Grrl Power #861 – Exemplarum showus offus
Sydney almost made a joke there about knowing where she could find a spare foot. But she didn’t.
Making Sydney watch Seneca run the course is a little like getting Math to teach her martial arts. But sometimes seeing what’s possible can help people break out of old habits. Also watching Sydney plod through the course a few times was making Seneca super antsy
Seneca is actually the record holder for this course. Sean, the ex-SEAL who wears the blue cap and who I haven’t drawn in about 400 pages is second fastest, (he was on the climbing wall a few pages ago, but that was from behind) followed by Goose, the Duke Nukem looking guy. Hiro is next fastest, followed by Ren, then Peggy, who unsurprisingly has far and away the best aim/grouping. But the fake leg does slow her down a bit.
Yes, obviously Maxima is the actual fastest, but she has super speed and that doesn’t count. She can detail strip her gun while one of the targets is popping up, and fire her break action Tyrannosaur .577 pistol faster than Seneca can pull the trigger on her glock.
For those of you wondering, Seneca claims to have “Reverse Diabetes” where she’s certain she’ll lose a foot if she doesn’t ingest at least 3,500 calories of refined sugar a day. She obviously doesn’t have that because it’s not a thing. She just exercises a lot.
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Just because Maxima is fast enough to field strip her weapon in less than a second does not mean that *physics will allow her to do so* without something catching fire, melting, or fissioning. Maybe if she and the weapon were being hosed down with lubricant the whole time. Which I’m sure some of the pervs here would love to see. But speed is actually a terrible superpower because there are practical limitations to how quickly you can interact with the world around you, including the air molecules surrounding you, without destroying *everything*.
Real world physics don’t allow a biological being to function that quickly without accumulating toxic levels of fatigue poisons, burning ALL the quick burning resources in seconds, and ripping itself into pieces trying to flex and contract so quickly that there would be explosive pressure changes. It also allows speedsters to sense things (sight/sound/etc) quickly enough to dodge them despite normal response times for nerves firing, decision processing, muscle engagement, and so forth. This is similar to the problems in physics as super strength (which frequently allows for the lifting of objects in ways they are not structurally able to be lifted) and so on.
So… if we decide that we want the universe to account for speedsters or super-strength, there’s an ‘easy’ fix. Whatever force that allows for such things… the psychokinetic shell of the superman, that is extended to contain the large heavy object to give it structural support and lift force that keeps it intact while being lifted by a man one-handed? The same force that allows the speedster to function can just as easily be extended around objects and other people (within reason).
I know there’s some enjoyment in trying to keep real world science and physics intact while writing stories about ‘advanced’ humans (supers, powered, etc), but mostly its just rude.
Bleh… not the best written comment I’ve made this year. Grammar and logical chaos, engaged!
Anyway, what I was trying to say there… was:
There are always elements of fiction that break the rules of real world physics when you tell stories in fantasy, sci-fi, and anything that isn’t meant to be ‘real world’. And that’s fine. You can spend lots of time detailing the ‘exact’ way physics are different, but that isn’t going to be exciting to most people. But if you’re going to commit to breaking regular physics… the scope of that is usually pretty open.
If you allow for super-powers, you have to accept that super-powers are going to interact with the world in ways that break the laws of physics in the real world. If you want speedsters to exist, speedsters have to be able to interact with people and objects at speed without physics coming in the way… otherwise its self-contradictory.
The only thing that would make it impossible for Maxima to field strip her weapon at speed… is if the author says that she cannot interact with it at that speed. Real world physics simply don’t apply. They went out the window the moment that Maxima touched someone or opened a door or crossed a room at speed.
Oh, hey. Cool!
Kristin Darken of Whateley Academy fame.
Loved your “Fling” stuff! Always wondered where that was going.
Hey hey! :)
More Fling in the pipeline. Along with more from my other canon characters (Esoteric and Shieldwall) in the near future. Including (now that the timeline has advanced far enough), some real progress in the GEO plot arc.
