor.
Obviously a space cat, and a space pan, that just goes without saying.
By Grabthar Hammer, my hull will be avanged !
By the sons of Worvan!
Never give up! Never… swerve into oncoming traffic….
Sydney, what the fuck? Why would you just jump in front of high-speed traffic?
Someone could have been killed.
I think Sydney should probably get off the street and into another shop until the traffic situation gets sorted out. Maybe try one of the dessert places for an after-dinner treat. Just be careful in those selling certain alien cuisine. The silicon based races sell Baklava that is made with actual lava.
“By Grabthars Hammar, what the fuck was that?!”
“Sydney is one of those heroes who will probably wind up saving the world on the reg, but there is a price to be paid among the inhabitants. In the form of general collateral damage and surviving groan inducing puns.”
So she is Kei & Yuri of the Dirty Pair Anime then. the WWWA is for supers this time instead of GeneMod Agents as delved into by Adam Warren great take on the series.
That’s exactly what I was thinking!
Cora will take Sydney back to Earth, and then Dabbler or Maxima will mention her medication. Cora immediately comes to a sudden halt, and exclaims, “THAT. EXPLAINS. EVERYTHING!!!”
…Dabbler will then break it to Cora that the lack of medication only explains about half of Sydney’s absurd behavior.
If that much…