No-op. CARDINAL is not a "who".

>The other: What genre (fantasy/sci-fi/anime) project are you most
>looking forward to?

Of my own? Or upcoming from some mass-market source?

--G.
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Interesting...

>>The other: What genre (fantasy/sci-fi/anime) project are you most
>>looking forward to?
>
>Of my own? Or upcoming from some mass-market source?

The latter. Tho if you feel like answering the former too, go for it. :)

Hmm. Tough to say...

This will probably come as a shock to some folks out there, but I don't really do anime any more. I think the last show I tried to follow in any depth was Heat Guy J, and I only got about halfway through that. No, I lie. I tried to get into Full Metal Alchemist on the Cartoon Network at one point and made it about four episodes.

There's no single reason for this. It's not even that J or Alchemist are bad shows - heck, I liked J enough to steal some stuff from it. I just got tired of a lot of the tropes, the obligatory flourishes, and the cliches in the material and in the fandom itself. It got to the point where it was kind of like listening to my fourth-grade teacher play the piano. She knew a lot of songs, but she managed to make every one of them sound pretty much the same.

Ditto for fantasy - it's not really my cup of tea. Sure, I read the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy in high school, and a few of the early Forgotten Realms novels - and a bunch of early Conan, which I suppose counts, and is if anything more legit than the rest because it's not based on somebody's game diaries - but by and large that genre doesn't do much for me.

That leaves sci-fi. Hmm. Specific projects I'm looking forward to... Sadly, I think I've reached the point where most, if not all, of my favorite SF authors are dead, and, as such, there really aren't any upcoming projects to look forward to on that front.

Still, "sci-fi" covers some pretty wide territory. I'm sure there's something in the works I've heard about lately and been at least a bit excited about, but not so excited that anything jumps out at me. The relentless tide of comic-book movies continues. The trailer for Ghost Rider looks like it might not be terrible, but I wouldn't really say I'm looking forward to it so much as figuring I'll probably catch it when it comes out.

In the world of actual comics, all is sadness and desolation, except possibly Invincible, and even that's kind of edging toward the shark tank at this point; Kirkman's been doing too much work for Marvel, it's poisoning his synapses.

TV-wise, I need to catch up on Doctor Who - I've fallen five or six episodes behind the UK airings - but what little has filtered through my shields about the eps since The Idiot's Lantern doesn't exactly fill me with eagerness. Which is a shame, since the series started with such promise. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised; I need to get around to finding out one of these days. Apart from that... I dunno, are they even still doing sci-fi on TV any more?

So yeah, I'm not really doing much genre-wise these days. I've been mostly reading non-fiction lately. On that front, I think I'm most eagerly awaiting The Mutineer, the third compilation of the late Hunter S. Thompson's correspondence, but that's not due out until January 1, 2007, so I have some time to wait.

--G.
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Jyurai.

--G.
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Moo hoo ha ha. Oh, that's brilliant. The trees must have had a collective cow.

Mike Thedford
College Town
Shopkeep at Large

Pretty much all the time these days, actually. The warning buzz of incipient burnout has been my more or less constant companion for the last couple-three years. It's hard to tell how much of that stems from real-life pressures, as opposed to the actual possibility that things here are reaching the end of the road. I still have quite a few ideas, and a number of long-planned things it's been my hope for quite a long time to get to, but often lately I go to the well and there's nothing there.

I've felt that way before and good things have come along eventually, and I have no statistical evidence to back me up, but it feels as if the moments when that happens are getting fewer and farther between, especially as regards Symphony 5. I wrote in my LiveJournal when Interlude at Vortigern's Lake No. 2 came out that I hoped it wouldn't give readers a false sense of ending, like the fourth season of Babylon 5 did to me, leaving me uninterested in watching season 5 at all. I hadn't counted on the possibility that it would have a similar effect on me, but there you are...

--G.
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Did the not-so-recent loss of Redneck and and recent loss of Doc Mui from the creative team have an impact on your writing?

-D-

Hmm... tough one. I mean, I'm sure there's been some effect, there's always an effect when things get changed around in any organization, but I don't think there's been a direct one.

