Page 14 – This Is Crazy!
Another minor setback this week, but business before pleasure, I’m afraid. Another 24 hours ought to do the trick though. For those of you who haven’t totally given up on this comic by now, thanks for the patience! See you tomorrow!
Well then there now. There goes the South African Air Force. Looks like they’re in real trouble now. I’m quite glad I took the extra bit of time to retouch this page. The extra bit of lighting here and there was really worth it. I hope.
Thanks to everyone for their encouragement – and for being so patient with me. In recent discussions on a forum I participate in, some fellow artists have come down rather militantly against delays of this sort as “unprofessional.” Well, okay. But in the end, I’d rather the delay and a good product than a rush to a bit of half-assery. I’ve had too much of that lately, particularly the rather disappointing pages during the computer outage this summer, and so now that I have a chance to give you guys something rather more up to scratch I’d prefer to do it. So thanks for the kind forbearance!
Anyhow, I have a long day tomorrow so I better turn in. Keep on voting, and all that – today, in particular was a real boost to 6-Commando’s “ratings,” so thanks! The visibility is excellent and very helpful! The next page is on the drawing board even as we speak, so forward march!
See you next week!
Am enjoying the story but afraid I’m going to nit-pick. South African Air Force? Why do they have RAF roundels? I can see they’ve gone through numerous designs since WW2 but even at their closest they had a springbok (or similar) in the middle like Australia has a kangaroo. Modern markings are quite different.
Fascinated to see where this is going now I’ve finished the archive.
Actually, those rather boring markings ARE the markings of the SAAF, from World War II. This being the 6-Commando universe’s Second World War (they only had one, so far), I thought it’d be an interesting thing. They’re Blue, White and Orange, but with all the light effects you can’t tell the difference in the end, can you? Ah, well. Small points, I guess. Note however that Maj. Rucker’s nuclear codebook was published by the IAEA. Which was a little wry humor on my part.
–M
By the way – Ghost Bears? Nice Choice. Though I was always partial to the Free Worlds League, myself. Underrated.
I was also wondering that, but considered it might be a worldbuilding point.
We already know that the Governments of several European countries decamped to their associated overseas territories and/or ex-colonies in the aftermath of the 1970s revolutions: France to Quebec, Portugal to Brazil, etc. On that basis, the British had a few options open – Canada, South Africa, Australia, to name just the biggest and culturally closest. And while the Government is a singular ‘entity’ that wouldn’t really withstand fragmentation, the Royal Family could easily disperse between a few major territories to maintain a direct ‘Head of State’ representation. So this could easily be the Royal Air Force in the sense of acting for Princess Anne as vicereine (while the Australians have Prince Andrew as viceroy, and Prince Charles stays in Canada as the heir), rather than directly for Queen Elizabeth as the (British) RAF does.
Mark 1 Vulcans though, especially at low level… I’m just going to assume their timeline found a different way round the aerodynamic problems that ours solved by changing the wing shape!
Nice to see Avro Aircraft having a brisk export trade there. I just hope General Ripper lives long enough for someone to point out to him that the soviets kinda had a good reason to use nukes when nothing else stopped Mike, and for possibly the same someone to kick him in the nuts. 😛
HA! You got it! Those ARE Avro Vuclans! You just made my day!
–M
While we’re on the subject, could we please pretty please have some TSR-2 at some point in the future? 🙂
You know I looked at the TSR-2, but in all my sketches it ended up looking too much like the Backfire I’d already used and the Vulcan had a much more distinctive shape. But maybe. This is, after all, just the first hour or so of the war so far.
–M
Or you could pair the vulcans (yes I also know them) with Vampire fighters
Aaaand so it begins!
A bit of knit picking here, sorry, but how about you try different facial expressions? Everyone seems to have the same shocked, wide-eyed look on them. Again, just some knit picking, other than that, great job on the flames and planes!
You know I’ve been trying to get this part of the story over with, actually, because of that very thing. The emotional tone is pretty consistent fear-anger-panic throughout so far. Atomic war hasn’t allowed me a huge degree of variation yet. YET.
But the point you make is a good one, and quite true. So, you know.
–M
Sh*t Jst got reeeeal
Darn right.
That’s one of the things I’ve aimed for so far, and which I like to explore, is the idea of characters caught up in circumstances beyond their control. We’ll just have to see how they get out of THIS one.
–M
For some damned reason I can’t keep the nightmare on elmstreet freddy song out of my head last few strips…. 1,2 mike’s coming for you…..
😀
Well he sure isn’t licked yet. SOME part of him is still working, that much is sure. Or seems to be. For now.
