Pirates of the Coal Sack #20

Oct 02, 2022

And with that, we’re underway again. This issue is meant as a jumping on point for new readers, so the old salts will notice a lot of old concepts being reintroduced. Phoenix has been refitted and is now a little more comfortable for a majority human crew. We also have more than doubled the size of the crew, with recruits from Vritra III and the port making the crew large enough that they can get some sleep sometimes. But warm bodies may not be everything they need, as we see this issue.

Among the new faces (Singh, Padda, Madison, etc.), the sharp-eyed veterans will notice Sister Victoria has transfered to tactical. The cloaking system has been moved from engineering to tactical, and Chief Medes takes over Victoria’s old job as Rigger for the warp drive. The sisters in general are now wearing their cloister habits aboard ship; the void habits will still be seen when they join away parties.

This is also the first look at Phoenix’s redesigned bridge. Harding missed having a chair, and I found it difficult to maneuver the camera around for good shots on the old bridge, so the new one is a hybrid of Aenean and Terran design. It’s still missing the big screen forward, but has the Aenean-style holographic tank. I spent a lot of time thinking through this space; I was avoiding bridge scenes because of the difficulty of shooting on it, so expect to see more up there from now on.

And then there’s the crew assembly on the hangar deck. All 300+ crewmen are not shown, but I think it’s more than half of them. That one shot took a week to put together. I don’t expect we’ll see them all assembled like that again anytime soon, but I did want to convey the rough size of the crew; it’s easy to get tunnel vision and focus just on the ones we’ve met. As part of getting set up for this voyage, I drew up a muster list for the ship. I may share it if there’s interest.

Mapping out this voyage, I’ve got a plot outline that carries us through issue #27 in 2024 at least. So hopefully I’ll see you in the comments!