Grrl Power #1370 – Definitely no but maybe
“But…” You have a spaceship and we want to continue to have access to a spaceship, so…
That’s the real subtext of whatever Faulk is going to say on the next page. “Please let us continue to use your stuff which would take Earth 200 years* of concerted effort otherwise. Also your incredible medical technology and space pornography.” Like I said, subtext.
It’s still a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Throwing Sydney into the mix does offer a solution to the biggest problem, but still adds to the list of bad things that can go badly if something bad happens.
The first time Sydney found herself out amongst the general galactic population, nobody knew her orbs were significant. On a station where you can buy holographic wings, floating glowy things hardly stand out. But now it’s known that her orbs are known about. Sure, people claim to find Nth tech all the time, but the payoff if it’s real is enough for alien governments and other organizations to take interest in rumors and potential scams.
* Predicting what technology will look like in the future is something that most people are really bad at. I hate it when movies show some futuristic cityscape with flying cars and the info-text pops up and says “In the amazing year 2019!” Seriously, Blade Runner with humanoid… bioroids (?) and flying cars and pyramidal buildings 16 square blocks at the base, takes place in 2019. I mean, the movie was made in 1982, but that’s still only 37 years to transform entire city skylines, invent flying cars, and oh, Roy said something about seeing “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…” If he was being literal, then the stars that form the constellation Orion’s shoulders are Bellatrix, which is 250 light years away, or Betelgeuse, which is… uh… hard to measure for reasons, and is between 400 and 550 light years away. Which means within 37 years of the movie coming out, when the pinnacle of home computing power was the Commodore 64 or the Apple IIe, (both of which had CPUs that ran at 1.023 MHz, BTW) the writers thought we’d invent some pretty fucking impressive warp travel.
Unless they wanted someone who was alive when the movie came out to appear as an older person in the movie, like some expository news cast saying “Bill Gates turned 73 today…” or something like that, there is NO REASON not to say that movie takes place in 2119. No one seeing that movie in the theater would be alive in 2119 to complain about it like I am now.
My point here is, could Earth make a warp capable spaceship in 200 years? Who the hell knows? Obviously it depends on if warp travel is even possible and what is required to achieve it. If you need to set up an orbital facility in low orbit of a neutron star in order to produce FTL-onium, then it might take us 4,000 years to make the first one, because it’ll take a long ass time to build that first factory. (Apparently the closest neutron star is 400 light years away, so it would actually probably take closer to 40,000 years to get there with conventional propulsion.) On the other hand, if you just need a shitload of energy to throw at the problem and that lets you Alcubierre the problem, then… maybe? Honestly, the rest of the ship isn’t so challenging. Once you have enough energy to not have to worry about barely being able to lift your own fuel into space with you, then you could make something that looked like a cool space ship covered in armor instead of all of our space stuff now, which looks like tinker toys covered in foil and quilted blankets.
So in the Grrl-verse, with Earth’s supers, yeah, you could probably build everything but the warp drive on Earth and have someone like Maxima carry it into space. Or have her carry a bunch of shit into space to be assembled as a factory, which would put together components or whatever. The superpowers will give Earth a massive timetable advantage when it comes to spacetravel. Getting warp engines will probably still be expensive though.
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.
I like big buts, and I cannot lie
All the other generals can’t deny.
When a blue girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a scheme to get rich in space
I get concerned!
Butt that’s not the end of it.
Second comment. New record. But me no buts, but do go on. An old saying I remember my gramps teaching me.
Yeah, Sydney and Max in a death match space event… what could go wrong?
No, Sydney is only going along as the GalacticUber Driver to get Maxi back in time for Maxi to do what Maxi does best
And what makes you think that Sydney do only that? Even disregarding sudden unexpected events, Sydney’s attention span is hilariously bad. Do you seriously believe nothing will happen?
Besides, remember Sydney depleted her orbs during the Darude situation and it hasn’t been that long ago. I’d hate for her to get into a battle to find out Mr. Bubble has run out of juice. Recharging takes time, and like driving a EV for hours, and then thinking 30 minutes on the charger will fix it.
