[443]Power Station

Ominous.

It says power station, but the picture looks like a communication tower. Interesting.

It reminded me something seen in The Fangs of Summertime, when they were all up on the roof and there were lots of satellites. Found the page: linky, (the picture not the title, btw).

Getting "stalker: shadow of chernobly" flashbacks looking at that page.

Well, energy could be transmitted by radio waves, but it's inefficient with our technology. Also, the power station could be giving out GHOST-POSESSED ELECTRICITY

this looks like fun!!

Submonauts??

Surfmonauts?

Think. There is not thinking about that sort of thing: there is only GC

;D

True.


Zergmonauts!!


It's also funny to notice how we come up with ideas, jokes and character and plot discussions without any actual content delivered by the recent strip. I mean, what we have so far is basically this:

Chapter 19: <insert random word here>
<insert random pic here>

All this eventually leads to several conclusions: We are geeks. GC is awesome. So is Tom.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.

Psychonauts!!

Cuz that power station is obviously transmitting MIND-CONTROL WAVES.

It's obviously the wireless power source for the Tick-Tocks.

It's obviously a reference to Ray Bradbury's "Powerhouse" which is all about schoolgirls and mechanical birds if I remember it clearly.

This is a 4-legged tower, folks. Everything comercially deployed in the last 30 years has been 3-legged. The square ones were used almost exclusively by AT&T (manufactured by Western Electric) during the Cold War era, for their Long Lines microwave relay network. In the US, anyway. I'm not sure about the 4-vs-3 thing in the UK but I'd assume engineering follows similar lines, so this tower's squareness indicates its age.

It's also obscenely tall, which separates it from the stout, sturdy beasts of the Long Lines era. The presence of so many small microwave drums among the large ones suggests that the eponymous power station is also host to a nontrivial amount of infrastructure gear, which uses short-haul radio links for control. The larger drums are for high-data-rate or long-haul links, because either would require more antenna gain. Do we get to see Kat hack a SCADA system in this chapter?

The rack of cellular antennae is remarkable only for what it lacks: There's only one sector shown here, so the others are probably below our view. (Asymmetric height is common, when some sectors serve a dense urban area and some fire farther into a rural or suburban area.) The power station, therefore, is on the edge of the Court's central region.

And up at the top of what's depicted here, we see a number of typical omnidirectional antennae. I'm guessing pager systems, two-way radio for public safety usage, maybe even some FM broadcast, though those usually use multibay rings that I don't see here.

Now, in the middle of the tower, is that a clubhouse? It might just be scribbled "these aren't the girders you're looking for" abstraction in the drawing, but I think not. There's a pretty clear door there. It's relatively common for small amplifiers and things to be tower-mounted, but an entire room-sized equipment shelter? That's rare and curious. The wind loading must be immense, so someone had a pretty clear reason for putting it up in the air, rather than at ground level or subterranean like most shelters. Makes me think of the BREN tower. Oooh...

Nucleonauts!