Grrl Power #768 – Late to the party
I done goofed.
I have to own it. The very first draft of this page had Sydney saying something slightly more innocuous like “When did this happen!?” or whatever. Then at some point while I was drawing it I decided to do the change up gag where someone overreacts to the wrong thing. I don’t know the name of the trope off the top of my head.
Here’s the problem. This whole scene started with Sydney watching the press conference from the firing range. She’s a flake, but that’s just too flaky, even for her. But I just forgot about that page while I was writing/drawing this one.
I realized this sometime Wednesday and I could have fixed it, but I thought just to mix it up, it’d be fun if you guys wanted to pitch some lines for Sydney that hopefully make more sense. I’ll update the comic with the best one.
Whatever else happens with this page, I’m positive I drew either the Interdictor or Archon HQ at the wrong scale. I think the building is way too small. Cora said the ship was 160 meters long, but that seems super small now, even if she meant the body of the ship and not including the gun/gravity sled nacelles at the front.
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To the people who are saying the Interdictor is flying now, so it’s the right size, I say look at the carefully drawn ground shadow next to the ship. It’s clearly on the ground. It should be smaller (60-75% of what’s shown) and the “Super Battle Carrier”™ should be 2-3x the size.
Agreed. It looks smaller than Cora’s ship, and that has a crew of under 10. All those assault Fel should take up some room. I mean even if they aren’t sentient so you can just stack them like cordwood when you’re not using them to assault stuff, and don’t need to set aside things like a tentacle closet or maybe a ping pong table for their recreational use, there’s still a lot of them.
To be fair, from the size of the ship compared to the skyscraper, it does look like its flying if you miss the easily overlooked shadow.
To the people who are saying it’s on the ground, I point out the FOREST in the top right that it’s wings are sitting over. The wings sweep down further than any other point of the hull. If it was on the ground, there’d be a bunch of knocked over threes there. Since there aren’t, it isn’t.
I think you’re reading a lot into some fairly nonspecific artwork.
Since it just got gutted like a fish, it is most likely on the ground, because that’s usually where things that were up in the air end up when their “up in the air” method is removed from them by force.
The comments in this specific branch are about the Interdictor (Cora’s ship), which was definitely NOT “gutted like a fish”.
I actually think it’s funnier this way. It’s like she forgot on the way over that she had started off watching the press conf. Makes the facepalm twice as good.
I agree with that. it’s a double facepalm from peggy. And doesn’t seem out of Character for Halo to do that either.
I expected Sydney to say – “Never mind the .50 Cal – I want what she’s shooting” – looking at the gun ports on the starship.
For Sydney’s comment just use, “Holy Crap! I just realized that Cora’s ship looks like a (insert might morphing power rangers weapon or any crappy anime weapon you can think of).” and then as a running gag have her have the theme song go through her head every time she talks to Cora about the or sees the ship.
The broke a spaceship pinata without me!
Hey Dave! You can also write a short flashback panel in the next strip, showing that the TV set with the press thing on it was turned off by Peggy in an attempt to get Sydney to focus on her shooting.
How’s that for earning a ‘No Prize’?
I noticed there’s no swimmingpool on top of the Archon building. Is there a possibity that could be corrected?
Perhaps the pool is under the retractable skylight.
Also, add in Maxima’s skylight that she flys out of.
The pool was on one of the ‘shoulder’ rooftops, not the very top. We can see four of the ‘shoulders’ clearly and half of a fifth, implying that the pool is on the corner furthest from the camera, closest to the spaceships.
A is for Archon
B is for Bechon
Wait? You are allowed to park there?
Isn’t there a parking lot?
“I was gone or two months and they got rid of the pool?”
Sydney in the last panel: “That still only counts as one!”
That was the funniest (as in the only actually funny) Gimli gag in The Lord of the Rings.
It would have been a good other option for Sydney to say.
Plus, the next panel she could then sidetrack herself further by obsessing over if people would now see her as a dwarf because, you know, short
while I like the idea of an ironic echo for such a scene, that requires setup for the punchline, and someone predictable to deliver the punchline. Sydney is predictable in some ways, but largely immune to predictability when it comes to dialog. I’m sadly drawing blanks for whatever remark she could make that is facepalm worthy.
I’m looking forward to Archon reverse engineering the enemy ship.
the science community has just been given a gift.
might take a few decades to get the faster than light engines working again,
but that’s a lot of alien technology, and knowledge once they can translate
the data in it’s computer systems.
Shields, Weapons, Alloy materials, Engines, Digital Library, Star maps, Universal Translators
And they might even get some Refugee Aliens that can help with the science and engineering.
How many times must it be explained as being impossible, You cannot reverse engineer, technology that you have no idea, of when you cannot, understand the basis, or the therapy of it’s creation.
It won’t magically boost the tech level but it will help point them in the right direction, i mean perhaps reverse engineer may not be the best word choice but i dont know of any better ones for this sort of situation
I guess it would still give them an idea of what’s possible? That’s not nothing.
You don’t have to understand the theory to create an exact replica and use it. The Romans had concrete and arches without understanding the chemical reactions and mechanical stress distributions that made them effective.
