Ye all impatient lot… as if I ever put up comics before late at night with them gun jumping accusations. Anyway… comic.
Most importantly – far more important than that there is a comic page, there’s a vital poll posted at the bottom of the page, for in contention is the Christmas crown, the legendary crown of popularity, the Santa Hat poll.
Next post will be December 25th, and may come with the winner of the poll.
I limited it to 50 characters, because that felt like a reasonable number to limit it to. You can vote on as many as you’d like.
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Thinking about how to shroud the-… item, I’m going to guess Tom. Which really, really, really would not sit well with Tom, but if it works, you know?
My reasoning is that Peter was hand-carrying it into the building with the less skilled than it thought demon and did not draw any attention. His house was more likely to explode when he left it there, or maybe when he left his house with the traces left from it having been there over night in Peter’s custody. But it didn’t seem particularly more likely to explode than normal, except that one time, but that one time was Peter throwing a grenade, not someone else throwing a grenade. That was in response to Atter creatures hunting Peter, not Atter creatures hunting the-… item.
Maybe Atter creatures shouldn’t have been able to find Peter either, but I’m going to guess it’s something due to familiarity. Like maybe instead of actually aiming for one Peter Kepler, the Atter creatures were instead looking for that place where they couldn’t detect anything that was more or less Peter-shaped.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Ugh. I missed a “when Peter was home” in the third sentence of the second paragraph.
Of course, this assumes that Peter went to Tyler’s place because he found his home already exploded when he arrived, rather than he was home but got out in time. I feel like that’s probably a safe assumption, because the former is not really all that exciting and may not merit being depicted. Being caught at home and escaping, on the other hand, is exciting and worthy of drawing.
But it might not be how it happened. It could be that the “was at home but escaped” scenario was hard to draw, such that the scene was just skipped entirely in favor of jumping to a lighter update.
Past,
You wrote that the next comic would be December 25th. Please ignore anyone pressuring you for a comic this week. The Newnited States gummit swooped in with black hellycopters, black trucks and men in black suits talkin into their coat sleeves. They done went and took all the torches but the weird thing is they paid for them and want more!!! Heerd them sayin You Crane a few times. –grin and giggles–
Happy Holidays To All,
Jim
It’s impressive how vague Arron can get once reminded that someone nearby has low clearance… 😎
“…move it off-world…” Where to? Who would get the hot potato?
The conversation between Kor’s World control and the soldier raises some interesting possibilities. It looks like Kor’s World resources may be strained. Nathan notices older version attack robots and Kor’s Control has the soldier disengage. Possible damage to Control HQ? Maybe Kor’s World is fighting other enemy/enemies?
Pretty sure Kor’s World is fighting a war of extermination against something else, and Central et. all are simply places where they chose to make firebreaks. Which implies not only another enemy, but possibly that they are losing.
Maybe they used a different version of the tanks to prevent Peter from stealing the communication cards out of them for Mium
You know, that’s a good thought. They probably are fighting other enmies. I mean, they apparently attacked Central with very little provocation of which Central was aware. OK, sure, I had the thought that someone like Sophie had been especially naughty in a way that drew their ire, but as their reactions have shown, they’re very heavily anti-red construct/demon. It could be that they’re going to war with anyone they detect using those.
It’s also possible that like the IDS they have a certain amount of infighting. Or it’s possible that they’re trigger happy for red constructs because they unleashed something on their world and they’re doing badly enough against it that they’re proverbially shooting at anything that moves. Assuming they’ve unleashed the magic using SMAI and caused it to attack them, it’s possible they’ve gone to war on the various fronts they have because they’ve detected it touching those places. (Whether that’s because it did or because it feinted in that direction is anyone’s guess.)
There is also the possibility that Control’s conflict with Central was similar to the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Kor’s Control went in with supposedly superior strength but ended up getting their a$$es handed to them. Now they need to use older hardware as replacements because the newer stuff is no longer available.
On this particular note, I’m reminded of something I heard about from what the US calls the Korean War. (I’m pretty sure Korea’s been in a lot of wars, but only one that we were really around for.) Also known as the 625 War, the Fatherland Liberation War, and The Resisting America and Assisting Korea War, depending on whom one is talking to.
Apparently, there were quite a few incidents where we had left machine gun nests to control strategic positions. The guns in these nests were a bit bigger than a minigun, though with the tech of the time, I’m not sure how they compared from a military perspective. In any event, the people in the nest could gun down all the enemies that tried to make it through the strategic positions, except if the enemies came at them for too long, the gun would overheat, the barrel would warp, and the gun would jam. It took something like a thousand troops to accomplish that.
Given the disparity in numbers, this was considered ‘acceptable losses’ by the Chinese and a loss by the US.