Mysterious enough for you?
–M
Hm… A bit of a BIG disbelif here…
Before the Counterstrike the situation was – Mike crossed Feds border and so Feds nuket THEIR OWN territory. The best thing UNs could do in this situation – declare MIKE malfunctional and give excuses + offer aid in clearing the fallout.
A bit worse option would be sending a spec.ops team to recover what’s left of MIKE and then stand on “Nothing happenet. There were no huge robotank thing and we have no idea why your nuke went off… it was not ours – you may count our warheads if you wish.” Feds would be mad, but if they start war – they would be agressors in that scenario…
But this way… This way UNs just signed that they had somethink on FEDS territory worth a nuke. And so UNs are agressors now if war starts… And that is really bad for politics.
Actually, you’ve gotten the point exactly. The whole situation is meant to be an ambiguous one. On the one hand, the Federate troops were loading nuclear missiles close to the UN area, which was provocative. But then, Mike crossed over, provoking them. Now, the UN is counter-striking, which is a further escalation. This is how we in the West feared things would go between the U.S. and Russia back in the 1980’s. In this world they don’t have any real basis for having any kind of political understanding like we do in this world. If the U.S., for example, nuked its own territory, it would still be seen as provocative by Russia, China, India, and so forth, but we’d have diplomatic ties that would likely allow us to defuse and explain the situation. Here, the climate is much closer to that in the 1960’s, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where they are so distrustful and panicky that small things lead to larger things very fast and controllable situations get out of hand before anyone has a chance to respond. Besides which, the one World War the people of 6-Commando did experience (they still call it The Great War) started under similar circumstances and for similar reasons – misunderstandings leading to provocations, leading to escalations, leading to orders being given that can’t be taken back. So really this is like World War I with atomic bombs. A pretty scary thought. After all, the real World War I was scary enough as it was.
–M
IMO – WWI was really scary because defensve tactics used there were really superior to offensive. Thus war quickly turned into a stalemate when no one could overpower it’s enemy without crippling own force (and thus losing to a counterassault afterwards).
Here we have mobile armor, airforce, effective personal power-armors and nukes. This puts offensive abiity way above defensive. So it will be more like WW II.
Also – Mike crossing the border was not provoking. That was violating. Of course if Mike had crossed the border of Feds territory, not a border of “Fed controlled neutral buffer”. In that case it was provoking.
Also I do not belive I got your point about “…If the U.S., for example, nuked its own territory, it would still be seen as provocative by Russia, China, India, and so forth…”
Are you implying that If an US nuke went off somewhere on US territory, other countries would feel worried about that. And offended by americans?
That is IMO only partialy true. They would be suspicious and worried, but mostly because until it is clearly stated that US nuked itself – the most belivable version would be “third party diversion. That may happen on our territory too. Have to be carefull now.” And only reason to be offended would be – Nuklear testings are banned at the moment, and if US did test a nuke they violated the international law. But, like I said – test run of a nuke would not be the number one version.
Well, true. I’m speaking more about how the war started, though – the European “Great Powers” had these enormous, advanced and efficient military forces, but the technological infrastructure to support them was still in its infancy. So when the orders to mobilize and attack went out, they couldn’t be taken back, and Europe went from a state of supposed stability, with these forces acting as each others’ deterrents, to total warfare on a continental and, later, a global scale. The speed with which things went south was what seemed scary to me, and the sense that it all became kind of a force of nature that nobody could control.
You are correct though, that the actual fighting of this war (the conventional pert, after the first few waves of strategic a-bombs go down), is likely to be much more like World War II – tanks, mechanized and motorized infantry, and mobile rather than static warfare. It was a myth of the Cold War that a nuclear exchange would be a quick and isolated event, what Kahn called “Spasmodic Warfare,” where everyone threw everything they had at each other all at once and then tried to clean up the mess. In reality it would probably have been a much more controlled event lasting several months, which would in the long run have been much more destructive. For story purposes I’m telescoping some of the events as they would “actually” occur, but not really all that much.
–M
Have you gone all Groeteschele on us? While many theorists were playing around with limited nuclear war, etc., there is really no way to know how it would have gone down, except for badly.
Also, aren’t there a lot of vulcans in that one frame? Exaggerated for dramatic effect? (and yes, I recognized the Vulcans as well. Great job with the roundels, by the way. I wouldn’t have caught that even if you had pointed it out.)
