‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 667

The Dude was no match for it, either.

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“The Dude was no match for it, either.”
Him specifically or level 1 characters in general? Because we know he’s just acting the “Brave Sir Dude ran away” shtick and that thing looks like it’s all about excessive violence, so it just might trigger his special easily. Just let it crash into some trees or smaller monsters during the chase. So I’m assuming it’s generally too strong for a 1v1. A rare chimera card was required to chase it off after all.

Panel 3: Kleya is lying. 🙂 She knows that the portal was hacked. An actual guard isn’t so stupid that it just chases after the first adventurer who comes close to it. Otherwise anyone with a chimera card could lure portal guards away.

Panel 5 is Aneeka thinking about having to draw a bunch of those things in the near future. 😀

Also I’m curious to see what ballet in double gravity looks like. Danni is going to feel so fat.

It’s not so much a matter of feeling fat, so much as it’s literally feeling weighted down. It’s like wearing a suit of chainmail armor. Fatness comes with mobility limitations due to your own body getting in the way (I know this personally, because I have gained excess weight in the last few years of crappy health problems), but double gravity does not.

For example: If you could put your ankle behind your head like a contortionist before you landed in a realm of double gravity, you still can do it; it’s just exhausting to move around. If you could put your ankle behind your head like a contortionist before you gained weight…you most likely cannot do that anymore, as a spare tire of pudge around the tummy makes it impossible to bend everything just right.

Oddly enough–and this is also something I’ve experienced in the past, as a weight lifter (oh to be that healthy again)–if you seriously bulk up in muscle, you can ALSO have the same problem as being too stout from bodyfat. If you refuse to skip leg days at the gym and bulk up your quadriceps and hamstrings, you will also discover you have difficulty putting your ankle behind your head, because the sheer bulk of thigh muscles will make it difficult to do so. Gymnasts might be muscular, but acrobats who also do contortionist tricks tend to be very slim for this sort of reason.

…Of course, I’m admittedly assuming that dancers in the era just before the end of the world were no longer stigmatized into body-shaming themselves through starvation. We’re finally (if slowly) getting away from the whole BS of fat-is-evil-and-shameful in dancing communities, so I’d like to think that Danni knew & worked with several fantastic dancers who just happen to be stoutly proportioned, and did so without any problem…but I’ll also bet she didn’t put on a full suit of chainmail (hauberk & leggings, camail hood, gauntlets, etc) and attempt to dance Swan Lake while weighted down by 60-70 pounds of armor, arming clothes, etc…which is what this is gonna feel like for everyone.

Double gravity is really tough to move around in. It’s said that when you go up or down stairs, you’re exerting forces at twice normal gravity–obviously when going up stairs you’re lifting your body vertically with twice the strength of just standing, but the impact of your foot coming down on a stair tread is twice what it otherwise would be when simply stepping forward.

For those of us who rode around in carnival rides, there was a somewhat uncommon one called the Gravitron that spun around and used centrifugal (blah blah centripetal fite me you’re not a part of the infrastructure so it’s centrifugal) forces to give the illusion of double gravity. The guy who operated one at the Seattle Center amusement park always offered $100 to anyone who could sit up, haul themselves to the center where he sat, operating the ride, and collect the money. No one ever managed, of course. Thankfully, nobody in the Game has to deal with actual real-world double-gravity, of course, just the computerized illusion of it…so there’s no danger of your real body passing out from your virtual body standing up, or even just from sitting up, no crushed ribs, etc.

At first i thought you were making “centrifugal” up but it’s an actual word that means the same as the other… O_o

Subtly different, actually. Centrifugal is the pseudoforce you “feel” pushing you outwards, whereas centripetal is the *actual* force pushing you inwards. (So as you turn in a car, the centrifugal force is what “pushes you outwards,” whereas the centripetal force is the actual force of the seat which pulls you into the turn.)

The fact that the “felt force” (centrifugal) balances the actual force (centripetal) is why you feel like you’re getting this pull that’s balanced to keep you still (with respect to the car or spinning object), whereas the actual force is why you’re actually accelerating* (by being pulled in to keep you going in a circle, called centripetal acceleration).

*This might require an explanation of it’s own, depending on how much physics you know. Concisely stated: “spinning in a circle at a constant speed” is accelerating, because even though your speed isn’t changing, your velocity – which is speed and direction – is, because your direction of motion is changing.

#physicsnerdaway

Your comment about centrifugal force made me realize that there’s an exception to “everything feels heavier”: spinning takes just as much centripetal force, even though everything is heavier. The moment-of-inertia-for-a-shape-to-weight ratio would feel off. I don’t know how that would affect the feel of dancing, though.

Actually, I wonder if someone’s done research on that. Maybe something for pilot training, to understand how moving your arms laterally “feels” under the higher gs of some maneuver? Sounds plausible, at least.

That’s a good point, operating under different gravity or constant acceleration is quite different (and less bad) than the effect of a change in mass. For a dancer or other athlete the forces required to make practiced movements would be the same as always for lateral movements but everything with a vertical component would require more effort. (A pool player would find no change to their game at all, but notice the increased effort to just stand around the table; a juggler would be hopeless as it’s a totally different effect from throwing heavier or lighter balls) I think most actions while in contact with the ground would be unaffected as the positional feedback from ones proprioception would automatically adjust the amount of force applied by the major muscles to stand and move. (So most fighting styles would be mostly unaffected as maintaining good contact with the ground is usually a key theme )
So I’d expect a dancer to be able to do a spinning move correctly without much need to practice, but everything involving jumps and leaps would be terrifingly wrong as the timing would be off- you’d land too early from every jump which for a dancer or gymnast would cause a lot of falls (precisly in the manner of danni’s first fall when she kicked jane in low gravuty) until you retrain every such move. And all the falls would hurt more.
I expect for someone strong and accomplished they would adapt to it especially in the context of a gym mat or dance floor (if you could do multiple spins during a leap on Earth adjusting to less time it the air would still allow similar moves, just with fewer spins and or less distance and height for leaps).
Anything like parkour would probably be a death trap though since so much depends on getting jump distances exactly right or slam into solid objects.

Alas for Danni that it wasn’t judo or Aikido as a subspeciality as unbalancing skills would be more dramatically effective in high g. Leaping is going to be very tricky to get right.

An experiment occurs to me, if anyone can juggle try practicing in an elevator to see just how challenging a change in G actually would be. You’d want a smooth one with some duration of constant acceleration and not all jerk. (Refer to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics) )

The thing about gravity, besides it directly affecting weight, is it affects acceleration. There is something of a pendulum motion to our walk in normal gravity, and it’s something dancers will also use. Cut the gravity a little, and the pendulum slows down. Cut the gravity a lot… and you discard the pendulum motion for movement. Instead, efficient movement begins to involve hopping around. Boost gravity and the pendulum swings faster. Things fall more abruptly, reaction times are reduced…

Walking in higher G will demand faster reflexes, offer harsher punishments (falling) for minor mistakes, and just might offer a dancer some opportunities that don’t exist in lighter gravities

Is it just me or is it more people on clear who talks in the 3 picture? That the 1 text bubble is 1e kat and 2e Danni

I read the bubbles clockwise, starting with Danni. I admit I had some difficulties as well at first, because it’s a flashback consisting of two images, so at first I thought those were two panels and thus I read the last speech bubble as the second one.

I’m not sure what you mean by 1e and 2e.

wonder if Kat will boost the ratings if needed

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 667