Grrl Power #921 – Watergate-SG1
Before you go scrambling to google, “obstroculous” is a word Mrs. Slocombe of “Are You Being Served” made up. Based on context, it means “obstructive” or “being difficult” as in a person, not like a math problem. There is a word, “Obstropulous” meaning “noisy or rough, especially in resisting restraint or control,” and arguably, Mrs. Slocombe might have been saying that, but to me it’s funnier that she’s trying to sound fancy, but is doing it with a made-up word. Yes, yes. All words are made up. Like “matmass,” apparently. What we know for sure is that HenchWench watched “Are You Being Served” and is convinced Mrs. Slocombe said “obstroculous.”
The speed of sound in water is 3316 MPH or 5336 km/hr so it is almost 4.5 times faster than in air. The source I found that states this doesn’t take water pressure into account, and the speed of sound varies depending on altitude/barometric pressure, so I imagine the above figure is for a single additional atmosphere of pressure, which I think is like 37-ish feet. So yeah, Max is unhappy at the moment. It’s actually a little silly she’s going that fast underwater, and I debated changing this, but I ultimately decided to leave it in so you guys would have something extra to talk about. I suspect moving this quickly through water would have some additional effects, like vaporizing a massive amount of it in your wake or something. I’m not sure anyone knows what really would happen, as it would be insanely difficult to test it. Probably the only thing that has moved that quickly underwater is a meteor.
I came up with this page, imagining that the Hudson or East River or the Upper Bay, or wherever HenchWench portaled them to, are like 300 feet deep. Something that would be actually be pretty disorienting. Of course, getting zapped into any depth of water under about 15 feet at night would be pretty disorienting. Anyway, most of the rivers around New York are like 30-60 feet deep, which is really surprising to me. Parts of it are as deep as 160 feet, but really, a river is only as deep as its shallowest point if you’re trying to sail it.
I think that’s the Brooklyn Bridge Max is popping out by. The interwebs say the water around there is between 24′ and 108.’ So I guess HenchWench has done some underwater scouting for a good emergency bail spot?
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… Well that was incredibly stupid. She’s signed legal contracts that have her personal information attached to them. They’d be able to back trace pretty much everything back to where she lives.
Not really a problem for a teleporter. She’d be out of there in 5 minutes after grabbing her cat and other things. She’s got time to get a change of clothes and get dry at least. She could be working for Deus in less time than that given her performance against Maxima as well so we’ll likely see her again, in Africa.
Deus isn’t going to hire her after that performance. He likes sublety and good PR, and like any Boss, he likes loyal employees.
Oh, Deus wouldn’t hire her _openly_, of course. Not while she was still wanted and an American citizen. He’d just arrange for her to be hired by whoever he needed a power-clone of at any given moment. How much exporting is Galatyn doing again…? (And does Vale count as a super for the purposes of power-cloning?)
Openly or not doesn’t make a difference. He can’t trust her.
Doesn’t really matter who hires her. Especially considering all they have to do is find her. It’s a matter of where can she run. Since she’s basically limited to the legal realm of contracts as we’ve seen here. Legally labeling her a terrorist effectively voids legal contracts in that regard. US being part of the UN security council could likely extend that internationally as well. Thus, outside of select areas she would basically be depowered.
so they take out the person with the rift gate power
I would presume, given the level of terrorist damage to a US city, that she will be marked down as “terminate with prejudice on sight” if she actually escapes.
This is a very short list, and you do not want to be on it.
Love the old Brit sitcoms, we got a steady diet of them on TV in the 70’s and even today.
If you’re looking for inspiration for pure snark try watching “Waiting for God” or “Open all Hours”
or even “The Two Ronnies” for that matter ;)
Knickers would be in twists if you tried to make them today, more’s the pity, we’ve had the abliity to laugh at ourselves taken away by overgrown children who expect to be obeyed blindly and have come out the worse for it.
If you really wanna see knickers getting twisted, get them to watch that English-language sitcom (which… currently can’t recall the name of, but it has this guy trying to teach a stereotypical cross-section of foreigners basic English)
Mind Your Language, apparently
That was it, great comedy that would never be allowed now :(
Technically, there’s a Chinese super-sub that breaks the sound barrier. Sublimation is a thing with it.