The main point with stories that break ‘real world’ physics (amongst other things), is to keep it consistent within the ‘alternate world setting’, and once you have explained how it does work, one should never have to defend it (explain, never defend, or you fall into the pedantroll’s trap)
And not all super-strong characters share the Soup-can’s (and Maxi’s) zero-point (touch) TK shield thing that allows them to lift a plane while only doing superficial (if any) damage to the hull
You should perhaps take a peek at:
https://docfuture.tumblr.com/
This author’s speedster, who can reach relativistic speeds, cannot open a door while at speed. Not without ripping it from its hinges. She cannot catch a falling person, or pick one up, at speed. Not without killing them. She has to watch her speed when running across the ocean in the most haste she dares take in Earth’s atmosphere (about .2c), because of the potential danger to shipping caused by her plasma trail, which resembles small nuclear explosions.
speed = force
the most often broken rule for speedsters in comics. Both in application to what they are hitting/interacting with and their own body.
Also one reason so many newer speedsters try to pull the “slows down relative time” shtick so they don’t have to explain not breaking bones with every punch *opponents or their own hand*.
One of my favorites on speedsters was Cyborg 009 where an episode he was going so fast he thought time had stopped, but it hadn’t, however he quickly realized trying to interact with anything or anyone produced so much friction he burned them.
Lets just assume that most superpowers come with their “subpowers” like a speedster being bulletproof while speeding around to avoid impaling yourself on a some dust
Check out The Fall of Doc Future ( https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/34152071413/flicker-phone-tag ) for a fantastic example of speedster interacting with physics. (I’m not the author nor benefit in any way, I just really like the book and think it deserves a bigger audience.)
It starts off with Flicker (the titular speedster) running from somewhere in the Midwest USA to London in 116 ms and full attention is paid to all the problems that causes in the environment.
Heh, your post was well below my browser scroll when I submitted my reply…
Great, now i spent hours reading that instead of doing something productive. I blame you.
Thanks for the recommendation though. :)
If I were going to rationalize super-speed, I’d say that the speedsters can reduce their inertial mass while leaving their gravitational mass unaltered. Within a wide range that would have the effect of speeding them up, motion, metabolism, reaction times, all of that. And if the effect extended just a bit past their skin, allow them to slip through the air without sonic booms or friction burns.
But manipulating outside objects that weren’t so effected would become very difficult, as they’d appear to be much more massive. And punches wouldn’t hit any harder, even though you could punch many times in the time a normal person could once.
Of course, this is just advanced baflegarb, because the equivalence of gravitational an inertial mass goes VERY deep in physics. But it’s a good way to rationalize it, that puts limits on it.
Nor would they be able to ingest enough normal calories to go around lifting 15 ton girders or whatever (barring a stomach that is actually a fission reactor/ nuclear annihiliation engine/ etc).
Welcome to the world of comic book physics.
I remember an early Flash comic, this was in the mid-to-late ’50s… Maybe Barry Allen? The team took the trouble to illustrate Barry’s insatiable hunger after running so fast for such distances. It was my first energy-to-power lesson, that if you want smoke to come out of the rear wheel contact patch, you need to put some petrol in the tank.
I believe it was Wally West who had the space scherbel homegirl after moving at super speed. In fact I remember one comic where he said that just running out his apartment and across the street to the store has super speed costume six candy bars worth the calories. What’s Barry he never seemed to question call his speed work and why he wasn’t constantly in need of massive amounts of food
And of course I wouldn’t miss that some of my post came out crazy. The words that were mangled we’re supposed to be speed-related super hunger
I particularly enjoyed “space scherbel homegirl.” and may use it as the name of a speed-metal band.
The recent live action show just explained it in the second episode or so where he just had to take extremely nutritional rations but I dont know about the comics
The short run comic Common Ground (a diner owned by an ex-Supervillain who was powerful enough to lay down a “no fighting on these premises” rule and open up his clientele to both supers and villains) has a story about a reporter interviewing a speedster whose life was pretty much a living hell because of his powers.