Their absence doesn't contribute to my feelings of burnout, if that's what you're getting at.

--G.
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It's the Order of the Black Rose, and she's trying to figure out what the hell Saionji is up to. As to her friends suspecting, probably not; Mia has a habit of vanishing for indefinite periods like that, since she's a Ranger and all. They get sent on secret missions quite often - especially the ones who are being groomed for eventual advancement within the organization.

>How did Akio contact Saionji to 'recruit' him, and what convinced him
>he could be trusted?

Saionji found him, and what makes you think he is trusted?

--G.
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Okay, not so much 'trust' as 'not have him killed the moment he saw him'. But I suspect that falls under Akio's attitude of using everyone for his own goals.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Circle gets the square!

--G.
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Answering that would require me to know all the references I've used, which is pretty well impossible. If I had to guess, and I pretty much do, I'd say it was probably some buried cameo of some little-known comic character, so buried and so little-known that even I've forgotten I did it, or something of that nature.

>Do you have a moment that you occasionally think back to and think
>"THAT is why I do this"?

Yeah, there are moments like that, though they get rarer as the years go by. There will be moments when a couple of things drawn from completely disparate sources suddenly fit together in a way I hadn't considered before, everything dovetailing just as it should, that give me a little chill and make me think Aha, there's where the beauty in this method is.

>In the same vein, is there any one moment in EPU you're particularly
>proud of? Or a top three/five if you can't decide on a single?

That's kind of like asking someone which of his children is his favorite, but yeah, there are a few bits and pieces I go back and look at and think Yeah, if I do say so myself, that was nicely done.

In no particular order, and understanding that this is not a comprehensive list, I feel that way about:

- Raven's "rebirth" in Blood Ties #3 (and, really, pretty much any time I have an excuse to have her say, "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.");
- The scene in which everything goes pear-shaped in the prologue to Last Transport ("Delta Green, Delta Green. Abandon your evac routes and form on us. Emergency spacefold in one minute... mark.");
- The fight scene at the end of Blades;
- Interlude at Bancroft Tower No. 1 in D Minor (the whole thing's pretty much one scene);
- This will be a good life... damn good.

>Who exactly were represented by the flaming cross on Surtur's
>chessboard in Twilight?

Kris wrote that scene, so there are a few of the players I'm not entirely sure of myself, but I believe the flaming cross represents the radical militant elements of the Church of Man.

>Likewise the exoskeletal 'slavemasters over
>slavemasters' from the same?

The Pfhor, an infamous race of slave-takers, are themselves slaves, though they do not know it. The creatures mentioned there are their unseen masters.

--G.
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Hmm. Y'know, I'm not sure I know that. Wedge is doing development work on A Day at the Races now, and I don't think either one of us has actually decided the finish order yet.

Chad, am I right about that?

--G.
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Neat!

I feel vaugely like I just stumped the Schwab.

Hm...backup question, then...

Favorite car of yours that's ever shown up in the various EPU series. :D

Yeah, the finish of the final heat is still mostly up for grabs.

I know who *wins*, mind, but I'm not spoiling that. :)

	Chad Collier Smirking Kilrathi The Captain of the Gravy Train

I'll be looking forward to it!

That was the one peeve I've had about the Unfinished Symphony... I can live without most of the rest of it but I darn well hoped that Day at the Races would make it out someday!

It's mainly in my head and those of my cohorts. Drafts of stories being worked on have chunks of notes and background in them, a lot of the time, until the parts of the narrative that cover what the notes are on gets written. There should be an overall master plan for the UF universe, but there isn't. The closest we ever got was a projected timeline compiled 10 years or so ago, and that almost immediately slipped fabulously out of date.

We've also got ream upon ream of chat log from the studio channel that contains stuff we thought of and were determined not to forget, but in many cases have forgotten. Ardie or Truss are usually our trusty researchers on those matters.

--G.
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Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

Nope. Not really my cup of tea all on its own.

