Grrl Power #1409 – Swords out
In case you can’t read it, the security screen in panel 2 says “EROPASS” at the top, and the screen says “Think about your favorite orgy, you dirty space trollop. -X,xox” and there’s a little heart there too. This first X is for Xuriel, the rest are the usual hugs and kisses, which, uh… Well, I guess that panel would probably not be written in English. Probably that sexy space French-ish sounding language they usually speak with each other. I know I wrote down the name the language in the post under a comic, but I don’t really have a way to search that, so I don’t remember what I called it. I thought it was a good name too, like “Exhora” or something. A lot of times when I make up words in my head, I seem to go a little consonant heavy, coming up with words like “flerng,” or “himlrrg.” Oh, look, I invented Welsh. Hah. Seriously though, sometimes I get stuck in that mode and it’s like, “No alien words for you today.”
The thing I wanted to bring up is that the security system Dabbler created for her “not good enough to be her primary weapon, but still it was super cool, so she didn’t sell them to vendors and kept them in her stash inventory.” Literally anyone who’s played an RPG knows that exact category of equipment. The “almost good enough or was my best weapon but doesn’t synergize with that cool unique shield I got, or just looks rad” stuff. That’s what this vault is.
So anyway, the security system basically scans (in a future space tech MRI way) for specific, uh, orgasms? Recollections of orgasms. Erotic memories. You don’t have to reenact them. Not that Dabbler didn’t consider that option. Maybe if you fail the scan three times. You have to train it with a bunch of specific memories, but that does seem like it’d be a pretty hard thing to fake, and it’s not something someone’s going to socially hack by causally asking about your first pet or something.
Doors that slide into the surrounding walls/floor are really not good for vaults. You have to have a vault door sized gap in your wall, meaning your vault wall has to take up a lot more depth, and leaves a big hollow space, which might be exploitable somehow? I don’t know, like an employee stick gum that isn’t really gum but is actually remotely activated acid to part of the door that slides into the hollow space and lets it build up over a long time until you have enough to do detrimental acid stuff. How often does the door hollow get checked for gum-acid?
So, there was a whole docking the ship, seeing another ship in dry dock… is it called dry dock in space? More like a freeze-dry dock, am I right? The point is the StarForge has a ship construction hangar. Then they go though security, decon, Sydney makes a joke about War of the Worlds, Cora says hi to a bunch of people, etc. The vault isn’t just accessible via an external airlock or anything. I just didn’t want to spend like 4-6 pages on all that stuff. I’ll get to a little “establishing the interior scenery” stuff later, though this base isn’t intended to a long visit.
The signs under Sydney’s word bubbles are for a gun and a hammer. The chain-whips and boomerangs and other miscellaneous weapons are in the corner of the armor vault, which is on the other side of the central elevator, not so much for balance. Mostly just for symmetry.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I imagine the scan for favorite orgy might only have issues if you get a new favorite since your scan
honestly it might be scanning more for how the memory is accessed , which parts are remembered / focused on, etc, as a whole
That and its very likely if and when you get a new favorite that Dabbler was probably there for it.
Cora: “Damn, that was the best sex I’ve had in years.”
Dabbler: “Yeah… Time to go update our passwords.”
It doesn’t even care about the memory itself. If you’ve been in an orgy with Dabbler, you reach a certain level of horniness when you remember it. It’s that specific pheromonal response the EroPass is looking for.
Of course, the designer of ANY lock has a cheat bypass – sort of “if you can find and use this exploit, then you’re awesome and deserve to be let in” kind of thing. If you can manage that pheromonal response WITHOUT Dabbler’s influence, Dabbler wants to know you.
Or the whole ‘think of your favorite orgy’ part is not connected with the identity check at all and Dabbler put it there jsut because she is herself. Kind of like you have a keypad supposedly for entering some access code but it is secretly a fingerprint scanner.
That sounds likely – she is quite methodical and although she would have fun with her security she is unlikely to make one that can be so easily bypassed. Although if anyone would have reliable lust-based locks, it would probably be her.
Of course, she may have also put all the actual security long before you reach the vault, or even dock at the station, and this one is more just to poke fun at her friends.
wonder how many of them she will break :D
These weapons remind me of various Terraria mods.
Torque is real.
The Witcher brought to you by ARC SWAT
The best kind of Vault Doors are the ones that recess into the wall and have to come out then move out of the way to let anyone in. The only hole they leave in the vault is the one they close up.
I wonder if Dabbler has any of those weapons in there that are the ‘look cool yet take a lot of training to use’ types, like a spiked-hammer Pollaxe or those shields that are also weapons with their built-in blades and spikes?
