December 4th, 2020
4 Dec 2020 · page 1038 of 1306
g-gasp!
Cast: Lei Feng, Verity Cunningham
Comments (59)
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That sure isn't an ominous name for a boat.
Glad to see the ship has proper sails. You can’t trust these new-fangled steam engines.
Because "I have a bad feeling about this" was slightly too long for the name plate?
Will they solve a murder mystery on a boat? Or a theft on a boat? I want them to do crazy boat shenanigans
my outline for this chapter for a while literally included the word "boatcrimes"
Retitled by Lei: "Death on the Nope"
That is the single greatest bit of news I could have heard
Those are the best kind of notes.
The primary boatcrime being of course calling a ship a boat. ;p
Shiny ship like that? I was thinking more 'Titanic'.
Given that the cover of this volume has them in a lifeboat...
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who immediately checked the nameplate for Titanic, Brittanic, or Oceanic.
I was going to, but then I noticed that it was too small to be the Titanic or the Brittanic, didn't have enough smokestacks, the sails were too prominent, it had that the pointy bit at the front that I don't know the name of and those greenhouse looking structures on the top, which the Titanic and her sisters didn't have.
I dunno what the Oceanic looks like.
This ship looks older than the Titanic, more late 19th century than early 20th century. The Titanic sank in 1912, but I’d put this one in the 1870s. The spar on the bow is called a bowsprit, and it fell out of use as steam engines got better and the sails and masts got smaller and less important.
In fact a ship built in 1927 looks almost the same. It was the luxury cruising ship Stella Polaris - she became a legend and survived nearly 80 years before she sank.
[http://thegreatoceanliners....](http://thegreatoceanliners.com/articles/stella-polaris/ "http://thegreatoceanliners.com/articles/stella-polaris/")
That's quite a name.
The sails on the Stella Pollara are a lot smaller relative to the size of the ship, though, and the rigging is configured differently (note the loss of the shrouds, the ladder-like lines coming off the mast that can be climbed - this suggests that the sails can be hoisted up from the deck, something that didn’t come about until the 20th century). The Good Intentions looks like a mid- to late- 19th century sailing ship with an engine added. For a Victorian-era ship, Kate really nailed it.
thanks, it's heavily, heavily based on a real on but i'm not letting on which til someone guesses :3
Ok here's my guess: the Tartar, built by the Union Line in 1883 to run between England and the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. Ran aground in 1907 after being rammed by another ship.
no, but the years are quite close
I actually looked for "Mauritania" or "Lusitania".
Guess who's going to hell?~
Where we're going, we don't need roads...
I was coming here just to crack this joke, and it's already been done! Alas!
(Also, well done, you and TachyonCode.)
Nope! There is no pavement on the ocean, so no way this can be the road to hell!
hmm, murder mysteries in closed space.
SS Good Intentions: Hey, I'll ship you! First class, too!
>:=)>
...what kind of_nutter_ christens a ship the Good Intentions?!
This will end in tears.
Doomy McDoomface was already taken
Either someone with literally zero irony in their soul or someone who has it coming out of their pores. There is no middle ground.
Lei Fang will cry in no less than three occasions on this boat...
Some Culture spaceships may name themselves on there lines, but you would feel the sarcasm oozing off the ship from the next solar system.
Another Culture fan! I see us so rarely. And I guess Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath wouldn't have fit.
How about There Being No Roads in Space, I Proceed With Good Intentions
I don't know, Good Intentions just has a little too much gravitas, you know?
Another apt name might be Fate Amenable To Change.
After what happened to the Forever Lost II, III, IV and V, they figured it was time for a slightly different approach (and as for the original, no one's quite sure what happened to that one).
A nascent Bond-style supervillain?
Could have been worse, could have named it the Event Horizon.
Or the Icarus. That's just asking for trouble.
Well, I think we can finally lock down, once and for all, that the Widdershins universe is significantly more technologically developed at this point than IOT.
Not by much. The White Star Line of Titanic fame started in 1845, and by 1873 had 6 iron steamships making the Atlantic Run from Liverpool to America. They had a total of 16 ocean liners built and operating before the Titanic was even on the planning board.
Not that. Look at the utility poles to the left. Those are either electrical power lines, or telegraph lines (more likely). Even assuming the latter that's mid-t0-late '40s tech, right there. At this point IOT Morse hasn't published his code yet, even.
Also: I love this comic (it is in my top five), and on the days it updates I obsessively refresh the page as soon as I can possibly justify it.
I highly recommend an RSS reader. It can obsess for you!
Someone on the old "Wapsi Square" forum had a .sig that said "F5 ... Is the comic up yet? ... F5 ... Is the comic up yet? ..."
By a considerable amount - look up the pictures of some of those early steamships.
The Sidewheeler they arrived in wasn't too far off 'though rather tall for her length.
This - er, thing, looks like a 1930's harbour yacht dialled up 'till the knob drops off. (Harbour yacht: Millionaire's vessel designed to look good when lived on in harbour, the owner travelled to the tbe next harbour by other means whilst his crew suffered her appalling sea-keeping on passage.)
Clipper bow with excessive bowsprit, undersized masts with 1920's style superstructure to prevent spreading enough sail to be of use - and despite our knowing she carries at least one boat there's no boat deck so in extremis most passengers are going to have to swim for it. She is gong to roll like a pig and, frankly I wouldn't step on board unless she was resting safely on the mud at low tide.
Moe Lane is right about the timeline, this harbourfront couldn't exist before the first world war in our time line and this vessel not until the 1920's - but no shippng line would buy her.
The most likely candidate port, New York, never looked like this in our timeline but the flags tend to rule out the south.
This is Widdershins time at the most extreme that we have seen so far.
"Harbour yacht" - love it!
Never heard it before, but as described it's pretty the much nautical equivalent of "hangar queen" {I.e., the F35}.
What a large ship, very majestic, or gargantuan, or gigantic, or something like that.
And when that moves out of the way you'll be able to see their actual vessel.
Gosh, Kate, couldn't you have picked a less ominous name? Like, I don't know, Titanic? Olympic? Britannic? All three?
Somehow, this ship will make the titanic look like a kiddie pool accident.
That is an Incredible Ship! I spent 10 minutes just oooing and ahhing over her! Then I saw the name.
Feh, I don't care! She is as beautiful as a sunrise and I'd book passage on her. Just not on the maiden voyage.
Any chance of you doing a full portside drawing of her?
okay, but like did Verity actually get tickets for both of them? Or is she gonna try to get on board without paying?
My theory is that someone traveling on the boat needs the services of a bounty hunter and hired Vee (and Lei) to come along.
So they're not staying in the US? I may have to widen my search somewhat
Probably not going to the Canadas (they are two provinces in the 1830s), since they have direct shiplines from Liverpool to Quebec City at this time, and no customs for British citizens.
I wonder how she's able to write in her diary while carrying a pile of luggage. She must have a third hand tucked away somewhere.
I'm trying to recall when screw propellors came into general use.
HMMM. Brunel's Great Britain, in 1843, was the first screw-driven ocean-going vessel; his later Great Eastern {1859}, OTOH, was a side-wheeler.