#Vehicle Speed Sensor

[dh5ryxhgbctgr]

Global Electric Vehicle Wheel Speed Sensor Market Trends and Future Analysis Report 2024 - 2031

The global electric vehicle (EV) wheel speed sensor market is rapidly evolving, driven by the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and advancements in automotive technology. Wheel speed sensors play a crucial role in enhancing vehicle safety, performance, and efficiency. This article explores the key dynamics, trends, challenges, and future outlook of this burgeoning market.

Overview of Wheel Speed Sensors

The global electric vehicle wheel speed sensor market is set for significant growth, propelled by the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and advancements in sensor technology. While challenges such as high development costs and market competition exis

Wheel speed sensors are critical components in electric vehicles, providing real-time data on wheel rotation speed. This information is vital for various systems, including anti-lock braking systems (ABS), traction control, and stability control, ensuring optimal vehicle performance and safety.

Types of Wheel Speed Sensors

Magnetic Sensors

These sensors utilize magnetic fields to detect wheel speed. They are known for their durability and accuracy, making them widely used in the automotive industry.

Optical Sensors

Optical sensors rely on light reflection to measure wheel speed. They offer high precision but can be affected by environmental factors like dirt and moisture.

Hall Effect Sensors

Hall effect sensors generate an output voltage in response to changes in magnetic fields, providing reliable wheel speed data. They are increasingly popular in modern electric vehicles.

Applications

Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS)

Traction Control Systems (TCS)

Electronic Stability Control (ESC)

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)

Market Dynamics

Key Drivers

Rising Electric Vehicle Adoption

The global shift toward electric vehicles, driven by government initiatives and consumer preferences for sustainable transportation, is fueling the demand for wheel speed sensors.

Technological Advancements

Innovations in sensor technology, including miniaturization and improved accuracy, are enhancing the performance of wheel speed sensors.

Increasing Focus on Vehicle Safety

Growing concerns about road safety and the implementation of stringent safety regulations are driving the integration of advanced sensor systems in vehicles.

Challenges

High Development Costs

The research and development costs associated with advanced sensor technologies can be a barrier for smaller manufacturers.

Market Competition

The wheel speed sensor market is highly competitive, with several established players and new entrants vying for market share.

Regulatory Challenges

Compliance with various international standards and regulations can complicate market entry for new products.

Regional Analysis

North America

North America holds a significant share of the global wheel speed sensor market, primarily due to the presence of major automotive manufacturers and the increasing adoption of electric vehicles. The U.S. is leading in both production and consumption.

Europe

Europe is a key market for wheel speed sensors, driven by stringent safety regulations and a robust automotive industry focused on electric vehicle production. Countries like Germany and France are at the forefront of this trend.

Asia-Pacific

The Asia-Pacific region is experiencing rapid growth in the wheel speed sensor market, fueled by rising electric vehicle production in countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea. Government incentives and initiatives promoting EV adoption are further driving demand.

Latin America and the Middle East & Africa

These regions are gradually emerging as potential markets for wheel speed sensors, with increasing investments in electric vehicle infrastructure and a growing interest in sustainable transportation solutions.

Future Trends

Integration with Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS)

The growing trend towards automated driving and ADAS is expected to increase the demand for wheel speed sensors as critical components in these systems.

Enhanced Connectivity

The integration of sensors with IoT technology will facilitate real-time data sharing and predictive maintenance, improving vehicle performance and safety.

Focus on Sustainability

Manufacturers are increasingly prioritizing eco-friendly materials and processes in sensor production to align with global sustainability goals.

Conclusion

The global electric vehicle wheel speed sensor market is set for significant growth, propelled by the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and advancements in sensor technology. While challenges such as high development costs and market competition exist, the future looks promising with the integration of advanced systems and a focus on sustainability. As the automotive industry continues to evolve, wheel speed sensors will play a crucial role in enhancing vehicle safety, performance, and efficiency.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The ��free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[imagine-darksiders]

Transformers Prime: Optimus + Reader. Chapter 1.

So, I read @lovinglonerhybrid 's post here. And it absolutely had me in a chokehold, so this is based off that premise. I'm in the UK so please excuse my ignorance of American states lmao.

So, there is a part 2 to this, but I'm going away for 4 days and wanted to get some of it posted before then.

You've broken down fifteen miles short of Jasper's city limits in the dead of night. Deciding to hike in to town, you feel the earth rumble beneath you, and over the horizon, something enormous approaches...

Chapter 1: 9352 words.

-------

It’s a rare and covetous thing, to find even a single moment of peace in the midst of an intergalactic war.

The gap from one of those precious moments to the next seems to grow wider and wider every time, until their frequency is so negligible, it becomes hard to recognise them for what they are anymore.

For everything Earth could have offered Optimus Prime, he hadn’t been expecting it to relinquish the gift of peace so willingly. But he’s glad – more than glad – to accept them when they come, even if he’s only stealing glimpses of tranquillity on the sand-swept road leading out of Jasper.

Low-beam headlights lazily trace over the faded tarmac ahead of Optimus’s tyres as he trundles along Highway 49, one of only two roads that surround the small, sleepy city of Jasper. It’s a very routine patrol, one he obligingly excused Bumblebee from taking after his poor scout all but begged Optimus to give it to someone else, beeping out promises that he’ll take double shift tomorrow night, if need be.

All this on the back of Miko announcing another of her ‘slumber parties’ at the base, much to Ratchet’s noisy chagrin and Optimus’s private amusement. And, of course, when Bumblebee found out that Rafael would be staying the night too… Well…

‘You’re too indulging,’ their old medic had admonished from his workstation, the broad expanse of his back turned to the Prime, ‘He ought to learn he can’t always have his way.’

But it was a harmless indulgence, and Prime was more than happy to take over the patrol in this instance.

Besides, he had an arguably selfish reason for doing so.

If he’d admitted as much out loud, Ratchet would have scoffed and sent a pulse of chiding dismissal crashing into Optimus’s EM field. ‘You don’t have a selfish component in your body,’ he might say.

But this… Optimus muses, gazing skyward as he trundles down the highway in vehicle mode, letting the crisp, night air slide through his grill and cool his powerful engine… This is the appeal of a solo patrol.

Every now and then, there are times when the Decepticon activity goes quiet, Fowler has nothing to report, and Optimus can almost pretend that he’s just another Cybertronian enjoying a long, quiet drive through the Mojave wilderness. And while he remains ever vigilant, keeping every sensor poised outwardly in a constant surveillance of his surroundings, the old bot still permits at least one sense to wander.

Somehow, it’s always his sight.

Oftentimes he catches himself doing it. Other times, on nights that are quiet and still and clear like this one, there’s a wire-deep longing that overrides his logic gates, and the Prime won’t notice that he isn’t keeping his processor and his optics on the dusty road ahead of him. He’s too busy stealing long, pensive looks at the stars above him, scattered like a-hundred-billion souls sprawling across a curtain of crushed velvet.

It’s out there… somewhere… riding a lonely orbit on the furthest reaches of the galaxy’s Centaurus arm.

Cybertron.

Home.

Their first home, he amends gently, depressing his accelerator to speed up when he realises he’s starting to crawl. Earth is as much their home now as Cybertron ever was.

Sagging on his suspension with a low hiss, Optimus drags his hidden optics back to the road ahead, and all at once, he nearly lurches to a halt, his exhaust pipes sputtering out a hollow sound to betray his surprise.

There, parked several feet from the road a few hundred yards ahead of him, is a vehicle.

Prime’s senses sharpen to a startling focus.

Pumping his brakes, he slows down again, and the roar of his engine fades to a fluctuating hum.

A Decepticon…?

He doesn’t feel anything trying to breach his EM field, nor does he pick up on any resistance when his scanners hone in on the vehicle – ‘Ford. F250. A Pickup truck.’ Year….? Optimus’s focus narrows to a pinprick… ‘Eighty-seven.’

It’s red - a faded, dusky red like some of the sun-baked sandstone at Red Rock Canyon. As Prime’s massive form rumbles on through the night, looming closer and closer to the mysterious truck, his lights reflect off something situated above its rear bumper, the presence of which quells his flaring codes and eases his rigid frame.

A number plate.

Thick, black numbers and letters stand out against the white rectangle, though it isn’t the sequence that alleviates Optimus’s suspicion, it’s their mere presence.

No Decepticon he knows would ever suffer the ‘indignity’ of having a human number plate stapled to their bumpers.

Primus, even the Autobots have foregone the accessory after Fowler gave up trying to keep Bumblebee from losing his, Ratchet from ‘misplacing’ his, and Bulkhead from bending his irreparably whenever he transformed. Optimus had given it a go, for a time… mainly because he was growing worried that their overworked liaison would quite simply combust if he had to intercept one more phone call from ‘concerned civilians’ who were reporting a semi-truck driving through Jasper without its registration.

The Prime’s number plate came to its own crumpled end when he sat down on his berth one evening without removing it first.

One genuine, slightly sheepish apology to a very fed-up liaison later, and Optimus was informed that he and his team no longer needed to wear the plates.

So, the presence of one on this truck is a good sign. It’s less likely to transform and cause an incident.

That does, however, open up an entirely new avenue for concern to creep in.

A crash, perhaps?

Several dark skid marks indicate that it must have veered off the road after a hard, panicked brake.

He can’t pick up any biological signatures either. Even when he casts a wider net, all his sensors catch are the heat signatures of a few tiny, Earthen mammals scurrying about over the sand before they dart into various rock formations when he rolls by. But just because he isn’t picking up the presence of a living human, it doesn’t negate the possibility of a human being inside…

Frame suddenly taut, Optimus trundles to a cautious halt on the road alongside the truck, his engine idling like some great, murmuring beast in the quiet of the desert.

A throaty hum seems to escape his smokestacks as he peers down at the smaller truck, contemplative… considering… Then finally, relieved. There doesn’t appear to be anyone inside, judging by what his headlights illuminate through the cab windows.

What is it doing out here?

It definitely wasn’t here yesterday when he made the drive into Jasper. It isn’t a vehicle he recognises either, and he’s been doubly vigilant of late regarding all the civilian cars, bikes, trucks, vans, and even agricultural vehicles in and around the town.

Privately, he’s been compiling a catalogue of them all, for his own reference.

If there’s a threat to his human charges lurking about in their hometown, Optimus needs to know about it. A Decepticon disguised as a civilian vehicle would be an effective method of infiltration.

Casting one more, cursory ping out into the night to check that he’s definitely alone, he at last begins to unfurl himself into his bipedal mode. Metal plating slides away from his grill, pulling back and rolling along the body of the semi as he rises onto newly revealed pedes. The mechanical whines, whirrs and buzzes are terribly loud and alien amongst the desert’s natural ambiance, but soon enough, the air falls still once again, and a monolithic Cybertronian stands in the place where a Peterbilt used to be.

Soft, cerulean light spills over the abandoned truck as Optimus settles his optics upon it, easing his enormous frame down into a crouch and draping one arm across his knee with a ‘clunk.’

At first glance, he hadn’t noticed anything especially odd about the truck save for its unexpected presence. Leaning sideways, he casts an optic over the front bumper and finds nothing out of place, no damage to indicate a crash, no broken headlights or crushed bonnet.

It’s the same story with the truck’s bed. Only when Optimus hauls himself upright and treads carefully around it to inspect the other side does he notices the glaring problem.

The whole vehicle is canting onto its offside front tyre, a tyre that sports a rather sizeable puncture, considering how flat it is. And from the looks of it, this one was only ever meant to be used as a temporary spare. A quick glance into the truck’s bed reveals what he assumes must be the original tyre, flat as well, with the silver head of a nail jutting from the centre tread block.

Optimus clicks his glossa softly for the owner’s run of bad luck.

Right away, he sends a ping to his team, advising them to be wary of stray nails along this stretch…

He receives several pings in return. Immediately comes Bumblebee’s frustration, buzzed over the airwaves like a sulking sparkling who’s been told his toy was broken. Given the Scout’s inclination to race at top speed all over these roads, Optimus doesn’t doubt he’s just vexed at the shuddersome notion of having to slow down.

Arcee and Bulkhead respond in kind as their leader absently moves his attention to something strange obscuring part of driver’s window, letting their concern wash over his field.

‘Popped a tyre, Boss?’ Bulkhead’s message hits his comm, informal and probing, but with the warmth of care behind it.

Optimus is quick to send a pulse of reassurance back through their shared channel. He’s fine. If one little nail was all it took to take a Prime out of commission, they’d all be in serious, serious trouble.

The channels go quiet after Arcee and Ratchet send their short, concise responses, and once again, Optimus is alone on the road, peering down at a small sheet of paper that’s been taped to the inside of the truck’s front window.

Gradually, he furrows his optical ridges until they almost click together into one, solid line, the apertures inside each optic whirring and shrinking as he reads the words scribbled on the paper.

He recalls the first time he encountered the languages of Earth as they were written. The looping letters, graceful and elegant, chasing one another across the front of the letter Agent Fowler gave him as part of an unofficial welcome to the United States.

Optimus had held the paper so delicately between two of his digits, blinking down at the dark ink soaked into repurposed cellulose fibre. It was beautiful.

When he remarked as such, Fowler made a noncommittal comment that you could tell a lot about humans from their handwriting.

Optimus would sometimes find himself glancing over the children’s homework when they left their books out unattended on the table in their recreational area.

Jack’s neat and sensible cursive. Miko’s chaotic, glittery script that rose and fell and ventured outside the lines because she was usually paying more attention to her music than the words she wrote in her textbook. And Rafael, of course, with his quick, almost frantic stokes of the pen as he tried to scribble his thoughts down as fast as his brain could make them, only to end up losing his confidence halfway through a sentence, doubled back, drew a single line through the words, and started again on a fresh page.

This handwriting though… written in blue, splotchy ink and stuck with a piece of scotch tape to the truck’s window, makes Fowler’s words ring true in Optimus’s processor.

He can tell a lot about the human who wrote it.

‘Please don’t steal/break into my truck,’ it reads. The word ‘please’ has been underlined several times. ‘Not worth much, it’s all I’ve got. Tyre is flat, spare tyre too, so can’t get far anyway. Walking to town to find help bcos phone died and I don’t have a charger. Be back soon. Thanks.’

The ink has run in several places and rendered some of the letters illegible, as if water has been dropped on them from above.

Optimus isn’t naïve. He’s seen the children cry, more times than he can bear.

Then underneath all that, in much smaller writing stuffed underneath the first message like an afterthought they forgot to leave enough space for…

‘P.s, if the truck is still here in 3 days, assume I’m dead.’

With a sudden groan of his metal frame, Optimus braces a servo on his knee and hurriedly pushes himself to his pedes once again, helm swivelling sideways to stare down the length of the road.

The truck’s nose is pointed in the direction of Jasper, but the town itself is still about a fifteen-mile drive…

Surely they wouldn’t make the journey on foot…

But if the note is any indication, then…

His processor flashes again to the children; Miko in particular, and the alarming disregard she has for her own safety. The boys are guilty of that as well, though to a lesser degree.

Suddenly, there’s a very high likelihood that there might be a human wondering through the vast Mojave, alone. Worse still, Bumblebee had reported just last week that there’s been an increase in Decepticon patrols in the area around Jasper. No doubt Megatron has been ramping up his efforts to locate the Autobot base. Their growing presence in the vicinity of town makes these roads particularly treacherous…

Optimus ex-vents roughly, more troubled than frustrated.

Blue optics narrow at the road ahead, and once again, the peace of the desert night is filled by the sounds of living metal collapsing back in on itself.

