Hmm.. “potato masher” grenade detonates next to 4 torpedo tubes.. presumably loaded with 70 year-old torpedos. Yup, that’s potentially going to make quite a bang. Question: Is Bud’s swimsuit indestructible? If not, she’s going to be standing at the bottom of a small crater in her all-together
well, the Stiehlhandgranaten were inherently unsafe for the user, there are enough cases delivered from war-veterans that these things exploded as soon as you pulled the string on the back.
Given the fact that Bud probably didn’t know what an SHG is, I guess she poited nowhere when it happened 😉
Soo..in this case a slight drop of the grenade, while hanging from the cord could possibly have detonated the damn thing?
Makes sense. I was, like another commenter, wondering if the weight of the grenade would be enough to pull that friction fuse-cord-thingy.
Actually, that’s one of the real “field-expedient” uses of the “potato masher”: They were sometimes hung from their detonating cords on walls etc. to prevent climbing as any disturbance would trigger the grenade. That captain knew what he was doing…
U296 was a Type VIIC/41, or at least the WWII version was. Assuming since they sunk no ships and none fired, all 14 torpedo’s would have been on board. Add to that the 200 or so rounds from the 88mm deck gun, and whatever Diesel the submarine was also carrying at the time.
Might be just enough to give our Golem Girl a nasty headache… And need a new change of swim wear.
ditto. I hope Stinky’s sank safely underwater recovering from a self-inflicted anchor bonk. Being a surface explosion, there should minimal underwater shock waves
How was he still propped up after blowing his own brains out? Granted I am no medical expert but isn’t there some sort of twitch when a bullet enters the more vital parts of your grey matter?
One sub’s explosive content in WWII makes me wonder if your comment has a corrallary. Something along the lines of “Explosive required need not be all in the same place at the same time.”
Ooooo. That’s a good idea. Have Paul set up a Paypal thingie (bonus, if it’s set up for a dime at a time) and when people make puns, we have to ‘tip’ one in.
Maybe no more island. It appeared to be mainly a sandbar, such a blast could have scattered it below sealevel.
The blast would have certainly destroyed the sub’s log and any journals crewmembers might have been keeping, so no chance of finding out what happened now.
Probably good Monica and/or Shelly weren’t along, it could have been fatal for them (assuming Monica didn’t poit out). On the other hand, they might have yelled at Bud not to touch anything they didn’t know what it was…
i’m sure as intellegent as nazis were, the must have had some sort of black box device, and i’m pretty sure the captain would have a safe in his quarters where he would keep a journal…though it maybe hard to find without the help of one particularly lovable squid. XD
If you look at the historical record, “Had some good engineers who they occasionally listened to” doesn’t equal “smart”.
There’d be no reason to put a “Black Box” (aka flight recorder) on a sub, because if you lose a sub you lose the whole thing and aren’t getting it back.
Lets see the VII C Uboat had 12 torpedoes in the forward torpedo room. The standard German torpedo used when U296 patrols was the G2/T2 torpedo which has 617 lbs of Hexinite for a warhead. That around 3.t tons of high explosives which equals…big BOOM! And you might as wall add in the 2 aft torpedoes which brings is up to 4,2 tons of explosives.
And then there’s the possibility of plenty of diesel fuel being left in the fuel tanks. Let see Germany -> Ireland -> let’s day Bermuda is 6000+ miles. 8000 mile range for the Type VII C Uboat. Fuel tanks could be still be 25% full.
If I was still running my Superhero RPG game, I’d actually go lookup the power of Hexinite. The damage in the game was figure by the number of 6 side dice to rolls. For a situation like this I would pull out a handful of dice and roll them. And then watch the face of my player when I was “This was just the first handful.” which tells them they really, really screwed up.
And then there is the effect of over 60 years of exposure to ocean water. That grenade (and the skeletons and uniforms and pretty much everything but thick steel) wouldn’t have survived that for 20 years in that shape. Potato mashers had a lot of wooden elements in them and they were powder based so I am gonna say Cartoon Physics saves the story here.
Nope! Bud already stated that it was far dryer than she’d have expected.
The dangerous bit of old grenades is often the acid used in the detonators. The acid would slowly eat through all metal that kept the compounds for detonation separated.
Overhere we still find WWII ordinance buried in landfills and such. People sometimes even carried them, strapped to their bicycles,(!!) to the police to be disposed of. None of them ever went up. Only those that people tried to pry open went “kablooi”. Most WWII ordnance is pretty sturdy.
German stick grenades (as far as I remember) do not use an acid-activated ignition, they use the same detonation system as a thunderflash practice grenade; an improved variation of a match and an ordinary fuse.
Moisture would practically make them useless, hence the small screw-lid on the bottom of the laquer-dipped stick of the grenade.
For some unknown reason I’m thinking of the sticky bombs/sock bombs used on tanks.
We occasionally get unexploded ordinance as well, but it’s mostly lost items from test ranges and such.
What I really want to know is, what dumbkoff put a “throw it and run” grenade on a SUB? Wouldn’t the concussion wave from that thing going off have sunk/killed everyone if they’d ever had to use it??
Maybe that “dummKopf” had exactly that in mind?
What I mean is ,maybe that, which was let loose on that sub, could only be contained by blowing the sh*t out of the sub?
Or, maybe the captain anchored himself and the grenade to the artifact to prevent it from being taken.
But it went wrong somehow and “it” escaped???
The artifact looks like something was attached to it’s bottom-prongs. Maybe something like a containment-vessel of some sorts, imprisoning some ancient power/spirit/demon….
