Fine back on topic! Who can guess where the name "Metropole" (the space station) came from?

a brand of donut?

...Metropolis aka Mega City?

I'm assuming since one of the main focal points you will be touching on his how civilization came to survive in such an atmosphere that you woould be refering to the term originating from Greeks metropole aka mother city aka Mothership.

Superman reference?

Nope! =D Here's a possibly misleading hint: Ron Howard.

..
John Wayne's movie. "The Shootist".........

"Books rents a room at the quiet boarding house of the recent widow Mrs. Bond Rogers (Bacall). But his secret is difficult to keep, as Mrs. Rogers's hero-worshipping son Gillom (Ron Howard) learns his mom's guest is the famous gunslinger, the uncouth Marshal Thibido (Harry Morgan) is relieved to know the dangerous gunslinger doesn't have long to live and makes no bones about it in public, a wormy newspaperman Dobkins (Richard Lenz) prints the story in the paper and teams up with the gunslinger's ex-girlfiend (Sheree North) to try to make money off Books' legendary status by getting an authorized biography that they plan to fill with tall tales, an unseemly undertaker (John Carradine) schemes for a fancy funeral, and even the friendly liveryman (Scatman Crothers) tries to make a few shekels off his fame. The widow at first resents having a gunslinger as a boarder, but when she learns he's dying she suddenly remembers to act like a Christian and the two bond in a sincerely endearing way by taking a buggy ride in the country. Books goes about putting his affairs in order during his last week on earth, and rather than face a painful death arranges for a final shootout in the cavernous Metropole saloon with three local gunfighters, the faro dealer Pulford (Hugh O'Brian), a gunslinger named Sweeney (Richard Boone), who wants revenge for Books killing his brother, and, a thug named Cobbs (Bill McKinney). Books insists to the very end of living the only way he knows, by his old-fashioned behavioral code. "

Yep! The Shootist is a Western set about 1900, and the name "Metropole" really jumped out at me, since it sounded like something from Star Trek more than the Old West (although 1900 isn't really old, I suppose). When the time came to think of a name for the space station in episode one, that's what jumped into my head.

Hey Rare! Love the setting you're working with here! And seriously like your style - did too in MxO but here it seems like you're getting it down even more! :) Can't wait for episode 2! =)

Episode 1 is now online with sound! Let me know what you think. Voice acting by me, music from incompetech.com. I kept the music relatively low-volume so it wouldn't drown out the voice acting; and I *think* I kept the overall volume at a decent level for normal listening--for some reason most other Flash I hear seems to be cranked way up--but you'll have to let me know how good a job I did at that, along with the rest of it. The "files" section of that episode now includes *voices.zip, a compilation of the voice clips used.

Oh yeah, it now has a little "loading" screen, so all the sound will load up and be in synch before it starts trying to play the animation.

In case anyone is interested, the tracks used from incompetech are, in order:

- Ominous
- Exciting Trailer
- News of Sorrow
- Gnarled Situation
- Dangerous
- Faceoff
- Achilles
- Monkoto

And I should mention that, for those interested in doing their own editing with the .gif files, there are some changes in timing, particularly in mouth movements of people talking, between the gifs and the final Flash version. I do the main animation in a program that ouputs all the bitmaps, with timing, as animated gif files--which is where the gifs in the "files" section of the episode come from--but then I load those up in a big sequence in Flash to add sounds, and I'll inevitably end up making tweaks to timing at that post-gif stage to keep the animation synched nicely with the voice clips.