Grand Scheme
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By Rhys Sun Oct 5th 2014 at 6:34 pm
Brilliant! From the reveal of the scheme >mind blown< to the punchline–Brilliant.
My wife actually shushed my laughing out loud at this! (We are out at a restaurant)
Well done!
By Otaku Sun Oct 5th 2014 at 10:13 pm
Remember to grab other valuable materials as well; you don’t want to flood the market.
Of course, there will probably be some hilarious glitch in the plan given that it just seems too perfect right now. 😉 From the gold not being quite “right” (unstable in our reality, flat out hitting parallels where gold is radioactive, etc.), not getting “wild” gold (Not! Claw from Dimension 2B or Not!2B will want his gold back), alternate reality invaders/unspeakable horrors from limbo, someone else realizes that stealing from parallel realities can have other benefits (“Took well over 600 tries, but finally this toy magic wand’s parallel is a real magic wand!)… or that the power consumption/other overhead for the plan is higher than Claw realized and he just can’t steal enough gold to make a large profit.
The latter, for the record, is why you make it clear that co-conspirators are getting a “share” and not a flat amount (or even a vague amount) of what you’re making after expenses.
Oh, or the other option; this is just to explain why, at least until its no longer conducive to the plot, Claw has no major budget concerns. Like I said, he can’t just flood the market with too much gold too quickly, plus he’s got to wait a minute for the portal to reset, so he doesn’t have “infinite” funds at a moments notice… but anything small enough he can try to take from a parallel reality and anything that can be anticipated and saved up for… he’s good.
By Otaku Sun Oct 5th 2014 at 10:14 pm
…and messed up the XHTML again. >_<
By zorro362 Mon Oct 6th 2014 at 11:49 am
hmmm those make a lot of sense. However, I don’t think they have quite the comidic turn that this comic seems to be going for. We all know there will be some hitch in the plan, however, just how it will be funny is another question.
By Rhys Mon Oct 6th 2014 at 5:23 pm
Plus, to have infinite gold from this setup, you need to have infinite time to sit there and pull our a gold bar every minute. What about coffee breaks!
By Weeble-Wobble Tue Oct 7th 2014 at 12:10 am
That’s what minions are for!
By EdorFaus Tue Oct 7th 2014 at 1:00 am
While it’s not quite infinite money, you could do a lot better than one gold bar per minute, with just a few minutes of initial patience.
Place your one initial gold bar, start the machine, grab the gold bar in the copy universe, and place that bar next to the original. Wait for the machine to reset, then grab the two bars in the copy universe, and put them next to the original and first copy (so you now have 4 bars there).
If you do this for just 5 minutes before you start taking the bars instead of adding them to the pile, you’d get 16 bars per minute thereafter.
Assuming they’re using standard 400 oz t gold bars (as held and traded by central banks and others), 16 bars would weigh 199 kg (439 pounds). At that point it’s already starting to get difficult to handle, so probably best not to duplicate again.
According to goldprice.org, the average price of gold for Oct 5 (when this comic was posted) was 38,269.36 USD/kg, so over 7.6 million USD for 16 bars… and that’s per minute. (Not accounting for price fluctuations or problems due to flooding the market.)
However, another thing that may be even more efficient is to copy other things than just gold. E.g. if you need to equip your henchman army, buy one set of the best equipment you can get (including weapons and ammo), and then duplicate it in the same way as the gold, until you have enough for everyone. Heck, you could even grab extras and sell them; depending on what you copy it might be easier to sell than gold, and might create less suspicion and other problems.
Oh, and, if you can manage to set the machine up in a way that is very quickly disconnected and grabbed – grab a copy of it, and start using the copy in the same way. Unfortunately, the physical size of the machine relative to its opening probably precludes this.
Of course, this is all moot since the machine caught fire instead of working, but it’s still interesting to think about.
By Rhys Thu Oct 9th 2014 at 3:09 am
HA!
By maggPi Mon Jan 23rd 2017 at 12:22 pm
Oh wow… Um… I like you! Will you make Villainbabies with me?
By Aslandus Wed Feb 25th 2015 at 10:57 pm
The parallel dimension is obviously mad about that gold and set the machine on fire as retribution…
By Sam Bronson Tue Jan 29th 2019 at 3:54 pm
Huh. Why didn’t they just grab it back?
By Marscaleb Fri Feb 27th 2015 at 7:49 am
Man, I SO bet I know what’s going to happen next. But there’s not much point in posting theories when the next forty pages are already up…
By winger Tue Sep 12th 2017 at 6:15 pm
i always love there reaction
By Poetically Psychotic Wed Jan 17th 2018 at 6:20 pm
You see the first thing they should have duplicated was the machine itself. Always make a backup. Or maybe they tried that, and the resulting paradox caused the fire.