Grrl Power #878 – Fist face floor
The hardest part about being Cora is coming up with a UI that lets her pull from her quite frankly asinine arsenal in a quick and efficient manner. She hasn’t quite cracked the tech that makes the world slow down when she opens her weapon wheel. “Hmm. Chainfist? Chainsaw fist? Meat tenderizer? Tazer knuckles? Spike fist with DNA collector? Aw, who am I kidding, they wind up with plenty of DNA on them.”
I know what you’re wondering. Has Cora been stabbed and hacked in the limbs enough for her to install a subroutine that makes little clamps to automatically entangle said stabby or hacky implements?
The answer is yes.
It occurs to me that Cora is basically Green Lantern, but just for her own limbs. With more color options.
I had an odd thought while coloring this page. Would Cora’s hard light “metal” armor be reflective? Not like, reflecting lasers, I mean would it reflect the environment? Probably not, right? Unless she programmed it to. (Or more likely, grabbed some open source shader) But if you’re making holographic battle armor to perfectly align with your projected force fields, how much processor time do you devote to rendering? Cora has hella thicc FlOps, so it probably doesn’t matter, but it’s interesting to think about the various iterations of her hard light gear. Like the first version could have been flat shaded, no specular highlights or self shading, leaving her walking around looking like something out of The Last Starfighter (which had some basic ass rendering). I guess she eventually she decided that making her hard light gear actually look like real physical materials would help her in situations where people thought she was wearing nothing but a thin cotton T-Shirt and a pair of Daisy Dukes.
Wondering if she put the effort into making a holographic thin cotton T-Shirt go all transparent when it gets wet?
The answer is yes.
I should mention, Detla’s design is kind of… let’s call it homage to a model made by Dmytro Bajda, who is really good at sculpting skinny girls with sexy lips.
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Well someone has been watching Earth movies.
Cora did say she liked our entertainment. Monty Python for the win!
OTOH, Dave has addressed that in text at the bottom of the page: “Sadly, neither of them…”
OTOP, they probably would have watched some Earth movies, on their inbound trip, to help familiarise themselves with Earth culture. Sadly as sex tourism is one of the main pulls to visit Earth, the types of movies popularly exported may well have left them with gaps in their knowledge.
If they watch things like back to the future then they could assume we now have hoverboards. Our assumed tech levels could be higher than they are permitting us to purchase such things easily.
if tv and movies were their only source of information about the planet. But with a millennia long tourist trade there is bound to be some more basic stuff; and honestly if you just looked at this planet from the air and didn’t see any of the sub-surface integrated technology you could be forgiven for thinking nothing but how much electricity is being used and number of planes has really changed in nearly a century.
radio waves everywhere, vehicles emitting the same toxic gases, combustion tech is clearly still the most prevalent by analyzing that, electrical wires just hideously draped overtop of really flammable structures, stuff like that is what you’d see. Not the internet, not DARPA and Boston Dynamics theoretical or in progress stuff, not CERN, or discoveries made by NASA *although noticing the international space station and satellites view it as baby steps into space* and the inefficient land use when seen from the air can be atrocious to see. The amount of space just paved over vs being used for home and business, especially in some countries just looks like something with no city planning skills designed it.
‘Tis but a scratch!
I can help but think that if your sword is capable of separating into hundreds of pieces and flying about at your command, then thats a much more effective weapon than a blade on a stick.
Byakuya Kuchiki knows that.
“Senbonzakura… scatter.”
Let’s assume there isn’t any licenses she’d need to use it outside of some specific prescribed methods. IF they can fly about and be used as a swarm weapon, that is obviously a more advantageous weapon than a sword. And you can’t just have them fly as a true swarm where movement is chaos, since that’d leave you open to other attacks, melee or ranged.
So they have to fly complex patterns that shift and change on the fly. But the problem is, where is all that processing being crunched? Sure, each individual part might have full computation in it, and it might network together, but that would be very loud, comms wise; and also really easy to disrupt or get into, since each part a vulnerability in the system (Core is holding onto only the parts directly in her leg – if she can crack into that system, she can use them to put malware into the swarm).
But if processing is centralized to the control unit, a part lost is a part lost, nothing more nothing less. But now all of the work is being done on a singular single-person portable unit, which would could call for some simplifications to the system.
Let’s assume that visor, which its shitty wee eye holes with no peripheral vision and a huge frontal blind spot is the primary HUD/controller of Detla’s tech. It can only devote so much of its resources to controlling the blade swarm when it also needs to keep track of Dabbler, Hulk’s love child with the Blue Meanie, her ally that has Max, other law enforcement (maybe not Earth’s – depending on what they know about Earth’s Supers), rival mercenaries (like Cosmo), her own power management, and also keeping an ear out for any radio chatter with encryption she can crack. Oh, and anything fancy with the blade would probably be largely manually controlled with eye and other somatic controls – and even if they’re controlled by cybernetic implants, she might still have to work against her own neurology about controlling so many separate things at once like she might her fingers on a piano.
Or simply, she doesn’t know the full extent of the tech she found can do, and the middle of a fight is not the place to try to find out if it has any other presets of functions.
Also worth keeping in mind, is that she was entirely taken off guard by hard light prosthetics – I find it a little difficult that she’d fail to see a lack of… well… anything of substance in the missing hand space.
There’s also the cleaving benefit of hitting something with all of the weight of the mass at once too. Perhaps the swarm configuration would be highly useful on lightly to unarmoured targets, but against foes with shielding or heavy armour, she’d need the oompf to cleave through into flesh and bone – which does raise the question of why not make a rail gun using them, to launch individual parts at the opponent and recall it back after they do their damage or miss; you can substitute mass with velocity, if all you’re concerned about is your output of pressure onto your target.
The complexity of the interface required to do what you suggest is in large part why I feel like the sword can’t actually do all of what you suggest. Otherwise, why make it look like a sword in the first place?
