The First Order Strikes the Penultimate Jedi

by D. on 15 December, 2017 at 23:39

I thoroughly enjoyed Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It is worth seeing in the theatre, sooner than later.

I’d avoid spoilers, but the truth is there aren’t many spoilers to be had because there isn’t much in the movie that is truly unexpected. Instead of big reveals and progression of story, Episode VIII is a full-on explosive nerdgasm of Star Wars fan service.

There’s new walkers, cute creatures, an R2D2 and Luke reunion, BB8 acting like a badass, Anakin’s lightsaber hilt (inexplicably called a “laser sword” by Luke), and the Millennium Falcon saves the day. If you’re surprised, you probably haven’t watched 9 other Star Wars movies, 3 TV series, and a Holiday Special. If you don’t enjoy it anyway, then why did you watch 9 other movies, etc.?

Major character deaths were expected to the point where you’re sort of just waiting to see how they die. Leia’s thirty-five separate “omigosh they killed her” scenes were completely trumped for emotional impact by a single goodbye credit to Carrie Fisher.

Like The Force Awakens, the filmmakers made a point stuffing the ranks of the rebellion with female and ethnically diverse uniform fillers. Flashing to a cockpit to show that a craft is piloted by a black woman is only “progress” by Hollywood standards, because she moves a switch and is never shown again. Now, The Last Jedi does a better job because some of these—short lived—characters are minor heroes struggling for their last moment to give hope to the larger story.

Unlike The Force Awakens, Episode VIII is not just a retread of an earlier film. Though it has the same general theme as Empire—the rebels are perpetually on the run while trying to get Luke to be a Jedi—there is story progression which is unique to the series. They are definitely trying to establish a new path and conflict for new stories and characters. Kylo even goes so far as actually saying that Rey has to let all the old ways die for the new order to be good for the universe. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be written in the dialog or the script notes.

On the topic of new characters, Rose Tico (played by Kelly Marie Tran) is another janitor turned hero (like Finn) that really grasps the “epic seen by characters in the lowliest stations” that was the original film, and Benicio Del Toro’s “DJ” reminds us that scoundrels are still a part of Star Wars.

Modernization of dialog bothered me in Force Awakens. In The Last Jedi, I got over it and really enjoyed the throwing of shade and general nose-thumbing at the stuffier elements. Bathos prevails throughout the film. While that detracts from deep meanings about the force, balance, and the Jedi religion; Star Wars isn’t a story of deep lessons about humanity. It is the American myth about heroic triumph against impossibly overwhelming oppression—and jumping into an X-Wing and blowing things up.

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FPS – Explosive Runes

by D. on 5 October, 2017 at 03:42

It happens to all of us. You write or say something short, sweet and to the point. Then, someone doesn’t get it — or you think they won’t understand it — and you write another two paragraphs explaining that one sentence fragment.

Mister Stein calls out, “Bow! Raise to two thirds, and back full.”

8 words — of technobabble. Simple, meaningless language to fill space, and have one character tell another character to do something specific within his technical profession. The audience doesn’t really have to know what it means — as long as the characters do.

You might start seeing a trend here.

Striving to make Flying Pirate Ships! as internally consistent as possible means the technobabble has to sound meaningful. In turn, that means it has to be applied the same sort of way every time it is used.

Mister Stein’s job is the giving of commands for how to move the Britannia’s “sails” to achieve a desired effect. So we didn’t have to explain that command — we had to explain every possible variation of all commands to the people who actually move the sails. Well, not really. We just needed to know what information would be conveyed and in what format.

We wrote a script (tiny computer program) to figure out the timing of travel using completely fictional technology. To explain those 8 words, we wrote a 758 word article on the issuing of sail commands and crew hand signals, along with examples.

Then we wrote 248 words to tell you about it.

