Grrl Power #1176 – Downgrayedd
I’m actually rooting for Maxima’s plan, but when it can be not inaccurately spun as “Superheroine plans on unleashing death portal in order to further empower her own militarized super powered police force.” mmmmaybe some peer review is in order.
This is the “potentially catastrophic danger” Dabbler mentioned on the prior page. Like a garden, dungeons need to be pruned and harvested, or they will level up and spill past their borders. Gardens have levels in this analogy.
Actually, that’s just one of the potential dangers. Anytime you have a large concentration of mana in one place, like when you’re initializing a core, things can go wrong in many ways.
I’m fairly confident that a modern military could kick the shit out of most of what might come out of a dungeon IF they were ready for it and educated about what they were fighting. If they were caught by surprise and didn’t have silver ammo or whatever they might need, sure, they could get their ass kicked pretty hard, but it’s hard to see an AC-130 gunship having a hard time against an army of orcs. Okay, sure, if the orcs have a shaman, things could swing pretty hard. And against an army of earth elementals, 5.56 ammo is just not going to help, and who knows if a 20mm Vulcan can penetrate the hide of an Elder Dragon, but that’s kind of my point about education and preparedness.
Also, let me just throw out a pet peeve of mine, is when dudes in fighter jets fly within the arm/wingspan of the giant monster. An F-22 carries AIM-9 Sidewinders, which have a range of TWENTY-TWO MILES, and/or AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles which have a range of up to THIRTY (nautical) MILES. And nautical miles are longer than regular miles! Oh, and by the way, they do have a minimum range of like 0.6 miles. And guess where the idiots in the jets are in every fucking monster movie? That’s right, circling the monster’s head from fifteen feet away or doing loop de loops around its ballsack. And then the generals are all mystified and sad when the pilot roster goes red one after another. It’s fucking stupid.
Of course, my picture in panel 6 of the battleship installation, in reality, wouldn’t be nearly that close to the entrance. If I’d drawn it correctly, you probably wouldn’t be able to see most of the defenses. You got a battleship with 14 inch guns with a range of 7 miles? Obviously you don’t put the thing 300 yards from the entrance. You put it, what, 4 miles back? 5? And this is in an unscalable valley killbox with tons of AA and guns up on top of the walls, and if you’re really doing it right, electrified bands of sheet metal lining the valley walls every 50 feet or so. At least, that’s how you do it right, but as Gault points out, that’d all be crazy expensive. Expensive enough that eventually budgets get “optimized” and after a few decades all that’s left is 600 feet of non-contiguous fencing and a guy with a sidearm operating a plywood toll booth with one of those arms that goes up and down.
FYI, I caught a cold. I’m not saying that to brag, just to let you guys know. And it’s not like, “the end is nigh” sick, or anything, just, I have some low grade crud that’s been adding some drag factor. I actually rarely get sick. Like, I get a proper cold maybe every six years or so. It kind of makes me feel bad because my wife gets a normal amount of colds and, well, the occasional migraine, which I’ve never had to deal with. But when I do get sick, it’s always some low grade crap that takes forever to burn through my system. It’s not Covid either. I got tested twice. Pretty sure it’s just a cold. Maybe the flu? Ah, remember when people just caught run of the mill common colds? Those were the days.
So why am I telling you? On Monday, I wrote one page (I normally write two each Monday) and then I drew… one panel of the comic. Mostly I just stared at the screen, or really, a few inches in front of the screen, nudged dialog text around the page, tried to find a reference for an impossible angle I was drawing (I seem to have a real S-Fucking-Tier talent for drawing shit at angles for which there is no photo reference) and then returned to staring at my screen. The kicker is, on Tuesday, I rewrote part of the page and couldn’t use the one panel I drew. That’s actually ok because the page is better with the rewrite, it’s just kind of funny that I had to ditch my all-day panel. Anyway, I am slowly improving, but there’s a real possibility that a page or two from now might go up with only flat colors or something cause, man, it’s been slow going this week.
Also I’m aware I still owe you a new vote incentive. I’m not going to skip a month or anything, I just hope once I get fully over this I’ll be newly energized and can make up for lost time. That’s how sickness works, right?
The June vote incentive is finally up! Maxima is prepping for her night out.
And in the Patreon variants, she gets (un)dressed and takes a look through all the makeup options.