Knitting further on that thought: Maybe Jin’s scary-girl was part of herself that got ripped out of her to make the Jin-Golem controllable(->no soul/conscience=useful Golem) and the artifact was -in fact- the container that held Jin’s not-crazy part. That would also explain why Jin’s scary girl actually looked more like saying “mommy?” when jin saw her after the snowmobile-scare… 💡 and it would also explain the increased “activity’ of scary-girl. She has been free since WWII…
Oh..I hadn’t even noticed the spelling. I just thought it a nice understatement to call someone that took a hand grenade on a sub a DummKopf, which is a very benign German way of stating that someone was a bit dumb to do something ,not super-stupid. Super-stupid would be “Blödmann”
Well, given the fact that some commenters are non-native speakers, I couldn’t bloody care less. I understand what’s meant. It’s not literature…
Sorry for the irritated reaction, but I have a very short fuse if it comes to Grammar-Nazi’s, especially if they are commenting on people that learned the language as a second one.
I’m far from a grammar nazi, as you may notice I double clutched on a word in my previous remark. The cringe I had was from years of seeing the same error in official correspondence from many who claimed expertise in the field.
How about the newspaper article on Lipizzaner horses that was headlined: “Horses of a Different Calibre”. I wondered how big a cannon (or is that a canon?) they needed to fit the horses’ asses…
Well she did say it was dry so Cartoon physics strikes again. A submarine with a massive hole in it at the bottom of the ocean is rarely burdened with the descriptor “Dry” but lets say air pocket and extremely effective german engineering and leave it at that.
She’s also lucky that the water was relatively shallow–had it been more than a thousand feet or so, it’s likely the sub would have been crushed by the pressure at the bottom.
Ooohkay..this really made me LOL SO hard I spilled my morning-coffee.
I can just imagine Bud -after the blast- standing on the sand-plate in a pile of smoking rubble, annoyed, and mumbling “crap! And there went my favourite one-piece too”
Bud can’t be harmed by such a minor catastrophe, but what about the relic? She had a second or two between the Klank and the Ka-boom — let’s hope she had the time and wit to snatch the thing and go elsewhere with it, or that the relic itself is impervious to damage.
I also wonder what Monica is going to say about the sudden degradation in property values on their little slice of paradise?
Exactly! For someone that can poit a complete snow-front on a cruise-liner, a bit of sand is a doddle..
Although it would be a bit like our beaches in the 70’s, before environmental regulations, when, as a kid, digging a hole often ended in being covered in sticky oil residue….
i spose you could poit the oil into a bucket and the metal into a scrap metal yard?
though i could be overestimating the pointing skill alittle 😀
but thinking of that bra-poit…gotta be able to do little stuff 😀
I’ll bet the captain, wherever he might be, would be laughing his ectoplasmic ass off too. He had to wait well over a half century, but finally got the punchline he planned. Dancing around doing his “it worked, lalalala!” dance.
One day the EOD guys blew off a couple tons of assorted explosives at a dump across the bay from our receiver site (Naval COmm Station Cam Ranh Bay, Republic of Viet Nam, 1971) I happened to be there, and outside and looking that way, and the site of the compression wave walking across the water was pretty impressive.
What always amazed me was the utter lack of giant flames and over-abundance of smoke/debris etc. in a real-life detonation of old WWII bombs.
Not exactly what my youth’ diet of WWII movies had fed me…(Not to mention my amazement to discover that America used “german tanks” in real-life…i.e. M60 without those movie-faux crosses painted on 😛 …. My first look of a “real” Tiger shocked me quite a bit, it couldn’t have been “real” it decidedly did NOT look like the German tanks in the movies (duxford tank museum has the last really functioning Tiger nowadays I believe….. )
Getting lots of dark smoke in a detonation means inefficient explosions. That means less explosive power. People who work on creating high explosives necessarily want clean efficient explosions. As Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters puts it, “Jamie want big boom”. Clean means bigger boom.
In this case Paul got it right. This sub exploding should look just like a Hollywood explosion. They make them look impressive by using a small explosive surrounded by cans of diesel fuel. That’s exactly what we have in this case, high explosives surrounded by cans of diesel fuel (the big bulges along on the sides of the sub are fuel tanks).
At one time they used a small part of a stick of dynamite, gasoline (or diesel) and several pounds of cat litter and a gallon or two of rubber cement.
That makes those nice red/black fireballs with the streamers of fire spraying out…
Hollywood explosions are remarkable non-destructive for the amount of sturm & drang – a particularly good example of a movie explosion was in Deja Vu (at abot 30 seconds) – the powderman and his assistants were aboard the ferry boat with fire extinguishers during the explosion in the beginning – and the boat was back in service three days later.
And then there’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School in which they really did blow up the school … and the powderman overestimated the amount of pyrotechnics to include – and the fireball set the flag and the trees right behind the cast and extras on fire while the Ramones played the theme song. Marky glances over his shoulder, then hunches down over his drums and keeps playing…
I have to admit, when I got to throw handgrenades for the first time, I was utterly disappointed by the lack of fireballs and black smoke. Just a lightflash, small puff of white-ish smoke and a short, piercingly loud “PENG!!” and the “rrrrekk” of some shards hitting the bunker-walls we sat behind.
Movie “kabloois” are much prettier and more fun.. *sulks*
Good thing though Bud decided to have a look herself first. If she had followed some suggestions in former comments. like, “take Monica along, ’cause she’s a specialist in old stuff” well..M would be reddish guacamole by now… Although..on second thought..M ‘d have poited the both of them I guess, since her “self preservation poiting-ability” seems pretty well developed.
On third thought: Bud ‘ll have poited-out too by now, saving her favourite one-piece in the process *pouts, somewhat dissapointed*
Bud is impulsive, somewhat clumsy, but does have a clear head on her shoulders.
Eyeteeth= canines. So called because when pulled they cause pain in the eye socket and a momentary blurring of vision as the socket is distorted by the forces of removing the tooth.
Of couese, being that old it could have gone off pretty quick, not waiting the usual time for the fuse to burn down. Just the drop may have set it off.
I guess the grenade fell down somewhere in the messy pipes and wiring that a WWII sub would have below the walking boards, plates(?).
Given the fact that -especially old- handgrenades, give between 3 and 7 seconds before detonation, I doubt she had the time to pick the damn thing up and toss it through an improvised hole.
