Helllllooooooo, Friday!
Just drew for the last local play this season. A thing where a bunch of us illustrators descended on the final tech rehearsal of the run of four local plays, drew, and then our drawings were hung during the run of the show. This week was a review of Johnny Cash. Fun! (if you like Johnny Cash)
Do they have any landing shuttles? If not, then finding a planet is out. Unless they just want to admire it in their final days.
Since we have had no flash backs we have little to go on. How did they expect to greet the aliens? Probably in space in orbit. No need for a shuttle. Now we know they were intended to be an expensive means of disposal we can see why.
I may have missed or forgotten something, but have the references to Xi Tauri (a hierarchical quadruple star system roughly 210 light years from Earth) been explained in any way?
For that matter, beyond this being humanity’s first encounter with intelligent extraterrestrial life, do we know anything about humanity’s other exploits in the galaxy? Are there colonies outside of the Earth’s solar system, for example?
I’m really enjoying the story in general, so I may have overlooked something. I’m kind of hoping I have because I love background details like this as much as actual plot 😀
@Marc, I’m afraid the expression (used a few times so far) has not been explained, nor really discussed humans’ space colonization. I like details like that too, but I’m not sure that there will be a good place for me to write dialogue about either.
Evaluate assets, call a meeting, then figure out what to do. They teach this in the military and business schools.
This is ridiculous! Why aren’t they loading the photon torpedos?? Where is their token Vulcan who can figure out the important stuff? Surely there is a Federation StarBase somewhere along the way! If the new drive fails, bring out the dilithium and just fire up the old Warp Drive – and set phasers to “Roast Their Alien Balls!”
Why is this crew not following protocol? The Wookie must be destroyed!
“By Grabthar’s hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!”
Sorry, but those slightly-over-the-top space-y expressions are the only thing irking me about this comic 😛
“Blatz(ing)” I can see as a euphemism (turned actual curse word) though.
@KNO3, yeah, that’s what a PROPERLY run outfit would do. Unfortunately, Orion slept through that part of the meeting, and Star killed the instructor before the course was finished, sooo…
@Nathanyel, I assume you’re too young to remember when “SHAZBAT!” gained a minor following (Robin Williams from “Mork and Mindy”).
And I was tickled silly when I first heard “frak” used in the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot, although I later learned it was a “reimagined” import from the word used in the original series. I mean, how else are you going to show you’re on an alien planet, in an alien society, hearing a translation of an alien language, than by having the translation computers (provided by IBM, no doubt) occasionally substitute the native word when they can’t find a suitable substitute.
I’m just glad they had most of the bugs in that translation system worked out by the time we were introduced to Spacetrawler. Dimitri would not have been quite so charming if you’d actually read him saying “Yeb’ v’rukki” or even “Yeb’ tvoy mat!” when he got really upset.
Repeat after me: “Zhil da bwil, Krokodil…”
I was rather the ALF generation.
Of course there’s the “translator malfunction” or untranslatable words, but these aren’t aliens, they’re humans (of the future)
The internet has shown us more than anything before how language evolves, but this still sounds somewhat ridiculous 😛 Well, at least there aren’t “space [urban items]” or light years as a unit of time 😛
@Muzhik: I Grok you.
Yes, I am old.