The biggest issue I see with the idea of that swarm of flying sharp metal bits is the same issue with unmounted monofilament weapons. Sure, it can do a lot of damage, but the person who’s most likely to get hit is the person wielding it.
It’s probably useful to keep in mind that while well-travelled adventurers may be familiar with a lot of tech, there’s probably more tech to keep track of than anyone can. So there’s always someone out there with gear you don’t know who can mess you up with it, merely because you don’t know it. It’s not necessarily more advanced, it just takes advantages of your assumptions in some way you’re not anticipating.
I immediately started a train of thought headed down this track as well, but you’ve both gone way ahead of me already. I have nothing to add except ‘thanks’ – this type of considered analysis on made-up fictional tech is one of my favorite parts of this community.
I see two reasons for the sword over foil weaponry.
Anyone not shielded/armored… you CAN use the foil on them as a weapon, but the problem is those conflicts will likely be against civilian-level targets. They may not realize the Sakura-storm of foil flakes is a weapon, and may be stuck gazing at it thinking “Pretty” rather than “Scary”. Swords will illicit the correct response. Maxima may be able to shoot down battle cruisers or such bare-handed. She has a gun for the same reason.
Anyone who is shielded/armored, the foil-flake storm is going to be like grains of sand hitting a windshield at 80kph. It might, if lucky, mark the target, but you’ll get zero penetration. An intact sword will have the mass and energy to break harder targets.
My best explanation is tech fail.
What the sword actually can do is follow one point with an appropiate power source(her hand to whatever provides her weapons with kick), which is a lot easier to build in a swarm of rectangles than giving them an option to go into multiple directions.
Another acceptable explanation is: shields.
We know they have all kinds of shielding, maybe she uses a sword instead of any kind of ranged weapon, because Cora’s shielding stops most ranged tricks and because the sword is attached to her she can give it more power and active monitoring, so it doesn’t get stopped.
If that’s the case the minimum rules we’ve observed now are: stasis guns don’t work on her and simply guided solid projectiles don’t get through.
My second explanation appears to be supported by the page before this page, because Dabbler pulls out a sword the moment she realizes their current enemy has good shielding, so apparently swords help against shielding.
bharda.m.sullivan@gmail.com
Unlike in the real world, in fiction & games, ranged weapon defenses don’t usually provide much help against melee weaponry. And even in the real world, questions of weight, bulk, maneuverability, etc aren’t trivial.
That said, a good melee weapon used with professional competence is usually more useful in close quarters than a ranged weapon.
There’s the psychological factor to consider as well. You can be shot anywhere, but a blade _has_ to go _somewhere_.
thanks for the addition
Looks to me like the “swarm” function is limited to being recalled to her hand, or possibly directed by waving the hand because the glove acts as some manner of beacon.
Admittedly that is one of the cooler methods of ‘recalling a lost sword to your hand’ that I’ve seen.
Reminds me of breath of the wild sheika tech
Our hero, Space Elvis, is doing well, too!
Max is going to owe him a kiss!
except he, Dabbler, and Cora are being kept busy while flame head is likely calling for possibly more co-horts to bring a stasis pod that I guess they had in their overhead compartment on the tour bus.
that said, Amorphous, Achilles, Heatwave, and Halo, have no doubt noticed that about 20-50 feet from them a large number of people have vacated the area or formed a very wide circle as several individuals are fighting and a noticeable blue glow is encapsulating an unmistakable golden reflective individual (who I suspect is playing possum till she know WHO ALL are combatants (the mercs may have more hidden in the crowd still) before she powers through the immobilizing device like Superman walking up Goku’s Kamehameha in death battle and crushes the gun like a tin foil toy.
If it’s a stasis field, Max is fine, but no time has passed for her yet. Of course, if it’s a budget-type stasis field (which it probably is, since light is still getting in & out) and only SLOWS time inside, they’re in for a surprise – having no clue how FAST Max is, especially if she reacts by “Maxing out” speed….
due to it looking like Syndrome’s beams from (The Incredibles) my mind didn’t go to time manipulation but a type of immobilizing beam (which stasis in biology means inactivity or equilibrium),
that said if it works anything like Syndrome’s devices then she could still be conscious and able to see and hear, just unable to move.
That’s possible, but since Max’s “biology” was drastically revamped when she got her powers, it seems very risky to depend on such a device being effective. My guess was temporal “stasis” that simply slows time around the target to some fairly large degree (maybe 1000 to 10,000 times) – no problem for light, but makes practical physical movement very difficult.
I rejected the idea it was time manipulation device based on the conversation with Dabbler about Krona, how even her time looking power wasn’t time manipulation and time manipulation is both extremely difficult and dangerous. With that sort of thing established having some random mercenaries having something like that as a hand held device seems a tad advanced, as opposed to a containment beam *like a tractor beam used to move freight around in a warehouse* coupled with a some feedback to the device to produce enough force to immobilize the target completely as well as a tranquilizing effect from certain magnetic fields.
that said if you come from a society that can make hand held time dilation devices, then what value does Maxima have? Surely you can produce weapons capable of astronomical time and space bending power, androids that can blow up entire cities, war craft with singularity and dimension weapons, fractal time line manipulation devices that insure enemy bullets always miss. ect…
and to be honest regardless of how it works, the fact it even exists, is something mercenaries have, and is THIS powerful at such a small size; and could immobilize someone as powerful as Maxima so easily has already devalued Maxima’s worth to anyone as a weapon. As its existence implies larger and/or more powerful versions of it also likely exist *rifle – cannon* *sling shot – catapult*, and more complex forms in the hands of syndicates and governments.
