Grrl Power #1475 – Megascorpion
Super Hiro is about 80% as strong as Maxima, but his flight speed is just shy of supersonic. Anvil can theoretically out-strength anyone on the team by absorbing enough kinetic energy (being punched all-out by Hiro doesn’t make her as strong as Hiro, there’s conversion entropy, and a lot of the energy goes to reinforcing her body) and no one is sure what her upper limit is and if she would instantly explode if she exceeds it or develop a full-body hernia or what.
Basically, no one else was quite right to take Babezilla down quickly and nonlethally. Dabbler did some back of the cyber-abacus math and gave Max an idea of how hard and fast Max would need to hit her without exploding her head. I’ve posted about it before, but I’m positive super fights would wind up being extremely lethal. If some guy is robbing a bank wearing, let’s say a tank themed costume, you really have no idea how much punishment he can take. So you give him a tap that would lay out a normal human, or try to, because if your regular punch is measured in megatons, scaling it back down to a 300 lb boxer punch might not be a level of control that’s easy to achieve. Maybe to you, exhaling differently during the punch means the difference between 300 lbs and 3,000. Maybe you lay the guy out, maybe he doesn’t realize he’s being punched, maybe you break his neck. So if he’s still upright and giving you flack about how his grandmother hits harder, you go back in and punch again a little harder, trying to work your way up till you’re hitting him as his level, or just slightly above, but somewhere between 30,000 lbs and 180,000, his skull pulps. And that’s a hero trying to control his strength. A supervillain with eye lasers could walk into a stadium and kill 5,000 people before a hero shows up and decides there’s no time to work his way up to just the right amount of takedown force.
There was a start of a good discussion on the previous page about whether or not Babezilla’s phone would still work when enlarged. I think it comes down to how she grows. If she just summons more molecules to fill in the spaces, then I think the battery would still work, but I don’t know the antenna. I also don’t know if the CPU or the screen would still work, because suddenly regular sized electrons are flying around circuits that are 55x wider and thicker, and data transmitted to the screen (like the LEDs themselves) is traveling through wires that used to be hair-thick but are now finger-thick. I think there’d be some lag at any rate.
If she grows by making her molecules larger, well, then how does she breathe? The phone itself should still work perfectly, but again, not sure about the antenna. I think that would fail, unless the EM waves returned to regular size once they leave her super-domain, then yeah, I guess it’d work.
And if it’s some sort of weird reverse-TARDIS-she’s-bigger-on-the-outside nonsense, then of course it’d work, because she’s just closer than you think she is.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Yeah I kinda figured the team doesn’t have the specific power sets to defeat Babezilla without killing her or possibly destroying more of wherever they are than she was. I actually think forcing her to joi-I mean recruiting Babezilla would help fill those gaps in certain situations.
max has time to stop to make witty quips?
I though the same.
She doesnt.
Any smart folks know if time dilation hypothetically works for or against Max here?
If you mean time dilation due to her reaching relativistic speeds it would work against her.
I mean more like how Sydney was stuck in space for a while and for her it was a few days but for everyone on Earth it was almost two months. I don’t know how any of that works but I feel like it could apply here. Max could have time to quip, grab a sandwich, and a shower before her 30 seconds are technically up in who knows where space. Or maybe she’s already disqualified.
Sidney’s situation was time travel, not time dilation — as confirmed by the text under https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-727-a-timely-prank/ — which was perhaps a consequence of the accidental portal activation.
Sydney’s situation was different, she traveled forward in time because the portal malfunctioned because it was incomplete. No time dilation involved.
BTW, I LUVED the “Boot to the head” skit from EU. I watch it several times a year.
That last line “stop thanking God….” I wonder if Max is going to have him look at pictures of kitties until he’s no longer distracted by them? Since she did have him look at chesticles until he was immune to being flashed…
Math isn’t distracted, he’s just annoyed at Anvil and Maxi praising some anti-NSFW ‘god’ for ruining his day :P
Does “relativistic time dilation” exist in the Grrl Power universe?
In our universe, radioactive decay slows down with increasing velocity. Since the standard for time measurement is radioactive decay, aka atomic clocks, it is assumed that time is dilating. It could be that the gravitational effect of ‘relativistic mass’ is causing the change in observed decay rates. Beware “Occam’s razor”; down that road lies Phlogiston, and a host of medical misinterpretations, disproven in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Time dilation only applies if one is traveling though regular, mundane, space. The Aethireum Gateway that Max went through went “around” regular space which means special relativity does not come into play. Also, Grrl Power #714 states the Aethireum Gateway ignores gravity wells in mundane space which implies general relativity does not apply. Either way, there would be no time dilation.
