Grrl Power #1367 – Get rich violently scheme
Cora’s plan probably sounds like a bad idea for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons may be laid out in the next few pages.
At the time this page was posted, a Kg of rhodium is worth about $183,260, which honestly is less than I would have guessed. Iridium clocks in at $132K/Kg, and palladium is a bargain at $35K/Kg. I know they’re all useful in electronics, and also that Rhodium was the primary currency in Star Justice, where I guess it was used as star ship drive fuel.
In the Grrl-verse, elements are valued by four factors: how pretty is it, how abundant is in nature, how useful its chemical properties are, and most importantly, how energy intensive it is to mine/refine/extract or artificially fabricate. Generally speaking, the higher the atomic number, the more energy intensive it is. Also isotopes take more energy – generally, the more neutron variance, the more energy intensive it is to create.
Even with alien super science, the laws of physics still exist, and you can’t use your nuclear reactor to create more reactor fuel. Well, you can, but even the best alien super science can’t get you over 100% efficiency, so it’d be dumb to do. That said, it’s also possible to create Dyson arrays around stars and harvest absolutely massive amounts of solar energy, so it’s possible to create darn near anything – if you have access to a Dyson Array slash Matter Replicator – Let’s just call it a Knights of the Old Republic Star Forge. Not everyone does, of course. Have access to something like that, I mean. Not even every race has their own Star Forge, so while the greater galactic community claims to be post scarcity, the reality is that there is scarcity based economics at play. It’s all just at a wildly different scale than what Earth manages.
The vote incentive is finally done!
The update to the TWC image is pretty minor, but the Patreon version has the bonus comic as well as nude versions. I will strive to make the next one more timely.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Gee, a whole PAGE of vote incentives…
And for more dyson swarm fun,
If you get to that level of technology you can also set up a ring of mirrors in a specific configuration around the sun and start siphoning off valuable elements, while dumping the relatively worthless hydrogen back.
After all 99.99% of all mass in our solar system is concentrated in our sun, and that includes (over)proportional quantities of heavier elements. There is several jupiter masses of just about any element you care to harvest swirling around deep inside the sun, and some of it occasionally swirls close enough to the corona that it can be separated.
And, this has the happy additional benefit of adding several billion, or trillion, years of lifespan to the sun. It is the helium and metal that is polluting the sun’s core that eventually will cause it to stop fusing hydrogen (when it burned through a couple of percents of the total amount of hydrogen in it).
Nothing heavier than iron until it goes nova, though.
Nothing heavier than iron is /produced/ in stars (and our star likely will just stop at carbon or maybe oxygen)
However, the cloud from which our solar system condensed did already contain a lot of elements that are only produced during nova or neutron star collapse events. Of those elements almost everything ended up inside the sun.
The sun is 70% hydrogen because the cloud originally consisted of about that percentage of it. A small amount (comparatively) has since been fused into helium. Smaller planets lost most of their hydrogen over the past 4 billion years, the heaviest planets and of course the sun have enough gravity that it overcomes the effects of solar wind.
Nasa says that roughly 0.5% of the sun’s mass is the rarer elements. But given that the sun is 2 x 10^30, that amounts to 1 x 10^28 kg. Earth is 6 x 10^24 kg, so that is 2000 times the mass of the entire earth.
Getting this out of the sun, against all that gravity, of course is the tricky part. The basic principle is simple. If you have two parallel mirrors at opposite sides of the sun, so that when you fire a laser from one mirror to the other the beam will pass though the uppermost atmosphere of the sun, that beam will drag elements with it. At both mirrors you capture this stream of elements and sort it by mass. Hydrogen is dumped back onto the sun, anything heavier is siphoned off. Once you have this running stably you will produce far more valuable elements than even large scale asteroid mining can hope to achieve.
Getting it to run stably of course is far easier in theory than in practice.
Stars the size of ours don’t nova. They go red giant when they start fusing helium more than hydrogen. Then when the fuel runs low they collapse into a dwarf.
Not sure that would even be useful, if even feasible..
Thing about being able to build a Dyson structure, is that you *alreadY* have the capability to vaporise and harvest entire asteroids, moons/planets if you’re serious. Probably scrub the entire Oort region for the star as well.
Simply because of the sheer amount of material you need to build it.
And you wouldn’t use an active star to begin with if you have the choice. Given that kind of construction capability and interstellar travel, like in the Grrrrl-verse what you’d really want is a nice young White Dwarf.
