Welcome back everyone. Rest assured that work continues on the stories I mentioned last week.
Something Old
In particular, I actually ended up going back and rewriting the entire beginning of the whole zero-G space gladiator story. In the first draft it felt like it was falling into the vein of “just another gladiator story". It was far too much here’s a colosseum, here’s some (blue) sand on the ground, and some men with swords.
And that’s boring. It all has been done a thousand times before, which made the story feel like it didn’t stand out. There was nothing new to grab onto.
But, that’s what editing is for! The whole beginning has been refit to be entirely in zero-G as I had hinted at before. Now the people involved are quite literally fighting with their feet off the ground. The challenge is no longer just the arena or the people standing on the other side. Instead, everyone is struggling to find a way to get the right leverage (literally) to pull off that high speed floating ballet that is zero-G CQC fighting.
Something New
What I actually got done this week was something else entirely. I started to brainstorm again on the events that trigger the Syndicate-Outcast War within the Illegal Astronauts universe.
(A concept you can read about in the stories here in Blue Suns and the Golden Void and others.)
What this resulted in was a macro-level play by play of the space battle that is now known as The Hi Supra System Incursion. And it really is the little thing on a galactic scale that shakes the beehive of humanity. But, I don’t want to portray it through a short story or something like that this time.
Instead, I’m going to try to make a small animation. It won’t be 3D models or anything like that (yet). Rather, it’s going to be something much more akin to a Cold War era, NASA orbital report. Something with a simplified graphics experience, but represents an underlying massive event on a solar system scale all put together with music to set the mood.
Now, you might be thinking I’d go ahead and use Adobe After Effects or something like that to do it.
No, instead I’m using an open source program called Manim (Community Edition) that is intended to be used “for creating mathematical animations.”
The thing is, everything about the solar system and orbital mechanics is just math. It’s circles, it’s simple shapes, and it’s all able to be expressed through vectors. And I think Manim will be a perfect tool for this since not only does it support both 2D and 3D representations, but it lends itself to extreme flexibility and repeatability. Which means that once I lay the ground work, producing content with my workflow will be quick (and that means more content).
So far, because obviously this is still a huge WIP, I’ve got the ground work setup and created the first set of representative icons to be used on the orbital maps. They’re things like ships of different sizes, asteroid belts, and mine fields. All the normal things you’d expect to see around an advanced space faring society’s holdings.
Check them out in the image above and let me know what you think. Do any stand out to you? What am I missing?
And, as usual, stay tuned.