Grrl Power #769 – Incoming (eventually)
Cora and her crew have heard of the exploits of the supers that Dabbler has been hanging out with, but it’s obviously different seeing it in action. Probably a touch humbling too.
I’m not sure why Maxima is standing like a model. It was a weird confluence of me randomly deciding to tilt her head up a little and not being sure what to do with her other arm. I threw her coat over her shoulder and suddenly she’s all vogue.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the previous page. There were some votes for leaving it as it. I think it’s a bit too far for Sydney for forget she was watching a press conference 20 minutes ago, but… she has had a few busy days. My favorite suggestion was Sydney complaining that she was iced out of the XP from taking down the Fel. Honestly, the team should be involving her in as much combat as possible since she’s the only one who gets a direct benefit fighting. I mean, everyone on the team benefits from fighting, but Sydney literally levels up.
So… I guess for now, imagine she says something about that, or the original thing.
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Haha, yes…
Remember I said it wouldn’t be a good idea for the universe at large to learn that the Grrlpower-Earth has such cool toys running around?
I stand by my statement.
Well at least now we know how Captain Cthulhu and the Worldstompers will be able to figure out where Halo went for a rematch.
That’s if they’re able to understand humanoids well enough to figure out what the U(niverse)-tube videos will say. ;)
In all seriousness, I fully expect them to be able to hack top secret xevoarchy transmissions. I just don’t know whether their frame of reference is compatible enough with that of other lifeforms to understand what they’ll be saying — and fortunately, these space cops haven’t seen Sidney in action, so Grrlpower-Earth might not look any more interesting to Cap’n Cthulhu and the ‘Stompers than any other world.
Dabbler’s mystery nemesis, however, that’s another story.
Remember, the Cap’n most likely saw Cora’s ship just before losing contact with Halo. They would most likely assume Cora picked Halo up. Now here is Cora’s ship and a being at least as powerful as Halo, who they had ALSO scanned along with Halo (Remember the scan of the entire group just before the Screwship turned up.) It’s not much of a logical jump to “This has to be the Ball Girl’s homeworld”
Based on the U-tube taken by the Xevo-cops, and their report, what they will see is a Fel ship destroyed in close proximity to Cora’s intact, unscratched ship. They couldn’t keep up, remember, so they arrived after Max dealt with the Fel. What is the logical conclusion to be drawn from that evidence? Don’t fuck with Earth? NO! Don’t fuck with Cora!
Since there are a few million humans in space, I don’t see why they’d assume Sydney was a TERRAN human. They assumed the balls are some sort of genemod maybe, to let her eat Grakz. Which means they assume she’s a human from a different, post-FTL world instead, like Cora is. The space cops on the station did not think ‘hey, that’s a human! How is she on Fracture station when she’s from an FTL world’ either.
They scanned halo AND Maxima at the same time. I was pointing out that they will now know where Maxima is, and by extension where Halo probably is. (They also scanned Harem, and she’s here too)
They didn’t really seem to care about Maxima’s scan. Just Sydney, because of the orbs. Plus I’m not sure that the Squidward Kaiju are busy watching Galactic Youtube when they’re not destroying entire empires. :)
Also there’s no reason to think that the Kaiju scanned Cora’s ship at all. She specifically was keeping her distance from the screwship because of the power readings she was getting from it.
Actually there is no evidence whatsoever that they cared about Sydney to begin with.
They had killed pretty much everything on the planet and were scanning for survivors to kill when Sciona’s gate opened up.
They immediately attacked with overwhelming force.
Attacking with overwhelming force is what Squidwards do, and not one encounter in the Grrl Power comic has ever shown the Squidwards reacting any other way.
I will prove you wrong, as per your name.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-641-well-thats-probably-not-good/
The scans were just basic … until they scanned Sydney and her orbs…. which turned the ‘yeeeeen’ scan to a VRNNN scan, and the blue scanning beams became red scanning beams, at whihc point the scans were focused ONLY on Sydney, none of the other characters.
Which made Sydney REALLY VERY MUCH LIKE TO LEAVE.:)
The scout did not call for the ship right away. Scanned Dabbler – nothing. Didn’t even bother to scan Harem or Hiro or Maxima at all. Then scanned Sydney, and it immediately called for the ship. It completely ignored the one Alari on the planet, Sciona.
So to say there’s ‘no evidence whatsoever’ is pretty ridiculous. There’s direct evidence.
Also, you have no evidence that ‘attacking with overwhelming force’ is what the Squidwards always do as the first thing, because there’s only one example of the squidwards attacking, in two separate incidents. The one where they scanned Sydney and immediately sent Squidward #1 down to blast them into oblivion (which Sydney’s shield barely was able to withstand, and it would have definitely killed Dabbler and Harem, and probably Hiro, according to Dabbler… maybe even Maxima). They did not START with overwhelming force there… they started with a scan. Then called the ship. Then sent down one squidward, even though the ship is able to fire blasts on its own, as it did later on after Sydney was fleeing at Mach 16 after killing the first Squidward.
The second example was after Sydney had already killed Squidward #1 and a thousand drone ships. They sent 3 more Squidwards down. But this time they didnt START with an overwhelming blast attack…. they started with a tractor beam (and then maybe the other two would have done a blast attack …. but Sydney used her teleportation to blast a hole through the tractor beam squidward’s head and escape. So even in the ONE instance, only 50 percent of the time did they go for an ‘overwhelming blast attack’ as the first attack.
The fact that they only sent one squidward down at first, in fact, show they do NOT ‘give it their all’ from the get go, or they’d have sent a bunch down the very first minute, as well as the drone fighters.
But lets steelman the argument you’re making. Let’s say that the squidwards did go for an ‘overwhelming force’ attack as the first option. Let’s ignore that in both attacks, they did something non-attacky FIRST before doing the overwhelming force attack (scanning and tractor beams). We will assume that they did, in both incidents of the SINGLE time we’ve ever seen the Squidwards, start with overwhelming force.
