Pirates of the Coal Sack #5

Dec 14, 2020

And we are underway! That’s the end of “Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest.” An action-packed episode, if not the kind of action one normally comes to Slushe for. Nur tried to do his part to end things with a bang, anyway. Another long one, but again, it felt like it needed to be to keep the story contained properly.

The crew’s headed back to the Federation, hopefully for a happy reunion with their civilian lives. Anybody want to take money on that happening? But at least they’re not living with the threat of being eaten hanging over them constantly.

In setting up the setting, I realized that I had never seen a space opera set aboard a cloak-capable ship–essentially, aboard a submarine. There’ll be a lot of how the Phoenix operates that’s dictated by the cloak; it’s not without drawbacks, some of which the crew hasn’t discovered yet.

I played out the ship to ship combat in the wargame Star Fleet Battles, which is to spaceship combat what Black’s Law Dictionary is to English–excruciatingly detailed but very, very useful. I’ll be doing that in the future to keep myself honest on tactics and capabilities. You can see some of the game mechanics on screen on the bridge. I hadn’t realized how useful it would be, narratively, that Harding’s most recent prior assignment was as an instructor. He’s naturally inclined to explain to his officers what he’s doing and why.

One of the things I think has been lost in a general emulation of Star Wars is tension in ship-to-ship battles. Everything’s all swoopy and effects shots, and you don’t get the sense of impact on the characters you do in Wrath of Khan, or The Hunt for Red October. I hope I avoided that. In this universe, starfighters are simply not practical, and even a maneuverable ship can take a minute to come about. There’s time to breathe, and see what’s coming.

A couple of miscellaneous notes:

p 2., “Hey, Majel!”: For Majel Barret-Roddenberry, the voice of the Enterprise computer, of course. “Majel” was considered for Google’s digital assistant, before they decided on “OK Google.”

p. 14, the Tzreek “guards”: They’re saying “Do you know what’s going on?” “I don’t know; maybe it’s another drill.” Where’ve we heard that before? These guys are actually cook’s helpers, minding the larder, which is why they’re not armed.