Holy cow, talk about a great debate! Last week’s page elicited a huge number of comments, and I really didn’t see it coming. If anything, this week’s page is only going to add fuel to that little fire…! Amusingly, I noticed an article had been posted last week on the blog Boing Boing about exploring the ethics of space science.
And now, I want to share my cool news that I mentioned previously– Galaxion has been nominated for a Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Webcomic! I’m still picking my jaw up off the floor. My fellow nominees (among them are Kate Beaton, Karl Kerschl, and Rene Engstrom) are a pretty amazing bunch, and I am honoured to be in their company. Winners will be announced June 5th, in conjunction with the Toronto ComiCON Fan Appreciation Event (no website yet) held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, June 5-6th. So it looks like I’m adding another show to my list of appearances this year!
Hello Scavina… meet Mr. ClueBat!
To add my two bits to this debate:
While I understand that the SCT’s do their job near-defenseless (to avoid another disaster like the Myradi encounter), don’t you think, with their one small means of protection–the shield/proximity alarm–kaput, that they might want to reconsider? After all, as Scavina points out, it’s gone from a survey to a hostile encounter without any provocation at all (other than being there).
Joe Shuster Award: That’s great news, Tara! Keep up the great work.
This is a very typical yin yang situation with two parties who feel are right. It’s two bad their is no “third” party who could decide between the two, meaning Scavina would have two be the mediator for herself and the others, to meet them half way or present a good counter arguement. You must also consider her feelings as a soldier in this situation as she is now responsible for civilian lives whom she is also leading, and that their resourses and options are now quite limited even to her expertise.
And congratulations on your reward, I don’t know about the other nominees but I’m sure you were the best of the all.
Typo: expendable
An outfit that puts its members in harm way without defenses is always demoralized and low on efficiency. Moreover, smarter people don’t linger in such organizations. What comes to mind is the UN contingents that were ordered to separate conflicting parties in war zones without returning fire — In Lebanon for example. These detachments rapidly became a mess of resentful, disgruntled troopers.
So either TerSa is an awful mess, or the “expendable” comment is wrong. The last panel seems to confirm the latter.
“Expendable” may be sarcastic exaggeration. Not arming your diplomats has been a long time tradition. You also don’t arm geologic surveyors, which is kind of what these people more usually usually do.
Congrats on the nomination Tara!
Ha! SysKoll, TerSA *is* a mess! It’s a business, not part of the military. How many businesses do YOU know that run efficiently??? IP is military in nature (think coast guard), and the General is career IP. While I’m sure she’s come to the rescue of TerSA ships in distress, I’m fairly certain she’s never WORKED with TerSA before, and certainly not with a SCT. Yes, Insectoid, you hit it on the head with Mr. ClueBat. (Oh, how I would like to take that metaphor literally…!)
Oops! Sorry – couldn’t help myself! I feel so neglected! It seems like years since the SCT left the ship!
@SysKoll: Not a typo, since I hand-letter and therefore don’t have that excuse, but a spelling error. Argh! I’m so embarrassed (in fact, I’m so embarrassed I almost misspelled that, too).This is what I get for messing with the dialogue at the last minute. Thank you for the heads up. It will be fixed in the print edition!
@Fusella: Relax, have a hot cocoa. You’ll get your chance to vent properly in a few pages, I promise.
Not to burst your bubble, Fu, but… it HAS been a year.
Insectoid: No cookies for you! *harumph!*
@Syskoll: “An outfit that puts its members in harm way without defenses is always demoralized and low on efficiency.”
Absolutely, but it’s not entirely clear that, as a general rule, they’re actually in harm’s way to any real extent. As some people remarked on the previous page, it’s likely that the risks from hostile fauna (sentient or not) on the occasional planet are far overwhelmed by the risks of strange pathogens, radiation, equipment failures, etc. encountered on far more planets, and they’re presumably adequately prepared for those.
Not that that makes their knee-jerk insistence on that rule even in this case any more rational, but it explains why they haven’t imploded.
Just keep in mind that these people are having the conversation in real time. They didn’t have time to deeply consider their respective positions of argument.
