Grrl Power #1029 - Sticker shock (Patreon)

Thanks so much for your support! For serious!

The discussion in panel 2 is entirely predicated on the crew of that gunship not returning fire. If I was them, I'd toss a flare into the gas tank of that pickup and dive down the side of the hill and hunker down under a thick blanket. This assumes that as them, I still would have played the gunship sequence of Modern Warfare games and understand how easy it is to spot dudes on infrared. That, or I'd only attack gunships when it was 98.6 degrees out.

You can't really claim to have the "most advanced military" based on a single piece of tech. If you gave whoever has the least advanced military on the planet (insert joke about Russia's embarrassing showing in Ukraine here) and gave them one handheld Phaser, they don't automatically become the most advanced military all of a sudden. I think it's really more of an average across your entire force. Deus is just needling Maxima a bit there in panel three, while also implying that other nations might be interested in his tech. I can't imagine that Japan wouldn't jump at the chance to have real live force fields. Well, in reality, I think Japan's diet is probably super conservative, but I like to think their leadership is basically the average homeroom class from any given anime, only 20 years later, meaning that while most of them are pretty forgettable, about a third of them have really formulaic personalities but notable hair. Oh, and at least a few would be interested in force fields.

A lot of discussion about the physics of force field technology on the previous page. That's always amusing when people get deep into the weeds about fictional tech, cause unless you're dealing with a long running show that has ample evidence of the tech in action, it's really all just speculation. And let's be honest, even then, the way any piece of tech is presented is usually pretty inconsistent, because unless you have some whip-cracking series continuity overlord, the writer from one episode is going to say that transporters can beam up people from within a cave system from geosynchronous orbit, and another writer will say someone stealing a ride from the shuttle bay will be out of transport range in the time it takes Picard to say "Beam them out of that shuttle."

As an aside, I think the shows that were the best about technology continuity were Stargate SG-1 and The Expanse. To be fair to something like Star Trek, a multi generational franchise has no hope of maintaining any sort of continuity, tech or otherwise, especially when they idiotically keep doing prequel shows. Of course nothing in Enterprise matched established TOS or TNG continuity. Calling it a comic-book-esque alternate timeline/multiverse doesn't make it any less disappointing.

Anyway.

Obviously airtight spherical shields wouldn't work on a modern jet or prop plane for a number of reasons. The simple answer to what happened on the previous page is that maybe an appropriately equipped plane sitting on an airfield can form a dome over itself to keep from getting strafed or bombed. This page shows a series of static shields forming to intercept an attack. This method would be much more problematic for front-on attacks, but then maybe the shields blit in and out, creating a static wall that only exists for a microsecond. Actually, it'd probably have to create them 2 or 3 deep to keep stuff from slipping through during the blits.

BTW, I'm looking into what happened to the page header. Wordpress updated and who knows? Maybe it doesn't honor .php includes anymore? It'll return when I get a chance to dig into the backend a bit.