Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.
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How Panglossian. Nick is very Candide in his frustration, though.
Just how low was Nick flying and/or how huge was that Leviathan for it to be able to get ahold of him?
Almost as low as the the police helicopters in my neighborhood, I’d imagine.
Doesn’t an aircraft with stopped propellers which has just broken free of that… thing… promptly fall into the sea? And just as promptly sink, given the bloody big hole it has?
Probably didn’t actually stop the props, just didn’t crank up the pitch to get more thrust to try to pull free. Just used enough to keep hovering.
Helicopter propellers don’t really ever really get “stopped”, they continue to spin freely even if you cut the engine.
This allows you to perform what is called an “autorotation”, a slightly complex bit of physics where you slow your descent by manually controlling the angle of the blades of the propellers themselves.
(I presonally recommend anyone who is interested to check out the “Smarter Every Day” video series for great explanations on helicopters and autorotations – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTqu9iMiPIU )
That said, Nick clearly isn’t performing an autorotation here. It looks like he’s somehow actually stopped his rotors from spinning, which is not normally possible for a helicopter.
While the V-22 is technically capable of autorotation, the fact that its rotors have low inertia means that with a complete loss of power, the rotors would slow down and stop quicker than with a conventional helicopter. That unfortunately means that a complete loss of power at less than 1600 ft is not likely to be survivable.
It should also theoretically mean that the rotors can be brought back up to flight speed quicker than normal as well (if you have only cut power to the rotors, as opposed to dual engine failure), but I’d hate to be the guy testing that theory, particularly over the ocean.
Anyone with actual experience with an Osprey, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.
How does he even feel that?
Sensors
With a human brain running the show, it’s going to interpret sensor data as physical sensation… IMHO, that is.
Not to mention there may be some amount of panicking involved. No matter how much experience you have, there are just some things you can never prepare for.
And even if he’s not actually feeling any pain, there’s got to be a bunch of warnings and error messages being thrown up, which probably amounts to the same thing.
I’d totally design the interface so that Nick could feel pain. His brain already has a perfectly good mechanism for providing negative feedback; why waste it?
I’d also give Nick a non-emergency shutoff switch for that, because I’m not a monster.
Surely anybody who knows Nick would want him to feel pain.
You got that backwards. Anyone Nick knows, he wants them to feel pain.
Quite well, thank you.
Or quite thoroughly?
Or quite intensely?
So there are 100 universes in the multiverse or is that just how many where they experience this particular timeline? I’ve heard the number of dimensions put as 3, 11 or infinite.
The amount of universes may well be infinite, but Jonah isn’t. Chances are he can only view a cross-section of the multiverse. By his own admission, his future-sight is quite finicky. He’s no Doctor Manhattan.
Alternatively, since smaller infinities can be nested in larger infinities the odds that the timelines where Jonah still exists is a smaller infinity is pretty good. My best guess is that 99 is the number of universes where Nick suited action to words before Jonah could say anything. @_@
Yu just did a rough calculation based on infinity minus one universes. You are looking at more than one comic here, with maybe only one you can see that happens to be within your visual wavelength, where Yu says “99”. My computer shows Yu’s number as plrx.
The swear filter’s a bad speller. Should be “nematode” with an “a.”
Nick’s never been one to use good grammar. No reason he should bother with spelling correctly. 😉
And if Nick pronounces it incorrectly, it only stands to reason that it would be printed the way he says it, rather than the way it’s supposed to be.
Shelby’s says it’s a five o’clock stop,
With the gang of buffoons thinking funny it’s not.
Let them see water snake is strong.
What’s done is done, hereupon.
In airspace. slug from somewhere,
Scream in terror, “Something’s out there!”
Flying over ocean high,
Ninety-nine universes go by.
—from “99 Red Balloons,” Nena.
If you’re having your skin peeled I feel bad for you, son.
We’re dead in 99 realities but this ain’t one.
…And I don’t know the song well enough to take that any further.
Then they picked the right one. Good start, but my lyrics aren’t enough to continue, either.
Did anyone else not get the update until around 1100hrs Pacific time?
Well, they weren’t in my GoComics email this morning, either.
I checked around 3 am Eastern and didn’t see it yet. The first comment was at 3:44am Eastern, ten minutes before my first one.
The nice thing about getting broadband back after Hurricane Maria is that I got to read a month’s worth of Skin Horse all in one go.
Wow. A month. I only lost internet for six days from Irma. (And phone and cable.)
The optimist says this is the best of all worlds; the pessimist fears he’s right.
According to Jonah, they both have valid points. According to Nick, that is sufficient cause to curse at the universe at large.