As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a DV snub fighter. On the ground, in a vaguely-factory-ish compound, is another Retro Rocketship. It’s not so easy to make clear that this one is being assembled or worked on. I put in a forklift and a repair bot, as well as a guy welding something to the periscope hatch. (He’s hard to see, on the top of the ship.) Actually, I had to go find models for almost everything, as I didn’t have a lot of industrial nick-nacks lying around.

Another in the series, this one with the tag “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them“. This is based on one of the most effective WWII posters I know of, with the same tag but the shadow of a swastika. My job here was harder, in that I don’t have an instantly-recognizable symbol of the Martian oppressors. Instead I settled for a Martian war machine off-camera, with a low spotlight to throw a long shadow. I’m of mixed opinion on whether it gets across the shape but I like the atmosphere.

I used the Poser standard figure “Ben” plus the Poser 4 girl. For no good reason I decided on only two children instead of three. The original had the kids playing with toys, so I used a Poser-standard cartoon character “Ginger” for a discarded doll. Ben, meanwhile, holds a scale model of an Avro Lancaster bomber. Technically, this is counter-factual to my timeline, as WW II doesn’t occur in the world of IW2. But surely some further development of the airplane will occur, and the Lancaster is not a wildly unusual design.

Because most of my posters seem to exhort either “Buy War Bonds” or “Work to Win”, I decided to add something more. In this case, I mention the “Second Guardian Drive”. My nebulous assumption is that this is early in the war, when the humans are in the process of expelling the Martians from Earth. The “Guardian Drives” are bond drives to finance the outposts that will guard Earth’s orbit. This places this poster significantly earlier than, say, “Take the Fight to Them” or even “That You May Breathe Free“.

Another in the ongoing series. This one reads “Keep Us Flying — Buy War Bonds“. The inspiration is a WWII poster with exactly the same wording. In the original, it’s a pilot wearing a parachute harness. (I’m assuming it’s a pilot. It could be an airborne infantryman, I suppose.) Using the by-now standard substitution, I put in a jetpack trooper. Exhorting people to buy war bonds is pretty much the major focus of war posters, apparently.

I made one change. I didn’t like the blank background, so I scoured the Net for a free background I could use. (I found a site called stock.xchg, which has thousands of stock images [get it?], many of which are free to use.) I settled on a stirring sunrise sky, which I like quite a bit actually.

Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.

The key bit to understand is, Poser is an excellent program for, well, posing stuff. But as a full 3D rendering program, it’s simply not ready for prime time. As a user, I’m becoming aware that it simply gobbles memory and uses it not terribly efficiently. This will be important in just a little bit.

For this design, I had to replace the ubiquitous WWII bomber with my workhorse, the retro rocketship. I decided to cheat a little and have one leg of the V come from the Zharkov type and one from the Mongo type, though in the end product the distinction is hard to spot. Placing them was simplicity: I put one up in the sky, then duplicated it and translated it in the -z direction, Repeat that ten or so times, and you have a line of rocketships stretching back toward the vanishing point. Yay.

To get even more flashy, I decided to add some steam flying machines, which I envision as the gunboats of the campaign. This added some complication, because the SFM is a complex mesh itself plus it needed two or three crew to make it work. Otherwise it looks ghostly. I added Ava and Gene, specialized versions of Victoria 3 and Michael 3, and posed them carefully. Then I began the replication …

… and ran into that memory thing. Five gunboats, on top of the rest of the scene, killed my computer. I mean, the render really drove a stake through its heart — it was everything short of a Blue Screen of Death. I started removing objects from the figures far enough away to tolerate th e loss of detail. Not good enough: the renderer just wouldn’t take it.

I sat back and regrouped. I know of, but not how to use, a program called PoseRay, which I knew converted Poser objects to POV-Ray meshes. POV-Ray is a kick-butt free renderer that’s been the standard for something like a decade. I have lots of experience with POV-Ray, dating all the way back to version 2.1 (it’s at 3.7 now) and Ion Yadigariglou trying to render relativistic retarded-potential electromagnetic potentials around neutron stars. Poser is new to me, but POV-Ray — for POV-Ray, I know some real tricks.

So I grabbed a copy of PoseRay, read a quick tutorial, and converted my scene object-by-object. I lost the interactivity of Poser; POV-Ray is a scripted language, lacking direct manipulation. But in return I gained numerical precision and ease of adjustment. Most importantly, I gained the POV-Ray advantage: While meshes are not particularly efficient, the second copy of a mesh costs almost no memory. In other words, replicating the Mongo rocketship a thousand times took almost the same amount of memory as rendering it once. Suddenly, I could have entire air fleets and it would hardly impact the render time.

I didn’t go quite that crazy but I included, easily, twenty or more. Something about the textures didn’t quite take and things look a little plastic-y. But for the most part I am quite satisfied with this effort. As much as possible, I want to stay in Poser, but it’s good to know that POV-Ray is there when I need the big guns.

I’ve been making posters that, I’ve claimed, were from the First Interworld War. I’ve decided that, “really”, they’re from the Second Interworld War. The primary motivation for the change has been the realization that most of my inspirations are from WWII, not WWI. Also, this allows me to imagine, vaguely, that H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was the First Interworld War. Here’s what I envision:

Wells’ Martians apparently did not have radio technology. It seems a pretty big lack, but who knows? Mars does not have a Heaviside layer, I believe, so the idea of long-distance transmission by radio might not have occurred to them. Also, there are signs that Well’s Martians were telepathic. If so, and if telepathy is not easily conveyed by electromagnetic fields, then they might never have gotten into that technology. If telepathy is then also short-ranged, we’d have the situation I want; to wit, that the Martians dying on Earth are unable to relay a warning about infection to the Martians at home. Since the Martians (justifiably) probably found it inconceivable that we resist their might, they might have kept chucking one or two cylinders a year as reinforcements, not knowing at first that the war was lost and later, not knowing why.

So, for the next decade or two, at random times spaced by a few months, these engines of death would come down on Earth. The Martian within would extricate the walking machine, lay waste to the surrounding area, but then eventually die from the same disease that brought down the first. Along the way, the powers on Earth would get valuable experience and technology battling the lander and then trying to recover it. This allows me to leapfrog tech when I need to, and explains the follow-up.

More below the fold.

Somewhere in the 1920s, the Martians catch on. I mean, they’re smart enough to cross interplanetary distances and invent heat-rays; they can’t be entirely stupid about biological peril. Eventually they figure out their weakness and make some compensation for it. Then they launch a second invasion. But this time, they’re not facing an unprepared humanity caught off-guard and still adjusting to the very idea of extraterrestrial life. This humanity is forewarned and forearmed, has played considerable catch-up on tech, and is looking for a fight.

The early advantage lay with the Martians, since they had the initiative. They could pick where the cylinders came down, which cities to target, and so on. And their tech was incontrovertibly more advanced, even after two decades of frantic research. But the sheer size of the Earth and the mass of humanity would eventually tip the balance. At some point, the Martians would be thrown off Earth; not long after, the great counter-invasion would be launched.

I don’t have a lot in my mind yet, although I cannot escape my vision of large bases, hewn from asteroids and passing each other at intermittent but predictable intervals. Maybe neither side gains complete control of the high ground — maybe cis-Terran and cis-Ares space is always contested, so that movement is unpredictable and reinforcements unreliable. Mars will have to be much wetter and more hospitable, of course — though I intend that it be drying out on a short geological timescale, prompting the Martian attack.

So far all of this is just a bunch of goofy posters. But it’s fun to play with.