If people know she was caught by it, then the second any “bidder” breaks her out as a brain washed enforcer the counter for her is instantly known. Hell use devices like this as a security system, someone breaks in, oops stuck there. In fact for “crime syndicates” I’d wager such an OP device is drastically more valuable than the risky, has to be kept under mind control or will likely kill us all super. Want to rob a space bank, time to load up on stasis beams to stop the guards their robots, living nukes,
military, if it is time based. Well then why wouldn’t the Xevoarchy have a ship sized version, heck advance with a chrono-collapse or a time dilation sphere. Trap Fel Battle carriers inside a bubble of slowed down time, or rapidly speed up time around select spots causing rapid decay of the hull or a limb ect…
time manipulation tech is a genie bottle, and the genie is drunk.
Look at it like d&d damage types.
That Max is sensitive to a damage type only means she has to put on the right shielding to be an amazing asset, but that doesn’t mean this damage type is effective to properly prepared others(shielding, swarms).
Your point about hand held time manipulation being an issue still stands, because it also has a lot of uses outside.
As the chokers are comms devices I’m assuming Dabbler has already alerted the rest of the team, and possibly even Archon HQ. The mercs are about to find out this isn’t the easy snatch and grab they thought it would be.
That would be a great idea, but remember why Dabbler has cybernetics. Sometimes she’s overconfident.
Of course there are others nearby, and are probably on the way already.
This isn’t exactly a discreet or quiet event, especially not with the crowds there.
Besides that, there’ve only been a few lines of combat taunts and soliloquies, so it will probably be another page or two. ;)
My favorite was the road rash comment. Total Dabbler.
After the fight, I wouldn’t be surprised if she offered to kiss it to make it better.
With his attitude and business methods, Ray would almost HAVE to be at least something of a badass to have survived long enough to have pissed off both Cora and Dabbler.
And lived to tell the tale…
Perhaps that is why he is still alive. He knows when to delete his ‘boudoir’ archive of them.
Space Kuwabara at best.
It somehow is nice to see Ray isn’t all talk and is actually holding his own there.
I’m just waiting for Sydney to do something to interrupt the stasis beam, freeing Maxima who’ll mop up all three fighters in a second, showing why this whole thing was a bad idea to even contemplate.
One part of me wants to see Sydney interrupt the beam with her shield.
Another wants to see Achilles walk into it.
Yet another wants to see Maxima power through the beam like a ticked off Super Juggernaut.
and then the chaotic fourth side of me wants to see Sydney use Achilles as a sword with her light hook to duel the techno-drow.
Achilles says “swish” every time Sydney swings him.
Nah, Achilles hums like a light-sabre.
he says ‘shinggg’ like Usopp
Wicked witchcraft, And although, I know, it’s strictly tabooooooo
Dave… How do I commission this?
Soda….right up the nose at that comment
I think Achilles would be more usefull as a shield than a weapon. But since this is a superhero comic let’s go for what looks cooler instead.
Bwahahaha, this has my vote. From what we’ve seen of Achilles, he would totally get a kick out of being used as a sword/blunt object in a fight.
A mace that can punch people ^^
the best type of mace
You are charged with 6 counts of “Grievous harm with a body”….
If you hit someone with someone else and they both die, where’s the murder weapon ?
“Dunno, Sarge, looks like a pedestrian accident”
Or, as I’m surprised nobody else has said, “she’d hit a @#$%er with another @#$%er” ;)
It’s Achilles, not Oedipus
Sydney once used Achilles to check a supervillain lair for traps. He didn’t seem to mind.
Achilles could do a Hammer impression/parody with “Can’t Hurt This”.
The only part of Achilles that can be hurt is his feelings, and he’s apparently chill enough he’s still way tough to hurt that way.
Achilles really needs several more levels of knockback resistance. As it stands now, the best way to deal with him in a fight is to knock him out of the park.
Of course you can’t hurt his feelings — he’s invincible, right?
Achilles isn’t super strong or mobile. He doesn’t need to breathe though, so burying him under a pile of rubble, a mountain or chaining him down naked in a room you then proceed to fill with quick drying cement will work until you dig him out.
Likewise, filling his lungs with water, chlorine trifluoride or bugs is just inconvenient. Heck, he probably uses ClF3 as mouthwash.
“You will be extremely clean.” “And on FIRE.”
which brings back around to if he even needs mouth wash. We know he eats so a digestive system is there but if he is so indestructible does he even shed skin, hair, sweat, cry, expel mucus, which brings up does his body even have any of the self bio-sphere flora and fauna all other humans have *won’t go into great detail as people not accustomed to it notoriously get itchy hearing about what all is on and in you living off dead skin, mucus, other microbes ect..
So is he just some sterile anomaly, heck if nothing he eats goes through him…which maybe it does, like a Gem from Steven Universe, no real digestion the mush just passes through the body; if nothing left that was consumed and his body has zero break down so nothing is returned back to the world I’d accuse the man of being the multiverse’s weakest and most inefficient world eater.
Basically at some point his body got replaced with a 3d projection like the Id monster in Forbidden Planet; Not so much indestructible as instantly renewed from microsecond to microsecond.
Apparently his indestructibility extends to the psychological: Getting buried under a mountain doesn’t even make him claustrophobic.
Yeah he could be seriously strong if he couldn’t be pushed aside as an irritating kid by anyone he encounters.
I’ve a few suggestions how this could be Achieved.
Teamup: Achilles has a wide variety incredibly konckback resistant crewmates with less resistance to fysical attacks let them shield each other,
– Sydney could hold him with her lighthook and to her choice her shield or flight orb.
– Anvil could absorb his kinetic energy
– Hiro could catch him, while weighing as much as the Apollo.
– Heathwave could warm the air behind him to the max and cool the air before him to the max
– Maxima could use her flight and super stregth to stop him.
– Stallward could throw a heavy object at him in the opposite direction he’s flying.
– Dabbler can shoot her railgun at him in the opposite direction he goes.