You can actually derive time dilation from Newton’s laws and basic geometry, if you just add a fixed speed of light. I did it back in high school physics class. (High school physics class was *serious* in the decades right after Sputnik!) That’s what is called “special relativity”. Time dilation and the Lorenz contraction were derived before Einstein, by, oh, yeah: Lorenz. Einstein just put them on a less ad hoc basis.
It’s general relativity, warped space, where you have to break out the heavy duty math. Never did wrap my head around that.
Actually, that is how Einstein derived it.
The link between Special Relativity and General Relativity is a lessor known effect of Special Relativity. As a sub-light mass is accelerated towards the speed of light its mass increases. The equation is Mm = Mr/√(1 – v^2/c^2) where Mm is the mas in motion and Mr is it’s rest mass. The effect is that it’s mass increase as it approaches the speed of light and reaches infinity (1/0) at the speed of light. As it’s mass increases it’s gravity well deepens. Since the mass is always at the bottom of it’s gravity well it is continually descending deeper into it’s gravity well. General Relativity is, usually, stated as time accelerates as a mass ascends out of a gravity well. It is equally accurate to say time slows down as a mass descends into a gravity well. Special relativity indicates a mass will continually descend deeper into it’s own gravity well as it accelerates towards the speed of light. General Relativity states a mass descending deeper into a gravity well will cause time to slow down. Thus General Relativity predicts, or agrees with, the time dilation of Special Relativity. I hope I explained that clearly enough. One does not have to get into the relatively complicated match of General Relativity to understand the link.
It’s like with most tabletop RPGs, talking is a free action.
Certainly Spiderman wouldn’t have time to make quips in any real fight.
Not just a free action, you will be surprised how much can be said in so little time (kinda the reverse with Poli-talks: so little said in a hug amount of time :P )
Of course, she is a super.
Pretty sure this is a “talking is a free action” situation.
Babezilla is going to have one hell of a headache when she wakes up. How would you do concussion protocols in this situation? Because she’s not severely concussed from the boot, she definitely is from the face-plant.
I hope for her that she shrinks down some; it’ll make it easier to treat any injuries she’s sustained.
Those ‘bap bap’ sound effects coming at the very start of the impact would tend to indicate that her head didn’t take the main impact of the fall. If they had come after the impact, then I have no doubt she’d be in danger of a concussion.
On the other hand the fall angle doesn’t really look right for the chest-first impact implied by those sound effects either.
But if she did hit the ground chest-first, she may want a concussion, immediately, just to help block out the pain.
I guess we will see, when she wakes up, which parts of her anatomy need more attention.
Yeah, the impact in panel 3 doesn’t seem to match the strike in panel 2, where she appears to begin a backflip. She would have to flip at least 180° while still in the air to make sense of it, but it is possible. I know, I accidentally did something similar recently, lucky I didn’t break my neck, but I tripped instead of getting hit.
I think the artist’s goal here was to achieve the twin bap-bap sound effect, and display the giant under-boobage. I don’t think Dave B. will ever be able to top this, it looks to me like this will be his career high jiggle art. Purely based on the defined fictitious magnitude.
The upskirt shot in the last panel feels unnecessary, no matter what Mathias thinks.
But yeah, good thing she wore at least some underwear.
IF you can rail gun her brain stem then you can shoot her phone…
and tell her the next shot will be her brain stem.
And remember Supers, when seconds matter, combat quips don’t.
I agree with this 100%.
I was thinking kneecap her to prove she can be hurt then tell her the next ones a headshot if she doesn’t power down.
Some of her followers may be minors.
Possibly miners as well
I mean it’s pretty implicit that the Superion Field and anything influenced by it runs on at least 50% Bullshittium at all times.
On a straight scaling the phone would not work. Digital electronics use clock signals that trigger state changes, so every time the clock ticks millions of things happen in a modern processor. A clock domain is a bunch of circuits synchronised to the same click signal. Modern phone processors run so fast that you can’t have the whole processor synchronised to the same click signal because the speed of the signal moving across the silicon isn’t fast enough, so you have many click domains. Make the phone bigger, and your clock signals timing gets messed up.
Also there are components like inductors printed on the silicon that wouldn’t work the same if they changed size.
You’re right that the antenna wouldn’t work either.