This is high technology, at least 1000, above our understanding. “Reverse-Engineering”, is a Hollywood movie cliche.
Reverse engineering is not impossible. Even with technology that you don’t understand. At the very least, you can take it apart, see what parts you can understand, then figure what’s required to fill in the gaps of the parts that you don’t understand. At a minimum, it lets you know what is possible as an end result so you can focus your studies on that goal.
Maxima hit ship with a beam that pierced it from one side of the hull through the ship and then out the other side. Subsequently the ship blew apart and though there are several huge burning pieces lying around, part of the ship is just gone.
There’s not going to be a lot of reverse engineering of the rubble left from the ship.
There seems to be quite a bit of ship there to reverse engineer, even with the damage Maxima caused to it.
And since the damage inside the ship was so great that it blew the ship apart from the inside the inside was in worse shape than the exterior hull even if you could stop the fires now.
Seriously, have you ever really looked at a plane or a helicopter which blew apart and burned?
Maybe a tank or a mobile antiaircraft weapon?
If even the hull isn’t intact then the pieces are going to be largely slag.
And even the slag would probably advance material sciences.
You run a cross a 6 inch piece of wire, not worth much, right? Well, if it’s a 6 inch piece of room temperature superconducting wire, maybe it would be.
Material sciences yes.
But it’s not going to give you more than the containment material as far as an FTL drive.
This is where Deus X is ahead.
“And since the damage inside the ship was so great that it blew the ship apart from the inside the inside was in worse shape than the exterior hull even if you could stop the fires now”
You’re making a whole lot of assumptions there. Most of the ship seems to still be quite put together. It doesnt look slagged or blown apart like you’re suggesting. Are you looking at the picture of the Fel ship? It looks rather mostly intact still, save for the hole through a small part of it (Maxima’s beam had to be condensed in order to get through the shield). And aside from the fact that they have a super who CAN GET RID OF THE FIRE, I’m willing to bet the Fel technology is not going to burn up from your average fire. I’m assuming it has more durability than a Gameboy or Nokia phone, both of which have been shown to still be able to work after an explosion or a fire.
https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/unstoppable-game-boy/
https://www.androidauthority.com/nokia-3310-900425/
Where are you getting that the hull isnt intact? You can SEE that the hull is still there.
I the picture at the top of this page, parts of the Fel ship are on one side of Cora’s ship, and other parts are in the woods past the other side of Cora’s ship, and the various parts have flame or smoke coming out of them.
In my personal experience that indicates that the insides are going to look worse than the outside.
The parts on the other side of Cora’s ship are ‘drop pods’. It’s how the infantry got on the ground so fast without landing the ship istelf. The open doors should be a big clue.
The parts on the ground are the drop pods that the Fel came out of. Like in Starship Troopers.
Give a crew of 1920s engineers a modern cellphone…
Would they be able to reverse engineer it?
The speaker magnets? Possibly.
The battery? Sure.
The touch screen? Maybe the touch capability. Probably not the colors, and not the resolution. Definitely fail on some of the glass properties.
The memory? CPU? Unlikely.
In the 1920s we were starting into some snazzy technologies like vacuum tubes. Computers did exist, but as collections of gears and cogs. Heck, we were still fleshing out the periodic table and didn’t have a fraction of the theories that modern ICs are based on.
It might actually be safe to remove a few bits from the ship (no quantum nova bursters for you, be silly if you accidentally blew up your star) and leave the rest for the natives to clean up/pull-oh-hair over.
Alright, let’s be fair to those 1920s engineers, though.
They’d be decades and decades from creating a working cell phone, that’s no doubt. But what might they discover? Well, first off, they’d see the pixels, the color LCD, the miniaturized battery, the circuitboard as a basis for a computer, the concept of 3D rendering with a computer… Various connector types, the various adhesives, a whole new level of plastic and silicone… digital stinking photography.
The thing isn’t that the cell phone actually unlocks any of these technologies. What it does do, though, is give a direction for technology to develop. Without something like that as an example, it’s always tough to know what works, and often tough to know what is even useful (famously, both the mouse and the color LCD were invented by companies who didn’t grasp their utility).
Just knowing that something CAN be done is a huge step forward in doing it – and having an example might let you cheat quite a bit in overcoming problems that crop up along the way.
Get at that reactor – knowing if it’s something we’ve imagined already would help us advance – discovering it’s a whole different approach would help us advance tremendously. Give it about a decade and it might solve our energy crisis. Examining their energy distribution center might let us charge phones wirelessly. Getting into their life support systems might let us build better skyscrapers, new materials could revolutionize transportation and construction, etc. We don’t need to build a new spaceship to benefit tremendously from taking one apart.
They’d be hamstrung tho – no electron microscope to see what’s in the microchips at the micro-scale. No mass-spectrometer to figure out what trace elements are used where. Sure, you have gallium in these parts and vanadium in those… The 3D graphics? A wild goose chase at best. Sure, it’s a thing that can be done, but it may tempt engineers into trying too hard or focusing on the wrong steps. You need extremely high purity when making microchips. 99.9% pure? Bah, not nearly pure enough. The chemistry, techniques, and technology needed to make such things simply wouldn’t exist, and would need to be discovered first.