Good point, has that actually been adressed? I honestly don’t remember reading about it.
What also, as far as I know, what does the point put in the green orb that was put in on the plane by itself, what does it do?
Prediction: Sydney will be good and not involve herself UNTIL she detectifies that Max’s opponent is cheating in some fashion, at which point she’ll insert herself to the tune of Yakkity Sax.
Didn’t say she wouldn’t do something stupid (it’s Sydney!!), just that she won’t be entered (officially) into the death match
If you wanted to invest the money in it, there are a variety of ‘active structures” that could be built with roughly current tech, (Building them is just an ordinary engineering exercise, not requiring major technological breakthroughs.) like the Loftstrom launch loop, that can reduce the cost of putting stuff into orbit to roughly comparable to intercontinental shipping costs, given about 10 years and somebody able to cut the check.
Nobody does them because they don’t make economic sense at current traffic levels, like you didn’t build the interstate highway system for Lewis and Clarke.
A less radiation paranoid culture than ours would just Orion drive that stuff into space.
So you don’t even need supers, though they make it a bit easier.
We don’t really have a good idea how FTL works, (Actually, in the real world what we do have is a good idea that it’s categorically impossible, going up against a lot of wishful thinking.) to judge how hard the technological leap from “Can visit other planets” to “Can visit other stars in less than a lifetime” is in the Girrlverse.
Apparently it’s not insanely energy intensive, the way relativistic photon drives are, where a ship capable of getting up to half of light speed is putting out enough power to fry continents if they point the drive in the wrong direction. It’s probably the sort of thing where, once you know how to do it, physicists do a lot of face palming and beating heads against walls in embarrassment over not realizing it.
YT channel Isaac Arthur has many videos on “active structures”, Mega structures and other future tech. Older ones are a little hard to listen to at first do to a speech impediment(but has greatly improved over the decade he has be doing this). So if you want to know the many uses of Black Holes or what Alien Invasion movies get wrong give it a look.
>(Actually, in the real world what we do have is a good idea that it’s categorically impossible, going up against a lot of wishful thinking.)
Actually, theoretical physics seems to suggest that FTL by means of traversable wormholes and/or warp drives may well be possible, even if it is by no means current or near-future tech.
Yeah, go use the Orion on someone else’s planet, please.
Even Pournelle thought that the boom-boom nuclear drive would be better used bringing minerals from asteroids back to Earth. Which, sure, space is big and all that.
Predicting technology will always be iffy.
In defense of older Science Fiction stories, take 1982 and go back 37 years.
That’s 1945, the end of WWII when the atom bomb and jet engines were new. Computers? Not really in sight compared the the first desktop computers. Spaceflight? Even if we are just talking satellites, orbit or the moon was still Science Fiction.
And today? we are capable of doing so much more if we really wanted to. People don’t really grasp the technology we already have, not to mention what’s just on the horizon or in reach.
By 1982 we traveled the world in speeds and numbers someone from 1945 would have trouble to grasp. We had enough atom bombs to wipe out the world several times over. The first home computers where there and the global network was in it’s infancy.
And today, 43 years later? Get someone here from 1982 they would have trouble grasping what was going on despite us not being as advanced as they imagined us to be.
Suddenly Blade Runner doesn’t look that far fetched, does it? Maybe a little optimistic, but so would have been what we had in 1982 if you look at it from 1945.
I think the point he’s making is that, even if you assume all those tech advances, there wasn’t time enough before the projected date for all the events prior to the story to have happened yet. Even if all that tech had dropped from the sky neatly wrapped with a bow, you didn’t have time for it to have all happened.
Now, to be fair, Blade Runner is a movie based off of Philip K Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, and THAT was written in 1968. But it was portraying events supposedly in 1992, only 24 years later, so suffered from much the same issue.
A lot of early SF assumes extremely accelerated tech development timelines, relative to what we’ve experienced, but this was reasonable. They were written in an age where government regulation wasn’t slowing things down nearly so much, and they just assumed that would continue. If we still had that regulatory environment, we probably WOULD already have a Mars colony, electric cars running off nuclear batteries, and those flying cars. They were all reasonable projections, the tech didn’t fail, the regulators just smothered it.