If I thought about it, I could probably come up with plenty of other reasons, but what’s the point, that phone’s a brick, unless there’s some sufficiently-advanced-technology/magic involved in the scaling.
I’m wondering if her power is to just appear big, like a zoom-in power that changes her size in relation to the universe which also affects physics in her local spacetime.
Because you wouldn’t be able to walk if your body was just increased hundreds of times in size without also changing your local physics…
There was a scifi series that addressed that, cannot remember the name. But different people woke different powers all over the world and one guy’s power was to grow huge. He spent his time in traction, strapped to a giant wheelchair because muscles cannot just be scaled up and his bones were brittle at that scale.
Except she’s been crushing the asphalt with her weight, so she really is that big/heavy. So instead, it is, as posted above, “Bullshitium”.
Specifically, her powerset at this point appears to be as follows:
1: Get (or maybe “Be”) gigantic.
2: Have strength/endurance sufficient to function ‘normally’, which will entail being very strong and durable against normal-sized opponents.
3: Items within her Embiggen Field function normally with respect to herself–clothing becomes larger, her phone works, etc.
So, given this, we do have a few areas worth questioning. The first is, “Just how much can she affect with her field?” Could she, for instance, get into a car and grow, and have the vehicle grow with her?
Closely following this is, “What happens if she releases an object that was affected by the field?” In particular, imagine her holding an AK-47 instead of a cell-phone. If she fires it, presumably it makes a really, REALLY loud noise, but then are the bullets snapping down to normal size as soon as they leave the barrel, or is she basically creating a rapid-fire Schwerer Gustav? More esoteric possibilities exist, too, such as the bullet shrinking, but due to conservation of momentum, gaining a 55x velocity increase….
Of course, if her power is simply “being big”, then whatever she was holding at the time is now large (and likely to stay that way), but she might not be able to affect other gear, meaning she’s stuck wearing that outfit forever, at least in places where public nudity isn’t allowed. Presumably, in this potentiality, she just happened to be wearing that cropped hoodie as a personal fashion statement, and it was just fortuitously appropriate.
Sounds vaguely like George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series.
The ‘bodyguard’ of a Middle Eastern terrorist/political leader had that power. The guy was carefully staged to look impressive without having to move.
“Gigantifying this phone will void the warranty”
I’m surprised Max stopped to say anything. Doesn’t she need to get back into the ring in less than… ten seconds? fifteen? Definitely not enough time to have a beam battle with Zilla which is something I would love to see.
Dave, don’t stress too much about her phone that couldn’t possibly work when enlargened: it is obviously affected by the same “superion field magic” she is. Scaling a human, or any other creature to that size would not only cause all kinds of issues, but also make it impossible for them to stay alive as-is.
They could all go inside her and see how big she is, but they’d all feel like pricks doing it.
What’s Math like on a speedbag?
World’s punches vibe…
I feel like there should be a your mama joke here.
Math raises his hand and volunteers to go first to make sure it’s safe.
As others have said, I am VERY surprised that Max even bothered to stop and make a quip before jetting off to try and make it back through Sydney’s portal to rejoin the fight. Or has she figured she won’t make it back in time to continue the fight?
Talking is a free action.
I assume Max is pausing to see if that finished it. While being DQ’d would suck for all concerned, getting back only to immediately have to come back to complete the KO (and maybe more times) would be it’s own level of ridiculous with reappearing and disappearing immediately after.
Pausing long enough to be visible on camera at the scene of the fight establishes her presence on Earth, which (given that she doesn’t know who is watching, or what they know) could seem useful enough to squeeze a quip into her time budget.
I love the sound effects conveying the sound of her boobs and the rest of her separately.
“I’m the silliest Zilla of them all!” Anyone else read it like this first?
> I’m positive super fights would wind up being extremely lethal.
Go read Worm already. Yes, super fights should be stupidly lethal unless superpowers come with enhanced durability as standard.
Though at at least in that series powers are much smaller in scope. You only get super-durability if it’s your primary power or a result of your primary power. Like I tried to PRT-rate the MCU and everyone is able to shrug off bullets by default, so they’re all Brute 3 at minimum.
In Worm you can usually trust that the person making specialized grenades or shooting lasers from their hands is going to take a bullet the same as an unpowered person, it’s only someone that’s punching through walls that you have to worry about
“They’re all Brute-3 at minimum”
That was my point. In most stories, (almost) all supers get enhanced toughness as a secondary power. Worm is the only one I know of where they don’t.
