The Nightstar Zoo

Okay, Gavcorp may have a few bugs to work out of the Transmogrifier.

Also, that was hilarious.

I'm glad you liked it.

I love toning the violence down by using silhouettes. It makes the blood richer, redder, and gorier, because that's what you're imagining.

--Howard

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

Oh, he managed to draw blood? I was assuming that was mostly chassis debris.... his body LOOKS mostly intact..... I think I see a head and all four limbs.

I suspect what you think is a head is actually the stretched out remnants of a neck, spurting blood from the place where the head used to be.

hmmm... could be. Now I'm starting to wonder how that final fling of the waldo-arm worked.... his head was crushed, his arm must have gone limp and started to fall.... i wonder how the interface worked? was it integral to the cockpit, so his dead arm lost control once the catapulting process took his body clear of the mech? otherwise, I'd expect some more flailing as his body continued to move.....

That was wonderfully random and hilarious. Obviously, all Gav-Clones are not created with equal competence.

Yep, even in the 31st century (in the Schlockiverse at least) overconfidence + heavy machinery = almost guaranteed fatality.

Good thing there are plenty more Gavs to go around.

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The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

I'm reminded of an old quote by a soldier from the swordslinging days, warning about disregarding a dead opponent, and saying that even beheaded, the human body has one good strike left in it.

It's possible that when the arm started crushing, Binnie started a panicked fling of his arm, either to ward off the gian metal hand, or to get the crushing grasp away from him using the waldoes. Unfortunately, he didn't let go beforehand, and the panicked arm motion that was meant to save him instead ensured his death.

Heh, Binnie is a robot booger.
He had the programmed skills but apparently not the programmed experience.
Ah well. Plenty more where that came from. Looks like the Binnie identity is up for grabs again.
Let's hope the next one is given more information.

That is a sweet looking robot rig.

All the best artists (authors, cartoonists, directors,etc.) leave something to the imagination. Try watching Alien and actually counting the total seconds the critter is on screen prior to the lifeboat scene, it is amazingly small.

going to be a pain to recruit more Gav's though... "We can now inform you that in the first week, one in five hundred of you will recieve incomplete or contradictory programming, which will result in your death the first time you face violence or operate heavy machinery"

Makes you wonder how good Gus's reactions will really be the first time he gets shot at or needs to use kung fu.... At this point, I'd say there's a decent chance he either fails to properly identify a threat, and thus delays too long before taking the neccessary action, or else outright kills the first person to do anything remotely threatening.

That's the justification I'm using. He got a hold of his own head, panicked, flailed, and didn't actually sever his brain stem until the end of the swing.

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

Ah, the "pith"y humor is just beginning.

makes sense... he sees a huge metal hand coming towards his face, he makes a fist and moves his arm to block the intruder.... and as his head gets snapped out of the cage and his body pivots to the left, his left elbow and fist go limp, which completes the catapult motion.... yeah, i can see that.

You got the consequences exactly right, too. I have a friend who maintains robotic systems for an automotive manufacturer. These robots don't just paint the car or weld on bumpers. They have robotic fork lifts that run on a track and go into the warehouse, pick up a 1,000 pound engine & transaxle asembly and transport it back to the installation site. If anybody happens to get in the way, just imagine a bug on the windshield. Of course, the track has a laser fence around it, but it can't be perfectly solid, and Murphy declares that any body part that happens to intrude will do so between the beams. Add in the fact that the "batteries" in the Schlockiverse hold about as much power as the Hiroshima bomb (and that's just for the flashlights), shake, stir, and you have the recipe for instant disaster. Then, of course, there's Murphy's Law Of Thermodynamics: "Things always get worse under pressure."

I've been doing some calculations. They're rough, and based on the statements that Oisri is about the size of Earth's moon and 1.2 times Earth's mass. I've also used the assumption that the core is degenerate star material with a density (calculated) of about 3.7*10^17 kg/M³:

Body Mass (E) Mass (kg) Radius (M) Volume(M³)
Oisri 1.2000 7.168E+24 1.737E+06 21.953E+18
Earth 1.0000 5.974E+24 6.371E+06 1.083E+21
Luna 0.0123 73.475E+21 1.737E+06 21.953E+18
Oisri Core 1.1877 7.095E+24 166.042E+00 19.175E+06

