page 686 – Hard to Miss
Not gonna lie, I spent a looooong time fiddling with the last panel here. Just for once, I wanted to at least TRY and do a spaceship/hovercraft/whatever that didn’t look embarrassingly sloppy. And I guess it turned out alright.
Anyway, there’s some OOOOOLD continuity up at the top of the page. Let’s see who can remember where that stuff came from?
And speaking of old, another new Voting Incentive on an old story idea!
(Historical Notes: Man, I spent sooooooo long cleaning up all the little details on that ship the first time around… and then did it ALL OVER AGAIN the second time around. It’s really subtle, but I think I was able to clean up a LOT of perspective problems and generally make the ship look less… floppy. Also, I had to try and be coy when it happened, but one of the comments for this page ABSOLUTELY NAILED what the twist with Astrid was going to be. I might have slightly panicked when I read that post… though at least nobody guessed the OTHER surprise of this arc.)
@ Layla: This place is a hodgepodge of pieced together scrap. Even if they didn’t want to try bringing it down in pieces, it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to find a hole that allowed them to bring the ship down here, which they subsequently patched up. I wouldn’t even be a bit surprised if the path you took down here was part of that patching up project.
I think that whole bit would have worked better if I’d done a better job of making the routes everybody took down there look more cramped and claustrophobic. Ideally, we should have been to used to thinking about the passages being awkward and narrow to even consider the possibility of more open spaces.
My guess is that it’s a no-longer-spaceworthy ship (the blah blah technobabble hyper whatsit drive is burnt out, but otherwise in good condition, but would cost more to fix the hyperwhatsit drive than the sip is worth) which was simply left parked in the interior of the station as they built around it, and is now used for various events such as this one as a command center, etc. since the regular non-hyper power/engines were still good for maneuvering, they could probably use its tractor beam for mving cargo around, or whatever, plenty of uses for it, looks like plenty of room for it to be moved around – So there was no need to bring it in, it was always there.
As will be revealed later, if there was any usable scrap on here (that could be accessed without dying), the residents would have instinctively known about it and come down to re-purpose it. So the ship being a junker that only looks good and has been down here for longer than anyone remembers there being a “down here”, not even holding water as well as a badly damaged glass.
Well, we do find out that the ship belongs to the crime lords running this whole gun market, but I guess that TECHNICALLY doesn’t have any bearing on how long it’s been down there. They question then becomes whether or not anyone would bother looking after the thing enough to keep the locals away.
The local kids who steal hubcaps off of cars know intrinisicly not to steal hubcaps off of the Mafia Don’s car.
As far as looking after it – remember, this is THE FUTURE™
Stuff looks after itself.
Unlike the present car alarms, which wait for someone to steal the car (or a large truck to drive by, or plane to fly overhead, etc.) and then emit a loud annoying noise that does…nothing, FUTURE security systems are a bit more “proactive”, particularly those on crime boss owned vehicles.
If the locals get to close, the ship’s point defense laser system automatically turns them into the aforementioned “person-ash”. (Thus explaining the smell they noticed in the area)