Grrl Power #1378 – Commence Operation StealthySpaceGambleBloodSport
I didn’t draw Maxima flying besides Sylv because she’s insecure about being shorter than him. If you could fly with zero effort, wouldn’t you do it sometimes?
I call out “with zero effort” because I have had more than one dream where I could fly, but it was the shittiest, worst flying possible. I could only get about waist high off the ground, and moving required basically swimming through the air, so I could move barely as fast as a brisk walk, if I put a ton of effort into scooping my hands just right to catch as much air as I could and shoving it behind me. Brains are the worst.
I looked back at the pages that introduced Cora’s crew, and I noticed that Sylv’s name was originally written as Slyv. It would be much easier to retcon that first page than all the others with him on it, but instead, I’ve decided that his full name is Sylv Slyv. Possibly his middle name is Yvsl.
And now I’ve decided that his whole race’s given names are anagrams of their family names. Because why not? They’re aliens, and aliens do alien stuff.
Why isn’t he wearing a shirt? Because I started drawing his muscles to make sure I had the proportions right, then decided I didn’t want to make up a spacey male-cut shirt. I would be the absolute worst costume designer for a sci-fi movie. Everyone would be wearing Han Solo adjacent outfits probably. Unless the project I was working on was Deja Thoris chic. Then I’d have fun with it. Or at least designing the women’s costumage. I probably wouldn’t enjoy designing men’s bejeweled banana hammocks or whatever. Leave that to a female costume designer, or a gay one. That’d be fair, right? Although, that might result in some competitive minimalism that’d have to be scrapped when it came time for fittings.
Maxima tried to hide her ascent into space by flying out into international water, then over the horizon, then up out of the atmosphere, since they figured the spy satellite was going to be positioned within a few hundred clicks of being directly over Archon HQ. But a quick google suggests there are roughly 100K ships at sea at any given moment, and that’s just large merchant ships, excluding small fishing boats and military vessels, so it’s probably hard to pick a spot where Max could get into orbit without being seen at all. Maybe somewhere closer to the poles? Lots of research stations out that way, but fewer eyes in total, I’d wager. Wearing a black stealth suit and doing it at night would help a lot, no matter where she was.
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.
How are they going to disguise the Terran mammal wierdo who is infamous on the hypernet videos for eating amounts of Grakz that make a fire daemon nervous?…
Probably already forgot her given that enough time passed for other things to catch the public eye.
With this reporting station, they have probably linked the two together. I wouldn’t be surprised if they think her superpower is pain tolerance or heat tolerance or something like that, along with whatever other reporting they managed to discover.
They’ve been combing social media, so they know everything Ariana wants the public to know about The Mighty Halo, including the fact that the blue one is the one that lets her fly. If they’re choosing to assume pain/heat tolerance they’re going to assume one of the orbs does that passively.
Ok, what about this. The power of the unknown ball is, in fact, giving the ability to eat crazy hot foods? Does what she is eating seem even remotely human?
Question is, what would the power-ups be?
Eat Rocks? Eat lava?
long time reader, first time poster
So…the final orb would allow for surviving the consumption of any organic matter for energy conversion to augment the bioenergy supply that it provides to the organic scout ship that she has become?
It’s probably already doing some regulated draw from an extradimensional energy source but why not get a caloric boost from the host? Acceptable.
Good point. That probably wouldn’t even move the Epstein files off the front page.
Max was presented with an apperanyly inpenetrable hard light disguisem(on which she had notes, but Faulk didn’t)
I think they have another one.
Or they use Dabbler’s choker, since they don’t actually have to show her to the “camera’s”
Or theh keep her on the ship, since she won’t be fighting.
let’s go with leather then lmfao
I expect the cellulose fibres of cotton or linen should not set anything off, as far as off-world detection of the origin of the clothing; there should be very little DNA in there after processing. That should be even more so with rayon. Leather is going the other way; it is going to scream cow or pig DNA instead. Their formal uniforms would be a giveaway as to the origin of these guys, but using a different mechanism.
Hum this makes me wonder if Sidny’s light bee can carry passengers. We know it can port her and her clothes but what about a backpack. Or something backpack sized a baby or puppy. Why not a child or a full sized person.
She has opened a portal to transport Vehemence to The Station before and back. Controlled. So yes, she can.