And the Russians were doing some stuff with supercavitating torpedoes.
The major problem with both is that once you get going, turning becomes a SERIOUS problem. A torpedo moving that fast has basically one chance to hit its target before it runs out of gas. A submarine moving that fast had better pray no whales get in the way.
Also, there is the problem of guidance systems for torpedoes and human reflex speed for manned submersibles. There is a reason the US Navy went for sneaky rather than fast.
Capitation has been a concern with the screws for decades. Once you get the internal sounds of the engine quieted, it becomes the primary source of noise until you get the shape just right. The US had a major advantage over the USSR in this regard until the Soviets managed to steal the tech.
Maxi is thinking one thing: “This. Means. WAAAGH!!” :P
As Max has mention Bugs Bunny, ” Of course you realize this means war” may be more apt, but the point is much the same.
My first thought as well. ^_^ Now that you bring it up though, this take of Bugs is my favorite.
Ahhh, Mrs Slocombe and her pussy, those were the days
She did go on and on about her pussy didn’t she?
I remember a pbs fundraising drive where they had Mr. Humphrey’s actor on doing an interview and one of the people asked him if he enjoyed measuring an inside thigh as much as the character and he replied with “nobody enjoys measuring an inside thigh as much as that character”
Is the sona guy based of the sofa guy in the film “hunt for the red October”? If so ‘happy nerd noises’
That IS the guy. Just look at his hat, says USS Dallas. :)
Jones: Captain, I just detected an underwater missile launch in the direction of New York harbour!
Sure as hell is not singing nor a magma displacement.
I also am pretty sure the entire Atlantic heard that.
I am so glad other people instantly recognized Jonesy. Its my favorite movie so this pleased me greatly! XD
I watched it just on Friday.
A group of us do a virtual cinema trip on Fridays (VR Cinema, lets us meet up and watch things,) and it was one of my recommendations.
Very timely
:D
obstropolous, or obstropulous btw… (the second one might be what you were looking for) but i love the word any way you use it, it was fun to look it up.
(and yes, I pretty much only looked it up because you said not to) [i know, you didn’t exactly say that, but I’m having fun with it]
:)
I like obstreperous.
Bad idea to taunt the speedster. The speedster might tackle you at 100+ mph as she follows you THROUGH the portal before it closes. Maxima is being way too restrained here.
Unless of course she planted a homing beacon on HenchW…
Something that I learned from a friend, who was in the Coast Guard, sonic booms under water are deadly-deadly. Due to the density of the water, versus air, much more energy is released in the compression waves. Math geeks, please take it from here.
Just getting a sonic boom underwater is… Kinda not a thing, actually? Cavitation and super cavitation tend to happen first, putting a stop to that. However, if you could manage it, well, the speed of sound in water is much faster than it is in air.
There are a couple of species of shrimp that create underwater sonic booms with their claws in order to stun their prey.
Some are even powerful enough to create visible sonoluminescence, are among the loudest sea creatures, and can wreak havoc with nearby sonar.
They’re using cavitation actually.
They are using death rays.
Any wave travelling faster through a medium than the medium’s speed of sound is a shock wave and experienced by an observer as a sonic boom.
The shrimps’ claws create cavitation bubbles, but when the bubbles collapse, they generate shock waves powerful enough to stun or kill anything in range.
In a denser medium than air such as water, the shock waves dissipate much more quickly, so the shrimp’s effective range is very short.
That said, different shrimp have differing specliaist claws.
For example, species of mantis shrimp, as mentioned by Dena below, have large claws which can produce a powerful near-omnidirectional shockwave able to stun, kill, or even dismember nearby victims.
Species of pistol shrimp, on the other hand, have smaller claws but they contain a plunger and chamber, allowing them to direct their weaker shockwaves so that only their intended victim is stunned, and also at an increased range.
What we see with Maxima is analogous to the pistol shrimp, where Maxima is acting as the plunger directing the shockwave along her path of travel and prolonging the effect until she breaks the surface.
