Well, here you go, folks. Finally the crux of the thing – or part of it, at least.
Sorry this is late – I got a little sidetracked yesterday. And those TREADS! Good Lord. Mike always takes a long time to draw with those treads. On the upside, though I’m finally getting a little vacation. It’s definitely been a while, and I’ve had the chance to work on comics in a relaxed, non-stressful way, which is wonderful. I’m working, of course, on 6-Commando, but also on another book I started about a year ago, and, if I’m able, would like to have something to show for next year. And actually, if you’re interested in seeing it (and haven’t already seen it on my deviantArt page, or don’t feel like searching for that), you can also vote on topwebcomics.com and catch a glimpse of what’s in the works.
But don’t worry – 6-Commando remains job number one! Apart from, you know, my ACTUAL job.
Oy. What a thing. Anyway, though, if I don’t mention it again before then, Merry Christmas to all. Or if you prefer, a non-threatening, non-denominational seasonal vibe. All the best, folks!
Speaking of Mike was he made in Detroit and if not what is Detroit like still the sewer of America?
Detroit is a fine city in the world of 6-Commando. It’s Motor City in this world as well, a center of military production, headquarters of VAMTAC and OVC/Chrysler. Mike, however, was built in Iselin, New Jersey at the OVC Heavy Indsutry Military Systems plant.
So, Mike is like the better built version of ED-209
Maybe. If ED-209 were a thousand-ton tank programmed to uphold and defend the Charter of Nations against all enemies foreign and domestic.
You have 10 seconds to comply!
Well, ED-209 was basically a walking gun turret and Dick Jones flat out said he had garunteed military sales lines up, meaning it really was never meant to be a police unit, something it was blindingly obvious it would be terrible at, even without the host of design flaws.
To me, its easy to imagine the Rumblers having evolved out of something similar, like a man-sized gun turret on treads that over time grew to titanic size and probably having similar origins as a ‘Civil Urban Pacification Unit’
Mike is an analogy to the Bolo’s or real thinking tanks from the Keith Laumer universes of battle tech. Nuclear powered they eventually become continental siege units that could take on entire countries with just one unit. Some could also take out ships in low orbit, etc. depending upon their weapon’s packages. A logical development that would happen independently from interested people who think along those lines…
We don’t have anything close to Mike’s CPU. Though at best he is a Weak Artificial Intelligence which would be a human brain with the capacities of a computer. I would wonder how they accomplished that so early. Maybe Babbage did marginally better in those A-Lines than in ours. And the British did not first deform, then kill that genius and patriot of theirs Turing got far better treatment and lived a longer life might have also contributed to this technology that succeeded where we have failed.
Maybe Ada Lovelace didn’t get uterine cancer and so lived a few more decades, collaborating with Babbage (maybe even financing him). That would have given comp sci *quite* a jump start – about a century ahead of our line.
“Well, that’s more complicated.”
Nothing is ever really simple when it comes to Mike 🙂
Sapience is a very complicated thing. 😉
Laser triggered fusion… just like the “National Ignition Facility” in California; they have to be approaching this problem from a different angle.
Any laser powerful enough to brute force that kind of fusion, in a package that compact, could itself be used to do something like this: https://youtu.be/QZIvstegsmI?t=10m20s
Well, Mike has (or had) a laser that had serious power at the core of the beam, enough to act as an effective antimissile and anti-aircraft system. But on the other hand, they don’t have orbital lasers. Or orbital weapons of any kind. Or any kind of space program at all. Their interest in space technology was radically stunted by an early Cold War and repeated brushfire conflicts over the last century – their attitude being “We have too many problems here on Earth, why waste money on space?”
Untill someone points out you could drop nukes from space anywhere on the surface of the planet, as was one of the very first things anyone thought of using space technology for.
That also means there is no equivelent of the Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the deployment of WMDs in space.
Or an Ion Cannon/SOL unit. But remember, lasers, space weapons, etc. are no panacea, either. They’re good for local defense and line-of-sight stuff, or early warning, but a single missile could be (and in this world, is) loaded with literally thousands of decoys, chaff bits, aerosol grenades, etc., to overload defense targeting systems.
Intrestingly Ion Cannons or orbital lasers would be perfectly legal under the outer space treaty, as are kinetic kill weapons, since the outer space treaty defines WMDs by the ABC triumverate of Atomic, Biological and Chemacal weapons, but since kinetic kill weapons were never seriously envisioned when the treaty was drawn up, they remain a potential loophole for anyone wanting to devise an orbital WMD.
The were plans for space weapons power by a nuclear explosion to direct HE beams from space on surface targets. I don’t know if they ever had the theory down and testing (such as it could be) to show any feasibility to the concept.
Ah yes the KK weapons are still on the table. Liked seeing them as a COBRA checkmate in the second movie. One of the few things I liked about it. Hidden in fake weather sats until revealed to be used.
We already know that anti satellite weapons have been tested, and just maybe deployed. Russia and China along with the US lagging.
