Hey Everyone,
Sorry for the delay last week. New England’s Snow-mageddon caused Matt to have a few delays and as you can see, this page has a lot going on in it, which means he didn’t have much time to spare.
The Dragoon is putting up a tough fight here and he still has the usual Dhuvalian bag of tricks up his sleeve. It’s gonna be a pretty cool fight.
Thanks for reading,
– Luther out
I am going camo!
So, is that surface on the left shoulder of Dhuvalian Limbs designed as an armored ‘shield’ to help cover the rest of the Limb?
Yep, the left shoulder has significantly thicker armor to serve as a shield, protect the ammo in the torso weapon, and help serve as a counter balance to the arm on the right side.
So the grid pattern on the front of ‘Foxy’ is some sort of ablative shaped charge?
It’s probably Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), the Russian type looks almost exactly like that.
The early modular ERA for the older M60 Patton tanks also look similar
http://www.israeli-weapons.com/weapons/vehicles/tanks/magach/magach__1.jpg
http://www.bestdreamworks.com/hobby/items/437//h1.jpg
Believe this one is a T-55 with said armor as well
http://i.imgur.com/LpHr0AP.jpg
Okay, I understand the maneuvering thrusters in the torso of the Dhuvalian mech, but what I’m unclear about is if the jets in the feet give it the power to glide along just above the ground in a more or less standing position, like a VOTOMS, or whether the bursts of thrust we see coming from the feet are synchronized to give boosts during running.
The position of the thing’s legs in the next-to-last panel could be interpreted as a run, but might just be an action stance.
On the first planel, the tips of the foot seem to still contact the ground, at least for the standing foot. It seems to walk on the tips, so it’s perhaps a hybrid between – unstable and power-intensive – floating and “boosted running” as you describe, where the thrusters cushion the movements so the tips of the feet need to merely kick off. I imagine the thrusters imparting too much forward movement at the lowest point of a top-heavy mech like this would be hard to balance, if not taking more effort to balance than increasing the joint rotation speed would take. By cushioning, the stress on the joint is potentially lowered and the ground pressure is also less, meaning it drasitcally improve mobility on difficult terrain, without the issues pure floating would bring (which would also require larger feet, or at least more and larger thrusters).
Going camo won’t do much provided the outlws keep hitting it, can’t hide the sparks and shrapnel.
He’d also still press on the grass, but targetting him precisely will be more difficult. Not that this always is depicted as “Shooter invisibility”, meaning the outline is still visible with some effort. Assuming this is the in-universe look, nd considering they are still several hundred meters out, this may well provide a significant advantage.
What may be more interesting is that, depending on the mechanism used to provide the cloak, it may interfere with the laser. Though since this cloak likely doesn’t blind the user (which would be kind of a weakness) it would likely not interfere with the laser either.
Going by technologies that were already trialled, this is either mimicry (using the surface to project a picture of what is behind the user, kind of only works long-distance) and light deflection (forcing the light around the object with nanoscale structures, however this has only been shown to hide, say, a bump in the material and not the material itself). Both would require the surface to be largely unharmed, which is already no longer the case. However, going a bit further out into stealth technology, there was one of those Cold War Scares about the Russians developing Plasma Stealth technology, which reduces the radar signature of a plane by enveloping it in low-temperature plasma. This has to my knowledge never been demonstated to be feasible (I assume there was some laboratory testing), but potentially it may be capable of also hiding the visible light signature if the plasma was “fine” enough (radar and light are different intensities of electromagnetic waves, light is more intense and has a wavelength of hundreds of nanometers, radar is between decimeters and millimeters). The plasma sheath would need to be kept on the surface somehow, but since this can be done in ways that do not require an emitter at every point of the surface and the emitters can be under the armor (they can be magnets or electric field coils, who are weakened but not necessarily stopped by the armor) it would be more tolerant to combat damage. Though I think I see some interference around the damaged part of the leg in the last panel. We’ll have to wait until the next page for a better view, provided the Limb isn’t just hit by an artillery shell before it’s fully cloaked and dies.
I like to think that the “wheeee” sound effect in the last panel is actually the sound the pilot is making while he fights.