You say ‘not one encounter in the Grrl Power comic has ever shown the Squidward reacting any other way.’ – you can’t make a pattern based on one encounter, when we’ve only ever SEEN one encounter. That’s not a pattern. That’s a single point of reference to make a pattern. Lets say you see me eating ice cream, and I’m eating chocolate ice cream, but you’ve never met me before. You can’t then assume that I have a pattern of always eating chocolate ice cream.
In addition your basic premise is wrong. You wrote, and I will quote, “They had killed pretty much everything on the planet and were scanning for survivors to kill when Sciona’s gate opened up.”
This is factually incorrect. They were NOT scanning for survivors when Sciona’s gate opened up. They were not doing ANYTHING until Sciona stepped over the scout. And the scout didn’t even bother to scan Sciona…. it completely ignored Sciona, in fact, as did the Squidward Kaiju, which was focused on Sydney and the others, NOT Sciona. The scans did not even START until significantly after Sciona and Archon arrived, Sciona did her little rant, Dabbler did her wind spell, and Sciona walked off all dejectedly. And when those scans did start, they were not directed at ‘survivors.’ Because the one Alari survivor was Sciona, which was not the subject of the scans. The most you can say is her walking over the buried scout ‘awakened’ it.
Okay, I proved you wrong. What do I win? :)
Frix’s PkE Meter as seen in panel one!
Like following a puppy to the wolf’s den after said puppy already gave you a good smacking.
Deathworlders comes full circle… Sydney’s mouth is a class 15 biological hazard by itself.
Sydney’s mouth is NOT a class 15 biological hazard.
It’s class 20 at least.
I said the mouth. The expletive stream extending from the lungs is a 26 but it has a limited radius.
A bit late, but how about “They’re doing space stuff without me!” for the previous strip?
No need to be specific. “They’re doing stuff without me!”
How about ” Max is flirting with Frix!”
Gotta be a question, I think – “Is Max flirting with Frix?!?”
You could also go with, “The fight’s over already!?” Or another fun variant, “They had a fight without me!?”
This reminds me of the start of the “Jenkinsverse” in the Reddit “Humanity, Fuck Yeah!” section. Were the galactically fear evil horde invades earth in the middle of a hockey match and the players beat them to death on live TV.
Or the fate of Leader Idow and friends at the start of Nick Pollota and Phil Foglio’s novel “Illegal Aliens” where the aliens beam up a “Road Maintenance Crew” (Their translator didn’t quite translate “Street Gang” properly) that promptly took over the ship and killed the crew (All except the engineering assistant, who they needed to operate the ship)
Long live Trell!
There was also a short story in reddit about a human and an alien captain who were on an inhospitable planet after their ships had crashed, and the human was badly injured from the crash while the alien captain was uninjured but incapable of doing some basic things that humans can do easily, like survive without food for an extended period of time, climb, swim, and have eyes that can adjust to lower levels of light. The human basically saved the alien by being able to swim them to shore, her being able to stay alive even though she had a broken arm, survive several days without food even though the human was hungry, and unfortunately the human ultimately died from the wounds from the crash, but the alien realized that any non-human would have already been dead within the first few minutes, instead of 6 days (plus she kept him alive as well).
Turns out the human was a 9 year old girl (most sentient aliens do not live nearly as long as humans also, in the story), and humans are just generally massively overpowered and capable of surviving long periods of time while injured, compared to most sentient alien species, and was the reason for an alliance between the alien’s people and Earth. Need to find that story again.
I found the story! It’s called ‘The First Human’
https://funnyjunk.com/channel/humanity-f-yeah/Hfy+post+222+trips+/msdsLzf/
I was wrong about a few things (I had read this story years ago) – the girl was 11, not 9, and the alien captain had no idea that 11 was a child for humans, although an average 11 year old human girl was apparently stronger than any Pell (the alien race of the captain).
I’ve just caught up with that series. It’s gotten…. interesting. Well beyond hockey stick beat downs now
That’s setting / storyline has really come a long way since it started as an offhand post on 4chan’s /tg/ so many years ago.
Heheh, all these posts about humanity being the galactic equivalent of the Australia Outback or worse. I’ve actually been reading some very good books and fanfiction with that premise. Let me make some plugs here.
The Dammed Trilogy by Alan Dean Foster. – Warfare across multiple worlds where only 3 to 5 species can actually bring themselves to be violent land an explorer team on Earth to assess their ability to help the war. They get a miracle for the war effort and so much more.
The Dark Shard: Enemy of the Light by theirishdreamer on forums.SpaceBattles.com – Young Justice fanfiction. During which Starro the conquerer invades earth, and people get so pissed off that the Red Lantern Corps is spontonslousy formed and Gaia itself becomes the charging spirit.
With This Ring by Mr Zoat on forums.sufficientvelocity.com then later chapters on forum.questionablequesting.com because of sensitivity issues. – Major plot point throughout this story is that Earth isn’t well known in the wider galaxy, and of those who know of earth see earth as we see the depths of a rain forest. I mean we have 3 or 4 active green lanterns and many of them are even officers in the corps.
I have a meme pic I wish I could post. Basically aliens know we are here. But they also know that Cthullu and friends are bound here. And no one wants to release them. So they leave us alone. Mostly.