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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For how to defend a gate.. watch GATE
and then watch Stargate (the movie) nothing says you shall not pass like a Tac Nuke.
So given the pic and desc. of 14″ guns did someone go back in time and grab a New Mexico or Pennsylvania Class ? or Build a Montana class with 14″ instead of 16″ ?
IKR? The last 14″ armed battleship built was the USS California (BB-44) in 1919. And battleship guns have the range of 20-24 miles, so 7 miles is close range. Think of a sabot round for a 16″ gun that is like 8″ in diameter. That would hurt. Japan built 18.1″ guns and the US flirted with 18″ and 20″ guns, before shutting down battleship construction. Posting a lot of 155mm howitzers around the gate could bring down a LOT of pin-point fire. What is used to guide the 155mm Excaliber rounds surely could be added to battleship rounds, for pin-point fire with them. A motorized division to garrison with an armored divsion for counter attacking would be good. You could mount naval guns into pillboxes for direct fire or when further back, indirect fire. The triple gun turret of a Des Moines class cruiser would be good, as it has auto-loading for a fire rate of 8 rounds per minute, sustained. That would be 24 rounds per minute per turret. A modern military can likely handle purely physical threats if prepared.
Stargate teams were small, because they were on a TV budget. I’m thinking the smallest SG team would be a reinforced platoon, with company to battalion teams being more common. Many armored vehicles will fit through a gate and so will some aircraft with the wings and tail removed to be put back on the aircraft on the other side. You would need some kind of ramp system on both ends of the gate for that. The defenses for a gate would be a divsion or so with LOTS of indirect firepower. The ‘detonate a nuke on the gate’ plan, means cutting off the teams off world, so more likely would only be a last resort. After the Goa’uld motherships show up at the end of Season 1, the cat would be out of the bag, so you could have the whole world’s military to draw on. And with crowded conditions in some areas of Earth, off world colonization would almost certainly be attractive. Many orbital boosters are small enough to fit through the gate with a support system, so orbiting satellites could give an earlier warning of approaching ships. In WWII, Russia moved whole factories to the East to get them away from the Germans, so industrializing a colony world be possible. But TV budgets are what they are, so not everything can be realistic.
There were reasons to keep Stargate teams a fairly small size. Keep in mind, they’re largely scouts, and there’s limits to how much/how quickly/etc. things can be sent through the gate. Sending 20 people through is much harder than sending 4 people through. It requires keeping the gate open for that much longer, which is more dangerous and–initially, before they fixed it in-universe–much more expensive.
They’re by and large also stealth operatives of sorts. If they land on a potentially hostile world, bringing 20 armed men is both hard to disguise and hard to start with diplomacy. But 4 is a more manageable size, easy to blend in and more accessible for negotiating.
Keep in mind countless times during the show, there would be people who went “if you come in peace, why are you so heavily armed?”. It was for self-defense, of course, which for a team of four is fairly believable. But if you send like 20 armed men through, suddenly, that looks like an invasion force.
That said, while standard operations were arguably beneficial with smaller teams, certain missions which’re EXPLICITLY militaristic in nature, really should’ve been larger. I think the largest operation consisted of like 5 teams: two initial teams that were there already, and then three teams to rescue them. Which would be a rescue team of 12, with 8 in need of rescue. (Down to about 5 by the time help arrives, naturally.) THOSE should’ve been larger. But every-day operations actually make sense to be small, highly mobile, highly trained, highly skilled, highly diverse teams capable of adapting to nearly every situation.
You need to secure the gate and that takes troops. Especially for 24/7 security. Which is why the platoon would be the smallest unit, even for the stealthy missions. If you are expecting contact with Jaffa or Goa’uld, then you send in the bigger units. Remember, not every SG team was a first contact team. Even the platoon size SG teams don’t all travel in a group, as you want to secure the gate with some of the troops.
You don’t have to send all the troops into the village or whatever. You could hold back a squad outside the village as a quick reaction force to extract the contact team if necessary. Even when SG-1 was on the air, drones were a thing. So it’s not like you would be wandering around blind.
Are you talking about the mission to get the teams out of Hathor’s base? Yeah, that is what the armored battalion is for.
Remember, the gate can be open for 38 minutes and even the few minute gate openings in the show would be fine for a well drilled platoon. With planning, you could get a LOT of hardware through the gate in 38 minutes.
Correct on the BB44 I was thinking it was 3gun x 3 turret while the pic is 3gun by 4 turret.