Also, I seem to recall hearing there was a battle in the Silmarillion that mirrored this, with some ridiculous number of orcs and not that many elves. The elves were driven off with relatively few casualties, describing their losses as catastrophic and unrecoverable because of who fell on that battlefield.
Central didn’t think they had a significant impact on their opponents, even when they brought out the nukes, but maybe they just needed to kill the right Kor’s World operative, and they did that. Maybe it was the one Colonel Ricci hit with a shovel. Or maybe it was someone who wasn’t even ever to Central. They control their mechanicals with implants like Miko and Peter have. What if one of the people controlling them died from feedback? Central would have no awareness of it, but it could have been catastrophic to Kor’s World.
I mean, OK, the name suggests an entire planet. Usually that’s not a small number of people. But with a stable enough genome and much less mutation than we have – maybe they have much lower background radiation – a smaller population could be viable. Or maybe they don’t have enough people to be viable, so they like to go out to get some genetic diversity from worlds that haven’t been shot to crap, and the magicals of Central caught them doing that and started the war.
Also, it could be that Kor’s World *does* have the kind of population that the name World implies, but it’s not the Kor’s World that is actually doing the war. Maybe it’s Kor’s World’s government, which could be much smaller than we’d normally think given the kind of technology they have to magnify the power of a select few.
Trying to reply again. First attempt disappeared…
Kor’s World Control may have run into a similar problem attacking Central as the Russians did when they attacked Ukraine. Control attacked with supposedly superior arms against a smaller/weaker opponent but ended up in a losing situation after initial gains. Like the Russians fielding older tanks as their armor gets hammered, Control may have had to send older robots as replacements.
Now that is strange. 45 minutes after my previous post could not be found, I posted again and changed the wording in case a profanity filter objected to my use of “a$$es”. Hours later, both posts show up!
panel 4: but seems to -> but it seems to
last panel: there I certainly wouldn’t -> though I certainly wouldn’t
Arron guesses Peter. Arron refuses to guess any further.
Aaron knows not to try and guess Peter’s plans within plans.
At this point, if Arron has no other ideas, he probably either assumes Peter is involved, or at least knows who/what is.
Either way, it means only one phone call. (…..with, admittedly, low odds of getting the information he wanted, but still only one call.)
Now what am I to do with all those new and improved torches?
For sale: Urban Assault Torch Mark 4 (UAT4).
Easily smuggled due to being disguised as a Tiki Torch.
Easily refueled from Tiki oil purchased at WalMart. (Keeps bugs away)
Easily refueled with locally purchased kerosene, diesel or heating oil.
Easily converted to Napalm with our exclusive additive.
Easily converted to ranged projectile with our exclusive spring loaded air handle.
Easily converted to longer range projectile with exclusive compressed air handle.
Caution!!! – READ the manual before operating. DO NOT use gasoline as fuel. Mr Bean, Larry, Moe and Curly have mostly regrown their eyebrows but the barn was a total loss again.
Maaaaaaan! We never get to burn things to the ground!
That UAT4 looks pretty sweet. I think I need one of those.
The kerosene, diesel, or heating oil being easily converted to napalm makes sense, since that’s basically a highly flammable petrochemical and a gelling agent, and those are all highly flammable petrochemicals.
The torch itself is easily converted to napalm? Now *that’s* a trick. Suddenly the prohibition against using gasoline as fuel seems both very important and very insufficient.
That may not be FOOOF, but I think I want to maintain about the same amount of distance from these torches as I do FOOOF.
Gasoline is only a problem in liquid form. If the gasoline is converted to napalm first, then their is no problem with using it in the UAT4.
On another note, when the barn was burned down, the rocket assist, high explosive and white phosphorus prototypes were destroyed.
I recently came across a Brittish flame throwing system used in WWI during the assault at Sonne. Livens Flame Projector. It became obsolete because the front line didn’t become stationary much after that initial assult. It required like 30 people to move and 8 Royal Engineers to setup and fire. They rebuilt one strictly to see what the effect was like, because all we have are B&W still pictures.
Frankly I wouldn’t want the front line to become trench warfare if I thought that would be facing me. In a way it is more terrifying than the bottle projector that he built after it.
YouTube has two videos by War Stories about the giant 60 feet long flamethrower. It was built underground and the head pushed up through the ground before firing. The first video is about finding one left at Somme(?) battlefield after a shell collapsed an entrance. The second video is about rebuilding and firing the flamethrower.
Finding the flamethrower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM3zQGSv9OY
Rebuilding the flamethrower:
They test fired the rebuild as part of the first video, so there really isn’t a need to show how its made. Let others injure themselves recreating it.. Strictly speaking the rebuild didn’t follow the plans because they use a different charging method and it’s not portable. They also very wisely shut off the flame before they shut off the flow.