Back at the lab! Yes, I had fun on this page.
And hey, if you didn’t see it last week – New Vote Incentive!
More below!
Bobservations
Travel Restrictions
A while back, one of our commenters (I think it was Just_IDD, possibly others) had speculated on the possibility of using the Strike Gate to send Countdown to other planets. I kind of had to hold myself back from babbling all over the keyboard at that point, because yep, I’d been thinking about exactly the same thing. Mars, in particular. Sure, he could only stay for three minutes, but hey, three minutes on Mars? Hell yes. He wouldn’t even need an air supply. Just a closed suit to keep him from getting freeze-dried during his brief stay.
Maybe if Madison aimed him right and gave him a dust cloth, Countdown could pull the NASA rover Spirit out of the sand pit it got stuck in, wipe off the solar panels, and get the brave lil’ bot moving again.
(Side note: For purposes of our own clarity, Max-The-Artist and I have taken to using the Batman/Bruce system of nomenclature. When he’s armored up, he’s Countdown. When the helmet’s off – such as on this page – he’s Max.)
We’re going with the postulate that the Strike Gate is not, strictly speaking, limited by distance. But we are going to try to stick to physics except where it starts getting out of hand (direction of travel, increased potential energy if teleported to a higher altitude, etc. We’ll include that stuff if it makes a neat scene, but not if it bogs things down.)
Sigh. Dad, I miss you so much. As an astrophysicist, you’d have had fun with this.
Anyway. From what I’ve been able to determine, even if the team timed things properly and waited until Mars and Earth were lined up on the same side of the Sun, the difference in the two planets’ rate of travel is still 21,129 KPH. Bit much for the Strike Gate’s Kinetic Boost mechanism to handle.
As it happens, despite being further away from the sun than Earth, Mars actually orbits the sun slower than the Earth. Using averages for a moment, and reducing it to kilometers-per-second, the Earth travels at 30KPS, and Mars travels at 24KPS. (Let’s ignore planetary rotational speeds for now.) So that should mean that there is a moment when the two planets are perfectly aligned, relatively speaking.
But I still think it would be like standing on the roof of a car going at 30MPH and just as you pass a car going 24MPH, you try to step across. Sure, the two vehicles are lined up for an instant. But you’re still going to take a 6MPH stumble, because momentum. Kinetic energy. That’s why jumping off the floor of a falling elevator will not save your ass when it hits. You may have changed your position relative to the elevator, but it – and you – are still plummeting downward at a far greater rate than you can possibly overcome by jumping.
So for right now, Mars is out. Maybe. Get to work, Marissa. You want Barsoom (and a Dejah Thoris outfit?)
Better science the shit out of that Kinetic Boost mechanism.
— Bob out
Nice review of our first book by James Blundell of Pipedream Comics! Thanks, James!
Hey, any landing you can walk away from……………
Seems Sophie has a new friend as well, in the melee i didn’t catch the fact that the kid could see her as well……………
With that outfit, he must have gotten an eyeful, won’t forget that anytime soon, if ever……
look in the comments last page.
you’ll see I was wondering about that and I wasn’t the only one.
Yes, don’t know if his age, or stress, were factors, but someone other than Max could see Sophie! She also seemed to be able to appear earlier in Max’s ‘3 minutes’.
They really just need to do the obvious, and do a port where Max doesn’t travel outside the building, to see if Sophie can show up where her FATHER and the rest of the team can interact with her.
more age than stress, but stress would still be a factor.
in the old celtic druid annals, children (and animal) are known to have a more… pure… vision.
The old celts NEVER doubted when a child said there was a monster near, especially if the adults didn’t see it.
This was especially true if nearby animals were also acting… strange.
Hear as well for certain then as the message she had from his mom would Definitely have gotten through.
And yes, get to work, Marissa! Barsoom awaits! Though they will probably also want to add an additional bank or two of coordinate verniers, they’ll be trying to thread a needle a heckuva long ways off with their ‘shot’.
They could err on the side of caution though, and for their first shots aim for ‘in atmosphere’ ports and give Max a parachute. Allow for thinner atmosphere!
Parachutes work badly on Mars. The atmosphere is just thick enough to need a heat shield, which you probably won’t need with a good enough velocity match, and just thin enough that any reasonable parachute has a terminal velocity with the ground way too high.
The ground level atmospheric pressure is the same as 100,000 feet altitude here on Earth. The atmosphere is 95+ percent CO2, with some Nitrogen and Argon thrown in. Propulsive braking, all the way to touchdown, is what SpaceX is planning to use at the moment.
We are missing the obvious, though. In our focus on getting Max to Bar.. Mars, with his three minute time limit, the tube could as easily port probes on the cheap. Granted, would take some engineering to come up with a probe design that doesn’t use metal, but engineers ‘love’ challenges like that!
Heck, fix the kinetic boost issues, and you’ve removed the major hurdle to a sustained presence on Mars; Resupply.
Fix the kinetic boost issues, and you’ve solved the primary issue with space exploration in general.
Imagine, not having to lug your propellent around with you.
Such was also the theoretical advantage of beam propulsion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-powered_propulsion ) (see: Direct Impulse) and also, of course, the God-Emperor of Mankind.
