salmontheking

[salmontheking]

Cookin'

#レイアウト #作画 #カーネルサンダースの呪い #animation #sakuga

[salmontheking]

We could have all this today and yet we don't. Building a self-stabilizing egalitarian system is incredibly difficult. It gets harder when a multi million city can get evaporated with ~2 hours' warning. I feel irrationally optimistic just assuming 2 socialism-adjacent superpowers by 2120, much less the mythical True Global Communism. mandatory A*I hat of shame: /\ / \ /_ D_\

This gentleman is consuming an anatomical sandwich - an artificial organism made specifically to take the form of a bun with filling, ready to eat, at the end of its life cycle. Like a banana.

The cheese is blue because at some point the number of cheese species grew so large that people couldn't distinguish that many shades of red, yellow an orange.

The sandwich itself feeds on petroleum, naturally.

It's called post-agriculture and most food is made like this since the 2120s. Beings that are neither plant nor animal nor fungus, devoid of any life functions other than growth. Natural produce is for eccentric people willing to splurge on food. The consensus is that if it grew out of the dirt, it also tastes like dirt and makes you feel like dirt when you eat it. Synthetic food is tastier, healthier, more filling and more varied.

A concept of a "food gap" exists among humanitarians - the idea that because poor countries still use ordinary agriculture, their citizens must suffer perpetual dietary deficiencies and waste plenty of time on preparation.

#replies

[salmontheking]

I am so glad I found your tumblr - I was familliar with your older work circa Anti-Air Lifeform, but I am delighted to have discovered Megaton Heart as well. Your art and writing are fantastic.

What are the capabilities and limits of post-agriculture? Are there foodstuffs it can't approximate? Are there foodstuffs only possible with post-agriculture? How closely does an anatomical sandwich resemble an old-style sandwich created from traditional agricultural products? Are there other kinds of anatomical meals?

Post-agro can do it all.

It was limited at first, all the foods tasted funny, but those days are long gone.

A lot of post-food is in the form of an enclosed skin or shell of some kind, much like fruit or eggs, filled with what we would call a complete dish. Imagine cutting open a watermelon and it's all roast beef. You crack a coconut and instead of just coconut stuff it's filled with perfectly fine coconut cake. Or curry.

Except it doesn't really taste the part - it tastes like a punch to the face, because food got a whole lot more intense. Most of the flavors would be near unbearable to us. Many would also be completely alien - ever thought of gasoline or nail polish flavor? The first comes in leaded and unleaded, and the second in different colors which, unlike real nail polish, all taste different. This is why a lot of food has weird colors - it helps you distinguish the trillion varieties from each other.

The skins and shells are either edible or easy to open, like a banana. Larger ones tend to have a convenient handle.

Most of it is edible raw, but many foods obviously taste best right after preparation, so some of it has to be on the consumer side. Economy of scale also means you don't get infinite variety, many people still cook to get more varied dishes.

The appeal of traditional agriculture is almost more historical than experiential. People eat it because it's authentic, or because they particularly have a taste for much more subdued and simple food.

#worldbuilding #questions

[salmontheking]

Hi, really like your stuff, just wanted to ask, what are your big mechs made of? For example Aster Yukon doesn't seem to have an elbow joint, are the red "gloves" on his arms rubber-like coverings? Is it liquid metal? Or does the whole shape shift and move without visible joints while being solid like modern jets wings?

Giant robots are made from starmass, which is catch all for materials produced by captive star tissues and organs. Starmass can be alive, but you can't know without a microscope. Sometimes it looks like living tissue, sometimes like plastic, sometimes like metal smoother than a mirror.

The armor on Yukon is rigid, shiny and metallic, it has segmented plates on joints but they fit close enough that you can't see them from far away. The red parts are just a livery, they regularly get scraped off from wear.

The dark grey lower torso is closer to asphalt in texture. It's "flexible" in so far as the robot can bend, but you could hit it with a sledgehammer and it won't even shake.

On the inside it's more like a gross slimy machine than a living organism. It's full of fluids, most of which are toxic and smell closer to bleach and motor oil than human blood. Most organs/parts are also coated in silicone-like elastic connective tissue. They're very confusing to look at in motion, how organic something looks doesn't always translate to how it moves.

Pretty much every giant robot is like this. The older ones had more obvious joints.

#megaton heart #questions #worldbuilding

[salmontheking]

In progress, some brass on board destroyer Lace Halogen

Never finished this one since I have more pressing concerns right now, some might still want to see it though.

In front, right to left, a senior noncom (likely master chief), a fleet admiral, and the ship's commanding officer, probably a commander. All in their fanciest uniforms on board Lace Platinum-class destroyer, Lace Halogen (Леисӯ Ха̄лазен, [ȴeisɯ ħɑɫʌdʲeɴ]), presumably just for show.

