Grrl Power #753 – A civilized abeyance
Welcome to what’s informally known as the Archon Professional Ladies League. Informally, because no one calls it that. And definitely no one calls it “Lunch with my bitches.” But sometimes Max likes to sit down with educated professional ladies and eat a watercress sandwich. They talk about being at the tops of their respective fields and the pressures and challenges they face. Sometimes they talk about boys, too.
The existence of the APLL was kinda sorta hinted at way back on this page. Also I thought I’d link that page because that wiener joke makes me laugh every time.
If anyone is wondering, Peggy assigned Sydney a FN Five-seveN as her sidearm. It uses a relatively small 5.7×28mm cartridge and the standard magazine holds 20 rounds. Yes, hitting a target 11 out of 20 times is not too impressive, especially if you look at the piece of paper Sydney is holding when she busts into the room. She hit the paper 11 out of 20 times, but Peggy thought Sydney could do with the distraction today and told her that it counted. Not exactly up to the standards of a super elite military team, but considering Sydney’s abilities, it’s not like they’d kick her off the team if she could only hit 1 out of 20 shots. As long as she can hit what she’s aiming at with the PPO. Anyway, Syndey seems to be over her nightmare at the moment. Let’s see how long her caffeine and ‘shooting guns at things’ high can sustain her.
Yes, Sydney still squeaks every time she fires a gun.
For some reason I decided to have Sydney holding the sheet backwards. It’s an actual target with the silhouette bust on it, not just some blank butcher paper or something.
You know, on the one hand, it’s a little odd that Sydney is excited about cutting a car in half, considering the powers she has. She already sliced up a tank, but… she didn’t do it with a machine gun, so I guess she’s just excited about doing some Mythbusters level shit.
![An Orc at College: A Contemporary Sword and Sorcery Harem Fantasy by [Lawson, Liam]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51beAodduqL.jpg)
Random book recommendation for you guys. I’ve been enjoying this series called An Orc at College. It’s modern fantasy, harem… well, kind of harem light. Some books go overboard with it, but the relationships in this feel a little more natural. The thing I like about it most is its amusing reading about humans (mostly, there are other species like elves, beast kin, nagas and whatever, but mostly humans) through the eyes of an orc, along with a little cultural dissection. The orc is smart, though, he’s at college studying magic. Someone makes him a pair of glasses that give him a HUD that helps him decipher others’ emotions, because orc emotions are usually pretty straight forward, like “biting your face because of anger” and “biting your face because of lust.” Well, not really, but the glasses basically turn the world into a kind of dating game even though he’s not actually looking for a mate. Anyway:
Book 1
Books 1-3 collected
Book 4 preorder
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
The page needs a who’s who.
You mean like the one just to the right of the page?
To be fair, it’s missing Sydney. Also, looking at the who’s who reminded me that Max tends not to wear her choker/throat mic. Unless Sydney’s only wearing hers because she’s currently training…
Max is off duty, in a civilian blouse, so the choker is not required. Other times when you may not have seen it are more likely to just be an omission.
Hah! Whoops. I should add Sydney in.
Looks like the mental doc’s HOT coffee (in one panel you see steam) landed in physical doc’s chest, OUUUCCHHHYYY I hope she can self heal (verified in previous comic she has healing powers).
Dude, to qualify with a rifle in US Army training you only have to hit the target 23 times out of 40 with a rifle; 11 out of 25 with a pistol if you’re one of the few jobs that requires pistol proficiency.
Moving the goalposts, but in a good way.
By telling her she needs to pass a certain threshold to get a prize, Sydney will unconsciously push herself more than if it was just to “qualify for proficiency”. Keep stringing her along with more prizes, she might finally stop herself from squeeking like a mouse every time she pulls the trigger.
Kinda like on the tv show “Catch 22”: every time YoYo got close to reaching his flight targets, they added more flights, he ended up flying more missions than nearly anyone else, and saw his friends die along the way (except for some raping bastard who got away with rape and murder)
Or, you know, the book.
Never read the book, just the show with Clooney
TV•show? I thought the book was made into a ^movie^!
Also, the writter mentioned in the post below the comic that it was likely peggy taking it easy on sydney since she was clearly is under stress and needed a distraction. No one is saying sydney did good with a weapon here :D
To the contrary, that is exactly what Hunter Royall is saying. Sydney would have qualified in the army.
Mind you, this is Arc SWAT. Their baseline standards might be higher, as they are a special forces unit that needs to be able to pull off shots that regular troops would balk to even consider.
No, Sydney only got 11 out of 20
11/20 is a better percent than 11/25 :P soo, yea not sure about it ONLY got
You seem to completely misunderstand what Army is about.
Even if she would get 11 out of 11, that still would be only.
More so, if she would get 247 out of 247 – that would be “only” too.
If the Regulations say she has to hit 11 out of 25, then she has to hit 11 out 25 – not 11/20, not 11/11, not even 11/3.
Hence the “only”.
Military Math
Hollywood Math
[Political Party of the Day] Math
“Math”
None have anything more than a passing resemblance or aquantance to actual mathematics.
About that.
Demonstrate to us all how you will reject the math Artillery Units use. Please fire a one hundred fifty five millimeter howitzer to hit a target eleven miles away. You may have all the bags and shells you want.
At no time may you ever use the math they use, as it has already been determined (by you) not to be real math anyway.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, quiet.
Do you want the top brass to find out that they are using actual math instead of the military’s math? lol
The top brass mandated it.
