Grrl Power #1419 – Inquisitor vocare
Sydney just has an inquisitive nature, is all. And she often thinks of obvious questions that no one has bothered asking, because they’re obvious, but sometimes thinks of advanced questions that no one has yet considered, but when she does that, it’s even odds that she’s skipping over intermediary understanding.
Sydney’s rough estimate of the station being “10 miles” from the “surface” of the star stem from her never having been 100,000 kilometers away from an object 12 million kilometers in diameter. The star “looked big” to her. Honestly, the scale of things in space would probably be very difficult to estimate to the untrained eyes. Heck, being in an environment without atmospheric haze would mess people up, and would also make for razor sharp shadows and the surface of that huge moon you’re standing on look like a bad special effect.
I’ve tried to picture what standing at the base of Olympus Mons would look like. Unlike most mountains on Earth, OM isn’t surrounded by other mountains. There’s no real “base” to Everest, just other mountain peaks smashed up against it. But OM more or less pops out of an endless plain, so you could stand at the base and look up to the top, which is ~3x as high as Everest. The other trick to visualizing it is to remember that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, and no moisture, so there wouldn’t be any obscuring clouds, and atmospheric has would be vastly reduced. The other other trick, though, is to remember that OM has roughly the same footprint as Texas. You can’t stand at one end of Texas and see the middle, even assuming no atmospheric perspective, because the Earth curves away from you. The slope of OM does exceed the curvature of Mars’s surface, so while I think you could see the peak while standing at the base, I don’t think it would look as high as you might guess? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure no one has ever taken a photograph from the base, and I also don’t think anyone has made an accurate 3D model of what it might look like.
Imagine a planet the size of Jupiter, only it’s a rocky world that a human could stand on without being crushed somehow. I don’t know, maybe it’s hollow. The Red Spot on Jupiter is larger than the Earth. If humanity had evolved on a planet like that, it’s conceivable that civilization wouldn’t have migrated, what, 4 or 5 times past that Red Spot size up until we invented airplanes, and that’s assuming somewhat favorable environments to explore, and that the Red Spot “Eden Zone” we evolved in wasn’t surrounded by 10,000 miles of desert on every side. It’s a scale that’s honestly really difficult to imagine. I think most people don’t even appreciate how large the Earth is.
Anyway, things in space are big and usually far away until you hop in a ship and then they’re not far away, and then people would be like, “I can’t tell how big that is. It could be a moon, it could be a space station. I need some sensor readings or at least one banana for scale.”
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.
Lol that is so the “disturbed tom” face in panel 7.
I was wondering where Sydney had gotten to these last few panels. Was worried she might be up to some terrible mischief.
Sydney: ”Oooh, what do this big red button do?”
“Self-Destruct… Initiated. Have a Nice day.”
“Welcome to the Space Olympics! All the oxygen has run out…”
Remember “What does this button do? Is it a history eraser button*? Can I drink this**? Will it give me super powers? I mean more super powers? I mean not more super powers but actual super powers***?” (p412)
*Well, I suppose pushing a big red button on a box marked with a mushroom cloud will probably erase any history recorded in the vicinity.
**(green gloppy goo)
***At least she didn’t ask if it would give her the physical attributes generally associated with actual super powers, at least not on panel.
So the star it’s in orbit around is a red giant, based on the depicted colour in #1408 and it being “12 million km in diameter”. An odd choice for placing a Starforge, red giant stars do put out a lot of sunlight but it’s spread over a very wide area, so any individual solar panel isn’t going to be soaking up all that much power.
Then again, red giants have moved on to fusing helium, and at 12 million km that’s on the border of becoming a red supergiant, so it might have started fusing carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, so there’s a greater variety of raw materials available for the Starforge to work with, instead of having to begin every construction at “fuse together individual hydrogen atoms until you get the element that you want”, so it saves some time and energy.