He had very little meaningful human contact, because as he described it holding a conversation with a non-speedster was like trying to talk to someone who could only speak one word every five minutes. He was unable to have relations with a woman, because of friction burns. He had to eat constantly to support his body’s need for fuel, which took a lot of time and cost a lot of money. And then, as he described it, he had to spend an equal amount of time passing all the food he ate.
mmHmm. The fuel source factor is a big one for ALL powered characters. The baseline human body only has so many resources available to it. Take a hard core athlete and compare their necessary caloric input to that of the average couch potato or office worker and extrapolate from there. You’d NEED superspeed just to metabolize or even ‘eat’ fast enough to sustain superspeed. :)
Of course, you can solve that with a little hand waving by claiming that the energy source is external and all ‘mutants’ or powered people are what they are because of a natural or ‘installed’ connection to that source of power.
Her gear is specifically designed for her.
To counter such problems I suggest making everything super aerodynamic, artificially cooled and with the internal parts extra slik.
Maxima being hosed down with lubricant (for science) sounds like a good vote incentive picture
Using real-world biomechanics, a cheetah can run at 100 km/h, but only for about 300 m or so, in about 11 seconds. After that he/she has to stop or risk overheating his/her brain as he/she is generating so much waste heat. There is just no way to dump all that heat in that short time. About 30 minutes later, the cheetah will have cooled off enough to resume normal activity, but not yet running at max speed.
just say they instead of clumsy he/she
i honestly thought that sidney did that and Seneca was gasping at her record. had to read it again
This. x 100
Me too!
Ditto on the first read. Wonder if it was (partially?) deliberate on DaveB’s part, given that several of us were (are still) hoping to see Suitably Dramatic Improvement on Sydney’s next run.
I think we all did. There’s not much of an obvious connecting between the unidentified person running the course (and so we naturally assume the same person from the previous comic, which ended with the conclusion she was going to have to run it again) and with the panel of Seneca popping a candy (which she could presumably be doing at any time for any reason).
Only after getting to the end and learning some context for the scene are we likely to go back and compare more subtle details like the skin tone of the hand holstering the handgun and match it to Seneca with her mouth open.
I’m on the fence trying to decide if this was the best way to do this, or if the 3rd-last panel wouldn’t have been better as a full-body shot clearly identifying Seneca as the person who just ran the course, tying the sequence together, rather than leaving trails of proverbial breadcrumbs for when we retrace our steps.
I assumed it was Syd too until I saw the knife slash made me dubious, and then the skin tone of the hand holstering the pistol confirmed it was not Sydney.
My clue was that on the last page Sydney was shooting for the PseudoPerp’s gun rather than center-of-mass.
Yeah, I thought the candy was popping out of her mouth in surprise-like a really solid spit-take.
I was also confused at first as to who was running the course, but the hand in panel 7 helped tip me off that it was Seneca
While I understand why they are teaching Sydney the basics, I cant help but feel that Halo is horribly misused as a door kicker. She is humanities first and only FTL capable vessel as far as we know. Her worth to the scientific community is incalculable both in terms of her ability to travel anywhere in system let alone her ability to heft satellites or modules without having to spend millions to do it. The idea that someone who could get us samples of every planet in the system getting her head blown off stopping a robbery fills me with visceral horror at the waste to science especially since we don’t know if the orbs can work for anyone else.
Do we know if there are others who can’t travel through space that way? Maybe not to alien planets, but at least to local planets. It makes sense, I think that she should be taught the same skills as the others so she’s a better team player, but I see the point that yeah, if we were to add everything up, she’d be very useful doing other things.
She’s not a ‘door kicker’, and this course isn’t about kicking down doors: every member of the team has to qualify, even if they never actually enter the field
It’s like how even the members of the army’s motor-pool have to at least be able to fire a rifle (or whatever the ‘correct’ term is nowadays) and run the basic obstacle course once a year
The funny thing about your comment is that variations of that apply to nearly all the supers, at least the “big guns” types.
Their real power is violating the laws of physics, in particular, the creation of energy. Superman or the Flash could do more good for humanity (in all but the most extreme cases) simply by running a giant hamster wheel or some such, generating power for the whole world for, essentially, free.
