Yes, I admit it, I’ve been setting up the encounter between Sarah and Helga ever since Episode 18. Though that bit about the ‘Oa Ki Coral’ was tricky. (You try searching through all of the online Samoan-, Fijian-, Tahitian-, and Hawaiian-English dictionaries to find some plausible homonym for ‘OK Coral’) In my defense, I offer the principle of Checkov’s Gun, proposed by Anton Checkov (the Russian playwright [1860-1904], not the weapons officer aboard the starship Enterprise) more than a century ago.
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” [Checkov, 1889]
From this, one immediately obtains Gazis’s Corollary to Checkov’s Law:
“One must not introduce two strong female characters into a drama if there is not going to be a catfight.”
This meant I had to bite the bullet (a rifle bullet?), decide what the two principals in this drama looked like — something I’d been putting off ever since Episodes 24 and 27) — and sit down to draw them. This raised all manner of additional questions, such as ”Where should their confrontation take place?”, ”What combat forms should they use?”, and finally… What should they wear?. Readers’ suggestions ranged from traditional (women’s Royal Navy uniform), practical (shapeless overalls), and implausible (flapper garb and a silk Chinese dress), to alarming (string bikinis). The fourth alternative had many advocates, but after weighing the arguments for and against it (beer vs death threats, depending on the gender of the proponent), I decided this would be just asking for trouble…
What happens next? Will Sarah and Iverson manage to get together? And to what new project will Helga devote her very considerable energy now? Stay tuned and some of your questions may be answered!
So, reading more of your many interest works, I see much science fiction; possibly you play Traveller? I am currently running a campain.
Oh- airships trailed an aerial out the aft tip of the envlope. This had a small drogue cone on the end to create a little drag and some lift a la kite dynamics. It did not hang out of the bottom of the cab- at least, this was not normal procedure. Remember that LONG wave was the order of the early days of airships, and that wire trailing out was LONG.
Hi Kirk, I’ve found records to the effect that aerial’s were handled both ways, and that it was common practice to lower an antenna of around 30-100m with a lead ‘fish’ attached to the end. Indeed, I thought I had an account of one of the 1930’s-era ships loosing its aerial when they flew too close to the ground due to a faulty altimeter setting, but I just did a quick search through my reference library and couldn’t lay my hands on it. Argh! Now I won’t be able to sleep until I find the darn thing
In answer to your question about Traveler, I am indeed still running The Eight Worlds, a low-tech Traveler variant we started back at MIT thirty years ago. (”Gosh… 1980… were there people then?”) By now, the campaign has lasted half a century in game years, most of the ships on the original Navy Lists have been broken up as obsolete, and the grandchildren (!!!) of some of the original player characters have retired. The mind just simply boggles. I keep meaning to post some of the rules, notes, and history somewhere on this site. Maybe in another thirty years?
If you’re curious, send me an email and we can exchange notes on Traveler campaigns. I’d be interested in hearing what you folks are doing!
Of *course* there were people back in 1980. I should know. I was 8. I was there.
We had just discovered fire and the wheel.
And video had just killed the radio star.
And huzzah for cat fights. I just started reading the serial so I’m looking forward to it.