Tue, 26 November 2024
This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history. If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass extinction events that ended almost all life a few times on this planet. In the history of humanity we have the fall of Rome, an event that was felt for almost 1000 years in Western Europe! It ended technological development, scientific research, the progress of culture, communication, trade, and production were shut down. Development atrophied and technology reversed and reverted. Meanwhile in Northern Africa, the middle east, South America and China advanced empires flourished, but that didn't stem the rot in Europe because there was little contact, communication or trade. There are other examples of this but that's the main one that comes to mind. Modern fiction is replete with a lot of different apocalypse and post apocalypse stories in many different forms (both natural, man made, and mythological). After the second world war the major influence was the idea of nuclear annihilation. A famous early example was On The Beach, a chilling film about American sailors on a submarine who survive the initial Apocalypse. They come to Australia in the Southern hemisphere and try and rally because life seems almost normal there, but when they travel back to the US to find survivors they learn everyone is dead that and the nuclear fallout will eventually even kill the people in the southern hemisphere down in Australia. The whole planet has an inescapable death sentence so all that's left is to choose how and when they will die. 20 years later 1979 famously gave us Mad Max! Which was a beginning of a whole genre of crazy low budget ultra violent deiselpunk post-apocalypse SciFi with muscle cars and torn leather. In this first movie it's pretty tame, we assume that society is slowly breaking down after an apocalypse but people are still keeping things going nevertheless. Max is a leather-clad highway policeman with a wife and child. Pretty soon though a road gang ends his little slice of normalcy and the Road Warrior is born. After that the world of the Mad Max films becomes more and more chaotic and alien, totally divorced from any connection to our present day society. This spawned many imitators, usually terrible but sometimes strangely amazing. What are some of your fave stories in the genre? The cover of this Quackcast is inspired by the 1985 Canadian film Defcon 4 (an image originally created in 1976 by Angus McKie). A Canticle for Lebowitz is a seminal story in the genre, about the preservation of culture and technology after an Apocalypse and how that can help rebuild things and that humans will inevitably repeat the same mistakes… Hell comes to Frogtown is an amazing and fun take on the dieselpunk post-apocalypse genre and definitely a fave of mine. But I think my faves would have to be The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Often thought of as “cozy catastrophes” because even though the world as we know it ends and the characters have to re-adapt they do it in a very level-headed way and they find a new normal- that is actually one of the very few absolutely accurate and realistic takes on what happens during and after a real Apocalypse which is why I appreciate it so much: life goes on, it's not the same but you do what you can to make it that way. What do you think? A fan of Waterworld, Fallout, Terminator 2, The Walking Dead, The End, Radioactive dreams, Don't look up, something more fun or more depressing?
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Tue, 19 November 2024
Last week we had an overview of weapons throughout history and how it's a constant game of balance and oneupmanship. Now we're looking at future weapons and Scifi stuff! There's a lot of potential and a lot of interesting ideas you can use in comics and stories. We talk about a few of these and some of our faves, as well as our own inventions. Future weapons can take all different forms, many kinds of directed energy weapons, energy propelled projectiles, satellite based weapons, drone and robot technology, autonomous weapons systems etc. Biological and chemical weapons are super scary but generally pretty useless in reality, even as terrorist weapons because they're so imprecise and uncontrollable and take a lot of work to set up and deploy. This means they will hit people who aren't your target and they also have an excellent chance of not even working at all despite all the preparation and cost, so we're not even bothering with these in the discussion. One future Scifi weapon concept that always comes up are “plasma” weapons. These are super undefined and no one really knows what they are because they can be so many things. When it comes to weapons what we mean by “plasma” is the very hot gas that has free ions so that it's electrically conductive like metal. We know dangerous plasma mostly from its use as a cutting torch in welding and also the gigantic planet sized solar flares that seem to erupt from the surface of the sun are plasma that's following the huge loop of a magnetic field projecting from the sun, because it can be controlled by magnetic fields. Given this it can be used in a few different ways as a weapon: you can use it like an explosive chemical propellant for firing bullets, you can use it as a sort of flame thrower (especially effective if you can direct it with a magnetic field), you can contain balls of plasma with magnetic fields and throw them like canon shells, or you can use the plasma as an electrically conductive medium to direct lightning bolts. Directed energy weapons are very traditionally SciFi but have only ever seen limited practical usage despite the old popularity of the “Death Ray” and lasers as weapons. They're attractive because the only limiting factor is your energy source, you don't need to carry ammunition so theoretically you can have unlimited shots, they travel at the speed of light so you can't miss, they're not affected by friction or gravity so there are no ballistics to work out either, there's also no loss in energy like there is with traditional guns where the propulsive explosion badly transfers energy to the projectile. The trouble is that they don't work very well as weapons because you need to put in a LOT of energy to do any damage over a distance because they don't work well in an atmosphere, you also have to hold it on a target for a long time. This category includes the aforementioned lasers, microwave weapons, electron beams, particle beams etc They have a lot more potential as space weapons where atmosphere isn't an issue and their lack of recoil is a huge advantage. Electrically accelerated projective weapons known as “mass drivers” are another category. They are capable to much higher speeds than traditional guns or missiles because they're not limited by the compression