20130721, 17:00 – I haven’t made any major adjustments in the last 90 minutes so I’m going to go ahead and call this one done. Following earth -42-, you’re getting a look at how the resource-challenged remnants of Thule Garrison cope with their base being nuked. While a lot of assets were evacuated to a nearby hospital, the critical signal hardware has gone mobile, and Tantek gets to babysit. VLA dishes are positioned via rails. The Templar Mobile Array (TMA) is adapted for Appalachia in a fashion the locals would doubtless approve of.

Were ATC a TV show there would be a quick cross-fade or direct cut between the last panel of the previous page and the first panel of this page, with Raven and Tantek’s grumpy exhalations forming an audio transition. That’s why they’re partnered – they sync.

I believe this is the first indication that Thule Garrison has some sort of relationship with an agency of the United States Government. Thule needs the equivalent of a SEP field for their long range comms; the NRO doubtless benefits from a covert multiverse-capable freely positioned sensor platform and truly covert launch capabilities.

This scene was originally going to be set in the offices of the Templar Provisional HQ. I stopped work on that after creating the base exterior geometry – that thought process is detailed in the build log. The Mobile Array is a more economical use of asset creation time and fits Templar character more than another big stone building would. It’s also a lot harder to bust up with an air strike, which may well be a consideration. New geometry is fairly minimal – the dish was modeled back in December, the AV hardware and chairs are from Allegheny Center. The new stuff is the pod on the back of the truck, the dish mounts, and the truck-mounted RTGs. Build quality is enough to get through this page and the next, and sufficient to re-use down the road with minimal work if I decide to do so. The technical fun in this scene is the camo netting on the roof of the pod and the Crepuscular rays in panel two. Getting a page shaded on its post date for the first time in months also counts as fun, though it’s fun of a different sort.

2.17 will be up next week. I may shade it tonight after posting this or I may make good on my {threat|promise} to myself to actually take some time off this weekend. I haven’t decided yet. After that I plan to take August off to do some other art, and to finally do some illustration work I was paid for back in April. While this page and the next were rendering I modeled the geometry I need for the next scene – while August is Augusting I plan to get the final scene of the chapter set up and rendered, then pushed out starting in September. More about the production schedule next week, either in the page metadata or as a blog post.

I bought Dishonored during the Steam Summer Sale earlier this week. I’ve put a couple of hours into it and plan to bite a bigger chunk off tonight if I can slip past my workaholic tendencies without getting caught. So far my basic Stalkout play style has adapted itself well to the game, though I am finding it difficult to not kill everything. The rest of my first impression has more to do with adapting to the interface, and there’s not much I can objectively say about that until I’m more comfortable with it – while how I play stalkout translates nicely to Dishonored, the buttons I use to do it don’t, with the most frequently used weapons/powers currently mapped to keys outside of the F1-F4/1-5 left hand comfort zone. Otherwise, so far so good.

Cast

  • A former United States Army Ranger, Tantek has been with Thule Garrison since the Waking God Protocols field trials of the mid 1990s. He works well with Raven Lockheart, typically functioning as muscle though...

  • A black ops field agent who – for reasons unknown – masquerades as a deputy from the fictional Antrim Police Department. Beef is slightly death-prone, and has been killed by Greg and Ornix. Beef...

  • A former Soviet military officer, Greymalkin disappeared in southeast Asia in the spring of 1968. He surfaced in late 1969 as an adviser and fixer for Michael West, succeeding West as head of Thule...

Glossary Articles

  • The Beefmobile

    Descended from detailed scans of an American sedan and custom built aboard Kolg Saerai Orbital, the Beefmobile has more in common with an MRAP than the stock police cruiser it’s camouflaged as. The beefmobile...

  • Templar Heavy Truck

    At some point during the 30 years between his Soviet military service and the events of Dead City Radio, Greymalkin acquired a number of Russian-built heavy trucks. The question of whether these vehicles are...