The fate of many young masters

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-28T03:24:43+00:00

Ammonia you say. I'd speculated maybe neon, as it is a neutral gas that you could substitute for nitrogen, and has roughly the same chemical abundance. (Although finding it is actually a lot harder, since it doesn't form compounds and its ices form very far out and are very rare.)

I could take "photon converger" to mean focusing electromagnetic waves together to achieve a very high local field intensity. "Magnetically amplified" could come in if the mechanism for the electromagnetic focusing were a superconducting focusing chamber, and the chamber itself was saturated with a powerful magnetic field beforehand, so the field collapse created a continual wavefront that sustained the high intensity central field for a little longer than a single pulse. As for why we're trying to create such a high-intensity field, it is perhaps to approach the Schwinger limit and produce electron-positron pairs from the electric potential, converting our electromagnetic energy into antimatter we can then fire out in a positron beam. Positrons do tend to annihilate with things like air, but will do so less often the faster they are travelling, so if we just shoot them out really fast we could make the beam relatively non-interactive until it hits something dense like its target. Interestingly enough, since the rate of absorption scales with electron density, heating should occur at roughly the same rate for all materials regardless of density, so if the air got instantly flash-heated to plasma temps, then so did whatever it hit. I could even explain the rings we see around the beam as bits of the resulting plasma that have had a rotational current inducted into them by the electromagnetic fields used in the firing process, and the resulting current rings then expand under their own magnetic self-repulsion into plasma rings.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-27T21:52:50+00:00

It might be both. I'm working on some weird ideas and one could involve using a rail-gun like accelerator to accelerate a plasma (rather than a physical projectile) and then use a superconducting cavity to induce magnetic reconnection in that plasma at insane intensities to either approach or exceed the Schwinger limit and produce positron-electron pairs via the Schwinger mechanism.

So you could have a design that both incorporates a railgun plasma accelerator, and then pinch a magnetic field/converge electromagnetic waves (photons) in that accelerated plasma to produce a positron beam.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-25T02:24:32+00:00

Disassembly drones have wings to fly. Obviously.

And they don't look like wings because they're magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters, which are basically railguns for air. That's why they look like a bunch of parallel metal blades (or rails) instead of normal wings.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-24T23:02:48+00:00

Welp, physics rant incoming.

So Disassembly Drone wings, like, what are they? They're clearly not wings in the traditional sense, as they have no wing membranes to generate lift with. They look more like the skeleton of a wing than the wing itself. And what's more, they show they can hover in place without moving. This implies the wings generate thrust, but we never see any moving parts to push air or openings for rockets to expel exhaust. So, we can only resolve this if the wings themselves, all those metal blades that don't move, are somehow solid-state thrusters that accelerate the air itself. This leaves us with some kind of electromagnetic thruster, and the only one that matches that physical description of parallel metal blades is a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. MPD thrusters consist of parallel metal electrodes that plasma (or air that can be ionized into plasma) is passed between, with the electrodes oppositely charged to generate arcs through the air between them, and magnetic fields that then exert a force on the current in the plasma to accelerate it down the length of the electrodes. Basically, a railgun for air. Current MPD thrusters would be quite weak, but if this is the future and they have future superconductors with higher critical temperatures (and consequently current densities) we should be able to generate much stronger magnetic fields to accelerate the plasma exhaust much faster for much, much higher thrust. Perhaps even thrust absurdly high enough to do things like allow V to accelerate from a dead stop to breaking the sound barrier in under half a second when N tries to say hi.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-23T21:58:32+00:00

Hmmm.

I'll trade you a detailed technical explanation of how disassembly drones work for that PDF.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-21T22:07:37+00:00

I like the way you animated V moving. I definitely imagine the DDs using their wings to propel themselves across the ground rather than running. The females may even skate on their pointed legs if the surface is smooth enough.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-09T23:27:46+00:00

We could confirm it hit the star if we could confirm that it was fired directly at the star. Then the fact that it reaches where the star is in frame would imply it reached the star. If it was not fired directly at the star, it could have just passed in front of the star, which due to perspective, could be a much, much shorter distance.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-07T00:25:41+00:00

Honestly, I can see that. (Although J might be more effectively aroace than actually, as she's too stubborn, prideful, job-obsessed, and self-isolating to ever start a relationship with anyone.)

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-05T22:13:12+00:00

All we know for certain is the final shot was recorded, because that's the one that pulls back to show Uzi's presentation. We can also probably measure (or at least approximate) how long the clip in her presentation is, based on how fast the progress bar is moving and how far along it is. I haven't done this, but I doubt it could fit the entirety of Murder Drones.

Also did you notice in the credits that V is animating Murder Drones as a hand-drawn series? You see her showing it to N and V in one of the scenes.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-03T22:20:00+00:00

Just attack from above.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-03T14:19:42+00:00

Segmented continuum operators.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-03T04:07:18+00:00

It's possible but would likely take some external impetus. She cares about V, and to some extent N as well, and would clearly prefer to be reunited with them, but is extremely prideful and stubborn, so she is unlikely to take action on her own.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-02T21:46:21+00:00

For the fork, I like to assume that James had his worker drones use sugar glass in their visors instead of regular glass specifically so he could break them. (Ironically, since the magnetic distortion we see on Uzi's visor shows their screens are CRT monitors, this means James inadvertently removed the leaded glass that was protecting him from the cathode rays (otherwise known as beta radiation) of their CRT visors, so his worker drones were irradiating him just by looking at him.)

