Comic 400 - From the Files of ToyCo's R&D Department (Strip No. 400)
28th Feb 2019, 12:00 AM
in Raiders of the Lost Apple
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Author Notes:
(I know, I already said something similar for the 300th strip...)
The purpose of this page is for sorta "defending my honour", concerning the technical blunder that I made designing the Pelican Playmate (as pointed out in this fan art by Stilldown), in which I exposed its jet engines to water, and even assumed that they could just be repurposed to function as waterborne propulsion systems.
Well, here I tried to come up with a way how to actually make this work. At least in a way that it leaves the willing suspension of disbelief somewhat more intact... It would quite probably still have a thousand problems if you tried that in real life.
Since designing and building an airplane/boat takes time, this is supposed to be a document from a few months before the assassination of Timmy III: Bettina is still busy in ToyCo's R&D department, having also hired Lena as promising new talent shortly before.
Also, it seems that Bettina thought that it makes most sense to assign this project to the Beach & Bath sub department.
The cooperation with Horizon Dynamic Systems is stemming from an old contract that they are bound to uphold, from their "Mad Science, Inc" days, before HDS's CEO Madeleine Waite decided to implement a more environmentally friendly company policy. This is probably one of the last projects they did that involved conventional fossil fuel propulsion.
Takira provided all of the hardware and some of the software needed to stem engineering projects like this.
"Project Puffin" is kind of an inside gag to myself, because Puffin Playmate was supposed to be the plane's name, until I decided to change it at the last minute. (TV Tropes would call this a Development Gag.)
User comments:
It could hover, too!
Skydiver
Anyway, there was also the spaceship Orion from the German series Raumpatrouille Orion, which always had to be launched from underwater, because there was its home base located for some reason!
But the whole UFO serial was full of fantastic design (the cars built for it are famous, and appeared in other movies, too), and for uniform, the girls in the control center on the moon had purple wigs as uniform instead of hats, and silver miniskirts.
And for Raumpatrouille (predating Startrek!), they had at least outregous dances in the future back then...
And oh yes, those dances in Raumpatrouille! My guess is that the writers figured that people have invented new weird dances in every decade so far, so why would we stop doing that in the future?
And for Raumpatrouillie: Germany had some interesting sci-fi serials and movies in the sixties and seventies, for example the pioneering "alpha-alpha". (Of course the UK had much more of them.)
So far I only coincidentally saw the last few minutes of it on TV - and what I saw I found to be rather weird, but in a really intriguing way.
(Probably because it is more a Science-Fiction Truffaut movie then a typical Lemmy Caution movie. And ironically, I find Alphaville even better then Truffauts later Fahrenheit adaption, although I liked it more when I rewatched it some years ago.)
spark of geniuspreposterous hackwork...Thank you. :)
(Though there was precedent, do you remember? Spiffee Burger was already in my 200th page!)
This page here was done entirely in FireAlpaca though.
(But I guess it would have been an interesting experiment to actually use a CAD program instead...)
But very soon there'll be a Cryptida page online where I actually utilized a model I made in Blender as part of the process... ;-)