previous page
next page

Previous: Air -20-

Next: Air -22-

Top to bottom: Daedalus bridge, Q1 2008. Castores aft cargo bay, part of the Castores, finished March 2013. Daedalus geometry is from Q1 2004 (not counting the changes and alterations made to the aft section to accommodate thrust gravity in 2008). The Shuttlepod is just below the dashboard in panel one; first real appearance is panel two, asset completed last Wednesday. Semi-rigid spacesuit placement model, last Wednesday/Thursday. Daedalus Cargo bay, March 2014 with first appearance today. ELG-2623.4.21, textured late November 2013 and first posted late January 2014. Daedalus cargo bay kibble (boxes), initially used in the rec area environment, first posted June of 2008. The first full-panel interior shot of the cargo bay also features the cargo ramp/elevator, first seen in The Dualist and modeled in mid 2007. Panel seven is almost entirely new work but some lighting, a texture and the lowered elevator are from the CTL, which first appeared in December of 2007. Panel seven also contains the first appearance of the Daedalus SAS, finalized on the 23rd. And last but certainly not least the rec area, again from early/mid 2008.

The Castores, the Daedalus cargo bay, the shuttlepod and the spacesuit dummies did not exist in February. I managed to keep the comic on schedule while developing these assets so I figure it’s forgivable that things slipped a bit when the whole mess was finally brought together on Friday. I was expecting a CPU-heavy weekend but not for the production schedule to be punted squarely in the groan area. The short of it is always attenuate your damned lights, and if it’s not in the shot and not reflecting light on the shot turn it the hell off. Panels two and three were surprisingly resource intensive renders, and panel seven was about to kick things out of alignment even further when it occurred to me to double-check CTL lights – it turned out that a badly behaved fill light was jacking things up.

So yeah that’s a HELL of a lot of work on the screen, and a good chunk of it will be used extensively in the next chapter of Transitional Voices, so the fact that I just burned roughly six weeks on what’s ultimately going to be a few panels of pacing filler isn’t actually Horrible Amounts Of Soul-Destroying Overkill – it’s getting key elements of the next chapter built now, while I have the opportunity to not skimp on them or otherwise rush them. Though I probably could have skimped on the Skyrim and gotten this thing out on time, had I foreseen the HORRIBLE RENDERING DEADLOCK that all y’all refer to as Friday and Saturday.

Panels two through five are textbook Plot Lighting – Murnau heading into darkness. Plot darkness.

Additional details: Visible in panel three – the pod is locally locked and being run via remote. In panel seven, visible on the full-scale but probably not the webscale – the home port of the Daedalus is listed as Kolg Saerai (referred to as “Kaysoo” by West and members of Thule Garrison).

Next week: FASTER RENDERING INTERIOR SHOTS THAT AREN’T GOING TO GUM UP THE DAMNED SCHEDULE. Also plot.

Cast

  •

    Inga Murnau

    The twin sister of fellow Templar Aleksis Murnau, Inga has been assigned to the Castores by way of Kaysoo. While Inga has all of the qualifications required for language work she’s not aboard ship...

  •

    John West

    The first extraterrestrial human to be born on Terra. Home-schooled by Templar, he left the organization in 1997 citing management issues and took the Daedalus with him. John is an incredibly talented Navigator, having...

  •

    Xand

    A pink-haired mechanical genius with a full complement of prosthetic limbs (one “bolt-on,” three high-quality synthetics) and no memory of her first twenty years, Xand is the Daedalus flight engineer. A non-terrestrial human with...

Glossary Articles

  • Castores

    Castores

    A Foundation class heavy cruiser, the Castores is a long endurance survey ship leased by Expert Technologies with a Templar command crew officially following up on first-pass charts plotted by smaller Discovery class ships....

  • Compartment A1

    Compartment A1

    The bridge of a Javelin-type spacecraft, Compartment A1 contains four modular command stations for crew and two folding jump seats for crew or passengers. Aboard the Daedalus, the stations are configured for engineering, co-pilot,...

  • Compartment A3

    Compartment A3

    Compartment A3 – the rec area – is the living room and kitchen of the Daedalus. The compartment provides access to the bathroom, the spacesuit locker, the cargo transfer lock and the central corridor....

  • Compartment D1

    Compartment D1

    Compartment D1 is the unpressurized cargo bay of the Daedalus. It is dominated by the distinctive forward access hatch, port and starboard bay doors, landing gear wells, and a cargo lift that can be...

  • Daedalus

    Daedalus

    A Javelin class Am-capable high speed cargo transport, the Daedalus is the property of ex-Templar Captain John West. The workhorse of a shady courier service run out of the Australian outback in a nearby...

  • ELG-2623.4.21

    ELG-2623.4.21

    A small mars-like moon that’s managed to hang on to an atmosphere, clouds, and polar ice. Any one of these items would have merited a note in the logs but indications of all three...

  • Shuttlepod

    Shuttlepod

    Autonomous Entry Vehicle C728 is a small two-person entry craft that disappeared from the Castores around the time of a mysterious electrical fire. A smaller version of the Buran, STS, or Dream Chaser, the...