A powerful engine roars to life. Somewhere nearby, a startled jackrabbit darts beneath the safety of a sagebrush, hiding herself amongst its silvery leaves.

Unblinking, her wild eyes stare after the great, thrumming beast as it moves on down the road.

—————-

You’ve had a lot of ideas in your life.

Some good. Some bad. Some that have paid off, but most that have gone nowhere at all.

Perhaps you were growing tired of going nowhere…

What else would have possessed you to up and move all the way to the middle of Nevada state on the back of a job offer that came from a man your uncle purported to know?

‘Oh yeah, Terry? Did a job with him a few years back for some cattle baron out in the sticks. ‘Course, Terry always wanted his own dairy… Want me to tell him you’re lookin’ for work?’

Turns out, Terry did end up getting that dairy he always wanted. And as it happened, he was looking for a farm hand.

Does it count as nepotism if you’re fairly sure your uncle had only met your future employer once?

Beyond a certain point, you simply couldn’t care less.

A job is a job, even if it is out here in the desert near a town you’d never heard of a month ago.

Dust-caked trainers trudge to a weary halt in front of a large, green road sign.

The moon, thankfully, hangs fat and luminous in the cloudless sky. So at least you don’t need a torch to see, not now that your eyes have had time to adjust the darkness cloaked over the desert.

With your run of bad luck, you half assumed the heavens would have opened by now and given the Mojave a nice, little dose of rain.

“Well,” you mutter aloud to yourself, peering up at the green sign with a grimace, “Could be worse…”

‘Jasper – 10 miles,’ reads like a slap to the face.

Still… It’s better than the fifteen miles.

You must have walked at least five already, dragging your legs behind you like extra baggage that doesn’t want to cooperate.

It has to be beyond midnight now. Well beyond, you suppose.

You’ve been walking for the better part of two hours, slow and sluggish and exhausted. The journey getting to Nevada had been tiring enough, then as soon as you crossed state lines, your tyre caught a puncture going over a particularly nasty pothole that had snuck up on you.

After an hour spent in the blazing sun jacking up the truck and changing to the spare, you set off again for another several hours of travel. Then, twenty miles out of Jasper, just as you dared to celebrate being home-free, the unthinkable had happened.

Who hits a pothole and drives over a nail in the same, damn day? Apparently, the same person who forgot to buy a charger adaptor for the truck.

No charger? No phone.

No phone…? No calling for help…

Your chest expands and deflates with a bone-tired sigh, turning your gaze back onto the long, dark road ahead of you. Tears sting at the inside of your eyelids, and for a moment, you consider letting them fall, if only to ease some of the pressure building up behind your temples. But crying hysterically about the unfairness of the world hadn’t un-punctured your spare tyre, so why would it help the situation now.

“Come on,” you coax yourself, hauling one leg out in front of the other. Rinse. Repeat. “Not far now.”

Just a few more hours…

The going is slow, tough, draining. Even the dark shapes of rocks start to look enticing as you pass them, letting your eyes slide over to them as you wonder just how safe it would be to fall asleep in the desert by the side of a road.

Ever since you broke down a few hours ago, you haven’t seen one, single vehicle out here.

‘Which,’ you hum, pursing your lips and tipping your head back to peer up at the bleary sky far above you, ‘Isn’t so bad…’

The stars are numerous, and startlingly clear out in the wilderness. The moon as well seems brighter here, unobscured by clouds. She makes for a quiet companion on your journey towards Jasper, her starry brethren endlessly stretching out to each corner of the horizon.

Suddenly, you feel very small. A hopeless traveller trying to find port in a sea of sand and rock.

Swallowing roughly, you hike your tattered rucksack high onto your shoulder and tear your gaze from the stars.

It’s quiet out here, save for the rustle of sage bushes disturbed by the warm breeze, and the skittering of rocks as night-time animals go about their hunts.

Perhaps that natural silence is why the sudden introduction of an entirely new sound unnerves you so much.

You jerk to a halt, ears straining to hear something approaching from the distance. Underneath the thin, worn soles of your shoes, you start to feel it; the road thrumming with gentle vibrations, growing stronger every second.

Lighting quick, you whirl around to face the way you’d come, hands flying up to grip anxiously at the straps of your rucksack.

You’d have thought you’d be excited to see those headlights rise up above the horizon line. At last! A stroke of luck! A potential ride! Potential help.

Instead, it’s as though the sudden appearance of two, dazzling lights blooming into view as they crest over the hill finally jar some sense back into your dizzy head.

The haze of fatigue lifts slightly, pushed away by little bursts of adrenaline as your brain fights to wake you up to an unconscious threat.

You’re alone out here. Defenceless, phoneless. You don’t know the area. Nobody knows you’ve broken down… You try so hard to think the best of people, but now that you’ve had one doubt, a hundred others start to scurry around in your brain, demanding attention.

You can see the vehicle, or their lights at least, but you doubt they can see you yet, this far down the road. You wonder what it is. Car? Truck?

… Alien spacecraft? Despite yourself, you let out a snort at that. Isn’t that infamous military base supposed to be in Nevada? The one hiding alien activity?

Right. Sure.

Despite your scepticism however, a thrill of fear rushes down the length of your spine as if to say, ‘Oh? But are you sure sure?’

 Gulping audibly, you take a few steps sideways off the road, stealing a glance at a cluster of large rocks that sit conveniently just several yards to your rear.

You have a decision to make.

Maybe you’ve been alone on the road for too long, and isolation has bred a paranoia in you that’s so deeply rooted, you can’t shift it at a moment’s notice. If the sun was out, perhaps you’d be less apprehensive, but the night, no matter where you are, makes everything seem so much more… treacherous. It hides things. People, motivations, monsters.

And though it pains you to do so, you swiftly decide to err on the side of personal safety.

The vehicle is closer now, and your blood trembles as the roar of a loud, formidable engine thunders over the tarmac. Yet you’re still certain it isn’t close enough to have caught you in its high-beams.

On sluggish legs, you haul yourself about and make a clumsy dash for the rocks, clenching a fist around one strap of the rucksack and using your other hand to grab the closest rock and swing yourself behind it. Dropping to your backside, you flatten your spine against the cool, solid surface, eyes wide, heart beating hard against the cage of ribs keeping it from leaping up into your throat.

‘Coward,’ a voice in the back of your head scoffs, sounding suspiciously like your father. You shake it loose. Now is not the time to be bothered by old ghosts.

The thundering engine draws nearer, rumbling in your chest as it seems to creep towards your hiding spot at a pace even a glacier would be impressed by.

Around the corner of the rock, you can finally see the glow of its headlights smoothing over the tarmac, illuminating the sand and brush all around you. Hurriedly, you tuck your toes right into the shadow cast by your rock, keeping a breath held hostage behind clenched teeth.

“Come on… Come on,” you urge it frustratedly, aware that every second you spend not moving is another second towards sunrise. If you’re not on the dairy ready for work by then…

The vehicle rolls to a stop.

It stops.

The temptation to let out a frustrated scream is only held in check by your tongue getting stuck to the roof of bone-dry mouth.

They saw you. They must have seen you. There’s no way they could have known you were here otherwise.

Idiot!

Wasting time on the decision has only taken it right out of your hands in the end.

A bead of sweat escapes your hairline and rolls down the side of your face, following the curve of your cheek. Should you run? Keep hiding? Did they stop by coincidence? If they meant no harm, they’d have seen you hide and kept on driving, wouldn’t they? Stopping is suspicious. It conveys a desire to engage.

And then something really strange happens.

“Excuse me?”

And… Well, you’re… not entirely proud of the choked gasp that jumps out of you, nor the way you flinch as if you’d been struck.

When did they – He? It’s a low voice, deeper than anything you’ve heard in a long while, full of bass but soft like distant brontide.

When did he get out of the vehicle? You didn’t hear a door open, nor close.

You nearly jump out of your skin when he speaks again.

“I’ve frightened you…” Despite how gentle the timbre is, his voice is loud, like he’s speaking all around you, not just behind you. “I apologise,” the stranger continues, “That is the last thing I meant to do.”

What the Hell is he talking about?

There’s a long, unpleasant stretch of time until he speaks again.

“Was that your… Ford?” he asks, like he’s testing the word on his tongue, “Up the road?”

Shit. You’re starting to regret leaving that note. He must have read it and knew someone would be walking into town, alone and vulnerable.

The vehicle's powerful engine is still idling, strong and steady, buzzing along the ground and up through the soles of your feet.

It goes against your nature to ignore someone when they’re talking to you, but there’s still a part of you clinging to the hope that he’ll just give up and move on if you don’t respond or show yourself. Perhaps he’ll think you were just a figment of an overtired imagination…

Of course, instead, he persists. “Please.”

Jesus, he almost squeezes the word out, oozing dejection.

“You have nothing to fear from me… I’m a friend.”

A friend indeed. You huff quietly to yourself. You don’t even know him. He doesn’t know you. He’s trying to coax you out of hiding after watching you flee from his vehicle. Hardly the foundation for a good friendship. Still, you have to wonder why he doesn’t just come around the rock to stand over you if he’s so keen.

After another few seconds of stubborn silence on your part, the voice speaks again.

“Will you at least step back from the rock?”

What?

“There are scorpions on it, and I fear you’ll get-“

You don’t think you’ve moved so fast in quite some time. One moment you’re pressing yourself to the rock, and the next, you’re scrabbling to your feet with gusto, lurching away from your prior hiding space and spinning around, skin already crawling.

Sure enough, a pair of giant scorpions are scuttling around on the flat top, their tails held aloft, proud and large in the moonlight.

“-Hurt,” the stranger finishes.

Snatching your head up, you find yourself staring right into the vehicle’s headlights, and you instantly grunt with discomfort, raising a hand to shield your eyes from the light.

“Oh.” There’s a pause, the vehicle’s engine skips, and the lights suddenly dim, plunging you into almost darkness save for the dim glow of residual light. “Forgive me. Is that better?”

“Much. Thanks,” you respond automatically, only to turn rigid once you realise you’ve spoken aloud.

Well. He’s already seen you. No point pretending you can’t talk either…

Again, the stranger’s vehicle makes an odd noise, it’s engine hums gently, and as you lower your arm to seek out the man you’ve just opened a line of conversation with, you finally see what you’d been hiding from.

A monstrous Peterbilt sits squarely across the width of the road, entirely alien in the barren, rocky landscape. Smokestacks on either side of its cab reach towards the sky, glinting silver in the moonlight. It looks red under the meagre glow, with lighter panelling on the main body and dark, blue accents on the wheel trims and storage compartment. The grill is, in a word, massive, standing taller than you are, sporting a logo you don’t recognise on the front.

All in all, it’s a hell of a truck. Powerful, you imagine. Expensive too.

You try not to let your mouth hang ajar.

“Where-” Your voice cracks, still dry. “Ahem…! Where are you?”

Glancing around, your hackles start to rise. You can’t see the speaker anywhere. Which is why you let out an embarrassingly shrill yelp when his voice rumbles directly from the semi.

“I’m right here,” he assures you, polite enough not to show his amusement whilst you flap your mouth open and closed.

No, you shake your head. No, that is too weird. “What, are there like… speakers on the outside of your truck or something?”

There’s the tiniest of pauses, followed by a simple, concise, “There are.”

Oh. Well, then. That answers that burning question.

“Okay? So, um… Can I… help you?” you ask awkwardly, screwing one side of your face up.

The man seems to hesitate, allowing a pregnant pause to hang in the air between you before he replies, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Somehow, your expression twists even further south, and you begin casting your eyes over the semi, squinting through its dark windshield to try and catch a glimpse of what’s on the other side.

“I saw your truck on the side of the road,” the unseen man continues, “I feared you might have been hurt in a crash, so, I stopped to check that you weren’t still inside the vehicle. Then I found your note.”

He falls silent, and the air is dominated once again by the purring of his semi’s engine.

“Okay?” you prompt, still unsure of his motivations.

“It said you need help.”

He trails off, waiting. You’re promptly struck by the idea that he’s trying to guide you to some conclusion he hasn’t yet revealed. Finally, just as you start to grow restless, he forges ahead, “These roads can be hazardous for a lone hu-“

Suddenly, the truck’s engine revs, drowning out his voice for a second and sending you leaping backwards, startled.

“- A lone traveller…” he clears his throat just after the roar of its exhaust cuts out. Then, “Ah, If I may be so bold...”

All of a sudden, the passenger side door unlatches and swings open, and you’re presented with a clear invitation into the darkened cab. “May I offer you a ride into town?”

You wonder if he can see you turn stiff at his suggestion. Your body all but pleads on hands and knees for you to accept. What’s the worst that could happen, after all?

Well. You’ve watched several documentaries and movies that give you a pretty good indication of what ‘the Worst’ entails, thank you very much. You don’t like that he’s inviting you into his truck without showing his face to you yet. You’d like to gauge the person you’re speaking to. Get a bead on him. Is he big? Strong? Tall? Could you overpower him if it came down to it? Does he look like he’s hiding a weapon on him?

All these questions only serve to dry the moisture in your throat.

“I… That’s… very kind of you,” you admit, wringing your hands together as you take a small step away from the semi, “But I’m sure it’ll be okay, it isn’t that far.”

“At an average speed of three miles per hour, you will reach the outskirts of town in just under three and a half hours.”

You blink, caught off guard. ‘And they said we’d never need to use equations after we graduated.’

“Maths guy, huh?” you cock a hip, laying a hand across it and shooting the truck’s windshield a tentative smile, “Maybe I walk at four miles an hour.”

“Two and a half then,” he quips back just as smoothly, the door to his semi still hanging open. When he continues, you can’t help but notice that the cadence of his baritone voice rumbling through the speakers has turned to something a little more sombre, quieter, like he’s trying to impress upon you the gravity of a situation you don’t yet know about. “But time and distance aside, I do not wish to leave you to walk into Jasper by yourself, particularly at this time of night.”

He speaks like he’s been to elocution lessons. Every word seems to be carefully selected, every vowel and consonant articulate and refined.

It’s disarming. He’s disarming. But you’re still not convinced.

“Listen… Thank you, again. But…” It feels rude, like you’re committing some kind of faux pas in turning your back on the semi, yet you can’t shake the nagging voice at the back of your head, telling you that there’s something not quite right about the man in the truck. Not bad, just… off.

“It’s a kind offer,” you tell him again lamely, turning on your heel. And so, you recommence your weary march for Jasper, tossing one last sentiment over your shoulder, “But I’m sure I can make it on my own. Take care, okay?”

You almost expect him to argue, but all you can hear is the now familiar drone of the semi’s almighty engine. For several paces, you can feel a pair of eyes watching you, scrutinising and pensive, if a little baffled by your short yet polite dismissal.

When you make it another ten feet, heaving your tired legs after you over the tarmac, your ears perk up to the sound of an engine revving.

Smokestacks chugging, the massive truck pulls out of its standstill, unseen behind you.

Chewing on the inside of your lip, you keep your gaze fixed to the ground ahead and raise a hand, flapping it about in an apologetic farewell as you meander further off the road and onto the sand, giving him plenty of space to get past.

You start to frown when you make it twenty paces without being overtaken by the truck.

That frown only grows deeper when the engine keeps churring away behind you, rubber tyres crunching tiny particles of sand under their treads as it crawls along in your wake.

Is he…?

Tearing your eyes off the toes of your shoes, you send a fleeting glance over your shoulder, surprised – but not much – to find the nose of the Peterbilt creeping slowly along in your peripheral vision, keeping pace with you.