What artillery units have used since Napoleonic times to calculate ballistics is quintessential military math.
Well Sydney gets 5 free shots then, as she already hit the required number in her first 20 shots. Of course not being in the army she is not required to fire those other 5 shots. She follows Archon rules, not Army rules. But her standard is already higher than they require.
….You only have to hit the target on a little over half your shots? Not even the center ring, but the target?? That’s….uh….a really low bar. A really, really low bar. By that standard I’d have qualified with a rifle when I was 12 and just barely big enough to handle a decent sized rifle.
Military tactics have not revolved around individual infantry marksmanship in a very long time. If ever. The individual soldier, as a general rule, only needs to be accurate enough to threaten his enemies with his rifle. Other military skills and mindset is more important to teach in the limited time a troop has during his basic training, especially as marksmanship – despite what the pundits say – is a time-consuming and perishable skill to teach. Being an excellent shot takes real work, and the military would generally rather that work go into learning to move properly and do all the hundred and three other jobs a G.I. needs to do.
This is also why the Designated Marksman role exists (sometimes) in a squad – the generic troopers are more for pressure than for confirming hits. The squad gunner suppresses enemies, the DM actually hits stuff, and the riflemen schlep junk for the gunner and the marksman as well as defending the squad and contributing their rifle fire to squad maneuvers where appropriate. You don’t need to be able to shoot the wings off a fly at two hundred yards to do any of that.
That very much depends on the unit type and mission.
Very true. General rifle/pistol qualification, however, is for the basic G.I. duties as I’ve been made aware. More stringent requirements for a mission would by necessity require more stringent training, and thus qualification, standards.
The two doctors are clearly drinking the hot drinks but I gotta know who is drinking the prune juice. I would assume Arianna but I can’t rule out the possibility that Max’s metallic body tissue has some downsides that require extra fiber. I have a mighty need for science!
I’m assuming the Prune Juice is a “Worf” reference, so probably Max.
Which one is Nog? Which one is Picard?
Whoopi Goldberg’s character is the one who introduced Worf to prune juice (“a warrior’s drink”, according to him), in my all-time favourite Next Gen episode. The only one of any series I decided to buy, Yesterday’s Enterprise.
Yes, Yesterday’s Enterprise made up for the idiocy that was Tasha Yar’s death. By the time that the tar baby killed her, she was starting to act like a security officer.
Personally, I would have killed her on the Hollywood planet with death penalty episode, for utter failure to do her job. My solution to that one?
“We must abide by your laws, as we have agreed. But if Wesley Crusher is going to die, he will die by our method, which is known to be painless for our biology … transporter dissolution. And you, Yar, for your utter negligence in doing your job, causing the death of a crew member, will be executed as well. Commander Riker, please prepare the transporter room for dissolution procedures. And… try not to get people dust all over this room, please.”
This, of course, sets up the easy cop-out of allowing these characters to be “killed”, as far as anyone knows…only to have it turn out that they were transported to their respective quarters.
i think the prune juice is for Arianna, cuzza the stress dealing with supers; legal and PR at the same time, you have to run a tight ship to keep control of all that
Raktajino is a Klingon drink
Klingon coffee. But it’s very popular with Federation and Bajoran customers.
Makes it more likely the closet nerd (geek?) would be drinking it
I can’t imagine a closet nerd to drink Klingon coffee. I mean, you’d better be so proud of your dorkiness and nerdism to be loud about it. So loud that you can crack a moon in half. No Klingon would respect you otherwise.
You going to be the one to tell Maxi she can’t drink it? o_O
The reason she is ‘closeted’ is simply because she doesn’t want to the rest of the Archon Misfits (Dabbles in particular) know that she used to have a crush on Wesley :P
Out of the four at that table, the only one who has shown that she would even know what it was, is Maxi (unless it turns out Ari is a Space Puerto Rican princess in disguise)
I don’t believe that anyone was ever chewed out for expending ammo during my first enlistment (as a 2884 alternatingly with the S2 or with Comm) when I was with 3/4.
I never got to fire mortars, just hump their godawful base plates.
I did shoot all kinds of crap as a 2171 during my third enlistment.
It took me 99 rounds to zero my weapon in the Army. Finally passed zeroing, an got 32 out of 40 first up lol. I think the sight was bent
How did you make the bread look spongy like that? That’s some very cool detailing!
DaveB squeezed the sandwiches into the coffee cup holder, on his PC box, and pushed the close button, to get it into the machine.
*wags tail authoritatively*
You’d be surprised how astute us doggies are, at how human devices work. Like those water fountains in bathrooms.
It’s a texture I copied from a picture of a piece of cake. I create a Hard Light layer, then airbrush in the texture with something like a 40% value, then I reverse the texture (not flip it, in Clip Studio Paint, you can reverse a texture which makes the dark parts of a texture light and vice versa, like a photo negative) then I airbrush in a value above 50%, something like 65%, but it depends on what I’m texturing and the value of the initial color.
I use that technique a lot since I figured it out. Makes the textures pop. Mostly on stucco in the background actually.
MMMMM. Stucco sandwiches.
heh i dunno about the ladies in the pic but my pinkie finger is kinda stiff so when i hold something like that it tends to get extended, plus i have big hands so there isn’t so much room on the cup
There isn’t much room on those cups for a child to hold properly
Yeah, where sydney had a kill count in the few hundred at this point (the small ships from the larger ships and the two big boss types that even Maxima ran from), accuracy with the side arm is really more of a bonus than a requirement by any means in this kind of job.