LASERs being photon streams in a mono-wave set can be deflected. The big draw back. Also not so good in the air when they can be interfered with by anything in the air including the air! Maybe particle weapons could but we are talking major energy consumption scales here. We would need fusion reactors just for such devices. Several devices conceived during World War 2 that were only held back by the power requirements to have a chance of being effective. The Japanese built a microwave cannon but was seriously under powered. They knew about the effects microwaves can have on biology, both animal and human.
Wow, laser-detonated fusion bombs? We can’t even get laser-fusion to yield net energy yet. If they can trigger a self-fueling fusion reaction using equipment and power supply that can fit in a warhead, wouldn’t that mean that the fusion-power problem has been solved? Electricity too cheap to meter!
Something else about fusion that has always bothered me is its common representation in fiction as a “miniature sun”. Just because it’s the heat-source for the sun doesn’t mean that fusion power will cause something to behave like a star. Any sufficiently large release of energy will shine with “the light of a thousand suns” regardless of whether it’s chemical, kinetic, nuclear or thermal.
A much better fusion-specific analogy would be “Lightning in a Bottle”, since all fusion-power schemes involved the containment of high-energy plasma. This wouldn’t necessarily be applicable to a bomb though, whose materials must be dense and stable in order to be useful.
Getting back to the triggering mechanism for a pure-fusion warhead, I don’t think a laser would work. Laser induced fusion is actually just a form of shockwave implosion and required a very powerful external laser. For a large-scale bomb, a more feasible detonator is actually something based off of an EMP.
Anyways, those are my nitpicks. Any author on any subject will always find readers who have an excess of knowledge in any particular detail the author wishes to describe. Literally impossible to please everybody.
I don’t think pure EMP would work. You’d have to turn the fusing material into plasma first in order for the EMP to have any sort of effect, as EMP doesn’t do anything to ordinary deuterium. A combination of laser implosion and EMP might work, but it sounds far fetched to me.
And on the note of power generation, well, we’ve had uncontrolled fission explosions before economical fission power…
I don’t want to over-comment on things, but they have lasers in this world that are considerably more advanced than ours. Mike had one, for example, before it was wrecked in combat, and there’s a variant of the Sentinel tank called the ZR-1000 “Skylance” that uses a similar laser weapon. Flash plasma reactions aren’t beyond their abilities, from a technical standpoint. But that’s only one part of the puzzle – making Fusion work is well more complex than just starting the reaction, even an uncontrolled one.
For fusion the problem is sustaining that reaction and controlling it so it won’t go out or maybe expand. Seems to be the one that keeps getting away for 50 years and we wait 50 more in the mean time. Still Solar Power doesn’t translate readily to weapons. Fusion could as a power source. In fact if they adapted it to being generators of energy would be much cheaper——-in the long run. The more you build etc. And possible of smaller and larger sizes. Though with the ongoing wars they put them in battleships and TAV bombers, and other military equipment like say Mike. (Was Mike built by GM by any chance? Laumer’s Bolos were.)
I’m not a nuclear weapons expert, but Wikipedia has been quite helpful. Modern thermonuclear weapons (at least, in our world) require a 2-stage fission-fusion detonation. A “primary” fission implosion creates a lot of energy, which sets off the “secondary” fission implosion around the fusion warhead. After that, as a great man once said, you get “one mucho big bang!” Check it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
There’s lots of ways to build a bomb. You could have an A-bomb that detonates and releases neutrons to prime a fusion reaction. You could have a “sloika” or “layered” bomb that primes a small fusion reaction that then primes a succession of fission and fusion layers in turn. You can “boost” a fission reaction with a sub-critical fusion shell. I believe we’ve even tried “pure fusion” in our world as well, but found it too difficult to prime the reaction. Assuming they’ve managed to create a neutral-particle beam or super-high-energy laser to direct lots of energy at the target in a very short time, it would be possible – that’s something we’ve never managed to do in our world. But they do have lasers in this world – better lasers than we have.
Well, it’s true it’s not a direct analogy – it certainly won’t have a gravity well or a self-containing mass sphere like a star. But it is a single localized non-directional source of intense heat generated by elemental hydrogen plasma in a fusion state, so in common parlance it’s the best analogy Major Rucker can use. Lightning is a similar plasma but it’s electrically charged and follows electron flow lines, so therefore it’s directional in a way a fusion bomb is not.
Lasers or particle beams are just a way of starting the reaction in a single place, to generate enough power to sustain the reaction. The whole thing would have to occur in minuscule fractions of a second to work. And we’ve never managed to do that in our world for lack of a powerful enough prime energy source. An EMP source like a Z-Pinch is possible but as I’ve mentioned above, they already have practical high-energy lasers in this world, so that’s the route they took.
Lasers…. ugh. No. Just no. Power source, density, useful conversion efficiency around 10%. Also, you’d need dozens of these magic lasers to englobe the hohlraum (or whatever). You’d have been better off saying something along the lines of “superconductors led to effective x-ray/gamma/neutron reflectors”. That way you could dump more energy onto the T-U second stage a lot faster, making the 1st stage smaller (and thus effectively inconsequential, design-wise). That’s what I’d have gone with. Lasers for missile defense aren’t even in the same order-of-magnitude as pure fusion. Not to mention that all that precision engineering to get the lasers “just right” would make laser/fusion bombs stupid expensive… Still, the real question remains: What’s left (in Africa?) that rates multiple 40Mt candy-grams from our favorite caterpillar-tracked apocalypse??
