Page 290 – Technobabble saves the day again
Yeah, I know, this is a kinda anti-climactic way to end a page, but after all that complaining I did about Friday’s page, you’d better believe I’m giving this week’s material room to breathe. I guarantee, though, you will NOT guess how this pays off!
Also, the Nitpicker in me insisted on that second panel. Because, you know, the world would collapse if I didn’t IMMEDIATELY give a reason why people still use spaceships when site-to-site wormhole guns exist. The Internet wouldn’t stand for such plot holes! It would be CHAOS, I tell you!
EDIT: Aww crud. Once AGAIN I’ve forgotten to finish a voting incentive. Hold on, I’ll have it up in an hour or two…
EDIT EDIT: Dang, putting things off ’till the last minute really works out well for these incentive. This is another one that turned out VERY well… surprisingly so, in fact. To be honest, I’ve been in a pretty crappy mood all day, so I’m a bit surprised to have drawn something so cheerful. Vote to see what I mean!
(Historical Notes: Even with the throwaway “Oh, it’s too dangerous to use normally” line to justify things, the whole Instantly Teleporting Wormholes thing has never felt like a very natural fit for the Far Out There universe. Since we normally see our main cast puttering around on a ship that takes time to get from one point to another, it just feels like that’s how EVERYONE should get from point A to point B. I mean, why wouldn’t Mariska use something like this to catch up with her runaways instantly, if that were an option? Sure, there’s plenty of technobabble ways we could explain it away, but from a narrative standpoint I don’t like that we NEED to explain it. So don’t expect to see stuff like this used again, at least not outside of a silly joke.)
I assumed that the problem with the wormhole generator is that you couldn’t control the destination, so it was useless for travel, and only good for getting rid of things, because 99.9999999999% chance it dumps them harmlessly into completely empty space, which the universe is almost entirely composed of. You’d have to be unbelievable unlucky for it to go anywhere other than empty space. 😉
(Alternate explanation: it kills anything not already inanimate, so only good for moving objects and robots. And, of course, Avatar.)
Those are both good explanations, except they don’t fit the situation we just saw. Our Chief Nitpickers clearly used a form of this technology to travel EXACTLY to where Ichabod was, and arrived in a decidedly not dead fashion. Sure, we can say the mini-version attached to the gun has those flaws, but whatever big version they used to arrive here still presents those plot problems I was complaining about.
Yes, exactly, the thing you said about the gun being different from the travel version they used. (Totally not because I tend to read almost all webcomics in reverse chronological order starting from the most recent one and backing through them, so I hadn’t got to the previous part of them arriving yet, because what kind of idiot reads webcomics backwards, right? ….. )
Hey dude, when you’ve already read the whole thing once, why NOT spice things up by playing around with the chronological order on the re-read? 😀
Ha! As if I’ve only read FOT through once! 🙂
(and yet, here I am at 2AM on a weekday, rereading it again….)