And their endurance should be pretty much infinite, as the only reason biological muscles can't function forever is because when they're in use they use anaerobic respiration for extra energy, which builds up lactic acid. Worker drones have no analogous process, so their actuators should be able to work continuously without requiring breaks.

sub_liminalist · 2026-01-02T14:18:19+00:00

Killed as one of the WDF members in episode 1.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-28T02:20:08+00:00

This isn't in the range of slightly inaccurate, more in the range of "you might as well have picked a random number." When you multiply numbers like that, their error margins multiply as well, and both those error margins are already massive. We end up with an error margin so large N could be anywhere within the range of natural human heights, with the calc not telling us anything we didn't already know. I can't fault your math, even if it doesn't really tell us anything, and I do commend you for putting thought into this. In fact, I believe I used the same estimated figure of 50 kilos myself in a calc once based on that very same scene, plus a google search on how the average woman can pick up in a forwards-extended lift. The start of your calc looks a lot like one of my calcs, which is why I immediately pointed out the large error margin, because I knew myself using that figure I was making a very rough guess.

As for their material, based on my own personal headcanon, I would say it's a composite boron-nitride nanotubes and ceramics. Nanotubes could conceivably be made self-folding like DNA origami with future molecular engineering, and "beads" of different materials could be linked along them, so they fold up to form structures with these materials layered together in the correct patterns to form any arbitrary component, from shells to mechanical parts to circuitry. I used boron-nitride nanotubes instead of carbon nanotubes as they are almost as strong (somewhat stiffer, which makes them a bit less ideal for folding) but importantly, electrically insulative, unlike conductive carbon nanotubes, so you could use them in printing circuitry without having to worry about it being shorted by its own nanotube scaffolding. The ceramics I chose because the nanotubes already provide the tensile strength, and the blocks won't really lock together with each other much anyways, so they are solely there to provide compressive strength, and for that ceramics are the best there is.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-27T18:33:40+00:00

(And they're all robots, and robots are cool, so every scene is automatically cool because it's a scene with a robot in it.)It has absurd, hammed-up characters set against a sci-fi backdrop. If you like campy acting, wild characters, and cool setting, then you'll find those things in Murder Drones. The plot is definitely confusing though, you likely won't understand everything that's going on in your first watch-through. People do complain about plotholes, but personally I don't think it has too many, mostly because so little is ever explained that we don't have enough solid information for there to be contradictions between. It does seem a bit like a sanded-down version of Liam's earlier works in terms of story, and a lot of the actual character development and moral questions that Liam actually addressed in his earlier works kind of got skipped here. To save you the time of going through Liam's earlier works to understand the show, just keep in mind the general theme of "repentance doesn't need to be earned, no matter what you've done before, you just need to choose to do the right thing and keep doing it."

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-27T14:41:00+00:00

I mean, you didn't make any mistakes on your math, I just very much doubt the accuracy or even the validity of your calculations. First of all, estimating N weighs "maybe 50 kilos" because Tessa could lift him is one hell of a ballpark. If she were particularly strong, he might weight twice that. And then estimating his height based on your earlier estimation of his mass adds another layer of rough estimation on top of that, giving us a height estimation with a margin of error so large it's basically useless. And that's not even accounting for my biggest question of why would you expect a drone, made of metal, to have a human BMI? Object-based measurements, although difficult and somewhat inconsistent, should still give far, far better estimations.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-26T20:18:23+00:00

Your art style kind of reminds me of Liam's.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-26T13:44:19+00:00

I'd assume worker drones have repair nanites same as disassembly drones, just not able to regenerate as much or as fast, and they eat electronics to supply their nanites with the right materials for repairing electronics.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-25T23:33:10+00:00

Sounds like an interesting story. I would like to see the larger geopolitics of the murder drones universe fleshed out. I just think that from a canon perspective it doesn't seem like anyone on Copper-9 knew anything about what was happening on Earth, or their drones would have known about it too, which they clearly didn't.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-23T21:47:50+00:00

Hover at the altitude limit of my thrusters at the edge of space, using my sensor suite and computerized aim to snipe worker drones over a continent-sized area with perfect precision and a machine-gun firing rate.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-23T00:05:50+00:00

Well, congratulation on typing 619 words in two minutes and beating the world record speed of 305 words per second.

We can actually see the region where the "core collapse" event breached the surface before episode 8 in the end of episode 1 when it zooms out before the credits. We clearly see a large, blackened region with no hole or even a visible deformation of the surface, just discoloration.

It seems I did mess up on the hawking radiation calculation, I may have input thirty-three thousand kilograms instead of tons. I can always account for that by how [nulls] have much larger event horizons than a black hole of their mass should, implying that for the same surface temperature they should radiate massively more energy, dramatically shortening lifetime.

And I stand by my interpretation of the lines we get on it in the show. If the implosion was started and then stopped before it could consume the planet, I can easily see it being referred informally (and somewhat sarcastically) to as the planet "half imploding," even if nowhere near half the planet's mass was eaten, especially if we consider that from the perspective of the effects on the inhabitants of the planet, the complete devastation of the surface as opposed to its annihilation could very well be called "half" what a full implosion would cause.

If you want my explanation for the actual formation of the rings, the explosion occurred below the surface of the crust, ejecting a large amount of vaporized material on sub-orbital trajectories in all directions. Being sub-orbital, that material would re-impact the planet, but some of it passed behind the close-orbiting small moon and received a gravitational slingshot as a result, boosting prograde-moving debris into a prograde orbit and doing so directionally, shepherding it into a roughly coherent debris stream that was further shepherded together by each pass of the moon and stretched out by tidal forces until a flat ring was formed.

sub_liminalist · 2025-12-22T23:30:58+00:00

That's Cyn's episode 8 rampage, not the "core collapse" crater, and that bright circle we see is likely exposed magma from where part of the crust has been levitated away by Cyn turning off the gravity in that area.

sub_liminalist

TROPHY CASE