So I would need to add the Tennessee class to my list
I figure you’d want to set that nuke on a timer. We know gravity gets past a gate when the gate is active, so does matter, so radiation will probably as well. Now that I think of it, you should actually see the other side while the gate is active.
radiation gets through the star gate, it was an issue a few times, and Baal used it to even bypass the Iris to create a high energy particles hologram of himself over the closed iris.
also yeah the seeing the other side is *true/theoretically* with real wormholes (in fact theoretically you shouldn’t even be able to see the edges either except as a mild distortion unless the environment on the other side is radically different enough to make it act like the edge of a photograph.
however the Star Gates seem to have this slip and slide tunnel…that randomly changed what it looks like inside during the final season or so…but I digress.
don’t forget Fuel Air Explosives, or Thermobaric as they are called nowadays. thow one of them, or better yet pre emplace it with a remote detonator and we will see how the Big Baddie deals with extreme overpressure followed by a vacuum. if you want to see one in action look up the Hulk’s first movie he lands near his old house after running from the army, and they detonate a FAE when he’s about 100 yards from the house, and the blast cut him, when nothing else the army could throw at him could even scratch him.
List of things to stop denizens from escaping a Dungeon.
Land Mines, Barbed Wire (not the movie), Heavy MG’s in remote mounts or auto guns, Light Cannon to back up MG’s, Artillery 155mm and MLRS in good number, Drones with ATGM, Trench System (advanced WWI with command mines over areas that you may want to counter attack over) All these are light on troops and heavy on fire power. A counter punch unit of M1Ax (x = variable) AV-8 in bomb truck mode (less expensive than F35) as they “retire” from USMC they go to dungeon defense.
WMD/NBC 155mm Nukes to give accurate and rolling atomic barrage options.
I don’t know. Barb Wire the movie might be a greater deterrent than actual barb wire. Either the escaping dungeon creatures would be so horrified at the thought of a society that could produce such schlock that they’d go back, or they’d be so mesmerized they’d be honey trapped right into your kill box. :P
Why not just put a really, really, really thick door in front of the entrance?
The council does like their big doors, but even then the overkill isn’t always enough. Especially if someone just digs a side entrance.
even with a lower tier labyrinth, if you get an anomaly spawn that can break through the door. Or a non-corpreal, even at low levels you can still get ghost type monsters, even the almost a joke goofy ones can be dangerous to mundane humans.
any and all forms of defense are nothing but a means to buy time for more lethal methods to arrive and deal with it. Your big door is not going to stop a determined enemy, but it will slow them down and hopefully have a method of notifying the folks upstairs that it’s being breached. Ideally, you have troops on site ready to deal with it, or at least troops nearby. You also have seismic sensors spread all around to notify you of anything tunneling out, and some forms of magic in place to deal with the non-corpreal.
Modern tech works fine until what spawns is the magical equivilent of a bush robot.
Then all the technology on our world is defensive toilet paper.
Adding magic and ultra-tech, makes all the usual rules invalid.
They already brought that up. The Army *could* stop the Dungeon from spilling out, but it’d be a major, persistent expenditure to pull off.
yeah, but honestly i would love to see a dragon getting shot by something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFDMO27c5mg&list=PL4Kf893QA7cVxnalPxZguVMChmkyeGtMe&index=182
Okay that thing is legitimately terrifying, and I kinda want one…
…wow. That’s that scariest anti-personnel weapon I’ve seen in ages. Comment consensus is that this turrent is utilizing quad-mounted M-134D miniguns, each firing 3K rounds per minute (200 /s).
I was expecting a page or two of dungeon farming. Exotic locales, instant gratification etc.
It’s all fine and good until something like Jiggawatt comes out of the dungeon. All that electronic security, powered guns, sensors, just calling out “Come to Momma”.
The beings that require special energies, magic, or items to actually harm is something I had worked with to create powerful ethereal entities and realized that while magic and super advanced multidimensional tech could contain or even harm them that by reasoning it out…no human weapon could hurt them…not even a nuke.
By this reasoning, an ethereal being whose language consists of electromagnetic pulses and heat, creating a plasma based body around its ethereal location to interact with the world.
