I don't think it's quite fair to say they don't get it, but they know they can't do it, so it's not an alternative they consider for themselves. It'd be like me saying, well, the historian thing didn't work out, but I can always be an industrial chemist.

Heck, Mio acknowledged last week that her desire to see Minna back in action is more about her than Minna, which verges on new-age self-actualization for her. :)

>... How do you neglect to mention a dishonourable discharge?

I'm not sure what the motivation was on the part of the powers that be, but it was kept secret from her; when she went back home to Yokosuka, she was told she was part of a "strategic reserve" and they'd call her if she was needed, and when she stopped by the naval base for a visit everyone there was quite awkward about it (except Mio, who got really angry, which is her way of being quite awkward).

>That must have made her return awkward.

It certainly did in the above scene; on the other hand, when there was actual action to be had, the overarching need to get on with that smoothed everything else over pretty effectively. In official terms, it's probably easier to take things like that discreetly out of a witch's personnel file after she's prevented most of the Romagnan Navy from being sunk.

>Son of a-! You know, it's moments like this that make 'shot while
>resisting arrest' so appealing in fiction. He'll turn up, but he's
>going to make a hell of a mess before he's done, isn't he?

Now, now, you don't know that. Maybe he just didn't want to wait around for his court-martial, and he'll get clear of the war zone, live someplace in quiet seclusion, and never bother anyone again.

... You're not buying it, are you.

>>Sprawled on the bed, Wolfgang took a couple of sleeping sniffs of the air,
>>then woke, raised his head, and made the soft hrf sound that was as close
>>as he ever got to a bark after hours.
>
>Wolfgang is a dog that understands there is a time for noise. Beats
>out the dogs I've had over the years, that's for sure :)

The real W.A. "Regal" Beagle possessed this trait; it was mildly uncanny. He seemed to understand when loud barking wasn't appropriate and restrain himself accordingly.

>Do Detians have better memory as well, or has he just gotten really
>good at remembering stuff he has to rewrite on occasion?

A bit of both, though in fairness, it's also possible he's reading them back on his omni-tool's neural interface and just using himself as a very slow wetware printer driver. (He's been very diligent not to flash that around, but he still has it.) After all, in that era the best he could do to automate the process would be to jack one of the Intel Office's Teletypes, AND THEN WILMA AND MINNA WOULD HAVE TO READ ABOUT THE FORCE IN ALL CAPS WITH NO COMMAS OR APOSTROPHES WHICH WOULDNT BE VERY RESTFUL. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I was about to express surprise at the inflexibility of the Intel Office's Teletypes, but then realized that they're probably of the "typewriter driven by Morse code" variety, rather than a more fully-featured TTY like an ASR-33. (Looking it up, it turns out that ASCII, which the ASR-33 uses, didn't begin to exist until 1960. On the other hand, and to my surprise, binary character encodings in general (not counting Morse Code, which is effectively a trinary encoding) have existed since 1870! Various forms of Baudot code did have apostrophes, but the first widely-adopted standard encoding, and the encoding thus probably used by the Intel Office's equipment, seems to be ITA2, which indeed lacks it.)

That's even more anachronistic than the Belv! No, the most common machine in use throughout the Allied Forces in 1946 is (just was it was on the Allied side of the real World War II) the 1930-vintage Teletype Corporation Model 15, because it's rugged, it's reliable, and - most importantly - it's cheap.

Probably-apocryphal telecom industry legend has it that, when the early single-case teleprinter system was being developed, the president of Teletype Corp. nixed a study showing that lowercase letters were better from a readability and machine-longevity standpoint with the terse note: "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity properly." This was presumably not a consideration in-setting, so maybe it was just a 50-50 shot that went the wrong way. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, he could use Hellschreiber which was around then and from personal experience using it in amateur radio can be made to do lower case and punctuation with no problems. With modern computers, it even prints out without that slant that the older, hardware based systems did because of slight timing differences.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

Well, if he had a semi-stable connection to reality, I'm sure he'd recognize his only chance at a life that didn't involve a short rope and a longer drop would be to be very quiet and not try a crazy scheme that could get everyone on the planet killed by Neuroi.

So, yeah, not buying it :)

>A bit of both, though in fairness, it's also possible he's reading
>them back on his omni-tool's neural interface and just using himself
>as a very slow wetware printer driver. (He's been very diligent not
>to flash that around, but he still has it.) After all, in that era
>the best he could do to automate the process would be to jack one of
>the Intel Office's Teletypes, AND THEN WILMA AND
>MINNA WOULD HAVE TO READ ABOUT THE FORCE IN ALL CAPS WITH NO COMMAS OR
>APOSTROPHES WHICH WOULDNT BE VERY RESTFUL. :)

Totally didn't think of the Omni-tool. Guess I expected it to get broken with the suit back in ep 1. Those things are impressively durable.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Plus G has the added bonus of the vambrace computer his Lens is (or was originally) part of, which may have the Omnitool integrated into it. (I'm not entirely clear on how that works - does the whole thing just kind of... evaporate when he doesn't want his Lens to give him away? Or does it do something similar to what his Gryphon armor does, storing itself inside him somehow?)