It’ll be like a person thinking up the perfect comeback AFTER the fact (often days after). She’ll think of all these things she could have done in days to come. Ah well, easy come, easy blow.
Accordinfg to modern dictionaries “Fuse” as well as “Fuze” is both accepted :
fuse 2 (also fuze)
noun
a length of material along which a small flame moves to explode a bomb or firework, meanwhile allowing time for those who light it to move to a safe distance.
• a device in a bomb, shell, or mine that makes it explode on impact, after an interval, at set distance from the target, or when subjected to magnetic or vibratory stimulation.
OK,
so this artifact seems to have the power to make people do stupid things-like chain himself to torpedo tubes, blow his own head, hold a grenade or let the grenade fall?
Man, this can’t be good!
“They say the Lord invented alchohol so the Irish wouldn’t rule the world…”
–the bridgebuilder in the movie “The Ghost and the Darkness” which you all should watch.
All in all, it seems someone/something booby-trapped the darn sub. Question remains: Why? To keep something in or to keep something out, or prevent someone to get his hands on the artefact?
So
The captain possibly shot the crew who were possibly trying to get the relic.
He set up a defence incase the sub/his body was found in which case he could blow the lot up (clearly he was worried that if he just did that then what ever he was scared of would escape but it would be better to attempt to blow it up as a last resort rather than just let it fall into anyones hands)
He chained himself to the torpedo tubes kinda like err that greek guy did. Stopping his ears and lashing himself to the mast to prevent the sirens from stopping him.
So its sound? But then that would just be a case of putting something in your ears so maybe mental?
It must be subtle enough that it would take over the crew (and that it could hide from Bud) before anyone realised but weak enough to fight (after all he did blow his brains out)
But the hole was coming out from the sub…
Possibly the Nazi which made the Captain realise something wasn’t kosher?
Orrrrrrrrr
Maybe the relic is the Captains precious and it had corrupted him and only him.
I have a song for this comic. It is stuck in my head.
I went to the animal fair
The birds and beasts were there
The old baboon by the light of the moon
was combing his auburn hair.
Well the monkey he got drunk,
climbed up the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant sneezed and fell down on his knees–
And that was the end of the monk!
Yeah it was old when my mom sang it to me at bedtime…
Also, I really wish I could post a picture here, because I have some pics of a Submarine Museum that give good representations of how sub sizes have changed in the past hundred years. Seriously, there’s easily a three-story difference. /shrug
I’m impressed by the fact Paul not only got the technical detail of the pull cord friction igniter of the grenade correct, but also integrated that detail into the story.
It suddenly occurs to me to wonder if women shaved back in the time Bud grew up. She has mentioned before that her hair can break scissors, so shaving now would be impossible.
Maybe Marvin should use the torpedos/grenade/sub trick rather than a Q-36 space modulator. Where’s the kaboom, there’s supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
Two comments of no real value but they’re my contribution.
The friction – ignition wire in the handle of a stick grenade actually takes some effort to yank out (It’s wrapped around the fuse cord). So It probably wouldn’t fall like that. Also the fuse would not remain sensitive for so many years.
It would be far more likely for a submarine to have been carrying the German version of the “Egg Grenade”, a stamped sheet metal version of the more familiar hand grenade. This had a pin and handle detonation system that fired a percussion cap and would be more likely to still be functional after all this time than a stick grenades friction fuse.
well it’s not really self-narration, she’s just thinking aloud, and for the benefit of the readers. Thinking aloud can help keep a clear head, and sometimes cause you to focus on things that you wouldn’t normally see or think about. I highly recommend trying it, if you don’t already.
True Dat ^^ my collegues are used to it by now, but in the beginning it got me some befuddled looks.
Nowadays I get expectant looks, because they know I am mulling on a current problem if thinking aloud. It helps me focus, and reduce complex technical problems into their seperate, easier to understand , parts.
I must admit to ‘Gurk-Gurk-Gurk’ already becoming part of my spoken vocabulary.
Me(reading yet another Emal about some policy minutia): Gurk-Gurk-Gurk-Gurk!
Co-worker (cautiously): Yeeees?
Me: Oh, sorry, just reading the memo about the Dress Policy change.
Co-Worker: Oh. Okay. (goes back to what they were doing)
(Seconds later)
Me: Gurk-Gurk-Gurk-Gurk
Co-Worker (Peers cautiously over laptop screen)
Me: Another memo.
(repeat as needed)
What an absolutely WONDERFUL idea! I work with a group of women who think I’m nuts as it is. AND I’m the eldest one there(I may grow old, but I refuse to grow up!) Instead of swearing like they do at upper management decisions, I do believe I’ll “gurk-gurk-gurk” instead. I’ll also check out Stinky’s other comments and use where approriate. Insert evil chuckle here!
I’m convinced there is a circuit missing in the human brain that is completed by thinking out loud.
It’s amazing how some things become so much clearer if one just talks it out.
Then again, it just may be the presence of an intelligent conversation partner.
I’ve found the best way to understand something, as well as, finding what you don’t know about it, is pretending to be explaining it to someone else, in detail. In my case such an exercize is entirely mental, so I don’t know about the talking out loud to oneself thing.
“They” say that teaching is the best way to learn. I feel its because you need to know more about the subject than who you are trying to teach, and if you end up trying to teach a bunch of know-it-all boy scouts who think they know everything, then you better damn well know what you are talking about. Sorry, summer camp flashback…
Oops! Good thing you’re invincible, Bud. Let’s hope the artifact is, too!
My thoughts exactly. 🙂
Word.
I hope Stinky’s okay.
Seriously. Poor Stinky!
