This reminds me of a time when I was in a language forum, and the system keeps censoring my phrase because I wrote in Japanese Romaji, “something something shite, something something shita”……(in case anyone was wondering, that’s the verb “to do” and is literally one of the most common words in Japanese……)
Or type “si” instead of “shi.” It’s a less common but still valid way to romanize that character. They pronounce it with what sounds like a sh sound to our ears, but it’s part of the “sa” character set (sa shi/si su se so). So sita/site is perfectly valid spelling.
Erie is the shallowest with a max depth of 210 ft, which would give you about 7 atmospheres of pressure. That’s possibly survivable in general, however keep in mind that in this case Todd would have just been hit in the face with shards of glass and a column of water at that force. He would suffer some serious damage and almost certainly lose consciousness.
That’s your best case scenario.
Next deepest is Lake Huron at 750 ft, now were up to 23 ATM, WELL beyond the max human survivabiltiy level (around 9 ATM) and it gets worse beyond that.
I am not sure that it really imploded. It looks more like it shattered and then floated up. Not sure that glass really floats though. Might be that he moved due to the sudden shock of water spurting on him, which caused the direction of the glass pieces to go where they went. Could be that there were hairline fractures that couldn’t handle the pressure with the leak.
The sub is mostly so they don’t need to spend half their air tank getting to the village itself. They wouldn’t have much time to explore or chat or visit if they were manually swimming down there.
When diving in a non-rigid suit the pressure inside the helmet is the same as outside the helmet, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to breathe, your lungs are only capable of expanding against a few psi difference. If you go deeper than ~120 ft you need to change the amount of nitrogen in the air because it starts to become similar to a narcotic.
If the Sarnothi can descend from sea level to the level of the city it can’t be *too* deep, the physiological changes needed to go very deep would keep them from ever being able to surface.
Reference the deep-water fish they bring up from the bottom of the ocean– they have to keep them under pressure or they explode when decompressed.
The most that would have happened in this case would be that the helmet would crack and the pieces would fall out.
I don’t think they’re in the Great Lakes at all. Trying to keep a refugee camp safe when there is unrestricted water access is a problem. I hold that they’re in a deep inland lake.
If you go “Trawling” through the archives, you can snag the comic where Todd’s father mentions a Lake Superior fishing incident, and after that the area is restricted from fishing.
Since they are dry-suits, maybe the air pressure inside is greater than the water pressure outside? Plus, random advancements in technology means we can suspend disbelief for the sake of story. But yeah, with regular stuff, it would have been bad/messy.
Hey, we don’t know what crazy settings these things were set to, we may have some weird science going on (I mean, if it’s able to have a tiny leak that didn’t turn into a high pressure stream of fury & destruction, maybe there’s some other science/magic/crazy glowing echo stuff going on (just internally on the gear, so it’s less obvious))
I mean, we can treat it the same way action movies & video games treat just about any major injury (namely being shot): get the bullet out, throw on a bandage, good to go (if even that much effort goes into the recovery)
But yeah, real world, we’d have soup; comic world, we have an imminent (but not instant/gruesome) life threatening disaster.
Scuba gear maintains the same air pressure as outside. Otherwise you would not be able to expand your lungs and inhale. So there’s no implosion, just filling up with water. With the usual breathing mouthpiece, you can lose your helmet or facemask and still breathe, but you can’t see as clearly.
David, the lakes are not the same depth all over. It’s unlikely that this village is at the deepest point – in fact, if they want to accommodate human visitors who are not expert technical divers, they’d put the village in the shallows.
Why would a secret Sarnothi settlement be designed to accommodate non-trained divers? Todd is basically the only one who has any reason to visit. Why would they build it in a super shallow area, where non-authorized humans are more likely to accidentally stumble on it?
Because it isn’t a settlement, it’s a refugee camp. Sarnoth has fallen. Their human host country (was that the US or Canada, I forget) probably placed them somewhere that their own diplomats, police force or military could easily follow. They are probably even being watched all the time.