--G.
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(There is at least one Usual Supect who does that kind of thing, though. :)

I'm still working on that bit. :)

Does it serve the purposes of the story? Does it derail the story? Sorcery should answer 'yes' to the first question and 'no' to the second. I have been known to think of it as a toolkit. It may be the most versitile toolkit you've ever set eyes on, but people will forget to put the screwdriver back after they're finished dealing with the kitchen drawer, and sometimes you have the wrong kind of caulk, and if you forgot to charge the batteries in the flashlight, well, you're not working in any dark places very well for a while, are you?

The story comes first. Magic is a side effect.

People in LARPs (and sometimes stories) like to think that magic is the answer to everything. It's much more interesting when it's NOT. (And then you get to have your characters bitch about, "Well what good is it then!?" which is always fun. ;)

Magic shouldn't be a side-effect, but an integral part of the universe you are building. And that means that you need to know exactly what it can or cannot do, even if the reader doesn't.

The main problem, to me, is consistency. It's what I call the Superman Paradox. If you have a character who can go toe-to-toe with alien gods, an ordinary man with a weapon shouldn't be much of a threat. So you have to set those limits. You can make them high ("Darkness beyond twilight...") or low ("I am called the Great Skeeve") but they need to be set. :)

I don't usually write scenes in my head before committing them to bits; what I have in my head is usually either akin to an animation sequence or a comic page. (Which can be very frustrating, since I'm no artist.) When things like that crop up in BPGD files, they're usually just thrown in because it adds flavor, but I can't say something like "Stargirl nearly brought down the leader of the Sky Raiders" without at least picturing generally how it went.

In this case, I must point out that, though Slade's armor and fighting skills make him a tough nut to crack in hand-to-hand combat and his jetpack makes him elusive, anybody with a flight power and a beam weapon has a better-than-average chance of taking him on and, if not prevailing, at least surviving. The trick is to cut him off from backup and prevent his escape, and then not to listen to anything he says while you're fighting him. :)

(As one of us in the lab paraphrased from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas after whichever episode it was in which Slade temporarily turned, what, his third or fourth Titan to evil - you know, after the writers completely ran out of ideas - "Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a manipulative archvillain. Your average teen hero will panic and immediately offer himself up to the service of evil. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the Slade-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow." :)

>Also, just how technologically inclined is Captain Photon? Is he
>Stark-level, Scott Lang smart, or something else?

I like to think of Cap as an inspired tinkerer, a rung or two below the likes of Tony Stark on the techie ladder. He builds his own gadgets for his secondary powers (Devices) and at least one of his Power Pool sets (Medicine), which means he can make some pretty esoteric stuff - Targeting Drones, Web Grenades, that gizmo that does all the Medicine powers, and so on - but his technological skills, or at least his level of from-scratch engineering ability, are probably not high enough that he could build new primary powers if he lost his mutant ones for some reason. (For that matter, he's not wealthy enough to build anything really esoteric, like tech-based replacement Energy Blast powers or what have you.)

The closest Marvel comparison's probably Peter Parker. Pete built his secondary powers, and they're very clever, but without his innate spider-powers he's just some schmo with a pair of web shooters and a miniature camera. :)

--G.
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I do believe you've managed to turn Courtney stubborn nature into a bonafide superpower. Anti-Slade Snubbing Powers! Bravo, good sir.

> The closest Marvel comparison's probably Peter Parker.

That's a cool answer. Thank you.

If you don't mind my asking one more, and if you'll excuse a pretty banal one: are/were there plans for Stargirl to show up after Last Transport?

Not as such, but she's part of Kara's circle of friends, and Kara's part of the Chief's household, so it's unlikely that she'll never appear again.

--G.
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Details are sketchy, but I believe it involved the rental of most, if not all, of one of Tomodachi's several ninja-clans-for-hire.

>In S3: Entr'acte: Gunboat Diplomacy, Kate had a dream where she was
>piloting a giant robot. Was this prophetic?

I doubt it, but I can't entirely rule it out, given the circles Kate travels in.