I am just amassed with the lack ideals in these comments.
Self-sacrifice is one of the greatest virtues there is.
The SCT takes strength in knowing they are doing what is rigth, not for themselves but for mankind.
Aldarad – Ah, the virtue of self-sacrifice! I think about that every time I hear about a guy wearing a bomb blowing himself up at a crowded bus stop in Haifa or in front of a police station in Baghdad, or a school for girls in Islamabad. What a noble thing to do, to cheerfully and with full acceptance of the consequences offer up your life for what you believe in!
So. Self-sacrifice. Not necessarily a virtue, even if the person sacrificing himself believes it to be in a good cause. To be a virtue, we must consider the true end to which it strives.
A virtuous self-sacrifice is taking that rake meant for Patty because you have no other recourse than to let her die.
A foolish and therefore not a virtuous self-sacrifice is returning unarmed to let the guy with a rake or one of his similarly unhinged friends take another unopposed swing at Patty.
Violence on your own behalf or the behalf of a comrade it seems is quite acceptable to the TerSA when they actually have something like an Extensible Pole to defend themselves with. I object to the idea that the Contact Team can square this circle by daring to be shocked at the idea of carrying tasers or an LRAD or a Microwave Painbeam after their lives have just been saved by the act of beating the shit out of their attackers with an improvised weapon. Is it acceptable to beat someone unconscious with a tool simply because it wasn’t intended to be used as a weapon, but not to render someone temporarily stunned or unconscious with a real (if non-lethal) weapon? Is there something inherently noble about clouting someone on the head with a glorified stick that pumping 40,000 volts into him for a few seconds from a safe distance with a taser doesn’t possess?
Yay Tara! Congratulations on your nomination!
Okay, I understand the altruistic principles of TerSA and all of the implications thereof. That said, there is a moral deficiency in allowing innocent, science naïfs go roaming around on an unexplored potentially hostile planet. Matter of fact, I could make the case that a private corporation acting in such a manner would be liable of criminal negligence. Judging by the look on Scavinia’s face in the last panel, I wonder if such thoughts are running through her mind. Look, I understand the idealism being espoused here. And considering past history I agree that any kind of first contact scenarios should be handled with kid gloves. But the contact team has to SURVIVE in order to make that contact. Look at any exploratory expedition into unknown territory and you will find that they have always been armed. For the most part this was (K’ I can’t think of any expedition that was sent into the unknown with express instructions to wipe out any natives that they ran across) NOT for the purpose of wiping out native cultures but for surviving attacks from hostile fauna. I think that is the basis for most of the posters here. One wonders how many survey teams TerSA has lost to slash tigers, blood vines and, in general, feathery/furry/finned/fanged people eaters of every imagined variety.
Now, if our heroes had been well armed and trained in hand to hand combat they would have been able to handle that scenario without having to resort to the weapons they carried to fend off attacks by snarveling eyeball eaters. Scavinia undoubtedly has such training as portrayed by the manner in which she handled the attackers. Ipso facto: Imma be on the IP survey team vice TerSA’s.
Observation: Upon review the attackers were dressed in what appears to be very simple homespun type clothes. Also their tools were quite primitive and seemed to be of hand carved and fitted wood, lacking any metal parts.
Hypothesis: Are these the remnants/survivors/descendants of an apocalyptic techno –war or some such? Could their attack on the team be explained as a result of a taboo or rejection of all sorts of technology?
I have got to say that I’m with Wilde on this one.
Being ex-military myself, soldiers are trained as much as to where NOT to use their weapons as they are trained to use them. This is why we do have Rules of Engagement to follow while in a combat zone.
As far as the natives using gardening implements goes, the nastiest weapons of the Middle Ages count farming tools as their parents. The Flail and the Gudendag (A large Flemish warhammer with spikes named after the cry they shouted while beating French Knights to death with it) were designed after implements used to thresh grain.
I’ve noticed ST being used as an example here to support the TerSA position, and I do note that Starfleet personnel DO go on away team missions armed. Their phasers may be on stun, but they do go down with weapons capable of both nonlethal and lethal responses.
