Grrl Power #1428 – Tight outfit + Maxima = Good disguise
I should have put all the competitor’s names on that splash screen on page 1425, only I hadn’t thought of them at that point. I tried to come up with a name for Maxima’s arena alter-ego that didn’t sound like a typical Terran (feminine) name, but also didn’t sound stupid. “Ixha” seemed to fit the bill. Took me about 50 iterations to come up with it. I also thought it was dumb to call purple-zilla “The Ultra Mega Bio Weapons Entrant” so I fumbled around until I came up with what I thought was a vaguely clever semi-acronym.
I googled how much a “tanker truck full of steel” would weigh, which I figure is about the dimensions of that bat. The number I got was 500 tons, though the real number is probably plus or minus at least 100 tons, depending on what kind of steel and other factors. I’m not sure solid steel that dimensions would go “bong,” though. Probably a decidedly lower register. Possibly a “BUNG” or “BLORP.” The question is, how much does U.M.B.Rage weigh? Well, I don’t know how tall he is, and googling how much Godzilla weighs gives numbers all up and down the range, so I’m going to say 80,000 tons. That’s just a wild estimation based on nothing. An uneducated guess. But who knows what his kaiju bones and muscles are made of? So 80K tons it is.
Here’s one of Gaxgy’s in progress shots of the painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I’ve finished the main picture with the nude variant. (More like the clothing is the variant, because it’s easier to add clothes than erase them.) But I haven’t finished the bonus comic yet, so I’ll update the incentives soon.
Patreon doesn’t have a nude version yet, but I’ll try and update this each week until it’s done.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Honestly, that might be the best part of the disguise. Anyone who knows Max knows she’d never wear something like that.
The problem is that the disguise doesn’t need to fool anyone on Earth, much less the people there who know here. It needs to fool ambitious galactic forces that are only now looking towards Earth for the first time and don’t know a think about it other than unconfirmed rumors of Nth tech, stories of how they took down a Fel Battlecruiser, and apparently they can open up an Aetherium Causeway to Fracture Station somehow.
Thats still a potentially useful obfuscation, though. Anyone significant enough to worry about will have informants/spies/Galactipedia for secondary info sources, which will rely heavily on knowledge gained from Earthlings at first. So they’ll at least be uncertain.
You’re forgetting the leaked footage of Maxima taking out the Fel battlecruiser, they know she’s the one who performed the deed it’s why the bounty hunters came to Earth and tried to kidnap her.
Psst. Typo. “I looks just like Max”
Yeah, Sydney should be saying “I look just like Max”. Without the “s”.
Maybe she’s doing a Popeye thing.
it really should be ‘It just looks like Max’, and it’s still not fixed. it’s a very minor problem, the art is still very amazing
this here, and agreed it’s a minor problem. But yea, it hasn’t been fixed.
I was going to same the same thing.
I’m reading it as: “It looks just like Max.”
Currently reads, “I looks like just like Max”.
Also, in Panel 1, her alias is spelled “Ixah”.
Fixed!
Is it though? Because rn it still has an error.
Dave fixed the sidebar typo, not the art typo.
What sidebar typo?
“That’s not a very good disguise. I just looks like Max …” You did fix the double “like,” but the pronoun is still wrong.
What sound a solid steel bat of that size would make in reality is mostly irrelevant since it will be heavily dependent on the fact it will deform. A lot. Just with the swing, the impact would have completely destroyed it.
It brings an interesting point where it seems that U.M.B.Rage also has “reality reinforcement” applied to things he picks up.
…Or it isn’t steel but some superhard sci-fi metal.
You *seriously* underestimate how strong steel can be.
Steel can also be rather flexible. At that length, depending on the steel, I imagine you could have a few decimeters of stretch, with a perfect return to previous form. Due to the thickness you would struggle hard to get anywhere close to bend it that much though.
The greatest weakness of steel in this circumstance is probably heat. Enough energy turned into heat would make it soft.. though it is big enough that you would need a whole frigging lot of it.
All that said.. depending on how much energy these beings can bring into the speed and impact, they may very well destroy a steel bat of that size. It boggles the mind how high the acceleration would have to be, and how big the impact when hitting. Anyone who could crunch the numbers for a one meter thick and, say, ten meter long cylinder?
So we’re going with BOING-NG-NG-NG!?
The first mode for a bar of steel that long would be maybe 150 Hz, so probably sort of baritone “boing-ng-ng-ng”.