Flag officers don't wear swords because if they ever had to draw one, someone's not doing their job. Senior noncom and officer shoes all have the owner's name on them, so that you can always look at them if you forget, but it's conspicuous if you do.

The color and pattern for the shirt and lining corresponds to where one spent most of their career - yellow with chrysanthema meaning surface warfare ships. A functionally meaningless distinction for a fleet admiral, kept only for legacy's sake.

By the laser turret, a sailor in standard work uniform, with high-viz marking and chemical airbags for emergency.

#megaton heart #worldbuilding #retrofuture #retrofuturism #scifiart #digital art #warship

[salmontheking]

How does Siberian Creole come into existence?

So, in the 2060s Russia was near bankrupt as a state. It sold off its eastern coast and a good chunk of land around it to keep the lights on. This area, known from then on as Outer Siberia, was jointly administered by Korea and Japan as a special economic zone, and used as the testing ground for the first oil sea.

Turns out it made heaps and heaps of money. The new industry needed lots of labor and the world was a sad place at the time, so workers from many places, especially northeast China and inland Russia but also Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia migrated there. Many of them didn't share any language between each other or even with their mostly Japanese and Korean management. The result was (Outer) Siberian Creole - an amalgam of mostly East Asian languages, English and Russian. It has very little to do with actual Siberian languages.

The creole was incredibly easy to learn and later became the lingua franca of Axis. Every citizen speaks it to some degree but other languages are still alive and kicking, tho Japanese and Korean are becoming endangered.

#megaton heart #worldbuilding #questions

[salmontheking]

What caused the mass use of biotech in the world of Megaton heart? What does it have over regular tech?

The general rule is that wetware lets you do very complex things very easily at the expense of more RnD.

You don't need specialized equipment to manufacture a new living device, they grow on their own, you just need an incubator of the right type and size.

Wetware mostly maintains itself. You can do what amounts to thousands of moving parts with no chance of failure.

It adapts - an individual machine will become better at what it does over time. ~10 year old devices can be more valuable than fresh ones.

For computers in particular, wetware gives you much more processing power per unit mass.

On the other hand

It's inconsistent

It can't take extreme conditions like heat, cold, radiation, reactive chemicals or high voltage.

Wetware computers make mistakes, are hardly programmable and need proper fish tanks.

It's inconsistent and less energy-efficient.

You don't want a living train engine, or a living autoclave. It all depends on the job.

#megaton heart #questions #biotech #biopunk #worldbuilding

[salmontheking]

If the stars are like a couple kilometers to a couple hundred kilometers across, then how far are they from the earth? And how did astronomers get the distance of these stars wrong (assuming before the first star "fell" they had the irl assumption of them being LY away)? Also, how do they navigate in space? Do they just have an instictual knowledge of orbital mechanics? And what about black holes 😳

The universe could be smaller than the Milky Way.

We got it all wrong because we were supposed to. Stars intentionally pretend to be huge and far away. It only works from the solar system, and they don't care much about us, so there could be someone else looking.

Stars have ways of faking every single standard candle, redshift, even gravity waves and parallax.

||||

This ties into black holes, or black stars. One of them, when it fell to earth, had a distortion lens that stretched halfway to the moon. It ruined laser measurements worldwide and made people nauseous from looking at anything further than 50 meters away. Radiocom was only possible with long waves on short distances. That's how it stayed dark.

Some black stars are just cold enough that they don't glow much. It really varies.

||||

Stars mostly don't have to navigate cause they barely move for thousands, maybe millions or billions of years. That's also how long they've had to figure it out.

It's hard to speak of instinct with them. We come with pre-packaged firmware like this because we're mass-production organisms, but every star is unique. Maybe some of them can't navigate.

#questions #megaton heart

[salmontheking]

so in megaton heart, is every star in the sky a kaiju? if so, is our solar system the only one that exists? also, is the sun itself a 'star' or is it a distinct thing in-universe (that is more like irl "giant-ball-of-gas" stars)?

Nobody really knows, but presumably every star is alive. There doesn't seem to be a difference between the stars that turn out to move and the ones that don't. The sun's nature also perplexes everyone and probes are being launched constantly to listen for psychic emissions from the sun. If it were to be alive it would be the largest known star by orders of magnitude, and possibly explain the apparent unique status of the solar system.

[salmontheking]

As someone else who wants to build a retrofuturism setting, do you have any tips on how you approach the visual design for technology? I find it hard to extrapolate sci-fi tech from the aesthetics of the period without just copying the stuff I use as reference.

