#exocomp

Red Exocomp: Hi I'm Almond Basket!

Lady: Awww, you're sweet.

Blur Exocomp: Hi I'm Peanut Hamper!

Peanut Hamper

Been catching up on Lower Decks with the boxset

Hir-es on patreon

Am I literally tearing up because one baby robot sacrificed itself so its two other baby robot siblings could escape a radiation field?

This one isn’t quite as personable as my previous entries, but it’s hard to make computer consoles look friendly!! It was still pretty fun to trace out all those little symbols on the screen. 

Here’s my thoughts about these two robotic friends: 

- I messed with the canon of both series pretty heavily for Lopez and Sheila. On the Trek side, these computers are much more sentient than they normally are. Maybe they’ve been given extra personalities by the Director to engage the Reds and Blues more. And on the RVB side, they’re much more similar than they are in canon, and Lopez is pushed closer to Sheila’s characterization. He’s also not in a body until the equivalent of around Season 7, instead being onboard the Scarlet. 

- Exocomps are fun little designs, and I felt it was both a good translation of the gag with Lopez only having his head for a lot of the seasons, and it was one of the only recognizable “robot-y” Star Trek designs without straight up making him an android. I wanted to separate him from AIs like Church and Tex. 

- Like in canon, at the end of the Season 5 equivalent Sheila is destroyed in an explosion inside of the Cobalt. Lopez would then have been transferred out of the Scarlet by Sarge and into the exocomp. 

- The “R” and “B” in the FILSS acronym are pretty simple; they just stand for Red and Blue. I guess this implies that there are Lopezes and Sheilas in every single Red and Blue ship in this universe, which is interesting. But our Reds and Blues are surely unique. 

I also included my little sketchy designs for the ships. I feel it would be silly for unqualified soldiers like the Reds and Blues to get access to big, Enterprise-class ships, but runabouts are the perfect size for a realistic living space, but still small and inexpensive. It’s like living in a submarine. These are the little details I translated into Trek:

- The spray paint decals are referencing the design things that they had on their armor at some point. For whatever reason I just could not find a picture of it, but I swear I’m not crazy and that was a thing. So I just did it from memory. 

- “NCC-24110″ is a reference to 2-4-1-10 from the song Contact. 

- The Red’s Warthog has been translated into a detachable shuttlecraft (I imagine the Blue’s command shuttle has been fused into the main body and can’t detach), and the extra ammo is referencing the ammo jokes. 

- The Blue’s tank is translated into photonic cannons that their computer, Sheila, operates.