Yes Earth who holds so many horrors of various levels of multi-planar powers. Chula-Varuna or as a certain writer from Providence called “Cthulhu” a slightly distorted echo of a “real” God is the most powerful. Though Varuna came saw took over here for awhile then other entities got together to force Varuna into the seas, where it can’t operate and took over Varuna’s domains. Still listed but demoted. Then whatever happened to those entities removed them from any obvious activity in our continuum leaving the “small leader” trapped mostly below in a crypt where it “sleeps” and sometimes can effect the weak pinpoints of minds filtered through the heavy layers of the ocean water. Though Varuna is locked away his millions of seeker eyes are out there automatically searching out the good from the bad and classifying them. Since they are a form of arcane life to most aspects are invisible to us. Now if someone some group discover and delve into the arcana of science. They can eventually locate this global surveillance system still in operation. Then tap into them and finally make use of them in the knowledge that when Chula-Varuna is finally freed said person–group will be targeted first by whatever such an arcane being deals with hijackers! They hope to be dead or beyond reach. When the arcane is discovered (again) and systematized (again)and becomes part of human technological actions also can wake such horrors up. Then it really gets scary for everybody. So any aliens who already stay away for a long list of reasons have this added feature to such a backwards rim world. And any who get within our system soon find out about Chula-Varuna’s eyes and quickly leave at emergency disaster acceleration.
Actually, Squirrel Girl is the most powerful.
And horrible!
Just think of what horrors await those poor, unsuspecting, non-Terrestrial beings if they discover Australia.
They never stood a chance………………..
Try Deathworlders. It was originally a reddit-based story around that concept in the beginning stages of /r/HFY (Humanity Fuck Yeah!), and has now evolved into a multi-branched megastory of more than 4 million worlds.
website is deathworlders.com
Huh… looks it has nothing to do with Harry Harrison’s Deathworld series, see “Deathworld” on Wikipedia, where the idea is a bit different: Humans adapt to survive as colonists on a world like… like Australia times 100.
Both good.
Harry Harrison’s (on Goodreads) is a traditional short story (86 pages), with 2 similar sequels with other unique world ideas.
The Deathworlders series started years ago as a flash fiction that moved around some popular online forums (notably http://reddit.com/r/hfy where it is still on the classic / must-read lists), but is now far longer and is still actively being released on its own site (and I think Patreon?). Much deeper world-building and character development.
“you’re after a violent species willing to kick some foreign species equivalent of an ass on their turf? Well you’re one fucking lucky bunch of explorers, because we just need a pointy stick and a reason to hate to do that to another nation. Give us twenty dozen frickin battlecruisers and a shittone of alcohol and we’ll help you out”
I’d say Maxima is posing like that because the men aren’t ogling her appearance for a change, like maybe she’s testing them a bit to see if it breaks them out of their geek-zone (it doesn’t).
Those two particular men are pretty much canon to be not just Cora’s crew but harem. Or if not harem at the very least casual sexual partners, since Cora was giving Sydney the run down on each of their various special sexual capabilities. They probably have a pretty high tolerance for resisting the urge to ogle females.
+2
This!
And then Daphne “accidentally” bumps both of them into her.
Aliens using HTOP in a shell… XDDDD
Hopefully the report is ignored as a prank or just too insane to be true… even with video.
Well sex tourists who have been to earth before Archon’s reveal will probably assert that it isn’t true based on their experience of visiting earth for a few day (or maybe even a couple of decades) and neaver even hearing a rumor of real ones. They will then go on to explain comic books as an earth literary form.
My spell check doesn’t check spelling anymore, it just inserts random letters.
Greeeeaaaaaatt….
Sydney’s store is going to need a bigger everything to cope with the rush of intergalactic customers.
She and Joel are gonna need a bigger building.
And maybe call their store an “Emporium” to justify the inflated prices.
Get a life-sized Darth Vader statue, call it the Galactic Emporium? (Other settings are available if preferred, but Vader’s visually distinctive and well known on Earth.)
Would *The Veil* help cover it?
No, no it wouldn’t interfere with an alien transmission to other aliens.
In fact it doesn’t even work anymore if something is outed on television and mass media (as mentioned in the council chamber), it is an old apathy inducer, minor glamor but on a wide scale combo to prevent humans from noticing (passively) supernatural things and imputed specific alien races visiting Earth. In other words you won’t notice that werewolf walking past you on the street but if they attacked you, you would see them for all that they are.
This would be why monster hunters can still be a thing, once you KNOW they exist and are looking for them, the veil no longer works; so like with Sciona’s crew they have to use a stronger localized glamour right there to hide as they could no longer rely on the veil.
Which would explain why Dabbler had to use her own glamour spells when around people as she is not being observed passively, and why aliens interacting with the public needed their own disguise projectors.
I’d say the only reason why Max is so chill at the moment is that Cora’s geeks are more interested in her devastating emissions than her physiological stature.
Well, a few hundred petajoules (so lets assume 300-400 at a minimum) is enough to power almost 6-9 million homes. So that one blast was the equivalent of almost the entire population of New York City’s energy output for one day.
I’d be focused on how that much energy can come from nowhere as well if I was a science-type person, which Frix and Gellen (the engineer and the science officer/XO) would be VERY interested in.
Perhaps somebody with better math-fu (and an actual understanding of relativity) could calculate how much energy would be needed to accelerate Cora’s ship to. say. 99.9% of the speed of light? I know it must be a ridiculously high number, maybe even in the same ballpark as Maxima’s petajoules?
In that case the remarkable thing is, other than a human sized powerplant that otherwise takes up much of te volume of cora’s 160m spaceship, that she can throw out that much power in a few seconds AND focus it in an insanely (by intergalactic community standards of technology) narrow beam?
0.999c for a ship Cora’s size is … WAY more than a few hundred petajoules.
I’m going to bring that down to 99 percent, because 99.9 is exponentially more ludicrous. The energy required to move 1 gram to 99 percent light speed is 5.473×10^14 joules.
Cora’s spaceship is 160 meters long, so about 2.5 times longer than the space shuttle. Making a huge, incorrect assumption we will just figure that means that her ship is 5 times the mass of the shuttle. This is a giant underestimation, but it doesn’t matter because the energy is just too huge no matter what.
The shuttle massed at 2,030,000 kg. So our severe low-ball guess puts Cora’s ship at 10,150,000kg. Times 1000 to get grams, so 10,150,000,000 grams.
10,150,000,000 * 5.473×10^14 = 5.555 x 10^24 joules. Or, 5.555 yottajoules to get a much smaller ship than Cora’s to a much lower energy level of only 99 percent of C, instead of 99.9. Somewhere around a billion times more than Max’s output here.