That being said, I think OUR SCT on the Galaxion is going to have to seriously shift their thinking, or find out if these guys speak any language that they are familiar with and start dropping leaflets.
@Ga’tor: Well, there is an easy answer to your question about how many people TerSA has lost to harmful flora and fauna, and the answer is “none at all.” For the very simple reason that in the Galaxioverse, nearly all of the planets within range of Earth ships are lifeless, or have only microbial life. That’s not to say Survey Contact Team members don’t die in mishaps, they do–just as happens in any dangerous job, despite all the precautions and training– they just haven’t died from being eaten.
I think it’s safe to say that SCT procedures (which will certainly need a little airing after this adventure) probably indicate that if a First Contact proves to be too much for the unarmed team, they should pull out and apply to head office for further instructions. One of those things that isn’t always particularly helpful in the field. If an armed team would ever need to be sent in, it wouldn’t be the SCT, it would be a team trained for combat. So far, this has not been necessary in TerSA’s exploration history.
These are all great points of view, by the way! I hadn’t planned on writing a scene in which they eventually all sit down and hammer out an updated set of First Contact rules, but I’m starting to be tempted. It’ll be a long way off before the characters get a chance to do that, anyway!
@Fusella: I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You’re the best, Fu… I’d wait a year to see you in the comic anytime.
Hot cocoa?
I’d have to say I would leave TerSa when finding out some desk jockey decided I was expendable. Very much in the Starfleet mode of things here. Phasers on stun. Especially on a world showing signs of post nuke war. Survivors of that aren’t gonna be noted for anything but doing WHATEVER it takes to get their next meal, or making sure the outsider doesn’t take the meal they have. Never mind any pseudo-religious taboo against the techno users who brought flaming doom down on them.
Have to laugh at the ideologues that think someone armed and ready to defend themselves is just a slavering idiot looking for an excuse to use some moving meat for target practice. And I do, with no little contemptuousness at that. Don’t know to many slavering morons looking for a fight in the Canadian Armed Forces, not even my brother. Nor did I see them going berserk at every turn, even after having one of their lieutenants having an axe burying in the back of his head while having a meeting with village elders. And of course they were just itching for someone to start something in Haiti, or in any of the other hellholes where they were the first responders for humanitarian missions. Yup, no small amount of contempt for the anti-military ideologues.
Every nation is occupied by a standing army. Theirs or someone else’s. The most neutral nation on Earth can only stay that way because every citizen is required to take militia training and own their own weapon for use in the event of invasion. Kinda why Hitler never invaded the Swiss, he knew they would ALL take up arms and slaughter his army, if provoked. Being willing to defend yourself doesn’t mean you have to cut off someone’s head and post it on a pike, or YouTube, at the slightest perceived insult.
Sleel
Oh dear, you mean that TerSA personnel SIGN UP to be Red Shirts?
Seriously, I would buy the arguement that they have surveyed mostly lifeless planets so far if the team didn’t keep constantly referring to the Myradi First Contact. We never did get a real sense of how that went other than the comment that it was considerably embroidered for PR purposes.
What if the survey teams ran into oh say the Bug aliens from Starship Troopers? Would they keep lining up for certain hideous slaughter then? Any at least minimally competent organization would have developed different protocols for different hypothetical situations. It’s called Contingency Planning. Team members don’t have to show up with guns at the ready but should have a plan in place to deal with hostile situations.
Tara – You said that normally the team would pull out and apply to the head office. I never got the impression from your previous work that communications and travel in your universe is instantaneous. A team would be on their own for a considerable period and hypothetical hostile encounters must be part of the equation or the organization is not only cruelly callous toward its personnel, they are grossly and criminally negligent from both a legal and an ethical standpoint. I don’t think that’s the impression you were trying to make….
Does Sleel’s comment mean we now get to call Godwin’s law on the discussion of arming first contact teams and whether or not the team should be able to defend themselves through potentially lethal force (and who knows what will be lethal or not to an alien species) against apparently or actually threatening alien species that may or may not be sentient and with which they may or may not be able to communicate?
