What, no love? There's new material...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>What, no love? There's new material...
>
I just finished reading it - these things take time :)

It was nice having them all together to read at once. I though that the bit showing Mylene putting things together was new, but hadn't actually paid attention to that fact until I finished the whole thing.

Founders Day I could tell was new, and I enjoyed it a lot. It fills in some of the gaps of how New Avalon came to be, which was nice to find out. I have ony one question: how is it that Gryphon's Dad is still alive? There's been no mention of him before (just his Mom), and barring some serious life extension treatments (or Omega-2), He should be long-dead by now...

Thanks for putting it all together, and giving us a couple new pieces to boot!

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

>I have ony one question: how is it that Gryphon's Dad is
>still alive?

Cianbro has an excellent health plan.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>>I have ony one question: how is it that Gryphon's Dad is
>>still alive?
>
>Cianbro has an excellent health plan.
>
Works for me :)

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

>>Cianbro has an excellent health plan.
>>
>Works for me :)
>
Darn... and here I was SURE there was more of a story behind it.

Ah well.

Actually, you know what I found just as interesting in its own way? Saavak and G's reactions in comparing their "post movie 2" memories of the Enterprise command crew with the younger "TOS" DC's they are interacting with back in the UF verse.

Just got done. There was a ton of hockey on today! Man's gotta have his priorities. :D

The new stuff was great! The end of Founder's Day was really, really touching.

Was mildly disappointed that Basara did not tell the audience to Liston to his Song. It was nice to finally have a band I can put a definite sound to though, instead of compleatly making one up like I have to do with Art of Noise, and I booted up SRW Alpha 3 just to liston to "Power to the Dream" just for the hell of it afterwards
Great way to spend an hour though
Also, was the Alfheimian benediction in some Form of Tolkien Elvish? I'm a little rusty in my Fictional Linguistics...

>Also, was the Alfheimian benediction in some Form of Tolkien Elvish?

Yeah, Phil came up with that. I don't recall offhand if it's Sindarin or Quenya. In the UF universe, the various modern Alven languages are descended from the ones recorded by Tolkien.

(Amusingly, the thing Maia says at the end is from Tolkien even in-story; it's a quote from The Return of the King. But then, in the UF universe, The Lord of the Rings is a historical text, describing the pre-Ćsir history of Alfheim, thinly disguised as fantasy literature.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>>Also, was the Alfheimian benediction in some Form of Tolkien Elvish?
>
>Yeah, Phil came up with that. I don't recall offhand if it's Sindarin
>or Quenya. In the UF universe, the various modern Alven languages are
>descended from the ones recorded by Tolkien.

The original root of the benediction was actually a line uttered by Faramir in "The Two Towers" when he finds Sam and Frodo on the outskirts of Gondor/Mordor - it sums up his reason for why he still fights, to defend his homeland. The elvish translation is in Sindarin, extracted from searching various and sundry Tolkien language sites (often in other human languages!) for something that had the right "Fit."

It also appears in a chorus in the film version score in "Fellowship of the Rings", during the Departure of Boromir, which probably served as the inspiration for finding the rest of the quote. Things are a bit vague from that time, it was like a fire in my brain making Reunion and its additional side stories. ^_^;

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "If you want to read more, check out The Fellowship of the Wordsmiths, which has provided a lot of the resources for the Tolkien touches in Mars Division..."

Heh. Not more than a couple days ago I started rereading some of this collection of mini-stories. Then I got distracted by something else, and I come back to find they've been nicely compiled and there's a little bit of new material.
Fun. :)

Oh, and then I finally decided to do something I should've done a long time ago and draw some fanart. Opted for Emilia, ala Defiance, for...well, no particular reason.

(dubious about posting a straight image link, but there we are.)

Apologies for any inconsistant details. Referancing for coolant jackets and neurohelmets seems somewhat sparse, and I don't trust Mechcommander's interpretation very highly.

>(dubious about posting a straight image link, but there we are.)

As it happens, there's no officially supported way to do it otherwise in DCForum. (If the server the image is on has a CGI handler attached, you can fake it out by giving it a nonexistent CGI command, like appending "?x" to the URL, but for whatever reason, DCF always inlines straight image URLs.)

>Apologies for any inconsistant details. Referancing for coolant
>jackets and neurohelmets seems somewhat sparse, and I don't trust
>Mechcommander's interpretation very highly.

Not to worry; there are a lot of different models anyway - unless they're part of a unit that's buying equipment in bulk, it's rare to find two MechWarriors with the same gear.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Yep. They go from the barely-there standard stuff to the full-suit lostech-style SLDF/Comstar-issue coolant systems in the BattleTech universe, and who knows in this one?

New material's always a bonus. With all that has been going on, though, I had despaired of seeing anything new here until at least November.

Imagine my surprise when I checked in to find there's something new. :)

Seriously? That's some damn fine writing, and some good explanations for things I had been curious about (for one, how the Dyson sphere got there; I suspected it had been built elsewhere, but beyond that...)

