(03-27-2021, 05:43 PM)robkelk Wrote:

(03-27-2021, 04:40 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote:

(03-27-2021, 02:09 PM)robkelk Wrote: I was going through old posts while populating the wiki's map with location markers, and I re-discovered these two from the very first Planning for Arc 1 thread:

Black Aeronaut Wrote: As for governments... well, part of the issue we have here in America is how the people that make up the upper echelons of our government are seemingly more and more disconnected with the citizens each election cycle. Not that I don't think there's decent people working in the bureaucracy - I know there's plenty. The issue comes in that these people have a framework they have to work within, and it doesn't really have much wiggle room.

I have the odd idea of something happening very much like in the Coneheads movie - someone at just the right level knows that something is up, they won't simply let this rest - it offends their sensibility that something out there does not fit their world-view and it must be brought into line, one way or another! (I love that the agent wants to deport them, never mind that they don't have the means to send them back home!)

And so it would go... At least, until this agent's incessant pushing comes to the attention of someone even higher up - someone who still remembers that his paychecks come out of the earnings of hard working types and works to do his job fairly and justly. They're not illegal immigrants, he decides. This! This is a refugee crisis! And these good Americans represent American values at their finest by taking care of these displaced people as best as they can.

A new agent is placed on the case, the old one is given a new posting. (Not Alaska. The higher-up isn't evil like that. Hawaii, though, will probably get this fellow to relax a bit while still providing him appropriate targets.) This new agent will make their credentials legitimate and act as a liaison between them and the rest of the government. In other words, this agent is someone who's done legitimately good work and has had experience working with other agencies such as Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Norgarth Wrote: And then the old Agent runs into Lilo and Stitch 8P

Okay.

So, where in Hawai'i do I put the marker?

Well, I would have thought "The same island Lilo and Stitch reside on"... Or am I misreading the question here?

(03-27-2021, 02:09 PM)robkelk Wrote:

Wikipedia's page for the island of Molokai Wrote:The island is an agrarian society, where the economy has been driven primarily by cattle ranching, pineapple production, and sugar cane production, and small-scale farms. Tourism comprises a small fraction of the island's economy, and much of the infrastructure related to tourism was closed and barricaded in the early 2000s as the primary landowner, Molokai Ranch, closed operations due to substantial revenue losses.

Hmmmmm... I can see Lord Phantomhive buying the residential parts of Molokai Ranch as long as he gets a government subsidy to do so. (does some quick research) No, wait, There might be a couple of smaller properties available (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Good GRIEF.

In that case, the locals might actually welcome Ciel buying up the properties and reopening the resort.

(03-27-2021, 02:09 PM)robkelk Wrote: Hire Lilo's big sister Nani as the property manager, maybe?

Any objections to the displacees having a Hawaiian getaway location, relatively far from the usual tourist traps? (Maybe have July 4 celebrations in the tropics...)

Oh, not at all!  After everything she's been through, Nani can definitely handle of the weirdness that's about to come her way. 

In fact, after Ben kiddifies himself, that might just be exactly what he and his rather odd, budding family needs...

The Kaluakoi Hotel  it is, then (which IRL appears to have been re-opened just in time for the pandemic to hit, but let's not let that stand in the way of our story).

Pity that there aren't any deep-water ports on Molokai, though (confirmed by checking the current NOAA charts). I guess the local school ship will just have to anchor offshore when the GnP girls show up... and Stitch won't get to terrorize them quite so easily.

• "Obligatory Beach Episode". That's the actual title, not a working title. No idea what to put into the story other than descriptions of the girls (yes, even Musujime and Rico) in fanservicey swimsuits... although we can use this to introduce the vacation getaway in Hawai'i.
  

(03-28-2021, 04:22 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: I'm just trying to come up with a good way to wedge it in there.  (No Ever Given/Suez Canal jokes, please.    )

The thing I have about the ships showing up as part of Step 5 is that they'd be a big enough deal that we'd be all too tied up to handle Academy City right away once it does show up, emergency or not.

For one thing, there's "Where to put them?"  Labster has already figured out that LA, San Diego, and even San Fran are a no-go because of the undersea geography.  Zuikaku is among the smallest of these ships, but even that has a phenomenally huge draft of 250 meters!

Our characters would probably be all right in the middle of getting the command staff, civilian government, school administration, and student body government on each ship read-in on the situation when Academy City shows up.