I do not have that level of math fu, sorry. :) And definitely not able to learn it while I’m doing pre-trial discovery right now, but I’ll give it a go tonight :) I’m willing to bet that the number is a LOT more than 300-400 petajoules. They were mainly amazed at the fact that that amount of energy was focused into such a small area by a single person, more than that that amount of energy could be produced, since a 1 megaton explosion gives off 4.18 x 10 to the 15th power joules of energy (http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects1.shtml), and 1 petajoule is 1×10 to the 15th power joules.
For reference, the Tsar Bomba, a nuclear bomb made in 1961, was around 100 megatons, and gave off 420 petajoules of energy. So…. Maxima can basically give off the same amount of energy as a 100 megaton nuclear explosion…. but focused within a single square meter.
First, calculate how much energy is needed for escape velocity
v=√2GM÷R = 1120 m/s
Then, assuming a 100,000kg rocket….
KE=(1/2)mv^2
KE=(1/2)*100,000kg*1120m/s^2
KE=62720000000 Joules
To break orbit requires 62,720,000,000 joules of energy for a rocket that weighs 100,000 kg.
62.72 gigajoules is required just to break earth orbit.
1 petajoule = 1000 gigajoules
300-400 petajoules = 3-4 million gigajoules if I’m not mistaken.
Which sounds like a lot. Because it is an insanely large number. But….
It’s a miniscule amount compared to what’s required to increase velocity to near light speed. It’s going to wind up being a LOT more than 300-400 petajoules for that.
And I just noticed that Tahnru did the math for it… using a ship that’s a LOT more than 100,000kg (the space shuttle). And Cora’s ship dwarfs the space shuttle in size from the looks of things. So I’m going to go with Tahnru’s numbers.
Wait, what happened to Harem’s shirt?
She’s wearing a dress.
This just in! Grakz scarfer home planet found! One resident blasts a fel ship in half single-handedly! More to flow at GNN!
According to one of our field reporters a source known only as Ford has previously labeled the planet as “Mostly Harmless”
Look at this bizarre Grakz-fired energy blast! And it came out the golden girl’s front!
Could Sydney have not just been complaining that they had an alien invasion without her?
I have no idea why; but, for some reason that guy at left in the first panel makes me think of Mr. Spock. :-)
Sydney: “If anybody damaged my Frix they’re gettin’ a PPO enema!”
It’s Ray and Venkman! Check out their scanners! Who ya gonna call?
Is Frix using a P.K.E. meter from Ghostbusters? Not gonna lie I had to search for the name which lead me to the color code of the lights and apparently Maxima is powered by a cursed artifact.
Both “sensor”s shown on either side of her I think are from Ghostbusters and the PKE meter you mention is also a communicator in more than one B scifi movie, LOL.
The crystal that spilled goo on Maxima could have been a cursed artifact.
This page reminds me of that old meme that lists the ‘superpowers’ of humans compared to most species on the planet. Like near limitless stamina, Sapiency, Hyperactive scar tissue, trauma resistance and so on.
hey, this is your work, you get to adjust it as necessary; ret-con sydney seeing the press conference in the first place, throw something else on the TV she was looking at!
hmm, dang it no; just looked at the old scene again, the “take me to your leader” gag was just too good
hmm, dang it no; looking back at the scene, the “take me to your leader” gag is just too good
Uh
A few hundred pettajoules?
Not convinced you’ve thought this through.
For comparison, baseballing people with massive I-Beams (~100 MJ), punching people (max of around 500KJ) and blowing up a large-ish building (~100 MJ) are way less energy intensive.
In fact, the order of magnitude difference between blowing up a building and poking someone is LESS than that between blowing up a building and 100 PJ.
Every single fight in the comic so far (with the possible exception of the alien’s first attack) has been orders of magnitude less energetic than this. The Vehemence fight makes no sense at all if Maxima has this sort of power on command. None of the rest of the team would have made the slightest difference given they max out at sane values (like a hundred tons for Stalwart).
I think you should move the numbers down to GJ, which the equivalent of dozens of fully loaded 747s hitting you at 500mph.
I’m going to do so for my head canon and I expect that predicting future fights based on a GJ estimate is going to get me far more accurate predictions than doing so with PJ.
Since Maxima is from Earth, shouldn’t her power be measured in ‘Terra’ joules ?
I’m pretty sure this was Maxima’s ‘maximum output’ – which she had not used in the Vehemence fight. Not to mention that Maxima could not unleash that energy output on Vehemence, on the ground, without also possibly wiping out most of her team and other civilians in the area (except maybe Sydney, who’s shield might be able to handle that). Maxima is capable of giving different levels of different powers – and since she was being protected by Cora’s ship’s shields, and the rest of the team was handling the Fel troopers, she didnt need to focus on stuff like armor or strength or speed. She was able to put all of her power into a blast instead.
A few hundred petajoules is basically the entire energy output of New York City for one day, and when you focus that much energy into a very small area, it’s going to be crazy-destructive (the more focused a laser or other output of energy is, the more destructive it will be). She would not have been capable of doing that with Vehemence, since he would have been able to then be faster than her and kill her with a punch. With Vehemence, she wound up having to have her armor at maximum just to prevent herself from dying (except for when Sydney distracted him with Dabbler’s bouncing and she was able to quickly change max armor to max strength for the throat punch).
Pander, she wouldn’t need “maximum output”. 1% output would still be relativistic baseball and far beyond what the visuals indicate for the comic. For another comparison so you get a feel for things:
The energy required to lift 100 tons (Stalwart) 1 meter into the air (and off Vehemence’s foot) would be 1 MJ. The energy required to throw Stalwart flying into the air at 100mph and over a building would be around 100MJ. That’s less than a MILLIONTH of ONE PERCENT of 100 PJ.