Your frown eases back, and you quirk a brow at him instead, calmly asking, “What are you doing?”

And just as easily, the voice returns, “If you will not allow me to drive you, I will happily escort you to your destination.”

You can’t help yourself.

“Ha! ‘Escort.’” The snicker jumps out of you faster than you can raise your hands to press your fingertips against an unbidden grin. “Sorry,” you immediately try to amend, “You just sounded so serious.”

“… I… am serious?”

Letting your hand flop back to your side, you give your head a shake, still grinning. You really do meet all sorts on the road.

“Regardless, I’m sure you have far better things to be doing with your time.”

How the truck matches your walking speed without his engine faltering or sputtering, you’ll never know.

A strange noise gurgles from its exhaust, almost perfectly reminiscent of a troubled hum.

“On the contrary,” the driver responds, pulling forwards a little until only the grill overtakes you, and for a moment, you worry he’s about to drive across your path, “There is nothing at the moment that concerns me more than getting you safely where you need to go.”

Huh. Of all the genuine, stubborn…

“Look.” Your shoes scuff up a cloud of sand as you draw to an abrupt and decisive halt, turning bodily towards the truck. Hands splayed on your hips, you glare at the windscreen, aiming approximately for the driver. A second later, he must have hit the brakes because the semi lurches to a stop as well, hissing noisily.

Still, he doesn’t step out.

“You seem like a nice guy,” you start, trying to keep your chin raised and your tone stern. You fail, of course. Your voice cracks nervously, but at least you try. Taking a deep, steadying breath, you finally elect to stop beating around the bush and just address the elephant in the room – or desert, as it were.

“But I don’t make it a habit to get into random trucks with strangers.” You make it a point not to directly accuse him of having ulterior motives, but you hope you’ve at least driven home your main concern. At best, he’ll grow offended that you’d think him capable of such a thing and – hopefully – move on. At worst… Well. You brace yourself for that, teeth grit so tightly, your jaw starts to ache as you flick your eyes over towards the truck’s driver-side door, waiting.

The truck in question does something odd then. It… sinks? At least you think it does, lowering on its axles by a few inches like the wheels have just deflated. It’s difficult to tell in the dim moonlight though, and it’s over so quickly, you can’t be sure you saw anything at all that wasn’t just a trick of the desert.

How long have you been awake?

You’re busy calculating the hours you were driving when the stranger’s voice is kicked out over the speakers again.

“You assume I mean you harm…” he utters.

And just like that, the stern, rigid scowl is instantly wiped off your face.

He sounds…

…sad.

Not offended. Not angered by your thinly-veiled implication.

Just sad. Dispirited, even. As if it’s only just occurred to him that you might have perceived him as a threat.

It’s almost painful when the pair of you dissolve into an uncomfortable silence that lasts for several beats of your rapid-fire heart.

Biting down on the inside of your cheek, your brows drift apart whilst you try to think of something to say. Trouble is, you’re afraid that speaking again will only make things worse.

You have no idea what’s going through his head. What if his dejected tone is followed by something worse?

“I’m sorry,” you backtrack, pressing your lips together and chiding yourself for faltering, “It’s nothing personal, just… I-I should probably get going before I fall asleep standing up.” You give a stilted laugh, but it soon turns into an awkward sound made at the back of your throat, lips pulled over your teeth in a grimace.

Dipping your head, you swallow thickly and grip the straps of your rucksack again. But just as you make to turn away, the semi’s wheels abruptly twist towards you. It’s ever so slight, just enough that the truck rolls a few paces in your direction before it stops again, its grill pointed straight at you.

With an audible gulp, you go to take another step back, staring at the metal in anticipation. Your retreat is soon halted by the mellow rumble of his voice.

“I understand your hesitation. And I know that the word of a stranger may not hold much weight,” he begins slowly. The Peterbilt inches forwards again. “But I can assure you, you have nothing to fear from me…”

Shifting on your feet, you let go of your bag and clutch instead at your elbows, brows tipped up indecisively. He’s persistent, you’ll give him that. He also speaks with a candour you’ve never encountered outside of a film or a storybook. Frank and forthright in a way you’ve never been privy to. Is that why you’re hesitating? Is that why he seems ‘off?’ Because his level of sincerity doesn’t have a place in your world?

Perhaps you’ve been spending so much time by yourself, it’s turned you distrustful. Maybe you’re just getting cynical. Looking back on your journey here, you realise that only other person who you’ve spoken to was a disinterested server who took your order at a drive-thru… That was four days ago. How long before that did you listen to someone who wasn’t the people on your truck’s radio?

Why is it so suspicious that this trucker wants to help? Hell, you’d be concerned as well if you saw some poor bastard hiking alone through the desert at night without a friend in the world.

Christ, you need some perspective.

The driver must see the conflict painted like a brand across your expression.

“Would it reassure you to know that this vehicle is operated entirely remotely?” he pipes up.

You blink once. Then again to wake yourself up a little more, pulled from your inner turmoil. “What?”

“This vehicle,” he tells you, “It is an unmanned vehicle.”

Curiosity overtakes suspicion faster than you can uncross your arms and stare at the grill dumbly, face opening up in surprise. “Wait. You mean it’s one of those self-driving things?”

“In a sense.” The semi’s engine rumbles softly, and the not-driver adds, “I am what you might call… the safety driver.”

Now that is curious.

You don’t even realise you’ve taken a step closer. “Really? But I thought that sort of tech was still in testing?”

“It is,” he replies, “We are, however, attempting to advance to field-tests, to see if these vehicles can autonomously haul freight in areas with sparser populations, to minimise the risk of collision.”

“Hence why you’re driving it out here in the middle of the night,” you realise aloud, raising an inquisitive brow at the windscreen, “So you’re really not in there? You’re driving it from somewhere else?”

“Would you care to see for yourself?” he asks kindly.

Your wide eyes flit to the passenger door when it eases open once again, though this time, it seems far less foreboding than before.

Tugging a loose piece of skin between your teeth, you give the silver steps leading to the door a scrutinising glance.

That does reassure you…

Slowly, still at least a little wary, you coax your legs to move, and they begrudgingly carry you onto the road. You approach the semi-truck with all the caution of a doe crossing an open meadow.

As you venture closer, its engine kicks up a notch, emitting a steady, gentle purr as if the vehicle itself is pleased with your acquiescence.

Suddenly, as you move along to the open door, you’re dazzled by a light flickering on inside the cab, bathing what you can see from this angle in a calm, golden hue.

From down here, it looks… just like an ordinary interior.

And lo and behold, as you stand on your tiptoes to see in, you find the driver’s seat is eerily devoid of its occupant.

You let out a breath that emerges shakier than you would have liked it to.

“Wow,” you laugh, impressed.

Maybe just a quick peek…

A vast chunk of apprehension breaks away from your chest and vanishes into the ether as you shuffle towards the steps, raising an arm and stretching your fingers across the space to the grab handle that sits invitingly just beside the open door.

This side of the truck is bathed in silver moonlight, and it’s only now that you’re this close that you happen to notice something you hadn’t before.

You almost wince when you spot them.

Although shiny and speckled with only the lightest dusting of desert sand, the metal panelling on the semi is covered in signs of wear and tear.

Enough to give you pause, at least.

For a moment, you’re taken aback, turning bodily away from the open door and cocking your head at the myriad of scratches that criss-cross their way up towards the semi’s roof.

All the paint in the world couldn’t hide some of those shallow nicks and lines that have been scraped out of the metal. In any case, something big must have scuffed it. Perhaps another driver in their own Peterbilt? Or perhaps it’s all damage sustained in testing the vehicle’s automated capabilities.

Clicking your tongue, you absently raise a hand to stroke your fingertips gingerly along the length of a particularly prominent scratch by the door.

“Oh dear,” you tut softly at the side of the truck, “You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?”

Without warning, the engine that had been buzzing so gently suddenly ramps up and starts to vibrate firmly beneath your fingers, so strong you can even feel it judder the ground through the soles of your feet.

Recoiling like you’ve been zapped, you whip your head around to peer through the open door, half expecting the driver to admonish you for touching his vehicle.

As swiftly as it started however, the thrumming engine dies down, and the truck returns to its soft, benign idling. “My apologies,” comes that gentle voice again through the speakers, “Just an overactive combustion chamber.”

“Is it... safe to ride in?” you retort, giving the back of the truck a sidelong glance.

“You will find very few vehicles safer than this one,” he tells you patiently, “I will not allow any harm to befall you, as I would not allow it to befall any of my passengers.”

Your shoulders jump with a silent laugh. “Befall,” you parrot, fighting a smile, “I love the way you talk.”

“… You do?” His speakers buzz with a pleasant hum.

Fingers flexing anxiously, you reach out once again and slide them around the grab handle beside the door, finding that it’s unexpectedly warm under your palm.

“So, I just… get in?” you ask, only to cringe immediately, realising you probably sound like a fool who’s forgotten how to get into a truck.

Before you can rebuke yourself harshly though, the absent stranger offers his response. “Do you require assistance?”

“No, no,” you rush out, placing one foot on the first, silver step and hoisting yourself up off the ground, bringing yourself level with the cab’s seats.

Your eyes grow wide with wonder as you take in the interior.

“Oh, wow,” you breathe, suddenly hesitant to pull yourself up those last few feet.

“Is there something wrong?”

“It’s just… It’s so clean!”

Laid out before you is a perfectly ordinary truck cabin. Soft, grey leather covers the seats, with the same dark colouration on the roof, doors and most of the glovebox, interspersed by a rich, black steering wheel. The soft light, you discover, is emitted by multiple strips of blue neon LEDs that the driver must have fitted underneath the radio dials and dashboard, casting the truck’s interior in a cool, soothing glow.

But most astonishingly, for as much as you search, you can’t spot a single thing out of place. It’s absolutely immaculate. There isn’t one receipt stuffed in the door pockets, no traces of sand or gravel dirtying the footwells, no loose change tossed into the centre console…

Dumbfounded, you glance into the back, but all you find it a dark, grey panel and a shelf set back into the semi’s rear wall, meant for use as a bed, you surmise. It’s empty, unsurprisingly. Not a blanket or a pillow in sight.

Finally, your suspicions are put to rest. This truck doesn’t look lived in at all. He really is operating it remotely.

“God, it looks brand new in here,” you marvel aloud, suddenly hyper-conscious of the abysmal state of your old pickup. The scratches on this semi’s exterior play briefly on your mind but you brush your musings aside, too fatigued to consider the contradictions of a worn exterior but an immaculate interior.

Instead, you feel a frown crease the skin between your brows.

It really is immaculate in here…

Glancing down, you scowl disdainfully at your filthy shoes, the tank-top that’s stained irreparably by dropped food and greasy finger-smears, and trousers that are tattered and worn at their hems.

“Is everything all right?” the ‘driver’ asks again. His voice must emerge from the speakers on each door, low and warm, filling up the cabin.

“My shoes are dirty,” you admit out loud, your grip on the handle turning slack until you sink a few inches back to the first step, “I’m dirty. I-I don’t want to get sand and crap all over your truck.”

“I don’t mind.”

Spoken with more consideration than you’ve heard in a long, long time.

You pause at once, brows tipping up in the centre of your forehead.

A deep inhale through your nose brings with it the unobtrusive scent of leather, with the faintest undertone of adhesive sealers, giving the interior that ‘new truck smell’ that so many drivers try to replicate artificially.

Comparatively, it’s been several days since you passed a rest stop that had showering facilities. Those that did asked for a hefty charge. You’d glanced down at the handful of coppers in your centre console and decided you could go without. Now, you’re starting to regret that decision. Every now and then, whenever you raised your arms to stretch or flip the visor down in your pickup, you’d catch an unpleasant whiff of yourself wafting out from under your light, cotton shirt.

Embarrassed as you are to confess that you’ve been severely neglecting your personal hygiene, you swallow past a lump in your throat and croak, “I… haven’t exactly washed for a couple of days… I wouldn’t want to make your truck smell…”

And in a tone so kind it threatens to brings a tear to your eye, the stranger answers consolingly, “I think your scent is perfectly fine.”

It’s so damnably genuine, you can’t even find it in yourself to point out that he isn’t here to smell you, so his point is moot.

“I…” One more cop-out strikes you. “I don’t have any money,” you murmur truthfully, ashamed, “I can’t pay you for the fuel, or-“

“-I ask for nothing in return but your company,” is all he says, cutting you off as gently as his profound voice will allow.

And just like that, you’re out of viable excuses. Or perhaps your body has noticed the comfortable seats right in front of it and you don’t have enough fight left in you to deny it a sit down. Besides, any reasons you come up with to dip are likely to be met with a counterpoint.

Even so, you can’t help but hesitate for one more question, hand clasping and unclasping around the grab handle. “Are you sure it’s okay? I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything am I?”

The next sound that hums through his speakers is so soft and rich, you think it’s the truck’s engine playing up again, at least until the stranger cuts the noise off by saying, “You do not look like trouble to me.”

If he only knew.

The sound prior, you realise, was a chuckle, the first one you’ve heard out of him yet. Something in the measure of it settles the last of your nerves, only slightly, just long enough to have you throwing caution to the wind. With a final heave, you pull yourself the rest of the way inside, sliding gingerly into the comfortable passenger seat. You never notice how the metal below your foot shifts microscopically, lifting you closer to the cab.

It takes a lot of restraint not to let your eyes drift closed, nor to slump backwards into the wondrously giving material on your spine.

Instead, you sit stiffly with your rucksack keeping you upright, legs pressed together, hands folded neatly in your lap. If you make any kind of mess in here, you’ll be mortified.

After a moment, you remember to close the door, but just as you turn and peel a hand off your thigh, you jolt, staring agog at the door as it swings slowly shut with a dull ‘click.’ All of its own accord.

“Full remote access,” the voice pipes up as the engine below you roars to life, and then you’re moving, and all you can do is stare through the window at the desert drifting by whilst trying to ignore the uninvited ache in your chest.

“Seatbelt.”

His gentle prompt spurs you to reach over and grab the fabric near your shoulder, tugging it across your body and fumbling a little to slot it into place. Suddenly, you feel an invisible pull on the belt, and the metal buckle finds its way into the socket on your next pass.

‘Must be magnetic,’ you muse distractedly.

“Are you comfortable?”

Blinking back the moisture in your eyes, you turn to glance at the empty driver’s seat. It’s bizarre, and more than a little unsettling to see the steering wheel turn itself around as the truck pulls back onto the road, driven by unseen hands.

When you don’t immediately respond to his query, the man continues just as patiently as before. “If it is too cold, I can turn up the heater. Or… perhaps you are too warm…” He hums to himself, thoughtful. “You have been exerting yourself.”

You instantly become aware of the light sheen of sweat that hasn’t quite dried on your forehead. Puckering your face up into a solemn smile, you shake your head and at last respond. “Not to worry. It’s very comfortable in here.”

What follows is a poignant moment of hesitation before the voice speaks again. “Forgive me if I’m overstepping, but… You do not seem comfortable…”

The open-ended statement fades into silence, and you’re left casting nervous glances around the cabin again. “How do you-?” you start, tugging your shirt further down your arms, “Can you see me? Like… in here?”

Again, there’s a pause, barely longer than a second, yet long enough for you to notice it.

“Cameras,” comes his measured response, “Both external and internal. They’re how I spotted you on the road.”

“Oh, I hadn’t even considered that… Of course.”

Suddenly self-conscious, you reach up and begin to paw uselessly at your dishevelled hair, humming though a thin-lipped smile. “I must look a sight,” you half joke.