A case of “Life Imitating Art”?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-13023686
Hmm.. “potato masher” grenade detonates next to 4 torpedo tubes.. presumably loaded with 70 year-old torpedos. Yup, that’s potentially going to make quite a bang. Question: Is Bud’s swimsuit indestructible? If not, she’s going to be standing at the bottom of a small crater in her all-together
if it waited till the time ran out, there was a few seconds to port out with the artifact, then rescue stinky.
well, the Stiehlhandgranaten were inherently unsafe for the user, there are enough cases delivered from war-veterans that these things exploded as soon as you pulled the string on the back.
Given the fact that Bud probably didn’t know what an SHG is, I guess she poited nowhere when it happened 😉
And yes, good that she is invincible 🙂
Soo..in this case a slight drop of the grenade, while hanging from the cord could possibly have detonated the damn thing?
Makes sense. I was, like another commenter, wondering if the weight of the grenade would be enough to pull that friction fuse-cord-thingy.
Actually, that’s one of the real “field-expedient” uses of the “potato masher”: They were sometimes hung from their detonating cords on walls etc. to prevent climbing as any disturbance would trigger the grenade. That captain knew what he was doing…
“I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
Whadda ya talking about? That went completely by me….
The quotation is from The Princess Bride; Inigo Montoya speaking to his employer, Vizzini the Sicilian.
Invincible is a usage of conflict — “that cannot be overcome; unconquerable”.
I think the term actually meant is invulnerable:“that cannot be wounded or injured; proof against attack; unassailable”.
An example of this distinction is the defense of Stalingrad.
Inconceivable!
U296 was a Type VIIC/41, or at least the WWII version was. Assuming since they sunk no ships and none fired, all 14 torpedo’s would have been on board. Add to that the 200 or so rounds from the 88mm deck gun, and whatever Diesel the submarine was also carrying at the time.
Might be just enough to give our Golem Girl a nasty headache… And need a new change of swim wear.
My thinking of the One-Piece, too.
We can only hope. 😉
Bud is going to be pissed. That was her favourite bikini
I agree! No way that bikini would survive that.
Hooray! 🙂
Sheesh – LOOK at the pictures.
Especially that second last one. The “Aw crap” look on Bud’s face as the grenade hits the floor sans pin is beautiful.
Not the first time Bud has had to go home naked.
B… Bikini… ? I may not be the formost expert on female swimwear, but isn’t a bikini a two-parter?
Uh, it’s a one-piece suit, not a bikini…
No it’s not..at least not after this …
I realize it is…was a once piece now. But you can’t blame me for wishing/imaging Bud in a bikini, can you?
Not so much a one-piece suit as a million-piece now…
Vapor-wear.
Nice re-definition of the term.
How about No-kini???
Threads-kini???
it wouldnt be the first time Bud found herself naked on the beach
At least the weather is nice here.
NEKKED BUD!
I hope Stinky’s OK.
…and she didn’t even have time to quote Shakespeare…
Ouchie.
I was expecting something more “Indiana Jones” like Bud grabs the relic and a giant freaking boulder starts to roll after her.
And most subs are equipped with giant boulders, so yeah, I agree. That’s what shoulda happened!
Wait! What about stinky?! Was he clear?
ditto. I hope Stinky’s sank safely underwater recovering from a self-inflicted anchor bonk. Being a surface explosion, there should minimal underwater shock waves
She warned Stinky to move away before she entered the sub.
Well, she did have a few seconds to get clear with the relic and the captain’s hat before everything went pop.
Potato masher gernade — small boom starts big boom!
BUUUUD NOOOOO-oh wait… Nevermind.
STINKYYYYY NOOOOOOOO
I was just thinking that I hope Stinky is OK
Well, it would be Sinky’s fault for not listening to Bud.
How was he still propped up after blowing his own brains out? Granted I am no medical expert but isn’t there some sort of twitch when a bullet enters the more vital parts of your grey matter?
Note chain around waist (and, in yesterday’s strip, arm hooked around stanchion).
More importantly, how does one shoot oneself in the head, then put your arms back around the pipe?
Sheer willpower, my Good Man, sheer willpower…
Nah. Someone/something went bezerk and shot all crewmembers, then left the sub through that tear in the hull.
Wait… 😮 😯 EEEEK there is a crazed, murderous zombie-nazi-ghost thingy on the loose somewhere???
Well, let us not forget that this is pure Bud speculation.
Not even all powerful Golems are always right.
It was the RED SKUL !! (Captain America)
“Oops!… I Did It Again”
Or, Nope, that’s not it!
Oh, lord.
Well that’s ONE way to wrap up a week. With high-explosives!! XD
You know what they say. Better to go out with a bang.
My e-mail .sig says : “The quantity of high explosives required varies directly as the square of the size of the social problem.”
One sub’s explosive content in WWII makes me wonder if your comment has a corrallary. Something along the lines of “Explosive required need not be all in the same place at the same time.”
I hate cliff bangers.
Deposit correct change in the Pun jar .
Ooooo. That’s a good idea. Have Paul set up a Paypal thingie (bonus, if it’s set up for a dime at a time) and when people make puns, we have to ‘tip’ one in.
…crap.
Heh. That’s lowing the boom onthe pundants. ($0.15, arguing that a half-mast pun is only worth … ok, ok. $.20)
The tragic thing is the island is now covered in half-burned fuel oil.
No more pristine beach, at least until after the next hurricane.
It is to be hoped that Stinky lost interest in the island in the last few minutes, or it will be covered with organic matter as well.
Bud told him to get well clear before she opened the hatch (about 2 strips ago I think).
Calamari for everyone? You go get the lemons, I’ll make the marinara!
I can just picture the scene after Bud tells Monica what happened.
Monica: “Bud, what do you mean “I kinda blew up your island!?”
Maybe no more island. It appeared to be mainly a sandbar, such a blast could have scattered it below sealevel.
The blast would have certainly destroyed the sub’s log and any journals crewmembers might have been keeping, so no chance of finding out what happened now.