And no. The energy output of New York City for a day is less than 10% of “100s of PettaJoules”.
Basically, Dave, like 99.9% of the population, hasn’t invested lots of time and energy and thought into getting a feel for orders of magnitudes of things and so when he guessed at what order he should use he got this one very wrong.
The ramifications of Maxima being on the scale of a full-power Tsar Bomba (100 megatons) or possibly even above (depends on what not-Frix means by several hundred) … What happens if she goes off accidentally again? What if she sneezes mid-blast? Walking talking MAD.
No, I’m saying it’s full power because she had to increase her output 4 times when firing at the Fel ship, and from what we’ve seen of her ‘power switch’ from the Vehemence fight, there’s about 4 ‘levels’ for each power she has to divy her points among.
Plus it then makes sense why she said ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ – she’s always wanted to be able to go full power on her plasma beam. Because it seems odd for her to say she’s always wanted to blow up an alien spaceship.
I think you are ass-u-meing that her “switch” has to be turned in integer increments. She might have turned from 1 to 1.2, to 1.3, to 1.5, and finally 1.6. Plenty of room to go before 4.0.
I’m basing it on the idea that the energy beam changed four times, each time with her narrowing the band and putting more concentration into it. Yes, it’s a guess, but it’s an educated guess. And from what we’ve seen with the Vehemence fight, the chart/dial doesn’t have its arrows go to midway points between the hard lines (ie, 1 to 1.2 rather than 1 to 2). But I could be wrong. It just makes sense given that she said ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ I don’t think that means ‘I’ve always wanted to use 1.6 times my minimum plasma blast power.’
Also I think it might be a major problem, storytelling-wise, for someone to be able to put out several hundred petajoules of energy as just a ‘minor’ amount of their power. Basically might as well say she can destroy the entire planet like a Death Star if she goes as far as half of her power. It removes pretty much any challenge for the story and DaveB hasn’t so far been making his characters ‘perfect people.’
We’ve seen her max strength, and we’ve seen her max armor. We havent seen her max speed, but we know it’s faster than Mach 4 (probably will find that out when they test Sydney’s new speed, but it’s implied that Sydney had the potential to outspeed Maxima once she levelled up, which Maxima agreed was possible). It makes sense that this would show an example of max plasma blast.
The only reason I’m even hedging my bets a BIT is because we did not see the dial like we saw in the Vehemence fight.
Also Stalwart was using 82.5 tons of force, not 100 tons of force. The space shuttle is 82.5 tons. :)
Also yes, the energy output of New York City is hundreds of petajoules. 19,000 homes can be powered for one day on 1 petajoule. There are 8.6 million people living in New York. Taking families into account, that comes to about 6 million residences and/or offices being powered at any time. Which is 300-400 petajoules. You are wrong. I did not come up with the calculation off the top of my head, while your ‘10%’ is your guess. An incorrect guess.
PS – sorry if I sounded overly argumentative. I just meant to say that you are wrong about your guess on the energy use of NYC residences for one day. I did the calculations based on how many can be powered by one petajoule, then used math.
Also I’m a lawyer, and the internet is bad for tonal inflection. Wasn’t trying to sound rude. Just stressing my calculation is correct and yours was incorrect.
I didn’t guess. I never guess. I literally looked up New York’s energy usage here: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NY
Then converted from BTU to Joules.
Offering some numbers.
New York’s peak demand in 2017 was just a little less than 30,000 MW. We’ll assume a whole day at peak demand (to intentionally over-estimate). This is 30,000 MW * 24 hours = 720,000 Megawatt-hours.
1 Megawatt-hour is equal to 3,600,000,000 joules. 720,000 x 3,600,000,000 = 2,592,000,000,000,000 joules. 2.592 petajoules, spread out over the course of 24 hours (and intentionally over-estimated). If she’s at hundreds of petajoules of output (and OMG in that short of a time frame), she bad news. Same ballpark as a 100 megaton blast.
Buyer Beware – Pretty sure I didn’t mess up my decimals, but it happens.
Power figure for NYC – https://www.reuters.com/article/new-york-power-demand/new-york-power-grid-expects-demand-to-decline-through-2028-idUSL1N1SA1MV
Actually….
I did mess up. My bad.
The figure I was using for how many homes a petajoule can power (19,000) is taken from a think tank by the Australian government on energy statistics, in which they stated that 1 petajoule (278 gigawatt hours) can power 19,000 homes (with the average home using 50 gigajoules of energy in one year). I misread it as being in a day. It was in a YEAR.
The rest of my stats are accurate, but it’s taken over a YEAR, not a day. 300-400 petajoules would power New York residences for a YEAR.
Nah Tahnru. I can admit when someone outmaths me. Congrats.
I mean, I’d normally agree you had a point, but Maxima allready demonstrated the capability to semi-casually toss around Tactical/Strategic-nuke level discharges during the press conference when she didn’t have to take collateral damage/reinforcing her own defences into the equation- and she was under a bubble shield this time-there was nothing stopping her from literally going full-power against a target literally nobody in the same solar system would complain about her vaporising/ blowing a hole the size of a Prius through- with prettymuch everything else she’s been doing onscreen she’s been jobbing (and Vehemence was both literally feeding off her fighting back AND lucky to catch her in an awkward situation where minmaxing out a stat to break free would make her vulnerable AND make him stronger)…
What is the output of the explosion from when Max shot the tank at the first press conference? Perhaps here energy beam is massively OP but hard to use without killing friendlies. Max need a force field using teammate just to deploy her big gun. In the parking lot fight, she could have atomized V, but it would have killed everyone else as well.
I am reminded of the first Tenchi Muyo OVA where Washu is confused as to why Ryoko wasn’t using her full power to fight Kagato and realized she was afraid of getting Ayeka caught up in the excess energy; and thus ended up in a position vulnerable to Kagato who wasn’t holding back.