Now, we can go ahead and write it like that.  This is deconstruction, and so this will present the issue of "What now?" because you can't just hide these things because they're all as tall as sky scrapers.  Not even Maginot's Surcouf because, despite it being a submarine, the old listening nets are still out there, and they'd sure as hell hear that monster of a sub and the allied navies would all fucking shit themselves.

...

(03-28-2021, 07:04 PM)Labster Wrote: The challenges of ships this size are a little nuts, to be honest. Basically, with 250m or 140 fathoms below the water line, it essentially means that school ships can't be on the continental shelf. This isn't a huge challenge out in the Pacific with subduction zones all around. You can stuff a ship fairly easily into Monterey Bay, because of Monterey Canyon. You'd only need to be about a mile offshore from Point Dume in SoCal. Molokai isn't too bad, but you can't get quite as close to a place without the tectonic action or erosive turbidity of a continental river, like in California.

But well, we can't get anywhere near San Diego because of the Coronado Rise. The SF Bay shipping lanes are only swept out to 55 feet; the Golden Gate itself is deeper, but not deep enough. But the challenge here is more that the Zuikaku's deck on which Oorai sits is twice as tall as the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Strait of Juan de Fuca is not deep enough either. And on the East Coast, you might need to be 100 miles offshore from New Jersey in Hudson Canyon.

I'm pretty sure what happened here is that the author of Girls und Panzer took existing aircraft carriers and scaled them up until the deck was big enough to host small cities. But is that such a good idea? This has the potential to mess with views ( at 10km away, the ship is 2.4° by up to 38° across ), and since it's so much larger than a breakwater, surfing. And wildlife too.

At 250m below the surface, that means we have about 25 atmospheres of pressure on the lower decks. Good thing we have an amazing carbon coating, right? The total interior space below the surface is 690m, which means we have roughly 160 storeys of space to fill -- and probably up to 200 on the bigger school ships. This is a lot of space. But hey, the average school ship is 10 times longer than the SDF-1 Macross, because that's what we need for education, right?

BlackAeronaut has been assuring me that GnP isn't from a post-scarcity society, though. I guess it's good that our lottery dollars are enough to pay for this, right?

Actually, let me look up tsunami wavelengths.... okay good, still an order of magnitude bigger. Whew.

Source for all the depths - NOAA nautical charts

(03-30-2021, 06:14 PM)Labster Wrote:

(03-30-2021, 05:40 PM)Mamorien Wrote: From Alvaro at MetaBall Studios, water vehicles including the Ōarai and Pravda school-ships:

https://youtu.be/ykCMsLPMca0

Hey, cool! If you want to see the school ships, you can skip to the last ten seconds, because they're the biggest things in the video. My only complaint is that Zuikaku (or Kiev) could not actually get that close to Jamaica Bay -- they'd need to be 80 Nmi further out to sea in Hudson Canyon to be in a place that could handle her immense draft.

(03-28-2021, 12:20 PM)robkelk Wrote: Considering that at the end of The Academy City Job we'll have over nine thousand Misaka Sisters that we have to put somewhere for a few days, I expect those apartments will end up filled ...

(03-31-2021, 03:46 PM)robkelk Wrote: They're simply too big to show up anywhere that they'll be seen immediately.

If they're going to show up, they're going to show up offshore where nobody's going to notice them for a few days, even if they were to show up in the shipping lanes (which doesn't need to happen). And der Film shows that at least the sensha-do teams use Morse code for long-range communication - they aren't going to swamp the airwaves with voice or picture traffic.

Malleable Continuity still takes a big hit, but nobody on Earth notices immediately. We might even have the managers be informed of the new arrivals by the celestials.

Also,

(03-28-2021, 12:20 PM)robkelk Wrote: Considering that at the end of The Academy City Job we'll have over nine thousand Misaka Sisters that we have to put somewhere for a few days, I expect those apartments will end up filled ...

"Hey, Anzu, can over 9000 girls borrow Yukari's camp-out skills and your forest for a week? Just stay out of storms for a while, please."

(03-31-2021, 09:24 PM)Labster Wrote: ...
The southern oceans would probably be the only place to escape detection, but gosh, I can't see these being secret longer than a week without cloaking devices.

