New posters

More from the First Interworld War. One is an updated version of my very first Interworld War poster. The second has the tagline “See Action Now … Join the Rocket Service.

My reasoning, and the actual posters, below the fold.


The revised poster arose because I never liked the background. I also changed “Transplanetary Expeditionary Force” to “Federated Expeditionary Force”, for a few reasons:

  1. Two words ending in “ary” in a row are dysphonic.
  2. “Transplanetary” is too long a word to roll off the tongue.
  3. I wanted something evoking the A.E.F., or Allied Expeditionary Force. (And yes, I know that the “Allied” bit is from World War II; in WWI, it was just “American Expeditionary Force”. But I wanted something more international.)

The second piece is inspired, again, by something from Posters of World Wars I and II. In the original, there are a bunch of men on the deck of a submarine, with a Japanese ship sinking in the distance. The tag was “See Action Now… Join the Submarine Service”. Well, the obvious analog to the sailors who served in the tiny tin cans cut off from the outside world for weeks or months at a time, would be the spacers locked in the similar tin-can rockets, cut off from both worlds for weeks or months at a time.

I went with the “Mongo” design I have, mostly because I needed windows to see out. (Inexplicably, the “retro rocketship” design does not have viewports.) For the target, it would have to be a Martian, of course. Sadly I don’t have any Martian cylinders lying around. Instead, I took the Walker that I do have and I turned off all the legs. That made it into a satisfyingly saucer-shaped object, though the center was off (since much of the “mass” was now invisible). At first, I used a “DV Fighter” just to set the scale and figure out where things had to be. But I got used to it and ended up liking it a lot, so it’s in the scene. Also, I have another Mongo coming in from the above-left because, well, I like rocketships. 🙂

Obviously having the people outside on the “deck” wasn’t an option, so I had to change tacks. Instead I came in close in the cockpit, so that the other ships were visible through the viewports. A few explosion FX help to set the tone. I used a Michael 3 figure (with the semi-hilarious Krk [sic] morphs that someone has put out on the Net) as one of the rocketeers. For the other, I was torn. I have a nice HoverDroid from DAZ Studios, and it looked OK. But I want to keep the counterfactual trend that the Space Services are gender-integrated. So instead, it’s a Victoria 4 with a generic bodysuit that looks vaguely ST:NG-ish. I don’t really have a lot of good retro sci fi things for the V4 figure (or the M3 one, for that matter) so I’m still improvising there.

I then updated the tag. I like the sound of “Rocket Service”; it’s just archaic enough.

revised “Take the Fight to Them”:See Action Now (I)