Indeed he did, to visit Planet Wet.
My question is, how effective is this superweapon against Dark Matter Entities? It doesn't appear to be gravitically based, only (possibly) gravitically carried.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOhttp://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20091219.html
I'm stupefied. It was there all along, but we missed it. Yes, the UNS as we've seen it is definitely prone to such actions, and yes, sufficiently powerful A.I.s in Schlockverse are both able and eager to carry out such seemingly excessive plots given cause, and yes, it makes sense that Lota would see this as cause. No Petey, no supervillain Lota, no dark matter entities.
One problem: If that was really all he was interested in, couldn't he have just sat on the evacuation system until such a time as it would be necessary to use it? I suppose maybe he was worried about the bureaucracy of the UNS; even in the most extreme emergency they should be able to spare the time it'd take to teraport everyone out (a fraction of a second), but they'd just swoop in with teraport interdiction fields on and he might have trouble getting to speak to someone with the authority to turn them off before they fired the thing.
Given how fast they have "swept in with teraport interdiction fields" in other parts of this webcomic, I'm gonna go with "better safe than sorry" here. I'd love to think that sitting on a hair-trigger teraport was a good idea, because it's definitely the sort of thing I'd be doing... but yeah, no dice.
On the other hand, I wonder how this speaks for Lota's future justifications of actions. If "a slight but nonzero chance that X might happen" is enough for Lota to take such drastic actions, then how far might he go to "protect" everyone, anyway? Hope it doesn't get close to that anti-cheeseburger thing (the Knight Templar fast food problem: "That cheeseburger might kill you via clogged arteries! I cannot allow you to consume it" - as seen in Darkwing Duck).
Still, my faith in Lota is largely borne out. If he does eventually go the Darth Lota route, it'll be because he's trying to do the right thing a little too extremely. Just not the supervillain type, and I'm glad.
Funny that Kevyn is making the logical fallacy there. LOTA didn't say that the weapon causes the situation. He's simply stating a correlation: a new superweapon is followed by a situation where someone decides that that weapon must be used. The situation may or may not arise whether the new weapon is there or not, but if you have both a new superweapon and a situation, the probability that the Generals will decide that the weapon must be used to solve the situation does approach 1.
edited 19th Dec '09 8:49:00 AM by Madrugada
*snort*
So Lota did have a good reason for them to be along after all...
Planescape Hijack
If I recall correctly, the reason is that it just took way too much energy to teraport to Andromeda from the Milky Way (found the relevant footnote
: "It just requires enormous amounts of power to open the requisite wormholes through the tiny hyperspatial volumes represented by those thin filaments of spiderweb. So much power, in fact, that it hasn't been done other than experimentally"). So hyperspace between galaxies was too "thin" to squeeze through without using a lot of power to "widen" it, but once inside Andromeda it seems like hyperspace is the same.
So the death ray would probably work, yeah.
Sunday's strip: And then Lota was a death ray.
Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count DorkuIt's just as well that they're running away
]: The Toughs seem to be really bad at working for the UNS (at least if you consider "making their employers happy" part of being good employees).
Track record:
- Installed Lota, a megalomaniac AI, as new king of Credomar, rather than any of the existing forces there.
- Helped Lunesby, a fugitive AI with a head for governing, escape from her pursuers, who probably had UNS backing.
- Helped Lota, still a megalomaniac AI likely still on bad terms with the UNS, bring a UNS superweapon up to usable condition and steal it for his own ends, depositing an entire city's population on a backwater planet.
The only thing they've done since going on UNS payroll that didn't piss off the UNS is repairing their ship, and I think they got the UNS to foot the bill for that.
Considering I hadn't figured it out yet, I'm gonna have to give Tagon points for being smarter than he looks
.
Also: ANOTHER TIME LOOP! Now that we know what's at stake once we rejoin the present I seriously hope this one's shorter than the last two. Though it's possible that this one will tie into what happened to the clone and the General.
PS: Out of respect for the respect Howard Taylor has given clones in this story, I refuse to use any monikers like "clone!Kevyn". He is not some alternate flavor of Kevyn, he's another person who happens to be pretty similar to Kevyn and happens to share his name.
Timothy Zahn spells the names of clones with a duplicate of a vowel that doesn't affect the pronunciation, so I'd go with Kevyyn.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOJust caught up on the last week or so.
Thoughts:
- The chronology of this storyline is really confusing me. I'm sure that's intentional.
- After what happened with LOTA, I think of every robot in this comic as a potential world-conquering megalomaniac. So even Tailor-Bot is unsettling me a little when the focus shifts to him.
- It feels kind of weird that thanks to time travel, we, the readers, know General Tagon much better than the characters do.
- YOUR CLONE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY NINJAS! ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE YOUR CLONE?
I have to admit, I absolutely freaking love it when one of the Toughs comments on someone else' lack of subtlety. You know there's collateral damage when even the infamous space mercs notice it.
- —> Thurl: "Whoever took him was not subtle."
- —> Kevyn: "Broken Furniture?"
- —> Thurl: "Craters."
Now that's a story hook.
edited 1st Jan '10 3:10:07 PM by TeChameleon
Bad ROE
(Rules of Engagement). I've been wondering just what their timid, wimpy employer rep expects of them. Look intimidating, and hope that's enough?
Planescape Hijack
Well, it is just mall security (IIRC), presumably they think letting them have weapons would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Of course, that raises the question of why they're hiring the Toughs in the first place. Extreme Genre Blindness, UNS plot, or maybe they just assume that the soldier boosts and power armor will be enough for them to deal with even armed attackers without causing too much collateral damage (almost reasonable, except, again: the Toughs).
edited 7th Jan '10 7:47:42 PM by Haven
Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count DorkuYou haven't missed it, Brickman, that bit of exposition hasn't happened yet. I've been wondering that myself, especially since the Toughs scare him.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. — George S. PattonIt's plainly obvious that their employer, at the least, has no idea of either how the toughs work or what they're capable of, armed or unarmed. Whether Tagon was already aware that they were weaponless and had decided that they could handle it anyways is to be revealed.
Also, note that this may not be a big mission on the surface. Schlock's team, after all, was officially hired to help with a police investigation, and Kevyn's team was hired as a mechanic and manual labor. They're taking whatever jobs are in the area while the ship's fixed up. Maybe this guy was just looking for ordinary security, and has the budget for ordinary security, but they took it anyways since the alternative was sitting on their asses.
Heh, "I don't think that it means what you want it to mean."
"We can take away his side arm, but that only makes him more likely to punch something." And their employer is clueless about the implications of a 12 megaPascal punch.
And we have a name at last, "Mr. Aliss"
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. — George S. Patton

Didn't Petey briefly teraport Breya to Andromeda at some point?
Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?