Not with the Lightbee though.
i dreamt i could fly. but only one inch of the ground, i tried to show off to people but no one was impressed and it distressed me greatly as i kept trying.
Have had lots of flying dreams, later most of them lucid. It’s mostly like they describe in Hitchhiker’s Guide, fail or neglect to fall down after jumping. After some practice, I even had a handful of dreams where I managed to fly around Dragonball-style. Can recommend.
I’ve also have had more than one dream where I could fly, I could only get about a foot off the ground, and moving required a ton of effort into a sort of push with my mind & while leaning forward like a Segway rider.
Of those “100k ships” the vast majority will be somewhere near the coast of populated areas (small boats, local fishermen, cruise ships). There are a few long-haul cruise ships out there, but very sparse. The remainder will be commercial fishing vessels (still closer to the coast than mid-ocean) and transport ships, all where the people on board are either busy working or belowdecks. I originally thought that they then wouldn’t have access to the internet, but it turns out working ships with long-term contracts are required to provide their crew with private communication, usually wifi; some still don’t, but most do. These ships would be many many miles apart. The earth’s oceans are absolutely huge.
All that said, even if a crewman on a tanker ship was taking a break, leaning on the rail, and scanning the horizon for birds or jets, a human-sized spec is hard to see at several miles distance. She’s wearing black, so coming up at night or dawn/dusk would make her full invisible to humans. Wearing light blue would do that in the day. It’s totally reasonable that Max could leave headquarters, head up at a slope toward some minor incident that’s happening somewhere on the globe, then go vertical over the ocean with no one knowing other than a few military tracking satellites.
Sidney, however, has a much larger bubble and would be oblivious to stealth. Especially since she wasn’t told anything about what was going on. She would have flown straight up from headquarters and been seen by the countless cameras trained on the building watching for exactly that.
Considering her speed she could look up the nearest place with fog or at least low-hanging clouds to lower the visibility radius even more.
i did air search and rescue, out of Hawaii. a man sized object is nearly impossible to spot at a mile.! once a Parawing was blown to sea,. a bright white sail, and neon green suit.! we finally spotted him at 500 yards.!!
also google San Deigo Bay. satellite view, zoom in till you see ships… (wow that’s close) now keep zooming till you see man sized,,.. hidden jem,. there is a man in a “Water jet pack suit”,. good luck in finding.!
It’s easier to see things in the sky than on the water, but your point is still absolutely accurate.
BVR, or “Beyond Visual Range” aerial combat is generally considered to be about 25+ miles. Fighter pilots all have 20/20 vision or better, and even when they know exactly where to look (thanks to radar), they can’t see an entire airplane farther than that. A human has maybe 1/6 the cross-sectional area of the smallest profile of the smallest combat aircraft, so we’ll say someone with 20/20 vision can see a flying Maxima at 4 miles. That gives a detection area of about 12 square miles.
Oceans take up 70% of the Earth’s surface, over 139 million square miles, so even if those 100K ships were perfectly spaced around the oceans, with a 12-square-mile detection area, they would cover less than 1% of the ocean. They are, of course, concentrated near the coasts and major shipping lanes. The odds of someone being close enough, let alone looking in the right direction to spot Maxima, even if she didn’t check for boats or ships before heading upward, are vanishingly small.
Plus, honestly, between the worldwide publicity and the evident problems humans have identifying things in the sky, there must be dozens of “Maxima sightings” posted every day. My sympathies to the alien in charge of sorting out which ones are her, which ones are another super, which ones are a 747 and which ones are a seagull.
I mean, “Spacecation” was right there on the table, Sydles.
…
Is that why everyone is wearing leather and spandex in space? I suppose textile fabric is a water hog.
Why didn’t Maxima just go up in Cora’s ship, and then slip out of the airlock once it was in orbit?
Max did go to Cora’s ship first in order to put on this stealth suit.
We know this because social media spotted her ascent, and had Max already been wearing the suit , that would not have happened.
No, I mean Cora’s ship is not a secret, right? So they could have landed it, had Max get in, then taken off.
The reports described a “small black shape”, which implies she was wearing the stealth suit (but it turned out to not be 100% stealthy).