How do you think she lost that eye,
i think Sidney lost balance?
don’t think she could lift it at all if its that heavy
Well, at least she’s doing a *little* better than she did with the minigun…
Yes, but she may not be familiar enough with that distinction to reference it in a panic.
She was able to pick it up because it was positioned vertically on the wall. She didn’t realize how important it was for her to keep it vertical, at least given where she was holding it, until it was too late. There are, from what I have been told, balanced halberds. This might even be one, as the end of the handle looks distinctly different than the rest of the handle. However, one needs to hold those closer to the blade for that balance to really matter. Otherwise the weight needed for the balance would be several times that of the blade…
Either Sydney got way too enthusiastic or else it’s one of those unreasonably heavy blades.
Melee weapons aren’t really that heavy; they extend your reach and/or leverage your strength. Which is also the function of edges and points, to put lots of pressure in a space that’s smaller than your fingers.
They need to be light enough to be swung or jabbed a lot. Also if they’re too heavy you end up moving around it instead of moving it around.
Admittedly, maybe some of these blades belonged to larger-than-human people before Dabbler acquired them. The two-handers in the back right look to be like that.
Safe doors tend to open outwards because the safe doesn’t have room inside for them to swing inwards. Note the hinges are armored and huge since they’re an obvious weak point. The Fallout vault doors have to open inwards because there might be lots of debris piled up on the outside when you open it.
Blade Sydney picked up may just be very top heavy, or may have an energy kinetic push of it’s beyond mass and gravity acceleration. Humans are used to weapons designed for Two handed wielding. 4 arms and magic may allow different leverage. Super powers may compensate.
Considering she’s not that tall, and the weapon is about her size, that’s likely a head made of depleted uranium or something equally dense. It’s not unreasonable to overbalance someone who isn’t prepared for it. The mass isn’t for how hard it strikes, but to give it inertia, and storage capacity for infernal energy that can be used to project various beams and even shields.
@Dave, your sexy alien language was Exultia, as per panel 1 in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1201-impossible-aura-elevator-mission/
Also, I’m strongly reminded of Deus’s sword collection. “Replicates. Yesss…” Only I’d trust Dabbler much more on authenticity claims.
Ah, thank you. I should write that down in a note somewhere.
Later, in the commentary to page 2208:
I wrote this down on a note some time ago, but I’m not sure where I put it and I have no way to reliably search for it.
I’ve been trying to breathe a bit of life into the GP wiki, and added a paragraph about Dabbler’s known languages to her entry.
Very much appreciated. I’m aiming to upload template pages for every comic page soonish.
I too was reminded of Deus’s sword collection.
Wait, I thought they were going to redo their disguises so they didn’t cause more scenes. How come Max & Syd are still the same as they were?
Sydney just needs to change the gem in her forehead; otherwise, given where they are, they probably don’t need to change their disguises for entering basically a combination lab/workshoppe, and only just need to ensure that they’re not recognized as Max and Sydney, just in case.
Anyone willing to pick a fight on a starforge with the guests of one of its owners is probably to stupid to be allowed within the facility anyways.
If there’s only 45 others there, maybe they established that none of them are Stygans or Mantellans, so the problems they had on Fractal Station wouldn’t come up.
The language was Exultia (in-comic note, #1201).
So the “equip magic guantlets/boot daggers/braid blades/etc… with spellblade enchantments for all the common problem magic” stage?
They’ll turn Max into an adventurer yet!
I’d barely trust Syd to hold a garden wrack, never mind any of Dab’s swords.
wrack? Did you mean “rake?”
Perhaps a wrack is a special kind of rake that wrecks things.
Maybe it’s designed more to be placed as a trap for people to step on and bonk themselves with the handle.
Bringing Sydney into an armoury full of magic and tech melee weapons. Not a good idea.
At least they were wise enough to not bring Digit. That would be a even less good idea.
Type of thing Superman would also get in on if he was written consistently by a single author.
Type of thing Batman would hand him in any story with magic in it when written by the same sort of author who has Batman keep kryptonite on his belt. Unless friendly enchants on Superman are important for some reason.
The Justice League in general would be a lot more powerful if they were allowed to consistently pool together resources and share items, I agree.
Which, you know, is 90% of the point of any league or alliance…
Not to mention, the world of DC & Marvel would be vastly different if all of the advanced science Luthor, Doom, et al. made was applied rather than forgotten and stuffed in a warehouse somewhere. See the tvtropes page titled “ReedRichardsIsUseless”
The important thing is, which version of War of the Worlds did Sydney make a joke about? The book, the TV series, one of the movies, or Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds (and to break that down even further, Richard Burton or Liam Neeson)?