>In S4: Interlude on Titan in F (For Tomorrow), Corwin had a dream that
>helped him decide to accept fathering Anthy's child. What was the dream?

I'm not sure of this - Corwin's future-dreams tend to be pretty incoherent, leaving him with something more on the order of an instinctive response or impression than intelligible imagery, and when I wrote that scene I was much more focused on this particular dream's effect than its content. Possibly he saw their daughter as an adult (or teenager, given her parents' tendency toward early achievment), doing Important Things.

>In S4M7: The Revolution Will Be Televised, we saw in Epilogue II that
>Kate was finally free of her stuttering. What were the circumstances
>surrounding that?

She's not quite free of it, but she's much better at controlling it, to the point where it now only tends to emerge in times of unusual stress. This has to do with certain meditative/chi-focus techniques learned from Sumire Kanzaki during Kate's stay on Ishiyama - techniques peculiar to the Kanzaki family's martial form. (There was also quite a lot of red wine involved, as per Starfire's musings in Blood Ties #2, but that was probably not directly involved in Kate's progress.)

--G.
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- ro

"One toke, you poor fool? Wait'll you see those goddamn bats, man."

--G.
(alternately, "Always... uh... never... forget to check your references.")
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>But Lensmen are supposedly about as incorruptible as it comes. Is the
>Detian process still available to Gryphon, and is it ever offered to
>those who pass the Test of Light? Or was access lost somewhere along
>the line and I missed it? It's been retro-engineered at least once
>from a Detian, so it can't be impossible to refine, right?

I'll defer to G on this one, but my take on it is that yes, Detianization is still possible for people who truely qualify, but at this point in time we dont really see it because most Lensmen either have already qualified for Detianization before they became Lensmen or have access to an alternate form of life extension.

Well, this question's answer is kinda complicated, so here goes.

The Order of the Eternal Knight, as the honor which comes with the Omega-2 retrovirus is known, is a Wedge Defense Force decoration. As such, it's normally available only to members of the WDF or one of its affiliated organizations (such as the 3WA or the militarized part of UPNS), or to people who, though not members, have done a great service to one of said organizations. It is still awarded, on average, about three times per year in wartime and once every three to five years in peacetime.

Here's the catch, though: the International Police Organization isn't part of or affiliated with the WDF. It's the enforcement arm of the Babylon Foundation, which the WDF is a voting member of, but there's no direct connection between the two forces - they share no administrative structure or common charter, beyond the Pact Babylonica. As such, IPO members aren't eligible for the OEK in the everyday course of things; they'd have to be working on something involving the WDF in some fashion, and pull off something spectacular that benefits the WDF. This has happened, but the circumstances allowing for it are quite rare.

So no, there's no direct connection between Lensmen and Eternal Knights, and becoming one does not automatically imply the other.

Now, as to the literal wording of your first question - "Is the Detian process still available to Gryphon?" - there are legal technicalities involved there, but yes, he does have access to a supply of the retrovirus. He's no longer part of the WDF, so he has no authority to bestow the OEK honors, but in rare cases entirely depending on his personal discretion, he can make someone a Detian.

>It's been retro-engineered at least once
>from a Detian, so it can't be impossible to refine, right?

Technically, Omega-2 is supposed to be impossible to refine from a Detian's blood or tissue. It does its work and then dies off, departing the system and leaving only the modifications it wrought in its wake, and those are supposed to be too complicated and specialized for someone to reverse-engineer the retrovirus from its effects. What Li Kohran did in that flashback in Aegis Florea 2 was, according to everything known by the galaxy's finest biochemists and retrogeneticists of the twenty-fifth century, impossible - and doubly so because, despite her undeniable brilliance with machinery, Kohran is neither a biochemist nor a retrogeneticist.

Of course, what those people - and Kohran - don't know is that Kohran is touched by the divine; she's one of Skuld's Chosen Engineers, and when the timing is right and the goddess's fortune smiles upon them, the Chosen can do the impossible.

--G.
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I so like your S.C.E. better than Star Trek's.

