And the bunnies keep on hopping...

[Black Aeronaut]

"I just know I'm gonna regret this. Hi, Li? Erica here. ... Yeah, I'm still down here. Look, you think you can drop by? We got a bit of a
problem with something exploding too much."

"I didn't think that was possible ... Oh. Yeah, putting somebody's life at risk is a bad thing. I'll tell
Noah I need a week off - is that long enough, do you think?"

"Plenty. And no need to bring the porta-lab, either. They're pretty well equipped for an upstart space agency, and their chemist is
onto something. I'm no chemist myself, but I can tell that its revolutionary, even by our standards."

M_Fnord said:

---

I tell you true, if you guys decide to bring Rocket Girls into the equation - and I'm cool with that, JSYK - I'd rather see it as a straight
crossover/incorporation than trying to build Yet Another Fan Group that we kinda sketch out details of and then never see again. Y'dig? There *was*
leeway for crossover work in the original idea, and RG is niche enough that it won't suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Really? SUH-WEET!

robkelk said:

---

Dibs on hiring Matsuri away from the SSA to work at Stellvia ATC! Or at least having her work at the SSA's Stellvia office.

Hrm... Rather not see you snatch away the girl like that. Besides, you'd have her taking off every other day to go stomping through the
woods. That, and when she puts her mind to it, she's pretty damn willful. Did you see the way she pulled the Jedi mind trick on the guard!? Other
points: she's pretty damn good behind the stick herself, not due to the kind of instinct that Yukari has, but in that she has an inate ability to keep a
cool head and an optimistic outlook in the bleakest of situations. Therefore, I'd rather see her flying Coconut instead of pushing tin.

Changes that I'd make: Tanpopo is salvaged after its disasterous maiden flight, and Mangosteen has a sister ship that has generous cargo space in place of
the mission specialist's seat. Of course, this means a fourth astronaut. How about that Chinese girl?

Benefits of having the Wave around: The orbiters are no longer simply orbiters. They now have inner-system transit capabilities due to the use of hard-tech
fusion-torch engines. That or they could simply be flat-out waved. There's pros and cons to this. Going wave-assisted hardtech, they're taken a
little more seriously by proffessional Daneside outfits. Going wave-jobbed, the girls could, over time gain a mild cross-contamination biomod. I'm
thinking it would be fairly uniform in nature: 1) they're stuck at their size so they don't outgrow their vehicle's ability to carry them, 2)
completely and utterly at home in space - freefall or extreme g-forces don't bother them and they even have a slight ability to sense magnetic fields.

How fast should their ships go? They're pretty small and lightweight as far as purpose-built spacecraft go, so I'm sorely tempted to say 0.12c (we can
say that, as a quirk, they gotta accelerate their way to that speed first - maximum accl. rate 10 G's). Should they be able to achieve FTL once they pass
the Limit?

ETA: Thoughts on the Solomon Space Agency of Fenspace...

For one thing, I find that it would only be too easy to steal the thunder from the Solomon Space Agency, so they need to be posed as a truly viable entity.

I plan on accomplishing this by presenting them as a space agency that acts as the happy-middle: they are fen-danes that rely mostly on hard-tech made by
wave-enhanced machinery who are not afraid of associating with the rest of the Fen when the need arises. They'll probably get a lot of business from
NASA and JAXA subcontracting out (JAXA especially since the operation is
primarily run by Japanese citizens).

Thinking further on the requirements that keeping Tanpopo and Coconut in
action while adding a cargo lifter to the fleet means that we'll need not one, but TWO new pilots. Personally, I think the Chinese restaurant owner's
daughter would be an obvious shoe-in and would probably take over as Tanpopo's regular pilot. Question is who
else did we see in the anime that would make a good pilot candidate? Will we need to come up with someone new entirely or do we draw one from another source
within Fenspace?