PaRARGdox 193
Speedsters!: A quick catch up with the speedsters who we last saw on page 7.176! Nadine leading a pack of younger cadets. Ever wonder how speedsters going at 300kph/190mph (or faster) manage to catch someone – or move someone – without turning them into a tomato sauce/ketchup explosion? Me too! The inertial dampening field is something Magellan speedsters need to be able to generate… it allows them to avoid annihilating themselves and others upon impact. Admittedly I got the idea from Star Trek techno-babble.
Patrons: Page 7.197 (in pencil form) is now up on Patreon… 7.197 colour version published soon…
Next update: April 2, 2023: A valid point…?
Obviously it wouldn’t invalidate that you got it from Star Trek, but I wonder if Star Trek is really first explicitly mentioning inertial dampening and when it happened, because very few spaceships can work without one meaning it must be implicitly present in most space sci-fi.
The partial or complete neutralisation of inertia was at the core of E E “Doc” Smiths concept of the FTL drive used in his ‘Triplanetary’ novel (serialised in ‘Amazing Stories’ in 1934)
‘The Billiard Ball’ by Isaac Asimov (published in ‘If’ in 1967) posits a generated field in which space-time is flat. Anything entering the field has its mass reduced to zero, rendering its inertia to zero, any residual velocity it had on entry accelerates it to light speed.
Star Trek inertial dampening would probably not alter the inertia (hence mass) of the objects within the field, but instead use contra-grav to compensate for the change in inertia due to acceleration.
The fourth last word in my previous post should probably have been momentum rather than inertia as it is an example of Newton’s second law of motion rather than the first law.
I loved the “Billiard Ball” story when I was a kid.
It inspired my own ideas for SF.
I guess this means Nadine and Vern DO have that ability? And apparently, it can be learned.
“Speedster” strikes me as an appellation that could potentially apply to many different power manifestations (eg, enhanced musculature, various techs, “The Speed Force”, etc). In Magellan, it seems to only be used when referring to “Speed Force” powers, which is well understood enough that Magellan can train its users in various ‘tricks’, like expanding your inertial dampening field to carry a passenger.
It seems that a common aspect of a lot of powers in the setting is that they involve some sort of energy field that can, with appropriate training, extend to apply other things/people. It’s how Hidden Dragon can make her costume go invisible (so she doesn’t have to fight crime butt-naked), and her conversation with Joe Berger at the end of Worst Fieldtrip Ever indicated his power works the same way, he just hasn’t figured out how to extend it to his clothes yet.
I remember a TV series with a super-strong speedster, who was made better, stronger, faster than he was before, after he was put back together using mechanical parts after a poor landing, but he only ran up to 100 km/h. I am thinking he was not fast enough to need inertial dampening field.
Still trying to figure out how he could lift a 2-ton bolder without crushing his still human spine.
I think DC’s The Flash comics articulated the idea of an anti-inertia field before Star Trek, to explain why The Flash could grab/carry something without that “tomato sauce/ketchup explosion” thing happening. Of course, Superman solved the same problem by wrapping Lois Lane in his invulnerable cape–which always struck me as silly, since the cape might be invulnerable but the person inside the cape would be crushed by the pressure and other forces. Superman would arrive at the end of his trip with nothing but a messy need to do laundry. Fortunately his invulnerable cape was also stain-proof.
stain-proof cape… lol, indeed!
Love to see Nadine taking charge!
Asking for more information and explaining your reasoning is bossy?
(It actually says “ineritial” in the comic.)
That is just Nadine’s New Zealand accent. 😉
The dark side of this is that if it’s something that could be turned off and on or kept solely around a single person, they can turn a supervillain or their minions into chunky Jello very quickly. Or grab hold of one, speed up, and completely shred them from the force of speed, as Quicksilver did once in an Ultimate X-men comic.
depends on how it works. It may be that trying to move that fast while carrying someone not surrounded by your field means they can’t accelerate and your are effectively running into a wall. You may be able to splatter the villain, but you go splat too. Which of course may still be a noble sacrifice worth making if she (yes super villains can be female! #girlpower) is about to launch a nuke at a local city or something but it would at least require be a last resort option.
Yay, I was hoping we would get a QuickSilver interlude with the speedos.
Cue the Eurythmics
Hmm, Pux (or Ax?) here doesn’t seem to have the best ability to put things into perspective and grumble about personal grievances later. We’ve seen a few characters show their character in crisis so far, some exemplary, some less so. Hopefully further schooling will help them get that in order.
Maybe he’s Ax Pux? If so, no wonder he’s grumpy!
First, she’s not even being bossy. Second, do these guys not understand how seniority works?