I based off of the various drawings of it, with Max as a measuring banana. I estimate the actual dimensions are 1.4 meters wide and just over 7 meters long, closer to 8. 1.4~ is lucky, as that’s the square root of 2. So pi*r^2 = half a pi. Then use that luck to say it’s 7.77M long, for a volume of 12.2 cubic meters (not including the handle!!). You take that, times the density and you get metric tonnes. If it is steel, that’s 7.85 g/cm3 for a total weight of 95,800 kg. Or a little over 210,000 freedom units.
But, are we really sure it’s regular old steel? If I was in his scales, I’d go for tungsten instead. For the same dimensions, that’s 19.3 g/cm3 for a total-ish weight of 235,460 kg. No, that’s too many digits. Now, round up or down, because it’s right in the middle? .. Keep it in the middle, 235.5 tonnes. Or rounding up to 520,000 freedom units. Again, that’s *not* including the handle. I used that much instead of continuing to calculate fully, because that’s how much of it actually hits the guy.
But still, that’s just a ballpark from a few guesstimates. Which may themselves be *wildly* inaccurate.
pi*1.4^2 is 2pi, not half a pi. I have *no idea* how you got half a pi. So, cross section of 6.28, times roughly 8, equals 50-ish cubic metres. Which gives us roughly 390 metric tons.
R is 0.7, not 1.4, 1.4 is the diameter. 0.7^2 is close to half pi
Derp, true. :D
BTW, for MAXimum weight, use osmium. It’s something like 22 g/cm^3. It’s also smelly. So smelly that’s what the name means.
Maxima has already been shown to possess, what was it called, tactile telekinesis(?) Something like that. The thing where she can lift things that were not meant to be lifted without them taking damage. She lifted an ambulance car with one hand without any bending.
Quite possible that the being who brought the mace has similar abilities.
“So basically you can lift things with your mind, but only if you’re using your body?” –Dabbler’s Science Corner #1
Max’s reality bending field obviously can be extended on contact and conscious desires.
Were this a innate talent from C Mantis “Path of Ascension: A LitRPG Adventure” series, then willpower would allow her to force it onto hostiles at the cost of willpower.
We don’t really know what it is made of. With alien super science the metallurgy could be almost anything.
Look what we have done in the last 50 years. Now try to imagine 500 years from now. Where science can take us.
I can’t. Too much possibility. 200? maby, but 500. Nope.
There is speculation of stable elements much higher up the periodic table than we have reached.
Well, not *much* higher up, and possibly not higher up at all. One of the possible mostly-stable isotopes postulated is Flerovium-298, and Flerovium (element 114) was first synthesized in the 1990s, albeit much lighter and more unstable isotopes of it.
I think Godzilla’s mass ranges all over the place because his height also ranges all over the place. They’ve never been all that good with ensuring the scale doesn’t change.
This is a problem with kaiju movies in general. E.g. just how tall is Gypsy Danger in Pacific Rim? Not the answer in some book about the movie, how tall is it in various screen shots against real world buildings?
Godzilla’s mass varies because every iteration and reboot involves a different director’s vision and ideas. So the size (and mass) varies from 39ft (12m) to 984ft (300m). If you watch that video, consider Gozzilla Legendary and Thermonuclear’s power-up as my (late) entry in the “best power up sound” for the fight. Except it was the yellow robot powering up instead of Rambo-Barney, but whatever.
my headcanon: Godzilla is attacking downtown Wherever, but it’s actually just a runaway parade balloon with limited sentience (can decide which way to go, but mostly ‘floats’) *boomp….boomp….*
They normally are pretty good at keeping Godzilla’s size consistent within whatever movie he is in. But Godzilla’s height has always been tied to the buildings around him. As modern day buildings got bigger and bigger, they scaled Godzilla up so he looks right when he is walking in a city. Keep in mind my comments are from a film point of view. Not an in-story reason.
On a slightly different subject: I was really hoping were were going to get an Orbs upgrade after the visit of Mr Nth T-Head. They are always interesting and it would be fun with everyone trying to work out “why?”
It will almost surely happen at the most inconvenient time, probably when Sidney is in her disguise.
This is pretty much the explanation for Superman during the immediate Post-Crisis John Byrne era. Did that inspire this?
Superman’s clothing used to be made out of cloth from Krypton. His cape was actually the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby. So it was durable because it was just as Kryptonian as him.
Plenty of old Superman comics showing his cloak stretching to impossible lengths, and him using it for a lot of purposes that way.