Especially when you consider that she doesn’t have max’s problem. Max’s point can be misconstrued, where as the ppo can be wielded with clear intent.
How? The PewPew is a ball in her hand, unless you can see what the other six balls are (and know what the colours mean anyway), you have no way of knowing it is the PewPew until it goes off
And that’s not considering it can be used as either a tank-cutter or a scatter-shooter, or… who knows what else
You live in a world of super heroes. You’re up against the clearly marked ark swat. You have in front of you someone who’s been on national news THREE times now. She’s pointing at you with a ball in her hand, with 5 other’s floating around her.
There’s a distinct difference between pointing with a finger, which is a gesture everyone can do, and then making a gesture with something that is clearly supernatural.
Again: how do you know which ball she is pointing at you? Remember, one is still unknown even to the ‘owner’, and several are classified
Yea, reasonable argument. We know that the orbs do have swirling clouds, lightning and so on. Not to mention the constant orbiting above her head, for the ones she is not holding.
However the contrary point does have merit too. The orbs do just look like Christmas tree ornaments. People will be much more likely to see a Halo cos player (and some may have convincing props which look like orbiting orbs) and there are an awful lot of people who do not follow national news.
If someone looking like a kid came up to you (and pretending you did not keep up with news), holding a Christmas tree ornament, and said something witty/barmy, whilst telling you to stop or surrender, would you hold it to be credible? Especially if the sun was in your eyes, so you did not happen to notice the orbs floating overhead. Not to mention that folks can sometimes simply be really inobservant and faii to spot even seemingly glaringly obvious things.
Like… a Golden Finger Poke of Death
To further Yorp’s point, an F.M. FiveseveN is a bit small, but it is quite obviously a pistol. No one even slightly familiar with life on Planet Earth will ignore it, while the stupid, the ignorant, and the unobservant, groups vastly overrepresented among criminals, are likely to say “Why are you wavin’ a glass ball at me?”
If the person was, say, floating in the air or had a shimmering force field around them I probably would.
Heh, reasonable.
Point of phrasing – Max did not “run from” the Squiddies, she very deliberately avoided dragging a bunch of mushy humans into an engagement that had no upside (whether they won or not) and was not required. Like a military leader instead of a pride-fueled gang leader.
I would like to see a “who would win” debate about how Max would have fared though, had it been appropriate to engage.
My bet on “Max versus the alien monsters” is on a stalemate; Max’s defenses are probably good enough where the aliens trying to obliterate her don’t penetrate through and turn her to dust, but on the other hand, their own shielding is probably good enough that she wouldn’t be able to bring them down–Sydney could only do so by getting inside the shield, a skill requiring her to teleport, something which Max can’t do.
Chances that Sidney requests a Hi-Point Yeet Cannon G1 as her sidearm?
She needs tranquilizer darts.
Something nonlethal with more range than the Lighthook or hitting things directly with the orbs.
For herself? Or others? o_O
“Yes”
Dabbler was shown inventing a “tickle laser” shortly after the parking lot battle. That seems like a perfect non-lethal firearm for Sydney.
You know Dabbler’s “Tickle Laser” would be designed to tickle in non-family-friendly places right?
I think The Mighty Halo would be too embarrassed to use it.
If Dabbler has seen Orgasmo (assuming that movie got made in the Grrl-verse), I’d be amazed if she hadn’t already invented an Orgasm Ray (I’d also be amazed if there isn’t a superhero in the Grrl-verse name “Orgasm Ray” — like Beta Ray Bill (possibly even keeping some . . . aspect of the horse-like appearance)).
I’d also place the odds of Max signing off on an O-Ray for field use somewhere in the range of the odds of a person winning the PowerBall lottery once a week, every week, for a year.
Highly unlikely. She doesn’t know much about guns so the only ones she’d be likely to choose from are the ones provided by Archon, and no military worth its salt is going to have Hi-Points around.
Fun fact, I used to own a Hi-Point. It was the scariest gun I’ve ever come into contact with for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t keep it for very long and never bought another cheap gun.
Please…just no.
Marketing yutzery and memism aside, Hi Points are Hi Points. They’re all terrible, the only purpose they serve is being guns for people who aren’t gun people.
That and we don’t need Sydney bogging the comic down in crappy one-off troll memes. At least let her stick to the ones that’ve withstood the test of time.
Sorry to disabuse Sydney of the notion, but you can’t cut a car in half with a LMG.
So, the day of our C9 qualification shoot a blizzard struck the ranges. The range officer went “Make spent casings!” and that’s all we did, because we couldn’t see the targets from 100m.
You did not have Peggy as your firearms instructor. Even if Mythbusters debunked being able to do stuff like that, Peggy could find a way to bunk a firearm into doing that.
I always hated it when we were told to just “fire it up!” or whatever. Some guys loved it, but I’d been shooting for years before my time in the Army and it wasn’t new or exciting to me. I even took riflery in college… For me more “empty your clips as fast as possible” shooting was just a waste of time. It wasn’t going to improve anyone’s accuracy, and just meant more time spent policing up the brass and cleaning the rifle.
Yes, well. That was the point of the exercise, wasn’t it?
No, the point is to practice fire and maneuver, and managing a situation with the resources at hand.
Congressional meddling saddled the military services with the same wasteful “use it or lose it” budgetary about 1983. Prior to that congressional interference services prided themselves on achieving mission requirements “on time and under budget.”