Sci-fi of any period is just people being in love with whatever technology is newest at the time. Right now everyone loves irregular abstract shapes (because now we can manufacture them), non-metallic materials (cause we have strong light plastics, carbon fiber and dreams of graphene), anything simulated and holographic (because we have realistic digital graphics), all kinds of colorful glowy stuff (because we're surrounded by screens all the time) and so on. Sci-fi isn't about the future at all - it's just the present but with all remnants of previous decades removed. The future will never look like what we think is futuristic.

Sci-fi before any specific period will be mostly or completely rid of that specific technology. Unless you want to nail a specific period, you don't even really have to try - just abandon any sci-fi visuals from the last 20-30 years and you'll get retrofuturism.

Sci-fi without LCDs, glossy plastic and color-coded glowing energy will feel 90s. Without fancy digital computers and irregular non-geometric shapes, it will feel 80s. Without much plastic at all, rounded trapezoid shapes or greebles you get 70s and 60s and so on. Unless you want a campy look, you don't need to emphasize technology of that period, those things will come naturally when you can't use modern tech.

I'd need to see your stuff to give you any advice beyond that.

#questions #retrofuture #retrofuturism

[salmontheking]

who are your favorite mecha designers working today? people you feel have an interesting/distinct style?

I don't know. Are Kobayashi and Nagano still alive? I don't really keep up with mecha news, if something good comes out then I'll hear about it eventually. Nihei's pretty cool too.

#questions

[salmontheking]

So if most food is grown from petroleum , how much petroleum is left? How many people are in this world? Are there concerns about riots when all the oil rigs dry up and people start starving? Is this a thing citizens or governments are concerned about?

There is infinite petroleum. Petroplankton lives in the ocean and synthesizes it from water and carbon dioxide, and is then scooped up by kilometer-long trawls. The biggest oil sea is as big as Australia, and more efficient strains are introduced every few years. It's the biggest industry in the world.

#megaton heart #questions

[salmontheking]

A statement of wonder and a question:

First; it is truly a indicator of the wonders of 23rd century science and medicine that theyve invented the Cigarettes That Are Good For You

Second: What is the unabbreviated name of UNÉTA?

UNÉTA or UNETA stands for Union and Nations of the Transatlantic State, in either French or Spanish, both of which are procedural languages at the federal level.

#questions #Megaton Heart

[salmontheking]

Now this question idk if you want to answer since it might be connected to a story of some kind, but that said. What do falling stars do exactly? We have understood now that where they land they create some sort of "ecological dead zone", you have also said on twitter that in some of these zones not even grass grows back. So what happens when these stars hit the ground? Do they irradiate a certain area? Do they impose the *concept of death* on things? Shutdown all biochemical processes?

Stars run on nuclear fusion, their bodies are like continual explosions. They do many things.

A hot star can melt the ground into glass, which then twists and shatters as it cools down, leaving you with a beautiful landscape of razor sharp rubble. If anything could even grow there, the lensing will likely set it on fire soon enough. A cold star is still hot enough to start wildfires, but more importantly is only cold because it breathes. And it's not carbon and water vapor that it exhales, but sooner fumes that kill everything downwind. When a star makes noise, it's the kind of noise that makes buildings fall, and when it decides to move its exhaust will stretch for kilometers or make a new lake where it stood. Some even do things that are not theorized in the 21st century, and sometimes also the 23rd.

But what all stars do is make a lot of neutrons, and what neutrons do is turn elements radioactive. It's not fallout - fallout is just radioactive dirt that settles on things. Neutron light activates the atoms that are already there, you'd have to strip layers off of every object. If you let a star be alive for more than a few hours, it will turn a place unlivable for hundreds of years.

#questions #megaton heart #worldbuilding

[salmontheking]

the cyrillic is misleading, you'd be closer with Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese for this one!

This gentleman is consuming an anatomical sandwich - an artificial organism made specifically to take the form of a bun with filling, ready to eat, at the end of its life cycle. Like a banana.

The cheese is blue because at some point the number of cheese species grew so large that people couldn't distinguish that many shades of red, yellow an orange.

The sandwich itself feeds on petroleum, naturally.

It's called post-agriculture and most food is made like this since the 2120s. Beings that are neither plant nor animal nor fungus, devoid of any life functions other than growth. Natural produce is for eccentric people willing to splurge on food. The consensus is that if it grew out of the dirt, it also tastes like dirt and makes you feel like dirt when you eat it. Synthetic food is tastier, healthier, more filling and more varied.

A concept of a "food gap" exists among humanitarians - the idea that because poor countries still use ordinary agriculture, their citizens must suffer perpetual dietary deficiencies and waste plenty of time on preparation.

[salmontheking]

Is your space cruiser design inspired by atomicrockets?

My entry point to hard sci-fi ships was actually Matterbeam's blog, but Atomicrockets definitely contributed.

[salmontheking]

Did gunbuster influence some of your designs :0

BOY DID IT

#questions