It doesn't evaporate so much as it sort of sinks. You shouldn't feel bad about not being entirely clear on how it works, though - Skuld isn't entirely clear on how it works, and she made it. :)

I had a whole range of abilities sketched out that were going to follow on that bit of Twilight, but most of them ended up being too cumbersome to integrate properly with the Story at Large and were quietly shelved. About the only one that's left is that the arm computer can conceal itself when surplus to requirements (which it is most of the time, these days, because the omni-tool's holographic interface does most of what it does, only better).

Part of the problem with omni-tools is that, because the user interface of the device is apparently independent of the device itself, it's never clear in the game what the machine itself actually is. It doesn't appear to be a wrist-mounted device, since characters often use them when wearing those short-sleeved duty uniforms. It might actually be an implant of some description (as the in-game encyclopedia noted that the haptic holocontrol interface things are), though again, it's never specified where or how big it is, or how much of a production is is to get one installed.

As such, I've always had to be a bit vague about just what and where they are, for the characters who have them. Quarians can presumably integrate them with their biosuits, but all we know for sure about Jen Rossum's, for instance, is that you'd need a saw to remove it, which implies that it's a limb implant of some sort. In G's case, it most likely is integrated with his bionic arm computer thingy, simply because that'd be the most efficient way of handling it.

Whatever the case, he's at pains to keep it on the downlow in 1946, because the disruptive potential of the technologies it embodies are on a much higher order of magnitude than, say, the mostly-invisible passive neural switching technology in Mio's goggles. And because picking up a wrench when Ursula or Shirley is slinging one next to him is neighborly. And because I sometimes forget he has it. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...That may have gotten away from me a little bit there. Anyway, since you said he's going to great lengths not to flash his ubertech around, all this is basically just a thought exercise.

THERE IS NO EMOTION THERE IS PEACE STOP THERE IS NO IGNORANCE THERE IS KNOWLEDGE STOP THERE IS NO PASSION THERE IS SERENITY STOP THERE IS NO DEATH THERE IS THE FORCE STOP

"Captain, for a peaceful philosophy, this seems a bit... intense."

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Or like dialogue for an unusually Zen Dalek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e59guruVL4o

IHNTA

You would have a better chance at being believed if the angel's halo wasn't being balanced on the devil's horns. ;)

Though you could throw readers a curve by having his situation dealt with off-screen. It often amused me in stories where a 'defeated' villain escaped and the heroes get psyched up for a return match only to find out he was taken down by someone else. There never is enough of those.

It wouldn't shock me to find out that part of her motivation is: "How many witches will this work for?"

She would probably see the rather huge benefit if it will work for more than a handful of obsessed witches, not to mention the possibility that it is a solution to a centuries old problem if it works for most or all.

I thought it was more recent than "centuries old". Wasn't it stated somewhere or other that the catastrophic burnout at such a young age was mainly due to using magic engines? So that without the damage to her magic talent from the engine's supercharging, an average witch would keep more of her powers for longer? This would explain the presence in canon of a few older witches who still have some amount of magic; they were trained and went through most of their working lives before magic engines were developed.

(I've seen but not yet bought the Fuso Sea Incident manga, where the magic engine was in a big bulky backpack instead of integrated into a Striker. Was this older technology more or less likely to produce burnout, I wonder.)

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

*Edit: Basic grammar fail fix, nothing to see here.

(Seriously, she causes overpressure waves on a deck broom. Imagine what she could do in a Strike Engine.)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

... is she waterskiing with those things?

Well, Porco's ride is a seaplane. (Note the Italian flag deco.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

nope, these days im doing 3d work(blender is a surprisingly robust toolset) and i didnt intend to post such a large pic. it came across my facebook feed earlier and i did a reverse image lookup for it. the site i got that particular copy from has some NSFW-ish pics so im unsure if a link is advisable but i can post if there are no complaints.

"Rocket Witches: Warriors of the Iron Sky", to give its full title.

lots of Finns in it, too.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

Well, you'd need them, wouldn't you, for control surfaces?

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

not if your going for the hard sf effect. then you'd want vernier jets

And if you're going for a steampunk aesthetic, Jules Vernier jets.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.