Oh snap! Someone else besides Max and Letoa saw Sophie!? This is special!
I remember suggesting once before that the team teleport max nearby to test his deadvision. This seems like the next step.
Hmmm, hopefully I don’t inadvertently spoiler on one of my favorite comics but I am suspecting unless you are close to joining the choir invisible yourself you don’t see Sophie. Although The coyote and squidley thing seem visible to their partners without needing impending ex-parrothood so maybe not. Of course that is a giant awesome not getting shot/blown up/beaten story line if Max and Sophie can ughh, date? Cohabit? Hang?
Sophie seems to be of a different type of ‘Ghost Helper’ than the other two ghosts.
Of course, we don’t know that Leota’s and the director’s ghosts weren’t once also living beings/creatures who were close to ‘their humans’ at the time of death.
we have not seem Leota’s or the director’s ‘guides’ handle anything physical (yet), but we just witnessed Sophia STOPPING a bullet and tying a blanket around some feet.
Gonna have to be careful with that morphine, Max. Too often and it loses it’s effect and withdrawal is a bitch. *he muttered, knowing all too well having a chronic pain condition*
Barsoom hmm? Looking for an excuse to get Max and Marissa out of their clothes there boss?
The kinetic boost mechanism reminds me a little of some stuff Anne McCaffrey came up with for her Pegasus/Talents series. Going from a lower to higher energy level requires supplying the traveller with power but going the other way you can actually siphon the energy off and use it. Thinking about it, I wonder if you could pinch an idea Terry Pratchett used, to deal with the kinetic problem? When Countdown gets sent out, grab a lump of inert matter (i.e. concrete) from the arrival zone and exchnage their energy states. On recall, do it in reverse. Just have to be careful about what you grab.
Oh right — Pratchett had a wizard levitate by knocking a chunk of masonry off the Tower of Art and using the energy of it falling to levitate. We’re still talking railgun velocities though, at least in the case of Mars. Future story, maybe.
If your relative velocity needs to stay the same but your position can change, just teleport yourself to a position outside Mars’s atmosphere where your current velocity vector puts you in a stable orbit. Then you only have to deal with the leftover potential energies and conventional landing problems.
Or you could just transfer all your energies into pushing an anchored pykrete barge around the pacific ocean, but that’s just lazy.
Actually Bob, I was thinking of a couple of different instances. In one a certain Wizzard is teleported and a cannon is exchanged with him to balance the energies. In another, a Wizard needs to teleport across the disc and teleports a large rock in the opposite direction to balance it out. I think they had to deal with where on the disc they were to cancel spin energies. You might be able to compensate for energy with bigger rocks, but that might not be possible for Emil’s machinery.
In any case, I think we’ve both firmly established our Disc cred here…
There were a series of sci fi short stories and novellas oriented around teleportation and door technology.
Short distances could be accounted for with just the hardware in the device itself to deal with slight angular and altitude changes. The long distance units were set up at airports where the lands were covered with artificial lakes and iceberg like foam dampers that would act is the energy compensation system from long distance travel.
The writers I read dealt with interplanetary translocation by dropping a node at the place you wanted to go to or get something from. This gets interesting if you are wanting to sample the Jovian atmosphere.
The thing that always bugged me about that disc solution is, to correctly cancel the 2 momentums, the items would need to intersect half way between the endpoints. In the case of a wizzard and a Cannonball. the Cannonball would be wet and the wizzard would be very unhappy.
wouldn’t that be “the cannonball would be RED and wet”?
Well, if you plan on actually doing that cosplay, might I suggest Deja Thoris’s combat outfit for Marissa and wedding “gown” for Sophie (from the 2012 movie)? Plenty of interesting choices for the men too, if you want to cater to your female readership… If you go with comics’ versions, there are even skimpier outfits.
If you go by the books, the outfits are pretty much just jewelry on the female side.
As regards the voting incentive.. those are obviously full sized milky ways. For which you have my thanks.
More like full sized Mars Bars 🙂
the explanation of the planets’ orbital speeds kinda confuses me.
I thought mars had a orbit further from the sun because it was moving faster.
I know it takes longer, but I thought that was despite its faster speed
That’s not really how astrodynamics work. The closer you are to a gravitational body, the stronger the ‘pull’ becomes, right? So an object needs more velocity to maintain a lower orbit. In eccentric orbits the orbiting body gains velocity as it sheds potential energy (moves closer to the gravitational center), and vice-versa.
Mars’s mean orbital velocity is 24.1 km/s. Earths’ is 29.8 km/s. So it’s a difference of (roughly) 5.7 km/s. That’s more than fast enough to put an object in low Earth or Mars orbit.
edit: Oh, and as pointed out in the Bobservations, that’s only if Earth and Mars were on the same side of the sun. If they were on opposite sides, the direction of their relative velocities would mean that an object teleported from Earth would have a velocity of 53.9 km/s relative to Mars, not taking into account stuff like rotational velocity. Though I imagine teleporting through the sun would have it’s own complications.
thank you very much.
5.7 kilometers per second is a hefty difference.
hell, a stick of bubblegum would be an armor-piercing mega-projectile at those speeds.