I think the ability to move the order of magnitude around here and have everything still working consistently very much depends on how much Cora’s Anti-Mass drivers toss around and how fast. If one shot is 1/5th the speed of light, the velocity portion is around 2×10^12 joules per gram. Let’s say each shot is 5 grams, so 1×10^13 joules of kinetic energy. That’s about the same as 2.5 kilotons of TNT.
1 gram of annhilation produces approx 1.8×10^14 joules, about 43 kilotons. So final energy per shot is (43 * 5) + 2.5 = 217.5, call it 220 kilotons per shot.
If Max is at hundreds of petajoules, she’s sitting in the ballpark of 100 megatons per shot.
If you change either of the parameters of what I’ve assumed for Cora’s guns, it gets even harder to put Max above them so as to be impressive. Increase the speed to 0.5c ? The energy jump is enormous. Have her shooting an antimatter cannon ball (10kg) instead of antimatter sugar cubes? The energy jump is ridonkulous.
Moving Max down to terajoules per shot probably puts her on the same footing as Cora’s main guns. Super impressive for a person to be tossing around that kind of power, but the scale for the physical concentration comment is a problem too. A 5 gram slug is going to be physically tiny anyways, so Max really would just be a stand in for one of Cora’s guns at that point. She wouldn’t be able to instantly overwhelm the Fel’s shields that would take Cora a while to knock down.
Uh oh. Nice Starcontrol reference though.
From weakest to strongest, the power scale seems to be: Muggles, magicians, mythical creatures, Sufficiently Advanced Technology/Aliens, supers, Maxima, Sydney, Sydney at full power. Dabbler fits in all the categories except the last three, enabling her to match Maxima occasionally.
Why are mages less powerful than mythical creatures? I’d think they’re more effective.
Admittedly most of my reasoning comes from White Wolf roleplaying games but being able to tinker with reality itself seems a bit more powerful than being able to turn into a giant half-wolf/half-man or being a moderately powerful vampire.
Quite correct. But you need to think reeeeely reeeeely deeeeeply about the tinkering…
Requiem #932
and jump to:
Requiem #937
and you can see where everyone is now in deep doo-doo :[
fun fact: the modern fantasy image of Magic users as glass cannons is entirely due to gameplay mechanics. Namely we can blame TSR (blame them for a lot of things people mistake as mythology rather than a specific game’s rules and world). For game play balance this and many other fantasy based games followed the idea that to compensate for the power of magic they give these characters low attack and defense; that way playing as a swordsman, archer, ranger, ect…was still viable as they’d have all the attack and other skills but no high level magic.
However in actual folklore virtually any powerful sage, witch, old man of the mountain, ect…you met also had impossible strength and such as well; because magic also boosted the physical abilities, even if they still had a human appearance; like a little old woman ripping stumps from the ground or the old sage of the mountain casually leaping over massive boulders or lifting them up and setting them down so unwanted visitors would become lost.
In other words meeting Merlin he wouldn’t have had to stand waaaaay over there while you defend him as he casts a two minute spell to summon lightning bolts and try to keep from being hit. He’d walk up to the enemy and smack their head clean off.
You left out Saitama
What’s that mushroom alien doing there?
Dropping an old-school game Star Control 2 reference! ^_^
It is no wonder the rest of the universe thinks we are primatives. We can’t even get the terminology right. In the new movie ‘Ad Astra’ Earth sends out a mission to Neptune when they notice one of its moons has exploded (“That’s no-longer-a moon!”). One movie review describes a lunar base on ‘the dark side of the moon’ and the one below describes a movie that takes place entirely in our solar system as ‘an interstellar adventure’.
http://www.cinelinx.com/movie-news/the-new-trailer-for-ad-astra-promises-an-interstellar-adventure/
The solar system is fake news, anyways.
I love this post :) Very funny.
Hold on!
Wasn’t one of the big Ideas for Sidney to be on the team was to well keep her in check?
She’s still a recruit and you’re wanting her to power level like nobody’s business. I think the higher ups would rather she was training than help unless it was necessary. Clearly they didn’t need her help, and it’s a good thing she didn’t because of the alien surveillance, that Sidney will notice and promptly forget in 5, 4, 3, 2…
*Universe learns what Earth can do*
*Universe decides to be VERY nice to Earth*
Also? Maxima is standing like she’s a model because she KNOWS how cool that was.
Im gonna be honest if I was an alien race and saw this id nuke the planet from orbit(Well not nuke-just blast the place so hard the planets core is visible from space) just to be safe assuming that all humans are as strong as Maxima.Honestly itd be the only sane thing to do to a race that loves killing so much its still in the warring tribes era dispite having crude space access already =).
“We have awoken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”
The problem with any plan which depends on destroying all humanity is that the ones most likely to not be destroyed are those most dangerous to you when they figure out who it was killed the rest of humanity.
And you better hope that none of the humans left alive are named Inigo Montoya.
Because generations later, they will still never shut up about it.
And then they will kill you
At least they’ll give you a moment to prepare to die first.
There has been every indication that Earth is less aggressive in its violence than the Alari or the Fel.
And look at alleys on Fracture.
The Aliens in the Grrlverse aren’t all peaceful.
And then there is the possibility that really powerful supers have tended to leave earth like Marvel’s Quasar, Adam Warlock, and Jack of Hearts.
Destroy earth and you may just find there are other earth supers out there in the universe much like Maxima but with decades or centuries more experience. And you just really pissed them off.
I swear that scanner thing comes from a Ghostbusters film…
Whoa! Star Control reference!
Juffo-wup = Juffy-wup? The Mycons?
So, imagine that you’re a police officer, and your country, while big, ain’t doing so good in terms of law and order. The cops are doing their best, but it’s still necessary to occasionally employ or even pass on prosecuting some vigilantes.
Now, you’ve just seen a bunch of Really Bad People go past in a fast car. You know this gang; they usually rob, rape, and murder entire households of people. So, you give chase but they outrun you.