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FPS – Cast of Hundreds

by D. on 27 September, 2017 at 03:41

In a summary, a single sentence can radically alter the length of a story. In writing comics, length is a tightly controlled commodity, so we redraft the story as an outline. The outline dictates the story beats, which scenes will appear in which order, and how many pages we have to accomplish that scene. Despite the principal purpose being control, our outlines tend to be a loose shorthand.

“Page 20 -21: Sewing circle for Abby, parlor game, learn of transport on White river, Abby as spy.”

This line dictates one left and one right page for a scene where Abby and a few friends gossip during a typical 19th century social gathering, a piece of information critical to the plot is passed along, and we discover that Abby is a spy. Seems like a lot for two pages, but it’s really not. Page 20 will set the stage for conversation, and all the story points are single lines of dialog on page 21.

The words “sewing circle for Abby” seem innocuous, but Abby didn’t exist before this line. She’s the wife of a central character, so of course she needed to exist, but she had never been mentioned directly, never given anything to do in the story; she didn’t even have a name. One line of sentence fragments and she’s a spy with critical impact on events surrounding the development of flying boats.

At every stage of writing a script, we maintain a cast sheet, listing all of the characters who will appear in the final story. Our cast sheet for a single issue of a comic included about 15 named characters on average. For each, we list: the shorthand name used in the script; the full name or description; and some identifying characteristics like build, costume, hair, complete origin story, or facial features.

“Sewing circle” two words that mean five more characters added to the “Master Cast Sheet” for Flying Pirate Ships! They could have been nameless women chattering about. But, in the moments since her spontaneous existence, Abby has known them for years. She knows their names — she would use their names. Which means we have to know their names, too.

Every one of these people has a name, and years of story before this moment, and something they did right after it.

As daunting as it is to suddenly create five women, Flying Pirate Ships! is a big story spanning two planets full of people. Obviously we’re not going to bother with knowing the name of every person on two planets — we’re crazy, not insane — but Britannia has a crew — 50 men who work together to run the ship.

50 Men we’re going to see a lot of. 50 men who know each others names.

From the Master Cast Sheet: “The hero ship, Britannia, is crewed by fifty named characters. … [T]here are no faceless/nameless/red shirts on Britannia. …”

They might not all get speaking roles, but they all have first and last names. They each have a job assignment on the ship.

We’re two outlines in, and the Master Cast Sheet currently has 120 named characters.

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FPS – Maths

by D. on 16 September, 2017 at 20:52

Internal consistency is an important part of any story. In science fiction and fantasy, this usually means deciding how some fictional technology works. The reader doesn’t have to know all the ins and outs of the magical energies at the wizard’s fingertips, but the writer does, or the story suffers.

In Flying Pirate Ships! this has come to mean a lot of math.  Math the reader will never see. With the map, curved longitude lines were calculated by graphing cosine along latitude. You know, “simple” three dimensional geometry. A crash refresher course needed to make an accurate map.

It’s the physics of fictional things where math gets really interesting.

You can “eyeball it” for the sake of dramatic tension. The story demands that characters are far enough away to be cut off from help, but we’re not ready to kill all these guys, so something fast to rescue them right when it seems most dire. Eyeball method: Dragons are fast enough and magic enough to cross any distance in any needed time frame. Of course they do have to send for help, first. (What is the average airspeed velocity of a note-carrying raven? I guess it depends if it’s Essosan or Westerosi.)

Flight physics is a central part of Flying Pirate Ships! I mean, come on, “flying” is in the title. How do you make a ship fly? What are the limits of that technology? The answers could be anything of course. Society is fundamentally altered by the ability to move people and cargo through the air – and space – so the answers affect everything.

For this story, the answer is gravity. That helped because science has described a lot about how gravity affects things, and almost nothing about why. This is fertile ground for those who want to make up stuff. Central to spaceflight in the 19th Century is a rock which repels gravity, with the force exerted upon it. Hold on to one of these rocks and you feel it push against you. Let it go and it falls up. Acceleration due to gravity near the surface of Earth is 32 feet per second change per second of acceleration. How fast? 32 x time. How far? 16 x time squared.