As you can see, if the core of Oisri is Neutronium (or degenerate star matter, to be precise), the vast majority of Oisri's mass is concentrated in a sphere with a radius of 166 meters. Using Newton's Law of Gravitation (which would underestimate things), one kilogram on the "surface" of Oisri's core would be subject to a force of 17.175E+09 Newtons, compared to 9.84 Newtons on the surface of the Earth, for a surface gravity of 1,745,000,000 G. Give or take a gnat's whisker. If the gravity shielding fails for even a millisecond, the people on the surface might survive; a human in good physical shape blacks out at 15 Gees; logically, soldier-boosts would include Gee-Tolerance. I'd guess that it'd be possible for purely biological boosts to keep someone concious and able to order "helmet" and "Gee-protection" up to 30 Gees or so. Since the suits can protect from falls of hundreds of meters, I'd guess that's pretty automatic anyway, and Howard has said suit inertiics are capable of "hundreds of gees." Of course, pulse-power is not constant power; typical engineering ratios are 5:1 to 10:1, so if we assume a suit can handle a surge of 500 Gees, it could realistically handle 50-100 Gees continuous, as long as the batteries hold out. Then again, it wouldn't take much power to sustain a static gravity shield; the power comes when you have to move--it all has to do with work functions. If you put a brick on a table, the table doesn't do any work holding up the brick. As you increase the gravity, the brick does work on the table. It's the gravity change which does the work. Thus, standing still would only drain your power at the rate caused by inefficiency. Walking along wouldn't use power much faster. Climbing stairs would eat power; going down would gain energy, but it might not be storable (the suits may not be able to create Neutronium). Actually, to be exactly correct, moving up would increase your potential energy of position relative to the gravitational field; going down would decrease it. Falling would convert potential energy into kinetic energy. This is why objects which fall to Earth do not decreacrese the Earth's gravity field, but this doesn't violate the Law Of Conservation Of Energy. Fields aren't energy sources; position & velocity relative to a field represent energy. The same rule holds for electrostatic and electromagnetic (in fact, all of quantum chromodynamic) fields.

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"A sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
"Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
Jack L. Chalker
"Magic is just another way of saying 'I don't know how it works.'"
Larry Niven

The problem I see here, is that if the vehicle is copying the movements of the driver, the robot arm should have reached into the empty space above the vehicle's "shoulders". Binnie's head wasn't mounted on the front of his chest.

The problem I see here is that some folks look for problems rather than solutions. Instead of telling yourself "that couldn't have happened because," you should be telling yourself "that happened in spite of..." and then asking yourself the question "why?"

Show some imagination! Be creative!

For instance, have you ever used a tablet in which the aspect ratio was different than the aspect ratio of the monitor to which it was connected? The result is that when you draw a circle on the tablet the mouse draws an ellipse on screen. It's annoying when it's not supposed to work that way, but there are situations where it's actually useful.

It may be programmable (like the annoying tablet I used to have) and perhaps Binnie toggled "moment arm correction" to "off."

Don't make me explain everything. I'm trying to tell a story here.

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

Yeah the waldo wasn't a proportioned exactly like a human, so it's movements wouldn't map perfectly onto the driver's anyhow.
Also he could have been leaning in his seat a bit which would make the sensors read his hand position as farther to the middle than intended. Issue resolved.

Don't Annie plants use neutronium for fuel? The core might just be enormous annie plant.

As for the gravity, I reached about the same conclusions you did; it depends on the boosts and how the armor is designed. The gavs would probably be dead, though; not only would they lose consciousness but even falling over in 16gs would probably risk mortal injury. Another question is the planet itself; if the ground itself is really accumulation, we can assume it accumulated during the reduced gravity field. A sudden switch to 16g might make the crust itself buckle.

Gavcorps supply is already compromised, and the Waldoes are specifically programmed to take control of Oisri and kill of the Gavs... starting with their operators.

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If I am what I eat... Don't ask what I eat.

if nothing else, the metal 'fingers' are quite a bit wider than Bennies fingers. If he makes a pincer gesture which touches the tip of his nose, the waldo fingers will overlap by a few inches onto his head. If he makes a fist in front of his face, half the waldo fist will be crushing his head.

so, he accidentally starts to 'grab' his own head, and when he moves his arm to 'block' the metal intruder, he closes his fist first, rather than opening his fist first.... so the waldo finishes grabbing his head and copies the blocking motion.

Hey, I've got a great idea: Considering humans obviously can't handle even the intellectual parts of heavy lifting, let's build a robot to do it!

I cannot POSSIBLY be the only one who presumed this mishap was a due to a) Sabotage, b) Subversion or c) Deliberate memory tampering

This is because I was under the impression that the can doesn't just dump memories in your head, it gives you entire experiences. Maybe several lifetime's worth. This dead Gav should have had not just the memories of learning how to use a waldo, but memories of actually using one, memories of having accidents in one, going on certification courses, memories of gouging claw marks (or the possibility of such) in the windshield because he absentmindedly scratched his head. What exactly is this procedure/device doing to them, if not all of the above? At the very least, in that kind of situation your first reaction should be to freeze, then slowly move your hand away from your head. A "certified waldo puppetmaster" should not only know this like he knows how to breathe, he should have done this uncountable times before. Maybe even taught other people before, if we're talking about the full experience.

Thus, somebody got him, and got him good.

Also in my WAG evidence bag: The fact that this is a strip featuring two random Gavs, one of whom kills himself in an extremely unlikely manner, in the middle of a sentence. All that panicking and then decapitating himself is conjecture, we don't actually see it. As far as i'm concerned the robot chose the perfect moment to mask it's murder as a suicide.

And there you have it, the Gavs have been compromised. Thank you, and Goodnight

BANG BANG!

