- Tibor: Follow me! We have to get away from here!
- Soldier: Reva?
- Soldier: Reva!!
- Soldier: Bastards!
The Machine of Eternal Summer 029
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- Tibor: Follow me! We have to get away from here!
- Soldier: Reva?
- Soldier: Reva!!
- Soldier: Bastards!
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24 thoughts on “The Machine of Eternal Summer 029”
Crystalgate
It’s Tibor. It should not have been, but it is. Anyway, aiming is harder when you’re targeting a main character and not an NPC.
HKMaly
It shouldn’t and the previous page actually CHANGED to make it at least little more plausible.
They really want to rush through this part.
And to be fair, they are further away and running and I still think hitting the father was luck. Also, being angry is generally bad for your aim.
Sekhmet
Yes, good point. Tibor’s hand is drawn in a different color, making it clear that it’s not a glove. And we see a “real” eye.
For the miss, yes being angry can ruin your aim, and we know that the soldiers missed Scarlet once before, so that’s plausible. Maybe these weapons are powerful but have terrible aim?
Crystalgate
They had no problem hitting Scarlet’s parent though, hence my main character vs NPC comment. Anger is a plausible explanation though, but not for the other shot that missed Scarlet.
Dilandu
Should point that it’s beam rifle. The hit is near-instantaneous and little recoil. Most likely, magnetic lenses are imperfect (recall Tibor pistol earlier – seems that quality of magnets is common problem)
BlackDragonSlayer
Two things:
1. Scarlet has that “hey wait aren’t you the fox who robbed us?” look on her face 😛
2. It’s entirely possible that Reva has a tag simply because another character says their name. However, I’m still hoping we get CyborgFox at some point.
yodal_
Sure, curse the civilians who you were murdering in cold blood for defending themselves and running.
Einarr
That was my thinking too. “Damn you for ruining a perfectly good war crime!”
FuryoftheStars
Yup, but that is completely believable.
Werwolfe
“Grab on to my big colorful fluffy tail if you want to live”
Intrebute
I was wondering if the whole comic was going to censor blood in all forms, but I guess that was just a result of magic pew-pew not instantly spraying the stuff everywhere.
Vicious Sand
The previous page’s changes include a better look at Mr Knife’s face (part of it), and finger-claws to make him more animalman.
Are there two doors to the shed? Easily possible, but Tibor showing up out of nowhere uses up a lot of “possible.” Scarlet running into him, finding Tibor slightly lost on the trail is loads more plausible. But why start being plausible now? Why would Tibor know where the Caroluses live? HOW would he? He doesn’t just happen to find them, he appears in the middle of the action to preform a heroic rescue of a girl who wasn’t being shot at by soldiers 5 minutes ago.
Sekhmet
My guess is that he found the house after a bit of search. They are not hidden. He knows in which village they live (he observed them quite a while before the robbery). He can just go into the village, have a look at the farms, ask in which one is a little girl name “Scarlet” (her name was revealed during the robbery”. No reason why it should not work.
Then what happened? He went close to the house, and started seeing the soldiers before the farmers. So he hid himself in the nearest possible place: the barn. Then he saw the soldiers killing the parents, the girl going close to him… he took the chance he had, the soldier was distracted and alone, good timing.
th009
He’s standing in front of the same door that Tibor entered through.
frigid
So speaking as a guy who served in the Marines, Tibor picked the worst way to stab the guy. Don’t reach around someone like that, if their back is to you, stab them in the back. Usually, I’m against that, but these guys just shot two unarmed people without so much as a “hands up” and one of them was going to shoot an unarmed child who was basically curled up into a ball. So you know… Screw ’em. Backstabbing is fair play in such a situation.
