Grrl Power #1501 – Danger Island Sex
Dire complication! Ooh! Lookit the view! What? A competitive orgy?
Sydney, focus!
In her defense, a floating island with a lava-fall might be a little more distracting that a squirrel. But it depends on what the squirrel is doing, really.
Seriously, how do floating islands always have infinite amounts of liquid falling from them? I’ll tell you the only way it’s possible. Portals. Or it’s possible people only bother photographing/filming them when there’s fresh meltwater or rain overflow or… well, the lava’s a lot harder to explain. What’s impossible is that it’s just infinitely generated water/lava/other assorted liquids, because the world would completely flood in a matter of decades. There’d have to be some balancing force that destroys an equal amount to what falls. Or just portals. That would be insanely dangerous, because it’d be like every lake with a matching island has a portal that can suck through any fish or swimmers and also an infinite amount of sediment, meaning the islands would eventually just get clogged up but they’d also steal massive amounts of nutrient dense silt and lower the farmability of all shoreline property. It also means you could go swimming, get sucked through the big drain in the middle of the lake, and if you didn’t drown, you could find yourself flung off an island 600 feet in the air to your near certain death. The best placement for a lake portal would be in the center, not just as far from every shore as possible, but also centered floor to surface, so it’d pull in the least amount of sediment and probably a lot fewer swimmers. It also depends on the size of the portal, really. Something a foot across wouldn’t cause an eternal whirlpool, at least not in something the size of a great lake I wouldn’t think. Maybe in your average local 10 x 5 mile branchy lake it’d cause a consistent slow pull toward the center.
A 1-foot diameter portal might not be enough to account for the waterfalls usually depicted in movies, and certainly wouldn’t be enough to squeeze through some viscous magma. An acre sized portal (which, BTW if you didn’t know, acres are an insane English measurement. They’re one “chain” by one “furlong,” which is of course 66 by 660 feet, we all knew that, or 1/640th of a square mile, because that’s all completely sensible.) Anyway, an acre sized portal would let through plenty of magma, and cause even a great lake to develop a deadly whirlpool.
So yeah. Floating islands.
Speaking of distractable, today I learned what a “settee” is. I’ve literally only ever heard the word once from MST3K, and once in an episode of Monty Python, but they pronounced it “seh-TEE!” Or maybe it was more like “seh-`EE!” I thought it was a weird way to say “tea set” but a settee is in fact a small-ish couch which is somehow different than a loveseat, or is maybe a sub-category of loveseats? Maybe it’s the other way around? Dunno. This has nothing to do with the comic. Just thought I’d share.
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If you like long LitRPGs with weak-to-strong-to-arguably-OP progression, but think Jason from HWFWM has too much personality, boy have I got a book for you. “A Soldier’s Life” The MC of this has almost no personality. His backstory consists entirely of “he’s out hiking.” That’s it. He falls asleep in a barn, and wakes up naked in a barn in the other world, gets chased out and is falsely accused of assault and attempted rape and winds up press-ganged into that world’s version of a Roman Legion, and has basically no reaction or indignation to any of it, not even internally.
Honestly, I’m taking the piss a little bit. It just feels like the author just wanted to get the story rolling, and I wouldn’t recommend a book where the story was nothing more than “numbers go up,” which is what a lot of LitRPGs I’ve started to read seem to think constitutes a plot. Still, the MC of this doesn’t develop much agency for quite a few books. I think the reason I like it is the worldbuilding eventually reveals itself without getting mired in politics, and as an Outworlder, the MC has vast potential, most of which he tries to grow into while having to hide the true extent of his abilities, because Outworlders tend to get taken before the Emperor and are never heard from again. There is some narrative dissonance as the MC is constantly machine-gunning basic-ass questions, and even though he plays it off as being from some backwater village outside of the Empire, it seemed like people on the lookout should have keyed on him right away, but whatever. It’s not Mark of the Fool or Delvers LLC or HWFWM, but I enjoyed it enough to go through all six books, which, importantly, all have audiobook versions, and I pre-ordered the 7th.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. The NSFW version is finally up at Patreon. Plus a bonus pic.
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.