“You look tired…” he replies diplomatically, and there’s nothing in it for you to be offended by.

Rubbing a thumb over the wrinkle slowly carving a home between your brows, you heave a dreary sigh. “It’s been a long journey.”

“I can only imagine… And… Where does it culminate, if I may?”

“Terry’s Dairy?” you offer, “Uh, it’s this little farm just on the outskirts of Jasper.”

The truck beneath you gives a reverberating thrum. “I know the pastures, but I’m afraid you will find they lay beyond the ‘outskirts’ of the city.”

Letting out a groan, you knock your head back against the seat behind you, staring bleakly up at the ceiling. “Of course… How far?”

“Only a few miles, to the East of Jasper. We’re coming in from the Northwest highway. I can get you there in twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty- Oh, no, no. You really don’t have to do that,” you protest, shifting in the seat to frown at the empty driver’s seat in lieu of anywhere else to look, “Just drop me off in town and I’ll walk the rest. You’re already going out of your way for a stranger.”

“I am dropping you off at your destination and not a mile before,” he tells you steadily.

His uncompromising tone brooks no argument.

You stare at the spot a person should be for several, long moments, debating how much you could push an argument. He’s already coaxed you into his truck, his powers of persuasion are rather good. What chance do you have, sleep-deprived as you are?

Conceding sullenly, yet appreciatively, you let your back touch the seat, settling into it a little less hesitantly. “You won’t be taking no for an answer, I assume?”

He only lapses into a stubborn silence, an answer in and of itself.

That quiet is broken, however, when you suddenly let out all the air from your lungs, a smile growing across the width of your face as the breath escapes your nostrils in a sigh. “Thank you for this… Really. You’re saving me a lot of grief.”

The blue neons on his dashboard seem to flare a bit brighter for all of a second before they dim again. “I am glad to be of service,” he replies warmly.

“Oh my god,” you blurt without warning, leaning forwards in the seat and staring through the windscreen with wide eyes, “I’m so sorry, you’re being so nice and I’m so rude – I never asked your name.”

“Nor did I yours,” he points out, “You may call me Op-“

Suddenly, a burst of static buzzes through the radio. You shoot it a funny look.

“Optimus,” the stranger admits over the static with a hesitance you pick up on right away, drawing your gaze from the dash, “My name is Optimus.”

“Optimus?” you repeat incredulously, a small smile quirking at the edges of your mouth, “Wow… You must have had creative parents.”

“I appreciate that it might seem… an unusual name…”

“It is,” you agree pleasantly, “I like it. Makes you sound cool. Unique. My parents just stuck me with Y/n.”

At once, Optimus echoes your name, and you’re jarred by the sound of it coming from someone else’s lips, reverberating around the truck. It’s been a while since anyone used it.

“Y/n,” he says again in his velvety timbre, “It’s a fine name. I like yours too.”

[laser-tripwires]

alright, R3 trailer analysis time. strap in.

y'all thought i was kidding about doing a shot-for-shot breakdown of this thing? i wasn't. let's go.

alright so we open on hardison walking down a hallway, tossing his phone from one hand to another (some things never change), looking up, and unlocking a door. from the jump, this is interesting - hardison is very present in this trailer, but we know from Aldis's recent comments in interviews that he's not going to be in this season a ton. i'll talk more on that later.

he opens the door to find parker hanging upside-down over a display case holding a small golden owl - we see later it's the target of their heist. she tells him not to trigger the floor alarms (once again, some things never change). we cut away before we can see hardison's reaction, but given as Sophie has the owl later on in the trailer we can infer that things went within some measure of fine.

exterior shot now, of what looks like the louvre - the alarm sounds could be hardison setting off the floor sensors but i honestly doubt it and i think we can chalk it down to trailer editing; again, given as we see them attempting an on-foot exit with the owl later on in the trailer, i think what goes wrong isn't the owl stealing but is something else. we'll refer back to this image a good few times as the trailer goes on.

so, what does this tell us so far? a few things. one, they're in paris, which means that so far this is from the pilot episode - parker and hardison are dressed as waiters, put a pin in it. it's very likely that this is right at the beginning of the show, and the trailer is going to stay with this plotline for a while. right now, i'm very much just recapping what's shown on screen here, but that'll change as we start throwing in more elements and stuff to chew on. stay with me, this post is long, and this is just part one.

okay, so, cut to a grey bakery van speeding down the street. which immediately raises some questions - we know from the mastermind job that the team do have brick & basil trucks in paris. this is either a stolen vehicle for a getaway or there's something else going on.

sophie, eliot and parker are inside the truck. sophie's wearing a blue suit and eliot's in a dark checked shirt and black tee - again, put a pin in it, we're gonna be using outfits to pinpoint down some stuff as the episode progresses.

then, eliot says "We gotta find a way out of Paris, now." - which again confirms to me that this is from the pilot episode. i didn't go to electriccon, but i'd bet any amount of money that these outfits are the same as the ones they were wearing in the opening scene of R3x1 shown there.

i think it's really interesting that eliot says they need a way out of paris - not france, not this car chase. he doesn't say they need to lose these guys or that they need to get out of the country; apparently, whoever's chasing them is looking in paris specifically.

cool wing mirror shot of the dudes chasing them - black cars, guns, shooting, bullets bouncing off of the back of the crew's truck. oh boy. dunno about y'all, but these guys do not look like museum security to me. couple more shots of the car chase next, which i ain't posting here because quite frankly tumblr's image limit already wants me dead.

we're on a public road and france has pretty damn strict gun laws - narrows it down to law enforcement (no uniforms, no insignias, so possible but unlikely), organised crime (afaik we've never pissed off anyone in the wider paris area, but it doesn't rule it out) or private security. they're probably private security.

parker swerves, while sophie and eliot get thrown around. once again, some things never change. we get the start of a line from parker in the audio. i'll talk about it in a sec.

it's from here that, for me, this is going to imminiently all stop being straightforward. welcome to the next several thousand words of your life, entitled Lottie Bitches About Trailer Editing.

we get a better look at the guys shooting at them, now. definitely not law enforcement - but those are leather jackets and jeans rather than the nice pressed suits that RiZ and their ilk likes to put guys in. whoever this is, they're either ameteur (unlikely), organised crime (again raises the question of "who") or well trained and trying to blend in (raises questions about the firefight in the middle of a street). the team are in trouble.

but i'll also point something out - we can see from the angle here that these dudes have handguns. to quote everyone's favourite murder encyclopedia: "A handgun is unreliable over the distance from the street."

whoever these guys are, if they're trying to take out the team, they very probably weren't expecting their attempt to escalate to a car chase.

now, we see parker saying the line that started in audio a few seconds back - "This was supposed to be a quick little weekend heist." she's in the same outfit and appears to be in the same truck, so this is from the same episode, but those of you paying attention will have noticed the sudden apperance of a hardison directly behind her, and some white sheet thingies that weren't in the last shot. this isn't in the same immediate continuity as what we've just seen.

given as we see in a few secs that hardison was in the back(?) of the truck during eliot's lil fight scene, i'm imagining this line is from after eliot's done his lil fight. it's a great example of the kinds of trick edits we're about to see a lot of throughout this trailer, and if you weren't paying attention you'd think this would be one continuous scene.

next is more of the car chase. car chase is car chasing. i'm remembering the S5 and R2 trailers - speeding vehicles make for good television, apparently. makes for fluff for my post, though, and image limit. so. i'll just say that we didn't see roadworks on the last wideshot we got, so confirms that this chase is long and covering some ground. seems like a basic thing to point out, but as we've already seen with that parker line - trailer editing is deceptive. that's why i've been stating the obvious so much; the more baseline reality we can establish, the stronger a foundation we have for when the trick edits get worse later on. i told you this post would be a lot of me bitching about trailer edits.

alright, eliot awesome time now! and our next line: "Drop me off." he's still in the front of the truck right now, provided that bit of webbing we see next to him is the same bit of webbing we can see behind parker and hardison for the 'quick little weekend heist' line. so this probably - probably - comes imminently after the 'we need to get out of paris' bit earlier. i have no idea what he's lifting here - some kind of sack or cardboard box? unclear.

we hear eliot say "This won't take long." it's in VO - but probably continues on from the last line. trucks stops, cars pull up. notable that the dudes leaning out the windows with handguns are now inside the cars, assuming that this comes after that bit of the car chase, which i think it likely does. pretty reasonable to assume that the next bits are all in order.

black screen, punch dude into car door, black screen. fun trailer editing for emphasis! this goon is wearing a beanie and a similar black jacket to the other guys, though his isn't leather. given the door he's stepping out of, it's likely that he was the driver who we couldn't see in the previous shots.

BADASS CAR SLIDE. this dude is one of the ones we saw shooting earlier - and, fun fact, this was the first screen any of us saw for R3. last filmed scene; most of the show was filmed in order with the pilot first, but some of the stunt stuff takes longer so they just gave up and flew everyone out to belgrade for this bit specifically, given as the electric entertainment folks had to be there for filming The Librarians: The Next Chapter anyway. if you go looking i think christian still has a video up on his facebook with the stunt coordinator from when they wrapped this.

another black screen then, because trailer editing. gunshot sound effect but we see that eliot's fine. still on the same dude here but a few seconds later in the fight, eliot slams him into the car. dude falls, fade to black, and then we cut to eliot opening the truck door (presumably just after this fight, given how haggered he looks) and we get what's easily the funniest line in the trailer from hardison: "There's my special little guy. How was your first day at school? Did you make any friends?"

...and a facial expression from eliot that i can only describe as 'dammit hardison'.

cut back to our louvre image, now in red and surrounded by some other pictures (we can see the eiffel tower, a skyscraper that turns up later in the trailer, the nola headquarters and a river i can't quite place yet) - this red and teal blue seems to be the colour scheme for all the promo this season. text sliding of "The Team Is Back" turning into "The Scheme Team Is Back" - first time i saw this i was expecting us to go into a bunch of different team nicknames, but we don't. which makes this interesting, because we haven't ever heard that moniker for the crew. i like it, it's cute!

from here, the trailer changes slightly and we go from an almost-chronological throughplay of the pilot into an avalance of clips from the season as a whole. means my job gets a lot harder. but on the plus side, cool titlecards for everyone! this is actually the most we get to see of random miscellanious episodes, so make the most of it.

first up, sophie! blowing out some kind of insence match thing, wearing a hippie-style denim dress reminiscent of tara's outfit in the future job. doesn't exactly narrow down what the grift is, because this kind of personality will be of great use in many circumstances, but means we're for sure in for a fun ride.

next up is parker and this is where stuff gets complicated.

there's a number of things here. one, parker's sniffing money - obvious, adorable, once again some things never change. two, she's in a blue waistcoat and shirt with a red bowtie, which we'll see her and hardison in multiple times throughout this trailer, making the second distinct plotline we can kinda almost follow.

the question of when in the show this is from is up in the air - but, given as among other things that stack of bills parker's got her nose in appear to be €200 notes, i'm currently guessing it's also the premiere. we'll keep looking back for this as time goes on. with the exception of some scattered clips, there really doesn't appear to be that many episodes mixed in to this trailer. i'm reminded that the s2 of a show called The Ark, an electric entertaiment show that came out last year, mixed up basically only the first three episodes and the finale for it's trailer (with again the exception of some scattered clips). we know hardison is in the premiere, episode two (put a pin in it) and probably the finale. i'm going to keep coming back to this because it's by far the most interesting question in this trailer, and luckily also one that we'll probably get an answer for relatively soon.

nothing unusual in the next few shots.

we've just a grumpy eliot in his natural habitat of punching people in what appears to be a kitchen. like sophie's, this isn't an outfit we see elsewhere in the trailer so we can assume it's from one of the as-of-yet-inscrutable midseason episodes. the apron eliot's wearing has a fleur-de-lis on it, meaning this is either in france or nola and because of the aforementioned non-reccuring of this outfit with the information i currently have i'd say it's just a random shot from some episode down the line.

next is bree, bree, my darling bree. we do not get enough of her and harry in this trailer (explained partly by electriccon peeps telling us that the two of them aren't in at least the opening of the premiere episode). nice to see she's still got the ace sticker on her laptop that she had last season.

then harry, playing what looks to be pool or snooker in a dark room. we see later on in the trailer that the team has installed a red games table, so it's likely that like breanna's titlecard this is at the nola headquarters. i'll be honest, when i saw this i almost reflexively ticked off the "harry does a terrible accent" square of my bingo board.

it was at this point when writing this post that i hit tumblr's image limit for the first time, and realised that that was going to be a problem. last and certainly not least of the title cards come hardison - in the same silly blue waistcoat thing as parker. we're going to come back to this exact shot later with a dialogue line, so i won't say much on it now.

cut to hardison at a briefing saying "We fix things," and a reaction shot of the crew, which we can tell is a straight shot reverse shot because of sophie's shirt. hardison's line continues on in VO with: "We stop bad guys nobody stops." behind him, we can see two headlines, one that's presumably 'lawsuit to be heard in court' and another that's 'activist strikes [...] blow for local [...]'. standard briefing, with the glaring exceptions of the fact that A) hardison is basically begging here - no reason for a big speech like this unless he's asking them something extremely important and B) eliot's in an arm sling. put a pin in it, we'll come back.

the next couple of shots are a blowoff and a seemingly unrelated moment of parker and harry saluting to someone offscreen.

the bad guy getting put in a car by some cops is actually the moment in this trailer i'm the most confident on. poster in the background says rio de janeiro, which is interesting. a while back, john rogers said on social media that they did an episode on water shortages in central/south america; i'm betting that's this dude. in terms of what episode, the premiere has a credit for "rio pedestrian", but given as that seems to be solidly set in paris i don't really know. cool that my stalking of a showrunner's bluesky has for once provided some useful foresight, though.

now for parker and harry here, which seems to be disconnected from our previous shot. harry's in his regular lawyer suit, but - as many people have pointed out - parker's costume here is extremely reminiscent of her MiB look from the first contact job. even the same hair. it's a cool look. she and harry are also saluting, which just raises... so, so, so many questions. i'm open to any theories or ideas people have for this - personally i'm just praying for another top secret government agents con.

alright next up is the most solidly baffling sequence of editing in the entire goddamn trailer, according to me. i'm taking this a little bit out of order so i can explain properly.

so, wideshot, eliot and harry playing pool/snooker (seriously someone tell me how to tell the difference) on the new table. breanna's talking, i'll go into what she says in a sec when i move into talking about the con. we cut from there to harry and sophie and then to bree putting some stuff on the screen (pin. it.) and then to sophie wondering what she's going to wear.

now.

notice anything?

bing bing bing! that's right, the random sophie and harry reaction shot has harry and sophie in completely different outfits than all the surrounding shots. why? fuck you! no idea. i did say that this post would be mostly me bitching about trailer edits. see why i made a whole point about establishing baseline reality? yeah.

right, let's talk now about the stuff breanna throws up on the screen, because it's some of the most interesting shit in the trailer:

"The scum of the scum," huh? we've got location markers on five dudes here - one unknown, one in transit maked over nola, and then guys in paris, montreal and karachi. paris, makes sense. nola, makes lots of sense. montreal and karachi? we've never so much as mentioned either of those cities.

this is clearly a breifing from some episode that we don't have a whole lot of information on. the dude located in paris makes me think it's somehow connected to the pilot episode, but i couldn't tell you how.

next shot, a sign saying mumbai airport, and sophie stepping out of a car in a blue summery dress in front of an airplane hangar. given as mumbai isn't really anywhere near any of the cities the bad guys from a second ago were hanging around, i'm willing to bet that this is an entirely different episode. we do come back to it once or twice throughout the trailer, though, so keep your eyes peeled.

right. the next sequence is A) important and B) fast, so i'm going to tackle it all in one block.

we've got a wideshot of a skyscraper with what looks to be the golden gate bridge in the background (making me think this is san fransisco, though it could just be a generic bridge). from there, we zoom in through the windows to parker dancing through some red lasers before reaching a keypad and pulling her balaclava off with an "I'm in."

now. a few things.

one, we've only seen red lasers once, and we've only seen parker run a solo break-in in a balaclava once. both happened in the inside job - the lasers in archie's flashback, and the balaclava as the episode opens. obviously, those are both aesthetic things, and given as parker's talking on her earbud we know she's probably with the team here. but it for sure pings my 'this is from a parker episode' spidey senses, especially given as - with the singular exception of that very crucial flashback - all the laser tripwires we've seen in the leverage franchise so far have been blue.