– Peggy, Goose and all other “normal” soldiers can shoot him in the opposite direction he goes.
– Math and Jabberwocky can grab him and redirect his momentum in the ground.
Additional weight: we don’t know what the normal super strength norm is but 1.45(around what a marine carries for a day) times your weight is a good step to making yourself less sensitive to knockback and all this weight could be used for many fun and usefull tricks.
Counter thrust: Achilles is invincible and should carry a lot of death weight anyway, so why not give him something to carry that pushes back, friction: he isn’t the runner anyway and he can hide in Sydney’s shield if they have to go fast, so call an aerodynamic engineer and tell him to design non-aerodynamic armor that can survive one super fight,
Pin him to the ground: you know how studs give better grip, that’s also true for Achilles.
With Sydney inside the shield with the beam hitting the inside and freezing everything on the inside till the emitter taxing itself trying to keep itself in stasis while fighting against the stasis to keep working burns its self out.
Her jet-fist reminds me of Vi from LoL, just more practical (i mean smaller fist is easier to wield (and in sydney’s words “more force per square inch”))
Vi is best Waifu in LoL
cant wait for the supers to get involved
Tut tut Cora. Should have head-shotted her while you had the chance.
Leave that head shot to Peggy.
Those guys seem to be shielded against most handheld ranged attacks.
In the past page Dabblers reaction to seeing their shielding is to pull out a sword after having shown to be willing to use ranged attacks, so apparently she thinks a melee approach is the most efficient here.
My tech explanation would be: shields don’t stop attacks as much as they redirect them and swords can be guided in the cut, while a ranged attack is always harder to guide or swords can carry more power, because they’re attached to a energy source on the wielder.
The slow knife penetrates the shield?
More the knife close to you, but yes.
Let’s just all appreciate that DaveB went through the effort of drawing the road rash on her tits.
I’m sure that after the battle Ray Cosmos will volunteer to rub soothing salve over her twin rashes.
I can get behind that.
And in front of it.
I’m open to suggestions, really. XD
Speaking from experience, road rash on the chest is fucking painful. DX The moment one of them pops the stasis gun this fight is over though. Max is going to rampage all over them for that.
Let the others have the spotlight for a while.
Still, it’ll be disorienting for Max — from her perspective, one moment she’s telling off Ray, then *blink* suddenly everyone’s been moved around, extra aliens are in the mix, and everyone’s fighting.
Super speed or not, it’ll take her a few ticks to assess what happened, who’s doing what and why, how best to deal with it, or even whether it’s really happening at all (for all she knows, maybe she’s been hit with a hallucination beam to try to make her go berserk while everyone’s still standing around joking about Ray).
She’ll probably think “Eh, Dabbler and Cora are punching that lady, I should probably punch her too (gently!) and *then* figure out what’s happening.”
Well Max’s initial roll in any given combat situation is that of overwatch and battlefield management. Gain some altitude, asses the situation, and direct her team to best effect. In the process, she can also determine if she needs to get directly involved and where.
Figure Sydney will just step up and pop her shield around herself and Max, breaking the effect. One quick ‘those are the bad guys, and thats the gun that shuts you down’ explanation later and it will be whompin’ time.
Having gotten shirt/board burn on the nips after a long day at the beach, I don’t even wanna think about road rash there.
Ugh, another of my least favorite tropes – space ninjas. Yeah, we have all the best tech in the universe, but we’re still using swords and acrobatics. Right up until someone pulls out a full auto energy weapon. “Parry this, casual!” If you can’t move faster than the speed of light, you’re fubar.
Worse yet, space ninjas with gratuitously revealed cleavage. Didn’t fantasy armor in modern RPG video games already drive this point home? Oops, laser arrow to the sternum, you’re dead.
Pekade don’t take this the wrong way, but perhaps this is not your kind of comic. This is a superhero comedy where realism is obviously not important.
I meant to write please, not pekade.
Nah, it’s all good. It’s a petty gripe, but when you read enough sci-fi, this kind of thing gets tiresome. Sadly, there’s only so much to work with, and you’re absolutely right, it’s a superhero comic. XD
What? You expect everyone to go around with fifty kilos of full body armour, ala IronMan?
Get the fuck out of here!
Maybe I can help a little: in the past page Dabbler pulls a sword after noticing the stasis gun holder is shielded, so apperantly her first instinct is to use the obvious advantage of ranged weapons, but she discovers that she will not be able to exploit it and since the only extra information she gets is that her opponent is shielded the shielding appears to be the cause.
Also they’re fighting in a crowded area full of places with good cover, while this is an advantage for the mercenaries(missiles are useless) it also makes ranged weapons less beneficial.
Now an explanation of how this shielding and swords should (roughly) work to achieve this.
First what do we know ranged weapons can certainly do and what it costs them: propell themselves and thus surpass all purely muscle powered fighting styles in raw impact power in return for mass loss, visibility and less speed to keep the internal parts intact, explode and thus provide more power in return for less speed to keep the internal parts intact and theoratical jammability, be guided to a certain extent in return for visibility, volume, mass, theoretical jammability and less speed to keep the internal parts intact, vastly superior speed in return for less gadgets, simple continuous effect
What melee can do: self propelling without weapon mass loss, but comparable visibility penalty, continuous adaption to circumstances for heavy backpack, big area to lose heath and other problematic effects in return for easy blocking, better guiding and lotsa gadgets and jamblock for bigger back battery
second problems with both the other hasn’t.
range
– hard to guide(still guidable, but costs a lot of benefits and hard to do, because it has to be either pre-programmed for unpredicitable scenarios or be guided from a distance making it easier hackable and jamable and it’s guiding is always jamable.
– hard to cram full of gadgets(little space and too much momentum in entire system)
melee:
– close to you
– slow
– bad momentum buildup
So what I expect is that the swords they use are full of reacting technomagic that to say it with Sconia will “change the nature of the attack” keeping the shielding busy.