So, a nuke,
the shockwave: this is a physical force, and the non corporeal ethereal beings decide wether or not a physical force will interact with them *hence touching but not being touched, pass through walls and the ground, etc…* so no kinetic or physical blow works,
the heat: they can live inside the Earth, Inferno hell dimensions, produce plasma and fire based bodies, so heat is not an issue.
the radiation: they are non-biological so the radiation isn’t really a problem, in fact it may even be something they can feed on.
the EMP: at best this harms them, but is like screaming really loud, it may not be enough against anything above a low level.
which would be kind of funny, drop a nuke and the outer planes ghosts are just not phased by it, but go in there swinging around a Demon King’s sword and they are fleeing in fear.
counterpoint: at ground zero of a nuke, all electromagnetic energies are suppressed/cancelled out in the one million degree initial blast.
In other words, ground zero of a nuke destroys souls.
There was actually a side gig in Russia during the nuclear testing days, where people would pay to sit next to the nuke when it went off, just so their soul would be wiped and they wouldn’t go on to the afterlife, if there was one.
Your ethereal entities are going to eat waaaaay too much reality, and be wiped if a nuke pops them clean.
Wait, what? Is that part about people paying to get their souls nuked real?
That caught my attention too, but my google-fu is coming up with absolutely nothing. Would love to see a credible source.
Found a passing mention to the idea. Rings a vague bell, but could easily be from fiction or some cult’s fever-dream, never actually happened. Would love to know, either way.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bmDZDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT165&ots=k1a_-OzRBT&dq=cult%20%22soul%22%20nuclear%20bomb&pg=PT165#v=onepage&q=cult%20%22soul%22%20nuclear%20bomb&f=false
Searching inside that book yields nothing relevant for me. Variations of search with ‘soviet’, ‘USSR’, etc still yielding nothing. :shrug:
and now there are some strange new terms in thje top 200 google searches of the week…..
these are the searches.
Expecting to see my searches on r/brandnewsentence ^_^
I am not falling for that sub. they can blow the ballast all they want.
I mentioned the EMP being the best bet, but against solar elementals, lightning elementals, void ethereal, and others that would naturally be exposed to such or is part of them it’s not going to be effective.
Also that soul thing sounds like mad scientist unsubstantiated kind of wacky Doo if someone was doing that in real life as the exact nature of the soul isn’t even now fully understood. Heck best modern guess is a sub sub conscious external to the body linked to a hypothetical memory aspect of time/space, like a “well of souls” or universal consciousness. But it is now as it always was guess work and basically spitting out ideas not readily tested.
There was an SF horror novel on that premise, or something like it. The horribly disfigured and fused together souls of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wandering around as a kind of invisible supernatural disaster, and a device had to be invented that could erase souls to stop them. (It was only discovered decades after WWII, because the thing spent decades wandering around at sea, taking out an occasional ship, before it finally found its way to land, not being capable of directly perceiving the physical universe, and limited to walking speed.)
huh, puts me in mind of GMK *Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All out Attack*,
in that movie Godzilla was the result of the ghosts of dead soldiers from WWII fusing together into a giant monster and attacking Japan.
Mmmm-hmm, so a monster preserve/habitat(dungeon) for them is more like a magical TARDIS, like Gary Gygax’s “Baba Yaga’s Hut”, a multi-room tesseract that grows more rooms and levels the more magic it has available to it, and the more inhabitants it attracts, the more magic they generate for the dungeon to grow on in a power loop… An I grokking that right?
a tesseract is more about becoming a demi-plane. A dungeon can be that, but many of them are just shaping the rock and stone and going deeper, too. Either mode works. The dungeon entrance also going extraplanar is certainly used, in video games if nothing else.
I don’t know what changed, but I started reading Gault with Keith David’s voice on this page
You know, deep down inside, Maxima’s inner geek is wailing “But…but….DUNGEOOOOONNNNN!!!!”
And Sydney has already acquired 51′ rope, and an 11′ pole.
Once Earth has itself established in the universe stage I could imagine Dabbler might know some worlds with Mythic tier dungeons who would welcome a visit from Maxima to help them clear and collect from it with reduced risk and reasonable distribution of the farmed items.
But I think Gault makes an excellent point that there are creatures with abilities out there that completely bypass Maxima’s insane strength, blasts and speed. We saw a sample of this with Sciona’s robot/golem using vampiric gaze to at least get as far as halting Maxima and she certainly still needs oxygen.