The issue really is, not the rapid development of tech, but simply not enough time for all the prior events to have happened between writing the book and the projected date. Dick just wasn’t good in that regard, a lot of his contemporaries were better at constructing reasonable timelines for events to take place.
Because SF writers didn’t count on one thing: greed
Not the greed to get things done, but the greed to make sure things didn’t get done so that those who relied on how things are now to be rich staid rich
Look how long it took for the electric cars to become more than just a fad, and that was due to one man (that 90% of the world hates) who had enough money of his own to say “Fuck you!” to the conventional automobile makers (and the ones fueling them)
Mum keeps telling me about how they had water-fueled engines in Rhodesia in the 40’s or 50’s!
Where are they now? Forgotten because the oil barons and big car companies didn’t like the idea of people just going to the local watering hole to top up the tanks
Dude, come on. This “water-fuelled car” thing was stupid back then, and stupid now, too. Water is basically ash: the combustion result of oxygen and hydrogen, and a very stable, low-energy state molecule. You can extract more energy from it, yes, but it will require pretty expensive/rare materials: like, you can burn magnesium in water – the magnesium will tear the oxygen off from the water molecule, releasing hydrogen gas and magnesium oxide, releasing energy. But a) magnesium is far more expensive than oil, b) even this would be far better done with air.
So, no, they weren’t driving cars with water. Not because of some great conspiracy, but because whoever set up our universe made the physics work this way. Energy can only be extracted, and water molecules don’t have much available.
The reason electric cars ddn’t catch on sooner was because of battery technology, not a conspiracy. Lithium batteries were too expensive, degraded too quickly, and didn’t output enough or hold enough charge to make up for the cost. All Tesla did was see that batteries were getting cheap enough to make it feasible and come up with a way to market EVs that would overcome some people’s range anxiety. And I say “Tesla” and not “Musk” because Musk didn’t do those things, he just convinced investors that it would work and provided part of the funding. Musk is not a genius engineer, he’s a genius con man who VERY occasionally manages to follow through on his promises.
Honestly I’m not sure that science fiction is really about the timescale. Like most fiction, it is in one way or another about the people involved, and the impact of other people and things on the lives of the few we choose to care about. If there’s anything that a short timeline says, it’s that the people involved won’t be prepared for the consequences, and–honestly–we aren’t. We still aren’t prepared for the consequences of email spam, hacking, PII release, cyberattacks on infrastructure, nuclear weapons… hell, we still aren’t fully prepared for the consequences of industrial polution, and that’s been around a hell of a lot longer! But moreso for plastic pollution, the chemistry-industrial complex (PFCs, etc), overuse of fossil fuels in general, refrigerants… we can go on.
Sci-fi in general has been saying “We aren’t prepared” since the earliest signs that we weren’t prepared, and we’re still seeing signs that they’re right. The exact timescale isn’t nearly as important as the fact that some parts of any given technological revolution will happen in the span of a single generation, and nobody will know what to do with it or about it by the time it’s absolutely everywhere.
I think we could have the arcologies, flying cars, etc. But it would all be relatively new, not looking old already is the issue.
The move from landlines to cellphones was gradual. The iPhone pushed the smartphone concept to a record level that left ‘dumb’ phones in the dust.
I don’t want flying cars. At least not until they have the autonomous driving thing figured out. Humans have enough trouble managing keeping a vehicle going straight on a straight Road with limited distractions to add two more Dimensions to that travel seems a highly risky for all travelers.
Look off “Assignment in Space with RIP Foster” it is a novel originally written in series…so minor continuity issues. BUT, (hobbles to bookshelf.) 1958, with lead time of the era it was written at least a year earlier. And that like a lot of Clarke and Asimov got quiet a bit correct (pretty sure the space station was from vonBraun) much of the rest I’ve not seen in early 20century SciFi, not even in a bottle shop. At least the writers know to now put in concerns about the effects of lower gravity, no gravity and such. Moon she is harsh, space wants you stone cold dead…ain’t no free lunch but what you take.
