New page!
Point of fact, Recon 1-4 are all new pages – written back in The Early Days, when the second edition was just starting to build up steam. This new sub-scene partially restores (in concept) a chunk cut from the original outline for this chapter. The initial draft had featured a much longer scene on the Sabrosa flight deck, with the Majestic crew getting ready to go and launching. At the time it was cut because it had nothing to do with the story; this time around I took the basic idea and trimmed some more, eliminating anything that would need to be modeled.
The first draft of the new scene was written at Pegasus, back when Ceremony (aka Goth Night) was still around. It being the first and so far only time I’d made it all the way In Theater before I realized I’d forgotten my notebook, the draft was written on the backs of a succession of quarter-page fliers. A few days (weeks?) later it was transcribed and sliced up, then laid out.
The first layout was for four panels of five pages each, and I’d started out in that direction and struggled with it for some time before realizing that doing twenty panels wasn’t just impractical, it was cluttered and insanely repetitive.
Not that the second (and final) layout draft isn’t a bit repetitive, mind you. It does, however, come with plenty of Majestic porn and quite a bit of space for dialogue.
RCS in this context would be Radar Cross-Section, as opposed to Reaction Control System.
Mastering notes, 2016.12.06 – Minor dialogue adjustments.
