Comic for Thursday, March 14th, 2019
Mar15
Sorry it’s a bit late. Hopefully will be back on track for Monday.
Where did Ila get the sniper rifle? Well, you see, there was plenty of sniper rifles just laying that were not being used particularly effectively, so she just borrowed one. Its last owner doesn’t even really seem to want it back. They aren’t all that much more effective for her in terms of firepower (as she has to give up one of the calculations to counteract the recoil while firing in midair like that – her acceleration spell itself cheats the whole equal-and-opposite-force thing by just imparting acceleration directly), really, but the main reason she uses them as they let MYM aim for her, as she is not nearly as accurate otherwise.
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One key fact that people seem to be missing, Mym is recommending that Ila not get to close to the Kors world soldier and probably also Atter. Possibly that is to keep her from counter fire but more likely to prevent possession/subversion attacks Mym probably dosen’t think Ilas firewall and/or connection habits are adequate.
Today’s comic has the same color speech bubbles for Muim/Query on every panel he talks. But everyone else has white background whenever they’re local. Meaning Kally is white on panel 1 and 6, but green on panel 5. That messed with me a bit on panel 5.
Could Kally always be green background speech bubbles in today’s comic?
The color is distinguishing who is talking when off panel, and that is the only panel Kally is not present in.
PastUtopia could start coloring all the panels appropriately, but otherwise it breaks the pattern in a different way to do as you suggest.
Thoughts:
Something is going on with Fluffy. He is fully opaque and his eyes are green. I would be willing to write off the higher detail as art differences, but he has always been solid red before. Kally seems to be seriously blurring the line between “red construct” and “summoned a god damn dragon”. Possibly this is to prevent Atter from being able to influence it? But I cannot help but think there is some implications to that.
The Kor World armor seems borderline indestructible. Soaking up the beating from Naomi was impressive, but this guy has just shrugged off a direct hit of a H.V.W.. Even Atter’s construct just rebuilt itself, but he seems basically unharmed (if at least slightly alarmed).
It also seems like he was about to do the same H.V.W. red construct shot the other one (or maybe same one?) was going to use to finish of Naomi. This is either the same one, or they just like that attack.
I suspect that Kally is going to show why everyone wanted to keep her out of the war.
Good eye! I would have missed this, especially the part about the green eyes.
That’s certainly an interesting theory. And I look forward to learning how this pans out.
When was it that the Kor’s World soldier shrugged off a direct hit from an H.V.W.? I just don’t recall that.
But, yes, the Kor’s World soldier’s armor seems indestructible to a depressing degree. It’s very frustrating to watch the bad guys repeatedly shrug off the very best the protagonists can throw at them – even the protagonists who can blow up mountains or are otherwise scary in how dangerous they can potentially be.
Being so indestructible makes one wonder how Central ever managed to fight Kor’s World to a standstill, never mind how they managed to finally drive them off their world. Consider, too, that Kor’s World potentially has millions of soldiers just like this one. Even if they managed to kill/destroy this one soldier, it probably would not even be a setback to their goals.
> When was it that the Kor’s World soldier shrugged off a direct hit from an H.V.W.? I just don’t recall that.
Ila’s “railgun” has often been compared to a H.V.W. strike. Even when she spammed it against Atter’s construct, the Mage-Commander’s first question on arriving was to inquire who was firing H.V.W. strikes.
H.V.W. just means “High Velocity Weapon”, but I do suspect there is a range to them. Skyhammer probably packs a good bit more punch than Ila, if only because she is using pebbles usually. A pebble probably loses quite a bit of mass even before impact from just air friction, while Skyhammer was seen to be firing a much larger projectile.
I doubt they could shrug off a direct hit from their own HVW or Skyhammer, but Ila’s version was enough to shoot an IDS Dropship out of the air (albeit with a projectile and targeting assistance courtesy of Mium).
“Hyper” rather than “High”. As in hypersonic (aka mach 5+)
Except Pastutopia speaks of “high velocity weapons” – http://wiki.pastutopia.com/index.php?title=Magic_System&diff=520&oldid=516 – and hasn’t corrected the expansion at http://wiki.pastutopia.com/index.php?title=HVW – but then, hasn’t edited that page at all. I guess it’s still short of conclusive.
But I don’t find the “hyper velocity weapon” in anything but other people’s comments. Do you have a source?
… or can we get an official statement, @PastUtopia? 🙂
The only time it’s been written out was when giving the full name of Skyhammer: http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-monday-december-18th/ and it used hyper in that, so it should be safe to assume that is the standard meaning.
Good find, but I’d argue that HVW is not written out there – “hyper velocity system” would be HVS, not HVW.
And again, PastUtopia speaks of “high velocity weapons” (which may be HVW written out) on the wiki, and still hasn’t corrected the one place on the wiki where HVW is explicitly written out as “High Velocity Weapon”.
I’d say it’s not safe to conclude either way, but since “hyper velocity weapon” is still not attested anywhere but in other people’s comments, “high velocity weapon” seems marginally safer.
The wording of the wiki page in question was taken directly from PastUtopia’s words in comments and on the old about pages that have been removed due to the wiki covering the same information.
Ila’s railgun may be very impressive for a handheld gun, much like the railguns in the Eraser movie were impressive. (It’d probably dislocate the shoulder or sprain or break something for anyone other than an android or a human who doesn’t use a tripod or bipod.) As the Kor’s World soldier says on this page, “Damage profile does not match small arms fire.”
But there’s just no comparison between that and a motorbike or car-sized projectile accelerated to 5 times the speed of sound. The latter is more like an impressive meteorite strike (or like a very small tactical nuke), while the former is more like being hit with a rocket launcher. Saying it, “packs a good bit more punch” is an understatement.
We saw Skyhammer drop a missile-shaped and missile-sized projectile from a satellite in orbit before Kalli tried to intercept it. It even had rocket engines to accelerate. I’d be very surprised of Ila’s railgun accelerates the projectile to more than mach 2 and the projectile is very tiny in comparison.
True, I would have likened it more to an advanced version of an anti-material rifle rather than an orbital bombardment. The Kor’s World soldier’s armour is pretty impressive for being able to shrug off Ila’s shot, but I doubt it would withstand the kind of HVW that Peter was worried about back when Kor’s World was dropping walking tanks on the school. The orbital platform HVW strike required a Fortress zone to ward it off and I don’t think Ila’s rifle compares to that.
On Kor’s World potentially having millions of soldiers – that’s rooted in current-day numbers. While we could easily learn it’s a trillion next week, advancing technology is generally tied to doing more (damage) with less (percent of population mobilized, and population in wealthier countries). A thousand of these soldiers could have been enough to ruin a mostly pre-magic Central, yet even that might not have been efficient. We can extrapolate from their activity:
* targeted strikes and break-ins,
* working alone with firepower, and
* having so much autonomy that they *narrate to Control* (which has limited remote access; sensor data has even been transmitted manually) and make decisions on the fly.
Basically, they function like a cross between the special forces and pilots that countries use to avoid putting “boots on the ground”. In open warfare, we tend to see lower per-capita force multipliers, because supply is limited. The invasion force presumably included more of the automated systems, of which Peter said “The ground forces are irrelevant.”
FIelding a low number of actual troops could be one of the reasons why Central’s non-magical weapons were basically useless against Kor’s World. If there’s only one actual soldier involved in a massive attack on a city, even if that soldier is killed by a nuke, the nuke does far more damage to the city than to Kor’s World, unless Kor’s World has such a low population it can’t field more troops than that. But we don’t have a reason to suspect there’s only a few thousand Kor’s World people. There’s probably millions, billions, or trillions.
… That could be why Tokiwa was willing to deal with Dendrin. If Situation Containment knows that Dendrin is likely to use the nastiness he was paid on Kor’s World, it could be a way for Central to make a stab at Kor’s World they think may not get back to them, but rather to Dendrin’s people.
if i recall correctly, and this was back a bit where peter was talking to “random” mookB who appears to have some connection to the gov.
But didnt he flat out say that Kor’s world guys just kinda leave, like they had done whatever it was they had set out to do… then more or less “ok everyone we’re done, pack up and come home”
I recall it being said like that, too. Or, at least, this seemed implied.
I think the notion you and others have that Kor’s World left because it effectively achieved it’s goal (more-or-less) may be fairly accurate. However, I think their goal was to either make Central a non-threat to them or to force them to leave their world.
I distinctly recall it being said that Kor’s World targeted Central’s nuclear power plants in their attacks. Obviously, this is going to create a lot of Chernobyl-style nuclear disasters around the globe. And it seemed implied that Central is now mostly uninhabitable wasteland, especially with how IDS is obsessed with moving as many survivors as possible to other worlds… such as Palindra. And, of course, we don’t know exactly how much of Central’s population survived the invasion. But it did sound bad.
I suspect it’s not a coincidence that the dragon’s eyes are the same color as Kally’s eyes (and we have previously seen the dragon echoing Kally’s circles, when they tried to shoot down the orbital H.V.W.). There could well be similarities between what she does and what Atter does.
The Kor’s-World guy’s previous comments about TWO entities that matched certain disturbing criteria seems real important here. Like, they’re basically equating Kally’s dragon and Atter as being essentially the same sort of thing, and the implications of that are… interesting.
It does seem like the strong implication is that “demon” is just a red construct that has become fully self-aware. Or that there is some relation between to the two.
Given that at least Kally treats her dragon like it is self aware, it might qualify. How course, how much the Dragon is actually aware vs. how much Kally is just crazy remains to be seen. She definitely seems somewhat embarressed when other people notice her talking to her Dragon in minus years.
The other possibility is that it really just was a dragon a shaped construct originally that has drifted more toward being an actual dragon due to the fact that person that creates it (Kally) thinks of it as an actual dragon (and is an immensely powerful natural mage).
I suspect this we have only seen the tip of the iceberg though. Given that one of the most enigmatic presences in the comic (Kor’s World) is suddenly paying attention, this is probably interesting indeed.
Perhaps it was said as a figure of speech. But I don’t think it’s fair to call Kalli “crazy” for talking with her magical construct. Lots of people talk to objects. This is “personification”, or giving human traits to non-living objects. Children talk to dolls or action figures. Adults often swear at an appliance or device for malfunctioning. Some adults even assign names to objects, like calling their rifle “Thunderstick” or they may use pronouns when talking about their car.
Describing someone as “crazy” is usually taken as assuming the person suffers from a mental disorder. But that’s a mental or behavioral pattern that causes suffering or poor ability to function in life, which is not the case here. Indeed, there is no officially-recognized disorder that causes one to assume human emotions in objects.
I believe at last part of the reason Kalli talks to her dragon is because she is attached to it. I wouldn’t be even a bit surprised if Kalli loved dragons even before developing this magical construct.
I would note that this is very unlike Atter, who seems to summon a lot them in an endless variety of horrific, monstrous shapes and who seems to treat his magic constructs as mindless automatons and cannon fodder. Atter is clearly not attached to his constructs – not figuratively, anyway.
Perhaps by talking to it Kalli derives comfort and more confidence in herself? Something that I don’t believe has been addressed in this comic, but which I’ve pondered, is whether confidence in one’s magic ability can affect it’s outcome or strength. This is the case in certain anime, WN and web comics I’ve followed. In some fiction, strong confidence in magic can make it immensely more powerful. In other works, it all comes down to willpower and concentration. And, in some, it can be a combination of these factors.
Unlike Atter’s approach, I think there is something to be said for concentrating on one and only one shape for a magic construct and only ever summoning one, albeit a big one. It allows one to focus on the details. Perhaps Kalli is deluding herself into believing her dragon is real, making it that much stronger? Perhaps Kali, herself, is uncertain whether her dragon is self-aware? Perhaps she is willing it to be self-aware?
If I recall correctly, we’ve only seen one other instance where magic was more than one color. I believe Ila summoned a swirly spell of two colors during the rescue of Kally from the Uber of doom.
This is not a swirl. This is a high-detail dragon with an eye color that seems to be completely unrelated to the function of the spell. There are no magic letters and there is a pupil in that eye.
At this point, I’m going to be shocked if Fluffy the dragon ISN’T a self-aware entity.
It is on record that the more “real” a construct is, the ones reality fights to reassert itself. A high level of detail placed into a construct might well result in a stable, self perpetuating entity.
A magical AI.
Comparing the Kor’s World Soldier’s armor to the new Fluffy (who now also has some *scales*, even), I’m going to make two guesses:
– The Kor’s World Soldier’s armor is not red to honor red magic. It’s red because it *is* a red magic construct, just one that is a hell of a lot more anchored than even the new Fluffy.
– Fluffy is now an independent entity. It’s possible it will still let Kally dismiss it. But I think in shielding Fluffy from being taken over by Atter, Kally has made Fluffy more like Atter in construction. Fluffy is probably not anything like Atter in personality, however.
I think I recall a conversation somewhere about whether a mage could see through the eyes of their construct. I don’t remember the result of that conversation, but it’s a potential explanation for the green eyes.
Why do I get the sense that there is a $#!7-ton of lore concerning Atter’s constructs and their link to Summer’s dragon… and that it has some connection to Kor’s World? Am I reading too much into this?
I’m not sure if you can read too much into this story, there is just too much here.
My memory of this is very foggy, but…
I seem to recall a brief mention of some connection between Atter and Kalli, aside from them using very similar magic. Did Atter teach Kali how to do red magic? Did they learn from the same instructor? Wasn’t there some sort connection between the Summer family and Atter? Isn’t there a special hatred between them (that is, even before Atter recently murdered that young woman – working in Arron’s unit – who was close to the Summers)?
It was mentioned that Sophie (the director of Situation Containment) was Kally’s mentor, and Sophie is the one that summoned/controls Atter. It is pretty likely that Kally knows Atter from that point in time, and given that it seems like there is some link between the red construct magic and Atter, it is quite possible there is more to it than that.
If I had to guess, I would guess that the Ervon Magic Society is somehow tied to Sophie and consequently Atter, and is somehow associated with the Summers family (particularly Nathan, which is apparently its Warden).
Nathan seemed worried that if Kally was to find and destroy Atter, she would realize that Atter was not rogue as he was still “anchored” by Sophie, which in turn would make Kally blame Sophie for Emmi’s death. If I had to guess, Sophie is an extremely powerful mage on her own.
As Egneil alludes to above, it can go endlessly deep. Everything is tied to everything else somewhere.
I get it. The last panel of Monday’s comic was through Ila’s scope seeing Kally arrive. I thought it looked weird for the Kor’s World Soldier point of view.
Once the round leaves the barrel, can Ila add her usual HV calculation but allowing for reduced effort since she isn’t starting it from stopped?
That’s what she does, pretty much. We’ve seen it a better other places, but we didn’t see her fire here. But she has to give up one of her calculations to suppress the recoil from flinging her backwards, so there isn’t a lot of net gain.
So it would have more gain if she actually rode the recoil, allowing it to move her off of the point where she fired from?
Maybe if she were stably braced on the ground or something. But she’s flying/levitating.
If she didn’t suppress the recoil, she’d probably lose more time needing to recover and stabilize herself.
That might make the later acceleration calculations more complicated. I know flying has been discussed as complicated for the reasons of calculations influencing later calculations; compensating for your own motion might have those effects too.
It’s complicated. If she’s braced (and her giving up a calculation to offset the recoil effectively braces her), then the gun imparts its maximum velocity to the bullet it fires. If she’s not braced, then the bullet gets half of the kinetic energy the gun imparts, and she gets the other half, at each unit time while the bullet is still close enough to the gun to be getting any energy from the explosive charge from firing it. I don’t know the full equations, but if I understand it correctly, the result of the calculus effect on this makes it slightly worse than simply losing half of the kinetic energy from the shot, due to the gun moving backwards at the end.
Further, unless Ila had carefully aligned herself to have her center of mass to be along the firing line, allowing the recoil to happen would redirect the bullet slightly. With computerized aiming, I’m sure the accuracy wouldn’t be thrown off by the recoil directly, but it becomes a much trickier calculation, and the resulting firing delay *would* reduce the accuracy if the target chose to move while that calculation was happening or the bullet was still in the path.
Note that most non-magically recoilless guns also lose significant firing energy to be recoilless. These weapons use a venting system that releases firing gasses out of the back of the gun. The alternative non-magical recoilless solution fires a slug in *both* directions, which is probably not an option. Unfortunately, venting recoilless guns will still impart *some* energy to whatever is holding the gun, so there will need to be some stabilization regardless, although it could be possible for it to be small enough to be able to delay that compensation until after the bullet has left the vicinity. But due to the energy loss, most serious big gun enthusiasts prefer guns with recoil, so recoilless guns tend to be more mid-sized. (At least, I have seen nothing to indicate the existence of recoilless holdout pistols, and the only recoilless pistol I’ve seen is used in Olympic shooting competitions.)
TL;DR: It’s complicated.
While it is complicated, that might actually be a reason that would make sense for Mium to calculate it and have Ila ignore recoil and add an extra accel if she can manage.
It’d make her much harder to track if her location after someone noticed the show was was altered by where recoil threw her.
Isn’t Ila’s gun a railgun? (That’s what Amaranth called it.) Railguns are still mostly at the laboratory stage, though the U.S. Navy and others have been developing them for years.
Railguns use electricity to accelerate the projectile down the entire length of the barrel. This is in contrast with conventional guns that rely on nitrocellulose or other explosives where most of the acceleration happens almost immediately upon firing.
In other words, while a railgun does have a recoil, it should be more drawn out and steady. On the other hand, this gun probably accelerates the projectile to near Mach 2 or 3, so it should still have a rather big kick.
Myself, I suspect Ila not only calculates for the recoil, but also times a forward acceleration of herself (flying/hovering forward) to counter it. If you think about it – if the acceleration is strong enough – this could be similar to bracing herself before firing. As such, she might not lose as much projectile velocity as you may think.
Then again, I don’t know much about magic-powered flight. For all we know, magic flight may make someone immune to recoil by either countering it or making it impossible to be pushed back.
Magically flight has been described as repeatedly throwing oneself into the air.
Amaranth called it a railgun. I believe she was trying to split the difference between standard rifle and HVW.
It is my belief that Ila is firing a standard rifle, it looks very much like a heavy projectile sniper rifle from our own world. These weapons fire a 300 to 1000 grain (20 to 65 gram) projectile at around mach 2.5 to 3.
THEN she adds magical acceleration to it. According to Past in the comments on this page she can dedicate 5 of her 6 simultaneous calculations to accelerating the bullet
I don’t know what this gets us. I can tell you that the upper limit on traditional projectile weapons is around 5000 fps. This is largely due to the physics on the projectile before it leaves the bore.
If Ila can only get the projectile up to around mach 5, I wouldn’t expect seasoned military folk to ask about HVW. If each calculation can add about 1 mach, she might be sending out projectiles at around mach 8. That might do it.
At least at mach 8, Amaranth’s railgun comparison is ringing true.
4 of 6. One counters the recoil, one keeps her airborne. It’s theoretically possible that she could use one of her six to accelerate up, and then do 5 of 6 at the apex of that movement, but it’s probably much better to counter gravity’s pull just like she counters the recoil, so she can be more stable and have an easier calculation for the accuracy desired.
Ila receives the same energy as the bullet wether she is braced or not.
Same impulse, not same energy.
Assuming Newtonian dynamics and both at rest initially, the ratio of the kinetic energies each receives, is the inverse of the ratio of their masses. Which is to say, the energy Ila receives will be as negligible compared to that which the bullet receives, as the bullets mass is negligible compared Ila’s.
Of course, magic does not respect any of this. 😛
Do we agree or disagree?
The force coming out of the front of the gun is equal to the force of the gun into Ila’s shoulder.
Whether she is braced has zero effect on the force applied to the bullet.
As far as the magical acceleration, the comics seem to imply strongly that this is applied after the bullet leaves the barrel. It doesn’t matter if physics is conserved or not, the magical enhancement happens too late to affect Ila.
Frankly I hope we agree. This forum is possessed of wonderful people who make me think.
You disagree, actually, because your physics is slightly wrong: “equal and opposite reaction” implies that the momentum change (impulse) imparted to Ila and the bullet are the same, but momentum is mass times velocity, while kinetic energy is mass times velocity _squared_ – the bullet gains quite a lot more speed than Ila, and thus has actually gained quite a lot more kinetic energy than Ila.
Another way to look at it is that Ila’s shoulder moves a lot less in response to that force than the bullet (which travels the whole length of the gun) – and energy is force times distance (traveled parallel to the force), not force times time (which is again momentum / impulse).
Also, whether she’s braced or not has an effect on the effective length of the gun, and thus how long the bullet gets acceleration from it. But that effect is, in fact, small, because Ila + sniper rifle is quite a bit heavier than bullet and that motion is small.
Just a note: the effect of unbraced recoil is that the gun + firer and the bullet get equal momentum change, not equal shares of kinetic energy. The vast majority of the kinetic energy still goes with the bullet in both cases – the ratio between the energy that Ila gets and the energy the bullet gets is related to the ratio of their masses, because Ila moves a lot more slowly than the bullet and energy is mass times velocity _squared_. For that matter, the effect of bracing on energy is just that there’s a lot more mass you’re splitting the same momentum between to make the resulting velocity go down and thus make the ratio larger and thus a marginally higher share of the energy going to the bullet.