NP Wednesday August 17, 2016

[Stature 96]

http://www.egscomics.com/egsnp.php?id=500

Well, Vegeta crushed his visor, sooo....

Hey, 500!!

Alas, Ashley broke Pandora.

[WR...S 41]

...oh, crap... we have no reason to think Ashley isn't marked, do we?  There was no hint she was until now, but unlike Larry and Rich, she's never been around Luke... surely someone like her would have accidentally used her powers by now...

[mlooney 3,417]

So does this mean that Ashley has a mark to transform, or that Liz, her best friend got one but is to apathetic to find it and use it, or did Ashley get a mark to find transforms?

And if Ashley got it a year more or less ago, why hasn't she used it yet?  Or is that why she has no questions?  Is she part of Luke's group?  If so is she dating Elliot for less than honorable intentions?  Is Nanase right, she too nice?

Talk about throwing a chaos bomb into plots...

Pandora turns into the good guy in main, and Ashley now has a slight case of being a suspect now.

Dan, you are either a troll or a Magnificent Bastard.  Not sure which.

[Ranma_2k8 12]

Dan is after a logical explanation for the Scouters exploding when they detect a power level that is rising very rapidly.  As a long-time fan of DBZ (since the show was airing on Toonami with Bruce Faulconer's music back in the '90s and 2000s) I think I can provide one.  Simply put: The power levels it is sensing is rising at a speed and towards a number that the creator of the Scouter simply could not fathom was even possible.  In a universe where 10,000-15,000 put you among the elitest of the elites, someone suddenly powering up to 40,000 would be unthinkable.  Thus, with this power level rising at a pace the device simply wasn't programmed to handle, the circuitry shorts out, and poof, it explodes.

So it's not just "a cool visual indicator."  It's demonstrating that the person being Scouted has reached a level that the inventors and programmers of the Scouters didn't believe was possible.

Which means when Vegeta's power-up destroyed Zarbon's Scouter on Planet Namek, he literally broke science.

Just in case you needed another reason to find Vegeta awesome.

[exterminator 37]

Thing is, you have to be a spectacularly bad manufacturer to get circuitry that explodes when it shorts out. Assuming standard terran voltages, of course. At most it should just get burnt.

[ijuin 572]

On the scouters: Consider that even Master Roshi, who was capable of blowing up the Moon (which is a whole one-quarter of the diameter of the Earth) with the Kamehameha back during the first Tenka-ichi Budokai arc, had a power level only in the three hundreds. Even if the scale is linear (i.e. twice the number means twice the power), that means that anybody powerful enough to overload a Scouter is also powerful enough to smash planets into rubble easily. Anyway, since the two panels in today's comic are explicitly a "dramatization", I think that the effect to Pandora is rather like what happened to Luke when he used his aura-vision on Tedd and saw a blinding flash.

As for Ashley, this story is taking place just before Halloween, so two and a half months before the "present", which means that she has not yet met Elliot in person (only seen him in videos and from afar at school), and doesn't yet know about anybody who has transformation abilities. Her yearning for it must be strong indeed.

[mlooney 3,417]

Some day I need to watch some Dragon Ball Z.  I have been told that the finale of season 5 of MLP:FiM was like a DBZ show, and was Freaking Awesome.

[coredumperror 0]

It's super cool (and kind of surreal) to see a DBZ reference in EGS. I had no idea that Dan was into it.

Also, regarding scouters, there's a little-known fact about them that the author, Akira Toriyama, has only mentioned at a few anime cons: they were designed to be shitty (by the author, not the in-universe creators). Their entire purpose was to give the bad guys a reason to underestimate the good guys.

18 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Some day I need to watch some Dragon Ball Z.

When you get a chance to watch it, be sure to watch DBZ Kai. It's a condensed, slightly updated version of the anime, with all the filler taken out. For comparison, DBZ Kai tells the same story in 159 episodes that it took DBZ to tell in 291.

The reason for this is that the original anime was airing at the same time that the manga it was adapting was being written. When the anime caught up to the manga, it had to slow itself down to a crawl to avoid overtaking the manga and having nothing left to adapt. DBZ Kai takes out all the junk they added to slow the anime down.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

Why would the Scouters break loudly?

The Scouters were built by military contractors (that is, the lowest bidders) for the forces of Frieza.
Frieza believed himself to be the most powerful fighter in the universe, so there was no need to have scouters capable of processing levels higher than Frieza's.
Frieza did not want anyone, especially his own forces, to know exactly how powerful he was.  So the scouters his forces used should not have been capable of accurately displaying levels significantly above that of his own elite forces, or the most powerful enemies his forces had so far encountered.
And as the scouters were valuable military equipment, they included self-destruct features to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.  A sufficiently powerful overload could easily trigger that function.

Edit: Not Canon. Just a bit of extrapolation based on my own experience.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Pharaoh RutinTutin
Relevant detail added

[Waspinator 2]

The real question is why people voluntarily wear headgear that could explode.

[partner555 170]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

 

And if Ashley got it a year more or less ago, why hasn't she used it yet?  Or is that why she has no questions?  Is she part of Luke's group?  If so is she dating Elliot for less than honorable intentions?  Is Nanase right, she too nice?