of gasses. In this group we have Gauss guns aka coil guns, rail guns and some other variations. They use magnetic or electrical fields to accelerate projectiles. The main advantage is speed, increased safety because they don't need dangerous propellant, and shots only limited by your electrical capacity. The disadvantages of these systems is that they're very complicated, they can't use explosive projectiles, and they have a high failure rate- Railguns are the most promising system but each time they fire they produce clouds of burning fire, which is caused by layers of metal being stripped from the rails inside them, which means they degrade very quickly and the rails have to be replaced constantly. We all know the potential of drones, but the use of autonomous self directed weapons where the drones can pick their own targets is where they become scary. Autonomous weapons are already a reality in large defence turrets on ships, around army bases, and important buildings (like the Whitehouse). They can be set to radar directed target acquisition, which they need for defence against fast moving missiles. Machine gun turrets on the defences along the DMZ between North and South Korea also work like this. Even cruise missiles are somewhat autonomous in that they can find their own way to their targets. What we're really worried about though are things like predator drones or tracked bomb disposal robots coming after us with weapons like mounted machine guns, both are possible and have been tested. Satellites have limited weapon capability, none have enough power onboard to carry useful energy weapons, while mass drivers and traditional projectile weapons introduce the problem of recoil which is extremely hard to cope with for a satellite in orbit. They can carry missiles like nuclear weapons be they're extremely vulnerable to attack for such an expensive weapon. successful experiments have been made using traditional guns against other satellites but they're very messy and dangerous to everything in orbit. A stupid idea that was proposed were the “rods of god”: giant tungsten poles which the satellite could drop as destructive gravity driven bombs, The trouble is that would be super expensive to get into space, the accuracy is extremely bad and the energy needed to aim them would be too costly. It would only be useful as a “sword of Damocles” if you had them always hanging over specific targets, but even then they'd be very easy to disable. We came up with our own future weapons. Mine was a marshmallow gun that would spray masses of harmless sugary marshmallow fluff all over your enemies, then use a microwave emitter to massively expand the marshmallow and heat it to debilitating levels. This would envelop people in masses of injurious, burning gooey muck, which would then harden on them and any surface it touched. It would also be terrible for the insides of electronics and machinery.
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Tue, 12 November 2024
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz and me, Ozoneocean. Gunwallace is a multi-talented creator, artist, writer, musician, composer, author, cook, and mixologist! This hale and hearty, towering example of a New Zealander has been posting comics here forever, notably the author of the very popular Playmobile art comic “Character Development” and the popular one panel strip “All Unicorns to Battle Stations”, among many others. He was a zine writer from way back in the day and he's STILL in the Zine-Scene now, having met many popular creators in that field as well and being one himself, he was even in talks to work with the world famous Lord of The Rings Director Peter Jackson at one point! In his free time he has written cookbooks based on bizarre old recipes, and books of cocktail recipes based on drinks he's devised himself and with friends. In this cast we have a long meandering chat with him about a whole bunch of things and by the by we also include many of the themes he's composed over the years. In order of appearance they are: Bruno harm, Life and death, Clint, Joe pop, Pinky TA, Typical Strange, Without Moonlight, Ginger and shadow, God's Revelation, and Super Temps. A message from Tantz: Join the fun, get more people to know you, and interact with more artists on Blue Sky! Follow us on - https://bsky.app/profile/theduckwebcomics.bsky.social (@theduckwebcomics.bsky.social) where the Quackchat continues every Sunday! This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by A SuperActionGirl - This starts off with a weird stuttering electronica synth sound that echoes and vibrates as it stammers its repeating yet evolving chorus of notes in way evocative of fractal patterns or blooming flowers, finally ending with a phrase that seems to reference a similar sound from the start of Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who Topics and shownotes Links Gunwallce's latest project, On The Edge - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/On_The_Edge/ Featured comic: Featured music: The comics with themes played in the cast:
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Direct download: Quackcast_713_-_Gunwallace_Master_Composer.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00pm PST
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Tue, 5 November 2024
This week we're talking the development of weapons, tactics and armour over the millennia. This is a fun little overview of everything from ancient stone weapons, to bronze, to iron, steel, guns, tanks, and jet-fighters and all the interesting stuff in between. Comic stories often involve literal conflict whether set in the past, the present, future, or fantasy and Scifi, so overviews are always good. There are a LOT of misconceptions when it comes to this stuff, we tried to address a few and correct them in the cast. Like people didn't go from bronze to iron because iron was a better material. People had to move to using iron because bronze is made of tin and copper and those two materials are not found in the same place, changes in empires and wars disrupted trade routes so badly that supplies of the raw materials were no longer viable. Iron was a substitute because it's common and doesn't need any other components, though it's inferior because it's more difficult to work, not as hard so it doesn't make as good blades or armour, and it rusts easily. It wasn't till people finally discovered steel that iron became better than bronze. Some other misconceptions: There has never ever been an “ultimate weapon”, rather it's always a balancing game. As one thing starts to help people dominate in a particular field other things develop to counter them and so on forever into the future. Do you know any misconceptions? How do you think weaponry will evolve to counter drones?
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