The lava falls are a bit harder to explain than waterfalls would be. Floating islands would be fairly easy to explain, since floating islands are higher in the atmosphere, so the rocks would be colder and so the water in the atmopshere would condensate on the rocks, especially the ones in the shade which are even colder than the ones in the sun, and so you’d have water pooling there, then overflowing, thus waterfalls.
Lava falls though would require portals since lava doesn’t condensate from the atmosphere.
To clarify since I missed your point about the ‘destroying’ is that water isn’t destroyed and I can’t edit my above post. You can see what’s happening in the movie itself as the waterfalls don’t stay a steady stream, they start to fray as they fall. So the waterfalls are just re-misting and re-adding back into the ambient humidity that then gathers back on the cold rocks. So its basically just a localised water cycle. Weird, yes, but not impossible.
Magic, the answer is magic.
The same way the islands float, they gather resources with magic.
Sidney: Distracted by awesome view. Sabotaged by her own brain, just needs a gentle nudge to get back on target.
Harem: Distracted by her hunt for the great O-whale. Completely uncaring of the ramifications of X-face being able to travel off-world. Moves to take the conversation further off-topic.
Cfr. #1342. Deus used his Stargate-like tech right in front of Maxima and Sydney, with Xuriel and Anvil nearby. He confirmed he could use it to open intercontinental portals freely. From that to interstellar travel it is simply a problem of degrees. If the Archon gals turn out to be surprised by Deus’ presence here it would be because they failed to connect the dots and use their brains. By the way, in the same context he publicly invited Sciona in her guise as the Senator’s aide and her boss to visit Gaitlyn and she accepted on behalf of both. So, even seeing the aide in Deus’ company should not be a big surprise, either.
Thank you for reminding me.
X-face’s presence still merits more than a casual shrug and moving on to sexcapades.
As it concerns possible consequences for their current endeavors, certainly.
> problem of degrees
That is a problem of *exponents*, friend.
The diameter of the earth is ~8,000 miles, so the longest straight-line distance between two points on earth should be around that far. The distance to our nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri) is roughly 25,000,000,000,000 miles. That’s 25 *trillion*. To be clear on the scale of that difference, think a small step forward vs round-trip to the moon and back. Think how ridiculous the statement “If you can take a small step forward, walking to the moon and back is just a problem of degrees” would be.
And this is not Alpha Centauri, so presumably much further.
For what I know (and I checked), the distance between two points in normal space is not an issue as it concerns the amount of effort/energy required to build or sustain a traversable wormhole. From Earth to Neptune, or from Earth to the center of the galaxy or its other end, it matters little.
Is that Japanese on Cora’s cap? Looks vaguely like ko shi to ko (with the to being katakana and the rest hiragana, but the two kos having very different drawing styles), but Google can’t translate this to anything meaningful.
I think that is Daphne/Harem not Cora.
The “floating” islands are easily explained. In the lava-falls there are hollow tubes hidden that keep the islands up. Those same hollow tubes are also used to pump the lava up to the islands. And why the tube is strong enough to keep up the island and don’t melt from the lava? Well that’s because it is made from some sort of space material.
Don’t know if the ring around the mountain in the background are clouds or is also a floating donut shaped island. If it is another island it is kept up by some beams at the back of the mountain. And we just can’t see it.
Came here to post this. I actually saw this in miniature at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum when I was a kid, featuring water instead of lava of course. The difficult part here is keeping the lava from solidifying on the way down
Actually, since the tube would be magitech, you could just have it heated above the melting point of basalt. You’d need to do that anyway, to keep the lava from solidifying on the way up the tube (would it be magma if it’s inside a tube or is that only if it’s underground?)
If you keep the tube heated it would also keep the lava flowing down. Otherwise it would solidify on the tube. Realistically if lava could fall like this it would make a mountain where lava would touch the ground because it would cool down really fast.
I came here to say this, but I was so amused by the thought of a load bearing infinite lava fall that I didn’t bother looking for the concept any other way before posting it. Sigh. Oh well.
I’d say the water/lava gets the same explanation as for why the rocks or entire islands are floating. Magic.
Those floating rocks most likely have some kind of mana crystal in them that gives them the floating ability, another set of crystals could be producing a steady stream of water or lava. To overcome the flooding issue it would only pull from an original pool, like a self enclosed fountain.
Deus x Sydney is a fun idea but I honestly don’t know if either of them would get to sex if paired together. They have such chaotic energy.
