Thing is, I kinda imagine that's something that would get a major rethinking post-Contact. The influx of new technologies, new materials, and new building methods would quickly revive a lot of old ideas about exploring and exploiting the oceans.

>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.

"So we had this lake monster back on Earth, called it the 'Loch Ness Monster.'"

"They have a Nessie on Earth too?!"

>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.

Yeah, it's sort of a boon that so much of Earth's history from Contact to 25th century is a broadly marked blank. We have the major periods, we have the major events, but there's plenty of elbow room left to shoehorn in more.

Puts me in the mind of UF-Gryphon having a filing cabinet somewhere filled with files on all those strange events of pre and post-Contact Earth. Whether it's marked with an "X" is open to one's imagination.

>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.

To be fair, when you've got enough firepower to slag anything that gets within range, such that planners have to seriously consider orbital bombardment, then being dumb as a post is not that much of a handicap.

>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.

"Ah yes, 'Fog,' the immortal race of sentient warships that allegedly defeated humanity. We have dismissed this claim."

>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. :)

She keeps it in her back pocket.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject