Comic for Monday, June 16th, 2025
Comic!
Little bit late. Hopefully this is the last time we’ll miss every-other-week for the time being, but not promising weekly yet.
It’s come up a few times, but <nuclear> and <radiation> are always in the Central language. I think this was probably most detailed on the Tyler side story long ago, but its technology that’s been suppressed. A side effect of a booster, particularly one like Naomi, is that they are immune to all but the most extreme doses of radiation. This is because the mechanics of boosting their physical form is constantly pulling on their eidos data, which serves, effectively, as a real time constant backup of their ideal physical state.
In extreme cases like Naomi, its why she is so hard to damage and heals from things that a human wouldn’t be normal to heal from, because even even she has – for example – a bullet hole through her shoulder, she is constantly restoring herself to her own eidos data subconsciously, and because of her mentality and nature, damaging her eidos data is nearly impossible. She isn’t entirely immune to poisons, though she recovers from them unnaturally quickly and tends to adapt to them after being poisoned, but something like radiation that takes affect slowly would have almost no impact. She is almost certainly entirely immune to something like a sunburn.
Naomi isn’t actually the most extreme case of being able to restore from eidos data in the comic (you can probably guess the most extreme example of this effect).
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No comic this week. Thought there would be, but here we are, and there is no comic for some reason.
“some reason” happens.
To some of us, it happens a lot! (V.O.E.)
We will look forward to next week!
“some reason” happens.
To some of us, it happens a lot! (V.O.E.)
We will look forward to next week!
Accidentally double posted
In the middle ‘panel’ where the green haired security guy is talking, last bubble… “…head of security term.” I think the last word should be TEAM, but with the font you are using the R almost looks like an A.
Couple interesting things I realized.
Being at the tech level Malsa is and not knowing about radiation is so unbelievable it’s insane. Not necessarily a bomb, but radiation itself is naturally occurring, and isn’t exactly hard to spot. Saying their world doesn’t have radiation would be like saying it doesn’t have carbon!
More likely it’s a context thing. I’ll absolutely believe Malsa knows about radiation, but more as a naturally occurring hazard. Similarly, they probably know about fusion and fision but more on an academic level.
Second, the first time we saw the councilor he was returning from groundside and was asked about his “vacation.” I’ll believe he was in a nicer area but it’s interesting how everyone else treats the whole planet as a hellhole.
Third, wow! Central had enough information control that Malsa isn’t familiar with Nukes, but they wanted to send tends of thousands of refugees to Malsa. The principles aren’t exactly difficult to understand. Is Central trying to get their citizens kidnapped for what’s considered “basic” knowledge?!?
It sounds like they know about radiation, just not the nuclear aspect that generates ionizing radiation. They have radio and sunlight. They wouldn’t have what we call X-rays(rontgen) radiation. Or maybe they do but have obscured the generation mechanism. It could simply be that when Minerva formed, those elements were not accessible in quantity from the crust.
With magic being so available and massivly destructive, development of fissile weapons might not hold an advantage. One Fantasy series I have read a lot allows mages to remotely cause deflagration in gunpowder even in containers. As a result gunpowder weapons only have limited usefulness unless another mage can figure out a way to shield it from the first kind of mage. The technology on that world was just reaching Steam Engine territory, but that was a closely guarded secret.
It’s important to remember that X-Rays may be ionizing, but they’re still EM. Same with gamma. Those don’t require fisile material. Nuclear radiation is Alpha (helium nucleus), Beta (electron), and Gamma (EM). Note the overlap.
The detonate gunpowder thing is a good argument against certain technologies, but physics is still fundamentally the same. If nuclear radiation didn’t exist, then the plannet would be much colder. Causing massive differences.
But the world Malsa is on seem magic rich (or rich in users of magic?). They treat data ghosts (magical constructs that persist for a time) as spirits! (Possibly a result of using magical constructs so regularly has created a pool of persistent ones???) And don’t seem to know anything about demons (self sustaining & replicating data constructs).
Malsan scientists must know about radiation from natural sources (sunlight, radioactive rocks, bananas, etc)… but either they have never needed to harness radiation in a dangerous way; or more likely there are some wacky mages who have radiation powers… but they probably use it to sterilize food or something benign, so it’s not viewed as dangerous in the same way water is not viewed as dangerous (cup of water is good; ocean of water is bad, somewhere in between depends on how big your pool is).
There are many things we are missing to be able to address this: the one I will pick is we don’t know how they generate electrical energy on any of these worlds. Central could be majority fusion reactors; Kor’s world could be magic-fission reactors; and Palindra might be a magic-banana-fire-power stations. They ALL generate electricity by heating water to turn a generator… they just reach that goal differently. Now I kind of wish I knew more about the arc reactors (Kor’s world technology) previously mentioned.
Well, it could be earth, on a tuesday the rest of the times it is truly dangerous. Or maybe the landing site is in Australia. That or florida.
Excellent comic as usual. Minor wait is more than made up by the comic enjoyment. Now we are in suspense about Peter’s latest plans within plans as if Mium posing as Peter was not enough.
“Best I can tell, you’re mostly bullet and monster proof, and I doubt even affects you.”
So…Naomi’s basically a Kryptonian, then? Just another reason to love her!
It also explains why she’s so frustrated that gravity affects her. Nothing else does.
I like that ≺radiation≻ is so censored you can’t even post it here… 😀
I believe that they are both speaking in Malsan, and the angle brackets indicate that there is no word in Malsan for “radiation”
Not in this context, no.
Basically Malsans haven’t discovered nuclear energy/weapons yet, and Central are hiding that information from them.
They might have a word for non-nuclear radiation though.
I’m confused…I’m unsure whether I misquoted and forgot to type the word “radiation”, or if the board-bot censored it..?
I assumed you included the angle brackets, and the board took it for (unrecognized, possibly mistyped, possibly extended, possibly nasty) HTML and stripped it out.
Might need to use HTML characters for angle brackets, or at least the opening angle bracket. Either named (lt, gt) or, if the board software doesn’t like that either, then numerical (#60, #62) or hexadecimal (#x3c, #x3e).
Eh, let’s test:
lt: <radiation>
#60: <radiation>
#x3c: <:radiation>
lt, gt: <radiation>
#60, #62: <radiation>
#x3c, #x3e: <radiation>
In straight-up HTML, all of these should work. But this software is stripping things, I assume, and that’s straight-up ad hoc, so any and all of these could wind up stripping too much or even too little …
Ugh. Well, turns out they all would have worked, had I managed to hit the semi- rather than the colon in the third one there. And the post was queued (for moderation, I guess), so by the time I returned to spot my mistake, the edit window was closed. 😛
I misunderstood the question since radiation and nuclear appeared in Past’s comment further up. However, he preceded it with < and followed it with > in the page source. When designing a web site, it is always a good idea to escape the characters that will cause actions by the browser, such as less-than, greater-than, and ampersand when the user enters them via a free text field.
Nice! We might be getting our first look at Earth!
Panel 1:
The Consul will visiting the perspective refugees
->
The Consul will BE visiting the PROspective refugees
More importantly… someone not permitted to find out about nuclear power, radiation etc etc is going to go visit the radiation farmers…
This is just a slang term for ground-based workers.On a space station you are shielded from outside radiation, whereas on the ground you are exposed to outside radiation. The people on the ground are likely farming in their traditional sense and growing crops. The hoity-toity people on the space station look down on those workers figuratively and literally even though without them they would be unable to survive on the space station.