For one thing, Deus probably has fewer chances to hang around with someone he finds amusing and interesting (getting jaded is a common downside of super-intelligence in fiction) than chances to have sex.
The answer is actually multiple microportals. Microportals limit the hazard to any living things in the water, especially if they are set to collapse on contact with a large enough solid. They don’t draw enough water individually to create a whirlpool or otherwise upset the natural flow. There is redundancy so that even if multiple of the microportals become blocked or collapsed, the waterfall can continue to function while someone gets a cleaning or repair crew to fix the inoperable ones. Plus, most sci-fi portals require exponentially greater energy to maintain the larger they get, so multiple microportals can handle the same flow rate as a macroportal at a fraction of the energy cost.
I would say I largely agree, with the addendum that the total portal area should be relatively large. The smaller the portal area, the stronger the suction (think narrow vs wide pipe) but if it’s wide enough you basically get one weird shape lake instead of 2connected ones. (Functionally the many microportals act as a sift in the middle of it.)
The environmental problem is actually very easy to fix, put the floating liqudfall above its source. Like with fountains.
Actual lava is probably a bit too viscous to get sucked down a microportal. It generally flows down hills sufficiently slowly that idiots who do not know what they’d be running from generally think they can outrun it. (You’re running from the heat and noxious gasses, both of which move much quicker than the lava. Yes, it is possible to outrun lava, but mostly by seeing it and going the other direction as fast as possible, rather than by investigating it with a plan to leave before it gets too close. Also having vehicle-assisted escape helps, as well as scuba gear. Except you’re not under water. Scnlba gear maybe?)
True but you don’t need to worry about sucking swimmers in with the lava anyway. They can just swim back through the portal, thanks to being faster than the current.
Non-underwater devices are just “SCBA” for Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus.
Fresh lava that hasn’t ‘coagulated’ too much can move at up to 60mph / 100kph.
Well, if you have elemental planes, you can tap into those.
As far as ‘flooding the world’ is concerned, that’s why you have both lava and water falls; the lava turns into rock, adding to the crust and creating more land. You are just very, very slowly making the world bigger.
You’d probably be worried about the sun turning into a red giant before there would be a notable difference in the size/mass of the planet.
Does anyone know what tsraratal means?
It’s Daphne’s codename while she’s in the holographic disguise. (I had to look it up because it confused me, too.)
Dave actually has their aliases documented in the Who’s Who section, if it helps.
Right, I didn’t realize. Thank you both.
Hey does anyone know what book series the abbreviation “HWFWM” stands for in the commentary? I’m always on the lookout for new stuff to read.
He Who Fights With Monsters by Shirtaloon/Travis Deverell. There’s a large sample on Royal Road.
In context I managed to figure it out as He Who Fights With Monsters.
Thanks for the replies. I have in fact read that series. It’s just been so long that I couldn’t associate the name Jason with the abbreviation. Looks like the next book is coming out soon too, nice.
Those islands float because of good plumbing kid, I should know. Us’tah work for on of those kinds of SV’s (you know, very good legitimate reason for actions, egotistical snot that doesn’t care about laws) with a “Floating lair” with 3 waterfalls…that concealed the lift pipes for the water intake, submersibles that held it all up AND moved the lair around so as to not be found. Oh man that was a time let me tell you. Back when satellites didn’t beam everything back down live. Aww well, better than some I guess. He felt pretty strongly about leave for parents with newborns, always hired who ever qualified and don’t sqwauk about the new guys anything.
I would have just excused the lava as ‘its magic’. Temporary, magically conjured lava that falls far enough to exhaust its supply of mana then evaporates into thin air. Could be an enchanted item, a Decanter of Infinite Lava, or a bored lava elemental under a protective force field.
If you want to see a real life “portal” in a lake, then look up Ladybower reservoir in the UK. It’s an artifical lake with two circular overflow spillways (“plugholes”, each 24 meters in diameter) to make sure the water level doesn’t rise above dam level. There’s videos on YouTube with the plugholes both dry and in action. It’s quite impressive.
Or there’s a physical law that the liquid can’t leave a certain distance from the floating island and simply ceases to exist after traveling so far, with a related law that regenerates the liquid at the source. That seems fairly common in Chinese light novels when you see infinite flows like that.