(oh and so i don't forget - @independent-fics sent me an ask saying that this scene looked like it was in the nola HQ, but i honestly think that's just them using it as a filming studio. won't be the first or the last time, and the zoom in from the skyscraper sure implied this was an external con. sorry.)

right, so, we've almost reached the bit of this trailer with actual. y'know. themes. i told you we'd come back to that hardison shot i skipped over earlier!

"I don't wanna do this anymore."

"You don't wanna crime anymore?"

and just. wow. yeah. so, we're in those blue waistcoats - meaning once again that i think this is either episode one or the finale, though e2 is still also a possibility (i'll explain why later). that's the same safe parker was standing in front of for her titlecard, so i think this probably takes place a few seconds prior to the liberation of those euros from earlier.

i wish we saw hardison's response to this. we're setting up a proper big arc for parker this season, from the looks of it. the question of retiring is one hardison's answered before - he's gone on record saying he never wants to get married, could never retire. i reckon that those things might both have changed, especially if the electriccon folks are right with the proposal spec. given as we do see parker happily pull that money out not long later, whatever he says can't be that devastating. i guess we'll find out.

but, speaking of devastating...

"I don't like watching someone I care about take punches meant for me."

now. before i dig into the meaning of that - and i will, i'm trying to analyse as well as summarise here - let's just look at the facts of the scene. given the outfits and the fact they're in headquarters, i think this is pretty soon after hardison's breifing that we saw earlier. because it's thus also probably the start of an episode (or possibly the end of the premiere?) that again narrows us down to pilot, e2 (THE PIN IS THERE I WILL GET TO IT I PROMISE) or finale. i'm saying e2 at this point, tentatively. depends on if we see eliot being injured or not.

oki-dokey, time for the analysis. i've had quite lengthy conversations about this with both @ghostlyarchaeologist and @aardvaark (and plagurised said conversations heavily in this section), and we're all kinda coming to the conclusion that... well, yeah. let's look at it from eliot's side: he didn't expect to live this long. no-one expected him to live this long.

i'm remembering the drop in sophie's face after the big tearful til my dying day thing in long goodbye. she knows eliot's gonna die for them. eliot knows it too. he's okay with that, he's not happy with it but it's as good an ending as he can hope for. and now we're over ten years later and "I'm afraid there's no such thing as a fair fight anymore." no-one can take him out. eliot knows how good he is but the truth is that he's goooood. and he's lucky, and he's smart, and he's surrounded by loved ones. he could grow old. this doesn't have to end on the wrong side of a bullet or a punch or a knife.

but in order for that to happen, he needs to let himself rest. which he won't, because there's always more to do. maria's right - he thinks that as long as there are bad people doing bad things, he doesn't deserve to be happy. maybe that's not how he consciously would explain it, but it's sure the rulset he's been living off for the last while, since we ticked over some imaginary expiration date. and it sucks, even if he's not really wholly in the wrong.

you noticed now that we're briefly cutting back to the first fight scene we saw, with eliot against the goons in paris and an unfun looking punch in the gut. if this brief montage is intending to show causality, then it again implies that this hardison scene is at the end of e1 or sometime in e2, especially given the following scene being our blue waistcoats again, and my current bet that those are premiere outfits. for something more fun, have hardison failing a vulcan nerve pinch:

i love the incredulous look on the guy's face. not how you do it, hardison! we can see parker breaking into a safe in the background here (or possibly breaking out of the room they're in?) and luckily for our overenthusiastic trekkie, eliot swoops in once hardison's down.

note: the arm eliot's using here is the one that doesn't end up in a sling. if my guesses are right about the ordering of all this and this is e1 with hardison's breifing being end of e1 or the beginning of e2, then this makes sense with eliot's arm injured in a preceeding fight. although, again, with nothing solid to tie the blue waistcoat continuity to any other scenes, we can't know for sure.

"Seriously dude, you try the Vulcan Spock thing again?"

"It's gon' work one of these days."

(not if you do it like you just did, it won't.)

and with that, i'm going to finish off part one here - there's a minute left of the trailer but i'm a little bit sick of dodging around tumblr's image limit! we've still got a lot of ground to cover, including a truly ridiculous number of parker awesome moments and a few returns to a lot of stuff we've already covered so far (i promise i will take out all those imaginary pins).

endless thankyous to everyone who chipped in with help and theories and rubber ducking and more than a few sanity checks - @lindseymcdonaldseyelashes also deserves a mention because any time i'm citing electriccon i owe my info to her. part two can be found here. i've been lottie, my main is @the-tomorrow-road, and you can follow me here for endless streams of leverage crazy. the con is on!

[stevebattle]

MITEE 7 (1994) by David Otten and Tony Caloggero, MIT. MITEE Mouse 7 won the 15th All Japan Micromouse Competition in 1994, with a time of 11.81 seconds. It's a four wheeled mouse with DC motors. MITEE 7 also took part in Techno Games in 2002. "In its Heat it fought against returnee Dash 2A. Mitee Mouse 7 raced through the maze at incredible smooth speeds. It slipped through corners and even avoided twisting and turn, opting to go diagonally ahead. The robot sped through to the centre at a World Record time of 9:65 seconds." – Techno Games Wiki.

"MITEE 7 is another of Dave Otten's successful micromouse designs in collaboration with Tony Caloggero. This is a four wheel drive, four wheel steering mouse. While mechanically, and computationally, more complex than two wheel machines, there are a couple of significant advantages to a four wheel mouse. Chief of these is in going quickly. As you accelerate a mouse, weight is naturally transferred to the rear of the vehicle. If you only have two driving wheels as in a typical wheelchair design, this will mean reduced downforce on those wheels and a reduction in the possible acceleration you can achieve. With four wheels working together, they all get to do some work whatever the weight distribution. Each motor need only have ½ the torque needed in a two-wheel mouse and can be correspondingly smaller. There are eight DC motors to look after in this mouse - one each todrive the four wheels and one each to steer them. Sensing is with the same PSD based side-looking sensors that have been used in other MITEE mice. Encoders and gear quadrants form part of a digital servo loop for steering. The green and yellow wires passing down through the gears provide power to the drive motors." – Pete Harrison.

The first video is an excerpt from "UK Micromouse 1998" showing MITEE 7 on a training run, while the second snippet is a full-speed race to the centre (from the same source).

[ronin-kendo]

Kendo ran over to the nearby pond, hastily scribbling down a note and sending it into the water. It vanished moments later, but his attention was caught from a flare from the mountains… near Warrior's Watch.

He froze. He had no proof, but there was a feeling deep in his gut. Daigo was there, and he was planning something.

He dug around in his pockets until he fished out a small communicator he had been given. Pressing and holding it, he sent out a distress signal, code red, to the Reality Warriors.

Naturally, Jones answered back in moments.

“Kendo, what's up? We just noticed a massive surge in mystical energy.”

“Yes,” He replied, breathlessly. “It's my brother. He's moved from the Meadows-- he's up near Warrior's Watch. Commander, the Oni are massing, something very bad is going on and my brother is caught in the middle of it.”

He heard back almost instantly.

“Roger that. Sensors indicate we can't bring the Blimp in too close-- some sort of interference field. But we’ll be there as quickly as we can. Meet us at wherever the beam is coming from.”

“Understood.”

Kendo shoved the communicator back into his pocket and ran back to Charlotte. “That beam of light! It--”

“Yeah, I saw!” Charlotte cast her eyes around at the Oni beginning to return and sighed. “Go. I'll cover your exit.”

“Are you certain? I do not wish to leave you by yourself!”

Charlotte chuckled. “I've been by myself for the past four years, pretty boy. I'll manage. Now go.”

Kendo cast one last look at her, then ran for his motorcycle.

Charlotte watched him speed off, then looked back at the Oni, grinning darkly. “Well come on, then! I've been doing this for the past hour and haven't found a suitable partner! Any one of you strong enough to give me a good dance?”

Jones handed over the control docket to Venge. “This will give you access to the full suite of instruments at our disposal. You're eye in the sky on this one, ‘kay?”

Venge frowned. “I should be down there, with you guys.”

Jones shook his head. “No. You're still recovering from your last tussle with some Oni, and there's hundreds converging on that mountain. Besides, we need you to make sure we have eyes on the situation from above.”

Venge made to protest, but quieted when Evie touched his arm.

“We’ll be ok, and we’ll come back, I promise.” She said, squeezing his arm. “You need to stay here to make sure we have a home to come back to.”

“Are we doing this, or what?” Skull complained loudly, Elvira already revved up and ready.

Venge sighed. “Ok. Ok, I can do this. You guys get back safe.”

Jones nodded, getting onto his motorcycle. “You too.”

Evie got on behind him, slipping her arms around his waist.

Jones looked back up at Venge. “One more thing: Get Don on comms. If we need backup, and I'm certain we will, he’ll want to know. I'll never hear the end of it if he misses this fight.”

Venge nodded, and Skull revved in neutral impatiently. Jones checked his gear, made sure Evie was firmly gripping, then activated his bike. The two vehicles launched out of the Blimp’s cargo bay, and raced down towards the ground below.

Kendo raced down the paths, cutting every corner he could on his way over. The train was incoming, but he made a well timed leap and cleared it, continuing along the high road. Passing near the cliff by the outpost, he was shocked to see Minato standing by the edge. Instead of looking at the beam, however, he was staring down the ravine, where the dust from vehicles was quickly approaching.

As he heard Kendo’s bike, he flinched slightly, but did not take his eyes off the road. “You and your friends are unaware of what you're doing. What it is that’s at stake.”

Kendo paused, looking at him. “As of late, I seem to have made a habit of arriving at places you have been, shortly after you have been there.. Even heard tell that you were avoiding me. Odd, that the same does not seem to apply to my brother.”

Minato turned again, stiffly. “Your brother is another matter entirely from you.”

“He does not recognize you, for one.” Kendo challenged.

Minato blinked again, his hand closed around his sword. “He is doing what both of us cannot. He is going to save your sister.”

He looked down. “No matter what it takes.”

Kendo growled. “I have no idea the dalliances you have been engaging in with my brother, but you of all people should know the imperfection of his methods. He dabbles in dangerous magicks! Any attempt to save my sister with such methods may doom us all! Besides which, you are aware, are you not, that he is the reason for her current trapped state!?”

Minato did not answer.

“They're getting closer.” He noted. “But they will not reach him in time.”

Kendo was about to ask what he meant, when Minato closed his fist around a small device. Suddenly, an explosion shook the cliff nearby, sending rocks tumbling down by the approaching vehicles. And before Kendo could further press as to what Minato thought he was doing, the slayer had leapt down the cliff, ready to face-- and presumably stall-- the trio of Reality Warriors.

Kendo was torn between helping them and continuing along the path. But the beam flared again, and he tightly shut his eyes, turning back to the path ahead, towards an outcropping where a large portal glowed…

Jones brought the motorcycle to a halt right before the rock slide hit. Skull didn't seem so lucky, however, as the slide managed to completely smash through the front portion of Elvira.

As Jones considered how to get up, a slayer in a black jacket slid down the cliff face and faced them, sword drawn.

“You shall not pass.” He said in a voice that sounded much smaller than he was. “You don't know what is happening. You cannot understand.”

Jones sighed. There was no other way up, and the kid had effectively blocked off the only path. “Listen, I don't know what you're trying to do here, but maybe you don't understand. The readings we were getting indicate that that portal is very dangerous. I don't know what your friend is planning, but I highly doubt it will end well.”

“He's not my friend…” the Slayer murmured.

“Can I just shoot him?” Evie asked. Her pistols were pointing out from Jones’ sides. “He's got a face that makes me want to shoot him.”

Before she could, Elvira shook slightly as her door opened, revealing an incredibly dusty-- and irate-- Skull Trooper.

“THAT $@€!#% CRUSHED MY GIRL!” He yelled.

“Your car will be fine by the end of next loop.” Minato said evenly.

“BUT YOU WON'T BE!!!” Skull launched at him, only for Hakaru to draw his second sword and neatly dismember him.

“Now please stay back, or I'll be forced to AAAAARGH!” Hakaru yelped in pain as Skull Trooper bit his leg, hard. Hakaru shook him off, only for Jones’ shield to ricochet into one of his swords, knocking it away. He got the concentration to block Evie’s first few shots, jumped to dodge Skull again, and went to disarm Evie, but Jones knocked him off balance.

Hakaru stepped back gingerly. That leg definitely stung. “I do not wish to harm you, but I will if I must.”

“And we don't want to kill you.” Jones said.

“SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!!”

Jones tuned out Skull’s protests. Just then, a crackle came over the earpiece.

“Hey Commander, there's more Oni massing near the mountain.” Venge informed him. “A lot of them. They'll be on you soon.”

Jones sighed, but he noticed the telltale red of Kendo’s bike on the edge of the outcrop where the portal was. He turned to look at Hakaru.

“Listen, you may not want to let us through. But if you insist on fighting us, there's a ton of Oni on the way that will gladly make their way up. Personally, I like our chances better if we defend from that outcropping, rather than down here. Then we can decide for ourselves whether or not to continue.”

Hakaru considered this, and looked at the army that was beginning to become visible across the plain. Shoulders shaking, he sheathed his sword.

“Follow me, then. I know another path.”

He went up on foot, Jones and Evie following after. A little behind, Skull grumbled about “rotten car smashers who didn't even taste good” while getting his legs back under him to follow them.

Kendo arrived at the portal and leapt off his bike. Daigo was there, in fact. He was meditating deeply, several simple masks floating in circles in front of him. The portal glowed brightly, Jade's face illuminated in its depths.

“Brother!” Kendo shouted. “What are you doing!?”

Daigo opened his eyes, and turned his head to see Kendo. “What I should have done from the beginning. The Oni betrayed me, brother, and so now there is no holding back.”

Kendo clenched his fist. “I warned you they were not to be trusted!”

Daigo frowned. “And I warned you not to provoke them. Even now, Jade might have been safe from them!”

“She is UNSAFE because of the mask you made for her!”

“MY MASK IS THE ONLY--” Daigo took a deep breath and turned back to the portal. “My mask. Is the only way to save her now. You cannot. No one can. Only me.”

Kendo shook his head. “No. Please, do not do this!”

Daigo smiled, and extended his cursed hand. Golden lines burst from it, extending onto the masks, which spun faster and faster… until they merged, all into one brilliant white mask, with cracks of gold covering it entirely.

The energy from the transformation burst forth, sending Kendo flying backwards. He groaned, getting to his knees, just in time to see Daigo reaching for it.