They’re much more stable than those uppity and temperamental main sequence stars, and will last you billions of years.
Do you mean a Red Dwarf? A White Dwarf is the post-supernova remnant of a Main Sequence star, is not stable, will collapse into a neutron star, or even, potentially, a pulsar, magnetar or black hole. Plus the planetary nebula, formed by the supernova event, will have cleared its immediate vicinity of the raw materials needed to make the Dyson Sphere, so you’d be importing everything from other solar systems.
A Red Dwarf, on the other hand, is the most stable star type, with no known upper limit to their lifespans. Plus, all their solar system would be there, for raw materials, thus reducing any extra-solar imports to a more acceptable level.
Nope. A white dwarf is the post-red-giant remnant of a star too small to go supernova. It’s not going to do any of the things you mentioned, it’s going to slowly give off heat for trillions and trillions of years until it eventually becomes a black dwarf.
A low-mass red dwarf would be a better idea, but only because you get the trillion years of nuclear fusion to start with and THEN it smoothly transitions through the (as yet hypothetical) blue dwarf stage to a white dwarf, so you get the benefits of a white dwarf plus the extra red dwarf bit on top.
The two big problems with red dwarf stars are that you need to orbit so close to them that your planet will end up tidally locked long before it can even start to form biological life.
And while the most stable that does not mean completely stable. It is still a stupendously large and heavy fusion reactor. And close as you need to be to remain in the Goldilocks zone that also puts you in shotgun range of the occasional coronal mass ejection and other fun things suns can do. And maintaining any atmosphere is difficult as well, given the amount and strength of the solar wind it is subjected to.
That said, white dwarfs are not terrible prospects either, as long as there is no possibility of large amounts of matter falling into it. Any system with a binary or large gas clouds is a bad day waiting to happen in the next several billion years (which unlike with our sun’s could be tomorrow). But a solitary white dwarf between the spiral arms, or between galaxies, is reasonably safe and stable as far as stars go. Finding one with a planet, never mind one with an atmosphere, that may turn out to be more of a challenge since we only get white dwarfs after we first blow up a major star and turn its planets in one of those lovely to see planetary nebulae.
One of the more practical problems with creating a Dyson Sphere is that it requires more material than exists on Earth, even if you used every single ounce of material that the entire planet is made from (saw that on a video with Michio Kaku).
Nobody’s going to make a Dyson sphere, it’s just a thought experiment. You’d build a Topopolis. That’s basically an ultra-elongated O’Neill colony wrapped around a star like a ball of yarn. (Every loop is good for 15 times the surface area of the Earth.) The material requirements are rather more modest, and it has the advantage that you have “gravity”.
An ideal candidate for such a project would be Przybylski’s Star, a Class Ap star a little over 350ly away from Sol. Spectroscopy indicates the presence of elements like Berkelium and Einsteinium, whose half lives are so short they should have decayed completely away, unless they are being continuous replenishment. The best candidate for this isn’t aliens using it for a nuclear waste dump site, but rather the presence of elements from the Island of Stability.
Of course, if those are present in the star, they’re probably present in any rocky bodies orbiting it, and they’d be a lot easier to mine.
Przybylski’s Star is my favorite anomalous stellar object.
Another good reason to like it is that the name is hard to pronounce.
It’s actually probably a good idea for Earth to establish itself by doing something like this. We need a rep on the galactic stage for one and the prize money is probably more than just enough to cover the cost of a bounty.
You are right. Some battle fun and training for Arc powerhouses, some badass rep for Earth, some easy money for Cora and her crew. What could get wrong?
I was gonna say Earth probably isn’t quite there yet even with Deus speedrunning its development, but between the Alari colony, Sydney’s friendship with Parfait broadcasting the planet (or at least her comic shop) as a safe space for extradimensional beings AND accidentally blabbing Earth has Nth tech to whoever. It probably is a good idea start debuting some galactic presence before someone with more resources than Lapha decides Earth is free real estate. Any major galactic entity can just claim the place. That can’t be ideal. Although intergalactic polotics also seems like a headache Earth can’t handle.
Another advantage is showing off one of Earth’s heavy hitters, potentially discouraging the rabble from trying to stake a claim.
Basicily, we are some hic backwoods world that dosn’t even have our own teck. We are like a tribe in New Gunnie who somehow came across a car and are trying to improve our village’s future with it.