(04-03-2021, 09:15 PM)robkelk Wrote: When Washuu-chan said "extended range," she wasn't kidding, Kazari mused as she looked at her computer display. The "Hatsuhara" drone that she received as a Halloween gift was still transmitting clearly to her mini-server, despite being 100 kilometres away.

(04-06-2021, 07:09 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: Wait, what time zone is this supposed to be?  Because Central Time in the USA is supposed to be UTC -6... or UTC -5 if its Daylight Savings Time.  Which should only be one hour behind from from Toronto or Montreal.

(04-07-2021, 03:15 PM)robkelk Wrote: Canon description is now copied over. As for changes in the Metacontinuity...

Quote:He awakened... somewhere, exactly where matters little... hale and hearty, alive in a body complete with working hands, and with the certain knowledge that his idle musings about possibly being a character in somebody else's story were correct. He is certain that this "somebody else" is [[Celestial supporting characters|either a goddess or a she-devil]], mainly because he awoke with a list, written by a feminine hand (he could tell), of the places in this strange new world where others like him, characters from other stories, had appeared.

If he is (as he assumes) to be a character in someone else's story, then it behooves him to be the best character that he can be, within the limits of his characterization and abilities. After all, he expects nothing less from his own characters; to fail to live up to his own rule would be rude.

And thus he walks the Earth, traveling from town to town (if one can call cities where over a million people live "towns"), adjusting the plots to create more interesting stories.

Isn't that just lovely? How could somebody like that possibly be a threat? Well, considering that he likes stories with dark endings, and has the power to warp reality...

EDIT: Quoting from his description on All The Tropes:

Quote:Drosselmeyer is often very Genre Savvy, particularly when it comes to fairy tales.

He's going to be simply fascinated by the characters from RWBY...

Quote:Somebody left that note for him... Marller? Satan? Salem? Some random Princess Tutu fangirl? Somebody else? Who knows?

Quote:Years before the opening of the series, Drosselmeyer was a writer who was working on his masterpiece, The Prince and the Raven. However, before he could complete his story, he died, leaving his story unfinished and the two title characters trapped in an endless battle. Eventually, the characters were able to escape the story—and it turned out that Drosselmeyer, while dead, could somehow control the story even from the grave...

In the series, Drosselmeyer takes a mostly passive role (or at least seems to be), commenting on the action and giving Ahiru (and occasionally other characters) little pushes in the directions he'd like to see the story go. At first, he appears to be mostly on Ahiru's side, trying to encourage her to continue in her task to recover Mytho's lost heart, even when things become difficult for her. But he has a sadistic streak that's obvious from the start, and it soon becomes clear that the sort of story Drosselmeyer finds entertaining likely won't be as happy as the characters might want.

Thanks to being a writer and storyteller in the series, Drosselmeyer is often very Genre Savvy, particularly when it comes to fairy tales. He takes great delight in telling the other characters what they should be doing per their "roles" in the story, and will sometimes even scold the characters for subverting their roles and trying to do something beyond what's expected for them. However, even when things seem to be going against what he'd wanted, after a brief moment of frustration he chippers back up as long as the twist is at least entertaining.

This is, perhaps, the part of Drosselmeyer that is most chilling: Although his "characters" are real people trapped in a story, he's fine with anything happening to them—as long as the story is entertaining. While this is a perfectly reasonable reaction towards fictional characters (as tropers that love The Woobie will often admit), the sociopathic personality needed to treat real people this way can be quite frightening, indeed.

(04-15-2021, 07:15 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: And Detroit has a new officer named Alex Murphy...

Quote:Alex Murphy's a little eye catching.

Quote:Karen Murphy in Chicago (hanging out with a PI by the name of Harry Dresden...)

Quote:more possibilities:

(04-15-2021, 12:57 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote:

Quote:Alex Murphy ...

He can always be imported from the first few minutes of the movie.

Quote:Karen Murphy in Chicago (hanging out with a PI by the name of Harry Dresden...)

"Karrin", actually.  ...

(04-01-2021, 09:06 AM)robkelk Wrote:

(03-31-2021, 09:24 PM)Labster Wrote: ...
The southern oceans would probably be the only place to escape detection, but gosh, I can't see these being secret longer than a week without cloaking devices.

We only need two or three days - a week is more than enough. And the map on the "Places" page on the wiki has no map markers south of the equator at the moment, so...