This is one of those pages that when I look at I can’t help giggling– for no other reason than the amount of time I spent redrawing the characters trying to capture the perfect level of exasperation/resignation on Scavina’s face, and the proper look of complete befuddlement on Zan’s, because for a moment there he genuinely doesn’t know what he’s doing in the Deep Freeze. It’s not often I get to draw the General looking anything else other than grim and determined. And Zan is just fun to draw no matter where he is.
And hey, Happy Canada Day! *waves flag*
For our American neighbours down south, Happy Independence Day (a few days early)! Enjoy the fireworks.
For everyone else… Happy Tuesday!
Is it just me, or has he gotten more facial expressions out of her in one page then she’s shown in the entire rest of the comic?
That’s entirely possible…
I’m with Scavina… how the heck does Zan know that? Is he hearing their thoughts, or something?
Ding ding ding – we have a winnah!
Zan: *pushes Scavina under a broken machine* “Three!”
Zan is certainly not the person he was. The question now is: is he under direct Miesti influence, or following previous Miesti orders, or just hearing thoughts.
There’s your Henry V right there: “Once more into the (engine room) breach!”
Hah!
I hear that quote every so often, yet I keep forgetting to look it up. Thanks!
Lady can we now discuss your screw-ups: the number of people you have injured or killed with the technology you know is dangerous and is not even a weapon of war?
Sadly, this is not how it works.
Those who screw up big enough are usually beyond reproach.
“Three dead is a tragedy, three millons dead is just statistics”
Then again, she was on board both in the Pathfinder and the Galaxion experiments, so a complete destruction would have killed her as well. That makes her at least better than modern military hawks who send troops without having been anywhere near a war themselves…
Not really, because she knew her technology did not work. As for the military leaders now, the old 18th and 18th century idea of the generals having to be close to the front is outdated and has been since Vietnam. However the idiotic idea of letting civilians dictate military objectives and rules of engagement was proven as idiotic in Vietnam and every conflict since.
OK why did it change the19th century to 18th century?
There’s still the IP hierarchy who gave Scavina the command and all that funding. They really want that hyperdrive, and if she succeeds, they have it. And if she fails, they have her as their fall guy.
Actually the technology DOES seem to work (and if they hadn’t seen any “interesting” results in a lab it never would have gotten onto the first ship, let alone all of the others), they just didn’t do it right: this is the sort of thing that you stick on an over-glorified missile first, but they’re obsessed with saving cash by using stuff they already have on hand. They probably would have noticed the power problems with the FIRST ship with no loss of life if they had done their testing right, as most (and maybe all) of the countries developing rockets ~WW2 – the Cold War did (with the notable exception of that one Russian instance). So, the problem with the drive development isn’t the tech in question, it’s that they were doing the testing wrong, probably due to a reluctance to spend money on it: skimping on your budget can turn any project into a disaster.
As for the change in sticking generals at the front:
1) We now have telecommunication, so they can exert command without being at the front, where previously even most logistics and strategy required being within a close range, much less tactics,
2) In the 1800s guns became MUCH more accurate than they had been due to the Minié “ball” and rifling, resulting in both a MASSIVE increase in accuracy (there’s a reason they fought in those musket blocks in the US Revolutionary War: they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn at a distance), and a decrease in e.g. duels.
I am curious why you seem to think the Nelson Jump Drive does not work. Hiawatha and Galaxion both jumped to another universe, and Pathfinder did a double-jump that took it 5 parsecs from home. From a strict sense, the Nelson Jump Drive is working as advertised: it gets you from point A to Point B faster than conventional physics permits.
The system failures aboard Hiawatha and Pathfinder were because the Jump Drive was tied into the same power grid as the main engines, causing a nasty feedback surge. In both cases, that’s more a situation of faulty engineering, and one of the reasons why test flights are so important. Galaxion however, had the Jump Drive and main engines on separate grids, meaning if the Jump Drive surged, it wouldn’t take out half the ship with it. The fact the Galaxion’s bridge didn’t erupt in flames in the first jump is proof this design change worked. The fact that the mains suffered such a nasty failure this time around suggests strongly that something else has happened – and there’s enough evidence to suggest it was sabotage, at least to us readers if not the crew.
I would disagree with Jared about the usefulness of using uncrewed spacecraft to test the Jump Drive. Consider the distances involved: these ships are supposed to traverse several light-years in seconds. If there is no FTL communication in the Galaxioverse, then a Pathfinder-style failure leaves you with a dead probe sitting a good 16 light-years away and no way to know of the failure until the radio signal returns 16 years later. If there is FTL Communication, you might learn instantly that your probe made the jump (and died shortly thereafter) but you now have the unenviable task of tying up a ship for months to go to the spot and try to find a hunk of metal in interstellar space. A crewed ship would be able to deal with contingencies like system failures and thus dramatically increase the chance of success. Pragmatism, not stinginess, appears to be the guiding principle here.