260 feet is 100 feet passed where you can safely scuba dive. Youd be getting issues even on Triox. Youd need to be doing saturation diving OR hard suit diving at that depth.
It’s set up, partly, to allow members of the Agency to check in on the colony or visit it if needed. It’s in a contained lake inside a controlled area of a state park, not in part of the Great Lakes proper.
A secret government agency can bypass certifications, but it won’t keep you alive when you exceed your training and experience. Scuba gear rentals/sales would love to be able to sell the most expensive gear to any customer with the cash, but they don’t want dead customers so they require some proof that you know what you’re doing.
Most likely yes, the pressure differential would throw everything into the helmet. I’m sort of winging it on the pressure variation, based on the fact Havei Jin Suir is located in a lake in a park and not one of the Big Lakes.
Okay, I’m not adept at science, but I don’t think the glass would react like that unless there was a sudden upsurge of air pressure in the helmet. And if there was I think Todd might be bleeding from some orifices…. But again I legit don’t know pressure or how it works so please forgive this Insomniac lady?
It wouldn’t react like that. A helmet implosion like that would have been much more damaging to Todd’s face.
I’m letting it go on artistic license. Star Trek would be hella boring if it actually took the whole 5 year mission to get to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
Thank you, Dave, for the artistic license you’re using to push the shards of glass out and away from Todd’s face. He’s about to be busy enough without dealing with permanent facial scarring and possible blindness.
And I may as well toss in my tuppence on this being a motivator for Selkie’s Echo powers to kick in. I have no idea how diving works – could we see an Echo-powered Selkie Swoosh to the surface or would that give him the bends? Maybe just to the submersible? Tune in Wednesday as …
The refugee town is NOT in the deepest part of one of the lakes, but merely in a lake near to the shore where there was land suitable to put a refugee camp that turned into a town.
Just as human settlements cluster on the edges of water, be it rivers, creeks, oceans or lakes, I would assume that Sarnothi settlements would also cluster on the sub-shoreline. This is the most bio-diverse and fertile region, where the two environments meet. The deep water to the Sarnothi would be the equivalent to our mountain peaks – a good place for certain types of resource management, but having fewer fish and plants, more dense water etc. they would prefer living closer to the shoreline. Remember they are amphibious. You don’t find frogs down in the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
I don’t think that Todd would have been permitted to go deep water scuba without more training, although of course, much of his training occurred off camera. But I think he is more at the stage of training of someone who is doing scuba diving during an all inclusive tropical vacation.
Anyway… that’s what I hope…. And my argument sounds plausible.
Wikipedia entry on Diving mask: “Diving masks may have a single, durable, tempered glass faceplate, or two lenses in front of the eyes. These may be supported by a relatively rigid plastic or metal frame, or they may be permanently bonded to the rim of the skirt, in a construction known as “frameless”. In the case of freediving masks, which need to have a low internal volume to minimize the amount of breath needed to equalize the change of pressure that occurs with depth, the lenses may be made of polycarbonate plastic….”
I’m going to go with this guess too for the moment (obviously I don’t know well enough about lakebed geography of the Great Lakes to tell if this kind of shallow parts exist)
I have a serious problem with suspension of disbelief, so I spend a bunch of my time analyzing my own fiction, other writer’s fiction and reality asking, “How could this be possible…?” I find this makes it easier to stay engaged and not give up, wander off shaking my head tearfully repeating “Not possible… not possible…” when I watch the news or have a brilliant story idea.
I do not have this problem of suspending disbelief; if it is a story, then they are telling the saga and I (just) must accept this as their tale as it is. Not that I must accept their story as reality. So I never have that “OMG, This cannot be Happening” feeling because the story is theirs to tell their way, without my checking it for verisimilitude. [that said, I do insist that a story have plausible motivations for the characters, or I’m outta-here. And Dave does this wonderfully]
Dave, the author, has shown himself to have great restraint and a large heart, with compassion for his characters, whom he loves; He will Not orphan Selkie again. (Statement made in the imperative, not the indicative mood.)