 

Actually, it'd be a few months at most.

[mlooney 3,417]

23 minutes ago, partner555 said:

Actually, it'd be a few months at most.

Still doesn't change the questions.  Tedd used his spell within minutes of getting it, just as an example.

[Matoyak 51]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

Some day I need to watch some Dragon Ball Z.  I have been told that the finale of season 5 of MLP:FiM was like a DBZ show, and was Freaking Awesome.

If you do, I'd personally recommend stopping after the Cell Saga, in addition to watching Kai as CoreDumpError suggested.

[Drasvin 123]

My thoughts on the scouters exploding is that it would be like the instrument panels in Star Trek exploding. It shouldn't happen and there are likely safeties in place to prevent it from happening. That's how bad the damage/overload is. Basic safety features are unable to prevent catastrophic failure. As for how the scouter is able to explode from an overload instead of just shorting out, its ability to detect power levels might be dependent on a compound that is normally stable but undergoes explosive decomposition if subjected to enough hea or high enough voltage.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Drasvin

[Scotty 1,061]

Either Liz is the one that gets marked, or Dan's teasing us like he did with Larry and Rich and Ashley won't end up getting marked. the visor breaking could mean anything.

[Tom Sewell 268]

I think I know where "scouters" came from.

[Tom Sewell 268]

2 hours ago, Scotty said:

Ashley won't end up getting marked

I guess that The Shive setting up Ashley as being totally obsessed with transformation doesn't figure in at all.

2 hours ago, Drasvin said:

My thoughts on the scouters exploding is that it would be like the instrument panels in Star Trek exploding.

I don't think there were any instrument panel explosions in the original series, probably because they didn't have the budget. They relied on camera shakes and actors falling out of their chairs. When Roddenberry was asked why they didn't have seat belts, he said that if they did, the actors couldn't fall out of their chairs.

Roddenberry did actually try shooting a space battle with no battle sounds and no falling out of chairs. It came off like a damp squib. I'm wondering if it made it into the blooper reels; I haven't seen all of them.

[Aura Guardian 57]

8 hours ago, mlooney said:

Talk about throwing a chaos bomb into plots...

Well, Pandora *is* called Chaos....

[Don Edwards 548]

6 hours ago, mlooney said:

Still doesn't change the questions.  Tedd used his spell within minutes of getting it, just as an example.

Tedd knew that transformations are, in reality (well, EGS reality), possible. Ashley didn't.

[PSadlon 88]

12 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Tedd knew that transformations are, in reality (well, EGS reality), possible. Ashley didn't.

Tedd is also an anomaly in terms of magic.

Anyone else think this is a cool, exciting, and scary development.

[Scotty 1,061]

3 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

I guess that The Shive setting up Ashley as being totally obsessed with transformation doesn't figure in at all.

I'm not saying that Ashley isn't capable of being mark, transformation is something she's been into for years, so  all intents and purposes, Pandora could be seeing huge "mark me" signs over Ashley.

On the other hand, Pandora could be seeing something that says Ashley is destined for something else. Pandora has to have watched Elliot enough to know what he's like, and she's probably seen Elliot and Sarah's relationship struggling. Maybe she saw Ashley as a perfect match for Elliot and decided to play cupid?

[Tom Sewell 268]

37 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Maybe she saw Ashley as a perfect match for Elliot and decided to play cupid?

I can see Pandora playing cupid, but Elliot and Sarah are still together when this strip is taking place.  The fact that the story strip for today revealed that Pandora didn't know about the mall incident until the morning after suggests to me that Pandora didn't know Ashley and Elliot got together. In (main) story time, they only really met a few days ago. Pandora seems to have been focused on grand godson Tedd and her marks at the Friday card tournament. If Pandora is playing cupid, wouldn't she be watching the lovebirds?

[Vorlonagent 442]

A lot of us thought Ashley was going to get the gender-bender mark that went to Tedd...

[Scotty 1,061]

48 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

I can see Pandora playing cupid, but Elliot and Sarah are still together when this strip is taking place.  The fact that the story strip for today revealed that Pandora didn't know about the mall incident until the morning after suggests to me that Pandora didn't know Ashley and Elliot got together. In (main) story time, they only really met a few days ago. Pandora seems to have been focused on grand godson Tedd and her marks at the Friday card tournament. If Pandora is playing cupid, wouldn't she be watching the lovebirds?

Ok, maybe I should have filed that part under "Wild Theories", but Pandora's had all week (comic time) to observe Ashley's and Elliot's fateful meeting, plus I did say that Pandora could have been aware of the relationship issues Sarah and Elliot were having, Sarah had made at least Grace and Susan aware of them way back in April, and then brought it up again with Grace in June.

9 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

A lot of us thought Ashley was going to get the gender-bender mark that went to Tedd...

A lot of people also thought Ashley was Pandora.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

I am thinking Pandora has little interest in romantic activities of Sarah or Elliot unless they somehow affect Tedd.

But if that is the case, and Pandora took no offence to Sarah's low level flirting with Sam at the game, then Pandora does not think Sarah's interests have an impact on Tedd.

Pandora does not acknowledge or support the One True Threesome.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Pharaoh RutinTutin
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