I’m willing to bet that if DnD stats were written up for Maxima, Sydney and a pile of nerds could likely come up with a plethora of ways for a party to take her out that would likely make Maxima feel far less unstoppable… Unless they just tried the Peasant Railgun
The galactic community has signaled its interest in supers pretty clearly, although the NYC attack certainly doesn’t represent the entire galaxy’s approach. But even under friendly and advantageous terms, Earth has a corner on the superpowers market and tons of magical expertise available to exploit a dungeon on their own, so trading for anything less then top-tier alien tech isn’t worthwhile. Also, there is a very real risk of additional attacks on the team, this time by fully prepared assailants, and dealing with that away from Earth seems unwise at this early stage.
But even if there was a safe and beneficial customer, Archon’s mandate is domestic US interests, with some limited international authorization. Congress and the G20 would have Opinions™️ on the team providing services in off-planet economies before taking care of interests a lot closer to home.
This is why you don’t put all your cards on the table. also why they let people mistakenly think electricity weakened her. No point in giving your foes a play by play of what you can and can’t do. Never make the Superman interview mistake “he can’t see through lead”
You know the story where the US is doing SCIENCE and it accidentally opens a portal to hell? Let’s remove the accident.
“Pacific Rim” but instead of evil aliens, its just delusional greed.
Incidentally, this is the plot of “Solo Leveling”.
I am wandering where they plan to seed these dungeons. Just toss them into a few areas, or maybe designate an island , make a monster island adding the ocean as an extra barrier for spill overs assuming any aquatic monsters spawned in the dungeon won’t have the easiest time making for the surface.
Event Horizon the intro movie for Warhammer 40,000 comes to mind.
“You know the story where the US is doing SCIENCE and it accidentally opens a portal to hell?”
That’s Doom. You just described the entire plot of Doom.
Also the memoir of of Mary Ann Mcleod, specifically the chapter on her efforts to get pregnant.
Also Half Life. And Sluggy Freelancer.
Maybe throw in Necrons from Warhammer 40K. For sure 40K Daemons.
Jurassic Park was wise enough to put their experiment on an island (dumb enough to make flyers, though).
Don’t even start with the salt water swimming dinos.
The electric fence seems like a great idea until you get shambling mounds.
A question, can they seed different themes of dungeons intentionally?
This thought occured to me for two reasons, one being I was going to make a comment about getting too strong of monsters in the dungeons that end up taking over and reshaping both the environment and other monsters, like a Necronic-Yggdrasil forming in the depths and encasing the core and spreading out to infect the entire rest of the dungeons causing everything to be undead and death themed. Or an Inferno Queen, Imperial Salamander, King Efreet, Lord Fire Dragon, etc..taking over and making everything volcanic and fiery…but then those made me think of Metoidvania games like Bloodstain.
Can they seed different themed dungeons intentionally, with wanting to farm specific kinds of materials *Ice Dungeons, Fire Temple, Haunted Mansion, Doll/Toy House, Toxic Jungle, Water Temple, etc..
or can there be different levels with different dominant themes like in Bloodstain or So I’m a Spider So What (which honestly it just was one level in the middle was fire and the others more underground general),
or are the dungeons more generic underground labyrinths, or the core is more a power level only and what specifically spawns isn’t controlled *which would be funny thinking you are going to make a Water Temple in your island nations and it turns into a Wind Temple instead* Or think it will be a dungeon of Yokai and dark spirits because you put it in Japan and instead it attracts some high level clown demons who turn the whole thing into a circus dungeon.
my guess would be yes, based on the terrain. If not, then you just farm accordingly. Wipe out everything fire related, leave the ice stuff, and soon enough you’ll have an ice-themed dungeon you can farm.
Then there’s the third kind of dangerous – when, after 20 years of quiescence, a dragon emerges from the dungeon, declares itself a naturalized citizen, and announces its candidacy for president… yes, I was around for Dunkelzhan…
US had elected
Nixon 1969 a Crook with a war criminal as advisor Henry Kissinger
Regan 1981 and 1984 – “Reaganomics” a massive deregulation aimed to inequality , “war on drugs” a complete faillure, Invasion of Grenada – a bully one and a demonstration of incompetence, response to the AIDS epidemic “it was the measles and would go away”, ties with the apartheid regime of South Africa to a Red Scare approach of geopolitics and the Iran-Contra affair-
George W. Bush 2000 and 2004 the term retard is adequate
Donald Trump 2016 traitor , coup d’etat instigator and crook
Dunkelzhan seems OK , he’s not Lofwyr …
And a Dragon could be an above average US president
Well, since they live so long, fantasy dragons at least would not INSTANTLY go for short term profit at the utter loss of long term goals and/or alliances like SO many on ALL sides of the wonderful new established American political order.