I’ve always found a lot of Bradbury to be surprisingly accurate, too, in his sci-fi. Sure, Martian Chronicles was way off, but look at his short stories and novellas, like The Pedestrian, or Fahrenheit 451s telescreens, or the always-in-touch communication of The Murderer.
RIP Foster, Ride the Gray Planet, was one of my absolute favorite and realistic sci-fi stories! I heavily and heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to start a kid on love of science fiction.
I like looking at Neuromancer. He vastly overestimated some computer tech but missed cell phones completely. Even Dick Tracy had cell phones. He had single pilot space ships flying around, built in body weaponry etc.
Eh, I give Star Trek credit for that one.
My favorite example from right around 1982 is Brian Daley’s Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, where he predicts the modern smartphone with a fair degree of accuracy… in a story set a thousand years in the future!
When watching TV, I often play a game in my head: “Think of someone in the US military intelligence the day after Pearl Harbor watching this. Could they figure out what’s going on in the show or commercial and would it bewilder them if they could? What could they figure out about the modern world? Would they figure out anything which would substantially help the war effort?”
I mean, they didn’t even have the concept of doing CPR on someone who was having heart failure. Or thousands of other things we take for granted.
My favorite bit of poorly estimated futurism in sci-fi is from the otherwise excellent 1956 sci-fi film “Forbidden Planet” which begins with a voiceover saying, “In the latter part of the 21st Century, man reached the Moon.” Only 13 years after the film was released, Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon, but the narration expected that it would take over 100.
A typical young adult from 1982 would have no more trouble grasping our culture than we do. (So, some trouble, but not a lot.)
Computers are pretty cheap and accessible, they are in lots of things as single-purpose hardware. They are good guessers and pretend-smart and they don’t have any more trouble with idioms than anyone else, but they make dumb mistakes just like people do, and of the same kind.
Oh, and phones work anywhere and have video games on them, plus junk mail.
Young adults from 2025 have more trouble understanding 1980 than those from 1980 would have understanding 2025.
As for the ‘but’?
But we get access to space money and could buy some space resources or tech if we are sneaky about it.
Earth’s warp capable spaceship will take 217 years.
Don’t ask me how I know that number.
Would’ve been a couple of years sooner, of course, had it not been for that janitorial incident.
oh nice, I predict space shenanigans in the future!
The strange thing is that I get the feeling that Deus would also try and make sure that Max can get back to Earth pronto, to the extent that he would reveal his Stargate. He knows that there’ll be enough intergalactic interest in Earth that could be a threat to what still is his power base, so he’d make sure our planet has its own Death Star.
And he has the hots for her. Even a super-intelligence can do stupid things if they think they’ll get the girl, although he has been quite in control of himself on that front.
Historically his track record in getting the girl has been remarkably good. Max is a long term project of his, he’s taking his time with her.
Deus is not someone Archon is going to trust with this. While not actively hostile, he is a rival power, and you don’t give a rival power a heads-up that your primary deterrent is going to be off-planet – and you certainly don’t rely on him to bring her back in the case of an emergency!
You think he would wait for them to ask him? If her gets wind of the trip, and he has his own spies, he might set up contingency plans of his own, and would not tell anyone about them. If it came time to implement, he would just show up and be like, ‘I can get you back to search in seconds, how about it?’ Might also make some kind of show of it, too; he does like his grandstanding.
Deus has already used his stargate to get to Fracture Station, and recently revealed it to Maxima.
“Giant flat TV you can hang on a wall!” was the one thing the 50’s Sunday supplements got right.
“Big Butt, So What?”
“It’s worse on the way out.”
The past had such high hopes for us. They expected us to have moon bases and flying cars by now. Instead we have sandwich wrappers with warnings not to eat the wrapper.
