To me, the neat thing about leaving them where they were (so to speak) is that a lot of people in the 25th century, in particular, aren't accustomed to thinking of planets' oceans, unless they're fishermen or in the bulk surface shipping business. For ordinary people, outer space has kind of taken over that mental pigeonhole, as the thing you have to cross to get from place to place - everything's sort of psychologically scaled up in an era of commonplace interstellar travel. So for a Mysterious Alien(?) Threat to have appeared that treated them as a priority - well, it's just weird. Like the submarine UFOs in X-COM: Terror from the Deep, or the kaiju in Pacific Rim coming from the sea. Nobody expects that, and the effect is exaggerated in a routine-spaceflight sci-fi setting.

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.

>What really struck me was how well it fits into earth history! Giving
>a solid reason for a mass exodus we've known about for many RL years,
>such that it's genuinely reasonable to have happened (well, through an
>anime watcher's definition of 'reasonable' anyway), is the kind of
>world-building gift I wish I had.

That was one of those "oh hey" design moments. My internal explanation for the Second Diaspora has always been pretty much the same as for the First - "because it's there" - but the timing of the (canonical) Fog incursion lined up so neatly with it that I realized it couldn't really have happened another way.

I'll answer (or dodge :) Nova's questions here, too, for efficiency's sake.

>>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.

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.

>>On a similar note, is it
>>only Terran humans that are plagued with the Fog? Or do Corellians et.
>>al. have them too (or their own local variation of the same problem)?

No, it only seems to be something that happens on worlds with a preponderance of Earth-descended humans. The people who don't think they really exist in the "modern" era assume the sightings are some kind of Jungian collective unconscious thing unique to that population, though there is no scientific basis for this belief.

>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).

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.

>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. :)

--G.
* This is more credible for some than others. Hyūga, for instance, would fit in as a member of the general public in a way that calls to mind Indy's much-reffed-around-here rant in Last Crusade about Brody. "Uh... does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek." :)
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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