And that’s folks’ favorite clown – the mantis shrimp.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
You can use chemical reactions to get supersonic expansion – i.e. a depth charge.
Much easier to do sonically. That can be managed with a few transducers in a tank.
http://acoustics-research.physics.ucla.edu/sonoluminescence
Former sonar technician speaking.
That’s the idea behind depth charges. The underwater explosion creates extreme pressure waves that, hopefully, will crack a submarine’s hull. Once it’s cracked the general pressure of the water all around will cause implosion.
Hedgehogs were another anti-submarine device used decades ago – a batch of explosive-tipped mortar-like devices were flung into the water over where the submarine was thought to be. When they hit the sub’s hull they exploded. The explosive charge in hedgehogs was not large, but again, the shock wave generated was amplified by the pressure of the water at depth.
Modern anti-submarine torpedoes are significantly smaller than anti-ship torpedoes for the same reason. You need a sizeable explosive charge to severely damage an aircraft carrier or other large surface ship. You only need a small charge to crack a submarine’s hull and cause it to implode when it’s 200 feet down because of the water pressure.
Out of curiosity, do modern sonars auto-compensate for the “volume” to protect the operator? I was just thinking to myself that Jonesy and USS Dallas must be pretty far away considering he is merely perplexed at what he is hearing and not ripping off the headphones and covering his ears in pain. I have seen too many movies watching sonar operators taking the headphones off in advance of an expected explosion or reeling in pain after an unexpected one.
Hmmm. There is no reason that technology couldn’t be set up to damp sounds that go above certain decibel levels. If they can, they should. It’s not expensive at all, and I doubt if there’s any application that would make it not a required safety feature.
In theory, maybe, but even electronics has a finite reaction speed. If Maxima’s boom is still a coherent shock wave by the time it reaches the Dallas, then the rise time would be effectively instantaneous.
There’s also a maximum possible volume a given headset can output, hopefully they’re designed with a maximum power well below the threshold of eardrum damage.
Greater minds make up their own words. Hench Wench is thinking with portals.
She should have aimed for the shower/tub. Oh well, time to portal to get a steam cleaner before that river water starts to stink.
If she had sense to aim for the tub, she would have had the sense to aim for… anywhere except her living room first
She was jumping away from someone with super speed and only momentarily caught off guard. Doubtful she had much time to ping her focus jump point on anything not very immediately familiar to her and quickly.
Poor kitty got a scare
That poor cat in the last panel looks like it’s about to have a stroke!
Well if you were napping on top of your Kitty Tower, and suddenly are splashed with a wave of cold water, You would be upset too.
USS Dallas. Nice touch. :)
I know, right?
I guess someone “just unzipped their fly and put their d*ck on the table.”
(Max would kill me for that reference XD )
That was… really dumb of Maxima. The wave she’s going to generate doing that will be about like setting off a small nuke in NY harbour. It’s not the shipping capital it used to be, but still… gotta be hundreds of millions in damages. I wouldn’t be surprised if it topped a billion. And I doubt they will ever have an exact casualty count, given the whole bodies being swept out to see thing, but certainly dozens. If there is an event near the water that night, thousands.
This was the line of my thoughts. I’m not sure on the math but given that sonic booms near ground level can cause a decent amount of damage through the medium of air I imagine it will be, uh, “bad” underwater.
At the very least there’s going to be a lot of dead fish in the harbor.
I didn’t check the 136 previous comments thoroughly to see if this was addressed, but if you open a portal from the air to underwater, won’t their be a sudden gush of water through the air side of the portal until it closes?
Come to think of it, if Henchwench opened deep enough, the resulting pressure would have forced her into the air on a column of water, negating that escape route. Panel six implies a few fathoms, at least.
Finally, her apartment wouldn’t just be wet, it seems the blast of water pressure would have sent furniture tumbling and crashing. Kitty would have been flung off its tower as it toppled like a bowling pin. At the very least Henchwench has violated her lease/renter’s contract and caused damage to any adjacent or lower apartment. People would be talking.
Being a super is hard.