Right, that’s all silver age pre-crisis stuff. And that his hypnotic super glasses he wore as Clark Kent were once part of the ‘windshield’ his space pod had, and they just popped out the perfect size and shape to be eyeglass lenses (even directly lampshaded in the story that explained this). That is all Pre-crisis, Silver-Age, makes-no-sense hooey.
As Jobe00 mentioned, Post-crisis John Byrne written era Superman comics explained his ability to lift things as at least partially a tactile telekinesis power that creates force fields around anything he lifts, holding those objects in shape. It’s an unconscious thing, he doesn’t try to do it, it just happens.
And Jobe00 was asking if that factoid may have inspired this in Maxima’s powers.
Good old DBZ clothing physics. Because at some point the power levels quickly out scaled the clothing levels made to resist planet buster attacks.
Max had yet to get the DBZ power training course to ensure that her pants would always survive and get it upgraded to even going to her shirt… Most of the guys never learned that second half.
Goku’s shirt is a power limiter. He cant win until it gets removed.
Well, it was. Way back in dragonball, and versus his brother Raditz, his 50-kilo shirt had caused a noticeable drop in usable power. 50-kilos, so basically if you made a vest out of tungsten instead of carbon fiber. He was fighting gravity enough to not bring his all against *you*.
Now though, that’s not even a drop in the ocean. Instead, he’s not having fun until the other guy blasts him hard enough to shred that shirt right off from him.
My dude, my amazingly smart artist due. This size ‘bat’ though technically it’s a cudgel or truncheon but is cut for one appendage usage. Well it doesn’t matter the size, if it is metal and it doesn’t RING you weren’t swinging hard enough. But you still get a chime.
If it wasn’t because Harem would probably already inform Deus this would be enough info for him to make an educated guess.
I feel like the costume Max wears is minor, compared to using an ability that no one can explain.
MechaGodzilla can lift a 500 ton bat, because his forearm is 50,000 tons, but a 6 foot tall humanoid? Possibly a target for inquiry like orbiting nth balls.
… isn’t the bigger issue here that for Maxima to wear a skin-tight suit makes it really obvious that she just scored herself a Zilla with her “own” powers, whatever they may be, and not some accessory ?
After causing weapons manufacturer and existential crisis of that level, it will be pointed question time galore.
The announcers sound impressed but not baffled by the display of power, so probably not.
They don’t need to hide her involvement forever. I think this is one time action to make big money. If no one figures it out before final round and payout, they are in the clear.
They’re also worried about alarming the galactic ‘government’, whatever it was called
Xevoarchy
I’m calling it.
She’ll play a few rounds, get some money, and drop out.
Too much attention to the winner, but place or show is almost invisible.
The Cora crew will get some money but not the boatload they were hoping for.
Or….
Max disqualified.
There’s also a literal fairy in this fight. I think the sorts of things you see in the “Unlimited Class” are all over the place in terms of ‘power’ density. (You know, I’ve never really liked the ‘power’ thing, as a term. What IS ‘power’? What’s a power level? Like, even if you’re wrong about it, toss in some Newtons or Watts or Joules or something.)
So U.M.B.Rage is big, but that might be because his creators used sub-optimal power:weight actuators in order to save on cost, or because they wanted him to be bigger so he was easier to see, or his species naturally evolved to that size and so that’s what the modifications had to work with as a base.
The mecha could be enormous because they load it with dozens of meters of ablative physical plating for defense, allowing the whole output of the fusion core to be put into weapons and movement, or you could have a tiny suit of power armor that uses 90% of its pulse-arc reactor’s output to power forcefields and beehive barrier shielding, relying on the wearer’s natural mobility and spells for offense.
So yeah, I think a humanoid being like Maxima isn’t unheard of with that sort of strength. Consider that there’s space-vampires and shapeshifting dragons and creatures that exist primarily on higher dimensions with what you see being only a small extrusion of their selves into our 3.5 dimensional plane. The issue isn’t that a human-sized person CAN generate that sort of power in that sized package, it’s that an EARTH human can do that.
The humanoid shape in skintight duds isn’t a problem, really…
You’re talking about a major spectator sport where …humanoid charms.. are obviously well appreciated by a fairly large demographic..
And there’s the *very obvious* glow-trailing crystals embedded in the suit…
People *expect* Unlimited contestants to be enhanced. Right up to the edge of feasibility. And will assume at least part of what Max is doing there has to do with that.
