The Nightstar Zoo

With a little more practice, he should be really good at it.

What arms will he use to arm his new arm?

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Being able to repair years worth of muscle fiber damage? That's incredibly good, and real-world miracle-level cure. Needing a little time to retrain your brain neurons? Well worth it.

Why is this guy upset at having that big of an improvement? (Or is it a girl -- I can't tell without red ears).

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

Because to him(?) this isn't an improvement. He was able to shoot before, and now he cannot. Yes, he probably should have died. Yes, he got a new arm out of it. But the end result on an instinctual level is that he is now worse than before and he is looking for someone to blame. That isn't himself for running into a firefight naked.

Also Schlock once again proves that he does in fact have a set of good instincts as to what the actual problem is and how to deal with it practically. He deserves that sergeant rank.

He actually deserves a higher rank, but turned down promotion years ago because he just likes being sergeant... "Sergeant Schock" just has too nice a ring to it for him to pass up. Plus he gets to shoot shit and get paid for it. Promotion would reduce his field responsibilities, which means Tagon would have a bored amorph on his hands. A bored amorph with the power to order lots of people around... o.O

I think that's the most frightening thing I've ever read in the forums here.

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I used to be Junius Gallio, until I messed up retyping my password in the Great Password Reset. Nice to be back.

" I gotta stop doing mathematics while sober."

It's hard to tell... I'm not convinced that Neeka repaired old age as such, she probably just re-braided the muscle fibers and neurons back together across the gap created by a bullet wound.

Problem being, regardless of whether Neeka's repair was better, worse, or mostly the same as the original hardware, it was definitely Asymetrical.. Apparently, Peri's brain is used to thinking that all four arms are near-mirror images of each other: upper left and right work the same, lower left and right work the same, and the differences between upper and lower arms is only relevant in terms of heavy shoulder muscles. And Peri's brain has spent all his life writing down the very minor and highly specific exceptions to that rule, like the fact that he prefers to handwrite with a specific arm, or the time that he broke that one wrist during a basketball game.

So, with major repairs to Peri's upper left shoulder muscles and neural paths, all his calibration files are shot now. And his brain keeps insisting that it's upper left arm calibration files CAN'T have drifted that far from true in a single day, and then it tries to restore the file for that arm by using the other three arms as a baseline, and that doesn't work, because his upper left arm now has several significant differences in terms of muscle strength and neuron length compared to his other three arms.

It sounds like fixing this will require one of two methods:
Option 1: Physical therapy. Sedate or immobilize the other three arms, and use nothing but the upper left arm to perform a wide range of tasks for several days or even weeks.

Option 2: Chop of all four arms and shoulders, and then spend several days or weeks regrowing a new and perfectly matched set of four.

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised they went five months without trying option 2....

Obviously, Neeka was not Peri's medic after Peri was evacuated from the field. Or it would have been Option 1.

_________________
I used to be Junius Gallio, until I messed up retyping my password in the Great Password Reset. Nice to be back.

" I gotta stop doing mathematics while sober."

I suspect trying option 2 would result in all 4 arms having their calibrations shot as a result.

They've regrown entire bodies from the neck down in the past, and nobody complained about limbs function.

Yes, but at least all four arms would then be identical to each other. So every time a calibration update was successfully applied to one arm it could then be easily mirrored to the other three. It makes learning how your new arms work four times as fast, and you don't get distracted by annoying asymmetries during the learning process.

Apparently that's how Peri's brain is designed to work: Calibrate all four arms simultaneously as you grow up, and assume that they're all basically symmetrical.

Giving him new arms that match that statement might be easier than teaching his current brain that the statement is now false.

Apropos of nothing, but I'm pretty sure Peri is a her.

There are higher ranks of sergeant than those responsible for a single squad. He can get promoted without becoming an officer. Though I don't remember when the option was on the table so I can't really comment on the specifics.



