As I mentioned earlier, something you don’t see in a lot of sci-fi is people worrying about money or trying to make ends meet. So I wanted to specifically address that in some subtle ways. Roka fired all his escape pods during the chase scene, but now he has to buy more, and that’s money he doesn’t want to have to spend.
I lump cloaking and lightspeed technologies in the same fashion. They’re out there, but either expensive for the hardware itself or resource-intensive to use. Since a lot of Runners occurs while the ship is en-route to destinations, I didn’t want them to always be able to just jump there in an instant. So I figure there’s a cost associated that makes them choose a slower and cheaper route unless absolutely necessary.
I thought the life pod recall drive would be something interesting to throw in. For a money-conscious person like Roka, it makes sense to have something like that to reclaim property. The backstory I had in my head was that remote-controlled lifepods would be part of a decoy ruse concocted by Cember and Bennesaud back in their pirate days, and they convinced Roka of its merits, given the danger in their line of work.
She /does/ look more human than most of the cast, doesn’t she…
They do seem to get between places pretty darn fast, even if not instantly.
I think in most cases, that would just be me cutting ahead to the next scene, but the intent is that they still log in quite a bit of travel time between destinations. But not TOO much time! It’s definitely a bit tricky for me though and I try not to get too specific about length of time. Realistically, it would probably take a long time to get from one place to another, but that would mess with the pacing of the story and character development. So I kinda chalk things up to a combo of lightspeed and sublight: lightspeed to cover the huge distances in a relatively short amount of time and sublight to cover the remaining distance.
So does that mean that the Brimia’s engines could operate on the Mechane principle?
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0937.html
The last two panels of this one are another of my favorites. Cember being Cember is always fun.
Ha ha. Yeah, I love little beats like these. Cember practically writes himself.
“Yeah, you” would have worked as an answer, after all Bocce is the only human in the crew and that woman looks like a perfectly normal human except for her pigmentation.
Ha ha. Good point. That could have made for a good joke.