I'm sure she can build a perfectly serviceable gene sequencer at any time - but she can build them all month and put in anything she likes, she's probably never getting Omega-2 out of them again.

>Oh, and how many of the Chosen have been "on screen"?

Hmm. Let me think a minute. Three? Maybe four? Not counting the dead ones in the World-Engine scene in Twilight...

--G.
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At his best (i.e., by Ditko), the Blue Beetle was a great character, sort of a high-speed combination of Tony Stark and Spider-Man - a gadget-oriented but not gadget-dominated, acrobatic hero who got by on guts, skill, technical prowess and witty quips. The fast-paced quipster is one of my favorite kinds of super-hero, which is why I'm fond of Ditko characters like Spider-Man, Blue Beetle II, and the Creeper - all of whom have since been Done Very Wrong by later artists and writers, although none moreso than the Creeper.

At his worst (i.e., by Giffen), the Blue Beetle was... well, kind of a retard, actually, but he still didn't deserve to get his head exploded by Max friggin' Lord.

I was, I must confess, not a big fan of the Wacky Justice League. I like for superheroes to enjoy what they do, yeah, but taking the flagship super-team title of the whole DC universe and making it campy was a bit much for me. The whole Booster Gold/Blue Beetle - Bill/Ted dynamic just grated on my nerves, as did playing Guy Gardner's moronic fratboy routine for laughs (which is, I think, directly responsible for the fact that he still has his moronic fratboy routine, and has never been restored to what he was like before his, what was it, bus accident). Part of that's because I was never particularly fond of Booster.

That said, I'm in kind of a quandary about what became of the Wacky Justice League. I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League took the goofy, stupid things from the original Giffen run and made them creepy and stupid (I'm looking at you, Child Molester Guy Gardner - I hate Guy and I still think that was repellently out of character), and the fact that Johns used that era of the League's history as the linchpin for Countdown, the "oh look, Max Lord's been a villain all along" plot, and various other crimes against humanity doesn't sit well with me. I didn't particularly like the comedy League, but perverting it into a gore show was just wrong, and I imagine it was a backhanded smack to anyone who really liked that version of the League.

--G.
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*nods*

Amazing how they could let that kind of character go to waste. "Yeah, we've got an Iron Man analogue, but wouldn't it be better if we just shot him?"

Sort of both. The original pair of stargates were found artifacts. The rest of the IPO network's gates are new construction, reverse-engineered by Skuld and her team at the IPO Technical Division's Special Weapons and Devices Research Facility (the same place prototype testing for Project BRIGHTEST DAY is now underway as of 2410). So the principle is ancient alien found technology, but it's well enough understood by the IPO that they can now make their own. (They're very expensive, though, and they have the disadvantage that the one at the remote end has to be hauled there by hand, so setting up the network is costly, time-consuming, and requires quite a bit of manpower.)

>And as a sort of follow-up, going on the conjecture that the whole
>Babylon 4 disappearance mirrors the same disappearance in the TV
>series, is it possible that there's a gate or even a series of gates
>out there that are "not on the map"?

Possible, but considered unlikely. The original pair of gates were discovered in the same facility, indicating to the xenoarcheologists involved that the technology had just been invented by the civilization that originally created it, which then fell before they could be emplaced wherever they were intended to go. That's the current working hypothesis, anyway. The beings who originally created the gates appear to have been extinct since the waning days of the Padishah Dynasty on what is today Zardon, and that was, oh, 10,000 years ago or thereabouts.

>Now, to switch gears, does the IPO have its own fighter squadrons?

The Tactical Division maintains some aerospace fighter assets, but the Space Force doesn't have carriers. Space Force ships have to team up with allied vessels if they need fighters or bombers for some reason. That kind of operation is a bit outside their usual bailiwick, so it doesn't come up that often.

>And last for now, did you hear that the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
>has officially been dubbed the "Lightning II" by the US Air Force?

I hadn't heard that, no. I haven't been paying much attention to the JSF project, since I suspect it's going to fail embarrassingly. They're trying to make it too many things to too many people.