Let’s remember, solar panels are all going to have limits to the temperatures they can take – not just the point they outright melt/burn/sublimate, but their efficiency will probably decline too well before THAT point. And whatever active cooling is going on can’t take more power than is being generated (peferably not even close) in spite of the difficulty in rejecting heat in space.
To wit, if the star was brighter, the panels might just have to be further away anyway to keep them in their operating zone.
Fair point, but the external temperature of the station (and presumably the solar panels attached to said station) is enough to make a human burn up like a vampire, so it’s at least 1000 C and probably much higher, since they’re in low orbit around a red giant.
Let’s think about the power density there. Lets assume 100000 km from the surface and a red giant.
Power output of a star is 7.16*10^-7*r^2*T^4, a red giant have a temperature is of about 3-4 kK and this one is given with 12 million km diameter. With an assumed temperature of 3.5 kK that is 3.8*10^27 W. In their position 100000 km above that gives you a surface area of their orbit of 4,676^21 m^2 resulting in a power density of 8.1*10^6 W/m^2 or about 8000 times illumination of the sun of earth. I think that would make people combust quite fast.
That’s why Sydney should wear sunscreen and carry an umbrella if she goes outside on a picnic.
A red giant is a bad choice because red giants tend to be highly active and put out a lot of flares and such (remember Betelgeuse dimming a few years back? That’s because it belched out a huge cloud of dust). You want a really stable star like a white dwarf.
But that doesn’t make for an exciting visual.
Hence, the reason Fracture Station is built around a white dwarf. Red dwarf stars are an option until you realize these long-lived wonders are much too small and would put a planet at 12 Gm, not its chromosphere. Also, red dwarves are almost as belchy as red giants.
Fracture station is probably another example of Nth Tech. It’s essentially a Mass Relay built around a neutron star. The civilizations escaping the Pa’anuri (DaMEs) in <Schlock Mercenary built their worldships around white dwarfs.
A red giant is a pretty good choice for a star forge, precisely because it’s belching out lots of material. Presumably the necessary habitat shielding isn’t much of a problem for galactic-level tech.
It’s only really ‘lots of material’ compared to the rest of space. It’s still a harder vacuum than anything we can achieve on the Earth’s surface.
I think we can safely assume Dabbler, or at least the engineers she hired, know a tad more about star physics than we do…
And you can hang around a red giant well enough if it’s “young” enough. Betelgeuse is a Bad Example here.
Besides being a supergiant with a relatively short life, even *we* have figured out it’s about to go supernova Soon™..
Its behaviour is not a measure for the behaviour of “gentle” red giants like our Sun will turn into.
At least it’s not a Red Dwarf :P
Space vampire uses “uno reversal”.
It’s extremely effective.
Meh…. We’re separated from a *lot* of red-hot liquid rock that would reduce us to greasy ash in mere seconds, by no more than the thinnest of skins on the scale of our planet.
And that seems quite normal to us…
Normal till it begins to pour out.
At that range, you wouldn’t burn to ash, you’d be vaporized.
Lest we all forget that Sidney Scoville Junior fears solar exposure…
“Flee to the Shade!”
“The slope of OM does exceed the curvature of Mars’s surface, so while I think you could see the peak while standing at the base, I don’t think it would look as high as you might guess? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure no one has ever taken a photograph from the base, and I also don’t think anyone has made an accurate 3D model of what it might look like.”
I did find a video looking at the top:
https://youtu.be/QXpzNNARzGI
Acording to it, it would look like you are walking on a hilly plain. But you would probably still feel the ~5° slope.
You need a navigation system to not get lost.
Google Mars lets you visualize it. For enough of a distance *and* elevation to see it in its entirety you’d have to be at an altitude of several km and of course hundreds of km distance, and it’d look like a large bump in the planet’s surface. A volcano like Mt Hood looks far more impressive, even though it’s a fraction as tall.
http://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@8.3007372,-118.6138963,411530a,35y,307.8h,57.04t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTIwOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Only one question Sydney? Somehow I suspect there will be more.