Probably good Monica and/or Shelly weren’t along, it could have been fatal for them (assuming Monica didn’t poit out). On the other hand, they might have yelled at Bud not to touch anything they didn’t know what it was…
i’m sure as intellegent as nazis were, the must have had some sort of black box device, and i’m pretty sure the captain would have a safe in his quarters where he would keep a journal…though it maybe hard to find without the help of one particularly lovable squid. XD
If you look at the historical record, “Had some good engineers who they occasionally listened to” doesn’t equal “smart”.
There’d be no reason to put a “Black Box” (aka flight recorder) on a sub, because if you lose a sub you lose the whole thing and aren’t getting it back.
Bud puts the “whoopsie” in the Wapsi Square.
😆
Or BP shows up to clean up the mess…
@radio and YakkoRex
Stinky is OK, Bud told him to get clear of the sand bar:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/no-zombies/
Now, the SAND BAR may not be so lucky.
Thank goodness. I can sleep tonight knowing that the octopus is ok.
But he may be pissed/sad one of his toys is kaput.
Mad Squid!! RUN!
Run? To where? It’s a very small sandbar, and just got smaller, and given Stinky’s size, I suspect he can reach right across it.
“When in trouble,
When in doubt,
Run in circles,
Scream and shout!”
Lets see the VII C Uboat had 12 torpedoes in the forward torpedo room. The standard German torpedo used when U296 patrols was the G2/T2 torpedo which has 617 lbs of Hexinite for a warhead. That around 3.t tons of high explosives which equals…big BOOM! And you might as wall add in the 2 aft torpedoes which brings is up to 4,2 tons of explosives.
And then there’s the possibility of plenty of diesel fuel being left in the fuel tanks. Let see Germany -> Ireland -> let’s day Bermuda is 6000+ miles. 8000 mile range for the Type VII C Uboat. Fuel tanks could be still be 25% full.
Looks at the last panel again…
Yep. That explosion looks just about right. I’d say that Paul got it totally right.
Hmmm…lessee:
C6H2(NO2)3CH3 → 6CO + 2.5H2 + 1.5N2 + C and Bud setting off Stielhandgranate.. Hmm..given Qmv = Qmp + W and W = P·V2
Hmm..(mulling, mulling) Yeah. = loud kablooi!
^^ I have NO idea what I am talking about, but that is what You get when googling “formula for detonation-force”
😛
If I was still running my Superhero RPG game, I’d actually go lookup the power of Hexinite. The damage in the game was figure by the number of 6 side dice to rolls. For a situation like this I would pull out a handful of dice and roll them. And then watch the face of my player when I was “This was just the first handful.” which tells them they really, really screwed up.
And then there is the effect of over 60 years of exposure to ocean water. That grenade (and the skeletons and uniforms and pretty much everything but thick steel) wouldn’t have survived that for 20 years in that shape. Potato mashers had a lot of wooden elements in them and they were powder based so I am gonna say Cartoon Physics saves the story here.
Nope! Bud already stated that it was far dryer than she’d have expected.
The dangerous bit of old grenades is often the acid used in the detonators. The acid would slowly eat through all metal that kept the compounds for detonation separated.
Overhere we still find WWII ordinance buried in landfills and such. People sometimes even carried them, strapped to their bicycles,(!!) to the police to be disposed of. None of them ever went up. Only those that people tried to pry open went “kablooi”. Most WWII ordnance is pretty sturdy.
German stick grenades (as far as I remember) do not use an acid-activated ignition, they use the same detonation system as a thunderflash practice grenade; an improved variation of a match and an ordinary fuse.
Moisture would practically make them useless, hence the small screw-lid on the bottom of the laquer-dipped stick of the grenade.
For some unknown reason I’m thinking of the sticky bombs/sock bombs used on tanks.
We occasionally get unexploded ordinance as well, but it’s mostly lost items from test ranges and such.
What I really want to know is, what dumbkoff put a “throw it and run” grenade on a SUB? Wouldn’t the concussion wave from that thing going off have sunk/killed everyone if they’d ever had to use it??
Maybe that “dummKopf” had exactly that in mind?
What I mean is ,maybe that, which was let loose on that sub, could only be contained by blowing the sh*t out of the sub?
Or, maybe the captain anchored himself and the grenade to the artifact to prevent it from being taken.
But it went wrong somehow and “it” escaped???
The artifact looks like something was attached to it’s bottom-prongs. Maybe something like a containment-vessel of some sorts, imprisoning some ancient power/spirit/demon….
Knitting further on that thought: Maybe Jin’s scary-girl was part of herself that got ripped out of her to make the Jin-Golem controllable(->no soul/conscience=useful Golem) and the artifact was -in fact- the container that held Jin’s not-crazy part. That would also explain why Jin’s scary girl actually looked more like saying “mommy?” when jin saw her after the snowmobile-scare… 💡 and it would also explain the increased “activity’ of scary-girl. She has been free since WWII…
Hmm..I am seeing too much here.. 😛
…I like your train of thought, Jay-Em. 🙂
And we have now proven that I shouldn’t try to spell in foreign languages at three in the morning. 😀
The artifact looked like a piece of a greater whole to me too. I just thought “quest time!”
Oh..I hadn’t even noticed the spelling. I just thought it a nice understatement to call someone that took a hand grenade on a sub a DummKopf, which is a very benign German way of stating that someone was a bit dumb to do something ,not super-stupid. Super-stupid would be “Blödmann”
The word is ordnance instead of ordinance. Common error. Just one that makes me cringe when I see it.
“fuze” vs “fuse”
“stationery” vs “stationary”
“discreet” vs “discrete” – always love when people announce that they are made of separate parts when the mean that they can keep a secret…
Well, given the fact that some commenters are non-native speakers, I couldn’t bloody care less. I understand what’s meant. It’s not literature…
Sorry for the irritated reaction, but I have a very short fuse if it comes to Grammar-Nazi’s, especially if they are commenting on people that learned the language as a second one.
My favorite was in a brochure we received from a prospective contractor describiing their expertise in manufacturing “Navel Ordinance”.
