Latest blog post: Redraw of chapter 1 is happening (2024-05-11)

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Senior

Looking at the cpt in panel 2 ... does he seriously have to manually push a PTT to tell his brain-connected implant to start transmitting? Which should probably involve selecting (a) specific recipient(s) beforehand?

(Yes, I remember Gharr pressing buttons on his on page 127, but that was a complete shutdown.)

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Senior
Wouter215

I suppose it is so that you don't transmit every errant thought you have over the radio. So that it does not activate while you dream, or panic.

It might have a thought activated PTT switch, but if you need to concentrate a whole thought just on "Activate Implant Transmitter", you'd might as well just push the button.

Or from a speech perspective, for most humans, moving and sentence formulation are two different parts of the brain and two different modes of thought/experience. (With mute/deaf people these may be more the same as they use sign language.) Imagine the proces for Captain Kas here, you want to say something to the Commander, you formulate the idea you'd wish to convey, then formulate the sequence of words to speak, then switch to a different mode to tell the implant to start transmitting, switch back to speaking to say your words? Like most humans the Rharr can move & talk at the same time, it seems simply easier to use PTT with the actual button on the implant.

Although, for military personnel I'd put the PTT somewhere more convenient, like in the hand palm or something so you don't have to maneuver an entire arm towards your head, since most Rharr interactables would have a four-arm usage configuration.

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Senior

Aaaaactually I had yet another thought overnight: If Kas were radioing Zane, there wouldn't be an open mouth or a normal speech bubble; it'd be a thought or a "radio voice complete with symbolic static" bubble. So he's likely speaking normally to the commander - the way he points his eyes seems to agree with Zane being within his line of sight already - and his reaching for the implant has entirely different reasons.

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Wouter215

I like the good up-close look at the holo-projector drone. Can it make a 3D projection with just one projector(drone) or does it need multiple? Would the projection with one drone just be a flat 2D plane?

And the Raharr use triangular & snubbed triangular plugs, I suspect these are like USB ports, but where our ports had 1 or 2 ways to plug them in, they have 3.

Also a 1½ second comms-delay is better than I got with Zoom and such during the plague era.

I suspect the Raharr need to be careful when walking behind Raharr sitting in chairs, as to not step on tails.

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Senior

where our ports had 1 or 2 ways to plug them in, they have 3.

Hmmmm, not sure about that. We have "naturally triangular" connectors that are slightly (or not ...) shape-coded so as to fit only one way, too:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60309#/media/Datei:CEE_16A_230V_Wandsteckdose_Pinning.png

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Regular
Lord Eric

Looks off-equilateral enough that one couldn't connect it wrong way round. I wonder what the Alliance calls that connector standard.

Also I like how Quantum's hologram is blurry when everything else is sharp. Shows how e's having to deal with a kludged setup due to all the security restrictions.

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Senior
Wouter215

I think the blurry holo is due to the single projector, not being able to make a propper volume projection.

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Senior

I wonder what the Alliance calls that connector standard.

Raharr/Alliance Standard Projector Interface (RASPI)?

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Regular
wolf ryet

Holograms are physically two dimensional but produce a true 3D picture, so I would imagine that a single drone would do essentially the same thing, it is how the eye see's it. I would think it might require more than one drone if you wanted a full sized 3D image, but what would that accomplish over what a 2d Hologram can do, since you have true 3D visual with depth perception. The government has been working on a true 3D viewer for air traffic control , but have not seen anything on this for some years.






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TRIVIA
Azinarsi relationship to death is different from the rest of the civilizations of the Alliance: they do not care about it. Death would mean loss of information and experience gathered by that instance of a person's mind, though, and these two things are about the only valuables for an Uploaded mind, so Azinarsi try to avoid it when possible.