I was in during the change.
The link back to Sydney’s firearms training reminds me of my initial LEO firearms certification class. There weren’t that many of us there, but after the first day, there was one less. The guy immediately to my left was getting more and more stressed as we started shooting and his accuracy kept getting worse. I tried encouraging him to relax as we had nothing we were getting scored on that day. It was just training and familiarization. After a little bit, we were doing single person shooting and I got a chance to see how he was shooting.
Every single time he pulled the trigger, he pivoting the barrel downward. Starting out around 15° when I first saw it, then later close to 30-35°, so he was shooting below his target paper more than on it.
When he shot through, rather than around, a barrier, the instructors called a break and had a meeting with him. He dropped the class.
A menace to cups of tea and poor innocent cars, but not to the Archon HQ.
Cuups aught to promote a range of “Halo specials”. With very prominently displayed health warnings.
And maybe require signing a liability waver.
Fusion probably has a stack available, if Cupps doesn’t have any.
As if the “Octuple Espresso with Sexdecuple Caramel” isn’t already on the Menu as the “Halo Special”, with accompanying legal and health warnings of course.
Don’t forget to add the jigger (1.5 fl.oz.) of Purecap! Just to up the legal liability.
Since the description of the drink sounds vaguely like it has the words “Octopus Sex” in it, I’d be amazed if it didn’t get added to the Cupps menu the next day, considering their franchise seems to run on implied double-entendres. And boobs.
I wonder if Maxima will tell Sydney that she shouldn’t be bursting in like that and will consider posting armed guards(if Archon has any)if this happens again..!?
Why? It was simply an informal afternoon tea with friends, nothing formal or requiring special clearance
*nods*
Of course it would be polite not to barge in like that, and spill a drink. But with Sydney hyped up that is kind of like asking a tornado not to blow.
Oh, of course, wasn’t saying it wasn’t rude (Sydney should be fucking old enough to know not to just go barging through closed doors, has she forgotten when she met the President… of Mexico?), just don’t feel the need for armed guards (even if the guards aren’t carrying firearms, they are still armed, and lethal)
But, of course, in any installation, there are doors you should never burst through, and doors it’s no big deal to burst through. Given that it was, essentially, a social gathering, maybe they were behind one of the latter?
Heck, I work at a civilian employer, and we have both sorts of doors. (The former sort all have keycard locks.)
I’m so conditioned to knock, that I find it difficult to walk into any room, even one I know to be open to the public, without my paw raising up.
No bloodwine? What a dinky joint…..
A real warrior uses their own blood, not a space parasitic crab drinking the contaminated blood of others!!
I just thought of something. We know the lighthook can lift 16 tons, but how much can her shield hold? Im 99% certain thats never been mentioned, but do we have any kind of clues we could use to discern it? If its the same as the amount of force needed to break it (like from that alien mini-nuke) then she can carry a LOT more in the shield than her lighthook can.
There is nothing to suggest that the force field only works one way. In fact we saw that its protection against emotion attacks (Vehemence’s aggro aura) worked just as well from the inside out as vice versa. So, yea, if it can withstand a mini-nuke’s worth of force, then it can be filled up with gold bullion, if Sydney knows anywhere with an Olympic swimming pool sized volume of gold, stored in some deep underground vault.
Just so long as she takes care not to squish herself in the process.
The problem is, yes, the shield can probably withstand having an entire battleship resting on it, I highly doubt that the FLIGHT orb can lift that much.
It’s easy to fill up with gold bullion, but if the flight orb can only provide a certain amount of lift, then she isn’t going anywhere with said bullion. It would be fun to take her to the hoodraulic press channel and see how much force her sheild can take before it collapses.
Maybe do the thing they did with Superman, test all her powers to limits beyond even normal achievability?
We saw she makes air and the shield is buoyant, the lighthook can lift 16 tons, how much can she lift if you chained a battleship to her shield?
She doesnt NEED to fly…
We still don’t know what her limits are when doing her Telepresence Teleport, but it might be powerful enough to teleport more.
>I highly doubt that the FLIGHT orb can lift that much.
I don’t.
She’s got enough juice to go FTL.
The power requirements for that make anything else look like a double A battery.
Anything traveling even close to light-speed has planet cracking amounts of energy, but Sydney doesn’t actually come close to FTL speeds. She has some sort of space folding warp gate yes, but we don’t know how long the lever arm at work there is or how delicious and spongy the space she’s folding is.
But say she weighs 120lbs and her flight orb can exert the same 16 tons of force as acceleration. She’d be able to accelerate at roughly 3,000 m/s2, and her top speed is ~5488 m/s which she’d be able to achieve in about two seconds. Ish.
To approach light speed in the same two seconds you’d need something on the order of fifty thousand times that thrust. Also there’s gotta be energy expended to keep Sydney Sydney shaped. But you know, space magic.
Actually that estimate sounds low, which makes me think I mathed badly somehow. Meh. Point is she could well have a hard time moving mass in excess of what her hook can lift. Unless she thinks with portals.
Check out Halo hovering in various scenes in the comic. Take especial note of any where Sydney is upside down or otherwise not hovering in a vertical position. You will see that her hair is always oriented towards her feet, the same as if she was standing on the ground normally.
This shows that “Flyball” is a misnomer. The orb is actually controlling gravity (or doing something similar to that, but which would require Nth generation technological terms to properly describe). As such the weight is irrelevant. Anything inside the force field (or in a similar area when only the flyball is being used) is subject to local universal laws under Halo’s control.
