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ST/AHNA: (Star) Fleet of Fog (READ DESCRIPTION)

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This submission is something very, very different from what I normally do.  It is a rather nonsensical crossover between two of my favorite fictional franchises: the classic movie era of "Star Trek," and the science fiction anime/manga franchise "Arpeggio of Blue Steel" or "Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio."  However, it's something I essentially did just for fun, and it does not have any place in either the "Trek" or AHNA canons.  

Therefore: if you want to understand what is going on, then I demand that you read the entire description before asking me any questions.  Otherwise you won't get it, and as a medical student, I don't have the time to answer the same question fifty thousand times.  Any replies to this submission that say something like "what show is this" or "what is this" will be ignored because it'll be clear to me that you can't follow my directions.

Now that I've made myself clear:

"Arpeggio of Blue Steel" is an interesting series created by Ark Performance that focuses on naval warfare and robotics, with more than a passing nod to World War II navy enthusiasts (like me).  In this series, sea levels have risen spectacularly, and complicating matters, a mysterious fleet of sentient warships calling themselves the Fleet of Fog have begun to attack humanity, blockading all nations, cutting every trade route and isolating mankind.  These ships are fully self-aware, and on the outside, they look like sunken World War II vessels with glowing symbols (think the "tattoos" that Starscream put on his F-22 jet mode during the 2nd and 3rd "Transformers" films).  But on the inside, they are nothing like WW2 ships.  With bodies created from nanomaterials, these "living ships" conceal immensely advanced weapons and defenses, as well as computer capabilities beyond anything mankind has ever known.  Furthermore, some of the larger ones have another special ability: they can manifest Mental Models, humanoid avatars (kind of like the human-form Cylons from the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot) that were ostensibly generated to allow the ships to better understand their human foes.

Anyway, with that aside, I personally find the plot of "Arpeggio of Blue Steel" to be a bit hard to explain, but I do owe you all some kind of explanation.  So I'll back off here and let these great websites do the explaining for me:

Wikipedia entry on AHNA: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpeggio…

TV Tropes main page on AHNA: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…

TV Tropes character page on AHNA: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…


The anime adaptation can be seen here for those interested in watching: www.animeultima.tv/watch/aoki-…

The manga can be read at a number of sites including this one: www.mangatank.com/manga/arpegg…

(New chapters come out every month or so.)

With the introduction complete, what exactly *is* this submission, anyway?  Well, the big appeal for AHNA has to do with the living ships and the unique looks & personalities of their Mental Models.  That's right, we are literally talking about ship-girls - for example, this is my favorite ship in the fleet - the Takao-class (refit) heavy cruiser Maya - and her Mental Model: aoshima-bk.co.jp/whatnew/gazou… (or) cfile23.uf.tistory.com/image/2…

One of the questions that often gets tossed around among AHNA fans, of course, is: "which ship is your favorite?"  Or, to phrase it another way: "if you were a captain and could pick your own Fog ship, who would you want?"  For me, it's the "singing cruiser," Maya.  Some of my friends prefer other ships, like the Kongou-class fast battleships (formerly battlecruisers) Haruna and Kirishima.

In the meantime, I would also like to imagine that if I could indeed take one of these living ships for myself, I'd probably run around her bridge wearing either my "Wrath of Khan" Class-A Officer's Undress or "Monster Maroon" uniform: images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.c… or a Starfleet Bomber Jacket from those same movies: images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.c…

Both of those Starfleet uniforms feature a gigantic chest badge, shaped like the TMP insignia superimposed onto a giant roundel.  (In reality, Robert Fletcher was originally just going to have the Starfleet insignia placed on the belt buckle and only use the ovoid roundel for the chest badge; he was talked out of this by the film staff, who were mindful that the Starfleet insignia's position on the left breast is iconic and shouldn't be tampered with.)  I'm quite familiar with this badge.  Being a TWOK-era "Star Trek" cosplayer, I've got several versions of it.  And I've also had plenty of experience tinkering with and redesigning it because of my own "Star Trek" fan concepts.

In "Arpeggio of Blue Steel," as I mentioned before, every Fog ship is sentient - a living mechanical being.  Because of this, all Fog ships have individual symbols, displayed on their bows, that they use to identify themselves.  No two ships seem to have the same insignia.   I was thinking one day that if I were Maya's captain, I'd probably keep my "Star Trek" uniforms, but I'd want to wear Maya's symbol inside the Delta Shield of my badge instead of the regular Command Division star symbol, as a statement that I "belong" to that particular ship.  In essence, I'd combine the Fog symbol with the TWOK chest badge to create a TOS-style "assignment badge."

I had tossed that idea around with one of my best friends for a while, before deciding one day - after being released from rotation early - to just go ahead and try to draw it out.  I took the traditional TWOK badge, simplified the design a bit to make it easier to draw, then enlarged it (unfortunately for me, my favorite ship also has the most complicated insignia among the Fog ships in AHNA) and tried to see if I could jam Maya's symbol inside that Delta Shield.  To my surprise, it actually worked... although the resulting badge was a bit oversized and looked a wee bit bloated.

With that experiment having been a success, I then decided to try to take this a step further.  I already knew what a number of the Fog ships' individual symbols looked like, and I remembered that in TOS, every ship had its own unique symbol.  I decided that maybe it would be nice to give Fog ships unique badges of their own, changing the shape or design of the TWOK badge so that no two ships would have the same badge and allowing them to stand out from one another.  Of course, I wouldn't change things as drastically as what we got in TOS (completely different symbols), but the TWOK badge had plenty of design elements that I could mess around with.  I put pencil back to paper and started to play with the chest badge design to see what I could come up with, and this was the result.

These don't cover every ship in the Fleet of Fog, but they feature a majority of the ones that appeared in the anime adaptation along with one of my favorite manga-only ships, the English battlecruiser H.M.S. Repulse.  The ships that are featured are the Fog versions of the following WW2 vessels:

Renown-class battlecruiser: HMS Repulse
Kongo-class battlecruiser/fast battleship: HIJMS Kongo
Kongo-class battlecruiser/fast battleship: HIJMS Kirishima
Kongo-class battlecruiser/fast battleship: HIJMS Haruna
Ise-class aircraft-carrying battleship: HIJMS Hyuga
Takao-class heavy cruiser: HIJMS Takao
Takao-class heavy cruiser: HIJMS Maya
Sen Toku-class aircraft-carrying submarine: I-401 (her Mental Model is nicknamed Iona; she is the protagonist's ship)

Unfortunately, because of how narrow the Starfleet Delta Shield is and because of the limitations of image resolution on Deviant Art, you may not be able to see the unique symbols of these ships entirely clearly.  Therefore, please consult these links to see the ships' personal insignia in greater detail:


As of right now, I don't have plans (or time, really) to create badges for the other ships in the Fleet of Fog whose symbols are known.  This sketch was really just a way for me to see if the concept was even plausible, and what the resulting "(Star)Fleet of Fog" chest badges would look like.  

I don't have any plans to get any of them made either, and I haven't decided on colors.  I know that the real TWOK chest badge had a particular color scheme, but I had originally planned that for these Fleet of Fog versions, each badge would also be rimmed in the unique color of the issuing ship.  For example, Kongou's badge would be rimmed in royal purple, while Takao's would have a deep maroon-red trim and Hyuga's would be orange.  (Unfortunately, Repulse has net to appear in the anime or any color panels of the manga, so we don't know what her color is.  This was one of the other main reasons I had for not coloring these in.)
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Dylgo's avatar
you know, this is actually a really interesting idea. I had never thought about this kind of thing before, but Arpeggio does sound a bit like a situation out of star trek, doesn't it?