And I am curious… When did ‘Great’ become synonymous with ‘Evil’? Maybe when verbs became adjectives?
Glad to see msnbc is still doing its job… sigh
Well, the school system ISN’T so SOMEONE has to. MSN is nowhere close to the worst or most politically short sighted of the networks. They all DO have factual information available, but finding it in the masses of BS and worse, making sure the information is actually TRUE can be very hard. Anyone can say anything online after all. Case in point, social media.
You just have to corroborate anything you read online and if it came from Fox? Corroborate it three times, just in case because of it happens to be true from them, it has to be a manipulation of some kind. Most of them do not do truth anymore. instead? They do bad comedy and call it news.
Funny that…
Was it Stalin who wanted the news to be funny? Or was that Mao? FDR wanted news to be uplifting, no matter if it was true or not, but according to people who were alive at the time he drew the line at the government or people supporting the government broadcasting comedy and calling it news.
How long before Deus suggests Maxima allow third-parties to bid on contracts to manage dungeons?
It wouldn’t be too hard for him to obtain a list of off-world mercenary organisations powerful enough to take out a legendary dungeon then negotiate a price for insurance services (an option to hire them on short notice in the event of a dungeon breakout that Deus’ new TyrantDungeonManagementIncorported company can’t handle).
He doesn’t have to suggest it, the senator already invited him into the room as a contractor. Why would he want it opened to competition when he’s already in on the ground floor? He’ll just subcontract work to those off-world groups and make money off their work in 4+ different ways.
After this,maybe Dabbler(and Anvil)would press Max about her night out….!!!
Interesting. The attack of reason is coming from the Senator, right? The one with Sciona as a secretary? Presumably then this is due to her influence. Which raises the question of why Sciona (whose main plotline so far has been gathering magical ingredients) wants Earth to take things slowly.
Several possible reasons spring to mind. 1) Genuine prudence on her part. Earth is the newly adopted home of her people, and she doesn’t want to see them endangered.
2) She is worried that if the magical sophistication of the US Government increases she will be discovered before she can pull off whatever she is scheming.
3) She thinks she can corrupt/control a mid-tier dungeon, but maybe not a top-tier dungeon.
4) She doesn’t want the team to have access to magical items of that power for reasons.
All that being said, I think prudence is entirely justified. Yes, putting a top tier dungeon on Mars, or Ceres, or Titan would be pretty safe, but no one seems to be thinking of that, and if it’s on Earth all it takes is a single incorporeal, spawn producing undead to escape and it’s the apocalypse. Sure there are probably several dozen beings on Earth who can easily take down such creatures, but there are also 7 Billion people who are just a growth medium for exponential expansion.
“The attack of reason is coming from the Senator, right? The one with Sciona as a secretary? Presumably then this is due to her influence.”
No, this attack of reason is coming from Master Gault, the archmage from the Council.
“Yes, putting a top tier dungeon on Mars, or Ceres, or Titan would be pretty safe, but no one seems to be thinking of that,”
It would be extremely inconvenient for it to be on another planet until they have those FTL ships backwards engineered and built, unless Sydney figures out how to causeway herself to other planets in the same solar system, which would still leave the same problem they have with ‘what if something happens to Maxima’ but isntead ‘What if something happens to Maxima AND/OR Sydney.” Unless they were to rely on the Council’s alien faction for travel and I’m not sure the US government wants to be THAT dependent on outside help.
Yeah, I figured out it was Gault right after I hit enter. Oops.
You don’t need FTL to jaunt around the solar system. The anti-grav ships Deus seems to have will do fine for in system travel. As for Maxima or Halo going missing, what happens then is you lose containment and the baddies completely infest an uninhabited iceball 5 to 10 light hours away from anything we care about. As opposed to going full anime on Tokyo.
To even get to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, at current technology, would take at least 18 months each way. To get to the Oort Cloud around the solar system would take 2 years even if travelling at the speed of light, and at current speeds it would take 300 years to get to the inner boundary of the Oort cloud, and 30,000 years to get to the far side. And that’s assuming travelling at 1 million miles per day.