I think the times that Sydney runs into someone who yanks her chain like that are fun. I also think her self indulgence is part of what makes her entertaining, but it devalues her contributions to the team by making her seem immature. I’m thinking of characters in other stories that seemed immature (and entertaining) but eventually grew into new roles.
Was ‘suss’ even in the human vernacular back then?
Based on my reading, over quite a long time, driven to a great extent by anglophilia, i’d say it’s been around since AT LEAST since early in the XXth century – if not before.
earliest attestation appears to be 1936, so it was verbal-only slang at some point before that.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/suss
‘Suss’ as a synonym for ‘suspicious’ is fairly recent (turn of the century, still before the comic’s time period) but ‘suss’ or ‘suss out’ as a synonym for ‘figure out’ (as it’s being used here) goes back to the 1960s
The term ‘Suss’ as a synonym for ‘suspicious’ predates my childhood and I was born in the 1970s, unless Brits, Kiwis, Aussies and other English-speaking countries are just *that* far ahead of the curve and the US was just lagging behind?
Not mungus “sus”. Suss is its own word
Well. So much for Sydney’s N tech being a secret.
Well, the one thing in this universe that travels Faster Than Light (besides neutrinos) are bad rumors, and this is an FTL society…
People have done the calculations, and, no, you can’t really see the peak from the edge. (Well, they calculated that you couldn’t see the edge from the peak, which is of course the same thing.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090827141153/http://www.dustymars.net-a.googlepages.com/VOLCANO.htm
The problem here is that Olympus Mons is so freaking wide that it wraps around a significant fraction of the planet, 11.8 degrees. It’s not tall enough to make up for that.
It’s not quite the same thing – the ground at the base/edge of Olympus Mons is roughly 1.5 meters below the eye level of someone looking toward the peak, and similarly, someone stood on the peak looking toward the base is looking from a point 1.5m above the peak. Those two sight lines will cross in the middle, but the midpoint of the arc of ground blocking the sightlines will be closer to the edge than to the peak.
It’s probably close enough to the same thing to not matter in this case – if it made the difference, then it would be close enough to require more detailed terrain (and possibly atmospheric) data to draw the original conclusion – but it doesn’t work as a general rule – if I can see someone’s feet, that doesn’t automatically mean they can see my feet…
On the gripping hand, you could drive up Olympus Mons, at least up to the edge of the caldera. Then you have the interesting task of climbing down to the floor of the caldera, three to four kilometers below.
Luckily these vampires don’t seem all that spiritual in terms of weakness. Otherwise being too close to the sun at all would spell doom as they are beings of evil/undeath straying too close to a symbol of rejuvenation/life.
A red dwarf star might count as a symbol of death and decay, which would be right up their alley.
The star’s 12 million km in diameter (for reference, our Sun is 1.4 million km), so it’s a red giant, not a red dwarf. Which, if anything, works even better as a symbol, it’s an old star on it’s way to one last explosive hurrah before fading slowly into eternal blackness
Whoops.
Still, isn’t that also pretty death-adjacent?
‘One last hurrah’, and all.
Cora really couldn’t have used a red dwarf to build her forge around, for a couple of reasons:
1. it’s cold outside
2. no kind of atmosphere
You forgot 3: it’s full of smegheads
I feel a bit chuffed that I was just speculating about vampires in space, and how that relates to their ‘sunlight’ weakness, in the last strip’s comments.
Of course, this vampire hasn’t actually revealed anything about how ‘sunlight’ in space actually works–is it only your home star that counts as a sun, or any star in sufficient proximity? Would it need to be as bright as Sol is on Earth, or would being on the equivalent of Pluto still count?
the thing with Olympus Mons is the slope. 5 degree slope would probably make climbing it not a huge issue if you had air.
Certainly not at the lower gravity on Mars.
Right, you might not even notice that you were on a mountain. You would probably notice the incredibly distant horizon, however.
There’s no real landmarks to determine scale and distance though. The slope nicely counteracts the curvature of Mars, so that horizon might be a couple hundred miles away.