I’m far from a grammar nazi, as you may notice I double clutched on a word in my previous remark. The cringe I had was from years of seeing the same error in official correspondence from many who claimed expertise in the field.
“Navel Ordinance” ???? I am getting a very strange picture in my mind’s eye…. Something about regulating navel-fluff O_o
How about the newspaper article on Lipizzaner horses that was headlined: “Horses of a Different Calibre”. I wondered how big a cannon (or is that a canon?) they needed to fit the horses’ asses…
I’m sorry!! I didn’t know that one. I’ll keep an eye open for it in the future.
I believe in the case of canon/cannon, two Ns shoot stuff.
P.S. I always laugh when someone uses “Mike” instead of “Mic” to abbreviate “Microphone”.
Fairport – Wouldn’t becoming discrete make you discreet?
Well she did say it was dry so Cartoon physics strikes again. A submarine with a massive hole in it at the bottom of the ocean is rarely burdened with the descriptor “Dry” but lets say air pocket and extremely effective german engineering and leave it at that.
Watertight doors. Compartmentalisation.
She’s also lucky that the water was relatively shallow–had it been more than a thousand feet or so, it’s likely the sub would have been crushed by the pressure at the bottom.
Ooohkay..this really made me LOL SO hard I spilled my morning-coffee.
I can just imagine Bud -after the blast- standing on the sand-plate in a pile of smoking rubble, annoyed, and mumbling “crap! And there went my favourite one-piece too”
Hopefully, there was a -poit- after the -klank- and before the KABOOoom…….
Hopefully not !! Almost all male readers here are apparently praying for a “Bud-Wardrobe-Malfunction”
I do not do such. I am a good boy… :-T *KaDonk!!*..hammer of Hyppocritical oath lands on head……
Allright! Allright!..I too hope for a wardrobe malfunction….sheesh.. *rubs painful head*
Bud can’t be harmed by such a minor catastrophe, but what about the relic? She had a second or two between the Klank and the Ka-boom — let’s hope she had the time and wit to snatch the thing and go elsewhere with it, or that the relic itself is impervious to damage.
I also wonder what Monica is going to say about the sudden degradation in property values on their little slice of paradise?
Nothing a bit of the poiting of sea sand onto the little island can’t fix.
Exactly! For someone that can poit a complete snow-front on a cruise-liner, a bit of sand is a doddle..
Although it would be a bit like our beaches in the 70’s, before environmental regulations, when, as a kid, digging a hole often ended in being covered in sticky oil residue….
i spose you could poit the oil into a bucket and the metal into a scrap metal yard?
though i could be overestimating the pointing skill alittle 😀
but thinking of that bra-poit…gotta be able to do little stuff 😀
forget the bra! they can poit pee out of a bladder!
Ahh. But would she be too mad to poit?
I’ll bet the captain, wherever he might be, would be laughing his ectoplasmic ass off too. He had to wait well over a half century, but finally got the punchline he planned. Dancing around doing his “it worked, lalalala!” dance.
Boom!
^^
that swim suit is toast…
cool ‘splode BTW even has the compression wave 🙂
One day the EOD guys blew off a couple tons of assorted explosives at a dump across the bay from our receiver site (Naval COmm Station Cam Ranh Bay, Republic of Viet Nam, 1971) I happened to be there, and outside and looking that way, and the site of the compression wave walking across the water was pretty impressive.
What always amazed me was the utter lack of giant flames and over-abundance of smoke/debris etc. in a real-life detonation of old WWII bombs.
Not exactly what my youth’ diet of WWII movies had fed me…(Not to mention my amazement to discover that America used “german tanks” in real-life…i.e. M60 without those movie-faux crosses painted on 😛 …. My first look of a “real” Tiger shocked me quite a bit, it couldn’t have been “real” it decidedly did NOT look like the German tanks in the movies (duxford tank museum has the last really functioning Tiger nowadays I believe….. )
Getting lots of dark smoke in a detonation means inefficient explosions. That means less explosive power. People who work on creating high explosives necessarily want clean efficient explosions. As Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters puts it, “Jamie want big boom”. Clean means bigger boom.
In this case Paul got it right. This sub exploding should look just like a Hollywood explosion. They make them look impressive by using a small explosive surrounded by cans of diesel fuel. That’s exactly what we have in this case, high explosives surrounded by cans of diesel fuel (the big bulges along on the sides of the sub are fuel tanks).
At one time they used a small part of a stick of dynamite, gasoline (or diesel) and several pounds of cat litter and a gallon or two of rubber cement.
That makes those nice red/black fireballs with the streamers of fire spraying out…
Hollywood explosions are remarkable non-destructive for the amount of sturm & drang – a particularly good example of a movie explosion was in Deja Vu (at abot 30 seconds) – the powderman and his assistants were aboard the ferry boat with fire extinguishers during the explosion in the beginning – and the boat was back in service three days later.
And then there’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School in which they really did blow up the school … and the powderman overestimated the amount of pyrotechnics to include – and the fireball set the flag and the trees right behind the cast and extras on fire while the Ramones played the theme song. Marky glances over his shoulder, then hunches down over his drums and keeps playing…
I have to admit, when I got to throw handgrenades for the first time, I was utterly disappointed by the lack of fireballs and black smoke. Just a lightflash, small puff of white-ish smoke and a short, piercingly loud “PENG!!” and the “rrrrekk” of some shards hitting the bunker-walls we sat behind.
Movie “kabloois” are much prettier and more fun.. *sulks*
DON’T PUSH THE RED BUTTON!
Also, Bud IS a blonde. That explains everything.
Good thing though Bud decided to have a look herself first. If she had followed some suggestions in former comments. like, “take Monica along, ’cause she’s a specialist in old stuff” well..M would be reddish guacamole by now… Although..on second thought..M ‘d have poited the both of them I guess, since her “self preservation poiting-ability” seems pretty well developed.