Guinea, like the pig or the coin
And the betterer analogy would be them coming across a laser rifle (or more accurately, a ‘blaster’) and think it’s a good idea to start being pirates to passing ships
My analogy is we’re like South Sudan with an operational F-35 squadron with logistical support. We’re oddly dangerous but economically irrelevant, and can’t project power at all.
The classic photo for this is the pic from Tibet, where a herd of porters are carrying the first car to Kathmandu, by picking it up and carrying it at shoulder height. There were no roads anything with wheels could travel over, so they built a platform of poles under the car and HUP! away they went, over mountains, through freezing streams and rivers until they got there. Then all the cans of fuel and lubricants had to come by porter or yak back
Well, rep on the galactic stage isn’t likely since while we’re known and also know of the larger galactic society, we still aren’t an actual space faring planet yet (outside of Sydney’s “accidents” and Deus’ “clandestine” travel activities.
The Alari refugee presence may change that a bit. However, that opens up an entire new set of potential problems as it could give the larger Alari governance legitimate claims to Earth as one of their “colony worlds”. Though if I recall correctly, Deus already handled that concern with the larger Alari Council.
“generally, the more neutron variance, the more energy intensive it is to create.”
That’s because you end up creating all the isotopes, and then have to sort them out. The lighter ones aren’t a waste, you can hit them with more neutrons, but knocking off an excess neutron without accidentally changing the number of protons and thus the element is tricky.
Reminds me a bit of Poul Anderson’s “Satan’s World”, where a rogue planet is used to manufacture rare isotopes, because there’s no native life to cause problems, and you’ve got whole seas to dispose of waste heat in, keeping the planet comfortably warm despite the lack of a sun.
Of course, in the Grrlverse, advanced societies probably have to tech to strip mine neutron stars for neutron rich isotopes…
It took me far too long to comprehend PTO as “Paid Time Off”, which I only got to after:
– Please Turn Over
– Peculiar Turn-Ons
– Perky Twin Orbs
– Punches-To-Orbit (which I hope we’ll see her do in the arena).
I’ve heard of grewsome farm accidents from a tractor’s Power Take Off.
Yeah never wear loose closing near those.
Don’t fall off the back of a tractor and land on one, either. That put me in bed for several days as a teen, and gave me an amazing bruise. Just lucky I didn’t break any bones or rupture something.
Ironically, the reason they’re called rare earth elements isn’t because they’re all that rare. They’re just so chemically similar to each other that they’re a real pain to separate from one another, and tend to be found mixed with radioactive elements like Thorium, which makes radiation paranoid governments reluctant to allow them to be mined.
But the platinum group metals aren’t even rare earth elements in the first place. And they genuinely are rare, on Earth, anyway.
It’s more like most rare earths are so difficult to refine that mining for them specifically isn’t worth it, it’s done as a side product of other mining.
My understanding is they are all a right pain to refine also. I do know that some nations literally have zero capability to refine said rare earth elements in quantity. I suspect I am wrong.
It’s early 1900’s chemical technology; You wouldn’t do it as a science fair project, but it’s not all that challenging, either.
The real problem is that rare earths are found together with elements like thorium, and so you tend to get toxic/radioactive waste products from their refining. Countries like China that have abundant slave labor and next to no environmental protections have a big economic advantage in producing them.
Now, if you really wanted to, you could combine rare earth production with remediating coal fly ash dumps. Coal fly ash is fairly rich in rare earth elements, (As well as uranium and thorium, of course!) and cleaning up those wastes would make the production an environmental wash at worse, and probably a net benefit.
Just to specifically state it, the metals listed in the comic are Platinum group metals. Not Rare Earth metals.
Oh, so the Grrlverse is going to have its own Tournament Arc, like a helluva lot of high-powered manga/anime stories, and Max, being the battle maniac she is, is going to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes Cora, a workaholic like her is absolutely going to have loads of unused PTO.
It feels bad to limit the fun to Max alone, though. In addition to her, I assume at least Halo, Dabbler, Anvil, Heatwave, Hiro, Math, Amorphous, Achilles, Stalwart, Jabber, Jiggawatt, and Ren have the right abilities to participate in superpowered gladiator games. And dear Universe, Vehemence. I bet Dabbs is no stranger to whatever event they are going to.
I struggle to think why this should be a bad idea, however. After they crushed a Fel invasion in minutes, it is not like the civilized galaxy is unaware of Earth’s supers.
I do like this hyperrealistic drawing style for Cora and Max. It highlights their sexiness and fitness/badassitude, just like a superheroine should look like.