You wouldn’t put the portal in the middle of a lake, you’d put it at the base of the waterfall. It would look similar to the real-world Virgin Falls in Tennessee, USA. Water flows out of a cave, travels ~60 ft (~20m), goes over a waterfall, then immediately disappears into another cave. Random Karst geology hijinks, or enclosed system with mana-powered portals? No one knows!
For a similar issue, consider the “rim mountains” on Ringworld, intended as a partial counter to erosion. But erosion still happened, and shiny flat “world images” still happened, if I remember the books.
Now hold up a moment. You mentioned He Who Fight With Monsters in the book recommendation section, but you completely bypass the two floating island answers offered in that series.
1) The water manifesting on the island is magic in origin and eventually dissipates or degrades into raw magic, and occasionally Water Quintessence. I also propose that the residual deposits manifest as the green stone being quarried, as presented in book 1. The green stone deposits would occur over such a vast period of time as to be unnoticed by most people.
2) The floating islands in book 8 (I think) draws up water in a central pillar centered on the underside of the island. From the outside it looks just like the water falling from other parts of the island, as the outer layer of water falls down, but the inner column of water is rising, drawn up to the island to pool and , eventually, to be expelled.
Eh. Any non-metric measuring system is pretty insane
That’s quite a biased view, but to avoid starting a three-page international fight, I’ll just gently point out that you use non-metric measuring systems (yes, multiple ones) regularly and apparently are so comfortable with them you haven’t even noticed.
To be fair, the date/time stuff is pretty insane. I mean, there’s reasons for some of it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t crazy.
… I should have mentioned, if you don’t think the date time stuff is pretty insane, then I pretty much guarantee you have never written any correct date/time code that handles different timezones and the changing rules they’ve gone through. Using the standard libraries to convert both timezones to UTC+0000 is, of course, the way to go, but that’s more using someone else’s correct date/time code. Look under that hood, and there’s plenty of madness, because time is a tortured beast and we collectively torture it in many different ways in many different places. We at least no longer have 27 different hour-aligned timezones at any given point in (current) time, but all of that nonsense is still in the zone info files for handling times back when that was a thing. And with all of the half hour and quarter hour aligned timezones, we have well in excess of 30 timezones, even before you take into account that just having daylight savings time happen at different times during the year means you need different timezone files for them.
And then there’s leap seconds. I’m not saying I don’t believe in leap seconds, I’m just saying they’re a crazy, inconsistent phenomenon, and the timezone support to handle them correctly – or not, because not all timezones support them – is by necessity absurd.
Disclaimer: I have not written any correct date/time code. I’ve inherited a bunch of systems that did it wrong, and converted most of them to using the standard stuff (one of them was on a platform that did not *have* a correct standard date/time library, so I did not fix all of them.) Also, I worked Y2K at a bunch of different companies and found that there are more ways to do time wrong even without caring about timezones than I could have possibly imagined. But I have *looked at* the glibc timezone code, which I think is more or less correct. All of the craziness I saw in there seemed to be necessary craziness, but that doesn’t make it not crazy.
We’ve been adding timezones though. The moon (yes, the entire moon) is in its own timezone because the gravity is less and relativity is real, and as a result time passes faster on the moon. For every 24 hours that passes on Earth, the moon gets 24 hours and 58 microseconds.
Now if we ever get around to dividing the moon into time zones separated by one hour with respect to solar time the way we did Earth, that would be an amusing thing because that would need more than 24 time zones. It would divide it into 708 time zones and one slice that’s about two-thirds the width of all the other time zones. — all of which, of course, will get an extra 58 microseconds per day.
‘Time dilation’ has not been proven for any effect other than radioactive decay.
So you’re saying that the experiments that have literally proven time dilation (carrying highly precise clocks on board high speed craft orbiting earth) haven’t actually proven time dilation because they used atomic clocks? That all they’ve proven is that radioactive decay is affected by high speeds and differences in gravity?
Precisely. If some ‘macro’ effect, other than kinetic energy, of ‘relativistic speed’ has been discovered, I haven’t read about it.
Fun fact: The half-life of free neutron flux is about twelve and a half minutes.
One hopes that Harem is at least focused enough to tell Hero or Anvil about Deus’ presence. But one wouldn’t count on it.
Settee is just another word for a sofa or couch, with no particular size of sofa attached to the meaning – in the UK anyway.