If you ever go to Hawaii, go to the top of Mauna Loa. On a good clear day the ENTIRE island is visible except where the other peaks are blocking. (140+ mile line of sight)
*Sydney pulls out SPF 1000 skin”cream”*
Max: Sydney, the station’s shielding is more than sufficient-
Syd: It makes me feel better, okay?
Javelina: SPF 1000 wouldn’t be enough, anyway…
Syd: *stops applying it* And now it doesn’t…
“Anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day!”
Sydney is apparently developing Batman’s knack for having whatever she needs in her utility belt and yet having the total bulk and mass low enough to be practical.
Last mystery ball is the cargo hold
Super cute panel 2 ngl
“A stake through the heart is bad for you, right…?”
I see you’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders. Never ask a nerd if they want clarification.
Sydney in panel 2 just reminds me of excited characters from EGS with her face. I cant unsee it now.
Huh, I wonder if Grace could improvise something like a Mantellan form. The hands are probably the least likely for her to already have a form she could adapt for the task.
Has Dabbler been keeping loose lips on the nth tech stuff? Sydney’s only had one other off-world excursion that anybody in the galaxy knows about, and the orbs were a mere curiosity to a few people on social media because they’d never been seen before, but the galaxy is full of things that float on their own and that nobody’s ever seen before.
The body hopping alien yelled about it being nth tech in front of a bunch of college demons before they teleported away.
Well it seems to me if that went viral on the galactic extranet or whatever it’s called, Earth would have more problems than Maxima being exposed in that fight.
I think it’s somewhat mitigated in that it’s just *suspicion* that the orbs are Nth Tech, and that there have probably been plenty of crackpots and con artists and honest mistakes generating exciting but ultimately discredited Nth Tech claims.
“From the Martian surface, its gentle slopes mean the peak is beyond the horizon, so you generally can’t see it unless you’re already on its broad flanks, getting closer to its massive caldera. Even from near the summit, you’re looking down at its own gradual slope rather than out to a distant horizon, making it hard to perceive its full scale from ground level.” (Google)
Sydney has been learning from Dabbler, as shown here
The ADHD meds have worn off in space again.
Not quite yet, she’s still waiting for answers before asking the next question. Give it another hour or two. Also she hasn’t decided outright if she likes her yet- that also tends to happen faster when Sydney’s meds wear out.
Oh no, this is stage 1 of ADHD meds wearing off. You’re thinking stage 4 where logic is gone in the questions as well. Stage 2 is when the speed increases in the questions. Stage 3 is when the questions begin losing logic but still contain links. It gets weird when you hit stage 5 after 2 hours of meds being inactive.
No, I do not remember why or how I created a tower of soda cans over the garage without breaking out the ladder. YES, they were still full. Also nobody knows where I got them all. Stage 5 gets really fing goofy.
On the subject of scale:
Your musings remind me of Larry Niven’s “Ringworld.” The scale on that thing was bonkers. At one point it turns out that there is a great ocean on Ringworld (which had been overlooked because … BIG). And by “great ocean,” I mean- the ocean has a scale model of the Earth in it.
What scale, you ask? 1-1.
And this ocean had been overlooked by the explorers. The scale model was a plot point, if I recall. Like, “oh, the builders knew about Earth, it seems.”
Not just a scale model of the Earth, but scale models of a bunch of planets, separated by enough open ocean to keep them from running into each other, at least until the Kzinti developed sea travel…
Not just “sea travel” though. Sailing from one “world” to another on that ocean would likely involve much larger waves than we have on Earth, based on the “reach” the wind can act over.
Assuming there are no mechanisms to counteract that reach of course. Maybe there is, so the wind doesn’t blow all the dirt of those big islands the natives think are continents.
Just when you think you have the scale in mind, it gets bigger and you have to readjust again.
Hey, we’re only 93 million miles from the sun… That still makes me nervous.
