Grrl Power #1479 – Make like a banana
When you have a (functionally) indestructible sword, it kind of becomes a bit of an omni-tool. Granted, it’d be unwieldy to use a 2 meter long sword to trim your toenails, but you could do it. After which you could chop open a vault door, then slice a tomato. In this case it’s mostly a lever. Or an axle, I guess? I actually don’t know if there’s a tool that’s specifically designed to do this. I’m sure there is. A twisty wedge? Maybe an auger? Nah, that’s just a giant corkscrew.
You know, just because the “sword” is indestructible, it doesn’t necessarily mean the cross guard is. In practical terms, the sword part of a sword is really the blade and the tang. Like, if the pommel could crack off, or the wrap on the handle could get scuffed, but the blade was still immaculate and retained a perfect edge, I think most people would still regard the sword as being indestructible. The cross guard is more… part of a sword than a pommel is, I think, but it’s a good thing the cross guard on Manavore seems to be extremely tough, if perhaps not actually, functionally indestructible. Cause any sword in her hands is probably going to get stress tested in ways the blacksmith/enchanter never imagined.
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?
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Could also be the pommel protect wielder from touching the blade and suffering the effects. Seen that a few times.
Then maybe the blade should have a part with simialr covering?
Two-Handed swords often have a part of the blade intentionally not sharpened. You can grab that part with your hand for better leverage.
If you need the pommel for protection from the blade, parts of the blade should have at least partial protection.
It’s called a ricasso, FYI. Dull section at the base of the blade, for “half-swording” techniques. Geralt uses it a lot in The Witcher TV series, if you want a demonstration.
And 2-handers often had a leather binding over that first length of blade. Also, swords used with half-swording (indeed, most swords that were mainly used in armoured combat) were not really sharp, that is kitchen-knife sharp. So grabbing the blade for half-swording (which could include almost the whole length) was not a great risk to your hands, esp. if you wore gloves.
Now, How that would work with Manavore, I wouldn’t want to guess. But I certainly wouldn’t want to grab it.
Yeah, with the right technique you could grab a sword at any point along its length for extra leverage without risking cutting yourself. Ricassos were partly a half-swording aid, partly to save time (the smith didn’t have to sharpen the whole sword), partly even a fashion choice in some circumstances. They were more useful on rapiers where you’d put just one finger above the crossguard instead of a whole hand.
The pommel is the knob on the end. You’re thinking of the grip, which is the part you actually touch, or possibly the hilt, which is everything below the crossguard (though some people include the crossguard and consider the hilt anything below the blade).
The crossguard, pommel and hilt should have comparable durability to the blade.
As they will be subject to comparable stresses. And if they break, the blade becomes largely useless.
The crossguard in particular is there to catch blades that would otherwise cut off your finger or arm.
And with magical crafting, there could be little reason to make them out of different materials anyway.
One of the main issues with lightsabers. Ben knew what he was doing.
Building a poorly constructed lightsaber that if it didn’t have those cross guard vents would have probably exploded?
But it looks cool.
To use an old meme:
To rightly defeat your opponent, you have to screw off the pommel and throw it at the opponent.
Edit: The phrase was “End him rightly”, translated to English from German Wiktenauer fencing sources.
Eedit: Liechtenauer.
Note to self. Learn to copy your sources rightly.
Pinwheel Golem.
AC…..
The fact this worked also implies Maxima’s invulnerability is stronger than thr golem’s. Which is hardly groundbreaking but a fun thing to note foe the powerscalers in the room.
Stronger? No. But relatively close at least.
1: He broke at a weak point, aka the penetration wound. Not on the head that hit her shin.
2: Due the difference between the blades width (source of torque) and the distance between the rotation point and the head (leverage), the force on the golems torso splitting it apart is several times higher then the force applied to her Max.
The issue is that it should have broken the golem locally around the sword penetration, then the sword would just spin freely inside the hole. There’s no reason for the applied torque to have extended outwards enough to break the entire thing apart. Yes, a solid rock penetrated by a harder metal shaft would break apart like that, but this isn’t a solid rock. It it did break like that it would be an incredible weakness for a golem in this type of fight. But then, the “specifically not iron” giant had a magazine cook off, so maybe such weaknesses do exist.