If someone shrank down a battleship, so that it fitted within Sydney’s shield, whilst keeping the mass intact, it is very likely that Halo would be able to transport it. Purely extrapolating from those observations mind. We will have to wait until a test is done to be sure.
However one other thing strongly supporting my supposition is that the orbs do seem to match Sydney’s speculation about them being a miniaturised spaceship. And something that ships (or spaceships) can do is tow other vessels or carry tenders.
Uhh… gravity control and opening a wormhole… err… aetherium causeway? somehow does not fit with me.
Probably because I lack the education necessary… and the intelligence/creativity to figure it out
It is not simple gravity control. as we have seen some anomalous stuff where it may be better described as inertia control. But neither fully explained all the fine details of the incongruous scenes. So it is safest described as Sydney having god-like control of her personal environment.
Which would allow her to ensure it does not conflict with her aetherium causeway.
Nth generation technology is simply so advanced that it does what the user needs, rather than having to create some result that has unwanted side effects. In order for us to get about we use cars, which generate a lot of waste heat, noise and pollution. For the orb makers they built it to move the user and her passengers/cargo. They did not see a need to have noxious fumes come out the back, nor to conflict with long-distance travel capability.
According to Einstein, what we perceive as gravity is the curvature of space/time around a given concentration of mass. Mass imparted by the Higgs Field, an effect of the Higgs Boson subatomic particle. A wormhole is a sufficient curvature of space/time as to cause its geometry to intersect itself in manner that connects normally disparate parts of space/time (think of a Moebius Strip or Klein Bottle as more mundane weirdly connected geometries). Sydney’s “Fly Ball” could work by manipulating either Higgs Bosons or the Higgs Field in general.
Gravity (Higgs Field) control would actually fit perfectly with creating a wormhole. In fact, assuming that Einstein is correct, gravity control would be the only way to create a wormhole aside from a very quickly rotating black hole.
We know the flight orb can push her default size shield through air at Mach 16. The amount of force needed to do that would be pretty terrifying. Frankly, if she just flew all out at ground level, she’d be leaving a sonic boom that would be comparable to a tactical nuke.
Unless maybe the shield has some weird anti-air resistance juju that just relocates air at the front to the back, without any boom.
We saw her produce a sonic boom waaaay back early in the comic when maxima was first testing out the flight orbs abilities.
Found it
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-353-the-handymans-secret-weapon/
found it:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-353-the-handymans-secret-weapon/
Speaking of her shield…
(I’d wager it has already been discussed a lot, but…)
… how does it even work?
It seens like it is airtight, spherical thingy which is perfect heat insulator on top of that (and durable as hell).
Seems like it goes through ground ( and most of the time, Syd (or maybe the orb) is in center.
But I wonder, how it forms.
Does it displace particles? If so, whenever she’d take off with shield on, she’d take some ground with her, wouldn’t she?
Else… If it creates just ‘in gaps’, I guess it wouldn’t form instanteously (or wouldn’t be a perfect sphere). Following the previous option, this wouldn’t be nearly as destructive, but still (yeah, cutting bars to pieces using shield and propulsion would be nice)
Else.. It could form around stuff,but… since we don’t see any of the pattern on the ground while she’s standing with her shield on… dismissed, I guess?
Last idea I can remember from this morning: Due to the nature of the pattern, I guess it may spawn some focus-points and form the shield by connecting them (if in proximity)… Doesn’t explain why it ‘connects’ to the ground (not that many points, are there?) Also it would be hell in sandstorm, unless the points keep spawning until the shield is a perfect sphere.
Uhh… too many ideas forgotten because of the difference in writing and thinking speed.
Also, when she activates the shield above ground and lands… shouldn’t she become something like a hamster in ball? :)
The shield forms in triangular wedges. If you check out the scene where Halo embiggens the shield and protects the media from Max, you will be able to find a page where we see the shield in a partially raised state, with each row of triangles popping into existence above the previous row, in quick succession.
In an emergency this process is done in the blink of an eye, whereas on that occasion, Sydney was showing it off in a leisurely fashion.
Importantly the shield can, and often does, reshape itself according to Sydney’s needs. Indoors it is always much smaller than outdoors. When flying it is cigar shaped, rather than circular. If she gets too close to an object (like a table) it deforms, rather than pushing the object out of the way (whilst being smart enough not to deform when an object like Maxima’s fist approaches Sydney, rather than Sydney walking towards one).
Similarly, when it forms close to the ground, it can form either an open or a closed hemisphere. The former is a dome, which reaches down to the ground, conforming to touch it smoothly all around, but not penetrating underground. The latter actually forms a forcefield underneath the feet of the people being enclosed. So that when Halo flys off they are lifted up, rather than falling out of the bottom.
This can also be done if Halo is hovering above someone. In which case it forms a full sphere, but the force field will pop into existence in between their shoes and the ground. We saw this being demonstrated when Sydney picked up Harem outside her comic shop.
The shield is indeed airtight. We saw Sydney starting to suffer from that, when she kept the shield raised for an extended period in the Battle at the Steak House Car Park. Similarly she has flown in space, since she figured out about the orb which produces air. Being airtight it would be fine at protecting her from a sandstorm. Although any inside the shield, when it is raised, would remain inside. As we saw when Halo ended up with a bunch of sand in the shield, during her tank melting demonstration, at the firing range.
