Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)

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Nunavuter:
 :laugh:

It was good to see Jeph add a reference to Canadian Tire money in the strip. Just to clarify, the classic way Canadian Tire money worked was that it was included in your change when you bought things at a Canadian Tire store. It was not a complex 'rewards' system or a data-tracking scheme. The rate used to be 3% of the value of your purchases. So if you bought something that cost $10, you'd get 30 cents worth of Canadian Tire money along with your change. You could pay for your purchase entirely in Canadian Tire money, and get *more* Canadian Tire money in your change. The rate at which it is calculated now is 0.5%, so it isn't quite the deal it once was. Every junk drawer and car glove box in Canada has Canadian Tire money in it.

Fun fact: Canadian Tire money was accepted at some other stores --even a few bars -- back in its heyday.  It even showed up in Africa and other places, where it had been passed off by dishonest persons as actual Canadian money. The notes are quite professional looking, although the most common denomination is 5 cents they do go up to $1.

Is it cold in here?:
Welcome, informative new person!

Akima:

--- Quote from: A small perverse otter on 19 Apr 2017, 12:19 ---For what it's worth, that picture isn't of an advancing cold front, but of a derecho (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho). The characteristic wall cloud of an approaching derecho looks very different from the typical horizontal bands carried by an advancing cold front.
--- End quote ---
It appears that term is specific to North America, and I have never heard it used here. The Wikipedia article you link describes the derecho specifically as only occurring over land, whereas our walls of cloud extend well out to sea. The colloquial term here is "Southerly Buster", and we certainly get the weather conditions you ascribe to a derecho, but the Bureau of Meteorology describes the phenomenon we experience as being caused by a cold front sweeping up the coast from the south.

I'll defer to people with greater knowledge of physics on the effect of EMP weapons, and whether it would be possible, or useful, to tune them to specific targets. The question that occurred to me was more strategic/political. Who deployed Bubbles, and against what enemy? Bubbles tells us that the enemy deployed EMP weapons and artillery, as well as small-arms, which argues for a fairly sophisticated force, or at least one that is supplied with the products of a fairly sophisticated armaments industry, like the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, for example, with their Soviet-made artillery.

I think we can assume that Bubbles was deployed as part of a US Army unit (I suppose Marine Corps might be possible but Bubbles says "soldier", and Marines are sensitive about being called anything but Marines), or she wouldn't be at liberty in Northampton in the first place, so we know who put her into the field. Nothing in the comic has ever suggested that the QCverse USA is engaged in a war at all until Bubbles came along, never mind a major one against an industrial power, or even a proxy-conflict with the ally of a major power creating the social impact of the Korean or Vietnam Wars, for example, but Bubbles's experience doesn't suggest an irregular enemy like IS or the Taliban either. I suppose Creepybot and her associates might have provided a simply-operated EMP equivalent of an IED to a guerrilla force ("Put it over there and press this button when the enemy reaches that spot"), but I don't see them mass-producing artillery pieces.


--- Quote from: Case on 19 Apr 2017, 04:54 ---Methinks the hard part would then be to isolate those leads from her insides, if necessary, or design the leads such that they burn through on their own in case of a current surge.
--- End quote ---
Optical isolation would work, I think. That is, have the antennae outside the protective cage connected to some circuitry to convert the electrical signal into a modulated light-beam that is fed into a fibre-optic passed through the cage, and then convert the light-signal back into electrical inside.

brasca:
More than likely Bubbles knows what happened after reading the reports, but I have to wonder how incapacitated she was when the EMP hit her.  Maybe she was immobilized, but conscious which made the experience of watching her comrades get slaughtered and being powerless to do anything all the more traumatizing.  Such a thing would compel many to take the same drastic actions to remove those memories. 

Kugai:
They look cute together

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