Grrl Power #612 – Thunderbirds are go!
When I started the comic, I kind of scattered the ranks around the characters because I didn't really understand what all that stuff meant. To me, military ranks always seemed like leveling up at your job like you're playing Call of Duty. I was genuinely blown away when learned the difference between commissioned and non-commissioned. Like, why does anyone not want to be an officer? I know you have to meet certain requirements like some higher level education, but being a Lieutenant has to be better than being a private, right? If for no other reason than there's like 10,000 fewer people than can boss you around on your base. I've always had a pathological aversion to authority, so maybe it's just me.
Sure, I've seen movies and TV with people of different ranks doing stuff, but usually it's all in service of a larger plot and it's just one guy barking orders down the chain. They rarely show the stuff that each rank actually does, (at least never in the shows I've ever watched) because 90% of what you do in the military is probably super boring. Stargate SG-1 didn't exactly focus on what a Lance Corporal or a 2nd Lieutenant spends all day doing.
Anyway, since I made Anvil a sergeant, I figure she ought to be seen bossing the troops around a little bit. I've definitely seen that in shows, so I'm sure I'm right on the money with that.
I don't know why I named the teams Alpha and Delta instead of Alpha and Beta. I guess mostly because Delta sounds cooler than Beta, plus, Alpha and Beta sounds like sociological categorization instead of military squads. You got to call them something, and Maxima vetoed Alpha and Kumquat.
Unrelated side rant: I need to make a 3D model of Maxima's gun, because I'm no good at drawing them, and I idiotically designed hers a little too complicated for me to draw from a lot of different angles. I started doing it once, but like a dummy, the first thing I tried to do was the rifling inside the barrel. That was not in my 3D modeling 101 skillset. I could make a barrel with little fins running along the inside, but as soon as I tried twisting one end, the middle part pinched in like I was twisting up a towel. The problem with 3D programs is there might be one checkbox that fixes that problem, but if you don't know the exact solution, you could spend 20 hours experimenting and googling for answers and watching youtube tutorials before figuring it out. Even then, if you do find the answer, the version of the program you're using might be different from the guy who made the tutorial, and the checkbox is in a different place now, and there's another 20 minutes of figuring it out.
The long and the short of it is that 3D programs are completely unintuitive as far as I'm concerned. I think part of the problem with them is their UI is made by programmers and not people who are actually good at UI. The other problem is there's so much crap you can do in a 3D program that a layer, and brush palette and a color picker like in a 2D paint program isn't going to cut it. There are probably better solutions than what's in most 3D programs, but there's probably not any great ones.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.