But here it gets nasty.

As you travel through space, the gravity you left becomes weaker – acceleration from gravity “slows”. There are formulas for this, but there aren’t formulas for a space engine that works on this principle. How fast are you traveling? How long did it take you to get to this point? Well, falling from orbit you get a curve where… Sure, but what about starting at maximum acceleration and decreasing? No one has done it; no one would have a reason to bother – it is fictional technology.

Borrowing a page from Andy Weir (The Martian). I decided the best way to figure it out was to make a computer tell me…

$vel=start velocity (e.g. 0 m/s)
$tim=start time (e.g. 0 s)
$dist=starting distance (e.g. 0 m)
$maxd=distance to engine off (e.g. 60,500,000 m)
$incr=increment / fidelity (e.g. 30,000m)
$accel=base Acceleration due to gravity (e.g. 9.8 m/s²)
$rad=radius of gravity well (e.g. 6,371,000 m)

for ($i=$dist; $i -le $maxd; $i=$i+$incr) { $tim=$tim + ( ( (-1*$vel) + [math]::sqrt( [math]::pow($vel,2) + 2*($accel * [math]::pow( ($rad / ($rad + $i)) , 2))*$incr ) ) / ($accel * [math]::pow( ($rad / ($rad + $i)) , 2)) ) ;; $vel=$vel+( ( ( (-1*$vel) + [math]::sqrt( [math]::pow($vel,2) + 2*($accel * [math]::pow( ($rad / ($rad + $i)) , 2))*$incr ) ) / ($accel * [math]::pow( ($rad / ($rad + $i)) , 2)) ) * ($accel * [math]::pow( ($rad / ($rad + $i)) , 2)) ) } ;;write-host $tim $vel

 

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Wait… They don’t love you like I love you.

by D. on 10 September, 2017 at 02:28

The truth is: this is a little out of order.

You would think, setting an adventure story on a fictional planet, I’d start with the geography. I didn’t. The fact is the geography doesn’t matter that much for the broad swathes of a story. It does matter a lot for the details and internal consistency, so I did have to stop and nail this down.

I’ve done a lot of world building – not just for Flying Pirate Ships, but in general – over the years. Beasts, landmasses, plants, politics, and seas can play huge roles or just be bits of frosting. Maybe it’s my background in architecture or the front pages of The Lord of the Rings, but for some reason I’ve always been meticulous about geography.

Galydor is a fictional world I created for a series of D&D adventures (Lisa is technically set on Galydor). When I codified that world’s geography, I started with the tectonic plates. Where were the cracks? Which way are they moving? What kinds of subduction is happening with each? Answering those questions dictates a lot of geographical features and makes an internally consistent planet.

That was 25 years ago. Two things were very different with this new planet.

Minerva is not an Earth clone with different continents. It isn’t vast oceans broken by a few landmasses that bubbled out of a volcanic core after some giant billiard ball smacked it so hard the moon was ejected. It is a rock in space that happens to be in the right envelope to support life.

The first time Minerva is observed by humans, it is understood as a sphere. The whole landscape will be navigated by flying. People can observe the planet from orbit. Literally every human on the planet knows it as a globe first and a map second. So to, then, must I.

Making a globe map is actually kind of tricky. We all grew up learning the Mercator Projection of Terra. Believe it or not, that map in your elementary school classroom does not work. Most of the distances in the northern hemisphere are completely wrong. Africa is actually gigantic, and Greenland is small. Starting with a flat map, I have to adjust for all the things that are wrong with a flat map.

Fortunately, I have a device with access to the sum of all human knowledge, and I know a guy who makes paper models. Turns out you can download a paper pattern for a globe, and though that wasn’t sufficient, some simple understanding of geometry, a few thousand dollars worth of publishing and graphics software, and time gets you a globe model pattern:

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