Now, is the golem out, or will it just reform from surrounding materials?
Not necessarily. Depends on the ratios of different aspects of its hardness, durability, tensile strength, ductility, etc.
Materials that are hard to damage/bend are more likely to crack when stressed that way. You can, in fact, crack some metals in a similar manner by accident when using a drill, which is *meant* to make a hole, not create a crack.
This usually means either A) you did something wrong (went too fast, didn’t use a lubricant, etc), or B) the metal was already stressed and weakened (Corrosion, metal fatigue, etc). In this case, she’s going fast, using something not meant to drill out a hole, and she certainly didn’t use lube.
If it’s not out it could be thrown out of the ring and fail to come back in a minute. Say she puts it into orbit.
interesting that the enery is spiraling in the oposite direction the sword is being rotated
No it isn’t. The spiral is going from the inside to the outside. Probably because the sword is drawing in the golem’s blasts.
To be clear, if I ever get a functionally indestructible sword, I am *never* going to use it to pick my teeth or clean under my toenails. Just saying, so you know. To be clear, that’s not an exhaustive list, and the list does include a bunch of things I’d be reluctant to mention explicitly on the Internet.
In “the wise man fear” there is a community of people that use their indestructible swords that way. Using them only for combat and killing is being disrespectful to the blades, or so they say.
Imagine being a paramedic or firefighter in a world with things like indestructible swords.
You just know there will pretty shortly be someone who tried to stress test that. Generally using some body part or other.
Just like the Mythbusters stress-tested the term ‘bulletproof’.
What they concluded is that there is no ‘proof’ only an upper limit to ‘resistant’. Which you can reach with a better bullet. 50-cal not enough? Try a 80mm cannon. Just keep going, if you can afford it.
Maxima’s sword’s indestructibility is seems stronger than the Golem’s indestructibility.
GrrlPower addressed this in an early comic.
In English, there’s a point where it stops being a “bullet” and becomes a “shell,” so things can be 100% bulletproof. Tanks armor, for example, is proof against all bullets as defined by English-speaking militaries, as well as smaller “shells.” The line is generally “can a person normally fire this from a gun they can hold under their own power, but there have been a few guns built that way that fire light shells, and a different meaning of “shell” includes shotguns, which don’t fire bullets, they fire “slugs” if they fire a single projectile, and it’s all very esoteric.
Any sufficiently tough and hand-held tool is effectively an omni-tool if you’re creative enough.
I suppose a rock is the first omni tool. I cant find it anymore but one of the British car forums had quite a list of tools that you could approximate by substituting a rock found on the side of the road.
How about a *car*?
Can you ‘rock’ that tool?
when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail., so, if you’ve got a car, everything’s an accident :}
The penalties for getting something wrong with while cutting your toenails are fairly mild if you’re using clippers, pretty sure that’s not true of a huge indestructible razor-sharp sword.
Not as wrong as if you were using it to trim nose-hairs… yours or someone else’s
How many RPMs did she get the golem up to before applying the break?
I’d say the tool this activity and hold on the sword resembles would be a tap wrench. Which admittedly is usually a much more delicate procedure :P
Spin. The. WHEEL!!
I mean, indestructible doesn’t necessarily mean “sharp”, like, at all – you could have a sword you could do nothing to and nothing with :) And you couldn’t even try to sharpen it due to how indestructible it is.
In an old fantasy novel, “Master of the Five Magics”, one of the schools of magic was basically enchantment, which created absolutely perfect, indestructible items, through precise, demanding rituals. They had discovered a ritual for making enchanted daggers…but if the daggers were sharp, it threw the ritual off, and it would fail. So they produced perfectly, eternally dull daggers. Magically dull. Like, duller than the flat of your hand dull. Nobles wore them as status symbols because they were wildly expensive, but utterly impossible to, say, stab your liege with.
Unless the enchantment was specifically to prevent liege-stabbings, then no, even a butter knife can be used to stab someone
Like, yeah, but anyone can club their leige to death with whatever sticks are laying about. One does not get a wildly expensive weapon commissioned when a random object from the room does equally well.