Also, am I the only one going 'Holy S***' at the idea of a Reflex fold large enough to move something of that magnitude? I hope not. -That- must have taken some doing. I have to wonder though... Is the sphere still fold-capable?

---
RCW # X-91873

>I have to wonder though... Is the sphere
>still fold-capable?
>
I don't think the sphere was ever fold-capable. You should have noticed that large number of Zentradi ships spaces equally around both the inside and outside of the sphere; it's been documented multiple places (including the original source material) that a ship's fold "envelope" is a sphere of a diameter somewhat larger than the largest dimension of the ship. As a result, if all of the ships in the Kridinik fleet synchronized their fold systems and essentially merged their fold envelopes, they folded and pulled they sphere along with it.

You're right that making a fold drive big enough for the ZCDS would be incredible. I'd argue that what the actually did to bring it to its present location is actually a greater feat of engineering...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

>I don't think the sphere was ever fold-capable.

No, no it was not.

>You're right that making a fold drive big enough for the ZCDS would be
>incredible. I'd argue that what the actually did to bring it to its
>present location is actually a greater feat of engineering...

It was certainly the greater feat of spacemanship.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>>You're right that making a fold drive big enough for the ZCDS would be
>>incredible. I'd argue that what the actually did to bring it to its
>>present location is actually a greater feat of engineering...
>
>It was certainly the greater feat of spacemanship.
>
>--G.
>-><-

Considering the effort required to make sure that hundreds of spaceship fold drives were perfectly synchronized, then add to that the precise calculations needed to plop that sphere around another star, potentially thousands of light years away without impinging upon the orbits of the innermost two worlds? I doubt you'll see a greater feat of spacemanship than that for some time to come.

>What, no love? There's new material...
>
>--G.
>-><-
>

Sorry - I haven't been paying attention to the What's New page. I like having it all - or most of it, since Travelers on the Shadowed Road is hard to fit in, drawing from Omnibus I as it does - in one place.

And I just noticed that Wolfgang says the Dyson sphere was "reclaimed." A tiny bit of information to chew on while I wait for whatever you do next.

Peter Eng
--
I'm only a Charter Member because of the DCForum upgrade, and because there's no rank below "Clueless F!wit."

>I like having it all - or most of it, since Travelers on the Shadowed
>Road is hard to fit in, drawing from Omnibus I as it does - in one
>place.

Travellers actually belongs with a different plotline which is still under development. Eventually, once the rest of those minis are out, there'll be another omnibus encompassing, in effect, the origin story of the Mars Division, and it'll be in that one.

And at some unrelated point, depending on rate of accumulation, there'll most likely be another like Omnibus 1 for the stories that aren't part of any given over-arc, like Saya and Mysteron.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

After looking at Mr. Moyer's excellent-as-usual artwork, I think I figured out what Therese Sterling does for her second job:

http://www.esurance.com/home/tv.asp

:)

>After looking at Mr. Moyer's excellent-as-usual artwork, I think I
>figured out what Therese Sterling does for her second job:
>
>http://www.esurance.com/home/tv.asp
>
>:)

And we have THE WINNER! :)

Yep, that's where Therése's physical design (and aliased first name) came from. :)

Congrats, you get the No-Prize for being the first reader to catch and post about it!

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "And believe me, that shade of magenta, and those bodysuits, ain't easy to color!"

The Zentraedi have always been a favorite of mine and I am very happy to see more of them in UF. My first ever post, one of the few, back when these forums were new, asked why they hadn't shown up past a brief mention in Core. I'm rather curious as to why they have a city on Cybertron, other than conveniently sized buildings.

>I'm rather curious as to why they have a city
>on Cybertron, other than conveniently sized buildings.

That's pretty much why. When the WDF and the Autobots were working out the details of their alliance, one of the considerations was what WDF units would be assigned to help garrison Cybertron. A Zentraedi Guards unit was an obvious choice because of the scale, though there was also, at the height of the pre-Exile WDF's presence on Cybertron, a Destroid unit posted to the vicinity of Iacon.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Well, now that I've rediscovered that the site is still in good health (see thread on "wwww.eyrie.net" no longer working), I have made time to read the new material.

And much love is given in response.

Kudos to closing out a prequel of sorts. And although I know that there's a lot of material following such as "Twilight", for some reason, my mind's eye wants to jump to "Symphony" as the next complete step in this arc's evolution.

-T.Zukumori

==================================================

"I believe that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Then find someone whose life gives them vodka and have a party."
--Ron White, stand-up comedian.

==================================================

This is what I get for not checking the what's new page this week. Reading now.

>What, no love? There's new material...
>
>--G.
>-><-
>Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
>Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Well, what I'm lovin' is the way these stories knit everything together between the Core, the storylines that came out afterwards, and the way they fill in the gaps between.

Also, the quantum leap in writing you've taken over the years makes it very satisfying to get taken back to the Golden Age and Exile in particular.

"A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan next week" - Gen George S. Patton, Jr.