She’s not a fucking ‘battle maniac’, the only time she stopped holding herself back and actually entered the fray was against Big Kev, and that was only after he showed that he could handle it (and everyone else who tried would have ended up dead if he wanted them dead, but dead heroes give no juice)
Don’t forget the mid-city showdown against Hench Wench and that crew. And the fight against Super Mass Hole and the Ascenders. And against the sandstorm guy.
Come on, she gets absolutely delighted every time she gets an opportunity to pull off the gloves and show off as the ‘Goddess of Ash’, ofc she loves battle. She shows a little more restraint about that than your average anime/manga battle maniac b/c of her dedication to her role, but that’s it.
Mind it, I have no issue with it, quite the contrary. The traits I dislike in her are different. Battle lust/hot temper is one of my preferred character traits in fictional/gaming characters, together with high libido/sexual promiscuity and justified arrogance/ambition. Lust, Pride, and Wrath, my preferred vices.
She so has to bring Kevin (Vehemence) along!
He’s probably already there, remember, he was sent offworld because they really had no way to keep him contained that was lawful or healthy (for him)
No, she said they would consider sending him to the demon world so he could participate in ‘off-world expansion’, ie. help Tom conquer new worlds and bring them into enlightened rulership.
To be fair with the alien invasions and attacks on the team being unannounced… Getting a semi legal/illegal ring for her to have people come down so she can punch them sounds reasonable.
They are going to mess with her in the future unannounced and this method keeps the problems to a minimum, a display of force, and earns space cash.
Better it in a paid ring rather than a surprise attack like the alien tourists or a surprise abduction attempt like what happened at the comic shop.
It’s kind of like her show of force during the introductory press conference. The idea is to discourage the small fry from wanting any part of what the team and Max, especially, can dish out. There will still be the occasional nut job who thinks they are all powerful and says, ‘I can take her, and I will be super famous/infamous if I take her down.’
Since no one’s mentioned it yet…
“Piss or zip up, don’t leave it hanging out there.” Wow, never thought Max of all people would be one to make a dick joke.
I agree. But it has the same effect as that scene in “GI Jane” where Jordan O’Neill (Demi Moore) defiantly roars at one of the teachers “Suck my di*k!”
Besides–women have to unzip to use one of these: https://go-girl.com/ so maybe that’s what Max was referring to…
I would bet that Max picked up the “zip up” phrase phrase while in the military. My mom used to say “piss or get off the pot” in similar circumstances.
Relating to “G.I. Jane” comment I worked for a number of years in an adolescent drug rehab. I remember a number of the girls using the “suck my d*ck!” phrase. The feminine equivalent just didn’t have the same impact.
..I was just about to mention that.
I’m going to steal that line for future use by the way.
As much fun as it would be to see Max fight alien warriors for fun and profit, no way the US government lets her leave Earth. Although I think she could abuse her power on that. No one could realistically stop her and firing her seems unlikely too.
How are they going to stop her?
i think the implication is an arena built on earth, with the aliens coming here to fight supers.
DaveB the art on this is really good, you’ve started to improve in your colleration and suddle shifts in facial exoressions.
Good for you, getting better at your job! Hope to see consistant improvement to come.
Actually, I’m not sure if Maxima would win. She has never had to face somebody who was outright better than her beond a few instances.
Compared to supers on a galactic scale who constantly and over time fight diffrent opponents who are Alpha and S to SSS level fighters.
I think the trick here is that no one will know how powerful she is, even roughly, until they see her in action. Any attempt to get a reading on her magical power is going to turn up as ‘zero’, and she’s physically stronger than any non magical/supernatural being could possibly be.
Also, she can one-shot hi-tech space ships with their shields up, which would be developed with the knowledge of what powers other beings have. The idea that a single person could casually one-shot something like that was shocking to all the aliens present without prior experience. That’s why Max was a kidnap target to begin with.
there are no supers on a galactic scale, supers are for now a thing exclusive to earth and more specifically it seems exclusive to humans living on earth
the rest of the galaxy was kind of terrified at the fact that a dozen earth soldiers can beat back a Fel invasion in less than an hour and a single human was enough to one shot a battleship, according to Cora’s enginers Maxima packs more joules in her particle accelerator thingies than a megaton nuclear warhead, there is nothing in the galaxy that can stand up to bullshit like that
Are we doing a Planet Hulk/Sakaar/Thor:Ragnarok storyline? Please tell me we’re doing a Planet Hulk/Sakaar/Thor:Ragnarok storyline.
