很抱歉本次没能来得及产出新刊，时间太紧张了。
所以主力是新刊宣传
不过在上海首次露面的刊物是
当然亦提供少量的既刊，Ocean、Abyssal、Orions。
最后，食物本下次肯定就露面了
不过最快应该是在成都的CD20和大家见面
[Mail Call 04/26/17] Evolution of character designs
“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.
[Mail Call 04/24/17] – General Update Edition
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.
Silent Service II: Submarine Roles
Tautog here. We’ve got a two-parter talking about historical sub design, but before I go into that K9 wanted me to talk a little bit about general principles behind submarines.
So, as I said before. Submarines do a lot of things. Their main job is pretty obvious – sinking ships, but they also run cargo, lay mines, recon areas, secretly land troops, and even help with shore bombardment. If you’ve got a job for a ship that can stay hidden, chances are, a submarine’s done it before.
During the cold war, submarines got additional jobs. While they were used to scout before, the newer generation of submarine allowed for a lot more information gathering, like trailing enemy submarines, taking pictures of coastlines, and intercepting enemy transmissions. The cold war also saw the rise of the ballistic missile submarine. Those subs carry nuclear missiles – think of them as a moving but invisible missile silo, and you’ll quickly see why they’re strategically important.I’m sure Cusk has more to say about this topic later.
As you can see, submarines are an indispensable part of any navy. You definitely won’t see them going away (like the battleship, heh) anytime soon! The take home message here, though, is that submarines can do something no other ships do, and that’s to do things while staying hidden. Whether they’re acting as an invisible missile silo or a silent hunter beneath the seas, a good submarine is very difficult to find for the enemy, and that’s one of its biggest advantages.
So, it’s no surprise then that a lot of technology goes towards keeping a submarine stealthy. But, think about this for a second. Stealth isn’t everything. For a submarine to attack anything, it must throw off its “cloak.” In other words, once a submarine attacks a target, it in effect discards its greatest advantage, and thereby renders it vulnerable to counterattack.
Given that submarines are very poorly armored, it gave submarine commanders an interesting dilemma. Do I risk my safety so I can be aggressive and go on the attack? Or is it better for me to stay hidden until I can make a “safer” attack, but possibly at the cost of the attack’s success?
Submarine commanders had to deal with this particular trade-off because so much of what they do depended on it. In fact, you look at all the great submarine captains of all countries in the war, and you’d say that a lot of them had a thing for danger. To be an effective submarine captain you had to be aggressive, and you had to be willing to put yourself out there.
But, if you were too effective, you’d probably end up on the bottom of the ocean floor. That’s the deadly game that submarines play more so than any other ship type. The ones that are really good knew when to call it quits and “cashed out” their successes before too many enemies showed up. They also had a sense for when the risk was worth it – and when it was not.
Historically, prior to World War II, the US trained its submariners almost exclusively in matters of self-preservation and caution. Stealth and evasion and avoidance was what was emphasized. In fact, during pre-war war-games and exercises, if a submarine was so much as spotted by a plane, that sub counted as “sunk” in those exercises!
Yeah. So, before the war, the submarine was supposed to approach stealthily, minimizing one’s periscope exposure and rely on passive sonar. This made sense at the time, because the only times where a submarine would be easily detected would be right after its attack. The wake of the torpedo, the tell-tale signs of the periscope, or even the most obvious – the wreckages, which may or not be on fire – that the submarine left behind. All of those are pretty good signs that a submarine was nearby. It took many years and many developments in modern technology to make it so that we can get better at picking out submarines before they attack, but that’s another tale for another time.
What we found out was that this just wouldn’t do the job. U.S. submariners learned very quickly that the best way to do things was to attack on the surface at night. Yeah, sounds crazy, right? Well, they’d have gotten reprimanded before the war for such recklessness, but it was what ended up working really well.
Right, of course. I had almost forgotten. You’re here for cute subgirls in bikinis too.
Here’s who I’ll be introducing you to next. She’s pretty quiet, so don’t expect her to be as social as me!
Or, maybe she’s the next one? Gah, I need to check my schedule again. Everyone’s been drawn at this point. We’ve got twelve new subgirls –
*mutters* Stupid swimsuit calendar…
for the book, so, hmm…
Wait, hold on. If Bats and Pam and Lori are in, I gotta go check if Frenchie is around, too. Okay, be back in a bit!