Morgane

[Mail Call 04/29/17] – I fell asleep and forgot to post edition

by Morgane 2017年5月1日

As an aside, Sima did a pretty fun series of the Northampton girls from vol. 1. It’s a bit like Kaga-posting but with our girls. I also really like using these to make a point.

“I have a question about submarine girl riggings. In Pacific it seems many of the girls carry what looks like basically the submarines on their persons. Yet in other instances like Sculpin they literally ride on the torpedoes themselves. Why is this the case?”

Oh. This is a case of show and tell. I think I’ve been asked this before.

Just because a subgirl isn’t wearing her equipment doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it. In the same way, just because a subgirl is wearing her equipment doesn’t mean she can’t do anything without it.

One of these days I’ll show you how subgirls use their torpedoes. It’s not quite as you would imagine. The general gist of things is that they have several options, ranging from literally throwing them (think darts, where the torpedo then go to full size) to using their equipment to track, guide, and align the torpedo so it would go on course properly. We’ll have a Silent Service explaining how in real-life torpedo runs were made and we’ll show how this applies to the shipgirls themselves. (Handy for playing Silent Hunter, too)

As for Sculpin? Sculpin’s just derp enough to want to ride them at base. These are girls that can take tank shells to the face without so much as a scratch, so…

“ENGLISH VOL. 2 WHEN”

… I knew this one was coming. Soon. We’re still ironing out the details in our NA distribution network. Unlike Asia we have to build all of our infrastructure from the ground up, and at any rate you’ll see Silent Service and 2016 first beforehand.

“Will Anime still be around in Pacific?”

That answer your question?

“Which one’s your favorite chibi?”

I like them all. They all make me very happy because Sima’s got a unique talent with capturing expressions and faces.

Case in point, this one.

I do lurk around and read other creative works, you know? While I’m amused and entertained by how many others view Ari (some even using our art), she’ll always be a little klutzy and adorable in Pacific.

The Arizona is one of the most well-documented ships, in no small part thanks to the Arizona memorial. It is almost universally associated with tragedy due to in no small part the significant loss of life at Pearl Harbor.

Yet it is precisely that it is well-documented that I took Ari in a slightly different direction. By the time Pearl happened, the Arizona had been in service for nearly three decades. Some men that my family’s very well acquainted with served there in the early stages of their careers. The tales I found were many, but they can be summed up in one word: animated.

Dodging the deck’s watch (to sneak some beer below decks) to hastily tossing the day’s piracy overboard. Impromptu sessions of fun and horseplay. Shore leave (why am I not surprised that this was remembered well?). Flipping between generally slacking off (as again, one particular officer who went on to become CNO would tell) and suddenly try-harding (and winning) at both inspection and sports.

She’s awkward. Sometimes she doesn’t want to be handled at all. Other times she’s slow to start. Reading some of the folks who worked down in the engine room really hits this point home, and I’ve read enough recollections from people that served to grasp that this was perhaps a little more troublesome than the others.

But once she gets going she gets going, and she does it well. She’s good at what she does. Perhaps not the best, but definitely “above average” (though basically everyone thinks that of their ship xD).

I’ve said many times that Pacific isn’t really a miliotaku work at this point. We simply don’t view the shipgirls as pieces of equipment, and we intentionally avoid or minimize the extent of which physical “attributes” of the ship would mirror that of a girl. That stuff is easy. I could have Ari walk with a slight limp in her left leg due to one port screw consistently having troubles, for instance. Or make her farsighted since she had a tendency of overshooting her targets.

But what does that add to the story? Why is that interesting? Why should I communicate that to the reader as a character trait when I can have Ari say that as a bit of trivia?

We’re in this to make cute shipgirls, after all. Emphasis on the girl 🙂

前线来信·Mail call

[Mail Call 04/28/17] Sleep edition (again)

by Morgane 2017年4月29日

Okay. xD I think sleep edition posts are basically days where I get home late, want to put something on the site (since I got done with writing) but doesn’t feel like putting it online just yet.

“Question: Excluding STEC and other ship girl agencies for now, but in terms of build-up and capabilities of Pacific’s ‘modern’ (conventional/non-fairy tech) military (’90s and beyond), whether it’s the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Japan, *insert country name here*, how well do they fare against the Abyssal Fleet as a last line of defense? Say, if they were to defeat STEC and the other agencies, what then? The military has to fill the gap somehow to defend humanity. What are the contingency plans for a STEC defeat? Or there is none? It’s either death or survival.”

Not very well.

