Grrl Power #1389 – On Fracture Station they’re called warp cakes
I want a funnel cake. I don’t think I’ve had one since some visit to a Ren Faire like… 15-20 years ago? Yeah, I know they’re basically just powdered sugar donuts, but still.
I seriously considered making Digit’s disguise some sort of brass steampunk robot looking thing, but then I realized I’d have to draw robot parts from a bunch of different angles and I keep messing up the shape of Maxima’s pauldrons every time her arm position changes, so I went with, uh… I guess she looks like a quest giver from a “dungeon filled with erotic traps” RPG/Platformer/Visual Novel.
In a lot of ways, her glowbod is the best disguise of the bunch. Given that they have the limitation that they need to be roughly the same dimensions, a proper disguise shouldn’t reflect the personality of the person wearing it. Maxima definitely didn’t disguise herself as a doe-eyed innocent in a flower-print dress and clicky kitten heels. No, she went for bad-ass looking space samurai klingon in a leather vest and combat boots. Honestly, it barely qualifies as a disguise, though Max does make a fairly feeble pitch in the mini comic as to why it will throw everyone off the scent. Sydney’s went with big-eyed, small-chested and cute looking. Again, not much of a stretch. Harem… well, I guess she doesn’t have so strong a personality that dressing up as sexy “generic” space babe has much chance of giving her away.
Whereas Digit went from obliviously sexy, naïve, dimwit-savant tinkerer to intentionally sultry, mysterious shadowy figure. Did she execute the assignment parameters better than anyone else on purpose? Or did she hit “random” a bunch of times and thought the hood that hid her eyes looked cool?
Yes, she definitely did do that.
My favorite warp speed effect in sci-fi is Star Wars. I love the starfield pre-streak from inside the cockpit, then the ship leaps ahead of the camera – even if the pre-streak doesn’t actually make sense, because it implies that the ship is suddenly moving so fast that all the visible stars are smeared, but half the stars in any given starfield could be thousands of light years away. Whatever, we can hand-wave that easily enough by just saying that the hyperspace bubble forming over the ship that causes that streaking effect.
The reason I mention it is the other part of the Star Wars warp effect I love is when they drop out of warp, and it shows the destination racing up as they decelerate. The actual ridiculous part of that is most of the time when they show someone coming out of hyperspace, they also show someone reaching up to a console and manually throttling back the hyperspace doodad. Then they come out of hyperspace maybe a thousand miles above the surface of a planet? What if that dude had waited 0.00001 seconds to do that? They would have left hyperspace halfway though the other side of that planet. There’s no way that would be a manual operation. Yes, there would be a manual control in case a computer messed up or something, obviously, but I mean if acceleration and deceleration to and from thousands to tens of thousands of times the speed of light happens in a matter of seconds (I looked up hyperspace travel speeds in Star Wars, in case you’re wondering – none of this “fifty times the speed of light” nonsense in Star Wars), and you plan on exiting hyperspace into high orbit of a planet, you had better have your exit scheduled to the femtosecond.
Anyway, I imply that the Grrl-verse warp speed is similar, at least for Cora’s ship, with panels 3 and 4. But it’s definitely controlled by a computer. No feeble organic reaching an arm with pulsing blood and creaky joints and who knows what conditions their nerve dendrites are in or whether they’ve digested enough sodium that day to achieve optimal neurotransission? Or if they’re just looking at a girlie magazine and miss the hyperspace exit lane entirely. Or a boy-ee magazine even.
Nope! Computers all around.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Looks like he’s got two others that appear to be guards along with whatever family member, high ranker or personal assistant next to him.
Naturally this will setup for the dweeb to be humiliated and likely garner Maxima and her team a lot more attention and interferrence as they approach the tournaments than they’d like.
But honestly, I can’t help but think of this kid as some rich daddy’s boy with his daddy’s guards and staff to back him up and try to keep or enforce the family/clan honor.
Glad someone smarter noticed the golden-duo in the back as well :)
Most times, daddy’s guards don’t care what happens to spoiled fruit of the loom… as long as the fallout doesn’t fall on them (but that’s still not until after whatever happens to SFotL happens)
Mostly you only see the ‘deceleration’ lever on the Falcon, and I figure it’s one of those custom modifications because it’s a smuggler ship. Probably need to turn the thing off manually to keep it from tearing itself out of the ship.
