Well, it makes for a dandy secret staging area, the Pacific Ocean. Seriously, though, I do agree with you here; it's jarring and disorienting for a spacefaring people.

>
>Similarly - I was talking with Nathan about this stuff in PMs the
>other day, and it occurred to us that 25th-century people would find
>the thing about the Fog popping up in different planets' oceans
>without ever being seen arriving, departing, or in space really
>creepy. As he put it, it would be like realizing that all the
>world's lake monsters are the same lake monster, and not
>knowing how it was getting from one to another.

See, this point right here is why I was thinking--hell, I was assuming for some bizarre reason the girls were just packing their ships up in Hammerspace like Optimus Prime's trailer, taking the 3:15 shuttle to Tomodachi, and settling in their new seaside apartment with a great view of the bay. That stuff is such that I took it for granted...didn't even think that it wasn't possible. Then again, they had to get around somehow. Maybe their fold drive works on the water.

>>>Second, I see the entry was written by a one Mr. Kirov. Is that a ship
>>>(or a Transformer? I'm probably getting wires crossed with the
>>>Vozdushnikons) of a later provenance, or did an actual Fog ship do a
>>>writeup of his people for the H2G2?
>
>I'm not going to answer this, but I will note that it's not uncommon
>for the listed authorship of Guide articles to be...
>questionable. The publication's editors are not the most thorough
>fact-checkers. :)
>
>Then again, it's also not uncommon for the stated authors to be
>exactly who they say they are, however improbable, because, well, it's
>that kind of book too.

Wow. It kinda sorta might be true, and it kinda sorta might not. XD

>
>It's worth noting, though, that the UF-universe Fog never displayed
>anything like a Mental Model during the 21st-century incursion; most
>people don't even suspect that they might've been properly sapient.
>They certainly didn't fight as if they were most of the time.

HERE is new information. Before we only knew they appeared and disappeared. I thought there was a decent chance the events of Arpeggio were what caused the Fog to leave. Now it seems as though that's not the case...

>
>>I do know that that's not a typical Transformer
>>name--they're usually named after personality traits and can't be
>>named after Earth vehicle models because many Transformers existed
>>(with alien vehicle forms) before ever coming to Earth.
>
>Transformers change their names all the time, though, often to reflect
>whatever their new altmodes are when they get reconfigured. Hell,
>practically the whole cast of Beast Wars does it in the first
>episode, except for Megatron (and Megatron already wasn't his
>real name anyway).

Hm, I see.

>
>Someone mentioned the Vozdushnikons earlier; they're a good example of
>that, as their names are all the NATO reporting names of their
>20th-century-Soviet-jet altmodes. Those were almost certainly
>not their names before they came to Earth. So if some
>Transformer had reformatted his altmode after scanning historical
>documents on the topic of World War II Soviet heavy cruisers, he might
>well start calling himself Kirov as a result.
>
>I doubt that's what happened in this case, though. More likely it's a
>joke on the part of whoever did write the article, referring to the
>Fog's strange habit of mimicking WWII warships and the fact that the
>Soviet Navy didn't accomplish much during the war.
>
>Or it might actually be the Kirov reporting. Who knows? :)
>
>> Also, a
>>Transformer the size of a battleship would be a LARGE Transformer, on
>>par with Omega Supreme or a combiner gestalt, but whose vehicle form
>>would be rather niche (not that that doesn't happen.)
>
>I refer you to the most preposterous canonical Transformer of all
>time, Broadside: a Triple Changer whose two altmodes are a) a weird
>jet fighter and b) a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
>I am not making that up.

...Well. I was more right than I knew.

>
>>He could very well be a Mental Model. Which is a rather strong
>>indicator of why the Fleet of Fog disappeared...they'd have
>>never gone away. They just went native. Can you imagine the nations of
>>the galaxy FLIP OUT when they found beings THAT powerful hidden all
>>over society? Ohhh that might be a fun read.
>
>So in this scenario, you figure they all just parked their ships
>someplace unobtrusive and slipped into the general population,* and
>have since been Wandering Among Us unnoticed? Hmm... interesting. In
>that case, it would follow that people are seeing Fog ships
>occasionally on, e.g., Tomodachi, simply because Kirishima got bored
>with the rave scene in Nagasaki and moved to Nekomikoka, and every now
>and then it amuses her to go and prowl the Narrows at night and scare
>the socks off some poor Coast Guardsmen. ... I have to admit that
>could happen, though it would have required a hell of a moving van to
>get all of the odd young woman's personal effects from one planet to
>the other, given that one of them is an inexplicable
>Kongō-class battleship. :)

I, um...well, yeah, that's pretty much precisely what I thought, modulo hammerspace and maybe a carryon bag. Is it a bad sign that I see that kind of thing enough that I didn't even consider more conventional logistics?

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu