Comic for Wednesday, December 7th
I have clearly pissed off some webcomic-deity. Trying to catch up and I lost about 4 hours of drawing yesterday. Drawing programs are sort of archaic in that they gobble ram furiously (so crash) and don’t have an autosave. I doesn’t happen that often, but man is annoying when it does and I’ve forgotten to save recently.
Anyway…
Technically still Wednesday? Friday will be technically Friday too probably at this rate. Work has been a pain, so there’s been less drawing time than I was hoping.
Ila is using the sniper rifle far out of it’s effective range, but is providing a vastly boosted shot velocity with her magic. Needless to say, the scope of the rifle has been updated for this purpose by Mium, and is in no way an optical scope, rather a computer that syncs to MYM who calculates where the shot will hit considering the aim and final shot velocity. Ila than has to accelerate the shot to precisely the accounted for speed with the aim.
As noted previously, Ila can cast six spells at once. In this case she can only use four to accelerate the projectile. These take effect after the bullet has left the gun cheating equal-and-opposite force; as the magic directly interferes with the acceleration, they are not being “kicked” forward. That said, the gun shot still would send Ila flying. The sixth spell is on the gun, to counteract the recoil by providing the opposite acceleration of the original shot. One could ask why she needs the gun at all – well, in part aiming. Ila can’t hit something more than maybe a hundred meters with her own eyesight, let alone something she can’t see. Second, the amount of change is the difficulty of magic, rather than the total end result (to a degree). Changing something going 900 m/s to going 910 m/s is not significantly harder than changing something going 10 m/s to 20 m/s (though it is somewhat), but way way easier than changing something going 10 m/s to 910 m/s. Thus she can get way better return on investment by using magic in combination with a gun than on her own. There is additionally complexities (such as momentarily suspending the weight shift while firing, which complicates the shot well beyond anything Ila could calculate on her own), but I feel I’ve gone on long enough on that front… 😛 Needless to say, it’s a complicated piece of magic largely supported by Ila’s complex and precise calculation ability and MYM’s rather ridiculous computational power.
Loading ...
At this point I would think whoever is behind this would start wondering if it would be wiser to enough to pull out and cut their losses for now before this becomes a bigger mess than it already is.
At this point I imagine even if they did succeed in what ever mission they are up to its created such a mess I can’t help thinking that someone is going to lose their head figuratively speaking.
Ila is reminding me of a character I once played in an RPG. Sniped a person in the eye, across a city and through two buildings. Without hitting anyone in between.
I love it when the good guys are genuinely powerful.
“Comic #294, still a prison cell. 284 comics since the good guys all got arrested and have been sitting in jail moping…” 😛
Well; I suppose its a bit of a self-filtering process, as we tend to see the people who do interesting things in the comic world, so they tend to be people that are either more powerful or have more ambitious plans.
Ila’s sniping is pretty neat. She is a pretty much a human (Prototype? Android? Gynoid?) railgun. The Prototype team is getting pretty stacked for talent, especially with the synergy bonuses.
I also found Naomi’s wound interesting. Her magic seems to be referencing that area of her body. Maybe it is stopping her from bleeding out? Would explain why she is still able to run around with a fairly literal hole in her.
Ila would agree. She thinks she is pretty neat too. Better than stupid computer virus that runs around pretending to be a prototype. She totally doesn’t rely on that stupid computer virus to aim for her. 😛
That’s pretty much what’s going on with Naomi’s wound – if the functional parts of her arm were still functioning, she could probably still use it. I don’t expect she’s very good at bed rest.
One of these times, Peter is going to be too clever by half and mess up his own plots. This may be that time. ><
It is possible that Peter has tied himself in a knot, but I thought a different possibility when I saw this. I doubt the local forces (even the Bureau) would do much more than slow down the IDS. I doubt they are in talking frame of mind after blowing stuff up and sniping people.
To Peter, using the local forces a disposable pawn is probably not a big deal. Naomi would probably stridently object to that though. Honestly from Peter’s point of view the IDS massacring some cops would be great, as it would get them kicked out of Malsa faster and make his life easier.
I was thinking that Naomi might be upset that the cops were bringing cars that the I.D.S. could commandeer and use against her. The I.D.S. vehicles were controlled by computers so Mium could easily take them over. The cop cars might not be as easy for him to do that to.
While most cars in Malsa are can be computer controlled, the cars here might be harder for MYM to control than most, as they are probably left in manual mode often than not.
The high tech way to prevent an AI from taking over your system is to make special security software. The low tech way is to make the plug somewhere easy to pull. Even MYM has some trouble with the second one…
Sure, no problem, stand in the middle of the air, point a very heavy stick at a target… only a mile away, adjust for windage, apply extra acceleration; no problem.
Pulling the trigger gently and smoothly without jerking the gun… argggh, frustrating.
I would like to suggest you look into Krita.org
Krita is a paint program designed by painters.
It is really awesome. Its brushes are leaving photoshop in the dust.
And it doesn’t have all the bloat, nor all of the things that are just for photo fixing. Its a really powerful artist tool. You can use pixel lines and vector lines in the same drawing.
And it autosaves!
As Ila would say… easy.
I’ll take a look at some point. I currently use Clip Studio Paint (the digital version of Manga Studio) because it’s line drawing (it can do vector and pixel as well, though as may be apparent I am not fancy enough to use vector lines…) is a lot better than Photoshop. I use Photoshop for effects and stuff (like the magic circles).
Typically speaking it works fine, but the autosave one does occasionally get me. If it happened like weekly it’d be easy to switch but it’s juuuust rare enough to make it not seem worth switching… 😛 I’ll take a look though.
The word you were looking for is raster not pixel. Both raster and vector graphics.