page 702 – Oh right, the whole point of this gathering
Well, what did Layla THINK was in all these boxes… at the kiosks OF A GUN SMUGGLER’S MARKET? Funny the things you forget about in the heat of a firefight… No really, try it. You’ll see.
Also… that’s possibly the ugliest gun I’ve ever conceived for this comic. I was trying for laser gating gun, but just wound up with a leafblower. I really need to go back to ripping off designs from more famous Sci-Fi sources and calling it an “homage”.
Anyway, as I was complaining about all last week, I’ll only be getting back from MAGFest by the time you read this. That is, I had to bash it out in a real hurry and couldn’t get a Voting Incentive done again. As I write this, I’m HOPING to get Friday’s page done before I leave as well. Hey, the Conventional Wisdom update is gonna have the odds stacked against it as it is. It’ll be better for both comics if I’m not trying to cough up another one of THESE in the midst of all that.
(Historical Notes: After all this time, I STILL hate the look of those leafblower guns.)
The following contains minor spoilers for the next page. It is up at time of posting, due to the mass reposting onto this site.
If you want, I can come up with a good explanation for why those guns are so ugly. Let’s see, the next page shows that they’re designed to be held with both hands, one of which is holding the handle up top and the other simply supporting the weight from below and controlling how it’s aimed. Which is basically the most horrific gun design I can think of, and one of the hardest to accurately aim that I can conceive of.
Right, time to try to make this horrific design make sense. The weapon’s design consists of 3 parts, the fat back, the barrel and the trigger on top. The Trigger is mounted on the top so that they could easily mount the weapon onto any platform effortlessly without said trigger getting in the way, because FOT has both people who are stupid enough to get confused by a handle being below the thing it’s mounted on, and those who think that a weapon designed for mounted use will always be mounted when in use. The fat-back is the working part of the gun, and it’s where the power is stored, transformed into “Teryon Beams” and released from. There’s two possible explanations for the barrel. The first is that it is used to Compress the Teryon Beams, and is long enough to make it an effective against heavily armoured targets, like tanks and buildings. The second is that the Teryon Beams are compressed in the bulky back bit, and the barrel is merely there to make it obvious where the thing is pointing, because even the special forces are too stupid to use it without a “Point This In This Direction” indicator, even if it would be easier to conceal, carry and use in close-range combat without it.
Oh, and that thing on the underside that allows you to hold the thing without mounting it? THAT is the difference between a Regular Model and a Special Forces Model. In other words, the regular model is near impossible to use without being mounted.
I love that the Far Out There universe is a setting where “because they were just stupid” is ALWAYS a plausible answer for any logical hiccup. Clearly, that makes it the most realistic setting in the history of fiction 😀