“DAI! NO!” He screamed, but it was too late.

Daigo affixed the mask to his face, and another flash of power burst forth. The curse spread down, down to his other hand, and with darkened claws outstretched, Daigo channeled his new power into the portal. It flared, and to Kendo’s amazement, Jade's face vanished from the surface, replaced with Jade herself, being tugged out of the portal slowly but surely by Daigo’s abilities.

But it was not to last.

Jade was snapped back inside, and in her place suddenly stood Shogun X, in all his might. He swiftly grabbed Daigo by the head and lifted him into the air.

“No!”

Minato’s voice came from a little down the path, and he raced forward, sword drawn in perfect form… until the leg Skull Trooper had bitten failed him, and he fell flatly, hitting his face hard.

Jones’ shield smacked into Shogun X’s head, followed by a hail of bullets from Evie’s duelies. Shogun X dropped Daigo. But once he did so, he raised his hand, and summoned a power so dark Kendo could feel it down to his soul. But perhaps… that was because ghostly tendrils extended from it, piercing his body, as well as the bodies of all present.

Kendo felt as though he was dying, the magic leeching at his very lifeforce. His vision grew darker, darker, darker…

And then it stopped. There stood Daigo, with the blades Kendo had forged not days before. And there was Shogun X, arm suddenly bleeding.

“I told you…” Daigo said. “I started this. And now I end it.”

And there was a sudden force and flash of light. And now they faced each other, Daigo and the Shogun… each the size of a mountain, and each prepared for combat. They ran at each other… and the clash that followed would surely be written down in song, if Daigo managed to win the day…

Megalo Don had been attempting to relax on the Leviathan, and was just getting into a good book, when Scuttlebutt wandered up to him. This wouldn't have been too unusual, if it wasn't for the fact that the small creature hopped onto his lap, pushed down the book, looked him dead in the eye, and babbled at him in a way that felt… uncomfortably coherent.

“qybnwnbrqwtmzbcpiracffzwckybhxwdndhqkwnfobqbqybkizkdiq.” It warbled.

Don wasn't certain what that meant, but coincidentally, the emergency frequency on his Reality Warriors ID went off.

He answered it, and Vengeance Jones' voice came through.

“Hey Don, we've got trouble in the South East by Warrior's Watch.” He said. “Big trouble. Commander wants you on comms.”

Don grumbled slightly. He had just been getting into the book, but APPARENTLY duty called right that moment. “Very well. Patch me in.”

While Vengeance did so, Don got himself into some better gear and went up onto the bridge, signalling for Scarr to join him.

A few minutes later, Jones crackled over the comm.

“Commander. I heard there was an urgent emergency?” Don asked. Before he got his answer, though, a sharp pain shot through his chest. This wasn't a usual pain, though. It wasn't physical, and it went past all of his tolerances and defenses.

That wasn't the worst part. He could see that whatever just happened, had happened to Scarr, and Rust, and all of the other Wastelanders in eyesight. It was over in moments, but he suddenly found himself very, very angry.

“I assume that was it?” He growled into the comm.

“Ugh, yes.” Jones said. He sounded like he had been affected too. Did that mean this was spread all over the island? “But I don't think that's even the worst part.”

Don wanted to ask him to explain himself, but that's when two giant figures appeared, standing across the island. The despicable Daigo, and the Oni known as Shogun X.

Suffice to say, Don was now aware of the situation.

The two figures fought, their clash sending shockwaves across the island and over the water. Unfortunately, Shogun X was clearly the superior fighter, and Daigo was only barely holding on.

Don cursed himself for thinking that he was almost rooting for Daigo.

“Don.” Jones' voice came through, still breathing a bit heavily. “Are the guns on the Leviathan operational?”

“Of course.” It was a stupid question.

“Can you fire on Shogun X? We need Daigo to win.”

Now he was considering cursing Jones for rooting for Daigo. That said, he could understand why he was wanting that.

“... Very well. ACTIVATE THE RAILGUNS!” He shouted. Wastelanders got to their feet and began moving. “AIM FOR THE GIANT UGLY BASTARD.”

He paused. “The one wearing the stupid red hat.”

The heavy weaponry on the front deck whirred to life, and then slowly spun to face Shogun X.

Shogun X had kicked Daigo down, and held up his hand. Some dark miasma swirled in his palm, and suddenly, Don and everyone else were knocked off their feet from the pain.

But Don was not some weakling who was going to let a bit of chest pain take him down. He lived through that every day!

HOW DARE THIS SPINELESS CREATURE ATTEMPT TO BRING HIM DOWN LIKE SOME COWARD.

He roared, and got to his feet. The button to launch was inches away, but it felt like miles. With another roar of effort, he slammed his fist down on it.

The Leviathan fired… and scored a direct hit. Shogun X staggered, and lost concentration, and that was just the opening Daigo needed.

Kendo got to his hands and knees, watching the battle unfold. After the Oni stumbled, Daigo got back up, struck once, struck twice--

And then Shogun X flipped him fully onto his back, before dashing straight through him… scoring a direct hit. And with a mightly grab, lifted him by the mask once more, gathering the energies for a final killing blow--

Daigo groaned in effort, and fused his daggers into a single blade. With it, he sliced clean through Shogun X’s arm. The demon cried out in pain, before the energies of the portal rebounded back upon it, and it began to be sucked right back through the way it came.

Daigo stood, triumphant… before there was another flash of light, dragging him through it as well.

And when the smoke cleared, there was silence. No clash of blades… no cries of Oni, either. Just Jade, sitting in front of the portal looking dazed, and a splash of gold across the mountainside.

Kendo scrambled to his feet, and ran over to her.

“Jade!? JADE! You're alright, you're alive!” He shouted.

She stood up, shakily, and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah I'm ok. Thanks to Daigo…”

“What happened!?”

She shook her head. “It… it was awful. They tried to break me, tried to make me one of them. But I resisted. And now our brother has taken my place… and broke the curse.”

Kendo blinked. “What… what does that mean?”

“This is the only active portal now.” She said, laying a hand on it. “The others will close soon. Daigo saved me, and he ended the Oni threat. They won't be able to get through to our world anymore.”

Kendo blinked. “But… now he's in there. Alone. We have to help him!”

“Unfortunately, the only one who could help him is in there, now.”

She looked up and Kendo. “Kendo… he was the only one who could've done this. He may not have done the right thing, but by ending this… he's a hero.”

A… hero?

Kendo took a step back. She was right. Daigo, the man who had exploited the spirits of the land for his own gain, had tortured countless innocents, and had spent the past few months attempting to bargain with the Oni… he had ended the threat.

He had… saved their family’s honor.

And he, Kendo, had done… what?

“Perhaps it is because he decided to actually go and be a hero instead of simply chasing the tales of them.”

Kendo froze, and looked at his sister. “What… what do you mean?”

She shrugged. “I mean, sure, you're smart enough to know to not go into the Oni Realm by yourself. But still, Daigo managed to do it. And I saw you trying to stop him.”

She frowned. “What… exactly have you been doing these past few months?”

Kendo’s mouth dried up. “I have been… seeking a way to save you…”

“Perhaps if you had worked together with him, you both could have come to this conclusion much sooner.” She sighed. “You can be really black and white sometimes, you know.”

She stood and began pacing around the edge of the portal. “I've got some things to meditate on. Dark days are coming, and what I saw... it may be the key."

She paused, shooting a glance over her shoulder. "See you back at home?”

Jade walked away, leaving Kendo speechless, staring at where Daigo had been just moments ago.

She… she meant the shop.

She didn't know.

She didn't know that the shop hadn't been his home for some time, now.

And based on what she had just said…

Kendo had a suddenly sinking feeling that it was to remain that way into the foreseeable future.

[mariacallous]

Sweden, Norway, and Lithuania will team up to buy hundreds of soon-to-be-manufactured CV90 combat vehicles, Sweden’s prime minister announced late last month. Economies of scale matter in the military—but these kinds of deals are very difficult to execute, which is why they’re usually very rare. The three Nordic-Baltic nations may be about to set a new standard.

“The joint procurement will speed up the delivery, reduce the cost, and benefit our defense industrial links,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden said on April 22. “With the CV90 [operating] in almost all Nordic and Baltic states, we can also improve our interoperability and our security of supply,” he added.

The Swedish-made infantry fighting vehicle has long been popular among European armies: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine use it. It’s easy to see why: The CV90, which was developed for the Swedish military and hit the market in the 1990s, can perform many of the functions of a main battle tank (including taking on enemy tanks), but it’s smaller, more mobile, and more versatile.

Just last December, Denmark ordered 115 CV90s from BAE Systems Hagglunds (which manufactures them in Sweden), while the Swedish Armed Forces ordered 50. Two years ago, the Czech ordered nearly 250, and a few months before that, Slovakia bought more than 150.

And now there’s the planned Nordic-Baltic mass order. Finland initially expressed interest in the plan but later explained that it won’t participate in the joint procurement, instead presumably opting to make a separate one, but that still leaves three countries willing to attempt one of defense procurement’s most challenging moves. According to Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas, it will involve some 1,000 CV90s.

Usually, the path of joint procurement is one of thorns, tears, delays, hurt feelings, and sometimes failure. In the 1980s, for example, several European nations decided to jointly order A400M transport planes, but agreeing on the details proved so difficult that the orders were not placed until the early 2000s; delivery of the planes began in the 2010s.

The countries participating in a joint NH90 helicopter order around the same time added so many individual specifications that “[i]n the end, there were 20 different versions. It was not a joint project anymore,” Hilmar Linnenkamp, a former deputy director of the European Defence Agency, told me for a piece about the curse of joint procurement that was published in Foreign Policy nine years ago.

Even in the friendly and collaborative Nordic-Baltic region, the process has produced a litany of failures in the past. The “Archer” artillery program “was initially a Swedish-Norwegian project, but the Norwegians left it in a pretty untidy fashion, which meant that Sweden had to buy those Archers, too,” recalled retired Rear Adm. Thomas Engevall, who worked until 2022 as the deputy national armaments director at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. “And Sweden also did a similar thing to Finland around 2007-2008, when cuts to the defense budget meant we had to abandon a joint torpedo, mine, and UW [underwater] sensor project with them,” he added. “It took the Finns several years to get over it.”

Project Viking, which was launched in the 1990s and involved Sweden, Norway, and Denmark jointly procuring submarines, had an even more ignominious end.

“At first it went well—then Denmark decided it didn’t need submarines after all, and then the Norwegians left, so the project came to naught,” Engevall told me.

It’s not the goodwill that has been lacking. “Countries have their own political and strategic priorities,” said Robert Limmergard, the director-general Sweden’s defense industry association, SOFF. “On top of that, there are invisible hurdles, including the fact that some governments prefer giving business to companies in their countries and may even own those companies.”

Then there’s the question of which country should do what, because all countries are keen that at least part of the manufacturing be handed to firms at home. “Governments usually feel they need to consider their domestic defense industry, so they’ll say, ‘if you do this, we do that,’” Engevall said. “That’s often inefficient and causes delays.”

Even more importantly, Limmergard pointed out, different countries’ ministries have different regulations, budget cycles, procedures, approvals processes, military requirements, and levels of ambition. Countries have squabbled over everything from vessel color to tanks’ leg space (an important detail if you’re Dutch, who are the tallest people in the world on average).

But these are no longer the comparatively peaceful times of a decade ago. Governments faced with the immediate threat of Russia no longer have the luxury of insisting on a transport plane, helicopter, or infantry fighting vehicle that is perfectly suited to their preferences. Things must go quickly, and given the threats on the horizon, governments also need maximum bang for their defense buck.

That makes governments more likely to buy more equipment off the shelf rather than commissioning a new version.

“Joint procurement of off-the-shelf equipment is much easier, and that’s what the new CV90 order is,” Engevall said. “The differences between what the countries need are very small, so joint procurement is simply a matter of buying many items of the same product.”

Kristersson had made much the same point. “Exactly how it will develop, it’s too early to tell, but I think there is a very good reason for this collaboration. We have too many platforms around Europe. We have too few countries collaborating in terms of procurement and standardization and things like that. So this is a good example that could be a showcase for other procurements as well,” he said during a visit to Lithuania.

And Lithuania is keen to point out that it, too, will benefit from the massive order. “Lithuania will receive about a hundred units, but we also expect Lithuanian businesses to participate in the production of the full batch,” Paluckas said after meeting with Kristersson.

Western armed forces will, of course, need to continue to work with the defense industry to develop tomorrow’s platforms and software—and everything in between. But now that things must proceed expeditiously, Sweden, Norway, and Lithuania are setting a benchmark with their straightforward CV90 order.

“These types of orders will increase dramatically,” Engevall said. “We just don’t have time to wait 10-15 years for a new product. And things are developing so quickly now that if you wait a decade for a new product, it may well be obsolete by the time you take possession of it.”

This trend has allowed new defense manufacturing players to emerge: Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than three years ago, Ukrainian firms have been pioneering defense innovation on the go.

The question is which countries will team up next—and nice guys finish first. The governments that have already shown they can work together with minimal friction are likely to be snapped up first. Even after this deal, Sweden, Norway, and Lithuania may also have a slot or two left on their dance cards.

[ghostlyglimmer]

Unlikely Roads Chapter 2: Ghosts on Their Tail

Summary:

Danny and his rival, Wes Weston, join forces to escape the GIW. On a tense road trip, they uncover personal truths and forge an unexpected bond while battling both the GIW and their own conflicts.

The motorcycle sputtered as they sped through the darkened streets of Amity Park. Danny kept glancing over his shoulder, scanning the shadows for any sign of the GIW. The quiet hum of the night felt too still, too unnatural, as if the calm itself was holding its breath, waiting for something to go wrong.

“How long until they—” Danny started..

“There!” Wes cut him off, his voice sharp. He pointed ahead at the road just as the faint glimmer of headlights appeared in the distance, followed by the unmistakable silhouette of a black van. The Ghost Investigation Ward had found them.

“Go faster!” Danny shouted, gripping the back of the seat tighter.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Wes snapped back, twisting the throttle as hard as it would go. The bike roared—well, more like it coughed—but it picked up speed, weaving between the streets as the van behind them surged closer.

Danny’s heart pounded as the van’s sleek, high-tech frame came into clearer view. The GIW wasn’t playing around. Their vehicle was far more advanced than Wes’s rustbucket bike, and it was gaining on them fast.

As if to prove the point, a sudden hum filled the air, followed by a flash of light. The van had deployed a drone, its small frame zipping toward them with alarming speed.

"Great, they've got toys," Danny muttered.

The drone flew overhead, scanning the street below with red, glowing sensors. Danny knew they couldn’t risk being seen, not with cameras everywhere. If his ghost powers showed up on any footage, it’d only make things worse.

“I’ll handle it,” Danny said, already phasing his body into Phantom mode. Wes glanced over his shoulder, eyes widening.

“Wait—don’t you dare—”

But Danny ignored him. His white hair flared into view as he shifted, floating just above the motorcycle. He reached out with one hand, concentrating hard as green energy crackled in his palm. A quick burst of ecto-energy shot toward the drone, scrambling its circuits. The thing fizzled out mid-air and crashed to the ground with a satisfying clunk.

"Got it," Danny said, transforming back before any security cameras could catch the sight.

“Are you insane?” Wes yelled. “They have cameras everywhere! If they catch you using your powers—"

“They’re not catching anything,” Danny snapped. “I took out the drone, didn’t I?”

“Not the point!”