Stealthy against radar / alien sensors is not the same as invisible. Arccon headquarters is famous; people (both military and just fans) will have cameras and telescopes looking at it 24/7 trying to get info on what the flying supers are doing and where they are going.
I assume that having a big ship fly into orbit, sit there for a bit, then fly back down is rather suspicious.
When Archon is involved? Not really…
You can come up with a ton of reasons why you have that big hunk of space metal hanging around somewhere for a bit.
Monitoring something specific. An excercise. Entertaining local or even national BusyBodies who *demanded* a space trip in the alien spaceship.
Arianna could no doubt spin out a reason *why* , and make people *want* it to have been there.
Well, if they were trying to convince the humans of Earth, yeah, Arianna could do that.
But the humans of Earth don’t have a FTL+ level spy satellite that they are trying to suborn without the owners knowing it. It’s much easier to remove a few social media posts than spin up a believable story to people who know how much Cora’s time is worth, and how little Earth has that could pay for it.
If I owned a spy device and there was even a chance that a Daring Space Captain got within smelling range of it I would be extremely suspicious of what it produced in that time period.
Yes, there are a lot of ships at sea, but remember that all of the oceans combined is a LOT of open water! I’ve read that it is very common for ships to not see each other except in port or the canals.
Don’t forget how clear the skys are at sea with reduced light pollution. They can see for light years.
You can see STARS from light-years away. You know, giant balls of fusion explosions millions of times the size of Earth, producing their own light so intense that looking at one from 100 million miles away will cause blindness. A human can be seen from a couple miles away at most, if the light is good and you’re looking in exactly the right spot, and they would just be a speck, not even identifiable as a person, unless you were even closer.
I love how Sydney is of course quoting Aliens.
Crocheted overall from Frix’ fur!?
Look up “Point Nemo”
Well, honestly, some of those ships are USS The Navy or something like that. If only Maxima had some sort of connection to the American military …
If you could fly swimming in the air style like described in the blog section then what you need is a couple of kites. Wind surfing
Sydney probably has already commissioned her own Silver Surfer board to attach to her feet when she flys.
Given that the ability to disguise one’s appearance is available in story, see Max’s date costume, Syd could do the full get up, silver body and all.
Same dream. I feel your pain. Sometimes its more like jumping but it takes a long time to fall so you end up going slower than a walk. That was in younger days though. I guess I’m not as stressed now that I’m an old man.
As for Sylv not wearing a shirt, at least on the ship, I’m not sure there is a lot of need. It’s a small crew and it is made pretty obvious that they have all seen each other naked. Being a small crew, there is not a lot of need to establish rank or their particular job in the crew. He apparently doesn’t have any hair or dangly bits up top to get caught in machinery. For all we know his skin may be incredibly tough. That said, I think a nice brightly colored Hawaiian style shirt would look good on him.
Is Cora wearing a trap door back door skirt? Like Prince’s ass chaps? or Salma Hayek’s long johns in Wild Wild West?
She’s not wearing any type of skirt…? Those are either pants and top or a bodysuit. Whatever they are, they are hard light projections and can be changed at a moment’s notice, so there’s no need for a trap door back door.
Cora grew up among a plethora of different species and clearly doesn’t mind mingling, so she’s had her choice of partners in terms of height. She’s chosen to surround herself with extremely tall boytoys, so I’m guessing her ‘insecurity’ about being shorter than someone she’s involved with isn’t even close to the “yelps and then has to take time out to hyperventilate into a paper sack if startled by a much taller person” variety.
Which, unfortunately, is a problem for a lot of women, for various reasons many of which are unfortunate.
I fear you misread the commentary.
“I didn’t draw *Maxima* flying besides Sylv because she’s insecure about being shorter than him. If you could fly with zero effort, wouldn’t you do it sometimes?”
Was it just the era, or did I just imagine that the worlds of ERB and Gor (and Robert Howard, et al) went with a fighting harness (with bejeweled banana hammock) unless they were in a blizzard? Nowadays, we only remember the Red Sonja “armor”.
Huh. I was going to say that I remember the same X-shaped leather chest harness on the men but searching doesn’t find any examples of it. Even Thundar the Barbarian wore a vest, and the Gor/ERB/Conan covers I can find mostly have the men bare-chested.
Mandela effect at its finest, I guess.