That’s because that cry represents (to me) Selkie’s full attachment to Todd. As an adoptive parent (biracial to boot) it is FABULOUS. Now Todd just has to figure out how to get some air. He has 4 minuets or so.
(likely not using a 1 ATM suit, air pressure in suit ~= to water pressure, regulator attached to helmet, no spare regulator show to date, look up Kirby Morgan dive helmet for real deal if curious)
People in really serious trouble revert back to their basic primary words/concepts. The two most common last words of pilots in a crash are “Shit!” and “Mother!” with mother being modified to whatever their primary word would have been “Mummy!” “Mama!”. When you is about to die either you announce that you are in DEEP doodoo, or yell for parental miracle rescue. So that Daddy! cry is a really heartfelt one and comes from the same part of the brain that produces swear words and involuntary vocalizations, not the ones that can be filtered for more nuanced communication.
I think it’d be an interesting thing to see Dave actually kill off Todd. Let’s see this comic go tragic for a bit and watch everyone react to the loss.
I think the situation is traumatic enough without actually killing off or doing permanent harm to Todd. I don’t think Selkie is going to forget this part anytime soon.
Losing his eye in battle would probably make Selkie respect Todd forever. The only problem would be that she would likely be unable to keep from bragging to the other kids that her father lost his eye in an “underwater battle with a giant man-eating eel named Pants”.
as someone who has LOST an eye to a similar accident (No not animal trying to crush my head by jaw pressure) but by having a very sharp bit go through said eye at high speed. The eye patch is cool but the frequency of knocking over things that should NOT be knocked over (including small children who can get stepped on) is not adequate compensation.
Since that’s a full helm diving suit pressure between the helm and the outer water is about equal (less on the exhale, greater on the inhale) so a sharp curse exhale to destabilize the helm even more then a sharp intake of shock to pop it outwards isn’t that hard to believe.
My bets hedge on sarnothi magical shenanigans to save the day an that Selkies powers aren’t dead yet
I am thinking maybe Dave will play it more with introducing Todd to the fact that Sarnothi HAVE such interesting abilities via someone else saving him and he’ll be havin’ a heap o questions… But we’ll see! I would honestly like to see a panel of Todd panicking as he is new to diving and I would like to see how he is taking this very scary emergency. I would be freaking out and flailing, for sure.
Oooohhh shittake mushrooms….
This reminds me of a time when I was in a language forum, and the system keeps censoring my phrase because I wrote in Japanese Romaji, “something something shite, something something shita”……(in case anyone was wondering, that’s the verb “to do” and is literally one of the most common words in Japanese……)
one way around that is to swap out i for ‘, i.e. “shashin wo torimash’ta”
It’s not standard, but still legible imo
Or you can use “l”, because in their alphabet this letter doesn’t really exist. (They use the letter “r” instead.)
Or type “si” instead of “shi.” It’s a less common but still valid way to romanize that character. They pronounce it with what sounds like a sh sound to our ears, but it’s part of the “sa” character set (sa shi/si su se so). So sita/site is perfectly valid spelling.
Switch to the romaji keyboard. It will then spellcheck against Romaji words.
I do this all the time when I type in Spanish.
I’m going to assume for the sake of story Todd won’t die but if this were real life,the mask would have imploded onward and he would be dead already.
onward = inward
#StopTryingToChangeRealWordsAutocorrect
They’re in the great lakes, not the ocean. I don’t think it’s -quite- that bad.
Depending on which lake it can be pretty strong
Erie is the shallowest with a max depth of 210 ft, which would give you about 7 atmospheres of pressure. That’s possibly survivable in general, however keep in mind that in this case Todd would have just been hit in the face with shards of glass and a column of water at that force. He would suffer some serious damage and almost certainly lose consciousness.
That’s your best case scenario.
Next deepest is Lake Huron at 750 ft, now were up to 23 ATM, WELL beyond the max human survivabiltiy level (around 9 ATM) and it gets worse beyond that.