I like the idea of the supers in gladiator gear. Hard to draw though.
If you had the technology to turn matter into energy and energy into matter at 75% efficiency a Dyson Swarm would not be required.
Turn 4 units of energy into 3 units of antimatter.
Add 3 units of ordinary matter, preferably toxic waste.
Turn that 6 units of matter into 4.5 units of energy.
Repeat with a gain of .5 units of energy with each pass and lots and lots of heat.
If you turn energy into matter, various conservation laws dictate that you’ll get equal amounts matter and anti-matter. That is, particle-pair production always results in a particle and its anti-particle.
So if you then take that antimatter, and combine it with regular matter again, you’ll get the same amount of energy back? Just takes an equal mass of protons, neutrons, and electrons to cancel out the antiprotons and so forth?
Has to be a catch somewhere.
Yeah, the catch’s scientific name is “the second law of thermodynamics,” and it will ruin that process’s efficiency somewhere. When you recombine, some of the energy will come in the form of heat, and 2nd law says you can’t convert all of it into work (roughly speaking, energy you can use to do things, like produce matter.).
Easiest way to remember the laws of thermodynamics:
0. There is a game. (Any two systems which are in thermal equilibrium with a third system are also in thermal equilibrium with one another. We can call that point of thermal equilibrium the system’s “temperature,” which measures what human beings perceive as “coldness/hotness.”)
1. You can’t win. (Energy is conserved, so you can’t ever get more out than you put in.).
2. You can’t break even. (Entropy of closed systems never decreases, heat naturally flows to cold, and not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process.)
…EXCEPT, hypothetically, at absolute zero, but…
3. You can’t escape the game. (It is impossible to bring a positive temperature system to absolute zero in a finite number of steps.).
In both stages of the process, neutrinos are produced, so there is loss there.
Hey Maxima, we got Kevin* to go into the ‘work release’ program.
*aka Vehemence
Oh boy…
“so while the greater galactic community claims to be post scarcity, the reality is that there is scarcity based economics at play”
“Sergeant, I’ve watched society cross into ‘post-scarcity’ three times now. Each time it happened we discovered a new basic commodity we didn’t have enough of.”
Cindy a centuries old AI, Schlock Mercenary
Since it hasn’t been mentioned until now – the Star Forge created useful items: space ships, battle-droids – but it took Force power to fuel it. The Rakatans didn’t realize HOW much Force power it took, but it removed not only Force powers from everyone in that planetary system – killing Rakatan Force wielders when they were drained dry – but it also removed the potential to use the Force from the genetic structure of the Rakatan species.
It took 20 thousand years before the Rakatans began to have any offspring who were even Force sensitive.
None of the mentioned elements are rare earth metals in the chemical sense (which are the one mostof the world buys from China). Just putting that out there :)
Oh, good for you! None of this talk about “post-scarcity” that we get from SF writers and fans who don’t know the technical meaning of “scarcity” or the body of economic theory that it’s embedded in.
I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard, always taking constant care not to break something, to break someone. Never allowing myself to lose control, even for a moment, or someone could die. But you can take it, can’t you, big man? What we have here is a rare opportunity for me to cut loose and show you just how powerful I really am.
If what Cora needs are rare earth minerals, maybe Archon can call in a favor from that entity mentioned a while back, who uses their powers to mine minerals and quietly become wealthy. But the idea of Maxima appearing in the galactic equivalent of American Gladiators (hmm…Galactic Gladiators?) works too. I’m sure hijinx and hilarity will ensue.
I don’t have a link to that strip, though…this comic needs an index! (That’s not a complaint, just a wish…)
On reading the comic I initially thought Cora was offering Max a GLASS Battle Arena. My reaction was “That’s not gonna last long.” After rereading to correct that error my next thought was “Will these battles be shown on GSPN?” (Galactic Sports Programming Network)
Other posts said this will raise Earth’s status and ward off attack. I say it will end up like any other weapon improvement, from poison gas to machine guns to nukes. Others will see it and say “I need to get that for myself! For purely defensive purposes of course.”
that is going to happen anyway since earth defeated a Fel battleship and we have seen that that is galactic news, at least Maxima showing up in the galactic stage will deter the small fry from trying anything and maybe it could potentially open up some interesting oportunities to forge some alliances
Copy pasta muted golden cleavage. Not opposed, just sayin’.
