Far Out There Looks At Christmas Lights – page 4
If I ever had the funds to sink into manufacturing both a Gear Santa and Christmas Wreath Gright ornaments, I wonder which one would sell better?
Anyway, I spent so much time trying to make the layered effect of that railing work, I never stopped to ask what exactly Ichabod is even doing up there. I’ve walked past this particular building for years and years, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a person use those doors. And even if they did, there’s clearly a decoration in the way of it being opened. Then again, if I had to deal with keeping May from wandering off, I’d probably be a bit to distracted to know where I was going too.
Gear Santa, since it would require *slightly* less explanation for non-FOT-readers.
Looking at the preview image on tumblr I assumed she was running because she had stolen it. Considerably less zany than expected. (But understandably so within the “something every day” regimen)
Dude, if my town had a convincingly steampunk-looking location for her to conceivably have stolen it from, she WOULD have.
Hovertext: Over the centuries, her culture gradually conflated the Gear Mythos, the Santa Mythos, and the Rudolph Mythos, and eventually ended up with a traditional song about Gear Claus saving Christmas with his glowing eyes. Along with the classic Gearanimatronic Christmas special TV show that kids everywhere came to cherish, and of course the tons of associated profitably merchandisable goods such as this.
My thoughts were more along the lines of how, and the answer was simple. The Eye Gears are painted a far brighter colour than the rest of the Gear Santa Head, potentially with a yellow glow-in-the-dark paint. And with that explanation, it’s now something that could exist in the real world today.
As in, Blitz could theoretically make that gear-santa as merchandise. I wouldn’t recommend it, but he could.
This could definitely be a both-and situation. The Rudolph parallels do write themselves, and I feel like there comedy to be mined out of cheap glow in the dark pain that rubs off and gets everywhere.
I suppose it’s possible they could have used plain old ordinary paint, but my theory is that the surface is composed of trillions of nanoscopic gears, intermeshed and rotating sufficiently fast that it creates a uniform luminescent affect from the frictional interaction of the gear surfaces. Because anything that CAN be done with gears, SHOULD be done with gears! 😀
(sure, it does occasionally become dangerously hot, but a few occasional burns is a small price to pay to have the prestige of gear based tech rather than some mere glowy paint!)
The gears aren’t plushy enough. Also, they would get clogged too easily, with small enough gears being clogged by a gentle breeze. So that has to be a no from me.
Besides, what’s supposed to power those gears? If they’re powered by an electrical battery, that goes against everything May’s Backstory World uses gears for. If not, how does she link it up to the steam gear system?
This is one of the times when the simplest solutions are the most applicable, for FOT standards.
Real life had gears long before it had batteries, clockwork clocks ran on stored potential energy. There’s a physical windup mechanism which stores the energy when wound and then transfers it to the gears. Likely this works like a “self-winding” watch where the potential energy comes from the physical movement of the device through a gravitational field – essentially a nanoscopic self-winding-clockwork system. If something can’t be made with gears, it’s obviously wasn’t really needed in the first place.