Did they used to refer to a Settee as “the fainting couch”? For those of you who don’t know, Europeans used to think so little of women’s abilities to handle stress that they kept couches in most rooms for women to faint onto whenever they needed to do so… which was often it would seem.
Ccouldn’t have been the the too tight corsets that caused fainting maybe? Also anemia.
Possibly also sometimes someone who you don’t want to talk to. I know I’d’ve feigned a faint to get out of some conversations if the option still existed.
At least in the U.S. a settee is similar to what is often referred to as a “love seat”. A small couch or over wide chair capable of seating two people side by side. I once had a settee dating to around 1900. It was very pretty and if two people were sitting on it they would be shoulder to shoulder and neither of them would be comfortable. A wooden church pew with no cushion would be more comfortable.
“Fainting couch” is a 20th century term. Day bed would be a more accurate term. The came into use during a Roman Revival in furniture design.
The “love seat” I recall from my youth, (I’m older than dirt.) was an S shaped chair where two people could sit really close and facing each other, but with the chair back between them for propriety.
You are exactly correct. However, ad writers who don’t know squat turned “love seat” into a synonym of settee. (I’m old enough to remember, “Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy.”)
Interesting. I live in Texas, and I’ve always associated settees to be smaller seating furniture than couches/sofas, but I’ve also considered them to be different from loveseats (which are generally two-seaters)…though now that I think about it, I don’t know that I ever really knew what that difference was. I may have to ask my mother, since that’s who is most likely to have taught me there was a distinction.
INFOGRAPHIC!!
https://i.redd.it/7vjy1pngnnme1.jpeg
Personally I always thought of a Settee, or Fainting Couch, as a kind of Chaise Lounge. Something low and long with a place to put your legs up. I wasn’t really clear on the exact differences, but now as I’m researching this briefly I’m seeing the difference looks to be that the Settee has a “Back” along the long axis with one or more arms along the short axis, where the Chaise Lounge’s back is along the short axis, with zero to one arms along part of the long axis.
Maybe it’s like a lava lamp; The floating islands melt at the top, but as they’re consumed new ones rise up to replace them? You’d need some goofy explanation for why they’d float when solid but fall when molten. Maybe the rock in the area is rich in Cavorite, and chunks break off as they cool beyond a certain temperature, and float away?
Of course, the melting at the top part still needs explaining. Maybe the planet is tidally locked with a white hole, and the floating islands melt as they rise above the horizon and are exposed to it?
Or maybe the set designer just thought it would look cool, and the people tasked with making it happen are still swearing at him.
What if the LIQUID is what makes them float?
Stupid bass-akwards logic, but you get a bunch of levitation juice in you, and you rise up from the surface. After you’ve reached a certain height, the levitation juice starts flowing back down onto the surface. Once you’ve lost enough of it, you start sinking back to the surface too. Eventually you sink under the surface of the liquid below, where you fill back up with levitation juice. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
I think you’re going to need something about relative density within a ferromagnetic field or some such to explain why you can hold so much more liquid than your apparent area, and why levitation juice falls back to the surface, rather than floating away forever.
“Seriously, how do floating islands always have infinite amounts of liquid falling from them? I’ll tell you the only way it’s possible. Portals.”
Meh. Oceans evaporate, so as you touched on later, yes, rainwater–maybe alongside a natural reservoir that gets filled–could be a sufficient source for seemingly endless water falling from a floating island. Frankly, I’d have thought that would be the common trope.
But yeah, if it’s lava, then… portals.
If you’ve only just discovered settees, wait until you learn about davenports!
Settee is basically a synonym of sofa nowadays. A loveseat is a sofa that only seats two, so that makes loveseats a subcategory of settees.
What is that on Harem’s shirt, some sort of alien QR code?
Maybe it’s not a floating island with an infinite lava fall. Maybe it’s a hanging island with a load-bearing infinite lava fall?
Basically, hidden within the lava fall is a big-ass pipe that supplies the return lava, and is also what keeps the island anchored in place like that.
I’ve seen this a few places in my travels. I mean, not with lava, it’s always been with water, because OMG actual liquid lava is just so reckless. But I suspect that this isn’t actual liquid lava, either. It’s probably just hot water with luminescent red dye and enough sulfur to fool people into thinking it’s lava.
