It was fun watching you all come up with possible answers for Joey’s question. 🙂 Yes, there’s some authorial fiat in staging this fight to give Jacob a good tough-guy line. It reads better straight through, I promise. I know it’s hard, anticipating a single line of dialogue for a full week.
This fight isn’t over, though. It looks like we’re going to have a shocking conclusion, but stay tuned…
↓ Transcript
Jacob: Regret.
Joey: Regret? That's it? How's that working for ya? All you got left is regret?
Jacob: That...and...an electric circuit.
Joey: Regret? That's it? How's that working for ya? All you got left is regret?
Jacob: That...and...an electric circuit.
Yyyup. Whoever said he smacked Joey’s gun into a tree on purpose called this one.
Nice.
Jacob…you forgot to yell “CLEAR!”.
Well, that does it…Jacob just voided the warranties of them guns and Joey will probably file a lawsuit against the manufacturer cause the manual didn’t tell that the gun can be converted into a stun gun…
In college, we plugged in a wire on the wall with one line up of five holding one wire and each other’s hand firmly while on the other side of the door, the other line up of five did the same…as a sucker passed through the door, the last one of each line up delicately touched the patient…who shot up right up to the ceiling…
To this day, I still wonder how come we did not kill anyone…that was a lot of amps going through the sucker’s heart! But we never felt a thing…
Since the guns aren’t connected together, there’s no current between them. There’s not really an advantage to using two guns for that.
That depends. If the circuitry in the gun is grounded to the frame, then their grounds are connected via a conductive bridge (i.e., Jacob)
@DanielLC
He’s using Joey’s body to close the circuit between the two guns, if I understand correctly.
Okay — some fact and some speculation here.
A railgun works by using two rails, one positive and one negative, with the projectile touching both, with a current that moves it along. At the end of the rails the projectile launches. It normally retains a small charge, which causes a small spark at the end of the barrel.
In this comic, a mis-tuned railgun fires a projectile that retains a large electric charge, which causes two arcs — one positive, one negative — that fire well past the barrel. Look back and you’ll see there are two lightning bolts coming out of Jacob’s gun when it fires.
With two mis-tuned guns, both arcs are firing into Joey’s body. Some of the current will cross, so that the positive arc from one gun will connect to the negative arc from the other.
But there’s a lot of handwaving in that explanation. 🙂 The first hurdle is having hand-sized railguns with enough battery to shock someone. If you can believe that, the double-arc shouldn’t be too much of a problem. 🙂
“Don’t tase me, Doe!”
Mildly off topic, did you know that if all you had were blanks loaded in your gun, and you were to press said gun to the temple of the person you wish to see stop breathing, the gas from the shot would crack through the temple and into the brain killing the other person. And about 1 amp of electricity is more then enough to kill a man.
It depend where you are in the circuit, the effects start when and where the current join…i.e. the guy in the middle, or midway between the two guns, where the electrically operating heart is…the heart electrical network is very delicate…ask those using stims, who are great for nerve pain relief, but may cause heart stoppage with only micro current.
@AsimovSideburns
That’s only half the circuit. Suppose the electricity is moving from the gun on the left to the gun on the right through Joey’s body. How does it get back to the gun on the left?
@Remus Shepherd
That does happen, but it doesn’t result in any more energy being deposited into Joey than if the guns were fired separately. It changes the distribution a bit, since in some places it interferes constructively and other places destructively, but it won’t change a whole lot.
@Mr. Ookami
One amp of electricity is orders of magnitude more than you need to kill someone, but it takes quite a few volts to get even the tiny fraction of an amp necessary through someone.
The electricity wouldn’t last long, since it doesn’t take much time to fire a bullet out of a railgun, so it seems unlikely John could fire both guns at the same time anyway. He’ll be off by more than the time it takes one gun to fire.
Mr. Ookami: the gun thing happens on a depressingly regular basis. There’s always someone who confuses “this cartridge has no bullet” with “this cartridge is harmless”.