Well that's a sigh of relief! Looks like that pesky gun turret turned out to be not so useless after all! Meanwhile, Zamora establishes once and for all that her dick out-measures Benny's by at least a full half inch. But what about girth?
Stay tuned, sports fans. More measurements to come.
I've been in a character bio mood of late, so I went ahead and did a Captain Savage bio to go along with last week's Commander Benny Ortega bio. Savage is one of the more “square” characters in the comic – she's not a space pirate like Jetta or a crimelord like Rana – but nonetheless she does have an interesting back story.
NAME: Captain Irene Savage HEIGHT: 1.8 m (5'11”) BODY TYPE: Natural (enhanced, cybernetic) OCCUPATION: Prospector, entrepreneur
BACKGROUND At nearly six feet in height, Irene Savage stands out among Kuiper Belt cosmonauts, who tend to be more on the smallish side. That's because she originally hails from the Martian colonies, where she got her start as an ore merchant in the Main Belt. In the aftermath of the Cererian Civil War, her fleet was seized by the newly formed Main Belt Collective, prompting her to emigrate to the Outer System. Shrewd and enterprising, the imposing captain wheeled and dealed her way across the solar system, amassing a respectable size fleet and a prolific collection of ex-husbands. Eventually she made her way to Neptune, where she profiteered off of the ongoing war, along with Benny Ortega and hundreds of other unscrupulous smugglers.
Despite some illicit activities in her past, Captain Savage has mostly kept it on the up-and-up since the end of the Ice Wars. She operates an independent merchant fleet and has been heavily involved in the Interstellar Highway project, converting comets and other transneptunian objects into a laser array to propel spacecraft on interstellar journeys. Unlike Benny, she did not take part in the postwar amnesty – which would have required her to surrender her ill-gotten gains and her fleet – and only just recently has the statute of limitations passed on her smuggling charges within the Neptune-Triton Commonwealth. Unfortunately for her, she seems to have chosen the worst possible time to return, as she now finds her ship – and her crew – caught in the middle of a deadly mooner plot. Her first trip to Neptune-Triton in decades may also prove to be her last…
If you've been looking closely at the rifle being toted by the guard formerly known as Woody's sock-puppet (and currently by Lt. Zamora), you may have noticed something odd about it: It does not appear to have a magazine. Instead, it just has some cylindrical knobby thing hanging off of it. What's up with that?
Well, the reason for that is: It's a plasma rifle. No seriously, it is. Sort of. No, it's not like the plasma rifles the storm troopers carry in Star Wars (more on that in a minute). This rifle uses magnetically contained microfusion bursts to propel bullets at high velocities. That knobby thing is the propellant.
So that's all rather boring, isn't it! So why not a gun that shoots flaming balls of plasma like the stormtroopers use? Well, believe it or not, that isn't entirely science fiction: We use plasma cutters to cut metal. An engineering team at the University of Missouri even built a device which can fire sustained rings of plasma, and it's pretty cool looking… but they only travel about two feet before dissipating. And that's the major problem with “naked plasma” as a weapon: It rapidly dissipates into the environment unless you have something to contain it. But that's not science fiction, either. We already have weapons that do that; this is basically how an RPG rocket does its damage: It uses a shaped charge, which is basically focused plasma, to generate an armor-piercing jet of molten metal. And that's pretty much the concept of what the stormtroopers' plasma rifles are supposed to be doing, except instead containing the plasma in a boring metal shell, I guess they're using some kind of magnetic field that travels with the plasma, or something? It sounds unnecessarily complicated. You could just build a gun that shoots little pellets full of gas or some other fusion propellant which undergoes fusion on impact and get the same effect. Yunno, like what this guy built in this (possibly fake, but still conceptually on-point) video…
So, plasma weapons are not pure fantasy. However, though lasers and plasma bolts look really cool, they tend to be less efficient than just propelling a bullet with fire, at least for non-specialized purposes. That's why I figure if you actually did want to use plasma in a gun, the best way to use it is as a way to launch bullets… which is sort of what a regular gun does already.
Most pointless blurb ever. Good day to you, sirs and madames!
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