But even if there were a market for such a comic, it would be over after the first issue, so we’d be back to this kind of stuff – less logical, but so much more fun.
There’s a compelling fan theory that all of Superman’s powers can be explained by an ability to manipulate the inertia of matter. Strength, flight, temperature, it’s all from just tweaking the energy state of matter he’s in contact with.
> But even if there were a market for such a comic, it would be over after the first issue, so we’d be back to this kind of stuff – less logical, but so much more fun.
Here you go: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
I’m fairly sure pilots have to make through Officer Candidate School, which has both physical and classroom training. If the Brass tried to actually get Syd up what they would what in an interstellar pilot she whoild never get out of the classroom.
As far as we know from canon, Sydney can’t really do this. Remember when she tried to fly to the moon of the planet she had been stranded on? Her “in system” speed of mach 4 just isn’t fast enough to do things like tow a instrument package to Ceres (in the asteroid belt, and just as an example). It just barely faster than Earths escape velocity, and about the same speed as the Apollo mission obtained. The ones which went to the moon, whether to orbit it or to land, took about four days to get there.
Her aetherial gateway capability is a jump to one of a set of specific points, and if “the orbit of Jupiter” isn’t on her list, she is left with having to hoof it via her regular flight speed.
She could possibly park some satellites in orbit fairly well, because getting to the upper atmosphere or a little beyond it wouldn’t take her days and the payload should be within the capacity of the lighthook for things like a GPS sat or the like. She’d probably need a lot of careful instructions as to how fast to accelerate the thing before letting it go, and where exactly to do that letting go, but that could be coordinated from the ground via radio.
Also, let us not forget that the Earth aetherial gateway point was all staticy, which led Sydney to speculate that this might be because of some disaster that befell the orbs previous owner. And this was why she went to the penultimate waypoint instead, which ended up being the Fracture.
AND YET, Sydney hared off to the Fracture, and then back to Earth despite the “staticy and weird” Earth waypoint that might have killed her previous number on the orb ownership list, both for a completely frivolous reason and ignoring all of her prior concerns about the Earth waypoint. It’s just preposterous…
You make some good points. Though Syndey would run into trouble with the parking and release of the satellites once she exited the planet’s atmosphere, seeing without her shield she can’t survive in vacuum. And she can’t use a spacesuit since she needs skin contact with the orbs.
Though am intrigued to see the effects of an air filled satellite suddenly being exposed to vacuum…
Sydney would need a special vacuum-sealed suit with gloves (mittens) that kept the flight and shield orbs in her hands, and satellites already have to go from ground level to space in 2 minutes. I suddenly realize I don’t know if rocket cargo bays/stages are depressurized before or during launch, but either one should be workable – it’s only 1ATM of pressure. More during ascent obviously, but whatever is done now should work fine.
Definitely some technical issues to address, like needing an automated system to set orbit once she got close to the general vector. But a Halo launch system for a single pilot and 16-ish tons of cargo (based on the lighthook lifting strength) has got to be far, far cheaper than even SpaceX’s ‘mere’ $50MM for a reused rocket.
Sydney also went back and grinded on that planet and spent one additional points in speed, mach 16, according to DaveB: “Sydney’s speed upgrade was significant. She didn’t go from mach 4 to 5. I’ll leave the actual number for a fun reveal later when she challenges Maxima to a race or something.
Okay, it’s mach 16. I didn’t want to wait to tell you. She went from 4 to 16.” as of: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-670-orbital-bombardment-obstacle-course/
She then put a point into the warp-arm of her speed orb skill tree, and then an additional one in the center of the tree.
Either of which might have augmented her total speed capability as well, we haven’t seen her test out her flight speed maximum yet since then.
Also Cora gave Sydney a bunch of waypoints for interstellar travel by pitstopping on the way back to Earth. (At least Sydney agreed to do so in: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-715-wormhole-101/ )
So Sydney has more warp points, if she engaged her warp drive at those pit stops and if that automatically bookmarks them, and so on, and her speed is massively faster than any other individual on the team, except possibly Max when stat-dumping.