You saw them turn off the main road and head up a long twisty driveway, to a place where a little old lady lives. This lady is kind of a hillbilly – you thought she was relatively safe, if only because she doesn’t have a car or anything else anybody wants to steal, and doesn’t come into town where she’d get mugged. If you’re up on the news, you heard that she recently took in a couple of orphan kids after their home got firebombed.
So, with visions of exactly how bad this is going to be dancing in your head, you arrive there too late to do anything, and discover one of the more notorious vigilantes on the scene. However, aside from protecting the refugee kids, the viggie ain’t doing anything.
You and the vigilante now are both looking on while the little old lady calmly pulls a four-foot-long katana out of a four-inch-wide purse and chops the whole gang into little bitty pieces, so fast they’re all in five chunks or more before the first chunks hit the ground.
Then, to top it off, she slices. the. gangsters’. car. in. half. And then calmly tucks her great big sword back into her tiny little purse and goes back into the house to bake some cookies or something. There is, maybe, something more to this innocent, isolated hillbilly grandmother than meets the eye, you think?
Now, you’ve just seen a clear case of killing in self-defense; given how thin your resources are stretched, you don’t even prosecute these. And there was a ‘keep out’ sign back at the gate, which maybe you should consider the implications of a bit more thoroughly. But this particular killing, self-defense or not, goes WAY beyond anything you ever imagined some insignificant hillbilly on her own property was prepared to dish out.
But… yeah, you probably wanna call this one in. For one thing you’re imagining what effect somebody like her would have if somebody showed her how to drive a car and started showing her around the big city….
How did you find out about what my grandmother did?
he must have called it in…
On the plus side, those who *want* the ability to shrug off a fel invasion *don’t have* the ability to shrug off a fel invasion. Which means they’re not going to do the military thing. Send diplomats? Sure – maybe we can convince these kind folks to help out our cause. Spies? Absolutely, we want to know all about them, and if we can quietly replace a few leaders or something, we might be able to get them to do our bidding without getting them angry, but this is risky. Merchants? Good idea! We can give them some stuff they want if they’ll do our bidding.
Soldiers? Nope. Nuh-uh. Ain’t happening.
Another plus is it gives Earth something to use as TRADE. Aside from porn, the Archer TV show, and whatever it was that Deus had used as currency, assuming it was not porn and/or the Archer TV show.
Archer rule 34?
“Oh hey, we popped down to a new-barb planet and watched the tail end of a fight where someone landed a super-bad with improbable levels of power.
“We realize there were two sets of shields, an atmosphere, maybe even clouds in the way, not to mention both direct and splash effects of the blast itself, but of course we saw that one of the neobarbs took out the ship by pointing at it. It defiantly wasn’t the visiting high-tech mercenary ship from off-world that was obviously the focus of the super-bad attackers.”
The obvious explanation is Cora’s bunch saw it coming and killed it with a prepared trap.
Hmmmm occurs to me… Supers are a recent development on Earth. Huge amounts of power in each Super. The Orbs turned up at the bottom of the ocean but nobody could know for how long they were there. They are in line with Nth level of tech, Supers are in line with Nth level of power… Sounds to me the Supers are someway related to Nth tech being on earth and how those powers ended up distributed out is a question that might be revealed when Sydney fills out more of her ‘Level Ups’. Also, is more tech around waiting to be found/needed? Maybe there is a rouge device going around causing Supers to develop. Leaving things that will be found, picked up, spilled all over someone…
Supers are long standing in the Grrlverse.
Their proliferation is recent.
Panel 1: Max, preening.
Panel 2: Dabbler, getting the BEST selfies. Like she does.
Panels 3 and 4: Cora knows that if only SHE knows, she can make all t3h monies.
Panels 5 and 6: Sorry, Cora. Someone else knows.
LOL +1 internet for you
Considering…
-Aliens are common on earth, have a seat on the concil and are included in the veil
-Supers are unveiled on public television and made public demonstrations of their abilities.
-Supers’s habilities apparently outclass anything in the known universe and can’t be explained by known science.
…why didn’t that get outerspace attention sooner???
for the same reason that Spies and Counter-terrorism Agents are not known by the general public (unlike 007 )… remember up until now / the relatively recent past, Archon was a government branch called the “Atypical Resource Commission” and for the time it was created the government did a lot of “stuff” that was kept secret by code names and such concepts as the all-important: “Security by Obscurity” if you didn’t NEED to know… then you just DIDN’T… supers had been not quite hidden from the public, but definitely NOT on the national/international news, and these days of every cellphone being capable of being it’s own movie studio… therefore anything done by them in the past could be kept out of the public eye much easier than now… so i think the government finally decided that it’s costing them more to cover-up events than it would be to publicly announce they exist (with all that implies, etc…) and just now is the knowledge entering the galactic level of info.
as for why wasn’t it known “sooner”… how about this: did YOU know that the fires in the Amazon Rain Forests in Brazil had been burning out of control for almost TWO WEEKS before most mainstream news outlets even picked up on the story and acknowledged them burning AT ALL!? And that’s just HERE, on ONE Planet… NOW imagine a couple of HUNDRED planets (or more!) with all sorts of “stuff” happening on each:… are you going to be able to get INSTANT news of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE… no… NO you will not but it might get to you sooner or later even after being drowned out of the news cycle due to other events taking priority at the time… so while SOMEBODY might know about the reveal of Supers here on Earth, it doesn’t mean that it is a General-everybody-everywhere-knows-about-it kind of thing… as an example of that… ask just about anybody around the world “who was the first human in Space? and you’ll probably get the answer “Yuri Gagarin” even though the person you asked was some (no offense intended) third-world farmer out in the boonies of his country, he still “knows” things, but ask that same person what actor/actress in Hollywood is currently in some scandal, and they’ll look at you like a loonie because it’s just not in their frame of “important to me ” stuff so they don’t know…
One problem I have with this. Wouldn’t the aliens already know? Both Supers and Aliens were apart of the Council. If Aliens are apart of the Council AND have a bustling sex tourism thing going on here then the rest of the galaxy should have at least some idea what Earth Supers can do. Does the rest of the Galaxy just not have Supers so they don’t give it much thought? The RofG knows about magic I assume or at least a significant portion does since Dabbler is both alien and supernatural, but she herself is also considered a Super and supposedly fought Maxima to a draw. So Aliens must be aware of and have their own Supers.