Tech has gotten smarter, people not so much
If you think about it, a person born in 1900 would have gone from a world where man could not fly and electricity was rare to a world where electricity was a common part of life, man could fly, man has walked on the moon, we had a man-made object 3.7 billion miles from Earth having left the last planet of the solar system, and we had access to the sum of human knowledge in the palm of our hands on a phone, and we had split the atom, within their a human being’s conceivable lifetime. There was more technological advancement in the 20th century than there was in the preceding 19 centuries before it. It’s not all that surprising that people would have tried to expect major advances in a short period of time, given how technology progression has been getting faster and faster if you look at it from a longer view.
Many people know about the Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881.
Few know that Wyatt Earp died in 1929. He was born in 1848.
Now consider what the man has seen in his lifetime.
And jars of peanut butter with the label “Warning: contains peanuts”. Not to mention “Vegan tofu”.
Congressmen warning us the libs will soon force us to drink plant based beer.
Keep in mind that every warning label represents at least one lawsuit.
i’ve seen one with a warning label that says ‘warning: may contain nuts’
I remember Space:1999. Fortunately, the moon did not launch itself to multiple star systems, being pushed by an exploding nuclear waste dump. Ripping that big a mass from the Earth would be devastating to our planet.
Don’t remember if we ever found out what happened to Earth after the moon went walk-about
Let’s see. Earth’s moon accelerated to just less than C, maybe?. Big big Orion drive, I guess. The Space: 1999ers would have needed someway to decelerate their little Eagle thingies way below C to visit this week’s planet, and then go near C again to catch back up to the Moon. Even back when the show was new and my hair was red, my math brain went “Wait….” And given the initial energy needed, Earth was probably a cinder.
Heinlein expected the max speed humans were capable of to continue to increase exponentially – after all, that is pretty much what happened in his lifetime. Pretty sure the curve plateaued (gods, that word is weird to spell) a little after his death.
We (as in USA), have had warp capable ships for many years. The average citizen will never find out about this.
I call BS. Evidence required.
Suuuuuuure we do. And not only was none of the research leading up to the warp drive published, but no one on Earth was able to detect the drive being tested or used.
The government does plenty of evil things and keeps plenty of secrets that people should know about without having to make up fictional ones.
Nah, climate change is the results of the tests. The base they built on the moon is where the tests are taking place and eventually it will render the earth an inhospitable desert.
Eh, she’s not only the most powerful person on Earth, she’s likely the most powerful person on Earth with vacation days. She should just use them if she wants to go. :p
Given her status, she is likely required to be on call even if she goes on vacation. On Earth, that’s not an issue – so long as she can be contacted, she can be anywhere on the planet within a couple hours, as noted here by Faulk. Adding a couple minutes to that for Sydney to grab her and warp back to Earth wouldn’t be an issue. I still think it’s a bad idea for Sydney to tag along (as I noted in a comment on the last page, it would probably be better for them to just take Sydney there the slow way, then have her port back to Earth to grab Maxima, take her to the Aetherdome or whatever it’s called, then port back to Earth on her own to wait for the signal to bring Maxima back)… although given the focus of the comic, I suppose that would just mean the situation on Earth calling for Maxima’s presence would involve Sydney getting into trouble again (she has thus far been neutralized four times IIRC – when she was captured by Sciona, when she was paralytically envenomed by the spider lady who abducted Decolletage’s prodigee, when she was captured by Concretia, and finally when she was bodyjacked by Lapha), meaning it would ultimately be better for her to be with Maxima. Also Sydney would absolutely want to go, so she may well try to rely on her genre savvy to convince them it’s best for her to stick with Maxima (and maybe leave out the fact that, if she’s with Maxima, if anything goes down on Earth there’s approximately a 99% probability they’ll have no means of getting the word out to her immediately, like with the Ascensioner attack).
i predict that sydney’s role will be much more active than just emergency transport, and i can’t wait. no one on the team has actually seen with their own eyes what she’s capable of yet, they’ve only heard her report of what happened on the alari homeworld
… and only Maxima is fully aware of what happened there, unless she’s advised her higher-ups and the team of Sydney’s Beeportation ability. If Sydney does wind up in combat, I can’t help but wonder if an older vote incentive (the one where she’s remote piloting a bioroid while her body is being patched up in a Legally Distinct Bacta Tank) might become relevant…
Sometimes the predictions go the other way. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, pretty much the foundational work for the cyberpunk genre, was written in 1984 and set around 2035, has a scene involving a bank of payphones in an airport.