The Abyssals are optimized against conventional human armies with all kinds of nasty tricks up their sleeves. Despair is a powerful tool and they excel at it. If the initial shock and awe isn’t sufficient to cow humanity, the Abyssals can easily enter a war of attrition that no human country could realistically hope to recover from. Human production would simply not be able to keep up – even if a full salvo of tomahawk missiles could kill an Abyssal scout there will not be enough produced to matter in the long run. Every ship or aircraft lost against the Abyssals is one that is more or less lost permanently given the speed of the Abyssal incursion.

Or, simply put. How long would it take to build a new Arleigh Burke or a new F-22? Do you think the Abyssals will give you time to breath and recuperate?

Humanity has many tactical short-term options, but even WITH the shipgirls and fairies, what are their strategic options? How would you even plan a strategy to “win” against the Abyssals without knowing what works on them and what don’t?

The reason why folks like Mike are important is that at the “beginning” of Pacific’s tale, this is the first time ever (thanks to stuff we’ve revealed in OCEAN) that humanity has considered seriously a long-term response or solution to the Abyssals. STEC is trying to figure out something that’s beyond “survive for as long as possible.” Or, rather, it’s figuring out better ways to ensure humanity’s survival.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the military has contingency plans for fighting *an* Abyssal with conventional forces – though I would bet on it being more of a delaying action than a real plan for victory. However, given that STEC is humanity’s last, best hope, I don’t think the military can afford to have their best and brightest spending time and resources planning humanity’s hopeless last stand instead of doing all they can to support that one hope.”

The Soviets and Chinese definitely have plans to fight “an” Abyssal, and the US already have plans for integrating conventional naval and air units into anti-Abyssal task forces. Japan and the UK are the odd ones out in that the segregation between function is still pretty distinctive.

However, you’re right. It’s not really STEC’s job to tell other services what to do. That’s really up to the proper parties involved.

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific

[Mail Call 04/26/17] Evolution of character designs

by Morgane 2017年4月27日

“If you could get any (voice) actress to do voice work for Pacific, who would you all get to play who?”

This is really more of a question for the team than me. Would it surprise you much to say I don’t know voice actresses very well? After all, I really haven’t watched anime – especially not recently.

“Once shipgirls sortie out for a mission, how long are they able to stay out? Can they stay out for days (or longer) at a time, or do they get tired, hungry, etc. at the same rate as a normal human?”

It depends on what the mission is, how fast they go, and the like. The limiting factor isn’t even necessarily fuel (though the “boosters” run out far faster than their regular acceleration stores), but more along the lines of ammo.

Pacific’s shipgirls can all more or less run on water without their special equipment. Having the screw-like heels or the “jetpack” like “backpack” locomotion units just make things a lot easier. It’s the difference between say, walking and biking and driving.

A shipgirl gets tired and hungry generally at the same rate as a normal human, but they’re made out of a lot of harder stuff. The subgirls can stay submerged for months at a time if need be (Not even Batfish would really want to go that long without human contact – she’d get bored) and while they’ll get grumpy and despondent and what-have-you, you can’t starve a shipgirl to death (to our knowledge).

Specifically, NKT experiments involving shipgirls basically show that you can shut one in a base for what might have been years without her suffering any apparent physical harm.

Since I still can’t upload to the Chinese hosting bandwidth saving thingie, here’s today’s update instead. x)

As you know, November typically does a sketch of sorts before actually putting the shipgirl down in paper. This is one of our drafts as a part of our creative process. If you look at her, it should be easy enough to guess who she’s supposed to be even without the CL-48.

Of course, as you know, for some of our other shipgirls, it’s not nearly as easy.

This is what Caroline looks like, and while she doesn’t look so terribly different from what she looks like today…

(No more pink hair)

O’bannon’s design and appearance looked quite different.

English Devblog, 前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific

[Mail Call 04/24/17] – General Update Edition

by Morgane 2017年4月26日

Note: This was posted yesterday, but apparently stuff didn’t sync, so I’ll probably have something up today as well.

First things first. The website’s experiencing troubles (again) over the weekend. What I can say with some honest confidence is that it goes down due to any number of things ranging from attacks to too much server traffic to general shenanigans.

Sorry, folks, but it’s what it is. We’re doing our best.

Thank you for the random questions. Zero’s actually working on the video-related stuff now.

Right now, it looks something like this.

…Yeah, it’ll be something derp-cute, I think, but other than that, it’s on-going.

You’ll see a number of new things in the works. First, we’ve reorganized the site. 2016 and the U.S. Navy Cuisine book now have its own sections on the site, and the Pacific section is now its own thing. As I mentioned a while back, I’ve made a “timeline” of sorts detailing the tidbits and all the random stuff we’ve done for Pacific. That timeline’ll get updated as constantly as I can – there’s a lot of stuff I’m trying to finish up in the meantime.