I am not sure that it really imploded. It looks more like it shattered and then floated up. Not sure that glass really floats though. Might be that he moved due to the sudden shock of water spurting on him, which caused the direction of the glass pieces to go where they went. Could be that there were hairline fractures that couldn’t handle the pressure with the leak.
Right, it SHOULD have imploded. Under pressure the glass/plastic wouldn’t have broken the way it does in this comic.
Whatever lake they are in… who says they are in the deepest part? Are they even that far from shore?
They are deep enough to have needed a submarine to get down and to go beyond standard scuba gear. So yeah, pretty darn deep.
The sub is mostly so they don’t need to spend half their air tank getting to the village itself. They wouldn’t have much time to explore or chat or visit if they were manually swimming down there.
When diving in a non-rigid suit the pressure inside the helmet is the same as outside the helmet, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to breathe, your lungs are only capable of expanding against a few psi difference. If you go deeper than ~120 ft you need to change the amount of nitrogen in the air because it starts to become similar to a narcotic.
What he said.
If the Sarnothi can descend from sea level to the level of the city it can’t be *too* deep, the physiological changes needed to go very deep would keep them from ever being able to surface.
Reference the deep-water fish they bring up from the bottom of the ocean– they have to keep them under pressure or they explode when decompressed.
The most that would have happened in this case would be that the helmet would crack and the pieces would fall out.
I don’t think they’re in the Great Lakes at all. Trying to keep a refugee camp safe when there is unrestricted water access is a problem. I hold that they’re in a deep inland lake.
If you go “Trawling” through the archives, you can snag the comic where Todd’s father mentions a Lake Superior fishing incident, and after that the area is restricted from fishing.
Since they are dry-suits, maybe the air pressure inside is greater than the water pressure outside? Plus, random advancements in technology means we can suspend disbelief for the sake of story. But yeah, with regular stuff, it would have been bad/messy.
The air pressure would definitely not be higher (see above).
Hey, we don’t know what crazy settings these things were set to, we may have some weird science going on (I mean, if it’s able to have a tiny leak that didn’t turn into a high pressure stream of fury & destruction, maybe there’s some other science/magic/crazy glowing echo stuff going on (just internally on the gear, so it’s less obvious))
I mean, we can treat it the same way action movies & video games treat just about any major injury (namely being shot): get the bullet out, throw on a bandage, good to go (if even that much effort goes into the recovery)
But yeah, real world, we’d have soup; comic world, we have an imminent (but not instant/gruesome) life threatening disaster.
doubtful. that would be a saturation diving. That’s some SERIOUS training Even Drysuit driving is dangerous as heck at 100+ feet.
Scuba gear maintains the same air pressure as outside. Otherwise you would not be able to expand your lungs and inhale. So there’s no implosion, just filling up with water. With the usual breathing mouthpiece, you can lose your helmet or facemask and still breathe, but you can’t see as clearly.
David, the lakes are not the same depth all over. It’s unlikely that this village is at the deepest point – in fact, if they want to accommodate human visitors who are not expert technical divers, they’d put the village in the shallows.
Why would a secret Sarnothi settlement be designed to accommodate non-trained divers? Todd is basically the only one who has any reason to visit. Why would they build it in a super shallow area, where non-authorized humans are more likely to accidentally stumble on it?
Because it isn’t a settlement, it’s a refugee camp. Sarnoth has fallen. Their human host country (was that the US or Canada, I forget) probably placed them somewhere that their own diplomats, police force or military could easily follow. They are probably even being watched all the time.
You need to remember though that they are still with in the photic zone; so the village is no deeper than 260 ft.
260 feet is 100 feet passed where you can safely scuba dive. Youd be getting issues even on Triox. Youd need to be doing saturation diving OR hard suit diving at that depth.
It’s set up, partly, to allow members of the Agency to check in on the colony or visit it if needed. It’s in a contained lake inside a controlled area of a state park, not in part of the Great Lakes proper.
