Sunday, April 6, 2008

About the April updates...

Hey kids,

Hope you all enjoyed the April 1st gag earlier this week. For those of you who missed it, I'm putting together a site mirror so you can relive the madness of that particular day. In the mean time, here's a glimpse at what you missed...



Credit where credit is due; This particular April Fools stunt would not have happened if it weren't for the efforts of the folks over at New Cape Quest (link at right) and in particular, Daniel G. Williams who built the following, rather excellent 3D model...



"Yeah, right... Unsink the ship. Real original, Jackass! I'll just go build a time machine and be right back..."

In other news, I've been considering a few of the less-seen aspects of Atlantis, in particular, the NSC fleet and the UEO Marine Corps. Late last year, I wrote a library page on the Subfighter Corps to fill in those gaps surrounding the history of the Raptor subfighter and the growth of submarine fighter warfare, and there have been a few requests in the last few months that have asked me about these other parts of Atlantis as well.

The UEO marine corps are pretty hardcore - let's just get that out of the way now. They are probably the only force within the entire UEO that consistently kicks the backsides of Macronesia so hard that they probably taste shoelaces for a month. Captain Ainsley once remarked that Force Recon was not real, and was nothing more than a bed time story invented to scare the crap out of the Army... and he might have been right if their track record to date has been anything to go by.

As there seems to be the demand - and as I do have an interest in exploring these guys and girls further - keep an eye on the Library over the next week or so for a history on the UEOMC.

The second I mentioned - the North Sea Confederation - covers the growing influence which this Confederation's military is having on the UEO war against Macronesia. We first saw the beginnings of this in Episode 4, and it's being brought full circle in Episode 5 and the in-production Episode 6. Long time Atlantis reader and part-time staffer Keith Carpenter has been slaving away in his off-hours on a pretty detailed breakdown of the NSC's military forces, including their ships, fleets, commanders and force strength. As he's getting pretty close to finishing this work, expect to see the NSC appearing on the site soon, too.

Call me crazy, but I'm going to give you a link to visit:

EMPIRE (Formerly known as Deep Angel)

Far be it for me to plug the site of the Arch-Enemy of seaQuest (Deep Angel used to be seaFire ASV) but I'd like to take the time to acknowledge someone who works rather hard behind the scenes of Empire to make their site (as much as we hate to admit it) so pretty.

His name is Stuart Stitt; and he is responsible for the 3D models and graphics that you see all over the Empire site.

Stuart has been around the sQ community longer than I have, and I regrettably made an uncomplimentary Faux-Pas in regards to his work on NCQ a while back that he came to read. Surprisingly, he didn't take offense to this (and I am grateful, as none was intended) and we had a brief exchange of our views on sQ, Empire, seaFire and to my further surprise, even Atlantis. I won't go in to much detail for the sake of this being completely unofficial, but sufficed to say that the growing resemblence between Empire and Atlantis might not be so much of a fluke as I thought.

Note: I will go so far to admit on my part that the name of the "Raptor" in Atlantis did indeed originate from seaFire ASV way back in 1999-2000. Call it an "Homage" or a Ripoff, but the name has quite firmly stuck.

Stuart also said to me that he intends on spending alot more time on the New Cape Quest forums, so for those of you that go there - keep an eye out and make sure you say 'Hi'.



EDIT: Empire - 3D modelling by Stuart Stitt (Rendering by K. Kotwicki - sorry for any confusion here.)...

1 comment:

mithril said...

personally i've always liked the CG work at Empire/Deep Angel. i just don't like the way the story is going now. i prefferred the old "US navy vs. hostile superpower" of Deep Angel. the new "Hamlet with submarines" story seems a bit too outlandish.

(i also find their super-cav fighters a bit over the top in specs, and a bit too reliant on "unspecified supertech", but as a scifi setting thats to be expected. a page detailing things like "how do these ships see where their going while cavitating" might be useful though, along with mentions of other advances from modern tech that would be required to see such a thing become reality.)