On third thought: Bud ‘ll have poited-out too by now, saving her favourite one-piece in the process *pouts, somewhat dissapointed*
Bud is impulsive, somewhat clumsy, but does have a clear head on her shoulders.
Im guessing the girls wont be happy that their little getaway spot just became re-decorated with a blown out nazi sub! :S
True. If M or one of the others poit there before Bud tells them what happened they are going to be in for a rather wet surprise.
Voops. Too bad she doesn’t think on her feet a bit more. Could have punched a hole in the hull and tossed out the explodey thingy.
Actually she could have just used her belly hatch.
Explosive Ordinance Disposal people would give their eyeteeth for a bomb dump that convenient.
eyeteeth?
Apple’s newest product, the iTeeth?
*tips the pun jar…. AGAIN*
Actually, can you imagine an implantable i-pod?
Click the left molar for back, and the right molar for forward.
Eyeteeth= canines. So called because when pulled they cause pain in the eye socket and a momentary blurring of vision as the socket is distorted by the forces of removing the tooth.
I don’t know about that, Sheik. Jin blew up whip cream inside her hatch and it shot out of her nose!
Of couese, being that old it could have gone off pretty quick, not waiting the usual time for the fuse to burn down. Just the drop may have set it off.
I guess the grenade fell down somewhere in the messy pipes and wiring that a WWII sub would have below the walking boards, plates(?).
Given the fact that -especially old- handgrenades, give between 3 and 7 seconds before detonation, I doubt she had the time to pick the damn thing up and toss it through an improvised hole.
Or, even better yet, just poit the grenade a thousand feet up or into space!
It’ll be like a person thinking up the perfect comeback AFTER the fact (often days after). She’ll think of all these things she could have done in days to come. Ah well, easy come, easy blow.
BOOOOO! …oom.
Hissss..
yes that’s the sound a fuse makes….
You better start running then… 👿
No, it’s the sound a fuze makes.
A fuse makes a sort of “pop” as it burns out, if it makes any noise at all.
Accordinfg to modern dictionaries “Fuse” as well as “Fuze” is both accepted :
fuse 2 (also fuze)
noun
a length of material along which a small flame moves to explode a bomb or firework, meanwhile allowing time for those who light it to move to a safe distance.
• a device in a bomb, shell, or mine that makes it explode on impact, after an interval, at set distance from the target, or when subjected to magnetic or vibratory stimulation.
Now shush.
According to not-so-modern dictionaries as well – my ’48 Webster’s Unabridged gives the definition of fuze as: “<i.n</i.: a fuse”.
OK,
so this artifact seems to have the power to make people do stupid things-like chain himself to torpedo tubes, blow his own head, hold a grenade or let the grenade fall?
Man, this can’t be good!
OMG a stupidity inducer?
The thing would be more dangerous than…
I give up.
What could be more dangerous?
More dangerous than a stupidity inducer?
A stupidity inducer in the hands of a three-piece chimera, one piece mentally instable…
so much for pet-cat 😉
Since when has mankind needed a magical charm to induce stupidity?
That’s the key–not to induce, but to magnify.
One of the Lord Darcy tales had such a thing.
Mankind has always needed alcohol…
“They say the Lord invented alchohol so the Irish wouldn’t rule the world…”
–the bridgebuilder in the movie “The Ghost and the Darkness” which you all should watch.
All in all, it seems someone/something booby-trapped the darn sub. Question remains: Why? To keep something in or to keep something out, or prevent someone to get his hands on the artefact?
Man, she’s gonna have to buy another swimsuit.
*picturing totally happy Brandi here*
Here –> http://wapsisquare.com/comic/newbikini/
Heh. That was what i was thinking of,indeed.
Hmm
So
The captain possibly shot the crew who were possibly trying to get the relic.
He set up a defence incase the sub/his body was found in which case he could blow the lot up (clearly he was worried that if he just did that then what ever he was scared of would escape but it would be better to attempt to blow it up as a last resort rather than just let it fall into anyones hands)
He chained himself to the torpedo tubes kinda like err that greek guy did. Stopping his ears and lashing himself to the mast to prevent the sirens from stopping him.
So its sound? But then that would just be a case of putting something in your ears so maybe mental?
It must be subtle enough that it would take over the crew (and that it could hide from Bud) before anyone realised but weak enough to fight (after all he did blow his brains out)
But the hole was coming out from the sub…
Possibly the Nazi which made the Captain realise something wasn’t kosher?
Orrrrrrrrr
Maybe the relic is the Captains precious and it had corrupted him and only him.
I’m sure Paul will let us know soon 😀
Ouch. The Nazi realizing that something isn’t kosher? And decided it was a bad thing? No wonder he blew his brains out!
hsssss
wow 3 hours after posting and we’re already close to 100 comments…. i wish i had a website that got hits like that….
I get that many comments all the time. Only, most are from ‘buy_gold_now’ and ‘sell_your_timeshare’…
I have a song for this comic. It is stuck in my head.
I went to the animal fair
The birds and beasts were there
The old baboon by the light of the moon
was combing his auburn hair.
Well the monkey he got drunk,
climbed up the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant sneezed and fell down on his knees–
And that was the end of the monk!
Yeah it was old when my mom sang it to me at bedtime…
…I always heard it “And what became of the monk?”
See, that’s a much nicer ending…
Annnnd, at the mention of song…
Dropped there on a whim
Steel shark can no longer swim
Antique Nazi sub
Retrieved from the briny deep
A supernatural hub
How long would it keep?
She blew the sub sky high
But found the artifact
And then a booby trap
She blew the sub sky high
Bud blew the sub sky high
We know that she can’t die
But will her suit survive?
Bud blew the sub sky high
The captain’s last stand
What’s in his right hand
Antique Nazi sub
Retrieved from the briny deep
A supernatural hub
How long would it keep?
She blew the sub sky high
Bud found the artifact
And then a booby trap
She blew the sub sky high
Bud blew the sub sky high
We know that she can’t die
But will her suit survive?