Im honestly hoping to see Sydney have phenomenal accuracy with the LMG. Im just imagining Sydney cackling while she fires off belts of rounds and then when shes out they go down range and theres this dinner plate sized grouping and Peggys astonished face when they get to the car. and Sydney being slightly upset that she didnt actually cut the car in half
The problem is, yes, the shield can probably withstand having an entire battleship resting on it, I highly doubt that the FLIGHT orb can lift that much.
It’s easy to fill up with gold bullion, but if the flight orb can only provide a certain amount of lift, then she isn’t going anywhere with said bullion. It would be fun to take her to the hoodraulic press channel and see how much force her sheild can take before it collapses.
Maybe do the thing they did with Superman, test all her powers to limits beyond even normal achievability?
We saw she makes air and the shield is buoyant, the lighthook can lift 16 tons, how much can she lift if you chained a battleship to her shield?
Sorry, it seems to have posted that comment to the wrong thread.
Have a listen to the Clown* drivers voice with the Cylon sat in the back of the car, or the kitchen scene in the 1980’s episodes ‘The Night The Cylons Landed’ (Parts 1 and 2)
youtu.be/g8z8fz8Ogag
That was K.I.T.T. before the Cylons killed him and Devon Knight shoved his brain into a Pontiac Trans Am :P
The Lighthook…. she could probably hold that orb in one hand, have it lift almost any gun, use her other hand to pull the trigger. She COULD be pretty accurate with practice that way.
I’m a little surprised she didn’t try that with the mingun way back when. That was the first thing I thought of when she tried.
I would note that the FN Five-seveN pistol is -not- a small gun. It has a big, chunky, blocky grip that makes a doublestack .45 look reasonable. Depending on the range she’s shooting at, for a new shooter 11 on the paper (especially with a big gun in a small hand) is reasonable. I would also note that literally every single woman I have ever taken shooting for the first time, if properly told how to use the sighting system, hits the bullseye on the first shot 7 yards or less.
I suspect that Sydney is making a very common mistake. She seems to both be anticipating the noise and over or under compensating for it. I daresay there might even be some eye closing just as shes firing. I’m quite sure peggy is trying to teach/show her what she is doing wrong but its sticking about as well as butter on Teflon.
If it was me I’d switch her over to a .22, less noise and jerk until she gets used to it and then switch her back to the FN Five-seveN.
Or just keep her on the .22
I mean, Max said they have to learn guns for the intimidating effect.
At the range you would know it’s a .22 aimed at your head instead of a .45 – it wouldn’t make any difference.
Ya know. Regardless of what the ppl in those ships were doing. Both the fighters? never mind the capital ships, she’s killed more ppl herself, now, then the whole team has in all their actions combined. Flighty or not, that’s gonna come back at you at odd times. Yeah. More. You don’t crew ships the size of mountains with a handful. Depending on how big those ships actually were, and don’t forget, she killed what 2 or 3 of them, never mind fighters, she’s pushing genocidal numbers on her ownsome.
Not that I wouldn’t have in her place. And with gusto. If it’s you or me, it’s you. If I have any say in the matter.
Sleel
^handful of crew in them.
She didn’t touch the big ship, just the drone fighters
We also do not know if the drone ships were actually manned. They could have been true drones much like the gold schlubs in GOTG2. Of course that could mean that many of them were actually shot down by Sydney multiple times…
While we don’t know for certain, if you look at the wreckage of downed fighters shown on the Alari homeworld they do look like they had interior compartments.
Those fighters could have been Alari
The point was: there was only one Main Ship (which Sydney didn’t touch), and she sliced Squidly into calamari pieces and blasted through the head of Tractor-beam Face (still a better name than Taserface :P)
I think that air force captain needs to cut down on her caffeine if she’s going to be around Sydney.
I feel like the good doctor would know that even though a hallmark trait of ADHD is being easily distractable, another hallmark trait is uncontrollable hyperfocus. Sometimes we fixate on things even if we don’t want to, and it sounds a bit like what was going with her sleep issues. I’m concerned that Sydney would miss some much needed aid since the one side of ADHD is being dismissed in light of the other.
(Sorry, as a recently diagnosed ADHDer myself, I’m a bit protective. :D )
Dave is a long diagnosed ADHDer, and knows the condition inside and out. There is a high concentration of folks with ADD/ ADHD in this community, unsurprisingly. So we get a lot of feedback in commentary, like your own, that expands Dave’s knowledge beyond just his own personal experiences. As such, you can rest assured that the doctor will ensure Sydney’s treatment is well rounded.
Unless he chooses to have the doctor be less competent than we may hope. Which is a reasonable reflection of a proportion of the doctors out there. However General Faulk has shown himself to be adroit at hiring good key personnel, so I think we can have faith in her.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that even the best Doctor making reasonable decisions will be wrong at least a quarter of the time, because people are complex… and there’s the Rule of Interesting. Pure competence ISN’T, for long.
Stories are sticky (and drive engagement) when bad things happen to good people. All other combinations of good/bad and things/people need to fit into the cracks of that one.
I understand that the Five-seveN is also good for smaller folks like Sydney because even with the 20 round mag capacity it doesn’t have a thick grip unlike a double stack 9, and it has very low and controllable recoil. Never handled one myself, just what I read.
That’s a good look for Max, especially in panel 4.