Some discussions here on Maxima’s power level here, even with stat adjustments and her different powers possibly having different limits; had me thinking Sydney would be the type to call foul on Maxima showing of an S class feat when before every indication in previous fights would peg her closer to A or B. Her energy blast output vastly overshadows her defense, strength, and possibly speed.
The strength, durability, and speed of Wonder Woman, with Kefla’s energy blasts.
Huh, Frix’s line reminded me of the TFS brick joke of ‘push-ups, sit-ups and plenty of juice.’ Specifically the Broly movie rendition.
“How can he be this strong? How many push-ups, how many sit-ups… WHAT KIND OF JUICE DID HE DRINK?”
Oh great while the rest may be able to keep quiet, that dumb mushroom idiot is going to call it in and put earth under a huge amount of pressure.
Does the alien’s wonderment actually make sense in context though?
The biological impossibility of the supers can be replicated or at least simulated through the use of magic. Sciona has shown this explicitly. Sciona is one of an entire race of aliens capable of using magic.
Dabbler is a demon from space who can use magic, and many of the cast expressing amazement here knew her previously.
It sort of seems like some individuals having abilities which “break physics” should just sort of be a well known thing in this setting.
You don’t really “break” the laws of physics, though, because they’re just a description of how things work.
All you can really do is reveal to someone that they were wrong about what the laws of physics were.
I think here its because magic is a known, hacking into a system and utilizing it, like a code found in sub-space that can be utilized to various degrees. But going by DaveB referencing Slayers before, magic typically draws power from something or somewhere, a specific sub-space, demon god, time, dimension, ect…and to cast the spell you must know of and have contact or even contracted your essence with said powers so you know where the power is being drawn from.
On top of that powerful attack spells typically take effort, time, sigils, preparation. What Maxima did was the equivalent of casting the Dragon Slave with a thought and then focusing it while its going off and continuing the blast by will alone; without knowing what the energy source is.
Other series equivalents of such a powerful spell tend to involve things like a council of twelve wizards using a stock pile of mana stones and magic machine the size of a building made of alchemy to channel and enhance their power.
Now if Maxima were a Demon Overlord or a Higher Elemental God, yeah, they’d probably not question it; but a human just casually doing something like that without using magical and/or technological assistance; and in a manner that outshines equivalent spells on how casually it can be done, is the really impressive thing here.
The point remains that magic could do what Maxima just did, albeit with a lot of preparation.
The cops arrived at the moment of application and really aren’t in a position to have documented the instantly available nature of Maxima’s power.
Sciona (even before possessing Escorpia) could do what Maxima did given the right blood and time to prepare a ritual.
I am of the mind they saw the whole fight or most it. Although they might not know Maxima is human and could be assuming the golden woman with the pointed ears and purple hair is a demon Overlord and Earth has bigger inter-dimensional problems going on.
Thats the point.
What Maxima did off the cuff, a top flight mage like Sciona could do with preparation beforehand.
The spacecops don’t know but that earth could have an army of mages prepped for incidents like this.
They didn’t get to earth until the Fel did, so they don’t know that Maxima’s team wasn’t being enchanted for a moment like that for a month, or that there isn’t an army of maximas being prepared as glass canons for the next fight.
Which is more likely? An army of Scionas (something that the Xevoarchy is aware of) or a Maxima?
I think the spacecops send their report, the intermediary who receives the report thinks “yeah right, you tentacle head” and then a higher up privy to the Twilight Council operative covers this up.
But could Sciona actually do it though? Even with prep time? Going by the math floating around these discussions this wasn’t just some mana blast, but a massively powerful focused beam that few known forcefields could have withstood (in real life leveling a mountain). Just having access to magic doesn’t mean you can do anything with it.
A blast that powerful you are looking at something like (We have the Anti-God Cannon), or an Anti-Cthulhu/Super Kaiju slayer platform of the ancient masters of magic powered by the furnace of the first hell’s heart crystal.
In blood magic its like, “we need 600 gallons of elder dragon blood and the ectoplasmic residue of an eldritch crystalized over a star furnace powered by the living flame of Cthuga hybridized with the spirit flame of ten thousand year old kitsune.
then build a cannon that can channel that into a thin focused beam of a few meters that must be made of a Mithril, Orihalcum, Magitian, Adamantium alloy embued with the living essence of four eldritch contained in super soul crystals embedded along the barrel, and the controls emit such power that only an elemental of lightning or a spirit possessing a sacrificial zombie body that will be destroyed with each firing thanks to the backlash of dark magic can even work the controls.
Basically it comes across less (Super Plasma Beam) by magic standards and more (Strike of the Final Heavens) sort of naming craziness.
But all that said, yes, it could be done with magic. But here’s the crux…that doesn’t make a difference.
Either
this primitive backwater pre FTL civilization has
A: S-class energy using supers
B: A high level demon lord and/or goddess
or
C: A Magic machine weapon or spell capable of penetrating virtually any forcefield and taking down a high level space threat at the ready at any time.
All of these are (Earth is fricken scary powerful and needs to be reported)…in fact the magic thing would be scarier than a super or an individual supernatural being as it would mean this primitive planet has weapons putting most of the galaxy to shame.
Report that a strike team got wiped out on a backwater planet, sure. But that would happen regardless of how it had been achieved.
Here we’ve got several aliens who presumably know that magic is a thing, being completely amazed by phenomenon which could be the result of magic. Their comments are more that what they’re seeing shouldn’t be possible rather than this shouldn’t be possible without some set amount of setup. When again… magic.