I think the ‘deceleration’ lever is more likely a “power off to that system” lever.
The pilot gets a notification that the ship is coming out of hyperspace in 3-4 seconds. If the pilot isn’t planning to jump again immediately, he’s disconnecting the power from the hyperspace engines.
The residual power in the engines finishes the rest of the trip. But if the ship is immediately attacked when coming out of hyperspace, there’s not going to be any sort of electrical feedback going straight into the engine to perhaps fry it out: the pilot has already disconnected the hyperspace engine from the power circuits.
Now if the engine itself gets hit in an attack, you’re out of luck. But you aren’t going to have random power surges going into the hyperspace engines when they aren’t actively in use.
Having the engine randomly power “on” during a fight would be about as bad as frying the engine altogether.
I always took that lever to be powering up the main engines. My head cannon is that both engines can’t be continuously running at the same time due to overheating, power constraints, etc. so they have to disengage normal space engines while in hyperspace, then reengage when dropping out of hyperspace. To me, that makes the most sense. Like not using impulse engines while in warp speed in Star Trek
In some SF concepts of hyperdrive, actually using a reaction drive while in hyperdrive is a Very Bad Idea. Problems range from ending up hopelessly lost, to getting fried by your own reaction drive because the exhaust is confined to your warp bubble.
“A random guy appears.
Random guy wants to do battle and/or get in your pants.”
At least he is handsome and shirtless.
She’s in a public location. I assume lots of other random guys appeared.
The problem is Max picked a common warrior species, ran into others of her “kind”, and she’s missed some of the social cues that would have prevented combat.
He is a stereotype of a young master and Max is the main character of this Arc, and on top of everything else it is a tournament arc. There is no way to prevent this from happening.
Of course once she has beaten him she will have to fight a succession of ever more powerful relatives until she is crowned warrior Queen and has collected a large enough harem.
And we know that Sydney is a savant at genre-savviness in general and acquainted with Xianxia in particular (p. 1148). She’ll definitely start taking advantage of their over-inflated pride to get them to make sucker bet after sucker bet, escalating as the relatives become more powerful and more worried about the already-too-high loss of status from their juniors’ defeats. And Maxima is a perfect person to play the role of the protagonist: calm, polite but firm, and not a fan of backing down from arrogant jerks who she could toss around like rag-dolls.
Between the two of them, I wonder how many priceless treasures they’ll be able to milk these chumps for.
Problem is Max appropriated someone elses’ culture without doing the research
*shrug* Just tell them you’re not actually a Stygan. Only been a few comics since we established holo-disguises, “piloted avatar frames”, and bio-mods aren’t rare.
Ahh, but they’re an honor-based society. Imitating a Stygian might be considered horribly offensive…
Yup, they should have asked Detla.
(Maybe they did?)
Yep. You forfeit all claim to honorable treatment. Prepare to be stomped into the muck.
Even if unintentional, it is a good way to get a dry run with the disguises.
Oh Heck Yes Funnel Cakes
My wife and I are going to the County Fair this week.
More than likely funnel cakes will be on the menu.
Clanless? What’s a clan? I grew up on a dark planet, was raised by locals. Was always taught to be polite, only fight to protect those I love and to hold the line…Ma and Pa Kent taught me well. You seem confused. Like you think honor matters more than those you protect. p.s. power outage at hideout, also all new system and things didn’t transfer properly. May revive old one to transfer by USB protocol 8.
Let me guess: Sammy likes going around picking fights with only clanless or those deemed weaker, because when they do beat his arse with his own inflated codpiece the guards make sure no one (specially daddy) finds out
“I’m not currently interested in humiliating you in front of your entourage.”
So….anyone else remember the whole ‘must now serve and learn from a worthy opponent’ bit? That is probably his aim, to collect low skilled clanless but attractive harem, but what happens when Max inevitably trounces them all….?
I SAID that they should just make something up to avoid meeting people of the type that they were impersonating!
Now each team member needs a back story.
Still getting 403 Forbidden unless I post from my phone from my local library.
