page 978 – Success
WHOA! It’s not even dawn and the page is already up? Enjoy it while you can, kiddies, I’m sure it’ll get a LOT worse over the course of next month.
Speaking of the future, by the way, just a quick heads up that there’ll be a extra page on Thursday. One special Thanksgiving page, two regularly scheduled pages on Friday and next Tuesday, and then the Christmas bonanza begins next Friday!
Anyway, actually seeing Tabitha and the kids was a last minute addition, the plan was originally to just hear her over the intercom. It’s definitely a change for the best, though, since Bridget is probably my favorite part of the whole page. “MOOOOOOOM! Why are always being so EMBARRASSING?!?!?!?”
Last up, there’s a new Voting Incentive, but the Vashti stuff is over. Between all the Christmas pages AND the multiple things I’m trying to get wrapped up for Patreon, Incentives aren’t going to have a theme beyond “whatever I felt like drawing at the moment” for a while.
(Historical Notes: Okay, from a strict storytelling standpoint, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. How did the ship not give off any “WARNING: escape pod flying right at us” warning BEFORE this happened? You could say all the sensors were overloaded or shut down during the fight… but that would seem to require the pod being shot DURING the fight, rather than after. Why would they abandon ship DURING the fight, especially one so short? Webcomic Time really hits this sequence in reverse, since what took weeks to depict originally how feels QUITE brief. And all that’s not even getting into how much stuff we eventually see is in that pod. How did they not only decide to bail but ALSO drag all their stuff over there in so short a time? The answer, of course, is “It’s funnier this way, shut up.”)
@Historical Note: It seems likely that their original plan, before it was interrupted by Ichabod’s plan and battle, somehow had always from the very beginning involved at some point intentionally abandoning the giant ship in the space pod, as, due to their convoluted irrational and completely impractical reasoning, it was totally necessary to do so in order to thwart the intergalactic conspiracy to enslave humanity by restricting our supply of imitation spaghetti noodles (or whatever grand conspiracy they imagined they were opposing). Thus, they would have already had the capsule packed and ready with all their stuff. They just assumed this encounter was part of that conspiracy trying to stop them, so they went ahead and launched during the battle because they figured “Aha! Now we have them right where we want them! Just like we planned all along!” “Them” being the Exposition/Anti-spaghetti Conspirators.
Sure, let’s go with that!
@ Historical Note: I disagree with Ed8. First of all, while it’s wonderfully combobulated and fits well with FOT’s overall story telling, it doesn’t cover how the kids would actually think in a crisis. I, personally, think it’s much simpler than that.
The kids got stopped, somehow. They hit buttons randomly, accidentally activating two things important to this happening, the gun & the emergency escape (which includes having their things packed by the helper robots, before they’re shot off the ship without said helper robots). This particular Emergency Escape being set to only package the human residents when a major incident is unavoidable, and thus was delayed for long enough to actually pack before the kids were thrown on and the ship was shot off towards the nearest safe-haven. That nearest safe-haven turning out to be a commercial ship in the nearby space, that is, the Captain’s Ship, which it promptly crashed into. The sensors didn’t react to the speeding escape pod due to a multitude of reasons: (1) Speed of the Escape Pod, (2) Everything else happening in the ship and the nearby space, from the temporary gravity well, to the high powered blast, as well as everything Tabitha did, making a mockery of physics and thus the sensors, to the point where they were effectively useless.
All in all, it’s can actually be considered reasonable and be explained away truthfully. That said, if they’re ever asked, they’ll probably answer with Ed8’s answer rather than the lame and truthful answer of “We didn’t know what we were doing, and so accidentally activated the emergency escape protocols while looking for something that worked”.
Not to go revealing any spoilers, but the “accidentally telling the ship to do this” explanation is actually pretty close to a plot twist coming in the future. (Remember, it’s supposed to be a colony ship, so of course all its systems would be designed around depositing its passengers someplace else). Still doesn’t explain the pod already having the kids’ mountain of luggage, though, that’s pretty firmly in “because it makes the joke work” logic.
It’s a colony ship supposedly made by some of the richest people known in the universe. For the members of their family, their stuff is as, if not more, important than the lives of some commoner who only has enough money in savings to buy a house if they take out a loan, let alone those who live pay-check to pay-check. It makes absolute sense for the “moving stuff” to include the rich’s property, especially if there’s no other passengers occupying the robot staff’s time.
You know, that’s a good point. I’d kind of just assumed it was a generic, government-built colonization project, but that wouldn’t explain why the kids were able to get access to it in the first place. If said whatever government had to outsource the project to somebody who could actually AFFORD it, I guess it’d only stand to reason that the project would take on some of their quirks and unique priorities.