There’s another book that we’re putting out. It’s called “Fate in History.” The book is Zero’s idea about a what-if of an exhibit of Fate series characters, but as their “historical” counterparts. In particular, we’re going with the hypothesis that the historical origin of Arthur is, well, Roman.

The artist has often been mistaken for November because of his similar looking art style, but he’s not November. In a very roundabout fashion, Maria (it’s a dude, just to clarify) found us a year or so back. If you’ve seen some homebrew’d British shipgirls (sort of like Pacific, only minus the worldbuilding and the lore), he’s the guy.

Now, where do we stand with the other stuff?

We’re working on logistics pertaining to 2016. Again, if you’ll recall it took us nearly a year and a half to sort out Pacific proper, I can say 2016 won’t take that long, but we’re working on it.

Volume 3: My great uncle’s girl (his words, not mine) has been done. I think we’re good for August release, but don’t quote me on that. November is working very hard. Especially now we need to sort out the rigging so that they’re uniform.

Silent Service: All the shipgirls except for one has been fully illustrated. Sima is working on expressions and fun stuff now. By my count we have 7 1/2 US subgirls, one U-boat, one Japanese subgirl, and two Soviet ones. Below you can see an example of an expression. We’ve picked a number of expressions that we feel exemplifies the particular girl’s personality. It’s also a really easy way for us to do some stuff on the site with text and liven the page up a bit.

I think at this point Pacific has yet another inside joke.

The Royal Navy is basically cast as “Sir not appearing in Pacific” because we never get around to finishing any of the British shipgirls. For Silent Service we briefly thought about perhaps bringing the British Trout, but then we realize it’d be really confusing. That, and I’m not quite prepared to settle the lore on what happens with two shipgirls having the same name just yet.

Here in the western-speaking countries, British sources on WW2 are pretty much second only to the US in terms of the sheer quantity of stuff out there that you can get. Well, I’ve got my hands full already with the American side, and currently we’ve really got no one taking the reins on the UK. Its role in storytelling is more or less a counterweight to the US. The UK is still quite capable of influencing international politics, it’s a convenient tool for us to keep the regions that I’m not interested in (e.g. the Middle East, Africa, etc) peaceful, and it acts as a direct counterbalance to the USSR.

At the cost of Germany and to a lesser extent, France, the actual Cold War is less U.S. vs. USSR and more like U.K vs. the USSR, with the US backing the U.K. mostly except for some very unusual circumstances. Again, given a not-collapsing Soviet Union, there is always that latent threat where another war can start in Europe or worse, the spread of communism.

Pacific’s USSR is a very curious mix in that it is largely concerned with its own affairs. Not much revolution-exporting there. To policy analysts, though, there’s that latent danger. Present day, Pacific, the USSR is more or less functional. A strong leader has emerged after nearly three decades of internal bloodshed, and things have been looking up for the last ten or so years.

This didn’t come to a surprise to America’s leadership. In fact, America in Pacific is basically hitting most of our modern technological developments decades in advance of when they would have showed up in real life.

The America in this particular setting is unique. It’s familiar to us, especially those born in the 90s, but it’s still different. On average less people are crowded into large cities, driving down poverty. Manufacturing, materials, and industry are still jobs that are capable of fully sustaining a family if they wish. The average education level still lags far behind that of Europe, with much fewer people choosing to attend college or obtain higher education. However, in contrast, high school completion rates are typically five to ten points higher in comparison to where they were at here. Wages have had steady and slow increases, and Americans, too, are just beginning to reap the fruits of global trade.

These are just examples of some of the small tweaks I’ve carried out, and the resultant changes that follows. You guys have seen my writings. You know how much I love this country. It’s part of why I find Pacific fascinating.

Now, I originally set out to basically (and perhaps naively) wanting to butterfly away much of the issues in which I believed to have turned America into what it is today. It’s not that I don’t want to do so in my fictional work, but I want to make what I do meaningful.

In other words, simply “fixing it” by wiping away the past in an attempt to undo what will be isn’t good enough. What I’m focused on now is trying to understand (deeply) what will happen or what might happen if X didn’t happen. For instance, what happens if the Vietnam War concluded with a North-South Vietnam similar to Korea? Would America have been more or less prone to adventurism? How would the Civil Rights movement turn out if Dr. King wasn’t assassinated, or if he was assassinated a month, a year later? Could we have worked things out with our primary geopolitical adversary? If so, how?

I used to think that I can go in with a cleaver. If I could change X, surely the world would turn out to be better. Fast forward to today and I’m going at history with basically a scalpel. You’ll see – and I hope you’ll appreciate – how different things can be if things happened slightly differently. After all, incremental changes can result in very big differences over time.