I wonder if Max is lavaproof.
Her holosuit likely might not be, so she’s probably not going to deliberately test it.
Why a single Portal? It would make more sense* to do a couple hundred smaller portals, that way you could spread the pull out over a larger area, need to worry less about accidentally sucking stuff up, and still be able to get a decent flow.
The real trick would be putting in variable width portals, to take advantage of pressure differentials. If you get a couple hundred portals that intake at 1 inch but output at 1 millimeter, and ensure the exiting direction is “down” the upward thrust of the water jets should be a serious aid in whatever you’re using to defeat gravity. Of course you’d have to line the basin of the floating rock with like Unobtainium or some such, but at this point, I’m sure you’ve got the funds.
I’d forgotten that Harem was banging Deus. Is he about to get a booty call?
We have not mentioned sectionals yet.
What if it is not lava at all but a type of bright red vine?
Does ARCHON- including Max- know she’s banging Deus?
Because if they don’t, then this little naughty slip/brag may be what exposes that.
Max certainly knows, as she once confronted Harem about that in #603-604.
Yes, Max had a loud discussion with her about it. Basically, Max was very opposed to the idea of Daphne banging Deus, but ultimately admitted that it’s Daphne’s choice.
Yes, exactly. One of the fun things about the scene was that Max was about to start one of her feminist rants about female spies being victimized by honeypot missions (instead of worrying about the loyalty issues, think about misguided priorities), and Daphne shut her up by stating it was not her business and she was enthusiastically doing it because he was a billionaire and a very skilled lover, and she had the libido of five healthy young women.
Completely ignoring the loyalty issues was a big realism problem. In no real world scenario would someone with beyond-top-secret clearance like Daphne be allowed to freely “date” someone like Deus. Who is effectively the leader of a country with aggressive “border expansion policies” and identified as a potential national security threat. It would be like a senior USA CIA executive “dating” Putin.
At the time of Daphne’s assignment, SmugD hadn’t taken over that country yet
If we handwave the floating bit & holding together, you *could* maybe justify the lava-falls if the inside are sufficiently radioactive. You pile a lump of high purity enough radioactives together they get hot, and insides melt, heat rises, crater forms which the sides fall into, and hey presto lavafalls from the top of the rock. Basically how earths volcanism works ‘cept more round.
Not like anyone *in* the final is gonna find a few greys of radiation a problem
Unfortunately for Sydney, the people in the room aren’t as invested as her into the Deus villain plotline.
Oh well, I sure hope this doesn’t prove a distraction for Maxima, or a risk of exposure to the galactic public
… while I like to imagine the dynamic between Deus and Sydney, in a sort of size difference villain x hero who are both nerds romance, I also imagine them as nerd buddies who are nevertheless heroes and villains despite technically working together. The situations you write are amazing!
Haha, I was going to say “Dave, if you want to read something that discusses endless water and how it doesn’t end up flooding, you should read He Who Fights With Monsters. They explain it in the first book!” So I’m guessing that may be where you got the idea to discuss it from. I loved the first book and am starting the second.
Gotta say I really do love Sydney’s disguise design. I sure wouldn’t mind her being a real character, or a recurring look to be used somehow.
It certainly carries the “Sydney as an alien” vibe, perhaps even more so than Lorlara.
If you’ve ever heard Do I Wanna Know by Arctic Monkeys, that’s another place you’ve heard the word ‘settee’
*squirrel*!!!
The simplest solution is probably a portal with some kind of filter to keep the portal from getting clogged and transporting stuff it shoudn’t.
damn sidney and her “hdd” hehehehe
The ‘one foot diameter portal’ may be enough, depending on how much engineering the builders are willing to do at the rim, which they certainly should be as that’s what produces the money shot. How wide a waterfall do they need? The amount of water going over a weir for a given width and head is well established.
The Poiseuille equation doesn’t help as much as we’d like, because while a portal can be modeled as a pipe of trivial length we don’t know what the pressure on the intake side will be. Since I had some weir discharge numbers at hand anyway, I imagined the 12″ diameter circular portal as if it were a weir of the same area, which is technically wrong but gives us a starting place. That would have a throughput of around 550 GPM, enough to supply a visually convincing water fall 10 to 20 feet wide; if the designers want something bigger they’ll need more water.