Leckford writes

Not many updates recently—sorry about that; it’s been a busy month, or at least a month full of incident.

This page is on location, in the sense that I actually got on my bike to go there and take photos that I then worked up in to backgrounds. If you are from Oxford you should be able to work out where. ☺

Something of a challenge given I can’t draw Petro consistently at all. … ☺

About time I did some Percy Street after obsessing over the Trek side-project for so long. Let’s see how long I manage to resist tinkering with starship models again… :-)

I have also redesigned the Percy Street table of contents page to strip out some unnecessary clutter.

I will be going to UK Web and Mini Comix Thing tomorrow in Mile end in London, to help out on the CAPTION table—CAPTION being Oxford’s annual small-press and minicomics festival, being held this year in the East Oxford Community Centre on 9/10 August 2008.

I will be taking copies if the ‘ashcan’ edition of Percy Street and a colour collection of the first 13 strips of TOSS. I have failed to find any of the copies with colour covers—in fact, I seem to have lost about twenty copies of #4, which means I only have seven to take with me tomorrow, which is annoying. No doubt they will resurface once there is no prospect of doing anything with them.

Sorry this page has taken so long—I have been struggling mightily with the dialogue, which is probably the part of the production of the strip I find the hardest, apart from the drawing—and the plot, of course, and indeed every other aspect of creating a comic apart from the programming of the HTML which is straightforward enough given the right tools, but not very interesting.

I was trying to cajole myself in to getting another Percy Street page done this weekend, when I finally got paranoid enough to measure the USS Enterprise model I have been using in Sketchup (as found in Google’s 3D Warehouse). It turns out that the reason the USS Mumbai looked ridiculously small the first time I drew it was that the Enterprise model is about twice the correct size (as if the modeller had given the saucer 128 m radius rather than diameter).

My intention was that my ship be a bit smaller and definitely have noticeably smaller warp nacells. I scaled it up a tad when it looked pitifully tiny compared to the double-size Enterprise. Then I added windows. Then I discovered that it is too large compared to a correct-size Enterprise and so I have scaled it back down again to make it fit between Daedalus and my hastily assembled size guide for the Constitution-class. This in turn means some of my windows suggest floors separated by only 2·5 metres. Allowing for say 0·5 m for machinery between floors, I now have a ceiling height of 2 m, which in some ways is good (claustrophobic and cramped compared to the floating palace that is Enterprise), but I may nevertheless have to redo some windows. And I was already getting sick of working on this model. Le sigh.

For consistency I revised the graphics shown in page 71 of Percy Street to use the correct sizes. Then I decided to cross-check the sizes of the USS Enterprise and USS Daedelus on a handy size chart on Ex Astris Scientia, and what do you know, my Daedalus is ALSO the wrong size! Going back to various web sizes referred to for Daedelus specs, it turns out that all but one give a length of 105 m, and the one I was referring to gives it as 160 m. So I fixed up the graphic in Manzil’s display a second time. While I was at it, I dropped in an updated version of the fleet picture on the same page.

Here’s an updated set of orthographic views of the USS Mumbai, which is now beginning to approach being complete. I have still now worked out a good way to attach text to the Sketchup model, so the text in this diagram is fudged in Corel Painter.

( Update (13 Jan 2008): I have worked out how to add some text )



Attentive readers will note that I have rather blatantly redesigned the rear end (erm, I guess I should say stern) to have a shuttle hangar like the Enterprise rather than a flat end. This does not represent a refit—I just fixed an error in the old model. If necessary I will update images older episodes to match!

( Random notes about the vessel in the image )

I think this might be enough fictional fan film discussion for now—this isn’t supposed to be the main theme of Percy Street, after all.

I am beginning to think that my original idea that you never see the outside of the ship (because the main characters never do) might have been right after all. I have spent too many hours drawing windows on my USS Mumbai model. And I haven’t even started on the secondary hull yet!