“The cross guard is more… part of a sword than a pommel is, I think”
Not really… Often it is just slid over the tang and then locked in place with the grip/pommel.
Hey buddy, want to go for a spin?
The cross guard of an indestructible sword should be at least, if not more indestructible than the blade in my opinion, especially on a sword that long. We all know the cross guard is for catching blades so they don’t slide down your sword and cut you, but with an indestructible sword, that would happen A LOT. See, normally when swords clash they bend and bind somewhat, sticking together at the point of impact, at least when hitting edge to edge. An indestructible sword presumably would never bind, or even if hitting less indestructible swords, would bind significantly less, and so you’d have way more blades sliding down towards your much less indestructible wrists. Additionally, for a sword that long, you would absolutely anticipate someone using the cross guard for leverage, check out zweihander and similarly long sword fighting techniques, you would think they grab everything besides the handle.
Also, this was a few pages back, but you talked about Manavore literally eating and digesting mana instead of just cliche absorbing it. Instead of putting out waste heat as a byproduct as you said, I think it would be neat if the ‘suction’ effect was actually the byproduct of digested mana. To explain, Manavore would theoretically always be drawing in any ambient mana it touches, and digesting it to use the energy to draw in more mana. However, this would always equal an equilibrium because pulling in the mana takes exponentially more energy the further from the sword it is, so it would never go crazy and absorb the entire universe, but it would also be able to ‘scale up’ a bit and eat more mana when something like this is happening where someone is trying to cull a extra++ core combat golem. Just an idea!
I you have studied your Agrippa, and I see that you have, you will know that every part of the sword is a striking surface and a part of the weapon.
The pummel is essential so “you can end him rightly.” IYKYK
I’m not super craftily inclined, but you have a tool that spins things? Just jams in and turns it around in place? That’s a screwdriver. Not so much driving this, but that golem guy was screwed, so. Yeah. In this instance. Torquing. You know what they paraphrase, when the only tool you have is an indestructible omni-tool, then every problem can be solved by a generous application of brutal violence and unimaginable force. Or something.
I often use a screwdriver to pry two things apart or make a crack bigger by twisting the screwdriver. Interesting that some people don’t have this experience already.
So, when you break a golem into chunks, do you have a few seconds where you can actually see the core(s) before it reforms?
Because it looks like Max can break it into chunks a lot. And is there any easy way to know, outside of magical perception, which chunks are actually the cores that you have to destroy in order to stop it for good?
“A few seconds” is an eternity to Max at high speed. If she gets so much as fifty milliseconds or so where she can see and identify them, it’s all over. But if she can’t figure out which chunks are the cores, she can go on breaking it into chunks all day.
Is there a timer on the rounds? After eight minutes or whatever, do they call a halt and declare a winner on points or something?
Nice to see the outline of Max’s AR-670-01 there, although the attacks and forces in this arena would probably have ripped it to shreds by now if not for her personal forcefield. The fact that it still exists at all means her forcefield has at least a half-inch of range, so maybe Max’s outfit didn’t really need to be quite so completely skintight. If she figures out that Cora and Dabbler were making stuff up just to put her in a deliberately provocative outfit she’s going to be annoyed.
The pieces that do not start growing back are not a core. The small pieces that are ejected permanently from the arena with a kick are perhaps disqualified.
oh that’s gonna leave a mark
Indestructible you say….
So now I’m imagining her using Achilles as a sword.
Reading today’s comments has inspired this theory on Manavore and the posessed golem:
The golem body appears to be crystalline. Crystal lattices do not normally flex, while the golem body does. Therefore any flexxing is accomplished through magic to avoid breaking the golem body. The Manavore has locally sucked all of the mana from the body, leaving a very breakable crystal lattice for Ixah to play with.
If at least one of the golem cores survives, it might remain embedded in Mt. Atrocitous’ leg. That makes Mt. A. a likely source of material to repair the golem’s body. We’ll see…
A blacksmithing question:
With all of the comments about indestructible sword components, I would like to know if swords can be forged in a single piece, blade, hilt, and crossguard, rather than cast in a mold. I expect it would be a more difficult job, but how much more difficullt?
Between two single-piece swords made of the same material, one cast, the other forged, which might be more durable used in combat vs. the other?