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"You think you know munitions? Darling you don’t know jack. What do you know about micro-missiles and nerve disruptors? What do you know of micro-janglers and variable grenades? Have you ever seen an e-dust commando? No? Well come talk to me when you earn your claws. It’s a big universe out there and most of it is trying to kill you already."

'Big' Kat Mikkelson to John. J. Johnson on his first day at boot camp.

Also, now I wonder how you'd walk with a Waldo. After all, there's only a limited amount of space in the cockpit. Are the puppetmaster's feet suspended above the ground somehow?

It does make you wonder whether it wouldn't be easier to run the Waldo with a suit that provides feedback from the bot's senses, possibly in a sensory deprivation tank. And put in a few safety interlocks that remove the ability to harm yourself (or the bot) the way Binnie did. But then again, judging by the three panels of characterization that Mr "I'm a certified Waldo master" received he probably overrode them the first chance he got...
Alternatively, the Gavs may still retain a "theoretical work = important, manual work = irrelevant" attitutde from before the Can and went with the lowest bidder on their heavy lifting equipment.

@mesmorino
Um... I think that's your "rig my robots to explode when sneezed at!" again. Never attribute to malice and so on...

I think mesmorino may be on to something with the memory tampering. If the UNS wanted to take over the base, Pi's method is close to but not quite the most efficient method - suborning the transmogrifier and thus suborning the differentiated Gavs is the way to go. That would give the UNS not just Osiri, but an entire complement of trained personnel with the knowledge and skills needed to study it. That doesn't seem to have happened (unless there's some sort of "sleeper" programming), but it could well be that a touch of incompetence and/or overconfidence have been added to sabotage any efforts to effectively defend Osiri.

Yeah, but the transmogrifier doesn't actually 'copy' someone else's memory, and just overwrite their personality onto yours. Every piece of experience and training including 'in the can' was programmed there, as a customized 'skin', by a Gav who considered himself qualified to program skins into the Can.

The simplest explanation is that Can-programmers are not quite as good at programming other people's lives as they think they are: Thus, either they left out a few key pieces of training when they created the 'waldo-puppeteer' template, or they left out a few key pieces of training when they created the 'waldo designer and engineer' template.

Or, alternately, they made an even simpler mistake: Maybe the Gav who built the waldo recieved the memories of a milspec engineer from an alien nation, who is used to waldo design requirements where the waldo must be able to reach into it's own compartment.

Then, the Gav who got the waldo-operator memories, recieved the memories of an earth civilian, who is used to waldos that have specific safeties, preventing the waldo from reaching into the compartment.

Cross-reference the two templates, and you get a disaster.

If I remember right, most altered Gavs take multiple pass thoughs of the Can. So is it possible that there was just a conflict between the memories of his skills and a personality overlay that made him too cocky and also potentially panicky?

I agree with mesmorino that this is malice, not stupidity... and I'm thinking subversion of the waldoes. Don't forget that the god of the Schlockiverse is a malevolent one.

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If I am what I eat... Don't ask what I eat.

Weeeelll, when you put it THAT way it sounds far fetched (more than it already is lol), but it's not malice from the Gavs themselves, it's malice from an unknown third party. Like the one that built whatever it is they're currently digging into.



This epic chain of disasters is incredible and far more entertaining than my overly convoluted subversion theory, and it's only slightly less likely! The most important phrase is "... by a Gav who considered himself qualified...". The bit about mixing up waldos and histories and expectations is that at the very least you should know what model of waldo you're qualified for. Okay, assuming both models are able to reach into the cockpit, and the milspec models generally have such safety interlocks disabled, I would have thought that a basic preflight/safety checklist was standard. If such a list is not standard, or it was and the dead Gav disabled such in order to show off, or the safeties were disabled and he didn't notice, or there were no safety interlocks in the first place and he negligently assumed there were... And let's not forget, this is a person who by all accounts is not just capable of operating the device but is actually competent at it... And was already reasonably intelligent before even getting his new skills...

There are just too many hurdles to go through. He would have to have been extremely stupid, or been deceived. The stupid part is hilarious, but for me "they've been had" is a simpler explanation

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"You think you know munitions? Darling you don’t know jack. What do you know about micro-missiles and nerve disruptors? What do you know of micro-janglers and variable grenades? Have you ever seen an e-dust commando? No? Well come talk to me when you earn your claws. It’s a big universe out there and most of it is trying to kill you already."

'Big' Kat Mikkelson to John. J. Johnson on his first day at boot camp.

Possible? Of course! Probable? I'd say slightly (relative to the current theories of sheer stupidity vs outside interference)

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"You think you know munitions? Darling you don’t know jack. What do you know about micro-missiles and nerve disruptors? What do you know of micro-janglers and variable grenades? Have you ever seen an e-dust commando? No? Well come talk to me when you earn your claws. It’s a big universe out there and most of it is trying to kill you already."

'Big' Kat Mikkelson to John. J. Johnson on his first day at boot camp.