Author notes

190 - Situational Awareness

El Cid

on Oct. 3, 2017

I finally realized after that first animation (episode 6) why the camera movements are so jerky. My animation software (Carrara) allows me to manipulate the falloff graph so that it eases into its motion rather than just lurching suddenly into full speed. I used that on the second animation (episode 7), so you should notice the camera movement is smoother. Unfortunately, I botched the last portion of it, so the action sequence runs too fast. One of the drawbacks to doing animations is that I just don't have time to fix and re-do the render afterwards, so I really only get one shot at getting it all right. The next batch should be a little bit more polished. I hope.

<< You can see the previous episode on page 188.



Commander Ortega is so getting fired after this is all over and done with! In her defense though, this isn't exactly a military installation or something, where they're expecting to be under attack at any given time, but still they're pretty lax on security. This is a “bridge” page mostly, but I did at least want to have one panel showing what happens to you when the “stinger” bots sting you. There's a cascade of necrosis (cell death) that starts at the injection site and rapidly overtakes the entire body. It's sort of like a combination of hyper accelerated radiation sickness and flesh eating bacteria. That, and it totally shorts out all of the electronic do-dads and bionic neural networks that are so vital to cybernetic human space people. In other words, it's really bad to get stung. I imagine the stinger bots are actually injecting swarms of much smaller self-replicating nanobots into the victim's bloodstream, but it really doesn't matter how it works. What matters is that it's very not good.

There's more chaos to come, so stay tuned.