Well if they are lined up in male-female order on this page, then Peri is a female. But honestly there's no way to tell since we didn't see the reaction to Tagon's comment at the end. We might well find out in the next few comics though.

Of course it's also possible that Howard is being deliberately vague about the genders of the Fobott'r. In which case we may never find out.

The Chief Warrant Officer slot is already taken by Thurl.

Maybe. We don't know how The Tough's rank structure looks (not in depth anyway).


Only possible? Mr. Tayler is most definitely being vague as all get out. And yeah, could find out tomorrow, could be never.

I'm pretty sure it used to be "Kaff makes it up as he goes along, using titles from conventional militaries for posts with a general similarity of responsibility to conventional ones." Since the advent of lots of formal training, it may have been cleaned up a bit.

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Weapon: Meal, Ready to Explode.

You're likely right. According to Planet Mercenary: "Fobott'r names are often gendered, with masculine names beginning with vowel sounds and feminine names beginning with consonants. It is not a hard-and-fast rules, but it is common."

Even if it hasn't been they've gotten big enough to need ranks between "commanding a squad" and "commanding everyone." And it was my understanding that there was generally a sergeant rank to go with each of those officers slots. Although really Schlock is pretty much filling that role for Cindy's grunts as far as I can tell, which is a slightly bigger role than just the 4-5 person squad he led for most of the comic. So maybe he did get a promotion after all.

Is the "easiest" way to fix this (as in, least hassle to the user, if not to their wallet) now to do a backup, commit suicide and restore from backup?

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Desperate Deployer of the Relativistic Marshmallow Gun.

Generally, there are sergeant ranks accompanying commanders at each level of the organization; Wikipedia has a good list of how the U.S. Marines are organized as far a leadership. Historically, the Toughs have been a very small organization, and I think they've gotten by with having a handful of lieutenants leading squads/fire teams and reporting directly to Kaff. Schlock has basically been a platoon sergeant since getting promoted from Corporal.

It would be interesting to see how Schlock would react to being moved into a Gunnery Sergeant ("Gunny") or First Sergeant ("Top") position. Those generally have the same problems with being paperwork-heavy that officer berths have. Oh, wait, we've seen Schlock get a desk job before, he didn't react well. Our favorite Amorph seems to have good intuition here about how not to be promoted above his level of competence.

Warrant Officers aren't NCOs, they're technical specialists whose rank falls entirely between the top enlisted rank and the lowest Officer rank. Command Sergeant Majors salute warrants, warrants salute second lieutenants. Also, the "chief" in "Chief Warrant Officer" is part of the rank's name; there can be more than one "Chief Warrant Officer" in an organization, one per duty that needs to be performed by a warrant. For example, a typical Marine battalion may have a Chief Marine Gunner, Chief Quartermaster Clerk, and Chief Pay Clerk all with the rank "Chief Warrant Officer".

TL;DR version: Thurl's job title is safe, even if they give Schlock a Warrant slot instead of a Commission; but if they do that, Schlock won't be a Sergeant anymore.

This ... is sig worthy

_________________
I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

It depends on the service. Around here, NCO ranks start with several grades of sergeant and end with two grades of warrant officer.

I don't know where you are, but in the US Army the enlisted payscale runs from E1 Recruit Private though E9 Sergeant Major or Command Sergeant-Major.

Warrant officer is an entirely different payscale, midway between the enlisted and the commissioned officers (usually referred to as simply officers). Warrant officers, while they may hold certain kinds of command, are basically technical specialists. A warrant officer gets his or her rank via a warrant issued by either the Secretary of the service (W1 only) or the President of the united states (W2 - W4).

It is true that most warrant officers are promoted from the enlisted ranks, but they don't have to be . . . they can be made from suitably expert civilians.

Commissioned officers, of course hold a commission issued by the United States Congress.

They are three separate rank systems, with defined relationships between them.

And while it's true that any commissioned officer outranks any warrant officer, a wise junior officer listens to his warrant officers (if he's lucky enough to have them) very carefully.

