"No matter what, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they do not."

Old school pre-WWI. ;) Nice. That machine gun changed the world.

I wonder what they would do if, on a live broadcast of a lunar mission, they discover Tranquility Base?

"The furries have landed."

Great, another president that can't pronounce "Nuclear".

Please, in this case it's understanable. It's probably a new word for anyone and the scientists probably read it somewhere on the bomb itself. Look at him, even the concept of destroying an entire city with one bomb seems to be a new concept.

Yeah, but it is still a fun thing to point out. (Also, I have no pony in this race, I'm Canadian.).

Was just thinking that.

YAY!!!

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

This should be interesting.

Problem with the nuclear weapon is it doesn't scale down very well.

Hard to drop one on Oakland and not also Screw San Francisco.

There are 3 classes of nuclear ordnence, the neutron or dirty bomb is the terrorists low income version, cheap easy and deadly though not a true nuke in the classical sense it may as well be given its damage potential, the tacticle nuke [city buster] then the Multiple warhead icbm's that i like to call 'continent busters' ...there is a theoretical 'planet breaker' class but...nobody has had the balls to build one yet....for obvious reasons.

i have no real reason for saying this just well lets put it this way, i like being a nerd

Yeah I was trained as an NBC Specialist.

Nuclear weapons get cleaner as they get bigger.

Unless you salt it a 5 Megaton Bomb is cleaner per kiloton than a 5 KT Bomb.

Initiating the Fusion with Fission is the Dirty part. Fusion is much cleaner fallout wise.

I thought Neutron bombs would kill all organic life and leave cars, buildings, etc. intact?

I may have goten my terminology mixed up, I don't know if the type of device your thinking of actualy exists though, i have heard of the idea its a device that works simlarly to an EMP burst burst but instead of releaseing a wave of electromagnitism it releases a high yield short term radioactive burst, with a very short fallout...devistateing a cities population but leaving its infastructure intact...well save for damage caused by say the sudenly dead people in cars slaming into things ect ect

I looked it up on Wiki. The neutron bomb is designed to kill with radiation but does not do so without an explosion. And deaths are not immediate, it seems.

Nuclear Fissile with initiation of a minimal fusion reaction.

Blast Radius 500 yards.

Radiation lethality 2-4 miles.

Theoretical bomb.

It was a concept to mostly kill tank crews. But used in another way an effective human killer too.

But it was never built as a weapon.

Second time i've heard that quote from Oppenheimer in as many days.

The new Godzilla teaser trailer used it to great effect as well.

The worldbuilding in these pages is really great.

HOLY

SHIT


PLOT

TWIST

Can't put THAT genie back in the bottle!!

"Not sure if I'll be able to get to the computer before we hit the open road tomorrow..."
Seems that the Orcaverse isn't even at the computer, now. Note the line about slide rules.

yeah Radio is there highest tech thing atm...they might have the big room sized computers at this stage though.

They also have helicopters as well.
I cannot recall if they have TV, but they sure have radio.
So that puts their civilization on a technical par with the RL 1950s.

which is about where the guy writeing the comic said they were

Wins the Prize, Yep a Nuke.

"Simply by scaling up?" No, not quite.

As nasty as this sounds, they are still leaps and bounds from being able to produce their own nuclear weapons. They may be able to tell what it is, (Its reaaaally dense and gives off radioactive energy) but just knowing what it is is a far cry from being able to make their own in laboratory conditions. They still think Helicopters are amazing feats of mechanical engineering, it'll take a looooot before they are able to produce their own plutonium in any sufficient quality or amount to make a viable weapon. Still, one functional nuclear weapon at the ready is a hell of an ace up the sleeve...

Not as much as you might think. How huge of a gap was it between working helicopters and nuclear weapons in our age? Maybe 40 years max. Now what if we had actual working items of both of those we could reverse-engineer? That gap would get significantly smaller. Years perhaps, but not nearly as long as you might think.

WHY do I have the feeling that this is somehow gonna bite Hermy in the butt later?

And...Herman just created the Cold War. D'oh! >_<

"Nucular. It's pronounced, 'nucular', Sir. Nu-Cu-Lar."

welll, so the meat problem ist solved,

"Hello other countries, send us blah-blah pounds of your citizen filleted and deep frozen or we will erase your cities.
To show we are willing and able, we now destroy XY.
Have a nice day"

oh dear Herman what have you done?

If they haven't developed their own nuclear power facilities already, then they're still in the dark as to the means to refine the fissionable materials needed to make another nuke. However, they now possess the technology that would allow them to reach any place on their little world, or leave it should they see fit to do so.

The president immediately realizes what the payload must be, and then what 'one of THIS kind of bomb' implies. Schmott guy.

Just leave the rats alone. Given their propensity for reproduction, in a century or so they'll have overpopulated to the point that they're eating each other.

...Oy...bad things're comin'

Heh. New-cue-lar vs. nu-clee-ar is accent, not stupidity most of the time.

And yeah - the Orcaverse appears to have started at equivalent 1930 in both tech levels and political ideas - the meat camps are a rather obvious analog to fascism.

So they're just far enough along that they can understand the rocket and the bomb without having been able to build them right away on their own.

Oh no, he gave them a Nuke. Fuck.

so i think most people saw that one coming...but what are the chances of them asking Mr. Orca and crew to submit to a medical check for the possible exposure?

with a bomb that old?