Clearly, that’s not how that particular portal works, or that would be in play during the jump to and the jump away from the undersea spot. Apparently, the air or water is not transported en masse.
The rush of air in the opposite direction is to balance out the vacuum forming at the top of the container as the liquid rushes out the bottom. Considering the ‘top of the container’ in this scenario is just earth’s atmosphere I don’t think there’s a negative pressure that needs to be balanced.
Hey, I recognize that deeply disturbed sonar tech!
Looks like he just discovered a new biological.
Me too! I loved it! The hat was a good touch too
if they are at 300 ft under water, then the pressure at that depth is about 145 PSI or roughly 10 Atmospheres of pressure. Going from 1 Atm to 10 Atm is very bad. Consider that since the water went with her into her apartment, then the air went with her into the water, meaning when they got there, the watter would have slammed into them with about 130 PSI with an average human having about 2800 square inches of surface area, makes for a total force of 364000 lbs of pressure, or 182 tons of pressure. Max might survive, pretty sure Hench Wench would become a pink paste.
Only about 50 feet is shown on screen, counting from Max’s height. The surface is visible in the background on panel 3. There’s no certainty of scale, but that limits it to an extra 2 atmospheres at 66 feet.
Dave also corrected himself in the comments where he realized the depth in the river where he planned wasn’t as deep as he initially intended. So even at 32 ft, you are at 2 atm, so 21 tons instead. Still a pretty heavy hit for most people.
While 21 tons sounds impressive it’s pretty misleading. To get a better idea of what it would feel like you need to think in terms of pounds per square inch (PSI). Doing the math again using your numbers 21 tons over 2800 square inches is going to be 15 PSI. I just googled how many pounds per square inch a human punch is and it said an untrained person can hit for about 60-85 PSI. Even your earlier estimate at 300ft underwater would put it at 130 PSI where a trained striker can get upwards of 200 PSI. Now getting punched by Mike Tyson on every square inch of your body simultaneously certainly wouldn’t be comfortable but might be survivable for quite a few. The real problem is that the air pockets in your body, such as your lungs, would immediately shrivel up and I suspect some of the space that air was taking up would want to be filled by whatever was available, like the high pressure water waiting to get in your lungs. I’m not sure that would happen but even so, air at pressure gets metabolized much faster and the air that was at 1 atmosphere in your lungs is now under 10 atm of pressure which means it’s now 1/10 of its original volume and you effectively have that much less to breathe.
Just as an addendum to my own comment I know for a fact that the air in your lungs at 1 atm of pressure taken down to 10 atm would mean the volume of that air would be 1/10 of its size but I don’t know if that means it would be metabolized at a commensurately faster rate, just that it would faster.
Wouldn’t it be funny/awesome if Halo’s aetheron gateway ball buzzed her right about now? It might prove Cora quite wrong about gateway tech…
The big problem with that kind of teleporting would be the pressure issues – which would be MASSIVE at any depth beyond a few feet….
Huh… are those air bubbles I spy? The question now is, how long can Maxima hold her breath? Does she even need to breath? Welp, if anyone wants to fight her, that’s one thing to certainly think about!
YAY! She got away! I like her :) Power setup is a bit weird, but still, I like her :)
Credit where it’s due!
This chick comes off as a moron, but has backup plans for her backup plans.
She’s becoming The (Ainley) Master with increasingly complex backup plans just in case his less complex prior plans don’t work.
Unfortunately a lot of her plans seem to rely on other people being dumb, as Arianna pointed out earlier.
I think that’s a safer bet than depending on other people being smart. People are pretty reliably dumb.
Relying on the employer(s) to be mind numbingly stupid when trying to get hired is not a particularly good strategy, one would figure
HA! I love the USS Dallas easter egg! Brilliant touch!
Okay. I really really REALLY dont like smarmy OP villains like this. But. That just means they are being written perfectly. I do hope they manage to give Wench a comeuppance though…and once word gets around of her betrayal…and it will…it should be interesting.
Me either, and I ESPECIALLY don’t like it when they get away
Did she?
They have her photo and maybe bits of her DNA. If they have the contract, even if she gave fake personal information, then they have a paper trail.
