Greetings programs! Are you ready to read? I said are you ready to read? Well let’s get to bloggin’!

Last week was my first full work week since June (I may have mentioned that before). It wasn’t rough per se, but it wasn’t all that much fun either. I was glad when it was over. Particularly when I got home on Friday since…

On Friday I got my long-awaited Kickstarter rewards for the Undertow expansion to Too Many Bones. It’s such an amazing production. Chip Theory Games has a focus on using poker-style chips in their game designs, as you may have guessed from their name. They have a nice weight to them as you move them around. I fancy them more than minis. The game is fairly weighty too. There’s a lot to explore with each character and it takes some time to get used to how to use them well. We played a two-player game on Sunday and it was a rough go. The two characters we chose weren’t a good mix but we really wanted to try them as they were new. We’ll have to try a new combination next week.

As you’ll have seen by now, I did get the Cyran piece done during the week. I REALLY like how it turned out.

This week we get our first peek at the new bird mounts that the Mouse Wing cadets will fly. We’ll be seeing more of them in the weeks ahead. The designs are…okay. I need to get used to drawing them. They should refine themselves as we go along. I got new nibs for my pen so drawing should be smoother.

I guess that’s all I have for this week. Thanks for reading. Have a great seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday! Carja V.

Blog time!

If you’re not a Star Wars nerd, this post will not interest you.

If you are a Star Wars nerd, there’s a chance this post still won’t interest you.

Part of my problem with Rogue One was the timing of everything. Jyn and her band of misfits head out from Yavin to Scarif. This is after being told by the Rebel bigwigs that the Alliance can’t afford to send any resources out to Scarif. Yet the Alliance fleet arrives at Scarif just in time for when things start going sideways for Rogue Squad. The Rogues are what? A couple of hours into their mission at most? That means that the Alliance had to change their minds AND mobilize the fleet within a very short time frame.

One of the accepted truths about the Star Wars universe has been that not all hyperdrives are equal. A fleet would have to coordinate to travel at the speed of their slowest ship. Now assuming that Rogue One has a decent hyperdrive, it should have taken LESS time to get to Scariff than it would take the fleet to get there. That gives even LESS time for the Alliance to change their mind if the fleet is to reach Scarif at “coincidentally” the exact right time.

So they would have to go from being diametrically opposed to the plan to hit Scarif to deciding to launch everything pretty much as soon as Rogue One left. Talk about a mood swing.

Now I haven’t rewatched Rogue One recently, so it’s entirely possible that Jyn’s time spent hours, if not days, scouting the planet before they launched the assault. Still, the timing really seems fortuitous.

As I was thinking about this, I came to think about A New Hope and there’s a timing problem there too actually.

So the Devastator attacks the Tantive IV over Tatooine (and they got there pretty fast after the Rebels for a ship that had no idea where the Tantive was heading at the end of Rogue One, but that’s just another problem I have with Rogue One). Anyway, the Devastator attacks. The droids escape to the surface and Vader sends a detachment down to retrieve them. Shortly thereafter, the Devastator leaves to rendezvous with the Death Star in some unknown system (or at least I can’t remember it). They interrogate Leia and make their way to Alderaan, in the galactic core. They blow it up and send scout ships to Dantooine. Let’s say excluding the hyperspace travel of all ships involved, at most a day passes.

The droids get captured by Jawas, get purchase by Uncle Owen. Artoo escapes. Luke heads out to find him early the next morning. Assume that by the end of that day or sometime the next day AT THE LATEST , they’re on the Falcon heading towards Alderaan.

The Falcon is considered to have one of the best hyperdrives in the galaxy when it’s working. We’re not led to believe they run into any trouble on the way so we can assume it was travelling at a top speed. Yet the Falcon reaches Alderaan just as the Empire’s scout ships have reached Dantooine.

Now the Falcon is making a bee line to Alderaan. They leave at most three days after the Devastator which has to rendezvous with the Death Star. Let’s say wherever the Death Star is just happens to be on the most direct route to Alderaan from Tatooine. Star Destroyers and especially the Death Star are not known for having fast hyperdrives. They take twice as long to get there as a standard hyperdrive. The Falcon takes half the time that a standard hyperdrive. So the Falcon should travel the same distance in a half hour that the Devastator can travel in two hours, give or take.
The trip from Tatooine, the farthest point from the bright side of the universe, to Alderaan, which as mentioned earlier, is in the core, can’t be very long even at half speed. If it took the Falcon a day to make the trip, it would take the Devastator/Death Star four days. My math may be off, but at that rate, even with the head start of a day or two, the Falcon should actually reach Alderaan BEFORE the Death Star. The longer it takes for the Falcon, compounds the discrepency. Granted I’m not taking the length of the Empire’s scout ships’ trip from Alderaan to Dantooine into account but actually that just makes things seem even less possible.

Given all this, the Falcon’s trip from Tatooine looks to be excessively short, meaning Luke didn’t get a whole lot more time to train with Obi Wan than that one session we see in the movie. Either that or the Death Star and Star Destroyers DON’T have slower hyperdrives OR there is no such thing as different speeds in hyperspace.

That’s all for this week! Have a good seven and we’ll do this again next Monday. Carja V.

Good Monday good readers. Time to blog.

I started bingeing through another old show this weekend. This time it’s WKRP in Cincinnati. It just came up in one of my feeds so I watched an episode. There’s one episode that really stands out in my memory from back when I would watch it here and there in syndication. The infamous Turkeys Away episode from season one. It’s a classic. Well, wouldn’t you know one episode led to two, which led to three and I’m already about to finish season one (watching at 1.5 speed also helps).

I’ve been having some trouble with my drawing lines lately. I THINK it’s due to my nib being worn down. I was going to place an order for some replacement nibs. That got me looking at some new tablets again. As I said, I really can’t justify buying one of the really high-end tablets. It just doesn’t make sense given my level. Right now, I’m looking at the Huion H1060P. The biggest issue I see is that I’m so used to flipping my pen over when I want to erase which the Huion pen doesn’t do. Sometimes the function doesn’t load properly in Paint and it just feels so unnatural to do anything else. I’m sure I’d get used to it though. I just happened to look at it on amazon as they were having a lightning deal on. Maybe that was fate trying to send me a message. I resisted the temptation to save 20 dollars and will think about it some more.

This subtle shading I’m doing on the flashbacks this set is nice, but I just don’t have the knack for figuring out how the lighting would fall in certain areas. If I don’t do SOMETHING in certain areas it looks like I forgot to shade that area, but then when I do what I think, it doesn’t look right. This is mostly true with feet.

This Funnies storyline has NINE new characters in it. You’ve already seen Remus, Ronson, Huck and Duana. Coming up are the birds that the cadets will be flying. As I said on Facebook this weekend, I didn’t really think of the implications when I decided to have other cadets besides Deema and Skitter. They’re mostly just standing there so they feel like a bit of a waste so far. They’re riffs off of Zoë’s design though so they aren’t terribly difficult to draw. I had to come up with five new bird designs though which was a challenge. I didn’t want them all looking like Popkin. I had one specific type in mind for Deema’s ride and I came up with an idea for a second pretty easily. The other three required a bit more thought. For better or worse, you’ll be seeing Gerald, Teeno, Joy, Atlic and Kyrr in late September.

That’s it for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.