Crystalgate
Speaking as a guy with no combat experience or training, I can not see how an untrained person would attempt that stab even if not knowing better. If I approach him from behind and want to stab him before he shoots a person I don’t want shoot, the natural approach would be a backstab, I have to get closer to him and then stop before I stab in order to reach around him. I can only imagine someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing attempting this stab if we remove the approaching the target elements, somehow you just already are behind the target. This is probably what happened here though, Tibor was just drawn standing behind Reva.
doclbn
Reva’s backpack is covering all of her back – nowhere to stab, I’d say…
Crystalgate
Unless Tibor happens to stab something hard in the backpack, said backpack will just squish, allowing Tibor a near full stab. Assuming a plasma knife is far more powerful than a knife made of steel, Tibor also has the option to just move the knife around inside Reva’s body a lot without facing the resistance a steel knife would have. All in all, I have a hard time imagine that reaching around would be safer than a backstab.
Banjomike
Should have taken Reva’s rifle. And where did Tibor leave his knapsack/bag?
Dilandu
Such high-tech weapon most likely have transponder integrated – to ensure that guerillas or enemy troopers would not be able to safely use captured guns, without risking them being pinpointed.
Agnarr
This is where Tibor redeemed himself. He could’ve run or stayed hidden, but he risked it to rescue someone.
Frith Ra
I’d want to grab his gun, just for self-defense, but I don’t know how much actual noise they make and the other fox landed full on top of it.
I guess this will be a plot point later.
Dilandu
Okay, some conclusion about weaponry:
* It’s a charged particle beam gun, probably either proton or ion one
* The main damaging factor seems to be bremsstrahlung – ionising radiation, released when particles slow down in body tissues
* At least in current firing mode, the heat damage to the body is limited (no explosive tissue destruction observed)
* Apparently the quality of magnetic lenses is poor enoug, so the weapon is not exacly completely accurate and there is some random deviation from sight axis. Otherwise soldier would not miss.
P.S. The weapon stock should be lighter; particle beam would hardly have emough recoil to validate anything more than a very light frame. And the rear part of the barrel should be equipped with transparent rariation shield – in case of magnetic lenses failure, and beam being bounced backward. Do not forget – particle beam gun COULD misfire in any direction, including right back at shooter.
DochSavage
Credit to Chaslain:
The VASIMR rocket/cannon uses three magnetic coils to contain the plasma.
Inside the first coil is the helicon antenna. You inject liquid hydrogen (LH2) into the helicon, which begins pumping HUGE amounts of RF energy into the LH2. The LH2 gets ionized by this, and flings electrons and protons everywhere (ions galore). BINGO–all of a sudden you have a swirling vortex of particles that will obey an electromagnet: heavy protons near the center, electrons orbiting on the outside. They get pushed past the first magnet and into the space between it and the second magnet.
The second magnet is coupled with the first one; their magnetic fields bulge outward in the space between them making a sort of sack. We have another radio array in this section: the ICRH array. ICRH stands for Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating. It’s a fancy word that means “microwave,” only it operates at the cyclotron frequency of the ions, which is “a few Megahertz” for the protons and “in the gigahertz range” for the electrons.
This is important: after coming out of the helicon (root word: helix!), this whole mess is spinning. FAST. How fast? You guessed it–at the cyclotron frequency. Those protons poke around a few million times per second, while the electron cloud jets around them.
When ions are in the middle of the bulging “sack” between the magnets, the magnetic field lines are parallel and the ions are left to circle unhindered. But if they stray towards one of the magnets, the field lines start to constrict, forcing the ions to orbit faster and faster, just like a penny dropped into one of those charity toilet things at the mall. The difference is, in a really cool quantum exchange thingy, the ion gets reflected back towards the other magnet, all without any “work” having been done on it by the magnet. In other words, by letting it swap out its forward momentum into and back out of rotational energy, it’s 100% efficient. There’s no newtonian force exchange. That means the reactor can hold a little plasma or a lot, without having to increase the magnet strength. All you need is “enough”, and above that you can keep adding plasma to the chamber until the ions reach saturation and start bumping each other out of the magnetic fields.
Now pay close attention. There’s a third magnet, the aft array. It’s purpose is to carefully modulate the plasma flow coming out the back end. There’s a thing in plasma physics called the Alfvén speed. It works in about the same way that the speed of sound works in a jet engine: if you don’t “fix” it, your engine can’t go faster than that speed, because the exiting exhaust will cavitate and actually “suck” your engine backwards.