As they rounded another corner, the van swerved sharply behind them, coming dangerously close. Danny cursed under his breath. He wasn’t sure how much longer Wes could keep the bike ahead of the GiW’s gear.

The van lurched forward again, and the back doors swung open. Two agents, clad in their signature white-and-black uniforms, stepped out, hoisting some kind of weapon that looked like a souped-up net launcher.

“They’ve got something,” Danny said, tension running through his voice.

“No kidding!” Wes yelled, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Do something, Phantom! That’s your thing, right?”

Danny scowled. “I am doing something.” He shifted into ghost form again, barely visible in the moonlight. With a quick surge of power, he raised a wall of ectoplasmic energy behind them. The net launcher fired, but the net bounced off harmlessly, the agents cursing in frustration.

“Nice try!” Danny called back.

The wall of energy collapsed just as quickly as it formed, and Danny phased back onto the bike. Wes swerved them into a side street, trying to lose the van on the narrower roads. But the GiW was relentless, their high-tech vehicle navigating the tight turns with ease.

“They’re not giving up,” Wes muttered, breathless. “We’re screwed.”

“We’re not screwed,” Danny said, though he wasn’t entirely sure of that. “We just need to get out of town. They’ll have to back off eventually.”

“Out of town? On this thing?” Wes threw a glance at the sputtering bike beneath them. “We won’t make it five miles before it falls apart.”

“We’ll figure it out!” Danny said, though frustration leaked into his tone. They were running out of time, and options.

A sharp turn later, the van was still close behind, but Danny spotted something—an overpass up ahead, leading to a freeway. It was risky, but if they could lose the GiW there, they might stand a chance of escaping.

“Head for the overpass,” Danny instructed.

Wes didn’t argue this time. He veered onto the ramp, the bike straining under the effort but holding together for now. The van followed, but the narrow incline worked to their advantage. It slowed down just enough for Danny to get an idea.

“Hold on,” Danny said, his eyes narrowing in focus. He phased out of his seat again, flying above the bike as the overpass loomed ahead. With a deep breath, he summoned as much energy as he could muster and let loose a pulse of ectoplasmic force. It shot out like a shockwave, sending debris and rubble from the overpass onto the road below.

The van skidded, its tires screeching as it was forced to stop, unable to navigate the sudden mess. The agents inside shouted in frustration as they were blocked by the debris.

“Ha! Got ‘em,” Danny said, flashing back into his human form just as Wes pulled onto the freeway.

For the first time in what felt like forever, the sound of the GIW’s pursuit faded into the distance. The only noise now was the hum of the bike’s struggling engine and the wind whipping past their faces.

They were free. For now.

But the silence that settled between them was heavy, filled with all the words they hadn’t had time to exchange during the chase. Wes finally pulled into a deserted rest stop on the outskirts of town and killed the engine. The bike gave a pitiful cough before falling silent.

“Okay,” Wes said, sliding off the seat, his voice tight with anger. “What the hell was that?”

Danny climbed off after him, stretching his legs. “I saved our lives. You’re welcome.”

Wes turned on him, his face red with frustration. “Saved our lives? You made this mess in the first place!”

“What are you talking about?” Danny shot back. “I didn’t send the GiW after you. That’s all on you for poking around where you shouldn’t have.”

“I was trying to expose you! To warn people about the real threat! Maybe if you’d been a little more careful with your secret, we wouldn’t be running for our lives right now!”

Danny stepped closer, the anger rising in his chest. “Oh, so it’s my fault the GIW is out there torturing people? You should’ve listened to me about them months ago!”

“I didn’t know it would go this far!” Wes yelled. “I didn’t know they’d come after me like this. But you did, didn’t you? You knew they were capable of this!”

Danny paused, gritting his teeth. Wes wasn’t wrong. He’d always known the GiW was dangerous, more than anyone gave them credit for. But hearing it from Wes stung in a way he hadn’t expected.

“We’re not going to get anywhere blaming each other,” Danny finally muttered, running a hand through his hair. “We need a plan.”

Wes crossed his arms, still fuming but clearly exhausted. “Fine. Plan. What’s your genius idea, Phantom?”

Danny let out a slow breath. “You said your uncle’s place, right? Florida or Alaska?”

“Yeah,” Wes said. “Both are pretty far. But we don’t have a choice. The GiW won’t stop hunting us down unless we get far enough away. And fast.”

Danny frowned. “Florida’s closer, but it’s still a long ride on this junk pile. We could be sitting ducks.”

“So you’d rather Alaska? You know how cold it is up there? And I doubt you have any winter clothes packed.”

Danny shook his head, frustrated. Neither option was great, and with the GIW tailing them, they didn’t have time to waste.

“We don’t have much time,” Danny muttered. “But we’ll have to pick one.”

Wes stared at him, waiting. Danny stared back. It was the last thing either of them wanted, but for now, they were stuck together.

[sonicasura]

Another surge of AllSpark energy suddenly ignited on the Repair Crew’s base’s sensors and the Steelhaven’s detection systems. The energy signature was fast moving so Ultra Magnus employed himself and Jazz to investigate. Which led to quite the mutual confusion as the two academy dropouts were suddenly being contacted by the third elite guard member.

He expressed the need for urgency and secrecy.

Also, that neither of them laughed at him…

.

.

.

Sentinel having been reduced to just his helm only magnified the odd proportions of his chin!

“You promised you wouldn’t laugh, ‘Lita! Optimus!”

——————————————

That organic young Optimus’ team took care of helpfully informed him on how to navigate the organic-scale city. Ultra Magnus never thought he would meet a friendly organic, but the universe continued to surprise him. Hopefully—the nature of these surprises would remain beneficial. He had seen far too many deceptions in his long function as the Magnus.

“How many Decepticons do you think could station themselves on this planet and remain covert, Ultra Magnus?” Jazz questioned over the comms taking the lead in driving to where this energy signature should pass by soon.

The Autobot and Cybertron leader let silence drag on whilst he thought upon inquiry. “According to young Prime’s intel, there are at least three confirmed Decepticons left.” A small taskforce compared to the legions of followers Megatron amassed in the war. “They could use this planet as a stronghold in the future for a retaliation attack. Megatron may have been our sworn enemy, but he wouldn’t have left his faction without a contingency.”

Grim prospects either way truly.

Even if the original reason for coming to Earth was defunct, there were still bound to be materials the enemy could utilize. Many Autobots would balk at being stationed on an organic planet. It would make the perfect cover.

“So between three to thousands?” The cyber ninja’s tone was attempting to be light, but he was largely tense over such vast numbers. Whatever Magnus was about to say next was interrupted by a speeding vehicle shooting out of a tunnel. The Elite Guard duo acted quickly driving onto the means of transport. If only they knew, this was all according to a Seeker’s plan.

.

.

.

When planning for an ambush, don’t expect AllSpark energy to be reliable. The previously defunct Fully Automated Rapid Transport System ended up spawning. Starscream had to flee the scene weighed by five various emotionally overcharged Seeker sparklings!

Meanwhile, the Autobots were set down by a giant mech only for the mech to split into three rather confused bots. Railspike announced himself as the leader of the new unit.

Team Bullet Train.

It was a very confusing night all around.

————————————

Ultra Magnus was too wrapped up in the logistics of housing the newly spawned mechs to notice the recent weld marks on Sentinel.

Railspike, Rapid Run, and Midnight Express were effectively cold constructed mechs with distinctly protoform like personalities. The three knew nothing outside their alt modes in addition to being able to form Rail Racer.

Lovely.

—ROB’d Anon.

Apparently, a version of Astrotrain already exists in TFA. So the Autobots get Team Bullet Train instead—Starscream’s five clones still appear as Sparklings. Yeah, he’s having “fun”.

Everybot gets a kid to deal with, lol! This is gonna be fun.

[asurastro]

♫

____

SUNDAY

Kaiju across the tropical Megafauna Island were riled up into a frenzy.

"SHAA!"

Racing over the seas, Rex arrived and entered his asura mode on the shores. Dragged down by snapping shellfish, cannonballed by the landlocked walkers, and divebombed by lords of the sky. Until finally, Rex found and destroyed the mysterious device causing the uproar-- perhaps planted by some mad scientist or a UFO tractor beam earlier. Something to watch out for.

____

MONDAY

*PTANG!*

It was a corner store robbery. A fleece hoodie-clad Rex was fresh from work and trying to stock up on a few odds and ends back at his apartment. A bullet from the gun of a would-be robber ricocheted off of the cosmic contender-- or it would have, had he not caught it in mid-air.

"... Go. Never speak of this again."

The two scrambled out the backdoor with a few stolen things. Disappearing as heavy rain and fog covered their exit. Rex was gone not long after that himself. Not a single badge in sight, until hours after the fact.

____

TUESDAY

The peerless Sordakran battlefleet was approaching a new star system. Volunteer galactic peacekeepers of varying origin and the more uniform psionics that patrolled the greater cosmos were on their way to halt the expansion. Until then, one would have to hold the line.

*KA-THRAAAAM!!*

One moment, Rex was being targeted by long-range sensors. The next, he shot off in a burst of hyper-speed. Smashing into deflector force-fields meant to stave off warheads with megaton yields, and shearing his way through the innermost workings of the cruiser, with the intent to do the same to others. At least, if not for starfighter squadrons and enemy superbeings that could also stand the hard vacuum...

____

WEDNESDAY

Back to Earth. Rex had been clearing out wreckage on a series of islands, following a devastating typhoon. Retrieving survivors, and carrying freight containers full of relief supplies out from boats midway to their destination, speeding up the pace at which they were received and distributed.

He was late in returning home, having remained a while longer to route off any stray kaiju, as well as military forces trying to set-up shop on the pretense of lending manpower to rebuilding efforts.

____

THURSDAY

An unopened beer was lobbed at Rex's head while he was taking a walk. Incoherent howling and laughter followed, sputtering out half-insults and other microaggressions. Such as incorrectly naming his planet of heritage, guessing at 'secret' non-human appendages and the disgust they might cause friends and lovers. Stepping to these irritants earned a jest about death rays, unflattering probes, and telepathic scramblers.

They'd be forgotten in time. But just to help the process of healing, Rex dismantled their motor vehicles before leaving the area. Leaving them to figure out how to return home afterwards.

The remainder of the day was spent at one of the research institutes he helped out at on occasion. Dealing with robots and labsplices gone awry, shoving unspeakable abominations back through stargates.

____

FRIDAY

Rex had a match at the Herculean-Class wrestling ring tonight, before he could relax. He did a couple rounds that were heavier on dramatic feuds, jobbing and coordinating. Then he was up for full-contact stuff, actual competitive combat in the four-corner ring.

He was later seen with a black eye and getting a broken leg set back into place, which left him biting his lip and shedding a couple teardrops, before shuffling home. Having had his fill of explosive strikes, solid projectiles and energy projection, as well as folding chairs and aluminum baseball bats covered in barbed wire.

____

♫

____

SATURDAY

The cosmic contender was laying in bed. Unable to sleep for quite some time, but remaining prone for just as long in the hopes he could get some rest at last. Eyes open, just staring at the other side of his bedroom.

Eventually, his pet kaiju Tugboat returned home. Shrinking down to the size of a common pig, and inching over to his master's side. Sniffing to determine if Rex was really there. All Rex had it in himself to do was move an arm to pat that miserable cryptid's head, gingerly before rising slowly-- a fist held up to the sky as he groaned. Imagining himself when he assumed his asura mode.

But he did not transform. All he managed to do was stand on his own two near-human feet. Stumbling, at that. Using that unsteady motion to propel himself forward without retreat. They could get breakfast during their walk.

Wouldn't that be nice?

[e-carlease]

And amazing options like the new Renault 5 EV will be high on the agenda. This “hot-hatch” has taken the UK’s BEV market by storm and is aiming to not only become a top-seller but to win an array of awards … already awarded the “car of the year” in 2025 the R5VOLUTION is poised to do much more.                      

Customers can head to Renault to choose between 3 essential options including:

Evolution - from £22,995 this will include 18” black alloys, 10” openR media screen, air conditioning, handsfree key card, LED lights, heat pump, wireless smartphone replication, 11kW AC charging and V2L Bidirectional charging ready, vehicle sound, cruise control, rear parking sensors, emergency brake assist and heat pump; 

Techno - from £24,995 this will add 10” digital driver display, Google built-in, adaptive cruise control, shark antenna, rear-view camera, central armrest, electric mirrors, V2L adaptor an “5” charging indicator on the bonnet; and

Iconic Five - from £26,995 this adds 18” chrono alloys, heated steering wheel, driver lumbar adjustment, active driver assist, blind spot warning and heated front seats.

But how does the new R5 perform? 

52 kWh 150ps - (this has a usable battery of 52 kWh which offers 110 kW (148hp), top speeds of 93 mph and 0-62 times of 8.0 seconds. Real-world ranges suggest a combined 165 miles in colder weather with warmer temperatures to allow for 230 miles (on a full charge) - combined overall at 200 miles. The 11kW AC allows for 0-100% charging times of 5 hour and 45 minutes with the 100 kW DC enabling 10-80% in 33 minutes. It has a 156 mpg equivalent, 326L cargo volume and offers towing capacities of 500kg (Braked and Unbraked). There is a heat pump on this EV. This model has Bidirectional Charging with the V2L (via an exterior 3.7kW outlet), V2H and V2G all confirmed.

[usafphantom2]

I flew the SR-71 Blackbird in the Cold War, here’s why it was so important

Hush KitSeptember 29, 2022

SR-71 In the Cold War

By BC Thomas

The SR-71 has the deserved reputation of being the most unique air-breathing aircraft ever built. No other could fly as fast, as high, or carry thousands of pounds of equipment above 80,000 feet. It was the primary strategic reconnaissance asset for the Free World during the latter 25 years of the Cold War. The SR-71 could sustain continuous Mach 3+ flight for over an hour while obtaining the highest quality reconnaissance information from multiple sensors, and with aerial refueling, the aircraft could have circumnavigated the Earth in one flight. The aircraft was one of the first to employ stealth technology, thereby ensuring that the airplane was almost invisible to radar. Its speed and altitude also cloaked its presence. During this time of sparse reconnaissance satellite coverage over potential enemy targets, the SR-71 could sneak up, gather vital information, and leave the area without warning, and often without notice.

The SR-71 was never successfully intercepted by surface-to-air missile or aircraft. It had a state-of-the-art electronic defensive system which would defeat an incoming missile’s homing and steering. Detectors on board would alert the crew of a missile launch instantly and, since the SR-71 did not normally fly at its maximum speed or altitude, the aircraft’s defense was simultaneously to jam the missile’s guidance while accelerating, climbing, and turning with 45º of bank. No surface-to-air missile could out-turn, thus hit, an SR-71, a fact demonstrated many times, especially during the Vietnam War. Attempts to shoot down an SR-71 continued until August 25, 1981, which was the last time an enemy (North Korea) fired a surface-to-air missile at an SR-71; that mission was flown by Maury Rosenberg, pilot, and Ed McKim, Reconnaissance Systems Officer (RSO).

It missed.

We carried an array of sophisticated sensors and recorders which could glean reconnaissance data with cameras capable of high-quality photographs horizon-to-horizon. We also had radar imagery capable of one-foot resolution. This was the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System (ASARS), which could deliver readable radar pictures night or day, bad weather or clear. I’m no photo interpreter, but even I could tell what was pictured. The SR-71 also carried electronic intelligence (ELINT) systems which are still classified. We advertised that the SR-71, within 24 hours notification, could be over any target on earth and be capable of surveying 100,000 square miles of terrain each hour. It was no idle boast.