If it was at technical diving depths, Dave could not be there. That requires years of training and experience.
Or a secret government agency that says you can…
A secret government agency can bypass certifications, but it won’t keep you alive when you exceed your training and experience. Scuba gear rentals/sales would love to be able to sell the most expensive gear to any customer with the cash, but they don’t want dead customers so they require some proof that you know what you’re doing.
Most likely yes, the pressure differential would throw everything into the helmet. I’m sort of winging it on the pressure variation, based on the fact Havei Jin Suir is located in a lake in a park and not one of the Big Lakes.
Oh crap.
That’s all my thought on the matter.
As thoughts go, I’d say it’s pretty accurate. 😉
Okay, I’m not adept at science, but I don’t think the glass would react like that unless there was a sudden upsurge of air pressure in the helmet. And if there was I think Todd might be bleeding from some orifices…. But again I legit don’t know pressure or how it works so please forgive this Insomniac lady?
Maybe the lightsaber things that give off heat and light also make them have less pressure in the general area?
It wouldn’t react like that. A helmet implosion like that would have been much more damaging to Todd’s face.
I’m letting it go on artistic license. Star Trek would be hella boring if it actually took the whole 5 year mission to get to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
Partly artistic license, partly to avoid spending the next real-world year focusing on Todd’s hospital stay. >_>
Echo powers activate!
Thank you, Dave, for the artistic license you’re using to push the shards of glass out and away from Todd’s face. He’s about to be busy enough without dealing with permanent facial scarring and possible blindness.
And I may as well toss in my tuppence on this being a motivator for Selkie’s Echo powers to kick in. I have no idea how diving works – could we see an Echo-powered Selkie Swoosh to the surface or would that give him the bends? Maybe just to the submersible? Tune in Wednesday as …
It’d probably be lexan anyways, instead of actual glass. Much less sharp (though still sharp) and would float away instead of sinking.
Could he just press his face into the mouth piece? Or yank it out and beeathe directly from the tank? Dunno how these suits work. 😀
My guess is: The faceplate is made of plastic.
The refugee town is NOT in the deepest part of one of the lakes, but merely in a lake near to the shore where there was land suitable to put a refugee camp that turned into a town.
Just as human settlements cluster on the edges of water, be it rivers, creeks, oceans or lakes, I would assume that Sarnothi settlements would also cluster on the sub-shoreline. This is the most bio-diverse and fertile region, where the two environments meet. The deep water to the Sarnothi would be the equivalent to our mountain peaks – a good place for certain types of resource management, but having fewer fish and plants, more dense water etc. they would prefer living closer to the shoreline. Remember they are amphibious. You don’t find frogs down in the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
I don’t think that Todd would have been permitted to go deep water scuba without more training, although of course, much of his training occurred off camera. But I think he is more at the stage of training of someone who is doing scuba diving during an all inclusive tropical vacation.
Anyway… that’s what I hope…. And my argument sounds plausible.
Wikipedia entry on Diving mask: “Diving masks may have a single, durable, tempered glass faceplate, or two lenses in front of the eyes. These may be supported by a relatively rigid plastic or metal frame, or they may be permanently bonded to the rim of the skirt, in a construction known as “frameless”. In the case of freediving masks, which need to have a low internal volume to minimize the amount of breath needed to equalize the change of pressure that occurs with depth, the lenses may be made of polycarbonate plastic….”
I’m going to go with this guess too for the moment (obviously I don’t know well enough about lakebed geography of the Great Lakes to tell if this kind of shallow parts exist)
You can cut the crap out of yourself with plastic, especially polycarbonate.
I have a serious problem with suspension of disbelief, so I spend a bunch of my time analyzing my own fiction, other writer’s fiction and reality asking, “How could this be possible…?” I find this makes it easier to stay engaged and not give up, wander off shaking my head tearfully repeating “Not possible… not possible…” when I watch the news or have a brilliant story idea.