It is insane what modern forensics can do in the real world with such evidence. Add in supers or Arc-Light/Dark? The ARC version of CSI WILL be called for this. She won’t get away.
And even if she does? Not even the Joker would trust her now.
You may have meant “obstreperous” – noisy and difficult to control..
Read the author’s blurb under the comic – he addresses this.
its a reference not a mistake.
It’s a feature not a bug. :)
And the cat looks like another Jonesy. Wonder if there’s a Jonesy connection with Devito?
I think the cat is the portal super she wrote the emergency contract with, Don Fluffles!
I hope for HW’s sake that her apartment has hardwood floors.
I do believe that Archon has her home address.
Max totally has ‘This isn’t over yet, you little shit’ face in Panel 5.
Hench Wench is giving some serious Grinch face in that second panel.
So I’m not sure if it has been covered already, but what happened to Hench’s leg wound? Did it get healed by one of her transformations?
The leg wound, and the missing teeth, appear to have been reset when HW pulled her physical body into the ghost-form and was then forced back out. I suspect the ghost-form largely takes its reference from the user’s mental self-image rather than their actual physical state at the time, with said self-image invariably being in a whole and healthy state.
Arianna is going to get an earful from our golden goddess about not cancelling all the little villaineses contracts in one go. Sloppy research. My Lawyer friends in titles and holdings would tut tut that major oversight.
Arianna had probable cause to show the Judge in asking for the ‘Evil LLC’ to be suspended, and the co-operation of several of its parties to make sure that she had all the details. She does not have anything like that level of knowledge about any other contracts that HW may have entered into, nor the information about their motives that would get her through the legalities. The LLC was only accessible because it is a specific legal construct that needs to be officially registered and sanctioned; there is no similar obligation for a private contract between two people to be registered and therefore accessible.
All of what Scott’s Folly said, plus the fact that HW apparently thinks she can gain the powers of her employer (as long as they’re a qualified supervillain), based on nothing more than a verbal agreement for temporary employment to provide a simple service, and it doesn’t even have to be a particularly evil service. “Hey! You want to hire me to go get you another milk?” HW said to Kevin in her imagination last comic. Unless it was evil milk I guess.
Rewrite: Panel 3, Maxima keeps her grip underwater. Panel 4: Maxima’s eyes narrow; crosscut Panel 5: Henchwench eyes widen as she realizes her mistake. Panel 6: underwater, shilloettes of Maxima and Henchwench, the latter of which is missing their neck as the water is bright red around where Maxima’s hand should be.
US colonels don’t fuck around with dangerous sociopaths that can amass, game, and horde superpowers.
Next page I’m hoping there’s a sonic boom and Maxima obliterates her after Arianna gives her Henchwench’s address.
Arc is law enforcement. Not military. I would highly doubt, “Kill them” is an order one would be given to a cop. Even if these cops are using military rank titles.
Clearly you are not familiar with the practices of law enforcement and counter terrorism.
Fact is, if the next page doesn’t have Henchwench in cuffs, Maxima’s in deep shit. There was an interstellar incident in times square new york in which a supervillain caused great property damage, Maxima was teleported away with her, and henchwench got away. There are going to be questions. There are going to be politicians looking to make a soundbite. Because Arc told the public ‘We are here to police Supers.” They succeeded in 1. If Hench escapes, it won’t matter that they caught 1-4… because the 5th one was on camera handing Maxima her ass and the one that GOT AWAY.
So is Arc incompetent? Is MAXIMA incompetent? Very public, politically awkward and embarrassing moments can cause very critical changes in national decisions. TPP looked like a done deal… till it wasn’t. And that didn’t involve supers causing property damage in times square. People will be asking the same things the aliens asked “You clearly could have ended this sooner… why didn’t you?”
I don’t expect this to do something like get her fired or even end Arc, but I do expect it will have consequences. As it stands, the US government would be better off hiring Cora than employing Maxima after this display.
Max was pretty solidly beating her in every panel of their fight, actually.
The whole reason HW went ghost was because Max, despite escalating slowly, was wearing her down solidly.