Worm’s general power level stays lowkey for most of its run, meaning most of the superhumans in the story can get dropped by a bullet. The only exception being once you reach the climactic battles against the more powerful members of the verse, all of whom would either give Maxima a run for her money or outright slaughter her and ARC-SWAT.
Although they’re written more as forces of nature for the low-powered protagonist to navigate around rather than outright stop.
The rest of the confrontations in the story just involve villains whom someone like Spiderman could comfortably handle on his own.
“Worm’s general power level stays lowkey for most of its run, meaning most of the superhumans in the story can get dropped by a bullet.”
I dunno. One of the reasons I like the wormverse so much is that even though no-one gets a brute secondary power unless they actually need it, they still have some truly rediculous powers flying around.
Tattletale would break Arc-Swat over her knee. So would Coil. Then you get the random encounters like Nice Guy. Not to mention Imp.
And then there’s Contessa. Who is physically no more powerful than you or me, but is one of the most powerful capes in all of fiction. Who I think proves that “can be dropped by a bullet” is no way to measure how “lowkey” a cape is.
RE: the voting incentive:
I Figure it’s actually a post-recruitment-by-ARC photoshoot against a scale model and Babezilla is actually ‘normal human’-sized. No harm to the actual ecology beyond what humanity has already done to keep the falls picturesque.
Also on that topic, it’s called the plunge pool or plunge basin
No the phone would no longer work, for numerous reasons.
Assuming everything has been “simply” upscaled”
1) Software wise: your electrons need to travel a whole longer distance, ruining the whole timing in your SW
2) Resistance wise, your PCB tracks are suddenly much bigger in diameter, offsetting your whole Voltage, Amper resistor values.
3) Flipping a transistor will require entirely different values.
and even assuming all that works:
4) your sensors will no longer function as the motion sensors and pressure sensors are all very precisly defined thicknesses/widths based on material properties. Take a rule, place it at the edge of your table, sticking out and let it vibrate by pulling it down a bit.. now do the same with a plastic bar :)
5) your camera pixels would get massively saturated due to light intake, the other way around: your Screen would be pixelmania. Or you get a factor 55 more pixels which again your SW and HW cannot handle :)
Sorry, just my 2 cents :D
If her brain’s electro-chemistry is still properly working, than the Superion field would take care of her phone too; it is probably due to the high concentration of handwavion particles you find in the proximity of all supers…
Comments like this are the reason why I read these comments and are an added benefit to Grrl Power. I have a huge comic view list, but GP is the only one where I read through the entire comments.
Shouldn’t that have been “BOOM” “BAP BAP”? Was the “BOOM” for her pelvis hitting or did her head did not hit the ground first?
Interesting observation here. She didn’t shrink down. I know the reality of sequential art means you can only convey so much passage of time in the frame of one page so it’s very possible it just hasn’t happened yet. With that said I assume Max knocked her out so if Babezilla doesn’t shrink back to normal size while unconscious that raises a lot more questions in the seemingly endless suite of questions about the logistics of her growth. I’m sure the science is all under superion field rules but I kinda really want her to join ARC now just to test what she can get away with. Just growing stuff on demand would be insanely useful by itself. So would hypothetically shrinking stuff, possibly even people. If she snatched one of those helicopters at kaiju size then shrunk down to 5’5 valley girl size do you then have a toy helicopter and very tiny human pilots? What happens if Varia touches her? There’s tons of potentially insane shit possible with Babezilla. ARC would be fools to let her escape from them.
Ohh, that phone’s going to be cracked dropping it like that without a case on. Bet it hit just wrong when it fell/landed. ;)
26 seconds really isn’t long when you start running your mouth. If Max is going to get back to the arena in time she needs to shut up and fly.
If her brain electro-chemistry is still working, than the Superion field would take care of her phone too; it is probably due to the high concentration of handwavion particles you find in the proximity of all supers…
Miss Zilla should have read the evil overlord list.
“I will never say, ‘I am invincible,’ because no one ever is. After that, defeat is usually instantaneous.”
*gasp!* A guaranteed loss! (p134).
Maxima should/should’ve caught the phone.
There’s an app controlling her size.
Slide the slider down to 1x.
Might have to use Babezilla’s finger with the phone in her hand.
That thing in the middle of the panty-shot has no business being there. Also I disagree with the camera focus.
Btw. whatever happened to sleeping gas and the like?
How would you administer enough sleeping gas to a kaiju size individual without wiping out half the countryside. I guess once she was out you could use a pipeline sized canula to keep her out.