Yup. Dave got a lot of advice from gun enthusiast readers, when he asked what would be a suitable weapon for her to use. Likewise for various of Peggy’s toys. Maxima’s purpose-built gun is entirely his creation though.
I hate double stack guns. While I’m a fairly heavy set guy, I was born with unusually small hands, a marginal birth defect. I actually share glove sizes with my 5′, 80 lb wife, except that her fingers are longer. It’s single stack or revolvers for me.
Or my Calico, of course; 100 rnd magazine AND a grip I can get my hand around! What’s not to love?
Please tell me Dr. Frost has some sort of emotion stabilizing power
Five plus years training to earn her doctorate? If that does not provide some skill at helping to stabilise emotions, then she is due a refund.
ever watch NRA TV? Or “FEAR THE BLACK PEOPLE AND GET A GUN TO SHOOT THEM!” channel.
Though, beign fair, the NRA just shut it down, so baby steps.
Ever get tired of spouting your lying bullshit about the NRA?
I served with people like that. Shoe ‘am a new book toy, they gotta shoot everything in the area just to see what it does.
One thing, she’s (DrChevy) is a Flight Surgeon, USAF from the from the look of things, so Ironically she can legally Medically ground Sydney ( or any flying supers including Max for that matter, also legally any non military flying supers and even USNavy officers) untill they can get a second opinion form a higher ranked flight surgeon, and unless Max is also a SFS any medical orders the doc ( Dr Chevy ) issues she has to follow.
This incidentally brings up the issue of Flight regulations. Yes I know technicaly most supers are ultralights, but even those have restrictions. This may take a bit of digging.
Perhaps the supers aren’t flying at all. Perhaps they are teleporting one micron at a time, really fast.
Or maybe, to quote Buzz Lightyear and Woody, they are falling with style.
Hulk couldn’t fly, but boy could he leap.
Sydney needs to have more of whatever she is on, at the moment. She looks particularly adorable.
Mind you the rest are all looking great too. Just not as hyper.
If this is going to become a habit of Sydney’s, then the Ladies Who Lunch may need to ask Ashley the Fabric-ator® to supply them with more water resistant uniforms.
Nah.
Just make her attend in professional clothing and talk about things which will bore her to tears. Like being taken by your mom to high tea followed by a quilting circle.
Then Sydney will be scheming to avoid that entire part of the building lest she be invited to attend.
X’-DD ;-þ
So we know that they have a firing range but just wondering do they have several paintball/laser skirmish courses set up for squad/combat training?
I would Imagine that they use an actual mock city like other military branches.
Who feels that Dr.Frost….
A.Can’t be trusted?
B.Is an agent of the Twilight Council?
C.Both???
Nah. But I think she’s a super. Like the other doctor, but where the other doctor has healing powers, I think she has psionic powers, or is an empath, or has some sort of psionic firewall powers.
I’ve been suspecting empath.
Thus there will be no “whiner babies” and nobody not really on the edge will get out of PT.
How about…
D.Under the employ of Deus Mechania???
Maybe she is actually one of the supernatural. An angel springs to mind. We have seen their silhouettes in the Twilight Council chambers. And I seem to recall Dabbler telling Sydney that there is no particular animosity between them and angels. But my brain is still squidgy from too many long shifts at work. It is too fragile to reset it to get it working properly again.
Or, she’s simply a normal Dirt Monkey Shrink (either iatrist or ologist)
Would a Light Machine Gun actually be able to cut a car in half? I’m doubtful honestly. But I don’t know a lot about firearms.
You can saw a car in half with a tongue depressor, if you’ve got enough time, and enough tongue depressors. Yeah, you could cut a car in half with one, but you’d go through a ridiculous amount of ammo.
Although I tongue-in-cheek argued above that Peggy could, in reality (other than spending inordinate time and ammo, as Brett Bellmore pointed out) you could not in practice. Bullets are too small and cars are too big in comparison.
However if you upped it from a light machine gun, to a mini gun (and a truckload of ammunition) then it starts to become more plausible, as Mythbusters chopped down trees. You certainly could make a visible gap through the softer parts just as quickly as in that video. However the heavy structural ones would not be torn apart so easily.
So if you were satisfied with it looking torn apart then a gatling gun could do a good job. But if you actually wanted to separate the two parts, it would take more ammo than a recruit would be issued.
Or, jump up to a Bushmaster IV.
40mm Chaingun FTW.
Guy Martin almost turned a BMW into a convertible using just 100 rounds from a Spitfire’s cannon (he may look and sound ‘odd’, butt that is just due to where he comes from, the dude is a genius when it comes to rebuilding things: like a Mk1 Spitfire that had been buried on a French beach for over four decades)
Vehicle mounted weapons are much better at destroying other vehicles than man portable weapons, generally speaking.
Soooo, Sydney is qualified as a menace under the Wilson Definition then, yes?
Off topic, but the link to superbitch is dead, it looks like all the comics were moved to https://tapas.io/series/Superbitch
We don’t much worry about things being on topic here. And I’m sure DaveB would want to know that.
Also, the replacement Magellanverse server is just about done restoring back issues and new comics are back on schedule.
I don’t know if this has already been mentioned as I don’t have time to read everything on the board (sorry, I have a client session in a couple minutes) but it is an ethical breach for Dr. Frost to even admit she is seeing Sydney. The whole ‘I can neither confirm nor deny anything’ is an actual thing Dr. Frost would be obligated to do.