I do not have this problem of suspending disbelief; if it is a story, then they are telling the saga and I (just) must accept this as their tale as it is. Not that I must accept their story as reality. So I never have that “OMG, This cannot be Happening” feeling because the story is theirs to tell their way, without my checking it for verisimilitude. [that said, I do insist that a story have plausible motivations for the characters, or I’m outta-here. And Dave does this wonderfully]
Dave, the author, has shown himself to have great restraint and a large heart, with compassion for his characters, whom he loves; He will Not orphan Selkie again. (Statement made in the imperative, not the indicative mood.)
That “daddy!” cry is one of the most heart wrenching things I’ve seen in this comic for some reason..
That’s because that cry represents (to me) Selkie’s full attachment to Todd. As an adoptive parent (biracial to boot) it is FABULOUS. Now Todd just has to figure out how to get some air. He has 4 minuets or so.
(likely not using a 1 ATM suit, air pressure in suit ~= to water pressure, regulator attached to helmet, no spare regulator show to date, look up Kirby Morgan dive helmet for real deal if curious)
It’s amazing how with girls you go from “Dad” or “Pater-person” (my daughter took Latin) to “DADDY!” in times of stress.
Seen it happen with my own daughter, at a much greater age than I would have expected her to use the term “Daddy”
People in really serious trouble revert back to their basic primary words/concepts. The two most common last words of pilots in a crash are “Shit!” and “Mother!” with mother being modified to whatever their primary word would have been “Mummy!” “Mama!”. When you is about to die either you announce that you are in DEEP doodoo, or yell for parental miracle rescue. So that Daddy! cry is a really heartfelt one and comes from the same part of the brain that produces swear words and involuntary vocalizations, not the ones that can be filtered for more nuanced communication.
I think pretty much my entire brain joins in on swear words. At least at the rate I burn through ’em.
The most common last words around where I grew up were “Dude, check this out!”
I think it’d be an interesting thing to see Dave actually kill off Todd. Let’s see this comic go tragic for a bit and watch everyone react to the loss.
I think the situation is traumatic enough without actually killing off or doing permanent harm to Todd. I don’t think Selkie is going to forget this part anytime soon.
… very no.
That’d be a C-a-D-miscarriage level screwup on Dave’s part, in my not so humble opinion.
Holy crap Todd!!!!!! This is not good?????
Any good diver has a spare regulator for buddy breathing. Todd can use that from Brown, surface with a decompression stop, and be okay.
Wouldn’t the water pressure cause the glass to go INTO his helmet, not float away from it? Would have been better if you had him lose his eye.
Losing his eye in battle would probably make Selkie respect Todd forever. The only problem would be that she would likely be unable to keep from bragging to the other kids that her father lost his eye in an “underwater battle with a giant man-eating eel named Pants”.
as someone who has LOST an eye to a similar accident (No not animal trying to crush my head by jaw pressure) but by having a very sharp bit go through said eye at high speed. The eye patch is cool but the frequency of knocking over things that should NOT be knocked over (including small children who can get stepped on) is not adequate compensation.
Sure. I had a bad eye injury about a decade ago, I recovered, but the between time wasn’t great.
Eye patches are still bad ass though.
Since that’s a full helm diving suit pressure between the helm and the outer water is about equal (less on the exhale, greater on the inhale) so a sharp curse exhale to destabilize the helm even more then a sharp intake of shock to pop it outwards isn’t that hard to believe.
My bets hedge on sarnothi magical shenanigans to save the day an that Selkies powers aren’t dead yet
I was thinking the same thing. This is the prefect set up to have Selkie use her powers to save Todd via stress manifestation.
I am thinking maybe Dave will play it more with introducing Todd to the fact that Sarnothi HAVE such interesting abilities via someone else saving him and he’ll be havin’ a heap o questions… But we’ll see! I would honestly like to see a panel of Todd panicking as he is new to diving and I would like to see how he is taking this very scary emergency. I would be freaking out and flailing, for sure.