I’ll take… them all.
Good thing they didn’t bring Digit, she’d be heading straight for the harpoons.
Low-key disappointed there’s no Scythe from Buffy
Hopefully Sydney doesn’t damage the base by “dropping the lightsaber vertically”
Huh. I’ve only just seen a reference to that Rick and Morty comic panel. There’s a 1950s story where
a guy drops a disintegration knife and a million or so years later Mars has been eaten away from the inside.
I believe that was The Hole Man by Larry Niven
Yes but no.
In Niven’s story he drops a micro-Black Hole.
In the story I’m thinking of it was an ancient Martian tool. There was also time travel.
That sounds like another Niven story, “Wrong Way Street”, where an astronaut exploring an alien base on the Moon (not Mars) time travels to the remote past and drops an alien disintegration/cutting tool while trying to leave a “Kilroy Was Here” type message. When he travels back to his own time, the Moon has been eaten away and Earth is a Venus-like runaway greenhouse world (the notion was that the Moon had stripped away excess atmosphere from Earth, which AFAIK is a theory no longer taken seriously). He tries to return to a time before the accident and prevent it, only to find that the alien base is “now” full of aliens…
Solved. I had conflated Mars and the Moon.
Thanks!
Max with that lava-looking sword reminds me of something way back when. When Max was showing off to the press, and Dabbler was reminded of some fire demon’s promise to come back. …though I think that was just Tom, but still.
That was just Tom.
One advantage of a sliding door or pocket door is more usable space on the inside of the room. Personally, one option I might do for a sliding vault door, if I wanted the outer face to be flush with the wall, would be a 2-stage door. When opening the door, it first slides inward into the vault by the thickness of the main security wall, then slides sideways. If we keep most of the closed position area exposed on the inside of the vault, it can then be inspected periodically. In the closed position, there would be locking bolts that slide into the door that would prevent it from easily being pushed inward forcibly.
Should “for any sort” be “than for any sort”?
I don’t know what THOSE are made of, but one of the things about real world swords and whatnot is they don’t actually weigh that much. A typical zweihander, which is one of the larger, heavier swords at 2.1 meters (nearly 7 feet long), only weighs about 2.3–3.2 kg (5–7 lbs). Point is swords really aren’t that heavy. The largest of them are more hefty than heavy. What’s more, you don’t really need strength to use them. What you need is training, structure, etc. A super strong person can’t really break a well structured guard from a much weaker person with strength alone, and any attempt to do so just leaves you open.
Of course maces and mauls are quite a bit heavier, which is actually a large part of the point to them. I don’t know much about using polearms like what Sydney’s having trouble with, but I do know that they’re not typically all that heavy either and in fact are generally comparable with swords, as they’re typically just a long stick with a bit of pointy metal on the end that is usually less metal than a sword.
I’d imagine that space melee weapons and magic melee weapons are likely using materials that are even lighter weight. So I’m guessing these are made by various races for whom what constitutes as “usable and light weight” is dramatically heavier than what Earth bound humans do.
That would, mind you, also require that the people they’re intended for also be dramatically heavier, because the rotational axis of an object (in this case a weapon and its wielder constitutes one object) is the center of mass of the object. So if a weapon weighs say 400 of what ever mass units and the user weighs 100 of the same mass units, the center of mass is going to be IN THE WEAPON, which means the weapon is wielding the user, not the other way around.
Which is to say when the user goes to try to swing the weapon, they’re just going to be moving themselves around. the weapon, and rotating the weapon while they’re doing it, and they’ll need to keep the weapon above themselves so it doesn’t just fall to the ground. Having all the strength in the world does NOT mean you get to stay in place.
Think about this. No matter how strong you are, you’re not picking an entire Boeing 747 up by its landing gear no matter how securely attached, rigid, bend, and shatter proof the landing gear is. You’ll be tilting the plane up, not lifting the entire thing evenly off the ground at once. And all the strength in the world isn’t going to let you just swing the plane around like that. You can turn it. If you’re tall enough you can pick it up from the center of mass enough to possibly throw it, but again you’re not going to swing it around by the end of it, it weighs an order of magnitude more than you do.
Now if you were to way a lot more than the 747, by being made of some kind of as yet undiscovered super dense material, then sure you could stand to do it, assuming you don’t break the airplane in the process.
So that’s what I’m getting at here… Some SUPER dense weapon has to be intended to be wielded by a likewise SUPER dense user.