For any reasonable mining or farming of anything, it would require a lot faster than Grrlpower’s current tech in spaceflight.
Also not sure what you’re talking about by ‘anti-grav ships or why that would change anything in space, unless you mean that Deus has access to Alari tech, in which case we are again talking about him having access to FTL tech. I was under the belief that anti-grav just would help with escaping earth’s gravity without having to generate the same amount of thrust to counteract Earth’s pull. Although you might also be referring to Deus’s ability to create stable wormholes, in which case I agree with you. :)
But I got off on a tangent. My main point is:
1) Farming a dungeon on Mars would take 7 months each way (assuming 24,600 mph), so 14 months between farming efforts.
2) Farming a dungeon on Ceres would take 18-24 months each way (assuming 24,600 mph), so 36-48 months (3-4 years) between farming efforts.
3) Farming a dungeon on Titan would take 7 years each way (since it’s literally a billion miles away), so 14 years between farming efforts.
In any of these cases, even for the closest one with Mars, the dungeon would be untended for a very long time and would spill over, ruining the use of the dungeon, even WITH Maxima being around, unless Sydney was to know how to causeway between planets, or unless those FTL ships get built sooner, or if Deus let people know he can make wormholes that go interplanetary and possibly even intergalactic.
Picking a nit…
I think maybe you meant “weeks” instead of “years” for light-speed times to the Oort cloud. Google says maybe 2000 AU to the inner edge of it, and 1 AU is about 8.5 light minutes, so 17000 light minutes, or about 12 days.
But your overall point seems valid; without FTL, visits to any of these bodies are going to be rare, so it would run unattended for long periods of time, and almost certainly find interesting ways to become a problem. And if security precautions are insufficient, you can bet there would also be hostile actors, human and other, exploiting this for maximum entertainment value.
“I think maybe you meant “weeks” instead of “years” for light-speed times to the Oort cloud.”
No I did mean 2 light years, although I’m seeing conflicting numbers for how far away the Oort Cloud is from the Sun. NASA says between 2,000 and 100,000 AU, which seems like a pretty big variation (1 light year is a little more than 60,000 AU), while Wikipedia says it’s 50,000 to 200,000 AU away, and the National Schools’ Observatory says it’s about 2 light years away from Earth (which was the one I had used when I had googled it).
In any case, without FTL it’s quite the trek. :)
I guess 2 light years would be about the outer edge of the Oort cloud, depending on which model you use. And maybe not coincidentally, that is about halfway to the nearest star.
They do have a single-person space ship in the form of The Mighty Halo.
… but yeah, we’re back to the base argument again: a dungeon based off a single point of failure isn’t that great.
Yep. Just instead of the point of failure being Maxima, the point of failure would be Maxima AND Sydney, since Maxima would still be needed to farm the dungeon while Sydney would be needed to get to the dungeon.
” Yes, putting a top tier dungeon on Mars, or Ceres, or Titan would be pretty safe,”
As a side note, there’s no freaking way Archon wouldn’t be time sharing Halo with NASA.
Pernicious Dragons, a.k.a the giant teleporting lizards from Pern.
I’m sort of wondering if this whole grape thing is some sort of Chekov’s Gun type of deal because I’m just finding it odd that she’s scarfing down the grapes.
I suspect it’s to clarify that they’re eating due to the length of the meeting, but the way she’s holding them and talking with her mouth full seems really flippant and completely out of character. I know she’s more down-to-earth than her official role usually allows her to behave, but she’s not a slob either. Come across kind of belligerent to her host the senator actually, especially since he’s also her boss / patron and this meeting is explicitly to gain his support. What’s next, she puts her feet up on his desk?
Wait, when did some random senator become Maxi’s boss?
He’s not but I’m going to agree with the second word brichins said – patron – since that’s closer to what the Senator would be since Congress would be holding the purse strings to funding this endeavor. I’m assuming he’s maybe head of the Appropriations Committee or some other group within the Senate that handles military funding, or holds sway over that/those committees.
^ this, ‘boss’ was just shorthand.
The reason the pilots are flying that close to the monster is otherwise….well, the battles get visually boring. It’s an issue with space fights as well.
I sympathize over the cold, but I *really* sympathize with your wife’s migraines. I’m currently trying to get a disability leave set up with my work, because I have been getting *literally* disabling migraines for some months now. (Stress after 24 years at my job, I don’t doubt.)