The cannon version DOESN’T have this decoupling array. It creates high-speed plasma and purposefully lets it cavitate… in order to eliminate thrust! You still have to deal with thrust from the sub-Alfvén plasma, but carefully modulated turbulence from the cannon can actually reduce some of this thrust.
Here’s the result of all this wacky science:
The cannon is “recoil-clamped”. Not quite recoilless; it generates a few pounds of thrust when firing. The sensation is not unlike starting up an industrial-strength hair dryer.
This recoil-absorbing cavitation involves turbulence. This means that at the muzzle, you get lots of side “lobes” and “muzzle flash.” And you thought it was just a neat special effect. Hah. That’s SCIENCE, baby.
The specific impulse of the weapon is probably very high. This is a rocketry term; it means the plasma comes out at HOLY CRAP speeds and GOOD LORD temperatures. (About 3 million MPH and 10 megakelvins.) The reason has to do with energy-to-force coupling. At those speeds and temperatures, the plasma stream is very poorly coupled to the rocket–er, weapon. This is a good thing. Imagine you’re pinned against a wall by the front bumper of my Jeep. I’m going to start the engine, put the car in gear, and dump the clutch. Do you want me to put it in first gear, or fifth? In fifth gear, the engine won’t be able to couple its energy efficiently into squishing you. Same effect with the plasma in atmosphere.
That leaves the Newtonian problem of “how to we make it GO that fast?” The answer is in the spinning of the plasma (those cyclotron frequencies again). If the plasma bottle has a cyclotron two inches in diameter, the electrons are cycling at 1 billion PI inches per second, or 2.9 million MPH. (A 1″ field ejects at 750,000MPH, but a 2″ bottle ejects at 12 MegaMPH.) Since we’re dealing with helical acceleration on stuff that has negligible mass, we’re good to go.
The muzzle magnet (ICRH) can vary the amount of ejecta released, so the notion of having variable settings is totally feasible.
The cannon must constantly be maintaining a plasma field (whenever the safety is off). It probably takes 10-60 seconds to reach firing temperature, so you’d want to turn your gun on before going into combat.
I hypothesize that the cannon has two safety states: ON and ARMED. In “ON” mode, the weapon makes its trademark OMMMMINOUS HUMMMM and collects hydrogen and helium for making plasma. Charge time here is whatever you want. In the ARMED state, the weapon actually begins turning the gas into ions and heating it up for playtime.
Below 100 kiloKelvins, we are not dealing with fusion. (We could be, especially at 10 megakelvins.) The weapon probably operates at or near 100 kiloKelvins, too cold for fusion. If you’re squeamish about neutron radiation, go with a “cold” plasma gun.
New term: Charge Exchange. Charge exchange is NOT your friend. What happens is this: an un-ionized bit of hydrogen makes it into the plasma chamber, and gets hit by a high-temperature proton. The cold atom says, “oh here, take this” and gives away its electron. Now you have a cold proton (ion) in the chamber, and–oh dear–a hot atom that is now neutral (no longer ionized) and thus cannot be held onto by the magnets. Nasa’s Franklin Chang Diaz notes, “The resulting hot neutral is oblivious to the magnetic field and escapes, depositing its energy on nearby structures.”
Roll that phrase around in your mind: “depositing its energy on nearby structures.”
You do not want to be a nearby structure.
Characters
Amos Allrick Ariana Carolus Athamas Baako Bolin Clara Graybold Cyril Darius Leyh Elwin Flammt Emelia Evelina Ferrus Gale Nenawa Gavin Carolus Iona Irvin Janos Zaisthra Jehona Shardyk Julius Mirkning Kala Silverspring Kenan Orege King Protos Lauro Levon Goldwood Leyton Wayt Ludis Graybold Luitpold Marik Marton Princess Elodie Raymond Reto Mirkning Reva Rodar Rosetta Greenleaf Scarlet Carolus Severin Silvana Mirkning Tibor Frey Vidal Viola Vreni Xaver Yerim Zach Ilkin