The shielding redirects and spreads every attack that comes to it and is permanently shifting something(lets call it calibration or ), so that most ranged attacks just bounce of it, but a guided melee attack redirects it back to the target.
It’s also possible they couldn’t get better ranged weaponry, because that’s to well controled.
The cleavage problem is harder.
My best 2 explanations are:
– Same as Dabbler in the killer manequins fight: actual armor with a glamour wrapped around it.
– Covered mission and because of fashion not having cleavage is suspicious.
a really bad explanation would be:
– chest needs air, because alien.(why also earth air? Can’t she just add a an air supply? Can’t she just ventilate it?)
I know it’s not the world, but I find it more supportive and fun than “it’s just a story” and “go away”.
Feel free to fill it with your critique. I would like to see more holes in my story so I can fill it with more of the putty I used to build it.
Being a supers comic, more than just physics is a matter of artistic interpretation.
There are plenty of reasons to use more controlled and less ranged weaponry, even if you increase their deadliness.
One of which is cultural.
Another of which is their very technology level and possible environments.
Ranged weapons do more collateral damage because they don’t stop going when they miss their target.
If your life, or at least your insurance premiums, are dependant on that piece of technology over there, or that window between you and certain doom, ranged weapons quickly become a no-no.
Even if you are no longer in that situation currently, a lifetime of growing up with it will stick with you. Often, it can be instilled into an entire culture. Imagine a world that was colonized before it had been terraformed. Centuries later it’s probably a given that they don’t use blasters in personal combat, that’s reserved for shooting at ships and buildings.
Road rash on tits sounds uncomfortable.
…Or like a band name.
Or the title (and subject) of a song by Steel Panther…
It ain’t no Sunshine on my Shoulder.
There aint no sunshine where it’s gone
An it’s always gone too long,
When she puts her foot away.
Oh no, oh no, oh no…
So, I recognize Holy Grail and Infinity War/Endgame. I feel like I’m missing something in the middle.
Same. I feel like “I’m keeping your sword,” has to be a reference to something, but I can’t think of anything. Maybe it was just the two references?
probably multiple references on keeping the sword, I remember something like it from a few anime; and heck one of the funnier things in Breath of the Wild was knocking a weapon away from an enemy, picking it up, and watching their reaction.
The first thing that came to mind for me was Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End, but it doesn’t really take the format shown here so I suspect it’s not the reference for this.
It’s just a Flesh Wound
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
“Who says there will be a ‘next time’?”
That’s exactly the question that needs physically made unnecessary to answer. Now, to avoid there being a next time.
last starfighter would have been a much better movie if the cgi wasnt as bad,, i know i loved the book
They were doing the best with what they had at the time. It and TRON were both pretty impressive back in the day.
for the time it was made, Hawk the Slayer was also pretty dang well done
It was released in 1984 after all.
That was 36 years ago.
At that time it was state of the art, unless you wanted several days to render each frame of the film, and even that would look rather poor by todays standards.
It was pretty fantastic for when it was done, but our rendering tech, as well as the computing power to process all that, has drastically increased. The computer I’m using is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer from the early 80s, and I’d bet yours is as well, unless you’re just using your phone.
But it would be nice to see it re-rendered with modern resources. (Of course, cheap knockoffs are always cheap knockoffs.)
I’ll always remember that the computers on the Moon Landings were somewhat less impressive than the C64…
Please don’t say that too loudly, some a-hole will try to reboot it and ruin it entirely.
It’s nice to know that Monty Python is universal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UijhbHvxWrA
I’m obliged to point out that Cora is playing the part of the Black Knight, who ended up limbless. He lost. (Or Arthur declared “We’ll call it a draw, then.”)
Cora could be thought of as The Black Knight’s retribution. Revenge of the Handi-capable!
It’s just occurring to me, didn’t I kind of see this same villain in Infinity War? Only not as sexy? I’d been wondering who she reminded me of…
*clicks on link* Dmytro Bajda does do good work. Bewbage aside, his faces and eyes are very expressive.
This just occurred to me…back when Syd was fighting kaiju, squidward and the tractpr-eye. her lightbee transported her and her shield. I wonder if she can take others along for the ride inside the shield. That would be a great way to get Max out of the force beam. Pop the shield over Max and then light-bee out of the influence. She could also put the molest-orb to good use beating the weapon holder. 14 tons aught to do some interesting things if she smacks the gun into the ground.
At least so far, I believe Syd’s teleport is limited to herself.
Seems interesting indeed it took her clothing too, so why not the entire internal inventaris of the shield/
Last time the shield an attack came in the shield it reflected the attack back at Sydney.
I confess that was kinetic attack, but it’s not something I would like to try.
Putting up the shield first and flying in-between is safer and doesn’t lock Max temporarily in a bubble she has confirmed not to be able to leave easy(just before Maxima’s show off)
There’s also a last drawback to Sydney assisting in this fight: there’s a reason to suspect her orbs are NTH-tech and if the galaxy even suspected such a thing it would result in an interstellar war.
As far as I can tell the light bee creates an illusory double of Sydney as she appears, which includes all equipment because it would be useless otherwise, this allows for certain accompanying features like being able to use the senses of the double either instead of or in addition to (I don’t know which) her own, and later, after an upgrade, swapping locations with her double.
I would imagine the reason her teleport brings her shield is because the shield centers on her person as a default, and so if her person moves the shield moves with her. Unless and until it is shown otherwise, I would assume that from the perspective of everything not sydney the effect of the shield when paired with the light bee is the shield ceases in it’s original location and begins in the new location. We have no reason to believe the shield brings it’s contents with it under those circumstance, and I would assume it gets treated like a new shield is projected rather than all of the matter within gets taken with it.
