Jacob is more or less an accelerated Captain America with a poison dart gun…so I thought we’d give him a shield of sorts, just once. 🙂
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Kentaro: Okay, you got lucky there. But making this difficult for me isn't going to -- save...you. Seriously? Oh, god. Um, let's see...
Hehe… although I’m on Jacob’s side here, I somehow like how Kentaro stays true to his character. He hasn’t really changed since realizing that he’s an AI…
Kentaro is making the typical mistake of throwing only one thing at a time at Jacob. Of course, Jacob can/will take on more at a time as I’m sure we’ll see as he is the “hero” of the tale.
Panic protocols initiated.
It’s also reassuring that Kentaro is still not *fast*, even if he has other AI capabilities (excellent interface to other computers, parallel processing.) Otherwise he wold have switched tactics and shot Jacob’s legs as soon as Jacob held up the shield.
Or… hmm, only 5.5° on the side guns? Jacob might not be far enough away for that to go past the shield!
The metal used for those gun barrels must be pretty malleable…
Now I’m wondering if the genocide men used drones like these for training.
As expected, the super-smart AI that had lots of time to prepare for a single well-known(Jacob has been around for decades and his actions have presumably been documented) opponent heading for a predicable target is easily surprised and outwitted by the average-smart human, because… plot armor. Seems a lot sillier now, since we already had one character figure out that mines would be handy against a genocide man.
If a few pages from now it turns out that Kentaro was faking being taken by surprise, and had just thrown a few solo drones out there to get Jacob overconfident, I would be so happy. Of course, I don’t see how the comic would continue if the reasonable result happened.
@ben I think it’s possible that Kentaro hasn’t been able to extensively study Jacob’s or any other Genocide Man’s tactics.
Assuming you’re an organization tasked with wiping out large segments of the population, and capable of wiping the memory of your founding members at will, it doesn’t seem like a stretch that they would also go out of their way to destroy any unauthorized videos that were made public, or to wipe the memories of people that encountered them.
You’ve also got to remember that Kentaro, like all AI here, is going insane. Even if he did have access he may think “f- it, I’m a genius computer. What can one guy do?”
Hmm, the AI going insane is a point that I had overlooked. It seems like a stretch for that to be the whole explanation, but it’s better than nothing.
I would disagree about the abilities of the genocide men being super-secret, this seems to be a highly connected world where there are sure to be security videos or other sources of information, plus the darknet which seems to specialize in sharing stuff that would annoy the governments. Also the main point of the genocide men is to terrorize, so keeping their abilities too secret would be counter-productive.
@ben,
I partially agree with you, but there are mitigating factors. Smart doesn’t equal good at combat. Most of the AI impressive tricks we have seen have been programming related – primarily they seem to be able to hack things that humans can’t and interface with any electronic system. Kentaro’s success against other military seemed to be primarily based on hacking the drone network and using the IFF targeting problems. Jacob is a different problem. Now if the same trick ever works twice on Kentaro I will also be yelling about plot armor.
Speaking of armor, using a drone body with internal ammo as a shield seems like you are asking for an ammo explosion. The underside is likely less armored than the top.
And bending barrels (last comic)… doesn’t make much sense. Barrels are generally one solid piece of metal – the joints should fail before the barrel. Unless these are Gauss guns or similar…
But these are Gauss guns…
You guys seem to assume an AI is superiorly intelligent. It’s not necessarily the case ecen it is always assumed in fiction.
The “A” in AI stand for “Artificial”. It may have some specific advantages in terms of interface, some specific fields, and still be average in other regards.
Remember Kentaro had not figured he might be an AI until he faced severe clues