In the UF universe, "Lightning II" was the name of the Lockheed/Incom SF-22B, Earth's first operational aerospace fighter. Intriguingly, the SF-22B began life as the early 1990s' YF-22, which was promoted as and expected to be a last-generation atmospheric jet fighter by Lockheed. The Incom team developed the aerospace version in secret, applying advanced versions of technologies originally developed in the 1980s for their covert joint project with Subpro of Salusia (the one that produced the Z-95 Headhunter), and unveiled it after First Contact in 1999 made it obvious that Earth's armed forces were going to need space fighters fast. The timing of the projects worked out such that the atmosphere-only F-22A never saw production - they went straight from the prototypes to the space-capable B model.

--G.
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I kinda figured it'd be something like that. Did Skuld and the gang have to "MacGyver" their own dialing system, or did they have the good fortune to find a working unit with the gates?

>
>>And as a sort of follow-up, going on the conjecture that the whole
>>Babylon 4 disappearance mirrors the same disappearance in the TV
>>series, is it possible that there's a gate or even a series of gates
>>out there that are "not on the map"?
>
>Possible, but considered unlikely. The original pair of gates were
>discovered in the same facility, indicating to the xenoarcheologists
>involved that the technology had just been invented by the
>civilization that originally created it, which then fell before they
>could be emplaced wherever they were intended to go. That's the
>current working hypothesis, anyway. The beings who originally created
>the gates appear to have been extinct since the waning days of the
>Padishah Dynasty on what is today Zardon, and that was, oh, 10,000
>years ago or thereabouts.

Well, I guess that'd make sense, since even if somebody did find a gate other than the two prototypes, they'd probably have no idea where to start on reproducing them, let alone the time or resources to spend putting together a complicated network that'd be worth the time and effort.

>
>>Now, to switch gears, does the IPO have its own fighter squadrons?
>
>The Tactical Division maintains some aerospace fighter assets, but the
>Space Force doesn't have carriers. Space Force ships have to team up
>with allied vessels if they need fighters or bombers for some reason.
>That kind of operation is a bit outside their usual bailiwick, so it
>doesn't come up that often.

I assume that, like the Swordfish II or the Getter prototypes, that Space Force ships could carry fighters if necessary, but don't due to both the space requirements (which might be better served filled by shuttles and transports) and the operational hassle of carrying pilots who'd have little to do on most missions a police force would be called upon to handle. A bit like the ships of Starfleet (Star Trek version) don't typically carry fighters, but can carry a wing or several wings (depending on the ship) in times of war.

>
>>And last for now, did you hear that the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
>>has officially been dubbed the "Lightning II" by the US Air Force?
>
>I hadn't heard that, no. I haven't been paying much attention to the
>JSF project, since I suspect it's going to fail embarrassingly.
>They're trying to make it too many things to too many people.

Yeah, I'd agree. The F-35 is, for all intents and purposes, now the ideological descendant of the same "master plan" which brought the F-111 Aardvark into existance. Like the F-111, the F-35 came about as several unrelated projects brought together not outta similarity by out of budgetary voodoo, with too much emphasis put on one customer (the Air Force) at the cost of creating an aircraft that'll be a disaster with the other customers.

And while the F-111 end-product was basically what the Air Force wanted, it ended up costing more and being more of a pain than had they simply gone with their original program. And the Navy had to drop out, simply because their variant was too heavy and cumbersome to work out as a dedicated fighter. The good thing to come out of the F-111 experience is that the Navy, through Grumman, managed to develop one of the greatest fighters in history, the F-14 Tomcat. Sadly, this time, not only will the Navy suffer, but the Marines and the Royal Navy as well.

>
>In the UF universe, "Lightning II" was the name of the Lockheed/Incom
>SF-22B, Earth's first operational aerospace fighter. Intriguingly,
>the SF-22B began life as the early 1990s' YF-22, which was promoted as
>and expected to be a last-generation atmospheric jet fighter by
>Lockheed. The Incom team developed the aerospace version in secret,
>applying advanced versions of technologies originally developed in the
>1980s for their covert joint project with Subpro of Salusia (the one
>that produced the Z-95 Headhunter), and unveiled it after First
>Contact in 1999 made it obvious that Earth's armed forces were going
>to need space fighters fast. The timing of the projects worked out
>such that the atmosphere-only F-22A never saw production - they went
>straight from the prototypes to the space-capable B model.