Gonna have to agree with Brand X on this one. One, she is law enforcement now and despite what it seems like at times here in America, they are not executioners. Two, even if she was still military, killing enemies who have surrendered or are otherwise unarmed and in your custody is still a war crime. Now as a Marine, do I think many military members wouldn’t hesitate to take out some piece of shit regardless of the circumstances if they thought they could get away with it? Ya they totally would. But some military members are a stickler for the rules and Maxima is the closest thing to the physical embodiment of lawful good in this comic.
HW had neither surrendered or was proven to be unarmed.
HW very clearly has poor impulse control and clear malevolent intent. She’s basically the Joker before he was allowed to be an unstoppable killing machine. No one is going to meaningfully object to Max limbing her and delivering a “surrender or bleed out” ultimatum given the healing powers of the team’s doctor
Nope, at the press conference ARCHON is specifically described as an arm of the military
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-144-pr-hopscotch/
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-147-flying-not-allowed-in-the-super-high-jump/
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-147-flying-not-allowed-in-the-super-high-jump/
US colonels can be surprised though. Which is the reason why Max lost her grip in the first place.
It obvious that HW’s power acted faster than Max could shift into super-speed.
Also; Even in your scenario Max could just thump HW to knock her out. That’s dangerous and could cause brain damage, but far less edgy than manual decapitation.
Clearly you are not familiar with the practices of law enforcement and counter terrorism.
Fact is, if the next page doesn’t have Henchwench in cuffs, Maxima’s in deep shit. There was an interstellar incident in times square new york in which a supervillain caused great property damage, Maxima was teleported away with her, and henchwench got away. There are going to be questions. There are going to be politicians looking to make a soundbite. Because Arc told the public ‘We are here to police Supers.” They succeeded in 1. If Hench escapes, it won’t matter that they caught 1-4… because the 5th one was on camera handing Maxima her ass and the one that GOT AWAY.
So is Arc incompetent? Is MAXIMA incompetent? Very public, politically awkward and embarrassing moments can cause very critical changes in national decisions. TPP looked like a done deal… till it wasn’t. And that didn’t involve supers causing property damage in times square. People will be asking the same things the aliens asked “You clearly could have ended this sooner… why didn’t you?”
I don’t expect this to do something like get her fired or even end Arc, but I do expect it will have consequences. As it stands, the US government would be better off hiring Cora than employing Maxima after this display.
Looks like this portal is an encapsulate and then transport type, forming kind of sack or mouth that can be jumped into (hence looking like a cloud vortex on the inside when she tried to jump backwards into it before as being a pocket dimension capsule), or can scoop up the target close around them and then open and release the contents of the capsule at a new location, hence scooping up water rather than making a gate that water would flow through.
Which makes this an in-between power in a sense, a half-way point between a regular walk through portal and a teleporter.
In the second of the “Jumper” novels by Steven Gould (great books, lousy movie adaptation that departed almost entirely from the books), he figures out how to hold his personal teleportation portal open indefinitely, and [spoiler alert] uses it to bridge a spot deep underwater to the roof of the villains’ office building headquarters…
Yeah, I think of the movie as “The Adaptive Abomination of which we will not speak.”
Finally, sonar enthusiasts will have something new to argue over besides The Bloop! …at least until they see the inevitable flood (ha) of social media posts from waterside security cameras, then they’ll have to go back to comparing The Bloop to the Wow Signal.
I’m surprised Max’s reflex was to let go of Hench’s throat rather than squeeze harder.
So…what about being teleported underwater made Max let go of her neck? Because I see no reason she would have.
Muscle memory from being trained to unclench her hands when surprised so as a soldier she would shoot a kid or small animal surprising her around a corner perhaps.
Is that kind of training actually part of soldier training?*
* I don’t know how to military, in spite of having some close friends that have served. They don’t describe military rules to me, I don’t narrate to them how their house stays up or their smartphone loads websites, everyone’s happy.
It doesn’t have to be regular soldier training, as long as it was Maxi-training, because she is a Super soldier and the last time she impulsively reacted, she almost became an only child