Granted I could totally see an upgrade for the light bee including the ability to make projections of more than just your person and accessories but also possibly some environmental objects, such as people, and if it can make a projection of it I would assume the teleport would also bring the other stuff projected when Sydney swaps places, but we have no reason to expect it to allow for passengers at this time.
Good point.
“[Sydney’s Lightbee] allows for certain accompanying features like being able to use the senses of the double either instead of or in addition to (I don’t know which) her own” – Psychie
I’m fairly sure it’s instead of, rather than in addition to. Can’t remember the page citation, but I think it was referred to during the initial evaluation interview where the Orbs were first introduced.
I’m still waiting for Sydney and cohorts to get involved.
Sydney: You’re under arrest for multiple counts of assaulting a federal officer.
Shield gets hit with a blaster bolt.
Sydney: +1
Unwinds the Hentacle.
No one is using the real name when writing about the Lighthook. This is of course fine by me. I’m easily amused like that.
I still like the name “Molestorb”.
“The Violator” is still my fave.
*Making the tentacle stand up wriggling*
Sydney”how you lose is our choice. When I defeat you using this at least you will feel like a winner”
Except when she first met Sydney Cora said she was used to having her limbs look mechanical. And while robotic looking limbs do qualify as “real physical materials, from the context that doesn’t appear to be what your intent was at all.
She’s used to them looking mechanical, because in high school she didn’t have such a chigue suit, but it’s still combat advantageous to make them look like normal clothed limbs, because of situations like the one above.
So…for those calling for Max to “power through” the stasis effect…
I don’t think she can, depending on how it works. If it’s effecting the flow time for her, then it doesn’t matter how strong or fast she is. She’s basically Thor wrestling Old Age at that point (mythology reference).
From a narrative angle…look, I know we all love Max…but do we really want her turning into Big Blue? Heroes who can just overpower anything are boring. There’s no real stakes, no real risk of failure.
Think back to Sydney’s Kaiju Hunt. That was exciting & fun because, although she’s got a cool suite of powers, they all have limits & rules. We could believe that the character was credibly at risk.
Yes, it’s fun watching Max go HAM, but that’s going to get dull, fast. And it’s not as though she’s being damseled here, either. Yes, she has literally been made a purely passive object, but not a way that takes her out of character. This situation also give the rest of the ensemble an opportunity to flex, and demonstrate that every member of The Team is reliant on every other member of the team to not just handle the specific tasks they can’t, but literally watch and protect each other’s backs.
Heck, the only reason Halo hasn’t intervened “yet” is that narrative flow requires real-world time to show us this bit, and that the passage of time in a comic is all wibbly anyway!
In superhero comics the strongest superheroes like Maxima and Superman are often temporarily neutralized so that the other supers can have a chance to show what they can do. DC comics would be boring if there wasn’t cryptonite.
I think you have come up with a new variation. Crypt-onite turns Superman into a zombie.
Lol.
It’s the Black Lantern Corps, and No.
So much no.
Nope, in fact. All the nope.
Crypt-o-nite is the name of the most hip new nightclub located in the crypt of the former church now serving as Sydney’s comic shop.
Crypto Night is an annual underground monster convention.
*see every story arc of Dragon Ball Z
(Where’s Goku?)
STOPPING the flow of time for her, means that it doesn’t matter how strong or fast she is.
EFFECTING (read “Slowing” or “Dilating”) the flow of time for her is something that can be powered through, once she has enough dilated time to assess that she is nearly frozen relative to everyone else, shift he power to speed, and then execute.
Sure, buddy.
*headpat*
“Speed” doesn’t necessarily translate to accelerated comprehension. If they dilated time enough for her, it’s still gonna take her a comparative three weeks to even realize that she’s been caught. Still though, the range and complexity of her powers have never been fully explored, for all we know, it does mean accelerated comprehension.
If this is confirmed to be a high-quality “stasis” field (of the time dilation variety), then assuming a large dilation factor is reasonable. But it could be cheap, due to bad planning or intel, or any other artifact of overconfidence.
We have confirmation that these people (mercenaries?) are clearly not aware of who Cora is or at least her capabilities in individual combat, so they haven’t researched every bit of info that would probably be available to the galactic community, much less every bit of info from Earth that might be available about Max – such as the coverage of the bank “robbery”. They probably planned and acted relatively quickly (to get ahead of other mercenary teams, maybe? who knows)
They may not have any awareness of, and therefore not have any concern for the impacts to their tactical plan, related to Maxima’s super speed, as they only heard about her shooting energy from her hands on the Galactinet. They may therefore have cut corners and gotten the cheap time dilator gun (1:10k dilation factor), assuming that to be sufficient and that once they got her into the more important, higher-quality, stasis chamber (with 1:1 Trillion time dilation factor or something), she would be far more immobilized, for safe interstellar transport (to the client?).
As for speed of comprehension, that’s absolutely correct, but the correlation of super movement to super perception is high, across super-powered fiction. There is at least some requirement for accelerated perception required to grab a bullet out of the air with a thumb and pointer finger – a feat that Maxima herself has shown in this comic. Whether it would suffice for allowing her to perceive her predicament from within this particular stasis field, and for enabling her to extract herself from it, is something we’ll have to wait to see.
I hope we can pretty much all at least agree that increased speed without increased perception is a very self-defeating power set — much like super strength without super durability. We’ve yet to see anything self-defeating about Maxima. The only weakness we’ve been given (through the cast page at least) is the POSSIBLE exception of her powers are not all at absolute full strength all the time – she would have to shift them, but I have trouble calling that self-defeating)
Further thoughts?
if its a stasis field that produces an equilibrium containment field absorbing and countering the target’s kinetic output with equal force so no movement is possible, a much cheaper option if all they know about her is the energy beam and assume she Is just a living canon; then Max could still be aware and crank up her speed and strength to over tax the gun and power through.
people talk of her powering through breaking narrative, but so too does having a readily available device on the galactic market that can shut down any super instantly.