I always suspected that Lockheed was getting help from somewhere else. Wonder if the boys at Boeing know that their rivals were cheating?

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

No, pretty much nothing was working in that lab. It took a bit of screwing around just for the research team to figure out what the hell the things were for, let alone how to operate them.

>I assume that, like the Swordfish II or the Getter prototypes, that
>Space Force ships could carry fighters if necessary, but don't due to
>both the space requirements (which might be better served filled by
>shuttles and transports) and the operational hassle of carrying pilots
>who'd have little to do on most missions a police force would be
>called upon to handle.

They could, but it wouldn't be very practical - in addition to the points you note, most ships of the Space Force fleet haven't got the infrastructure for handling things like fighter armaments.

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

Most TacDiv aerospace units use Lightning IVs. The Babylon 6 Station Security Wing, which - like the rest of the station security force - is a joint force of Tac Div, Starfleet Security, and Royal Salusian Security Service elements under the overall command of the station command staff, uses the GENOM TIE Avenger (as seen in A Day of Infamy), because they're more space-efficient (not needing conventional launch, recovery, or storage facilities).

>Would the IPSF ever maintain space fighters?

Possibly, but at present the Space Force's mission doesn't really call for them, and there isn't a single craft that would meet all the likely requirements. The closest out there right now is probably either the Incom T-65 or GENOM's Alpha-class gunboat, and they're both too big.

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

Oatmeal chocolate chip, probably.

>what's the 'cranberry bogs' joke?

You know, I'm not sure I remember precisely where it came from originally. It became a kind of running gag in GweepCo back in the old days. I think it came from the cover of a computer programming textbook. Why that had a sign saying "Beware! Cranberry bogs!", I don't know.

>what is babylon 5/6 colour joke?

I'm mildly surprised by how many people didn't get this, especially given that it's not actually my joke - I just continued one that JMS started on the Babylon 5 TV show. See, here's the thing. The spectrum of visible light is nowadays customarily broken up into six main colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Babylon 5, as seen on TV, has blue trim; blue is the fifth color of the spectrum. OK, could be a coincidence, but - in the episode "Babylon Squared", we saw the previous Babylon station, Babylon 4. It was green. Green is the fourth color of the spectrum.

So when Derek and Garibaldi renumbered Babylon 5, they knew what they had to do.

Now, here's where it gets a bit subtle. Six is the usual number of colors taught in elementary schools nowadays, at least around here, but not so long ago there was a seventh. Or rather, violet was the seventh and there was a sixth, indigo, in between blue and violet. It's basically a dark purplish shade of blue, which is why modern, um, colorologists?... tend to argue that it's not a proper primary color and leave it out of the list.

Derek knew that, but he also knew that most modern 25th-century observers wouldn't get it (or even really notice) if he turned the station... darker blue. But he couldn't just leave it out. So he split the difference. The special radiation-activated thermocoat they used to set up the "B6 turns purple" joke was, before activated, a somewhat darker blue than the original color. Not many people noticed, but Fuu Hououji did.

>can i have a cookie?

Not before dinner.

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

Yes, yes indeed.

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

Well, uh, I don't know if you've noticed, but Saionji has joined the enemy camp. It may be inferred from that action, perhaps, that he doesn't really give a crap about the Asagiri school's rules of rank and conduct.

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

_________________________________
We few. We happy few. We band of buggered.

Sheesh, I swear, I gotta do everything around here some days.

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

Oh, I noticed. I just assumed, going from Anne's email in Blades, that Saionji had rejoined the Light (er, so to speak) and that joining the Black Rose was a bit of deception on his part. It wasn't really clear to me what could have been inferred from Saionji's actions. But your response makes it clear that he's not rejoining the Asagiri, which is what I wanted to know, so OK.

- Chad