Heman? Not so sure about the leather part, but he certainly has the chest crossed out. Maybe you remember him from childhood or something and then combine that with the “classic” barbarian leather gear.
Zardoz
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
does this mean vinyl menstruation protection too? eww
I’m a big, strong, muscular guy… and I still appreciate weaker, smaller people helping me bring in bags of groceries and such. Can I carry them in by myself? Easily – but it’s TEDIOUS. The only thing I appreciate more is when someone else unloads the bags and puts everything away, while I decompress after doing the shopping.
Nudity it is!
Sylv Svyl Slyv. Yvsl is his fashion-designer sibling.
I think the simplest reason for her floating down the hall with him is so they’re eye level with each other. Most people are her height or shorter, so no real reason to float off the ground and appearing more imposing to others that are shorter.
I don’t really think it needs much explanation why Sylv would be shirtless when he’s on Cora’s crew. She probably mandates Topless Tuesdays or something to that effect so she has regularly scheduled eye candy.
Absolutely.
They got introduced as professional eye candy and it turns out they dress like it, shocker.
So now we know that Maxima’s flight is reactionless (no surprise) and does not meaningfully distort local spacetime (more interesting). Or that the spy satellite can detect some distortions but not others.
We also know Cora’s crew can’t detect her propulsion method.
George Lucas: “There’s no underwear in space.”
Sylv: “You don’t Alcubierre the local environment….” Wait – so he radically distorts space-time using negative energy, even when loafing around in Earth orbit?
Only during deacceleration and he can alternatively use combustion thrust(“or vent hot gasses”).
Still this is big news.
Accubulair’s ideas are apperantly the closest we have to an idea about how to achieve functional FTL.
I would start designing a negative energy storage device if I were an engineer in the grrlverse.
There are already fun designs for how to turn a little negative energy in a lot(fun things happen when you allow negative numbers in the first law of thermodynamics.)
Doesn’t that theory assume negative mass exists?
(I do not think our current understanding of mass allows for it becoming negative, at least not without a fundamental overhaul of the standard model, a dozen Einstein level geniusses and a couple of trillion dollars worth of experimental equipment)
Sydney’s gonna wind up in that arena.
“Vinyl underwear” is likely better than the “all-Velcro underwear”.
any synthetic or natural fabric that is composed of polymer chains.
and does not contain DNA.
No leather, Latex, Cotton
Rayon, and Silk do not have DNA and should be safe
polyester, nylon, acrylic, PVC, Vinyl, teflon are fully synthetic
Question – there was a time when her Halo power was getting weaker, did I miss something, is she getting back to normal or is she still at low power.
she should be back at full power now, this was only a temporary exhaustion, the capacitor of her orbs being drained, but the power source is still going on, just needed some time to rebuild the charge
“I looked back at the pages that introduced Cora’s crew, and I noticed that Sylv’s name was originally written as Slyv. It would be much easier to retcon that first page that all the others with him on it, but instead, I’ve decided that his full name is Sylv Slyv. Possibly his middle name is Yvsl.”
I honestly think this is one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen as a correction to a mistake.
Is that spy satellite actually in orbit (then it won’t be seeing Archon HQ all the time), or just hovering at a height where other satellites are orbiting?
Orbit is not a height level, it’s fast sideways movement.
There are orbits, and there are orbits. LEO is around 150 miles out from the surface. Geosynchronous is out around 26,000 miles, if I recall correctly. Speeds are different.
So nude?
DaveB, you know the gov never names ops after what they’re meant to accomplish. They’d probably name it Operation Potato Chip or something.
Maxima flies up at night, staying in the earth’s shadow. She is really hard to see.
Sydney will have a LOT of cotton clothing, decorated with distinctly Earth-centric cultural iconography.
…
…
I’m not talking about Batman logo panties; I meant her extensive T-shirt collection! Geez!
Pretty sure you’ve actually addressed both of these things before. Cora’s crew is always shirtless because she likes them to be shirtless (mentioned when Cora first picks of Syd). And you definitely said Max is always floating just a bit above the ground because “why wouldn’t you if you could”, but I don’t recall where you said that.
The only thing I can think of that resembles your claim is Harem stating the exact opposite.
Dont forget to pack freash space panties !