Bud blew the sub sky high
Y’all think that you have won
“Cause you got through without a pun
But of this golem I’m a fan
And I prefer my Bud in a can
(throws money at the pun jar)
Also, I really wish I could post a picture here, because I have some pics of a Submarine Museum that give good representations of how sub sizes have changed in the past hundred years. Seriously, there’s easily a three-story difference. /shrug
I’m impressed by the fact Paul not only got the technical detail of the pull cord friction igniter of the grenade correct, but also integrated that detail into the story.
Good research == credible action!
Superb explosion btw!
“Pull my finger”, indeed!
Talk about a cliff hanger! Thanks, Pablo. I’m not USUALLY in a hurry for Monday to come. Wish I could fast forward here-LOL!
89 comments already and it’s only 7:21 AM EST!!!!!
And with the weekend, we’ve still got two plus days to go…
Nice shockwave in that last panel, Paul!
I know Bud’s indestructable, but that’s gotta sting…
It suddenly occurs to me to wonder if women shaved back in the time Bud grew up. She has mentioned before that her hair can break scissors, so shaving now would be impossible.
nah, she’d just have to do the superman thing, either use lasers, or find some of her “kryptonite” before shaving….
…Or apply high explosives…
..Oh…
…Oh!
Yeah. I’ve obviously got a Dirty Mind, because whenever i see Power Girl in this costume, i wonder, since she’s just as invulnerable as Superman, what she can use for the Brazilian she needs to wear it…
Grrr. Forgot to close the link. Oh, well.
Son-in-law Steve suggests epoxy, BTW…
You know, what with the intermediate step in the GG’s creation, she may not have anything to worry about in the bikini-wax department.
…the lucky little ****! 😀
Maybe Marvin should use the torpedos/grenade/sub trick rather than a Q-36 space modulator. Where’s the kaboom, there’s supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
Bud, panel 5: “Aw, s!@#….”
Well dang, there goes another swimsuit. Lets hope that Stinky was not around when that sub went all kablooy.
Wierd co-inky-dink. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-13014640
The most hilarious thing about this one is the caption: “Pull my finger”…
Two comments of no real value but they’re my contribution.
The friction – ignition wire in the handle of a stick grenade actually takes some effort to yank out (It’s wrapped around the fuse cord). So It probably wouldn’t fall like that. Also the fuse would not remain sensitive for so many years.
It would be far more likely for a submarine to have been carrying the German version of the “Egg Grenade”, a stamped sheet metal version of the more familiar hand grenade. This had a pin and handle detonation system that fired a percussion cap and would be more likely to still be functional after all this time than a stick grenades friction fuse.
whew! and I was worried Wapsi was real. thank you.
Im sorry that was mean, im just cranky cause i was woken up early after a very late night.
Talk about a blast from the past.
Cool! Now it’s safe to recover all of that awesome scrap metal. It should be very good stuff. At least that’s what I hear about the old Victory Iron.
I’m still waiting for Hans Spatz to show up with the black pearl.
And from yesterday’s reading, a dream inspired image of Cthulhu chewing on the end of the sub thinking: Who wraps a sandwich in this much tinfoil?
HAHAHAHA thats awesome!
Whoa! Perfectly preserved (or nearly so) German WW2 war machinery is turning up all over the place…
That rocks! The Do17 was an awesome looking bird.
Fairportfan – thanks for the link – nice article.
I run through the day’s headlines on Yahoo and take note of Interesting Stories. And of how they might match up with other things i’m thinkling about.
I always said that gurl was da BOMB!!! 😀
Mmm… Self-narration is awkward. Maybe if it was in thought bubbles?
well it’s not really self-narration, she’s just thinking aloud, and for the benefit of the readers. Thinking aloud can help keep a clear head, and sometimes cause you to focus on things that you wouldn’t normally see or think about. I highly recommend trying it, if you don’t already.
True Dat ^^ my collegues are used to it by now, but in the beginning it got me some befuddled looks.
Nowadays I get expectant looks, because they know I am mulling on a current problem if thinking aloud. It helps me focus, and reduce complex technical problems into their seperate, easier to understand , parts.
I must admit to ‘Gurk-Gurk-Gurk’ already becoming part of my spoken vocabulary.
Me(reading yet another Emal about some policy minutia): Gurk-Gurk-Gurk-Gurk!
Co-worker (cautiously): Yeeees?
Me: Oh, sorry, just reading the memo about the Dress Policy change.
Co-Worker: Oh. Okay. (goes back to what they were doing)
(Seconds later)
Me: Gurk-Gurk-Gurk-Gurk
Co-Worker (Peers cautiously over laptop screen)
Me: Another memo.
(repeat as needed)
What an absolutely WONDERFUL idea! I work with a group of women who think I’m nuts as it is. AND I’m the eldest one there(I may grow old, but I refuse to grow up!) Instead of swearing like they do at upper management decisions, I do believe I’ll “gurk-gurk-gurk” instead. I’ll also check out Stinky’s other comments and use where approriate. Insert evil chuckle here!
I used to weird people i worked with out by telling them (quite truthfully) that among my friends, i was considered relatively normal.
I’m convinced there is a circuit missing in the human brain that is completed by thinking out loud.
It’s amazing how some things become so much clearer if one just talks it out.
Then again, it just may be the presence of an intelligent conversation partner.
I’ve found the best way to understand something, as well as, finding what you don’t know about it, is pretending to be explaining it to someone else, in detail. In my case such an exercize is entirely mental, so I don’t know about the talking out loud to oneself thing.
“They” say that teaching is the best way to learn. I feel its because you need to know more about the subject than who you are trying to teach, and if you end up trying to teach a bunch of know-it-all boy scouts who think they know everything, then you better damn well know what you are talking about. Sorry, summer camp flashback…
And boom goes the submarine.
OOooops! Yeah…that’s gonna leave a mark.
KDSHGBFB AEJ
AAAAAAH!
Cliffhanger!!!!
>__<