There is some compensation in that looking out of the windows at the rest of the ship is amusing. Here’s the vew from the captain’s ready-room-cum-cocktail-bar:



This is not realistic since what looks like the wall is the outer skin of the ship; there should be an inner wall as well. The standing chap is one of the generic passers-by Sketchup includes in its component library.

My computer's hard drive failed a month or so ago, which partially explains the lack of comicses from Leckford for the last while--this is the downside to my paperless method. I now have a shiny new computer and after a week or two of setting it up I have finally got it to the stage where I can draw an episode of TOSS in it. Having stayed up late last night to get the strip done, I discovered this morning I had not quite got things to the stage where I can automatically upload the new entry, so I snuck it in to work on a keyfob and FTPed it from there.

Also, I just stumbled upon Speak Klingon Like a Restless Native, a short list of 'useful' phrases in the Warrior's Tongue.

To research my fictional fan film I have been consuming more Star Trek spinoffery than is entirely healthy. Apart from Memory Alpha, the Star Trek canon wiki, there is Memory Beta, the wiki for Star Trek licensed works, and Star Trek Expanded Universe, the fan-fiction wiki. These are all Wikipedia-inspired no-original-content encyclopaedias. The main problem with them is that looking something up can lead to long detours as you surf from link to link and stuff your head with trivia that you instantly forget. And of course they are dominated by 24th-century stuff (The Next Generation era) that I am not interested in, since my imaginary fan film is firmly set in the Original Series time-frame, so it isnt’t even ‘useful’ trivia! :-)

Then there are collections of space ship designs—which were relevant given I am trying to do Manzil’s spaceship design work for him—including these ones:

• The Starfleet Museum by Masao Okazaki has lots of fleshed out ship designs and a plausible design progression from 21st-century fusion ships to the TOS era—totally contradicted by the Enterprise prequels, poor chap;
• Starship articles on Trekmania has in-depth essays on starship design as can be inferred from poring over freeze-frames, but something of a 24th-century bias;
• Bernd Schneider’s Ex Astris Scientia has more meditations on starship design, including Roddenberry's Design Rules, as well as other aspects of the future according to Paramount.

After a weekend of hacking away at the background for this page of Percy Street, and a couple more strips for TOSS, I was disturbed to discover myself lying awake in bed puzzling out Trek-related conundra and speculating story-lines for my characters from TOSS should be doing next. Argh!

The good news is, there is a new Percy Street page. The bad news is, this page is mainly space ships, so people expecting nookie will be horribly disappointed.

Strip # 14 of TOSS is published. I was planning to not publish another until I was ready to do another ‘season’ of 13 strips, but this one was half-done so I thought I might as well finish it off.

There is kind of a thematic cross-over with Percy Street, chapter 4.

I will be at Caption tomorrow—or at least I won’t be, because I am fictional, but my earthly representatives will. After much toil I managed to get Percy Street Ashcan #4 printed. What with one thing and another its cover is designed for colour but printed in black & white. I have now got my hosuemate’s colour printer working again (but for how long??), so if I have time this evening I will print up some covers and stick them on.

As we speak the self-same printer is chugging through a bookeltized version of TOSS season 1. Due to the complicated way in which I am printing the strips sideways (landscape, so the comic opens like a calendar), and then feeding it in to a program that flips and reorganizes pages so that they are two to a page in the correct order for a booklet, and then the printer driver automatically reorders the pages and rotates them because they end up being landscape, I have lost track of which way I have to flip or tumble the pages before feeding them in to the printer to get their backsides printed. So getting a booklet in the right order is something of a matter of chance, or at best trial and error.

Update: The colour printer has stopped printing black again. So I have two colour copies of TOSS, one with no black, and the other with the pages in the wrong order. Started printing on the monochrome printer instead. Window’s print dialogue is not quite as clever as the Macs, so after a couple of hours’ work, I have one fair copy and seven useless bits of wrongly printed crap. Obviously my idea of having a neat little TOSS pamphlet to hand out to people has gone out the window, Oh, well.

( USS Mumbai plonked on top of APOD )