Giving a 1920s crew of engineers a cell phone would be much like giving a modern compound bow to a group of cave men. They may be able to figure out how to use it, to see what it does, and see much of how it works. They may even understand why it’s arrows hit with so much more force than a standard bow with the same draw weight. But they lack the tools and math to begin creating their own. Without access to metals or strong plastics, they probably can’t recreate pulleys of sufficient strength to produce more than a fragile, weak proof of concept.
sounds much like the our primitive ancestors argument or the animals are stupid arguments. those 20’s engineers you may be correct they wouldn’t really gain much because they are already programmed to see things a specific way but any thing without that base programming would see all kinds of possibilities and in this case be in the position to ask those to whom these ideas are commonplace. humanity has a bad habit of trying to define its self as the top thinker while steadfastly ignoring the obvious tool use language and planning found in other critters we assume that if it doesnt speak the queens english (or what ever language group you want it must be mentally deficient.) however consider that a dog is in the least bilingual if it can be told to sit. as are most other animals with ears since they must understand their own species and our communications.. so the idea that those 1920’s people are to stupid to figure out how an advanced tech would or could work is fairly ignorant and insulting to any and all humanity and pretty much all other life on this planet. sorry but after you see spear fishing orangutans and a bird that can hold a logical and considered conversation the idea that we couldn’t in short order figure out most any tech we got our hands on is in the least majorly ignorant and at the most a bar room brawl insult.
“Forget the .50 cal, I want to try whatever gun did that!”
Sydney: Where is the pool? or They are parking on the lawn? or They didn´t save some for me?
I Have simple suggestion for Sydney could say, “I thought the Press Conference was a recording from Yesterday!” or something along those lines
“They had an alien invasion without me???”
Like she’s now the big alien expert having been to space and all.
“We have TWO helicopter pads?!”
Sydney like “I missed out on xp!?”
I like either the suggestions that she wants to know how good at shooting she needs to be to play with whatever did THAT, or perhaps something like “My therapist had no sympathy for my hating running before we were late to this! I’m never getting that medical exemption now!”
I have an idea for Sydney’s line:
Oh my god aliens are real???
“I forgot to Tivo the press conference!”
sub comic idea
Sydney lands still miffed.
People are moving alien bodies.
She blasts one.
“Sydney, we don’t shoot bodies!”
“IT MOVED! I swear it!”
We played space invaders?
Sydney: Surveying the scene frame before last “What the…”
Then the last frame “They had a press conference without me!?”
looks even better as you would expect some comment about the battle and wreckage.
“Oh come on, I missed all the fun!”
Oooo. Frix will need to stick around a while to fix that!
They hogged all the XP?!?!
“They killed an alien ship without me?! How am I supposed to level up?!”
And that’s why you shouldn’t split up the party. The poor Tank mage missed the miniboss fight.
this was definitely a story scripted barely survive prologue fight, but the dm didn’t realize just how overpowered the feats they allowed one player to use were
“They had an alien invasion without me?”
Opps, already done.
“We have a roof top swimming pool?!?”
(Or, looking at the nose of the alien ship)
“That’s the second biggest bottle opener I’ve ever seen!”
I’ll be honest, I didn’t even notice Sydney’s line until someone mentioned it in comments. My thought process ran sorta like:
Oh, good, the Fel ship’s back half crashed in the forrest! Look at the size of the forrest; were did the houses go (this is a suburban mall)? Why did Cora’s ship take off? Where are the parking lots? When did Archon get the huge perrimiter wall? Wait, the shadows mean Cora’s ship is still on the ground… (glance at the track; glance at the building – this ship is 3x or 4x too large in comparison to two strips ago [went back and checked]). And what’s casting the shadows that way? The scene is lit from the lower left of the panel, except Cora’s ship is lit from mid right.
At this point the brain refused to further analyze the scene… though in the process of looking at the scene while thinking about the comments, I also noticed the news vans are too big for the streets next to them… and I simply assumed the pool was under the skylight…
And I vote for “alien invasion” in place of “press conference”…
Sydney’s line: “Why did no one tell me Cora’s ship looked like an elephant dog?!”
Which led to searching elephant dog, elephant musth, Pon Farr…
Sydney: Cora’s ship looks like an elephant dog!
Thankfully Archon HQ is situated nicely in the middle of nowhere. ^.^ Almost as if someone had planned for there to be a chance there might be a battle at Super HQ and there should be plenty of space for collateral damage. (Like a giant spaceship being shot down.)
Arc Dark is going to construct a building around that crashed ship, and start quietly employing engineers and materials science people and theoretical physicists and mathematicians…..
And Deus is going to have Harem spy on them.
“That would have been way more fun than a car frame!”
I’m feeling something like “They got to cut a SPACESHIP in half?!”
Or, more appropriately, “They got to chop a spaceship in half?!”
“They had an invasion without me!?”