The biggest remaining issue I’ve seen is one no one has mentioned yet: Power. Not like strength, but like battery charge. Sydney’s not a super – her orbs run off some form of stored energy, and they have no real idea how much she has stored, or how fast it regenerates, or how much different actions cost. Given what Cora said about the cost of opening Aetherium causeways, those things presumably drain MASSIVE amounts of Sydney’s energy.
It’s easy to imagine that most of the energy that’s been stored over the millions of years the orbs sat undiscovered has been spent, given how Sydney felt the urgent need to stop and recharge on the trip to Africa. So it would very much be possible to run into a scenario – especially when Sydney might be using her orbs for other purposes – in which she doesn’t have the power to gate them back.
It’s actually kind of hard to say: It looks like Aetherium causeways are energy expensive to do with most tech because the causeway is a very inefficient side effect of the energy expenditure. The orbs, OTOH, operating to directly create it, might be doing so very efficiently, and might even regenerate the energy when closing them again.
She ran down the battery transmuting thousands of tons of oxygen into nitrogen, which plausibly required massively more energy than her interstellar gateways do.
What we DO know is that hypersonic travel consumes power faster than she stores it, because her charge was dropping during the flight home. Still no real idea how much power the orbs actually store, or how fast they recharge, or even how they recharge.
This assumes that the charge capacity is nigh-infinite, of course. Otherwise, it’s possible the orbs were charged to full in a relatively short time-span, and it’s just that Sydney’s engaged in a lot of very high-energy antics on short timeframes.
But when Sydney looked at her navigation log, she surmised that the Earth location icon was fuzzy, indicating a danger if she tried to use it.
not Earth location
she travelled to the station and to Earth back with big violence guy, so causeway to Earth is safe
we don’t know where the fuzzy location is, and we also don’t know how long those orbs travelled thru space before landing on Earth
No, it was the Earth location, but maybe at the location where she found the orbs. Maybe the last time they traveled to Earth they emerged underground, or while an asteroid was striking, and the orbs recorded that particular emergence point as dangerous.
But when she used them to travel FROM Earth, the departure point automatically got recorded as a new, safe emergence point, that she could return to.
I like the fact that the general here looks like the dad from Clueless, lets me hear his voice in my head. and imagine that Maxima is Alicia Silverstone.
Faulke is based on Dan Hedaya, haven’t seen Clueless (the movie or tv series) in decades so no idea if it’s the same actor
It is.
Although in that last panel, in a white uniform smoking a cigar, he’s channeling Dean Stockwell from Quantum Leap.
Ever see Chris and Jake on YouTube? This skit fits perfectly with the discussion! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLYwQb2T_i8
Hah, perfect.
I really must speak up to defend the awesomeness of the Commodore 64.
Hey, I love the C64. I was just suggesting it wasn’t a powerhouse of computing.
Still have a C64 in another room (also have two Atari 800XL’s and an Amiga600HD)
Great job with the art work. Really looks like him.
I wonder if anybody has told him that he is portrayed in a webcomic?
Bet he would get a kick out of it.
Buuut, Earth could become the cage match center of the galaxy. You would probably want to stage the fights on Mars to avoid collateral damage, especially with some of the kaiju level opponents. It would be close enough that you could shuttle all sorts of supers back and forth to provide a variety of opponents.
No, Commodore PET 8096, with basic compiler. But for novels predicting the future, note Eric Harry’s Society of the Mind (1996), which predicted at some approximation Elon Musk. He predicted the genius inventor/industrialist who gave us reusable satellite launch rockets with methane for fuel, Starlink, TVs with computer access, humanoid (sort of) robots operating factories, self-driving cars , and an AI system for which a psychoanalyst was summoned from an ivy-league university. (But asteroid mining by putting the asteroid into earth orbit.)
No, for a warp drive you need an old sewing machine that is full of gears, and a box of resistors and other electrical components. (For no points, name the real novel that deployed these.)
