Author notes

197 - Fallen

El Cid

on Oct. 25, 2017

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device"

— David Langford, "A Gadget Too Far," as a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law




Uh-oh. Looks like Nascha may be in for a big letdown. All dressed up and maybe nowhere to go. See, this is why you don't trust creepy floating heads with messianic aspirations. They're always up to no good!



Sci fi geeks and miltech nerds should immediately recognize Scorpion Eater One's big honkin' rifle as being a type of railgun. That's the heavy artillery. Today's cutting edge military railguns can achieve muzzle energies of up to 50 megajoules – that's equivalent to the kinetic energy of a 5 ton school bus slamming into you at 316 mph. The projectiles have so much kinetic energy that they don't require an explosive warhead to blow shit up (that's a proper military terminology).

Of course, those are gigantic artillery pieces, and we probably won't be able to build scaled down personal size railguns like the one in this comic until we find some kind of superdense, light and portable power source. And also current railguns can only be fired a few times without replacing the rails, because the stress of firing them tends to melt and warp the material. But this is a sci fi comic, so we'll just assume they fixed all that!



More to come. As you may rightly assume, the next couple of pages are a bit dour. Thank you, Thesaurus.com!