The SR-71’s potential versatility is not widely known. Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, the genius designer of all ‘Blackbirds’, was diligent in assuring that the Mach 3+ Blackbird aircraft could fulfil several roles, if needed for national contingencies. The first version was the A-12 aircraft, built for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This was a single-person airplane and carried as principal sensor, one very high-resolution optical camera.

A differently capable aircraft was the YF-12, the Mach 3+ fighter/intercepter version of the Blackbird’s basic design. It was developed as part of Kelly Johnson’s “Universal Aircraft” concept of adapting the fore-body section to accept reconnaissance equipment, air-to-air missiles, or four nuclear weapons. Thus, the Mach 3+ Blackbird type could have been straight reconnaissance, a nuclear bomber, an interceptor, or recon/strike. There is at least one video, available to the public, which shows an actual missile launch from a YF-12 at Mach 3. I’ll add parenthetically that it was also outfitted to be a Mach 3 drone-launch vehicle, but the first test deployment of the D-21 drone failed and resulted in the loss of the Blackbird M-21 launch aircraft.

So it was versatile. But did it deliver?

By the late 1950s, we knew the Soviet Union had better, more capable rocket launch systems than any North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country. This was dramatically evidenced by two sudden leaps in Soviet advanced technology: 1957, Sputnik, the first artificial satellite; 1961, first man in space to orbit the Earth. These notable achievements shocked the people of the United States and indeed, the Western World.

Knowledge of the military and industrial strength of Communist states was extremely important, and reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union started as early as 1947. Several American aircraft conducted these flights: the RB-29, RB-47, RB-50, C-130, PB4Y-2, U-2, and the Ryan 147 remotely piloted vehicle (RPV). Reconnaissance flights penetrated Soviet airspace, overflew the land mass, and many were shot down. The Los Angeles Times, 11/12/1992, reported that 40 such reconnaissance aircraft were lost and 200 American airmen died conducting these flights. That number of lost personnel was confirmed by Paul Glenshaw in his article: “Secret Causalities of the Cold War,” Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, December 2017.

So aerial reconnaissance flights against potential enemies (the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, the Middle East) were a top priority. These flights had to be conducted routinely and had to be survivable.

The SR-71 was developed to fill that need. From 1966 to 1990, the SR-71 flew over 3,500 operational reconnaissance missions while logging 11,000 hours in a flight environment which was most hostile: aircraft skin temperature averaged 620º F, outside air pressure was 0.4 pounds-per-square-inch (psi), altitude was 15-16 miles straight up, aerodynamic damping was low, and true airspeed was typically 2,000 to 2,100 miles-per-hour, making pitch controllability critical.

For operational survivability, the SR-71 was one of the safest military aircraft, as no Air Force crew member was killed while flying one, a testament to outstanding aircraft maintenance and crew training. A remarkable record given its extreme flight envelope and potential attack risk.

I’ll summarize the importance of the SR-71 missions by quoting Paul Crickmore, noted aviation historian and Blackbird author, in a letter to me.

“In theatre, the SR-71 proved the concept of high-Mach, high-altitude flight, to obtain vital aerial reconnaissance. The SR-71 regularly conducted reconnaissance missions in the skies over North Vietnam – particularly around Hanoi in 1968-70 which at the time, was the most highly defended area on the planet.”

“The Blackbirds provided superior flexibility compared to satellites, time after time, specific examples—Yom Kippur War 1973, Yemen 1979, Cuba 1977—1990, Lebanon October 1983 (following the truck-bomb attack killing over 240 US Marines), Libya 1986, The Persian Gulf 1987, but perhaps most importantly, the on-going monitoring of Soviet nuclear submarine fleets for the US Navy—particularly the Northern Fleet with their submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), capable of hitting large areas of the United States, as well as all Allied Countries.”

“The simultaneous, synoptic coverage of information gathered by the SR-71’s sensors, provided the intelligence community and national leadership—with photographic imagery (PHOTINT), radar imagery (RADINT) and electronic intelligence (ELNT), that unquestionably helped to keep the Western World free.”

Richard H Graham, Colonel, USAF (ret) was an SR-71 Instructor Pilot, Squadron Commander, 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing Commander, and assigned to the Headquarters USAF (Pentagon) to supervise Programs and Resources as a Strategic Force Programmer. His evaluation of the SR-71’s worth as a reconnaissance asset is quoted from his book: “SR-71 The Complete Illustrated History of the Blackbird, The World’s Highest, Fastest Plane.”

“…the synoptic coverage (displaying conditions as they exist simultaneously over a broad area) provided by the SR-71 was far superior to satellite reconnaissance. Broad-area coverage from different approach angles, in a relatively short time span, produced considerably better intelligence than a predictable, single satellite pass, every ninety minutes. In 1990, the SR-71 was the only airborne reconnaissance platform that could penetrate hostile territory, accomplish wide-area synoptic coverage, and still survive. It could also be tasked reasonably quickly and had the element of surprise.”

Photographs of two SA-2 surface-to-air missiles which were launched against SR-71 #976, July 26, 1968 in the vicinity of Hanoi, Vietnam. Tony Bevacqua (Pilot), Jerry Crew (RSO).

Order the Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes here

@hush_kit via X

Sadly, this site will pause operations in December if it does not hit its funding targets. If you’ve enjoyed an article you can donate here.p

[hirocimacruiser]

1st gen Subaru Alcyone. Sold as a Vortex in Australia but we never got these FLAT-6 versions, only flat-4 in NA and turbo with choice of FF or AWD

Hyper technology for greater driver loyalty. Intelligent Express.

Alcyone 2.7ℓ FLAT-6

ALCYONE 2700/1800

The Alcyone is a car with a new concept that anticipates the motorization of the near future. Everything about it has been developed to ensure that the driver feels no burden or stress under any driving conditions and always performs at 100% of its potential. It features a number of electronically controlled mechanisms that realize the ultimate in speed through advanced automatic control, including the next-generation 4WD, Active Torque Split 4WD, and the high-performance 2.7-liter FLAT-6. These intelligent mechanisms dramatically improve the vehicle's dynamic performance and create an unprecedented feeling of high-speed movement.

PHOTO: 4WD 2.7L VX Black Mica

Next-generation intelligent mechanisms create a new driving experience.

FLAT-6

2.7ℓ FLAT-6 Engine with EGI System

EGI Horizontally opposed 6-cylinder 2.7-liter engine

Subaru's traditional horizontally opposed engine has been made into a 6-cylinder engine, the FLAT-6, with a large displacement of 2.7 liters. The ideal rotation and vibration characteristics of the horizontally opposed 6-cylinder engine create a smooth rotation feeling. The flat and powerful torque is only possible with a large displacement. And the excellent basic performance has been carefully tuned with the latest electronic control technology to achieve refined speed. The unparalleled individuality invites you to the pleasure that only the Alcyone can provide. (VX)

EGI turbocharged flat-four 1.8-liter engine

The unrivaled horizontally opposed engine is equipped with a high-performance turbo. In addition to smooth and powerful acceleration from low speeds, the response has been greatly improved by the advancement of the EGI system and tuning of the intake system. (VR, VS)

Electronically controlled active torque split 4WD

"Active Torque Split 4WD" maximizes the potential of 4WD. This drive force control system uses a computer to accurately determine the driving situation and road surface conditions, precisely controlling the torque distribution between the front and rear wheels. Always achieving ideal high-speed, easy driving. (VX, VR•AT)

All-range electronically controlled 4-speed automatic E-4AT

Smooth and soft shifting feeling, sharp response, and automatic control of power/economy shifting modes, highly accurate lock-up control, engine brake control, etc. are some of the latest technologies that have been incorporated into the shifting mechanism of this highly functional transmission (VX, VR-AT, VS-AT).

For more reliable operation of automatic transmission vehicles

●Key interlock

•shift lock

•reverse alarm

●AT select indicator is adopted

Electronically controlled air suspension system EP-S

Precise vehicle posture control and vehicle height adjustment. The optimal spring rate setting that makes the most of the characteristics of the air spring and the synergistic effect of the variable damper provide exquisite high-speed stability and a smooth ride.

ABS (4-wheel anti-lock braking system)

The sensor detects wheel lock in advance, which can easily occur when driving at high speeds or when braking suddenly on slippery surfaces.

The ABS detects the vehicle's position and electronically controls the brake pressure, providing excellent danger avoidance capabilities. The 4-sensor diagonal select low system provides excellent control even on roads with different friction coefficients for the left and right wheels.

Electronically controlled motor drive power steering

The latest power steering system uses an electronically controlled motor-driven pump for hydraulic control.

The system determines driving patterns based on vehicle speed and frequency of steering operation. In addition to speed-sensitive control, it also provides optimal steering feel even at a constant speed. (VX)

Cd=0.29*. High performance aerodynamic form

The first Japanese car to break the Coefficient of Air Resistance Co = 0.30 barrier

Breakthrough. Improved maneuverability at high speeds (CD=0.29) and quietness.

PHOTO: 4WD 1.8L VR Medium Gray Metallic/Fine Silver Metallic

[sngl-led-auto-lights]

I see tons of fairly new cars at night with no tail lights, but headlights are on. Is this some new so-called feature? The drivers seem oblivious to the fact that their tail lights are off.

The phenomenon you're observing—newer cars driving at night with headlights on but no tail lights illuminated—is not a deliberate feature but rather a dangerous oversight caused by design flaws, driver complacency, and regulatory gaps. Here's a detailed breakdown:

1. Daytime Running Lights (DRLs) Misuse

What's Happening: Many modern cars have bright DRLs that automatically activate when the engine starts. These lights only illuminate the front of the vehicle (not tail lights) and are designed for daytime visibility. • Driver Error: At night, drivers assume their full lighting system is active because they see the DRLs and a backlit dashboard, unaware that tail/parking lights remain off. • Example: In the EU, DRLs are mandatory on cars post-2011, but rear lights aren’t required to activate with them.

2. Automatic Lighting System Failures

Intended Function: Automatic headlights should activate in low-light conditions, turning on both headlights and tail lights. • Common Pitfalls: ◦ Sensors may fail to detect dusk/dawn or overcast conditions. ◦ Drivers override the "Auto" setting (e.g., for car washes) and forget to reset it. ◦ Systems don’t link to wipers in all models (e.g., lights stay off in rain unless manually activated).

3. Dashboard Design Flaws

Always-Illuminated Displays: Modern digital dashboards remain lit regardless of exterior lighting conditions, removing the visual cue (a dark dashboard) that reminds drivers to turn on lights. • Toyota/Honda Example: Some models with "Optitron" instrument clusters have been criticized for this issue.

4. Regulatory and Industry Shortcomings

Outdated Standards: • U.S. regulations don’t mandate automatic headlights, unlike the EU’s 2025 requirement for auto-on lights. • DRL brightness isn’t standardized globally, leading to front lights that mimic low beams.

Manufacturer Choices: Some automakers (e.g., BMW, Volvo) program DRLs to activate rear lights, but this isn’t universal.

5. Solutions and Safety Implications

For Drivers: • Manually verify tail lights are on by checking reflections (e.g., in store windows) or asking a passenger. • Enable automatic headlights and ensure they’re linked to wipers.

For Regulators: • Mandate auto-on lights that activate both front and rear lights in low-light conditions. • Require dashboard dimming when exterior lights are off.

For Manufacturers: • Adopt "always-on" rear lights with DRLs (as seen in some Volvos). • Add dashboard warnings for inactive tail lights.

Why This Matters Driving without tail lights increases collision risks by 40% in low-visibility conditions. Other drivers can’t judge your speed, distance, or braking intentions, leading to rear-end crashes or underride accidents with trucks.

While not a "feature," this issue highlights how partial automation (e.g., DRLs, auto-dashlights) can create unintended safety gaps. Until regulations catch up, drivers must stay vigilant.

For further details, see discussions on automatic lighting flaws, DRL limitations, and collision risks.

[fernfrond-inks]

This is my very messy design process for Bumblebee. I wanted to incorporate Micheal Bay’s antenna and doorwings. Which tie into to his namesake. Plus they’re very expressive, and I feel that expressiveness suits Bee.

I read Bob Budiansky g1 profile on Bee to try and understand him better. It said that he was in espionage, which surprised me since he is usually depicted as a Scout that graduates to warrior. Interestingly his weakness on the profile was being physically frail. So a small, quick ambush fighter was born.

The thing that really got the creative juices flowing was that he has good sensors for on land and WATER reconnaissance. So here is an aquatically capable Bumblebee.

His altmode is his cybertron one from the g1 cartoon. It hovers by the use of magnets since cybertron is a metal planet, this is quite handy. The magnets are the blue circles.

Bee has vents to cool his internals. His vents have the added ability to provide propulsion for liquid based travel. On his alt mode these vents serve as his front grill and back grill, allowing him to shoot forward and backward. At speed.

These propulsion vents can be used in root mode as well they’re on the back of his calf’s, forearms, shoulders, and upper back.

His door wings are on the back of his vehicle mode where they function like the tail feathers of a bird.

Mictransformations! His alt mode has one where the ‘wing’ part of his alt mode segments into four independent parts. This gives him more mobility for uneven terrain. These can adjust to currents (land, sea, EM) while simultaneously gathering information on said currents.

Overall Bee is entirely a multi terrain information gatherer. Perfect for infiltration and espionage. Which accomplishes my design goals. Also I love the fact that his alt mode looks like both a string ray and a pupa. It’s awesome!

[nilima-2003]

SERVO DISTANCE INDICATOR USING ARDUINO UNO

INTRODUCTION

Distance measurement is a fundamental concept in various fields, including robotics, automation, and security systems. One common and efficient way to by emitting sound waves and calculating the time it takes for the waves to reflect back from an object, allowing accurate measurement of distance without physical contact.

In this project, we will use an HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor in conjunction with an Arduino microcontroller to measure the distance between the sensor and an object. The sensor emits ultrasonic waves and measures the time it takes for the waves to return after reflecting off the object. By using the speed of sound and the time measured, the distance is calculated. This simple yet powerful setup can be applied in a variety of real-world applications such as obstacle detection in robots, parking assistance systems, and automatic door operations.

WORKING PRINCIPLE

1. Servo Movement: The servo motor rotates to different angles (0° to 180°). The ultrasonic sensor is mounted on top of the servo and moves with it.

2. Distance Measurement: At each position, the ultrasonic sensor sends out an ultrasonic pulse and waits for the echo to return after hitting an object. The Arduino records the time taken for the echo to return.

3. Distance Calculation: The Arduino calculates the distance to the object based on the time recorded and the speed of sound (0.0343 cm/µs).

4. Servo as Indicator: The servo motor's position provides a physical indication of the direction of the detected object. As the servo moves across a range of Image map out objects in different directions based on distance.

5. Visual Output: The Arduino can also send the distance and angle data to the serial monitor, creating a real-time visual representation of the detected object positions.

APPLICATIONS

1. Autonomous Robots and Vehicles

2. Radar Systems

3. Parking Assistance

4. Security Systems

5. Environmental Scanning in Drones

6. Warehouse Management and Automation

7. Industrial Automation

8. Robotic Arm Guidance

9. Collision Avoidance in UAVs/Robots

10.Interactive Displays or Art Installations

11.Smart Doors and Gates

CONCLUSION

The Servo Distance Indicator Project successfully demonstrates the integration of an ultrasonic sensor and a servo motor to create an effective distance measurement an object, the project provides real-time feedback through the movement of a servo motor, which indicates the measured distance via a visual representation.