The problem with any kind of sedative gas or injection is calculating the dose. Too little may have no effect on the target, too much can cause serious damage or death. For a lot of substances the margin between those is pretty narrow. Plus there are so many things you need to know about the target to get the dose right. How much do they weigh? Do they have any allergies? Do they already have some other drug(s) in their system? In this setting you’d also have to worry about what species the target is, and what compounds they be resistant or extra sensitive to. Trying to use it against multiple targets makes this even harder. This is why police don’t use this kind of thing. I remember a story from a few years back. Someplace, I wanna say Russia, terrorists took a theater full of people hostage. The cops or military pumped some gas into the theater, only to end up killing many of the hostages themselves.
A Maxima sized boot traveling supersonic would be like a bullet hitting someone Babezilla sized. Guess she also has kaiju durability as well as size.
Well, the scales on her back do appear to be thick enough to provide a bit of natural armor, I think.
The part about trying to regulate your strength as a super does remind me heavily of the first episode of The Boys.
When the drunk speed-dick vaporized that guys girlfriend?
Oh, here it comes. Another boot to the head for everybody. (Frantics reference) And oh joy, I feel ancient. Because I remember that when it was new… But really, everyone in Calgary couldn’t have moved on just 5million dollars even in the 70’s. Not to somewhere nice anyway. GETOFFAMYLAWN! dang kids and their dog.
People complaining about supersized phones should remember there is a simple solution used for many giant screens.
Don´t grow the processor.
The software is often already designed to handle larger screens and sacrificing a little resolution isn´t really an issue.
People complaining about durability issues should remember has canon zero-range telekinesis and can thus spread the hit over the entire body.
The railgun can not.
I was unaware that Maxima was an advanced disciple of Ti Kwon Leap.
I’m with you, Math.
Math, look at her top. She’s not wearing a bra, and you look the perfect size to climb in and nestle between them. Admittedly that’s sexual harassment
Remember that episode of Justice League (animated) where it’s the rampant nanotech and Atom is riding in Wonder Woman’s corset?
He’s not harassing, he’s just checking for concealed weapons. I know there are people who get into the sexy giant thing but it seems like after a certain point the sexiness wouldn’t really scale up very well. Maybe it is a lack of imagination but I would have a difficult time connecting a nipple that is taller than me to an erogenous zone.
When a person’s ‘Victoria’s Secret Compartment’ is large enough to hide a tanker truck in…
So what’s the plan? She’s just gonna wake up and beat up Arc-Swat again. Assuming she shrinks back to 5’5″, how are they going to contain her? She could just bust out of any cell they put her in by growing. If she’s really a super and not magical, I don’t ser a good way to hold her.
Her strength and more importantly durability are likely size-dependent.
“The cell you are currently in is a 10′ cube. The walls are heavy armored plate 2 feet thick. It’s also located in an abandoned copper mine over a mile underground with no passages larger than 20′ wide. I would HIGHLY recommend staying normal size while you’re here.”
Canned Ham as it were.
Just point out to her that Maxi was doing non-lethal takedown this time…
“That’s a huge bitch!” https://i.imgur.com/BPT92IY.mp4
Math…”Taco time”!
To be honest I’m getting kind of tired of Maxima Sue.
Ok, but unironically, I love Babezilla’s design and personality, and I really hope we get to see more of her.
Kind of hard to tell what direction she was hit from back of the head side. The action graphics in the panel kind of indicate that she’s being flipped backwards somehow? Which is what it means to yourself from the front?
Still doesn’t seem like a threat worthy of calling Max back.
I notice that Babezilla is missing the plating on her nose in the Vote Incentive
Then shoot her knees and heal the damage while she’s in captivity.
And one for Jenny and the wimp!
That sketch never gets old
That old pulp hero, the Avenger, (No, not the spiffy dressed British guy.) used non-fatally shoot people by “creasing” them: A glancing shot to the skull.
It works because it’s auto-regulated: The bullet might have enough force to just punch through, but it’s only going to transfer the amount of force necessary to push the skull out of the way, maybe cracking it in the process.
I think Maxima just “creased” her.
I think Math wants to do a Maui.
In Hawaiian folklore, the demigod Maui (the dude we see in Moana) died trying to bring immortality to mankind. He thought he could do this by reversing the birth process so he turned himself into a worm and entered the body of the Goddess of Death while she was sleeping. Unfortunately she was awakened by a bird and he was crushed by her obsidian teeth. In her vee-jay.
Willing to be money we won’t be seeing *THAT* story in Moana 3…..