Well, again, I don’t want to overcomment, because there are still things I don’t want to give away. But in our world, you’d be right that lasers wouldn’t be a good idea. But in the 6-Commando universe, they are capable of making robust and portable lasers so it’s not a bad bet for them. And also, Major Rucker only knows the basics of what’s going on with the missiles – a laser somehow sets the thing off. He’s not a physicist – he’s giving the simple version.
I will admit I find it a little amusing that in the equation of a pure fusion missile carried by a thousand ton sapient tank with a gel computer brain, it’s the physics of the fusion warhead that make you stop short. 😉
Hope this won’t turn you off, though – but then, people have stopped reading the comic for less than this.
“Uncanny Valley” effect. Super-Tanks and AI = suspension of disbelief. Nukes are known real world (unfortunately!). Oh, and don’t worry about any off switch. I’m along for the ride. My only real problem with 6-Commando involves “disposable income”. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.
Oh I found it! This was a comment I composed when you first mentioned physics, then forgot about:
Possibilities, in descending order of likelyhood:
1) The South Americans misplaced a decimal point in their yield calculations.
2) The South Americans are lying about their yield calculations.
3) The French in this world defined the ton as something a lot smaller.
4) Their definition of “megaton” is in mass of Mentos-&-Pepsi, not TNT.
5) They’re really trapped inside Mike’s Matrix, and he’s reprogrammed their
brains to believe all this.
6) The South Americans invented a miracle x-ray/gamma-ray/neutron mirror.
7) The South Americans discovered (and are using) magnetic monopoles.
8) The South Americans have hi-power lasers that can trigger fusion directly.
9) Antimatter.
🙂
It’s the “Bike Shed” phenomenon. People smile and nod about things beyond their understanding, but the moment something is within reach of their knowledge? BAM! I have strong opinions on the matter!
Committee approving a new highrise with a novel elevator organization system?
-Yeah, sure, sounds reasonable.
With a blue bike shed next door for tenants?
-Wouldn’t red fit better with the overall color scheme? No way, red is too agressive, it should be green to fit with the environmental theme of bicycles.
As an architect I’m sure you’ve never had to deal with this before…
Me? Deal with it! Only every day of every week for ten years. 😀 but it’s all part of the show, man. And in the comic, having a technically-minded and perceptive readership has consistently put me one to two pages behind the level of understanding you either have or want to have of what I’m doing in the story. But I wouldn’t have it any other way – keeps me fresh.
great page 🙂
Thanks! Those tank treads… Whoo! 🙂
Someone set us up the bomb?
Wow, now Things get exciting. I can’t wait to see how this will evolve. And Keep that in mind: The Russian Killa-Kans also turned sentient (at least that’s the impression I got).
Sorry for being a stranger lately. I check back every Monday morning to read the new strips, but thanks to work and some other issues I didn’t have the time or energy to discuss the novel. I hope this will change soon.
Enjoy the holidays, people! And thanks for being awesome. 🙂
You win for that one! The South Americans set us up the bomb!
Merry Christmas, man!
Oh hell no! Lasers do not have that kind return of energy radiated on investment to be used as Fusion Bomb igniters. Fusion reactors? Sure. Bombs? Go rather with Anti-Matter Ignition devices for Pure Fusion bombs.
Hell no, it won’t go? Maybe, maybe not. I hope you’ll hang in there and see what I’m on about with all this.
Lasers may be a dud for pure fusion in our world, but maybe not in theirs. But this is a drama, not a physics dissertation. Major Rucker is a tank commander, not a laser induction specialist, so saying “they use a laser to set themselves off” is not a comprehensive explanation of the system being used.
Anti-matter now that is some power. 100% matter to energy conversion. In one Star Trek episode, “Obsession” we got to see what a half kilogram of antimatter would do if it is detonated on a planet’s surface. The one with the new special effects shows the crater and the now low atmosphere content of a formally M class planet after it was detonated. Too much power there as a weapon.
Except that ST/Obsession did not get it right (no surprise there). AM isn’t magic; a half kilo of AM would *only* be 22 megatons; smaller than the bombs mentioned here. Even with complete conversion you can only get as much energy out of the matter as is *in* the matter. Check this out for details, and to play with the numbers: http://www.edwardmuller.com/index.php?Page=calculator
Thanx for the information. I shall use it and update my knowledge that I should have done long before.
Out of curiosity: how has this world managed to avoid developing multi-stage thermonuclear? The potential of using an atomic weapon to ignite a fusion reaction was obvious too everyone on the Manhattan Project well before the first fission warhead was completed and would be too any nuclear scientist working in the ATL equivalent. From there, it’s only a matter of time until they stumble on various fusion-weapon designs. If not full Teller-Ulam devices, then more intermediate fusion-boosted designs like the Layer-Cake and others…