--FreeFlier

in terms of nervous system responses, There shouldn't be any difference between replacing the four arms, and replacing the entire brain and body. Assuming the brain backup was made a few days after the upper left arm was shot and repaired.

If replacing all four arms doesn't work, then restoring from backup shouldn't work either.

He's in Israel, where the rank system is as per his link. I'm in the UK, where Warrant Officers are the highest two grades of Other Ranks. The US warrant officer rank system is unique to the US armed forces, according to Wikipedia.

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Weapon: Meal, Ready to Explode.

Oops . . .

I dislike that this forum doesn't underline links. I keep missing the links . . .

--FreeFlier

That's why I've started manually underlining them when I post any.

What is the difference between an enlisted, a commissioned, and a non-com?

Other than the whole "all enlisted are of lower rank than commissioned" -- for that matter, why would anyone want to be enlisted instead of commissioned?

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

'Commissioned' is short of 'commissioned officer' - in some countries, such as USA, you have to go through a military academy or college, or ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) program in a civilian university; here in Israel everyone starts as an enlisted private and over the course of the service, those deemed suitable are identified and offered to go to officers school - if they successfully graduate, they become 2nd lieutenants. A non-commissioned officer is someone who has chosen a career in the military without going through an officer's training, for example a technical specialist, though in different services this is structured in different ways.

Lots of good questions, I'll try to be brief with the answers. I'll speak only to the U.S. Army way of handling things, as that's what I'm most familiar with.

Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) ranks are in the "enlisted" category; the enlisted grades are E-1 through E-9, and the ranks of Sergeant (E-5) and above are the NCO ranks. Privates (grades E1-E3) and specialists (E-4) are not given leadership responsibilities; they just follow orders. Corporals (E-4) are also NCOs.

In general, the division of Enlisted leadership vs Officer leadership is that of execution vs ideation: the O1-O9 ranks decide what needs to be done, and the E5-E9 ranks see that it actually happens. The reason that some people want to be something other than a commissioned officer is that they like getting their hands dirty; similar to the split between engineers and research scientists. There's a lot of politics in the officer ranks, too, which the enlisted ranks entirely avoid. Pay's pretty good both places, it's not like a 2LT gets paid more than the Sergeant Major of the Army, despite the SMA being required to salute the butter bar.

As do I . . . though I usually forget until I review the post, and have to go back and edit the underline in.


As far as "why?", it's a matter of qualifications . . . basically, a commissioned officer must have a college degree, though it doesn't have to be from a military college, nor ROTC, though that is the usual way. (Specialists the military needs may get restricted rank . . . Dr. Bunnigus is an example, or would be except she apparently now has command authority.)

Enlisted, OTOH, do not . . . AFAIK the current standard in the US military is that enlisted recruits need a high school diploma and no felony record, though this is somewhat variable according to the needs of the service.

That's not to say that the enlisted never have college degrees . . . one of the benefits of the service is that the service will pay for college "under the GI Bill". Some will then use that to become "mustang" officers . . . some will not. (I understand it's fairly common for senior noncoms to have degrees.)

For someone poorly educated from a failed school in a slum, this may be the only way to get to college.

One clarification: Specialists may be from an E4 up through an E9 . . . an E4 specialist (known colloquially as a Spec-4) is addressed as Specialist, and the higher grades of Specialist (E5-E9) are addressed as Sergeant.

Also, this is US Army information; other nations use other systems, and the other services (Navy, Marines, Air Force) use other nomenclature, though they still use the E1 through E9, W1 through W5, and O1 through O10. United States uniformed services comparative ranks

Finally, there's a lot of colloquialisms and slang used for ranks . . . e.g. Spec-4, butterbar, Top.

--FreeFlier

So "Sergent" means "non officer specialist of high rank"?

Schlock's specialty is killing people, I take it? So that goes with Bria and K2so.

_________________
I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.