Hey, look at that! Another Ryka joins the story and…

Oh…

OH!

OH, NO!

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

Well, this one took a bit longer than anticipated, but at least it’s out now.

I spontaneously took a couple of days off recently, mostly since I felt that a break was in order now that my semester’s well and truly over with. Considering that, I guess this page only took about eight or nine-ish days of work to complete, with only about an hour or so put into it on average.

The biggest delay this time around was my sketch work being shoddy, leading my construction to end up shoddy, leading to the roughs looking shoddy, leading to me not wanting to put in the work into fixing my shitty construction and instead procrastinating doing anything. The obvious and more time effective solution would have been to simply throw away my shitty sketches and to start over. Obviously, I didn’t do that, and now we’re stuck with three rather sub-par panels.

I do like the first panel, though. That one shot had been floating in my mind since I thought up this part of the story many years ago. Finally, getting to put it down onto (digital) paper felt really, really good! Although I do kinda wish that I had gone with my original idea of doing a short prequel comic to sort out my art style and characters before starting the proper AAiS story ark. Had I done that, this shot would have probably looked infinitely better than what we’re left with now, but maybe I’ll redraw it in a year or two. We’ll see…

Oh, also: This is the first panel to feature small-arms railgun action. There’ll be plenty more of that in the future, but since this is the first time, I put a lot of effort into learning about all the different facets of atmospheric railgun firing. Shock cones, hypersonic cracks, projectile heating and the resulting glow, plasma trails, atmospheric expansion, required heat dissipation solutions, it’s all there on the page. I took a lot of inspiration from different railgun test fire videos I found on YouTube, but also from my personal favorite ABM system: The “Sprint” missile.

Seriously, if you haven’t watched a video of the Sprint missile in action before, click <here> to see the coolest thing ever. Just look at the little thing go! What a champ!

Anyway, leaving the awesome world of Cold War dick measuring technology aside, I’d like to wish you the greatest of all weeks. I’ll try in earnest to be back with another update next Friday, and in the meantime, there should also be another Sunday Stream coming up, well, this Sunday. Hope to see you there!