Maxima though, it seems to me her armor ability makes her more dense. She could also conceivably use her flight ability to counteract the equal and opposite reaction, essentially flying opposite the way an impossibly dense weapon is pushing back on her when she tries to move it, but that’d require her power pool in that manner.
ALL THAT SAID…
It seems to me that Dabbler might have a magical device or something to adjust a weapon’s “compatibility” with a user by making it magically more or less dense for their proper use…
Except that Maxima’s case is complicated by the [“lift things with your mind, but only if you’re using your body”](https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-1/) thing that let her life an ambulance instead of tearing off a chunk.
If Maxima has a ‘deflector field’ that moves stuff out of the way while she’s flying without her having to touch it, then she should be able to learn how to tap into this power while she’s stationary and move stuff around with her mind.
Even if for some reason it’s impossible for her to become a full telekinetic, she should still be able to use the same trick she did with the ambulance in more creative ways. Instead of applying that force to levitate something in a way that makes it look like she’s lifting it with her hand, she could instead apply that force outward and explode a target. Overkill against most things seeing as how she would already need to be touching an opponent to do this, but in the unlikely scenario where an enemy has external armor that can actually block her attacks but vulnerable insides, this would be a way for Max to defeat this hypothetical enemy. Alternatively she could apply the force inwards instead and crush an opponent. Or if there needs to be a non-lethal way to use this technique, she could apply a torque and rotate something. Maybe she could apply a differential force to something made of metal and bend it into a particular shape. Of course, this would also make an effective armor-piercing attack, as it could also be used to rearrange an enemy’s insides without getting through their outsides.
People said this back when Deus gave Sydney a bat’leth, too. There’s no ordinary reason these things would be so heavy, AND Sydney at this point has completed basic training: there’s no way she’s so weak these days that she can’t carry them. But Dave seems to enjoy the “look at Syndey trying to lift this heavy thing lol she’s so weak” jokes.
Then again, if she attempted to hold the halbard by its end she would be imbalanced no matter her improved strength.
(and the halberd is definitely a weapon you need expert training with, since it basically is three weapons in one. A spear, a dane-axe and a war hammer.
Actually if it weighs the same as a canon Bat’leth it would be that heavy, since Star Trek writers are not martial artists, and the extent of their knowledge on melee weapons is “more weight=better weapon”
Given that this is (one of) Dabbler’s stash(es) of magic weapons, they probably do some weird (and literally impossible IRL) stuff with force magnification, so that they effectively get “heavier” once they’re in motion. And Sydney, as a n00b, moved it sideways…
Yeah, Max has a variant of touchteke, and she has flying, meaning that she is ‘always braced’ and can hold her position by will alone, ignoring mass.
Her wielding heavy stuff is not an issue.
In Max’s case, she could use weapons with more mass than her body mass would otherwise dictate by allocating some points into super-speed and flight.
Basically she “flies” to counteract the reaction from say swinging the sword around, using the speed to allow her time to get the counterthrust right (and also more leisure to study what her opponent is doing).
Marion Harmon in his “Wearing the Cape” series (there’s a crossover with Halo!) has a fair bit about this since the viewpoint character is Astra (who has super-strength, durability, flight and senses, but not super-speed).
Some of the supers (“Atlas” types named after the first one) have flight so they can “counter-fly” to allow them to use strength more effectively. Others (“Ajax” types) don’t have flight but are even stronger and more durable. They tend to do things like wear really heavy armor so they don’t fly backward from throwing a hard punch.
Also fights between two Atlas types tend to devolve into wrestling, since a punch that lands just moves your enemy away from you. Unless you’ve got him pinned between you and say a concrete floor.
I’m assuming that Max doesn’t have the ability to extend her “zero-range telekinesis” to her opponent when she’s in contact, otherwise punching would be far more effective.
Or look really weird since she throws a punch, the punch lands (and she locks in the TK), the target gets a whole lot of velocity while her fist is in contact, then her fist loses contact (no more TK) and the target goes flying.
I’m not sure whether the whole target would get all of the velocity, or whether there’s some sort of gradual loss of contact that means it gets a really deep impression of her fist at the contact point due to the further reaches not getting the last of the velocity while the nearer parts do.
The more I think about “zero-range TK” the more complicated it seems. I’m not sure it works out long term.
So, is it a sword of lava? Or a Sword of Frozen Fanta?
werent they supposed to change their disguises?
To be fair even if you don’t know how to use it doesn’t mean you can’t use it. A DnD party I was in found a cursed ring that would drain magic in a thirty foot radius if worn… So we had our fighter slip it on a skeleton hand and hurl it to use it like a grenade.