Please forgive my impertinence, Tara:
Informal motto of the TerSA SCT: When seconds count, help is only weeks away!
Scavinia reaction in panel 6 is priceless “ooooh boy…”
In a way, she is basically the single ex-military contractor tasked with keeping her journalist clients out of trouble. Read Bob Shepherd’s “The Circuit” to see the amount of hoops they have to jump through to make sure that their clients can file reports from the most dangerous of areas.
Scavinia’s problems are many. I presume she has no idea about the local area and she definitely didn’t know about hostile people wielding garden tools with the intent to kill. She also has a lack of access to arms apart from makeshift basic hand to hand weaponry.
Thus, she has to assume that she is in a hostile area with an unknown number of potentially hostile combatants *but* the level of tech on the planet appears to be extremely low. What she should do therefore is to maybe get that super-probe fixed and roll out the modifications on the other probes. Thus you have something which doesn’t look like a weapon which reduces tensions in the next contact but can be used as one if need be.
Next, they should keep a very low profile, possibly later adopt the local form of dress if they find out more about the planet’s culture and customs. If there is any need for body armour in this futuristic world (I doubt it) it should be hidden *beneath* their clothes rather than worn over it, again to try and blend in. Also, they should be highly aware of what constitutes an insult and what is a form of reconciliation and showing that they mean no harm.
Finally, before they go down to the surface next, they should take steps to properly examine the area for possible built up areas, escape routes, emergency Rendezvous Points or RVs and so on. Scavinia should know the area like the back of her hand after the week is out.
In short: keep weapons and body armour close but hidden at all times, dress like locals, do not piss off the locals and go a proper recce of the area of operations before entering next time.
Hey Tara, just so you don’t think I’m constantly picking nits. I really liked Aria’s panels while she was explaining TerSA’s operations and reasoning. Her expressions are superb especially the 5th panel where she displays that wide eyed, bubbling optimism of a young woman who has a passion for her calling. Compare that with Scavinia’s reaction of an older, wiser, more experienced person who undoubtedly has seen the darker side of such operations. It’s a wonderful contrast between two individuals coming from vastly different experiences and mind sets. One can almost see the thoughts whirling around in the General’s head as she takes in all of what Arias saying and the implications thereof. Scavinia’s expression in the last panel is priceless. One can only wonder what will come as a result of this revelation. Great work Tara!
I’ve been following Galaxion for a while, and I have to say that the last two comics have been eye opening. “Study all the ways a first contact can go wrong.” Huh, what if the aliens have no respect for any species that goes unarmed, and therefor feel that wiping out such a spineless species will improve the universe at large? Of course, there is the converse (aliens go to war if someone is armed…)
SCT is a job that requires the naive enthusiasm that Ariana shows…. which is why I would never be doing that job. “You are sending me into potentially dangerous situations without a way to defend myself? No thanks.”
Indeed, the approach that TerSA takes seems to be that the survey team will *always* be in the wrong regardless of the circumstances. Thus it is better to be unarmed and suffer the consequences of the wrath of the locals than to go armed and face the consequence of enforcing your negative moral standpoint.
Ariana has a similar level of naive enthusiasm that you see in totalitarian armies who field young soldiers brainwashed into backing their leaders. They view any cynical or realistic view of the situation as defeatist and demoralising. Its happened with young men going to war in the Napoleonic wars on “an adventure” you’ve seen it with young German kids going to war with the Volkstrum in WW2 and you’ve even seen it after America invaded Iraq in 2003 with a flood of College interns ideologically aligned with the Republican party naively convinced that they could mould the country into a free market libertarian paradise.
I’m not surprised in Aria’s point and Tara has scripted this very well by pointing out that Ariana has basically worshipped Jax Augustus and *his* way of doing things without actually experiencing the *reality* of meeting a hostile people who would probably rather kill you and ask questions later rather than accept the ol’ “we come in peace” spiel. And don’t give me “how do you know that?” because the TerSA team were ambushed without even having a chance to say or do anything.