I’m a bit surprised that Cora doesn’t have an “electric eel” field on her limbs, for just such an opponent. True, not every melee weapon is conductive, but sooner or later she’s going to get up close and personal with someone – either hitting or being hit – and that extra jolt can be the force multiplier she would need to end the fight.
Solid light isn’t conductive, no charge carriers.
What I’d expect is for her solid light limbs to be hollow, and full of guns; The world’s best concealment holsters.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just use them as lasers? But I guess it would look cooler of she pulls out guns from her legs ala Robocop.
“My God…it’s full of GUNS!” (Paraphrase of the first line in 2010: The Year we made Contact)
My hovercraft is full of eels.
My nipples explode with the light!
That’s, DELIGHT!!!
Dee-Lite actually :P
You can use certain types of radiation(broader term including human invisible parts) to ionize things and, since an ion is just a charged atom(missing or too much electrons) you could try to charge enough atoms to make it effective.
Okay now- attempting to kidnap a federal officer?
I think it’s time for some murderin- i mean, some preportional force.
…
No, they’re slavers. Kill’em.
The phrase “Roadrash on tits” instantly made me cringe.
Yeah me too. Saw a pre-op hospital pic of 3/4 helmet road rash. Don’t ever look it up, or get tricked into seeing it. I still can’t mind bleach if from memory. Only good thing – they lived.
One pic I will never show my parents.
I’m kind of a little dissapointed that I couldn’t find anything on google by searching that, just helmet ads. I’m the kid that watched surgery on PBS as a kid, so that kind of thing doesn’t phase me anymore. Still, the faceless person they showed us to prevent drinking and driving while in the military, that one still haunts me a bit.
Yes, there is a distinct difference between the road rash that occurs when you take a fall jogging or bicycling and the meat grinder effect of sliding along the pavement at 60 mph. It’s funny how blood doesn’t phase me so much but I still feel sympathy pain when I see a video of someone taking a face plant
Dave’s comments on rendering are intriguing. I normally hate “invisibility” tech like the Bond cars use, where something is made invisible by putting a bunch of cameras on one side and a bunch of tiny screens on the other. It completely ignores perspective and binocular vision – even with processing, it could only look right from exactly one location for one observer. Cora’s armor would have the same issue rendering highlights and reflections – even with unlimited processing, which observer do you render it for?
But if hardlight has unlimited rendering power and such fine-grained control, maybe it really can render a version per observer. The hardlight boundaries could be manipulated on the fly to create lenticular lenses and with appropriate high-frequency imagery for each viewer.
However doing this at high resolution for more than 2-3 moving observers, while Cora is also moving and with a large number of lighting sources, would require nearly molecular control of the surface. At which point, it would probably take less time / power to just actually texture the surface and let light take its course.
I suspect that if it’s ‘hard’ light, it doesn’t really have to render reflections and shading. If the fields are opaque and have enough fine surface texture, that alone should handle all the shading/reflectivity naturally. If not, I’d say it’s kinda moot, really.
As for it rendering a ‘different appearance for every viewer’, I don’t even think that’s physically possible, since they’d all overlap, it’d look like a big smudge to a room full of differently positioned observers.
If it is a holographic projection, the position of the viewer won’t matter.
Incorrect – a regular hologram can render only a static (albeit rapidly refreshed) image. Reflections are dynamic. As Sigurther and I both point out, it would have to render an actual textured surface to look real from all angles.
…….all the headliner supers are within shouting distance right now………this is about to become a very one sided fight.
Dabbler is a good galactic mercenary and thus can easily follow most headliner supers in quality of work.
Galactic mercenaries have apparently enough magitech to be able to handle most of them.
Once again Fighting for the fun of it, while their friends/team mates are in danger. I think Dabbler needs to go back to basic training.
Couldn’t Dabbler just put them to sleep, like she did in comic 235 with the lightbug Or her hollo copy from 219? or the Mummy Missile ( that uses myolinear ribbons ) from 220?
I’m waiting for Dabblers laser tickler to show ip.
Dabbler never did basic training, that would require her being part of ARCHON, she’s not, she’s just a consultant and can leave any time she wants, plus, she can literally tell Maxi “You’re not the boss of me!”
OTOH, (in the real world) militarish groups simply and politely tell the consultants to stay out of the way, preferably near the big TV screen so they don’t miss the action. Either that or become a target for being in the way. Consultants that want to join the fray/fun have to accept militarish discipline.
Except, most ‘consultants’ are simply paper-pushers or cyber-geeks, either only along to ‘observe’ or to make sure their machine doesn’t break down and kill the wrong people
And Dabbles is military (sort of), well, an adventurer anyway
Those all worked, because her opponents were very one sided defended.
This are alien mercenaries with shielding who were prepared to fight her. I certainly suspect they would think of shielding against the easiest weapons to shield against she has shown to journalists.
The Gal-gal shield probably can have the mummy missile easily, since it depends on the distance it perceives the target to be and the gal-gal 8 shield is transparent and hyper advanced, so probably capable of of sabotaging some flying turbo paper.
As for the sleep spell. They probably have just as Dabbler and Vehemence some kind of magical resistance or they’ve just as Sydney a shield that can stop magic(debuff aura guardian).
Cora can be forgiven for not knowing the Earth tropes, even as she unintentionally quotes them.
Dabbler, OTFH (On The Fourth Hand – What, that’s how many she has!), has no excuse for not quoting, “Have a Nice Trip, Detla, See You Next Fall!”
at moment I rather think she cant free command it, but rather simple unassemble at target and reassemble at hand
Made me think of tazer face lol
Why is every line on this page from a meme/movie? Why are you running? Why are you Running!
Because this is a comedy comic, and that was part of today’s gag.
