- Tibor: “A surprise attack by the Grondan army north of Kirkiok could be repelled. King Ceras will award General Heidar and his troops medals of valor for their heroic efforts next Twinday.”
- Tibor: “In response to the renewed hostilities, King Casimir of Avernum has summoned the Grondan ambassador. It’s assumed that Avernum will further tighten the sanctions against Grondar.”
- Tibor: Haven’t you read that book already?
- Scarlet: I’ve run out of new ones.
- Scarlet: Brrr.
- Scarlet: Hey, wait a sec!
A Sky Full of Stars 052
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16 thoughts on “A Sky Full of Stars 052”
Vicious Sand
Grondians don’t seem to have the sense to stop fighting for the winter. Forward/aggressive is much more expensive in winter than holding territory until the toes stop falling off.
Who is the newsboy in the first panel? Julian? So he’s got a girlfriend and a job at his age. 🙂 The Lavarel snowmen seem to have some variety that isn’t Monster Snow Goons. It’s a good ‘time goes by’ sequence.
Oh, right, the factory. I hope she isn’t going to eat that. Glowing mushrooms don’t usually go well with anything.
Elli
Newsboy: Not Julius in this case, it’s just me trying to vary hair colours and it ended up being too close a colour to our favourite boy. :’D
Crystalgate
This setting is peculiar in that food is a problem, but every other resource seems plenty available. With that in mind, it’s going to be food expenses that count for Grondor. Other expenses may matter, but a small gain in food may be worth a larger expense in other resources. So, does the war cost Grondor food? If they use horses for logistics, then it’s definitely so. If horses pull wagons, that is time they can’t spend eating (frozen) grass or being sheltered from the cold and the workload means they need more food. If they are able to transport supplies by other means, then the food expenses will far lesser, but not zero of course.
Icarus
I’d say that’s why it’s a surprise attack on Grondar’s part.
Julius usually wears blue, so that newsboy’s probably not him.
MegaJar
“Could be” repelled? I assume you meant “WAS” repelled — I doubt the king would be awarding medals for something the soldiers COULD have done, but didn’t.
Graybeard
If I remember my long-dormant German, the problem is the ambiguous meaning of “could” as a translation of the German “konnte” used in the German text for this page. The intended meaning is obvious. No harm, no foul.
Terence Hill
If translators ignore diacritics, then that’s ambiguous, yes. One is “konnte” the other “könnte”.
Icarus
Graybeard is talking about the English verb “could”: it can both mean “was able to” and “would be able to”. But I’d say an additional problem is the use of passive voice with “could” – the sentence “The Avernian soldiers were able to repel a surprise attack from the Grondan Army” sounds more natural that “A surprise attack from the Grondan Army was able to be repelled”.
I think the most natural (and brief) solution would be “A surprise attack from the Grondan Army was successfully repelled north of Kirkiok”. Or perhaps “A Grondan military surprise attack north of Kirkiok was successfully repelled”.
Graybeard
Correct, Icarus. I would be very interested to know how the German/English translation is done for these pages. It’s reasonable to assume that the “original” text is in German, so how does the English version come about? Translation software? A fluent speaker of both languages doing it manually?
My German was never very good, but my French used to be decent, and I got called on by a translator (who never tired of reminding me that she’d been educated at the Sorbonne….) to help with a particularly hairy technical document. Her word-for-word translation was immaculate, but there were some places where the differences in the “flow” of French and English made a literal translation hard to understand. My contribution was to smooth those places out by finding constructions that conveyed the intent, not the exact wording, just as you’ve done here.
Again, no harm, no foul, but I’d be interested in knowing how it’s done for this comic. Regardless of the answer, I’m glad it IS done; this is interesting stuff, and I’d be missing lots of interesting points if I had to read it in German.
Midgard
As far as I know, Novil just writes everything himself, both in German and in English.
BlueishMage
Ooh, what’s all this?
Thomas
OMG CUTE
Crystalgate
I think Grondar has food production problems, even more so than Kirelia, which had food prices go up, but still has a manageable food situation. If the Grondan food situation is dire enough, sanctions will not work.
It’s also snowing far more than usual in this world. Is it just extra snowy weather or does it have some significance?
Opus the Poet
On the first page Elodie said she wanted everybody to be warm, so I think this planet is entering or still leaving an Ice Age, Little or otherwise.
Pappenheimer
If Crystalgate is correct, the Grondanites (Grondanians?) are attacking in a desperation move. The Manchus invaded China during the Little Ice Age for just such a reason, but had to wait for whatever sparse grazing spring brought – if your core army is horsemen, you pretty much have to.
MelkiorWiseman
Just as a matter of interest, here are my guesses as to the current situation within the story based on what I have seen so far:
1. This planet was colonised using “magitech” by an empire, who also installed and maintained the climate control device referred to as The Machine of Eternal Summer, to change the planet’s harsh climate to something more livable.
2. The empire declined and possibly even fell entirely, leading to no more maintenance being done on the Machine.
3. When the Machine began to break down, there was nobody who knew how to repair or adjust it.
4. The planet’s original harsh climate is reasserting itself and so much time has passed since the Machine’s failure that people now believe it to be nothing but a legend with no basis in fact.
5. I speculate that possibly the “expiry” of some of the currency, and only being allowed to renew up to a certain number of expired currency, was how the fallen empire collected “taxes” from the public, with the rich automatically being taxed more due to being unable to renew all of the expired currency. It may also be that the “black market” did not come about as an accidental side-effect of this method of taxation, but was deliberately permitted as a method to improve the welfare of the poor. If the empire did collect taxes by this method, it may be that local government is still collecting the taxes in this way and that the “Empire” has nothing to do with it. That would explain why someone was upset that there was a black market in expired shards, since it would reduce the amount which could be collected in “taxes”. I’d presume that the person who was complaining was from the equivalent of the taxation department.
Poll
Characters
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