I believe in the end General Nelson, the experienced combat leader, will prevail in overruling the TerSA team (probably to the rage of Fusella purely out of politics rather than anything else) and in a way, I think Vessa would actually agree with the good General considering she helped out in fighting off the locals the first time.
The priority right now is getting everyone off the planet in one piece.
TerSa probably wouldn’t be allowed to run survey teams in the first place if they did not take draconian measures against the possibility of interstellar incidents. A survey team necessarily represents all of humanity, regardless of what’s listed on the paycheck.
And yeah, a survey team is by definition expendable… Anyone intelligent and motivated enough to get on a survey team will be able to figure that out. And all of the Galaxions SCT are clearly idealists to some degree or another, they believe in what they are doing. They are willing to assume the risk and if they can’t deal with it they shouldn’t be on a survey team.
It’s not like a weapon would do you any good on a planet of hostile aliens anyway.
A reinforced probe used as a weapon saved their lives
Thats what I mean when I say come armed but keep those weapons hidden at all times only using them in a drastic situation. There are several levels to this.
For example, if you are in a situation where there is one or two well defined big powers such as one big all powerful army performing a cordon & search operation or two big armies facing off in a tense stand off, being armed is the last thing you want to do because that will only give leviathan (i.e. the people with overwhelming firepower) an excuse to remove you from the equation.
However, if the situation is more muddled with multiple armed yet weak groups, it is far better to be discreetly armed, attempt to blend in with the locals, be as non-confrontational as possible and conduct your business as quickly as possible.
This situation is possibly in the latter.
I just want to point out that Scavina, who in moments like this demonstrates just how awesome she is, disarmed the one attacker quite handily, without weapons at all.
The reinforced probe did come in useful, though.
Also, “Aria” isn’t actually short for anything, the way “Zan” is short for “Zandarin”. She’s just Aria.
@Ga’tor, thank you!
oh, and @J Wilde– There are times when TerSA captains absolutely depend on that!
I can understand the principle of not bringing weapons into a first contact situation. A war can be started over foolish misunderstandings, such as the Minbari advancing on an armed Earth warship with open gunports. When one places the good of the many over the good of the few, making the few expendable is acceptable, even necessary. But that assumes a normal first contact, where violence is not intended by either side.
This is not a first contact situation anymore. The farmers were outnumbered, but they attacked from ambush without provocation using pick-up weapons. Not only that, but they attacked with lethal intent. In this situation, the natives are hostile, for whatever reason, and the situation has already led to unprovoked violence. First contact has failed, now the Galaxion needs to look out for its own and try to salvage the situation as best they can.
In this situation, I’d advise sending in armed scouts, who can locate and observe these farmers from a distance without being seen. Information gathering is the most important thing right now, to determine how much of a threat these farmers pose, and whether approaching them is feasible or safe. Also, if you send the scouts in with audio pickups, you might be able to learn their language.
I guess I don’t get the objections to the storyline here at all. Sorry, but all of this “we should be armed” stuff strikes me as very 21st-century-human-culture chauvinism. I really don’t want my SF to just take standard current-epoch-people and stick them into a situation that varies only from a modern human-vs-human conflict by some facade involving space-ships, and uniforms, otherwise essentially something I would see at the movies. I want my SF to be smarter, and I expect people in the future to act and feel differently about things, just as people today act and feel differently about things relative to the past.
Specifically, I am really quite fascinated by this general idea of how to train for a possible encounter with alien intelligence because any rational consideration of the problem leads to the conclusions that (1) the technological levels of the two civilizations are likely to be hugely discrepant [quite the opposite of what happens in human-to-human interactions] (2) such encounters will be fraught with peril on scales corresponding to entire civilizations, not individuals, and (3) the potential for lack of understanding and subsequent disaster is very high. Given these points, it’s astonishingly unlikely that anything corresponding to a “personal weapon” would have any bearing on any aspects of the encounter — including personal survival of the team — other than a negative impact on a species-to-species interactions. So I find the perspective quite plausible, especially from a scientific point of view.
