Atomic Robo goes Webcomic

Robo goes round the corner again, his head gets knocked off, and he ends up sitting with Edison's robot and a former janitor at Tesladyne watching terrible movies for the benefit of Dr Heinrich von Forrester.

Orbitpanzer... hoo boy.

For those not fluent in the majestic language of high German: Orbital Tank.

Fun will be had.

So essentially it's a space tank.

Or Orbital Armor, can't Panzer mean armor as well depending on context?

it can, yes.

Panzer does indeed mean Armor. The Germans called tanks panzers because they were "armored" vehicles. For some reason somewhere along the line the word came to mean "tank" as well, even though it really never meant that. Which is why I was very annoyed by most subbers attempts at Nanoha A's when they translated Vita's Panzergheist as "Tank Ghost" rather than "Armor Spirit".

So the Panzer Tank is either the Tank Tank or the Armor Tank.

Which is redundant either way.

Tanks are called Panzers because it's a shortening of the actual German word for tank: Panzerkampfwagen, or "Armoured Fighting Vehicle".

Coincidentally, the term "Armoured Fighting Vehicle" is now used to describing all vehicles that do fighting and are armoured, or "Tanks plus everything on the Tanks, but No Tanks page". Which brings up some amusing thoughst that in German, they are all "tanks".

Does this count as crossing the Godzilla Threshold?

At least ALAN's cold-blooded logic means that he's safer to make common cause with than your more revenge-prone arc villains.

You'd think that the Chinese would be smarter than to assign soldiers that don't speak a lick of English to the English-speaking guy they want to keep a close eye on.

On the other hand, Biomega doesn't actually represent a serious threat to him or his plans. He's got no biological matter for them to absorb. Might be he goes "hmm, interesting idea" and partners up with whatever intelligence is guiding them.

Last we saw of him, it was hinted his consciousness was in a leaf, although Robo and the gang presumably don't know that.

And it's been hypothesized that biomega will start eating the planet once the life's gone from it, which could put him at risk anyway.

When we last seen our heroes, they find out that Biomega Island is getting to land faster than planned, Bernard expressed his annoyance that with all the Titans engaged, they'll be lucky to annoy the giant thing, and there's just no friggin' trust going around, since America's going with their plan, the other countries are planning their own ways to end the Biomega...which all involve nuclear junk. So Tesladyne has to stop this madness before someone else does it with enough nuclear juice to cook the entire planet. And how's Robo doing? Eh, his German's kinda rusty...and there's a lot of German in that space station.

Man should have boned up on his German before going up into a German space station.

Indeed.◊ He should have. If he pressed that button.

You really don't need to know German to know that pressing the big red button labeled Orbitpanzer is a Bad Idea.

I mean, we all know what Orbit means, and Panzer has pretty thoroughly entered the public lexicon. It'd have extra meaning for Robo due to the whole Luftpanzer fiasco.

German is really convenient like that really.

Is that even a button? Looks more like a lever, maybe. Or even just a light-up label thing.

Flipping a Big Red Switch labeled Orbitpanzer, then

"Was that an intentional Tarkin?"

Given that Lang's immediate reaction to being declared a fugitive was to reference The A-Team, I suspect yes.

Actually, we already saw the term 'orbitpanzer', remember? So his body language is probably not 'I hope I know what I'm doing' and more 'I hope I can do it before THAT THING activates/finds me'.

Gosh, I hope I formatted this right.

I agree, and I think that we're in for an anti-climax regarding it. This looks like an Offhand Backhand setup, especially given that there's only so much pagespace left to resolve the Biomega plotline and to establish what happens to the Tesladyne crew. Either that, or Robo ends up stranded on that satellite for a bit longer than hoped/planned.

Welp, I was wrong. Eventually I will learn to not make these predictions on the daily half page pacing.

Spears...in space!

So is this some random undead Nazi mook or something?

It's times like this where brutal honesty works very favorably.

...Oops.

edited 30th Dec '15 11:31:52 AM by TargetmasterJoe

Man, Robo, why you gotta crush the kid's hopes like that? Could have at least made a funny quip about how you'd most likely be bringing it back in little pieces.