That being said, I suppose it is possible that being in ARC whatever means Sydney had to waive that privilege of privacy or Dr. Frost had her sign a Release of Information form so she could talk to these other people about her. Either way, Frost wouldn’t have to play coy in the 2nd panel. It would either be ‘Cannot confirm or deny’ or she could talk about the details if she felt it appropriate.
The only other possibility I could think of would be that Frost didn’t think it was therapeutically in Sydney’s best interest to share details even if she already has permission, in which case, I suppose it could play out like the above? Sorta kinda maybe?
Sorry to be nit picky, this is just my favorite comic and you actually talked about a field I know and am licensed in! Great work as always Dave!
The rules may be different in the military. Many of the assumptions we make about civil and legal rights for normal citizens turn out not to be applicable under military jurisdiction. On top of which the doctor needs the cooperation of the other people in this room, if she is to be able to successfully treat her patient. Her “I cannot talk about the specifics” is Dave’s nod at the confidentiality.
However there was still the practical need for her to demonstrate 1) that Sydney did need some R&R time and 2) that she is not an active danger to them. Both of which need to be judged using military rules and the operational needs of the unit, balanced against the needs of the individual. So, even if the situation does still fall under normal civilian ethical rules, the doctor may have decided to bend the rules a bit, in order to ensure that her patient got the treatment that she needed. Contrast that to following the rules, to the letter, only to find her request turned down or her patient unjustly dismissed. Or, as we sometimes see in the news, having her case dragged through the courts, to determine who has the greater legal rights.
In other words a minor breach of ethics now might be in the best interests of her client, balanced against all the other aspects she may be aware of. Albeit a slippery slope to be treading on. And, of course, bearing in mind that Dave confessed at the outset that he lacks expertise in your field. So your input will be gratefully received.
That said, I’m just throwing some food for thought out there. We have a lot of folks with military knowledge and they often have the answer to such obscure military regulations at their fingertips.
When you join the military in the US you surrender many of the rights you have as a civilian. I could see some legitimacy for Dr. Frost to discuss Sydney with Max, due to the fact that Sydney’s state of mind could become a life or death thing to herself or other members of the team. There may also be some legitimacy for Dr. Chevy to be in on the conversation as Dr. Chevy probably has ultimate responsibility for all medical situations, both physical and mental. What I can’t imagine any legitimacy for is Arianna getting to be in on this conversation. There is no reason I can imagine that would allow this stuff to be discussed in front of the PR person.
Ari is also Sydney’s lawyer
And there is no legitimate reason why her attorney would be included in this conversation either.
One of the possible outcomes of this conversation, had it gone another way, might have been Sydney being dismissed from the military, due to being unfit for duty. Something which her attorney may wish to challenge or be privy to the basis of the decision, in order to be able to properly advise her client on the best course of action. Handling the matter over a cup of tea saves a lot of formalities.
Another angle is that Sydney may have been deemed to not have mental capacity. In which case having her lawyer to paw, to represent her interests and ensure that someone with legal right to represent her (a relative, or court appointed individual) is brought in to the loop is likewise advantageous.
Finally Arianna is an Archon head of department, one of Maxima’s peers. As best I can tell (from her dual role as attorney and PR person, and the lack of anyone else visible in general roles) her remit is ‘everything non-military / non-spy’. In other words she may well be Dr Frost’s boss. Given that her department would be just as much at risk from Sydney slicing Archon HQ in half, it is not unreasonable (by military standards, rather than civilian ones) that she is kept in the loop.
All of the above is just me looking for possible loopholes mind. I basically am of the same mind about her presence here. However, artistic licence wise, Arianna is here because she is part of the Archon Professional Ladies League. Hopefully they solve more problems than they create by bending the rules.
Let’s see here. @Yorp, yeah I thought about the loss of that privacy being part of the military. It just seemed very odd for Frost to say something about it at all. I actually did a bit of googling about this topic and it turns out that there are a couple of exceptions to the confidentiality rules of counselors in the military.
1) A Command Directed Evaluation(CDE), where the commander orders the evaluation and is authorized to see the results .
2) There is a Soldier Readiness Program (SRP) where the whole purpose is for the person to be assessed if they are ready for duty.
3) if the program/treatment is associated with the DOD (which I think I remember ARC is or was?), that person’s records are actually considered government property, instead of the service providers.
It seems to me that #3 is by far the most likely scenario here and as such, all the people in the room would be fully qualified to see the records. You could even make a case for Ari as she has to have super high clearance and if the records are the property of the military, they could share them with her as part of that clearance if they so chose. Interesting stuff, I didn’t know anything about these exceptions.
So, I get why Dave did what he did, since most people don’t know much about confidentiality issues, Frost just comes off as a bit of a goober for getting this wrong. Especially since Dave did a pretty bang up job on making Frost come off as an excellent counselor!
Interesting stuff, thanks.
Military situations can often seem weird to outsiders. Like having to seek a superior’s permission to get married (or, in certain situations, even to date)! But there are reasons for these restrictive rules and losses of liberty.
Guns are therapeutic as fuck.
woo finally caught up. last time i did we were at the monster meeting explaining the veil thing.
but now here’s a thought
if green is life support. maybe it also has built in med kit. slurp juice, potion power, whatever healing float’s your boat. and stretching that further psychological health could be a function. like dream scape stuff while she sleeps
Three of those cups have steam. Someone is either enjoying a hot prune juice or a hot root beer….
Good to see Dr. Chevy again! And bless Dr. Frost for panel four. Glad to see that someone understands the importance of that.