Well, that’s not Elon Musk, that’s what Elon Musk pretends to be.
wait, they plan to disguise Maxima so people of the galaxy don’t recognize human supers, but they also plan to use the causeway that nobody else can use but everyone can monitor to travel to the arena and back?
that’s like holding a huge sign “here be human super gladiator”
Just in case an emergency pops up on earth. For basic travel they would use Cora’s ship.
And it would mean the end of that scheme.
“But what if we host? I mean, Mars is right there. Guarantee we keep any infrastructure they set up in orbit. I means, it’s Mars… God of War. It’s begging to happen. ”
“Gods of War would sell tickets. Kaiju, Siege mecha, Unlimited Class, maybe a 4 Way Army Battle Royale…easier to control. GPD would send a fleet for safety. Saves us a lot. Offer winners sex tours or movie deal on earth…This could work General.”
“How…how do you accommodate a Kaiju on a sex tour?”
“Details…Details. We’ll General?”
“What about ad revenue sharing? Offset infrastructure costs via promoters? Or do individual deals?”
“Think PPV by system or fleet, subcasts percentage of each ad. Locally for them. Half a point each in gal credit sounds delicious. ”
“Half a point? For blip or overlay ads? Shouldn’t that be more?”
“General, how many systems, fleet-homes, and planets do you think exist out there?”
“Sorry Frog in a well syndrome.”
“Problems start with clean up and indigents who bet poorly stuck on Mars… there’s profit in one, costs in another.”
“Add a surcharge or parking fee to live tickets. Contract a Space Taxi service. Dump em on a nexus world or station. ”
“What about towing, abandoned transports…”
“Contract out to GPD. They’ll remove illegal -for you- tech and weapons, and ensure they’ll not blow up. Last part is important. Some participants are very sore losers.”
“So…we get our own space fleet? I can sell the Prez on that. ”
“Probably should fast track this so that Sexy Smarmy guy doesn’t plant a flag on Mars and steal the show.”
“Hell. He’ll want to sponsor a team for sure.”
“Then we charge him accordingly. ”
“We might need a second ace…Permission to wake the Stoner?”
My main concern would be kitting Sydney with enough ADHD meds for the trip, as well as anxiety meds! She still might be having nightmares about fighting those giant world-killers when she got stuck half-way across the universe. Then, on top of that, they’ll need to stop whoever wants to challenge/kill her for the orbs.
Or, her wanting to fight to level-up the orbs!
Lets just say this arc is gonna be a long one!!!
(And I hope someone tells a certain “Not-Really-A-Supervillain” so that he can buy front row seats and a huge bag of space-popcorn.)
Typo in the first frame, second-to-last line. “… how long it would it take…”
IIRC the term “Bioroids” refers to the bioengineered humanoid life forms in the Appleseed Series…
Umm way before Appleseed.
Bubblegum Crisis and knock offs.
Dirty Pair. Etc. Even late 1970s early anime and live action shows.
Is that cigar box a reference to the cigar box that ended up basically deciding the Civil War because it got misplaced?
If we could harness fusion we could make a mater antimater annihilation relavitistic rocket …
If the Project Valkyrie is feasible the max spee wil be 92% the speed of light.
It’s not the bifrost but it will make basic star travel feasible
Super heavy lift vehicles can carry over 100 tons to orbit. Falcon Heavy can carry about 63 tons to orbit. Starship can lift about 250 tons IF you throw it away afterwards, and if it’s ever working correctly.
Just MHO, if you can’t build your engine in less than 200 tons, or about three Falcon Heavy loads, then you don’t have a practical engine. For a comparison, that giant haul truck (BelAZ 75710) weighs about 360 metric tons empty, and that of course includes frame and tires and bed and a lot of stuff besides engine.
As for FTL travel, I believe we’ll have the answers to those questions (didn’t say they’d be yes or easy or practical) in 30 years or less.
My understanding is the line “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…” was an adlib by Rotger Hauer to give Batty more of a history so we the audience would be more sempathic to the character and understand why he was fighting for life.
Eh, give Arianna access to space marketing and inside 24 hours EVERYONE WILL HAVE FAKE FLOATY BALLS!