I had difficulty in interpreting panel 5 (the secondhorizontal panel) – particularly the right side of the panel.
I’m probably being stupid, but can someone interpret it for me?
Read the two panels on the left first, then P6 shows the recovery to vertical and fight-back.
Standard comicology.
However, I’m impressed with Detla’s healing speed, there’s very little evidence of road-rash on her tits. And her bodice is some tough material!
Ah. Oops. Didn’t read the question properly. P5 RHS shows RayC giving Garamm some curry. Possibly — we live in hope — even grakz :)
I suspect she is actually armored there. We just don’t see it.
If she hasn’t she is leaving a hole near her heart and lungs making her really vunerable.
Dabbler has shown in the mannequin fight that wrapping a glamour around armour is an option.
I just can’t help but think about Cora’s hard-light programming and it’s UI.
My thought is this… the smart way wouldn’t program to switch between weapons on command (except by maybe some “advanced & search” menu), because you can’t take that time in combat. Instead, three inputs: observed opponent weaknesses (maybe triggered if the system reads something or Cora says something she’s deduced outloud), current opponent location (easily figured by tracking where she’s looking and swinging), and current body motion (I mean, the hard light is *making* the weapon, no reason it couldn’t read what’s happening at the same time.)
With these three inputs, the system then picks the optimal weapon from from stored designs without ever needing a manual AI. She’s swinging her fist at something with a hard but crack-able carapace at short range? Out comes the pile driver with spike. Opponent almost out of range, Cora making a wide sweeping motion, and they’re fleshy with organs? Spear time. Midrange and stabbing motion with a single weak point? Fencing foil.
Sound.
Although if the system can distinguish friend from foe, then it could also be programmed to extrude a spear straight through an opponent. Or every foe nearby, for that matter. Extruding a flat sheet could bisect any foe.
I guess the limitation on the latter option being whether the hard light projectors can be focused inside another object. But if it cannot, then just keep adding more to the opposite side of the pointy end, so that it is pushed forwards as each section is added.
Do that fast enough and you can emulate or exceed the force that mere muscle power could provide. It could even brace against the floor, so that Cora would not have to be gradually pushed back, due to the equal and opposite reaction.
Definitely a fair point.
Counter-point though:
Cora likes to show off and look good at what she does, and attract hunks to come back with her, and being a horror-sprouting space-sea urchin would be counter to that.
Lol.
Conceded.
Okay, seriously, what the heck is the rest of ArcSWAT doing?
Can we please not have another epic super brawl where the majority of the screen time gets eaten up by Dabbler?
Let’s look at who Maxima chose for this mission, and who got left behind. Other than Sydney, the rest are, well, Super but not spectacularly so. They’re happily interacting with the tourists as though they were Disney Cast. Dabbler and Cora would seem tailor-maidens for dealing with Space Tourists.
Who got left behind? The rest of the rookies, and the rest of the over-powered team members. Given that there are no long-range teleporters (except Harem) on the rest of the team, and Harem has limits for load-out, Arcswat will not be coming to its own rescue. That leaves it up to: Sydney, Dabbler, Cora, and the Three Amigos.
Only four attacks have been made so far, it seems like this is just happening on a very short timescale.
Read this on my phone first, so I didn’t realize until now that Detla actually DOES have the road rash on her tits after the fall.
If you can’t stop the ads, can you at least slow them down? They are refreshing every 15 to 30 seconds!
I’ve not been seeing any ads, but something (I was just blaming my crappy old computer that needs replaced and can’t even download chrome) has been slowing and freezing my computer when in the comments too long. The fact I can’t get past the are you 18 on the patreon has been frustrating *tap button…nothing happens*, when its not there tap for more options for the higher donation/request part, nothing happens. One part is my crappy computer, but other comics with the same options I can get past so there is something causing long scripts and delays too.
Four ads on the right side and one at the bottom
My best guess going by my own problem is the one at the bottom auto-refreshing or animated is causing the problem the most. My computer lacks the resources to keep up with the size of the page while scrolling and the ads refreshing.
Not just the bottom one, and even closing the ads using the tiny ‘x’ (that some don’t even have… ) doesn’t do shit as they return even without the page being refreshed
Not asking for them to be removed, as they are still a form of revenue for DaveB, just asking for something to be done as they are making it troublesome to read the comments
“… and can’t even download chrome …” Don’t you remember the horrors with many versions of IE? Do yourself a flavour, and simply ignore Chrome. Chrome comes to you from the same people that invented Android (the least privacy-aware OS in history) and the concept that “All your email are belong to us”. And frankly, WebKit and its bastard child Blink are worse than IE ever was: they both have problems trying to organise a chook-raffle in a pub.
Basically, just use Chrome for UBoob, a Game Of Thrones game (which haven’t actually played in months, still log in every day, on two accounts) and porn games
Apart from the ad issue, have no problems with IE
IE is a bug-riddled relic, at least upgrade to its successor Edge which began replacing it 5 years ago (roughly 87 internet years).
Edge and Chrome are both built in the open-source browser core Chromium; there’s been talk of Apple adopting it as well but I don’t think that will happen soon. If you trust neither Google nor Microsoft’s baked-in tracking, try Brave which is also Chromium-based but has a different revenue model.
No matter what you use, get an adblock extension (like this one) as well, and only turn it off for trusted / frequently-visited sites (like this one) or support them directly instead (e.g. Patreon). It’s not only a far better browsing experience, it’s much more secure.
Like said, no problems with IE (inferior to Netscape Navigator though :( )
Chrome is very much aware of privacy, in a Terminator sort of way.
It is funny because it’s true. The sword never actually cut flesh, just light.
Cora has plenty of cycles to spare. Those aren’t tits, they’re shock mounted coprocessors.
Haha, it’s funny because it’s literally not even a flesh wound!