We haven’t seen how much weight the flight orb can lift with the shield orb expanded around things, she could very well do in-system flight maintaining the shield orb, carrying an entire shuttle by power of the flight orb alone with it trapped inside her shield with her.
Sydney may be capable of setting things into orbit by just traveling straight upward for an hour or two (12 thousand miles per hour is her current max speed) and then releasing them from her shield while holding onto the atmosphere orb, the atmorb. That would need some testing, and probably a simple space suit that isn’t skin-tight, with the orbs inside of it just for safety. I honestly want to know how much atmo the orb can produce at once, if it’s enough to keep an area of vaccuum comfortably pressurized, if the atmo stays around the orb or if vaccuum would pull it away, and so on.
Well not just straight up – space flight is a lot more about sideways fast than being really high. But Mach 16 is about 71% of LEO orbital velocity, and (ignoring acceleration and sonic booms) she could get from the ground to ISS altitude in under 1.5 minutes.
Add a couple minutes travel for safe accel/decel away from populated areas, and a booster system to make up the last 30% of the velocity once she nears orbit (assuming she is speed limited and not acceleration limited), and you have a 5-minute ground-to-IIS launch platform for probably 5% of the cost of a traditional multi-stage booster. Vs the current 24 hours trip. Absolutely worth the R&D time, even before you consider the potential for her to then shuttle equipment to other planets via causeway.
Sydney should absolutely start contracting with NASA and the private sector, doing a few milk runs a month would make her richer than Deus in no time.
hmmm…. you know, sydney sees some other “player” using a non standard weapon on the practice course…. my gamer instancts say use the orbs to cheese the course.
(I think this would count as cheating and not count according to peggy, but she will still give props for sydney “winning” one)
The knife may be non-standard, but it is still a mundane weapon: NO POWERS!!!
You know, you’d think that Peggy would know you’re not supposed to eat or drink on a firing range. Nasty chemicals from the gunpowder, traces of lead worn off the bullets, lubricants, etc. It’s just not done.
Please tell me the knife is a Venture Brothers reference.
love the bottom left, with her popping the candy like jackie chan from armour of god :D
Was Jackie cross-eyed while he did it? :D
If he was focusing his eyes on a small object less than 20cm from his face… probably. ;)
“Cross-eyed” usually refers to people whose eyes are stuck that way.
When inspector Sledge Hammer did it, he used an item on his gun that he called a “loudener”.
He also hit every single target…including the civilians.
ROFLMAO!
Seriously My biggest problem with this page is Seneca doing the course that fast then not being able to pop a candy in her mouth without going cross-eyed. When was the last time you had to watch food going into your mouth?
Probably the last time I wasn’t using a fork, spoon, or my hand to direct the food to my mouth.
Tossing and catching popcorn would be a fair example. You either watch where it’s going or you get salt&butter in your eye.
So depending on exactly what criteria* are used to determine which powers are banned from the course, I’m thinking Harem could complete the course at (or at least very near) the top speed, since she could not only fire from 5 stations at once, but teleport to each of them and then over the finish line.
* Obviously super-speed since the point is the weapons/situational training, not the timekeeping. But there’s a lot of powers (e.g. 3-second prescience) that you can’t just turn off, so where do you draw the line?
Pixel could just alter reality, so that all the targets have a bullet tear through them, at a wave of her hand.
But Peggy could balance that by saying that her programming time must be included in the course time.
Or she could just overclock her processor. :)
Yorpie? Pixel’s the pink wereleopard with laser claws and invisibility depending on form.
Krona is the reality hacker.
Ta. I have a clinical problem with names, which has not been in much evidence of late, due to my drastically reduced number of posts. But, just to give you an idea of how bad it is this is how my posting process went:
“Brain, give me the name of the reality hacker”
“Pixel”
“Nope, try again, that is the pink wereleopard”
“Err … umm … thingy?”