Having said this, I guess even if you don’t find the perspective what you would chose yourself, I don’t understand for the life of me why you would find this perspective so unbelievable as to be “objectionable” to the point of asking the author to consider changing the dialogue. If you can’t suspend disbelief in SF for the purposes of seeing what the implications are for the storyline, when can you?
Carry on…
@ Corbin re: “Having said this, I guess even if you don’t find the perspective what you would chose yourself, I don’t understand for the life of me why you would find this perspective so unbelievable as to be “objectionable” to the point of asking the author to consider changing the dialogue.”
No no no. I don’t recall anyone suggesting that Tara rework her dialog. I for one would encourage her not to. She has pretty much answered all issues and points of contention. Keep in mind that this is an ongoing work of art and there are a lot of things that Tara has yet to share with us. TerSA apparently has very few experiences with hostile alien environments. Life bearing planets appear to be quite rare in the universe of Galaxion. That may change…
@ Corbin: So you’re saying that the smarter way… is to let people hurt, wound, maim, perhaps kill you?
Sorry, I disagree. I do hope we become a more peaceful people. But I hope we will still have a basic survival instinct which will allow us to continue defending ourselves if faced with an unprovoked assault.
The ’21st-human-culture-chauvinism’ comment might well work if the survey team had attacked first. They didn’t, hence the sentence doesn’t work all that well.
@Corbin: I too don’t quite understand the “21st-century-human-culture chauvinism” quote. This is a precaution that has been exercised by explorers for centuries and sensible close protection experts (no, people hanging off of armoured 4x4s with body armour and sunglasses are not sensible) for decades.
I don’t think I was suggesting that we train people for possible alien encounters, rather we train people on how to minimise risk. Lets look at your points:
(1) the technological levels of the two civilizations are likely to be hugely discrepant [quite the opposite of what happens in human-to-human interactions]
(2) such encounters will be fraught with peril on scales corresponding to entire civilizations, not individuals, and..
(3) the potential for lack of understanding and subsequent disaster is very high.
All three are very good points but you can associate those points with an average day in Afghanistan today let alone an encounter with the Minari. Thus the practices for ensuring the survival of your clients remains much the same.
We’re not suggesting for a moment that Scanavia and co go down next time armed to the teeth rather that they take the proper steps to ensure their safety. Surely everyone would agree with that?
I personally think Tara has worked the last 5 pages brilliantly. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Well, this is SF and thus requires some ‘suspense of disbelief’ in order to work, with emphasis (IMHO) on ‘some’. That is, at least some concepts in the story actually have to be believable for it to make sense as SF, but the crux is that different readers have different preferences and thus they have different concepts they require to be ‘believable’.
I can understand that some people object against the reasoning of the TersA survey team, but I personally don’t see any problems in this story to have a team of professionals with such an extreme view on themselves and their work. They work in an extreme environment (space) with a task that might have extreme consequences. That they regard themselves (and might be regarded by others) as expendable is, in a morbid way, fascinating (in the same morbid way H.R Giger’s monster in ‘Alien’ is fascinating
) and actually adds to the story’s ‘sense of wonder’. A nightmare kind of addition which mismatches with the generally quite ‘bright’ tone in the story, but hey, I kinda like that.
The extreme view that they are expendable does not necessarily reflect entirely well on TersA, to be honest. There are historical cases during the 1900s of military organizations who’s members I suspect to some extent considered themselves expendable (and who’s leaders definitively considered them expendable when the need arose, which it did). The Eastern Front in WWII comes to mind as an example. So even if the Galaxion crew seem to be a bunch of idealistic, happy chaps they might have some darker insights of the larger picture they are part of (which they apparently have decided to accept anyway). Or they are perhaps just happily unaware of what kind of (very?) darker machinery they REALLY work for.
(Ouch… just managed to compare the nice TerSA contact survey team with such nightmares like the most fanatic troops in Germany and Soviet Union during WWII… probably not a good thing! I’ll catch hell for this for sure!)
(Some posts written by ex-military folks here indicates that there ARE military forces where soldiers don’t consider themselves expendable which I don’t doubt for a second. However, military forces come/has come in a number of variants with all kinds of mindsets, some including the notion of own forces actually BEING expendable.)