Okay normally I don’t really agree with Max’s whole portyal as “beautiful beyond description” moniker and that’s just a failing of Dave’s Art which he himself has admitted to…. But this page does it for me.
I…. just remembered something.
This is still technically a flashback. From wen Mithbusters was still around.
The show would have deviated A LOT.
“Come to Earth, the only source of supers, they said. Fight supers in a nice, controlled setting they said. They didn’t tell us the super in question took out a fel battle cruiser!”
Super powers and magic both pretty plainly (and repeatedly) contradict the law of conservation of energy, so I don’t particularly get why technology gets the raw end of the deal here.
Well, we don’t know how much energy is involved in the thaumic and superion energy fields either, do we?…
It could be great as a one-off, to acquire some Space Credit and to compensate Cora, but I see too many risks to making it a regular thing.
A) Maxima still gets tired/exhausted/worn down. Don’t want your strongest asset to be weakened when you might need her.
B) Maxima CAN still get hurt, and after she’s appeared in the arena a few times, she’s gonna be pitted against the serious threats. Don’t want your strongest asset to be injured/weakened when you might need her.
C) They’ve taken some efforts to keep the limits of Maxima’s capabilities a secret; no need to make it easy for any potential threat to know her limits, what works on her, what doesn’t, etc. Not to mention giving potential opponents a free testing ground for “Does psionics work? No? What about polymorphing? No? What about microsingularities? Etc.”
D) If she’s fighting there, she’s not on Earth, and it may not be easy to contact her, pull her out of the fight, and get her back to Earth. Dangerous to loudly announce that your heavy-hitter won’t be around for a while.
…probably a few other concerns to deal with, but those are the first few that come to mind.
Not to mention possible resentment that Maxima is allowed to vacation off-world, but no one else can do so. I can see a bunch of people making a fuss about the privilege.
And eventually, the word *will* get out for where she went on vacation. Too many people would notice her absence, and with her level of fame, too many of them would attempt to find out where she went, on the off-chance of meeting her. Not to mention how… interesting, shall we say, speculation can get when people aren’t given concrete answers, much less the answer they want to hear. Rumor mill for where she went might get interesting.
When I was graduating high school decades ago, getting a gold class ring was hundreds of dollars but my palladium class ring was $69.99.
I made the mistake of giving that ring to a girl when she asked if she could wear it. Then she refused to return it when we broke up.
Anybody else expecting this to be Maxima’s “World of Tissue Paper” moment somewhere in this arc?
Actually, as I’m sure someone else has posted but so what I haven’t seen it, You CAN use a nuiclear reactor to make more reactor fuel. But the trick is you aren’t using the power *generated* to do it.
One thing all nuclear reactors have in spades is spare neutrons. Bombard Uranium-238 with neutrons and you get Plutonium-239 which is great for all your fission needs except it’s highly radioactive, toxic and very touchy at well-below critical mass. The same process turns Thorium-232 into Uranium-233, which is great reactor fuel and serves as “filler” in bombs sometimes.
Annddddd! No matter how advanced the civilization is, I always comes down to fight club.
Given that the galactic world at large potentially has already put bounties out on her, would this be wise? Lapha et. al. can’t be the only mercenary group that’s interested in selling her into slavery; just the ones that got there first. If she lets her guard down even for a moment, it’s possible an Aetholith with low enough scruples could partner with someone, bribe someone to gain access to Max’ room while she’s sleeping, and rip her memories out, just like Lapha threatened to do with Sydney. Granted that we technically don’t know that Maxima has that particular vulnerability, and we won’t know until Dave decides that she does/doesn’t, but until that decision is made canon, the possibility is there. Max goes missing, team has to find her in the galaxy, and when they finally do, she’s a completely new person, as whoever bought her on the slave trade remade her personality based on what they wanted–probably still a fighter, but also possibly a perfectly-willing breeder for her owner, a-la a cross between a succubus and a warrior (so, really, just a succubus, sans the lust magic and energy-drain issue).
Might make an interesting story line, with Sydney and Lapha teaming up to restore Max’s memories to her (assuming that’s possible; Max would be super pissed once they do), but I’m not sure I want to read that particular story. For one, Max would seriously need therapy once all was said and done, and what would she do about any kids she had while in that state (assuming it takes the team a while to find her)? Especially since the greater galaxy’s reaction to the entire thing would likely be, “Well, she shouldn’t have let her guard down, now, should she have?”