Correct on both points. Once atomic bombs start falling it gets really hard to control a war because lines of command and control start to fail. To say nothing of the enormous destruction. I’m not so much a Groeteschelean as a Kahnian, though – I think that it would probably be possible for a nuclear war to be “winnable” within narrowly defined parameters, assuming one can define a victory as losing by less than your opponent. The thing is, atomic bombs, though powerful, still have limits to their destructive power. Once you get involved with hydrogen weapons the power is effectively unlimited, and you start dealing with whole orders of magnitude of destructive potential, rather more akin to forces of nature like earthquakes and hurricanes than mere bombs and missiles. The largest hydrogen bomb ever made (by the Soviets, incidentally, the AN602 “Tsar Bomb”) had enough power to eradicate an area roughly the size of greater New York City (all five boroughs, simultaneously), and cause blast, fires and radioactivity across an area of several hundred thousand square miles and up to 750 miles distant. Fortunately for the people of 6-Commando, hydrogen weapons are only theoretical in their world. In fact, the first atomic detonation in the 6-Commando universe didn’t occur until 1972 – carried out by a French-German research unit sponsored by CIRA (Centre Internationale pour la Recherche Atomique) south of Windhoek, in what was then German South-West Africa.
And yes, aircraft making a strategic attack would be dozens or even hundreds of miles apart – I condensed them for dramatic effect, but really they’d be vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles tipped with small atomic weapons themselves. But admittedly, one bomber hardly had the same effect as a whole squadron of them. So I concocted an idea of South African atomic strategy was that they’d use their bombs as kind of a point weapon, with only one plane carrying them and the others flying interference as decoys, packed with chaff, flares, ECM equipment and defensive weapons, to see that the “real” bomber got through. That, and they’re flying low to stay below radar cover – I’m not sure if that tactic really works, but it’s such a typical and dramatic trope I couldn’t resist.
–M
Wow – I never thought a thread would get so narrow!
Oh, just you watch. Also, flying below the radar definitely does work. In hilly terrain a ridge will easily block radar, and ground clutter can make normal radar useless if it is mounted on an aircraft (not look-down shoot-down radar, though). In addition, due to the curvature of the earth you can calculate, fairly easily, the height you have to fly to be below the horizon or the distance at which you will be visible to a ground mounted radar. This is why we have sea-skimming missiles for ship attacks. By flying <10m off the deck, they can avoid detection until they are nearly on the target (the main drawbacks are limitations on range and speed from such a low velocity). This is also why ship radars are typically mounted on masts–the higher up they are, the further out they can spot sea-skimming missiles (and this is a drawback for the 4 PESA SPY-1 array on Aegis ships–their large size makes them effective at long range and versus multiple targets and ECM, but also means that they cannot be mounted on a mast and therefore have a closer horizon).
Also, apparently Mike's receivers survived, since he managed to pick up the R plan from allied command. Strange that he would feel the need to repeatedly transmit plan romeo, unless *he* was somehow directing the engagement.
“some fellow artists have come down rather militantly against delays of this sort as unprofessional.”
Posting rushed unfinished work is also unprofessional, so it all comes down to the artist. I think you made the right call here, readers didn’t initially come here because you update every Monday but because you make awesome work.
And I like the work you made this week! Great third en forth panels, those flying sheets of paper really add movement to this page.
Well, true. I’d much rather post what I consider “complete” than, as I have in the past, posting anything for the sake of posting. I’ve vacillated on that point but In the end I’ve come down on this side of it. FOr now, at least.
This is by no means a “big time” comic online, but I’m really fortunate to have insightful readers in this little “6-Commando” group, so thanks!
–M
I’m not really sure what’s so bad about being unprofessional in the first place, honestly. I mean if we wanted to read professional comics, we could just read Garfield…
cue flight of the Valkyries.
I love the smell of fallout in the morning.
–M
Attack Plan R? Do I sense a strange love of classic cinema?
You do indeed. Very much so.
I had to work it in somewhere.
–M
I think of this comic in terms of old sci-fi films from the 50’s when they still thought atomic power was a magical and wonderful thing that could be a viable option on the battlefield. I even remember one movie that talked about a naval engagement where the ships traded volleys of “atomic torpedoes”. I know that in the real world we realized there was no such thing as a limited nuclear war, but it’s not too far fetched to envision a world that didn’t get the memo.
As for the delays, it happens in the comic book world all the time. Even big publishers like Marvel and DC get hit with delays and changing publication dates. It’s a part of the business and only becomes “unprofessional” if it becomes a habit. Everyone misses a deadline once in a while.
There actually are nuclear torpedoes, by the way, but you certainly wouldn’t trade more than one volley of them.