That way we could still cast healing spells and such on him and it wouldn’t be stuck on his hand requiring a curse removal or hacking off a limb.
That shouldn’t work, since a skeleton hand isn’t a creature, it’s just an object. If that works, than just putting it on a stick should work, too.
Hand still attached to the thrown skeleton?
Again, would only work if it was an undead/animated skeleton. The ring would drain the animation anyway. Now you’ve got to have an undead follow you around everywhere, which is going to have an effect on reaction rolls.
Should we be worried about where Digit is after the last page?
A “Sometime later” in the top left corner of the first panel would neatly skip all the docking and hellos and all that sans the need for an explanation in the commentary.
Dry docks, as their name implies, are not right by the water. The water is close, but either the boat will be moved to the water by a pulley system, or it’s a wet/dry dock, where the water can be let in or pumped out, much like the locks of a canal.
As such, it wouldn’t be a freeze-dry dock, it would be an air dock.
Did I see frostmourne in there?
Ah yes, the usual “Welsh has only consonants” joke
Fun fact; there is more than one way to count “vowels” and Welsh beats English every time! For those actually interested in the linguistics of it, here’s probably the best video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H-s1TIkLY
Makes me think of Cloud’s insane gestalt sword from Final Fantasy Advent Children.
Hey Dave B!
so A) Panel 3 sans word bubbles at double res would make a nice vote incentive in between ‘traditional’ vote incentives.
If you still have the layer without the characters, it would also make a pretty sweet “Desktop Background” with only minor tweeking!!!
and 2) You’ve already established well that Dabbler has a lot of Hammerspace access. You don’t need the vault doors to slide into the wall, you just need to activate a Hammerspace slip between the seams, and let the door phase out into them. Then you’ve not only got solid walls, but also doors that physically can’t be forced open, as there’s literally nowhere for them to go until the portal opens.
Sigh.. Sydney, weapons are heavy, get with the program. Max, you have a collection of, if nothing else, magical chopping weapons. You can learn the basics pretty quickly, and I promise you’ll enjoy it, since, unlike Sydney, you have NO weight issues. Besides, after a hard day, sometimes hacking someone into chunks just feels good ;)
“Bustin’ makes you feel good!” lol.
Oh wait, the ghost thing comes AFTER the chunkin’. :D
Max has some kind of contact levitation, otherwise she would had just have ripped a chunk out of that ambulance:
(https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-67-jedi-yoink/ )
so she could quite literally pick up a 747 and use it like a club, but planes are costly, where a tree is cheaper and fairly easy to find on Earth.
Is “dirty space floozy” better or worse than “colossal space trollop”?
now i’m wondering about interactions between that lock and people with aphantasia…
I can understand why Max wouldn’t be a master swordsman, but a spear would be used like the bayonets she would have trained with in Basic.
Also, it’s an excuse for her to train and learn something new, to expand her skillset. Like the times that Superman has gone through training montages in boxing or martial arts.
Giving Maxima an anti magic sword is brilliant for any fights with magic users, but if the magic immune horselike guy comes up Maxima won’t be using the sword’s accumulated magic to blast him as her first move since she’s not a caster and trusts her own abilities more than the sword…
I can’t wait to see the Maxima rays zap him, leading to the reveal this isn’t magic and grabbing galaxy wide attention LOL
Officially siad horse guy was going to a different place (or plane?)
Then again, he was brought up at the first act of this arc, so the rules of play writing demand he shows up in the third act. Like Chekhov’s Gun (not to be confused with Chekov’s gun). Or should that be Hoss’s Booty Call?
Build on your advantages, Max, pick a mace.
Do we ruin his innocence and tell him just what X and O stand for in the context he provided?
You should see my everyday carry.
Alejandro Murriet (Antonio Bandera): “The pointy end goes into the other man.”
– The Mask of Zoro
And Max can do that quickly. The question is if the sword can withstand the force she can put behind it. A reason most super strengthers don’t use weapons.
“I don’t know how to use these. What use are they in the tournament”
Does Maxima really NEED to know how to use them? Even if you don’t know advanced techniques, smacking an enemy with a super speed sword swing is gonna do a lot more damage than just your bare fist alone.
Well, she needs to be able to put up a sufficiently convincing show that the viewers won’t figure out that she’s a ringer.
Many years ago, in the WebComic Erfworld, there was a similar panel to the third panel – save that every weapon was identifiably from pop culture, either films, books, or video games.
Any chance we will get the key for this panel? :D
Fourth panel (sneaky little third panel, taking our precious…)