They’ll NEVER find Sydney!
36 hours if she has to set up a contract with someone to slap floating runes on them.
I mean, a few pages ago there were clearly hats with blond ponytails and colored balls glued to them. Floaty balls are just an extension of the souvenir.
Dammit! I got sidetracked and didn’t read for a few years and now I’m all caught up again!
Truly a sad day. :(
“We don’t want it known our biggest hitter is not on Earth, but we do want to play with your shiny space toys.” Sounds about right.
If we wanted to make it our (humanity’s) goal to explore other stars, then we probably could make good progress in a few decades.
Building a “tower” that is 5-10km tall and has a spin launch/rail gun that can launch payloads into orbit with very little fuel. In addition to using nukes for propulsion could get a spacecraft going to a nearby star. Technically this is all doable with current technology, it’s just expensive and not a priority.
10 km would be way too short to be able to launch anything into orbit.
Orbital speed (at LEO heights anyway) is about 28,000 km/h
Rocket capsules that return from orbit will find the atmosphere dense enough at 100+ km to create a layer of plasma that tries to burn away the rocket (and is doing a very good job at it). 1500 degrees celsius is more than almost all materials, or atoms, can withstand.
To launch a rocket using a tower, it will have to exit the vacuum tube at over 28,000 km/h, which at 10 km altitude would cause it to do an accurate impression of a meteorite hitting the earth’s atmosphere. (it can be lower but then you have to accelerate rocket engines and a lot of propellant). If you have no engine you need almost double the orbital speed, since most of the speed your capsule has will bleed off as it ascends through the densest part of the atmosphere.
If you can build a 10km tall tower, you might as well continue all the way up to 80km and release at a height were we are at near vacuum and not much atmosphere is left to slow down the capsule as it pushes through.
Of course, you want to release the capsule at a mostly horizontal direction, so you would want a Lofstrohm loop rather than a straight tower.
Couldn’t Harem be sent along as well as an emergency teleporter? I don’t know if they ever established a range limit for her, and if she unteleports all but 2 clones, one with Sydney and maxima, one at Archon HQ, she should be able to teleport both of them straight back right?
Another person would be well over her weight limit, but she can’t teleport other people anyway. Varia can only tag along because of her own power, not Harem’s.
Ok, I forgot about that. But they could still take a harem along as an uninterruptible communicator.
With tech development, it would mostly depend on scaling factors I think. A lot of the explosive growth we had in the early 20th century came about because we properly propagated and standardized a lot of technology. Cheap aluminum requires access to reliable electricity, cheap high quality steel requires access to pure oxygen and alloying agents, cheap computers requires access to miniaturiz-able semiconductors. It’s a case of us finding the low hanging fruit and properly picking it, now we have to reach further up. The most likely thing I can think of that would result in a similar growth burst would be if we get some reliable nano-bot swarms since they can manufacture more of themselves, although that would likely lead more toward the cyberpunk-y futures than flying cars.
If you want another example of super scifi speeds, I believe the Cowboy Bebop timeline had the moon already exploded from an FTL gate accident.
The one that makes the most sense for the usual space opera settings would be somebody slow-boating an FTL gate into the star system and gives us access to the galactic market and people can buy what amounts to star trek replicators. I think that was the backstory to Schlock Mercenary, or possibly the fanfic that was published.
How much do you think he wants placed on Max winning?
“Sci-Fi Movies never pick the right year” from “Chris and Jack” adressed your first part. Even calling out Bladerunner by name.
“If you need to set up an orbital facility in low orbit of a neutron star in order to produce FTL-onium, then it might take us 4,000 years to make the first one, because it’ll take a long ass time to build that first factory.”
The idea of a dyson sphere (which is not from Dyson btw.) has a logistical problem:
You need so much energy moving solar systems worth of mass across the galaxy just to build one: If you can build one, you no longer need it.
His actual idea of a Dyson Swarm could actually be done with decades old technology.
About this comic: Is guess Faulk would be okay allowing other team members? Might be a good way to test if Achilles has a heel after all?