Just as the Big Bot and the Godzilla are Advertisements for weapons producers, “Ixah” may well be a showcase for a New Player in the field of MagiTech Enhancement who are fishing for Customers in more specialised fields of Effective Destruction than mere “blow up the Countryside” levels of Pewpew. Adventurers, Dungeoneers, Freelancers…
And really… With what we *know* Succubi are capable of, and what they like to Show Off….. Put one with enough magic output in an augmented suit like that, and you have an “Ixah”..
There isn’t a reason to suspect there’s an Earth Superpowered Human strutting her stuff there..
So Maxima is just as durable on the inside as she is on the outside?
UMB.Rage. His friends just call him Barney.
Are you sure it is not Blarney?
After all he has a … unique … way of persuasion and cham
As in the older She Hulk comics her underwear is stamped “Protected by the CCA”
Ahh, the CCA, brought to you by the same people who had rock musicians up before congress on various nonsense.
Hence the lamentations that She-Hulk gets her shirts from the same source cousin Bruce gets his pants.
Supers have underwear made from hulkspantsium. It’s indestructable but only when covering the naughty bits.
And elastic!
And purple.
Only indestructible in final edits and rendercode form matching tweaks
If I remember correctly, Hulk’s pants were said to be made of unstable molecules, courtesy of Reed Richards…
To paraphrase ‘Men in Black’ – “Freddie Mercury didn’t die; he just went home.”
Sooooo… I hope I’m not late to the game but am i the only one who thinks Bruce looks like a very green Freddy mercury?
Or a very green cross between Freddy Mercury and Sean Connery. Look up some images from the movie Zardoz and you’ll find the outfit and mustache. If you’re feeling brave, watch the movie. It’s an absolute trip, and gets referenced a few times in The Venture Brothers.
I’m getting a little more Chris Hadfield than anything – it’s mostly the Mustache.
The Martian Mustache Hunter.
Oooh, space fruit!
I have a feeling that those cube-berries will wrack a human digestive system, but hey. You only live once.
Cora, meanwhile, isn’t disguising anything.
Agreed. I’d like to see her as the next vote incentive! :D
She IS disguising the non-fleshy-ness of her arms and legs, but, we knew that.
Weight of Bat: Steel weighs 490 pcf (7850 kg/m3). An over-the-road tanker trailer in the USA can carry a max of about 11,600 gal (1550cu. ft, 43.9 cu. m). Ignoring the rest of the trailer and only looking at the liquid volume that’s 760,000 lb (380 ton, 344.6 tonne). Adding in the weight of the trailer itself is more complicated. Going for max weight and assuming steel instead of a more expensive aluminum tank and frame, that’s another 30,000 lb (15 ton, 13.6 tonne) for a total of 410 ton (358 tonne). So your 500 tons +/- 100 was correct.
Whether the bat bends after those hits depends on the yield strength, but I doubt it. It was (hopefully) designed for use in combat, either single or double-hand wielding, and would have to survive being used multiple times in a single fight. So they would have used a high-strength “space-steel” allow or something.
Please check your zero count someplace. A high end truck bridge will take 80 tons. 40 tons is more typical, leading to issues with driving a tank down the interstate.
While a bridge may be rated for more, the federal max gross weight of a (loaded), class 8 truck is 80,000 Lbs (40 ton), in the US. You are misreading Einnseanaire’s post. His calculations are correct. He is taking the volume of a tanker (@ 11,600 gal) time the density of steel (~65.4 Lb/gal) =~759,000 LB (~380 ton) to estimate what a tanker sized steel bat would weigh.
He is NOT postulating a tanker sized steel bat driving on a highway or over a bridge.
Excellent point. I was thinking of transporting an Abrams tank or a really big transformer on the back of a transporter. I did not save the image, but the transformer transporter had around ten axles in two clusters.
Nobody (so far) has commented on the shape of the cudgel, specifically that it has a cross-shaped cross-section. That’s going to make it a *lot* more resistant to bending than a simple square or round cross-section. It’s also going to make the whole thing more rigid, so it will bring up the resonance frequency (hence “bong!”). It will also cut down the total weight, thus improving weapon speed.
What I want to see in the next panel is that U.M.B.Rage has a glass jaw and he goes out like a light. It’ll get fixed in the next model, but in previous battles no one had managed to hit him on the jaw…
Max must be wearing pasties and tape down below otherwise, per Cora’s explanation, Max would have the cameliest of toes.
