Grrl Power #655 – The Robotech
Given how powerful those orbs are, the screw ship aliens might actually have good cause to attack Sydney. Imagine them in the hands of someone who was out to actually cause a bunch of mayhem. And presumably had 4 or more hands.
For those of you unaware of Sydney's reference, there was an amazing show called Robotech, which more or less introduced me to proper anime. I had seen G-Force and Speed Racer and Voltron, but that stuff was much more childish. Robotech had a serialized story, dialog spoken at a regular human pace *coughspeedracercough* and amazing music to boot. Hearing the opening theme to this day show gives me a serious nostalgia boner. Some of you will know it as Macross. Robotech was apparently three different anime series bought by Harmony Gold and then translated and dubbed to make them all one long story. Purists of course hate this but I didn't know any better when I watched it and I thought it was incredible.
ANYWAY. One of the things Robotech was famous for, especially the first season (Macross) was these panoramic shots of distant explosions ripping across the sky, just like Sydney has managed to pull off here. Hence the reference. The last time I checked, Robotech was available on Netflix, and is worth checking out if you've never seen it. Imagine that you're 12 and this is the first thing like it you've ever seen. It was pretty damned amazing.
A lot of people have questions about the physics behind Sydney's flight capabilities. The short version is that she's currently limited to Mach 4, which granted in most cases is like being limited to only having $4 million dollars in your bank account, but an important factor is that she is immune to gravity while using it, so things like escape velocity aren't a factor for her. She can just fly straight up and doesn't have to worry about slingshotting around stuff.
I say "immune to gravity" but of course, she's only tested it out against 1G. (We can assume the Alari homeworld is within 10% of Earth's gravity.) If I were her, I wouldn't go buzzing any neutron stars quite yet.
Thinking about that more, I had originally thought that her speed was fixed once she tops out at mach 4, and it'll definitely stay that way in the atmosphere, (unless she buys a speed upgrade, obviously) but in space" maybe it makes sense that she can accelerate indefinitely. 1G of acceleration is pretty fast, according to some math I found after a quick google, you could get to the moon in like 3.5 hours, half of it spent accelerating, and half spent decelerating. With 4 dots filled in on her flight tree, I'd actually give her 16Gs of acceleration, which would almost be like that scene in Futureama where Leela flies to the moon before Fry can finish counting down from 10. Ok, not actually that fast, but still pretty god damned fast. It makes me appreciate those Honor Harrington books with ships that could accelerate at 450-500 gravities.
Max never tested Sydney's Extrosphere flight capabilities. That's a word, right? It should be. Anyway, maybe Sydney's speed does work like that, in which case it would probably make more sense for her to Mach 4 straight up till she hits space, then G-boost across and back down, if she ever has to make a cross country trip. Even with that kind of speed, I think the previous page holds up. Sydney wasn't headed toward the moon long enough to close appreciable distance to it.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.