If I go incognito it seems to help
Hyperspace doesn’t do bubbles, at least not in Star Wars; that’s a hallmark of Star Trek’s “warp drive”. Ships using Hyperspace transition to a different plane or dimension in which places are closer together… or something like that. I don’t know if Lucas ever gave an official explanation, but that’s how the term is used in other series. I think Lucas actually added something about a tunnel, or the folks at West End Games did when they were coming up with the ground rules that got used in the magazines and novels and comics up until the preview movies came out and tossed most of the worldbuilding out an airlock. There was something in one of the “Tales of the Bounty Hunters” stories about most ships not being able to change course in hyperspace without dropping out, turning, and jumping back in.
I suppose a warp “bubble” might be used in some settings to maintain a pocket of “normal space” around a ship while it’s _in_ “hyperspace”, but Star Wars has not, to my knowledge, stated such a thing as being necessary…
Yeah, Wars definitely uses warp tunnels, we kinda saw it in the Solo movie, and how big enough ships can effectively block the ‘road’, or at least force ships off the ‘highway’ and on to some local side road where they can be easy pickings
Can remember a comic series about the Old Republic days that talked about pilots who would map the routes. It was dangerous because, until someone was brave enough to travel it and map it, there was no telling where you might come out
From what I remember, there’s a soft retcon in place. They can ftl wherever they want but the hyper drive has problems with gravity and can fail catastrophically when exposed while operating. The tunnels aren’t actually tunnels, but known paths that either avoid gravity wells or have had them removed. Also, their speed is measured against a standard travel time and it’s updated regularly. If you’re a week out from the core, a class 1 hyper drive will get you back in a week while a class 10 will take 10 weeks. The Millennium Falcon has a class 0.5 hyper drive, heavily modified from its typical class 2. Fighters (when they have them) will typically have between class 30 to 400, so they aren’t technically dead in the water, but for practical purposes they are.
Hyperspace is indeed a subdimension but it’s not that things are closer together, but rather that the standard laws of physics don’t apply the same as in the regular universe. So FTL travel is possible without needing infinite fuel. Though large gravity wells in the “realspace” can bleed through and affect areas in hyperspace. It’s also incredibly dangerous to travel through without a nav computer. Not only do you risk going right through something like a sun or black hole that will instantly ruin your day, even in the subdimension, but you can get trapped there and time gets wonky. There’s at least one novel dealing with this happening, and a ship coming out in a completely different time period than it started out.
There’s also weird things that are rumored to live in the hyperspace dimension. Giant creatures and the like. Like how sailors used to whisper about sea serpents and such.
Is he talking to Maxima or that purple lady next to him? Judging by the direction of his gaze, I’d guess the latter, but Max seems implied?
“Hey loser, you want some honor?”
“Nope.”
“…….I have no response for that.”
“Are you his bodyguards?”
“.. Yes.”
“He’s about to get killed. Do your job and get him out of here.”
What is fracture station anyway? Dyson sphere surrounding a neutron star?
I think it is actually a white dwarf. A neutron star would have too much gravity. They would have had to use all the leftover planets from that star to build that thing.
I think you could have referenced Space Quest’s buckazoids
Good frackin’ grief, do you overthink everything you draw? It’s a wonder anything gets posted…
“Has great funnel cakes?” All funnel cakes are the same! (Unless you over/under cook one.) I will die on this hill!
I want the warp speed effect for my next screen saver.
I just realized that I’m kind of suprised that Sydney didn’t add extra boob to her disguise. See how the other half lives.
Wait is Dabbler’s counterpart here dressed like Kasumi Goto from ME 2????
If anything happened and Sydney needed a new body, I vote that it should be space kobold. They have the tech, they can do it. And it was so damn cute.
Why do I get the “If you win you get the honor of dating me’ vibe from him, and if you lose I get to date you. He just oozes Kuno.
A Ranma 1/2 reference in 2025? in this economy!?
Ah yes, disguise yourselves as species you don’t know the cultures or history of, certainly nothing can go wrong there…
just claim you’ve never been to the homeworld, you grew up on Fracture station , not one of the DOZENS of planets that my species seems to have colonized.
AKA if you got a galactic Civ, you are bound to have outcasts who rejected their own culture.