*sighs*
*opens up GrrlPower Wiki and looks it up, getting “Krona”*
*confidently types in comment, absolutely certain of having the correct name*
It looks like we are going to need one hundred million candles on a birthday cake, for Earth’s oldest (known) LIVING inhabitants!
Seems like quite good chances that there will be surviving microbial life on Mars (assuming that when it had liquid water and an atmosphere, that its conditions for life developing were similar to that on Earth).
Sydney, fancy popping over and checking? I’m a bit impatient waiting for our probes to meander over there.
Any life we can find on other local planets/moons would be amazing, especially if we can revive it Jurassic Park style. But aside from boosting a few interesting applications we are already working towards with Terran microbes (soil remediation, food, medicines), I think we’ll all keep hoping for macro-scale life as the really exciting discovery.
…I just wanna ride alien dinosaurs, okay?
I love tidbits like this in the comments.
+1 Yorpie treat for you!
Oh, great…
Scientists bringing 100 million years old microbes up from the ocean floor has got to be the premise for a cool dozen or so horror movies.
Luckily they can’t be any older than 6,000 years, since that’s the age of the universe. Silly scientists, you need to read a bible every now and again!
Gonna Clarence Darrow that argument a bit! :) (inherit the wind)
Since the first day was of indeterminate length (the sun was not created until the fourth day), the first, second, and third days could have been billions of years. The microbes were probably made on day 3.
Reverse diabetes is actually a real, if quite rare, thing. Type 2 diabetes is the *improper* amount of bodily production of insulin, either too low, as most people have, or too high, *causing* (not *being*) hypoglycemia. Some things can make this worse. Diet food is poison to me. Artificial sweeteners can be deadly. I *always* ask for ingredients now, and sucralose is usually a red flag.
I have a medical condition where I can’t eat most vegetables. I’m almost a reverse vegetarian, except I’m able to still eat fruits and most nuts.
So as a child, I was able to have a legitimate reason to not eat broccoli or brussel sprouts.
So you are not able to eat shoots?
*looks quizically*
*slow clap* almost didn’t notice. Not often someone leaves a pun that subtle.
Jokes aside, sorry to hear that – restrictive diets make life hard.
I’ve still missed the pun so it’s extremely subtle! :)
Pander said as Panda.
I assumed everyone knew the old Panda grammar joke, but maybe some of you will be part of today’s lucky 10,000.
And leaves.
Sucralose is supposedly more chemically similar to DDT than sugar. Has no calories because your body can’t properly assimilate it.
I’d love it if the PPO had some sort of ‘auto-targeting’ feature.
Sydney starts to run through the course, turns on auto-targetting. Every bad guy cutout is shot at the same time in the head from a multishot (sort of like that weapon the Mandalorian has ). Sydney steps over the finish line. 15 seconds. :)
+1
*crosses fingers for next page*
We don’t know where
Budget HaloHex ended up after the parking lot battle, but she demonstrated multi-shot capability with her orbs. I think the restricting factor for a good number of the supers is probably the timing of the targets, since they don’t all pop up at the same time.Well, that’s because Hex had four(?) individual firing balls, whereas Sydney just has the one
It’s easier to have four individual balls firing one shot each at different targets than it is to have one ball fire four separate shots at the same time at any target (and we saw what happened when she tried the multi-shot function already)
Yes – I’m just using ‘Halo is a spaceship’ logic though, that a sufficiently advanced ship might have auto-targetting and homing in on the target capabilities for multiple beams, since we already know there’s at least one function which allows her to create many rapid fire attacks instead of one sustained beam.
Mainly because I think that would be a cool and logical upgrade on the PPO, for her to be able to do something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs_CIzwovcs
For some reason I read the title, and I’ve seen the show, but my brain still went here instead.
Hopefully Sydney can learn from that…..
As a sufferer of “reverse diabetes” I can say it is a real thing. Hypoglycemia (Little sugar), where the pancreas makes to much insulin instead of to little. Causes the body to consume absorb to much sugar into the cells and leaves it with to little blood sugar quickly. Great for eating what I want, bad for lasting through the day with little meals.