Olympus Mons is 16 miles high but 374 miles across. Not only would that slope be almost impossible to see if you we on it, Mars is smaller than earth so it only takes about 260 miles of travel to drop 16 miles due to the curvature of the planet. So the mountain’s slope is barely exceeding the curve of the planet.
“Imagine a planet the size of Jupiter, only it’s a rocky world that a human could stand on without being crushed somehow. I don’t know, maybe it’s hollow.”
“The world is Round” by Tony Rothman features this exact planet as a plot point. And yeah, pretty hard to prove something that big is round. On earth the horizon is about 3 miles, easy to see things disappear bottom first. In the world of that book nothing mobile would be big enough to even see at the horizon.
There’s Mesklin, in Clement’s “A Mission of Gravity”. A rocky planet 16 times the mass of Jupiter, but it’s spinning so fast that the gravity is only 3 gs at the equator. (And nearly 300 at the poles!)
Ironically, due to the rapid change in air density with altitude causing a lensing effect, anywhere you went it looked like you were at the bottom of a bowl, with things in the distance fading out through light absorption in the atmosphere, rather than having an actual horizon.
Majipoor Chronicles, Robert Silverberg. Science Fantasy. Good reads.
I checked it out and the angle of elevation from the foot of Olympus Mons to its peak (assuming it’s 300km) accounting for the curvature of the planet is about 1.74 degrees. So you probably wouldn’t even notice that it’s a mountain.
It’s a good day for Max: She got to snark at two people in two minutes.
Aww… Does this mean we won’t get a space adventurers power demo/All taking turns vs Max danger room battle to see if shes the real deal?
I mean it’d be smart to double check if they’re gonna put up the kind of fortunes Cora is hinting towards, but I guess they trust her word enough… though Miss Demon Lady might wanna fight for fun? I also kind of want to see Mr. Gold dragon get humbled… and then fall madly in love with Max. XD
Then she can join Sidney in the Space Boyfriend Club!~
Fight scenes burn page count like a 50s Cadillac burns gasoline though.
they’re SO GOOD though!
My understanding is that if you were at the base of Olympus Mons, you’d say “yes, that’s a big cliff,” because pretty much the entire perimeter is cliffs, but if you were on the slopes of Olympus Mons you’d struggle to tell that you weren’t on a flat plain.
Wouldn’t Sydney have known some of this info from previous interactions with vampires?
It’s a good thing Sydney’s in this comic. It’s been a few comics sine she was in one, and we all know that Sydney gets nervous when she isnt in a comic for a strip or two.
Mons Olympus has a really gradual slope. You would not be able to see the summit from the base.
This mountain in Norway is one of the most impressive on Earth.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PWSNAAVqdSghqxqj7
I love that vampire. :-) I’d also love to see her as a semi-regular, turning questions like this back on Sydney in most appearances. LOL
It’s like Joe Hendry but in reverse. She appears and everyone goes “Sidney strikes again.”
I think there needs to be a “are there any questions?” clipshow compilation.
Your statement for the size of Texas is actually true for most states in the US. Texas is the second biggest state, and as far as I’m aware, that statement may only not be true for two states.
That said, even for those two states, I believe local terrain would preclude such vision. even if strict curvature of the earth would not.
Just a little note, the Red Spot on Jupiter is no longer larger than the Earth. It used to be 25,000 miles wide, but it’s been shrinking for decades (and the amount it’s been shrinking has ramped up a lot since 2012 to about a 580 mile loss each year), plus was hit by a planet-killer asteroid which further destabilized it, and now it’s only about 7,770 miles across as of around 2023 (which is less than the diameter of the Earth, which is 7918 miles).
Not even the best trained eye can reliably judge size or speed without some known reference for comparison. Small objects up close and big objects far away tend to look a lot alike.
“Can’t See the peak from the base…” That’s the normal state of affairs. See “military crest of a hill” for a discussion. As a historical example, note “Charge of the Rough Riders”.
Where did the short alien with the eyeglasses learn about Sydney and Nth tech? That was supposed to be a secret.