Also, the current party (Scavina + the rest) as a whole have multiple, conflicting objectives. One objective is to do a first contact survey which when it fails (which it apparently has) requires them to leave and that as far as I can tell, do so more or less permanently. Another objective is to find out more about the fate of Hiawatha’s crew, which requires Scavina to actually return, in spite of potential rake assaults.
So both sides of the discussion in the party is right, because they both each tries to pursue one of the (conflicting) objectives the party have.
From a bigger picture perspective, I’m not sure Scavina is right. However, as she’s the most awesome character in the story and Hiawatha is like ghost that haunts her from the pas, I’m inclined to say: Have it her way and let her return with whatever crew, stunners and tasers she find necessary. And, oh, an unarmed, Jack Bauer clone can be handy too, if instructed to keep any rake wielding aliens he runs into conscious long enough to provide useful information about what happened with Hiawatha’s crew.
And yes, I like this comic a lot, so keep up the good work Tara!
I would like to add that though the crew might consider themselves “expendable” does not necessarily mean they will willingly let themselves die if they can help it. In a sense, I look on the “expendable” concept in the same light as a firefighter or rescue worker might – i.e. nobody wants to die, and they’ll take precautions not to (for example, I’d be willing to bet that the SCT clothing, while not bulletproof, can take a lot more punishment than, say, office wear), but they accept that there’s the chance that on a given mission not everybody will come back. They have restrictions placed on them, but they will work within them.
Weapons – especially ranged ones – are one of those restrictions, and I think the concern here is not that giving SCT members weapons will turn them into bloodthirsty killers, but that proper handling of those weapons in an unknown situation depends as much on experience as training. Someone mentioned that modern military forces get a fair bit of training on when and when not to use weapons, and I’d expect such training to be standard for future organizations that use weapons – military, civilian, or otherwise. However, there are times when you get a situation where things get ambiguous, where training will not help you and you need to make a judgement call. Someone making the wrong call – or someone just simply panicking and either firing a gun wildly or freezing up and not firing when he/she needs to – can lead to disastrous consequences.
In this case, I understand TerSA’s “when in doubt, don’t” policy.
I expect also that while armed combat is off the options list, that doesn’t necessarily mean that unarmed combat is forbidden. After all, once someone closes on you and attacks with deadly intent, it’s a safe bet that first contact has failed and defending yourself would be a suitable response. Question, Tara: do SCT teams get hand-to-hand combat training?
“Do SCT teams get hand-to-hand combat training?”
Well–and please keep in mind that the story is always in flux and the answer I give now may not agree with what I finally commit to comic pages in the future– they get limited training. They all get some, but it isn’t emphasized. (Other types of physical training are, though.) However, you’ll note that Vessa seems to know what she’s doing, so while they may not all keep those skills current, some choose to do so.
As a comparison, they also all learn those First Contact Protocols–which are equally disused by TerSA’s Survey Teams– but Zan seems much more cognizant of the fine points than the others.
Vessa does seem the most experienced an operator in the team and thats bourne out in her comments in the past few pages and also waaaay back in her interview for the job.
You could call her an old salt in a way; someone experienced with a cool enough head to steady the buffs when things get a little dicey. She is a fascinating character and I can’t wait to find out more about her.
One point I’d like to make is that while Aria is correct in studying past events which have gone wrong to learn new and better ways to operate better in potentially hostile environments, I must say that in this case it would make it hard to study this event to learn lessons if nobody from the original team survived to tell the tale
On that I agree, I think Scavania does have an alterior motive for getting everyone back home safe and sound…and it isn’t because she wants to record their experiences for posterity more like she knows they’re the only experienced survey team this side of their current dimension! She can’t achieve her own goals if the Survey Team dies.
@Prestwick: Tara reveals a little more about Vessa in her short story “A Matter of Principle” (look in the Archive), if you haven’t read it yet.
Wow… 72 comments in 2 pages… that must be a new record!
@Insectoid: I’ve read that tid-bit but like any good reader I demand MOAR!