From:SMS
To: Andy Robertson; Brett Davidson
|
Bearing in mind the comments, I thought
I'd send you a couple of more recent sketches.
Much the same design, but slightly more
'Baroque'.
I think I'm getting the hang of
it...
Best:
Smuzz |
From:Brett Davidson
To: Andy Robertson; SMS
Great!
Quibbles/praise follow:
"Scream" of the mask may be interpreted too literally. Perhaps needs to be altered? Horizontal louvres are too obvious...?
Diskos,
to be a practical weapon, needs to have its full perimeter or as much
of that as possible exposed. I also imagined it having a subtly
double-curved shaft, like a scythe (expediters as Grim Reapers - why
not?) - however, the dimensions and shape, I appreciate are subordinate
to composition. The implication that it is a double-ended weapon, the
heavy powerpack or whatever it is at the end opposite the blade is
interesting - never thought of it, but the martial arts taught to
expediters would no doubt involve the use of a diskos as an impact as
well as cutting weapon, so a substantial mass opposite the blade could
be handy. In some short story or other, I described training/use of the
thing and noted that there would be a lot of inertia tied up in a
rapidly spinning blade, and so combat would appear to be a rather
formalised dance... rather like Kendo...
Love the composition!
Ruff and helmet crest work for me. Love the "explosive" shape of the ground.
This
image doesn't need to be more complicated, as far as I'm concerned - I
leave this to your judgement, but depicting a specific incident with all
present, accounted for and in their appropriate poses is not an issue
for me. This says enough - as the drawings are a suite, we'll see the
faces of Meyr and Pallin elsewhere.
Cheers,
--B
From:Andy Robertson
To: Brett Davidson; SMS
Yeah, what he said.
Also, one notes there is no reason for all diskoses to
be the same size, shape, etc. In TNL it's a hand-and-a-half weapon -
may be used two handed or at a pinch one handed - and so must be about 3 ft long
or slightly longer. In some of John C Wright's stories it's like a
polearm, with a shaft at least six foot long. And the heavy
pommel/counterweight seen here is consistent with a one-handed weapon, but it's
all good.
However I agree with Brett about having the whole arc of
the blade exposed.
Additionally, the "below shoulder angle" sketch is
really fine. Lots of dynamic motion trapped in the
metal.
About armour:
Lames. Armour is essentially composed of
overlapping lames, which are ring-shaped, cylindrical, or slice-of-cone-ical
pieces of metal assembled to cover a limb or body; lames overlap
downward, that is, where two lames overlap, the larger lame goes on the
outside; lames may be partially cut away where the limb intersects the body or
another limb, in which case the segments of lame remaining are held together by
pin-and-slot constructions to stop them gaping.
Where does the arm attach to the body? NOT THE
SHOULDER, BUT THE INNER END OF THE COLLAR BONE. The construction of
the arm armour and especially the pauldrons (big stuff covering the shoulder)
reflects this. Practicable pauldrons are split up into multiple lames and
can fold up like a concertina so you can raise your arm. SEE GOTHIC
SUIT. Armour that does not follow this rule is usually ultra-heavy
tournament stuff not designed for much mobility, overrepresented in surviving
suits.
The "neutral" position for the knee or elbow is half
bent. Not straight. The swollen-on-one-side-cut-away-on-the-other
lame covering the knee or elbow (called a COP) reflects this fact.
The pauldron is also a sort of cop.
Lames look ok in these pix.
Looking very good.
((but Vertical "scream" face not quite right
somehow.))
you will find fine examples
of baroque parade armour. See the attached image of a shield, for
example. This inspired the gorget (a crescent-shaped neck piece) as much
as Giger's "Li 1" that Pallin wears. However, parade armour is not
fighting armour, and the kit worn out in the Night Land is more
functional.
Now of course you can't fit anything human into that wasp-waisted
shape! However, the broad planes of the centurion's armour are
i.suggestive of what a human would look like if we had exoskeletons, and would
suggest a culture that is both dependent upon technology and determined to
treat it as art. People go out, or Go Out, into the Night Land as
demonstrations and tests of their essential nature, and so there is a certain
ceremonial aspect to their expeditions and it would be logical that aesthetics
would play a part in the design of their armour. There may well be
ornamentation as the individual adventurers carry with them the pride of their
clans, so various family motifs and suchlike would probably be included,
either worked in if the armour was made by an artist, or painted on in the
manner of the art that was applied to aircraft in the First and Second World
Wars.
zoomorphic, suggesting an alligator in this case,
but I read somewhere that the designers were also thinking of human muscles in
the design, hence the curves. The ribs are supposedly some
sort of energy-dissipation feature, like the spaced or gridded armour now
applied to modern armoured fighting vehicles in Iraq and Afganistan.
I've attached an image of the Big G showing how it looks after it has
sustained cumulative battle damage (also, have a look at how it appears in the
very last scenes of the final episode, "Daybreak", with buckled and warped
plating). Now, as I mentioned, the Manshonyaggers can self-repair, but
they also self-design, so symmetry might not be retained over the ages.
Going back to the stag beetles, there might be some strange distortion
of the body form that coincidentally resembles something else.
A little after this
peak it was rendered pointless by gunnery and became ceremonial - and it's at
this time that the parade armour becomes popular. ((Which rather undercuts
Brett's referent to Negroli, because he was working in an era of armour's
decadence, while in the Night Land the armour is still vitally functional and
undergoing cutting-edge evolutionary selection by the forces of the
Land. This is not to say that the point of armour as decorated, or
as an expression of clan and personal status, is wrong, because it isn't, but
there is a difference here which must be appreciated. The Negroli
forms are over-ornate to a nonfunctional degree. But decoration and
badges of status and affiliation were used on armour at all times. They
tended however to be separate from the armour - surcoats, crests,
etc. Well, Brett has actually said all this already, hasn't
he???))