Why do I tell you? Partly so you can tell your wife it could be worse, and probably a subconscious bid for sympathy, which, around here, is fishing in a dry well, lemme tell ya.
Just please tell me that ARCHON isn’t becoming Fairplay. I hate Fairplay!
The issue with the ‘The jets come within spitting distance of the enemy!’ is that living beings (usually, I’m exempting the rare Fire Elemental) give off much less heat than a jet engine or helicopter engine and most of our air to air weaponry is guiding by heat… hence the ‘heat-seeking’ missiles term.
As to the Army being able to defeat a threat… No.
Our military IRL got its rear kicked numerous times in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea by insurgent forces less armed than ours by far. To the point where we were close to losing those last two wars when the populace finally put their feet down and said “No more of this nonsense… we are pulling out!” and the President was politically arm-twisted to do that.
The reason why the military almost got their arses sanded in those three wars, was because they had their balls shackled by the moaning population preventing them from actually going after the insurgents: they mostly had to wait for the cowards to stop hiding amongst the non-combatants and strike
And of course, the many political figures found it profitable to sacrifice American lives to further their careers in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Then they wonder why stupid things like 9/11 happen. Oh, wait, why should ‘they’ care unless said horrible events personally impact ‘them’?
Answer, they don’t. It is not their problem when they screw everyone else to get what they want as long as they get away with it.
But hey! It is all great! This is what the US WANTED in leaders, right?
Now, now, be fair. The reason they fight like that is because if they try to fight us straight up, they are going to lose.
EVERYBODY knows that. NOBODY in their right mind is going to fight us straight up. Saddam Hussein tried it, and basically lost his entire national army in like, what? Two weeks?
Nobody is that dumb as to challenge Americans openly in combat. Making civilians who won’t fight with you part of the fight is just another tactic to the determined. At least they are proving useful by stopping YOU from being killed, right? Pragmatism is a huge virtue in the rest of the world, as opposed to obeying the Geneva Convention.
Yeah, historically speaking, fighting on the enemy’s terms has always been a very good way to loose battles and wars.
Funny how so many people want wars to be easy and over in days or hours like movies, TV and in video games. That VERY rarely happens.
aye, and let’s be fair. They got some hits in because we are NICE and won’t do the things they do.
If all the gloves came off, we know how to get at them. The tactics are all there in history. You just have to be absolutely ruthless and yes, you can take out guerillas and insurgencies, too. It’s not THAT hard. It just requires not caring about civilian casualties and human suffering in the slightest.
Or not caring about public opinion, or the moral high ground. What’s the point of winning a battle if you throw away your justification for fighting it in the first place? Make yourself everyone’s enemy, and you have to always be on your guard, always be overwhelmingly the strongest, or eventually enough of them will gang up on you to take down their common enemy.
Why would it be funny to want wars to be short? Or non-existent?
I think instead of would be strange to want to be at war at all, for any length of time.
Funny as in ironic, not funny comedic.
But so many see war as entertainment now. A war is a collection of connected battles, no less. Unlike what some may think, wars are never easy, quick or clean. Only in politician wet dreams do wars solve or fix things.
Also ironic? So many saying ‘Oh, it will over in a few weeks at most’. Ironic because they are quoting so many on both sides in the US in 1861.
INCREDIBLY ironic, Americans today have the reputation of being weak and soft. My response? Do a Google search with the keywords ‘Battle of the Bismark Sea’ and try not to puke. We have always had our share of idiots and people who will give in to tyranny to save themselves BUT we also have our share of people who will step up to stop it no matter the cost. I know which side I am on.
Just to bring up a counterpoint to the author’s pet peeve… the Giant Flying Lizards could be cold blooded (*heat-seeking missiles are useless*), who can VTOL land and takeoff (*air-to-air radar systems are confused near the ground*), and obviously they’re not using radar (*anti-radar missiles are obviously useless against a medieval opponent*) .
Sure, you can attempt to play laser tag with laser-guided missiles… but that brings us back up to “circling the monster’s head from fifteen feet away or doing loop de loops around its ballsack”. That, or some soldiers on the ground are thinking really hard if they had forgotten anything in their wills in the middle of their missions.
I mean you can just type in the GPS coordinates of the monster using satellite or drone footage.
There really is no way jets would get that close no matter how difficult the target is to acquire.
Eeeee Abyssalisk/Gold Digger reference!