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Grrl Power #1378 - Commence Operation StealthySpaceGambleBloodSport
🕑 Added 2025-07-31 10:00:11 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!
I didn't draw Maxima flying besides Sylv because she's insecure about being shorter than him. If you could fly with zero effort, wouldn't you do it sometimes?
I call out "with zero effort" because I have had more than one dream where I could fly, but it was the shittiest, worst flying possible. I could only get about waist high off the ground, and moving required basically swimming through the air, so I could move barely as fast as a brisk walk, if I put a ton of effort into scooping my hands just right to catch as much air as I could and shoving it behind me. Brains are the worst.
I looked back at the pages that introduced Cora's crew, and I noticed that Sylv's name was originally written as Slyv. It would be much easier to retcon that first page than all the others with him on it, but instead, I've decided that his full name is Sylv Slyv. Possibly his middle name is Yvsl.
And now I've decided that his whole race's given names are anagrams of their family names. Because why not? They're aliens, and aliens do alien stuff.
Why isn't he wearing a shirt? Because I started drawing his muscles to make sure I had the proportions right, then decided I didn't want to make up a spacey male-cut shirt. I would be the absolute worst costume designer for a sci-fi movie. Everyone would be wearing Han Solo adjacent outfits probably. Unless the project I was working on was Deja Thoris chic. Then I'd have fun with it. Or at least designing the women's costumage. I probably wouldn't enjoy designing men's bejeweled banana hammocks or whatever. Leave that to a female costume designer, or a gay one. That'd be fair, right? Although, that might result in some competitive minimalism that'd have to be scrapped when it came time for fittings.
Maxima tried to hide her ascent into space by flying out into international water, then over the horizon, then up out of the atmosphere, since they figured the spy satellite was going to be positioned within a few hundred clicks of being directly over Archon HQ. But a quick google suggests there are roughly 100K ships at sea at any given moment, and that's just large merchant ships, excluding small fishing boats and military vessels, so it's probably hard to pick a spot where Max could get into orbit without being seen at all. Maybe somewhere closer to the poles? Lots of research stations out that way, but fewer eyes in total, I'd wager. Wearing a black stealth suit and doing it at night would help a lot, no matter where she was.
Comments
Mark Magagna
Stealth in space? Yes, changing velocity without an energetic exhaust is very difficult. I think that generalizes to stealth in space coming down to hiding your waste heat. Anything not perfectly efficient that does work generates waste heat, which makes you stand out from the very cold (3 degrees Kelvin) background. Infrared sensors are pretty easy to make since we've made military versions since at least the end of WW2, and science lab versions before that. This does depend on access to space - ground-based infrared sensors have to peer through a much hotter and turbulent atmosphere, making them much less useful. You hide your waste heat by attempting to direct it or by being in front of something hotter than 3 Kelvin. Directing it means knowing which direction the sensor is, and it doesn't work long term. Standing in front of hotter objects has the problem (at least at our tech level) that everything is falling if it isn't thrusting, so that's also short term. Most hotter objects also are known patterns, so you have to match that emission pattern. The cheapest method now for detecting moving objects in space is taking time-lapse photos (in whatever spectrum) and noticing which dots move against the known, i.e. "stationary" background pattern. Tracking things like meteors is more difficult because they're at background temperature, so you must rely on reflected radiation. In the comic, people have visited from space in the past. But I doubt they do it undetected much these days.
Mark Magagna
Vinyl underwear? I have it on very good authority (lots of old SF magazine covers) that not much underwear is worn in space. What we would call underwear is outer wear. Those magazine covers wouldn't show things that don't exist, right?