She’s probably wearing a customized and reinforced full-body holo-suit similar to the one worn in episode 1400. The new version for the fight would be thinner and tighter, with reinforcements at weak points. Weak points would include any body openings (“down below”, mouth, nose, etc.) which would also effectively prevent “camel toe”. Also she’s apparently wearing pasties, but I have no explanation for that other than an attempt at modesty.
Ironically Maxima… er…Ixah may still be considered a prude in this setting. Even the fey was revealing more and Greybuff was not hiding anything due to lack of anything to hide…
That is the literal excuse for some of Superman’s costumes from earth. It’s fine company to be in.
That is some tiny space fruit.
If kaiju bones and muscles aren’t made of something MUCH stronger than steel, the kaiju would collapse into a pile of meat and bone due to its own weight.
So….
500 metric tons moving at 10 m/s (eyeballed from how far Maxima flies in that panel and assuming it only takes a second or two to swing it) is 25 megajoules of kinetic energy, or about 6 kg of TNT. The sound of that impact is “oh god I think I’m deaf.”
Given the warning about magic, and her lack of magic-soaking weapons, I thought Max would use her dodge to go after the pixie. Then again maybe she just doesn’t want to draw too much attention at once, and UMBRage is already after her. Also, we don’t know if anyone else casts spells (my instincts say that [ |¯ might be a caster) or has flexible talents (like Kevin).
There’re several other very dangerous combatants.
She’s probably hoping somebody else deals with her or at least weakens her.
Was honestly hoping Cora would have said “… That’s not Max, want to make another guess?”
Math doesn’t math in the presence of Supers.
Denser than neutron stars?
E = M C Escher?
Just assume “Plenty” and “Lots”.
One wonders how Maima gets or keeps long hair. It’s well outside her body limits and while it is *her* hair. It’s dead cells.
Im sure there’s some sort of nonsensoleum reason
My guess on the cudgel noise would be more like a tuning fork, BONGGGGgggGGggggGggggggg……., frequency based on the length from the end to where Maxima is holding it.
Regarding the text at the bottom of the comic, I for one am more curious about the bloomers Cora is currently wearing, (if any).
So my question is, did she dodge or did she tunnel out from under that attack? They only think she dodged because they probably wouldn’t believe someone can tunnel that fast. But she can take a hit that would drive her into the ground like a nail, then plow through the dirt with flight and her forcefield fast enough to do a small distance like that in a blink.
Sometimes brute-force powers can substitute for movement powers, like when Colossus jumped out of an airplane, not because he could fly but because he could land at terminal velocity and climb out of the crater.
My archive-fu isn’t that good, but I’m sure we’ve seen Max’s clothes blown off leaving her in her underwear, more than once?
She’s lost that too.. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-521-to-no-dress/
“How is it that no matter how badly you massacre one of these thong-and-blanket types some shred of their unmentionables still survives the blast?” – Manchester Black
At first I thought “Yay, hologram modesty preserver. Problem solved!” But then I realized that this would merely shift the burden from the invincible underwear to the indestructible hologram generator.
I’m thinking Max should have caught Mr. Rage closer to the end of the bat, because the resonances coming back down to her will be a bitch. As anybody who’s shanked a baseball will testify.
How convenient for the femme announcer to always have little pinks hearts above their face!
I’m thinking this reporting team must be optimized for mammalian bipedal types. There is probably a team consisting of a sextet of mind linked isopods and another that resembles a couple of puddles of slime mold. Each team would have features selected to engage with the maximum number of entities within their demographic. Interestingly the little pink hearts are considered the height of attractiveness on several hundred planets across the galaxy.
Just fill it with sand or bird-shot that’ll dampen the resonance well and also increases momentum transfer…unsportingly so.
Maxima is going to snatch the fairy’s little wand, since presumably she’s the most versatile in magic attacks that may not be fully dodgeable (unsummon oxygen, mindcontrol, big magic that may be beyond Maxima’s sword ability block or absorb) and presumably just going really really really fast and grabbing the want might work or the attempt may be a distraction to get a punch in.
Maxima might attempt it as a nonlethal takedown out of habit and because it looks easy.
Unless Maxi is hiding that sword up her butt, she’s not using the sword in this tournament!!
That sword was going to be used when she got back home
Hmmm… sure would like to see more of Cora in the maid’s outfit. Or slowly removing the maid’s outfit. Just… more Cora please.