On this Future Earth where a lucky Spaniard's family rules and Nosh spent time in Russia, what has happened to other major nations and continents of our current day? Will we be seeing anything/anybody from the U.S.of A., China, India, Africa... please tell me Australia's still out there with kangaroos and wombats...

Speaking of which, what's the background of Captain Taneel? Does she have any pop singer ancestors? (Of course, Toni Tenille's married name is Dragon, which makes for other future possibilities) And O'Malley has an Irish name which suggests that those wacky Gaelics are still around, but considering the revelation about her [SEMI-SPOILER] is her real name Omallio? (And this may be asking too much but considering how thinly spread La Familia is, how could there be any 'undercover family members'?)

Will it be possible to see any crossovers between Drive and other future-based webcomics or is this a totally separate universe (yeah, I admit it, I'd like to see Nosh meet Jinx from Starslip).

A technical question: How fast does the drive go? Either in lightyears per hour or something like it or just plain nerdy, how much Warp does it do?

Hey Dave!

Two questions:

1) What or who were the inspirations for Nosh and The Pilot?

2) To satisfy the DVD 'bonus feature' nerd in me, can you post a how-to-draw one or some of your characters video in the near future?

Keep rockin' the awesome toonery!

Cheers, Noah

Do you remember what you were doing when you first got the idea for the series? Were you able to act on it right away, or did you let it kick around in your head for a while?

Thanks!
Molly

I'm curious about the time scale. are all the bits we see now taking place at around the same time, or will the robot building maker have to catch up to the period of Nosh and Co?

How does the drive actually work? What's the basic (if sci-fi) physics?

Is Drive a story that you have planned from start to finish like Girl Genius, or is it a story where you'll be coming up with it over time, a bit like Starslip Crisis?

There are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches (and a lot of successful sci-fi manages to have elements of both, like how X-Files had "Mythology" episodes about the characters and the alien conspiracy interspersed with "Monster of the Week" episodes about any weird thing the writers came up with.)

I have a question

If the Familia has like 7000 members, how did Fernando become head of engineering, firstly he is a bit young and secondly he does not come across as that gifted in the matter of engineering? is he really the best there is or is it due to some other reason?

<nerd glasses>
In "Webcomics Weekly Episode #46 (Without a Trace)", which premiered on September 6, 2008, you joked that along with Sheldon, you also produced a second strip that will never appear, "The Third Galactic Spanish Empire".
</nerd glasses>

So just how long has this idea been running through your noggin?

Wow! You made me start lookin' back with that:

- So, the first DRIVE strip appeared on this date: http://tinyurl.com/no7smb

- But the first public *mention* of it was here, yep: http://tinyurl.com/4oxw86z

- But! The interesting thing? I just checked back in my sketchbook stuff...and the first early *sketches * of the idea were done at this event. (Mostly sketches of Nosh and Skitter. And an old male captain in a spider-like wheelchair! Ha!) http://tinyurl.com/4udqdrb

Here's something from the animator in me. Have you ever thought of what each main character of Drive would sound like, were the story in animated format? Are there any existing characters or actors whose voices might make good examples?

I notice that the "Continuum" uses an asexual reproductive method and it is important that the soil be right. Sooo, does the continuum lay a self fertilized egg, chop off a piece of flesh or what? What is in those upside down nest-like things? All life forms are a sort of continuum, of course, but the generational connections appear to be the driving force (hah!) behind this one and I'd like to know how it is formed.

Does the new guy only have two fingers? Is that how we're gonna be able to tell the young ones apart from the old ones? Or does it not matter?

I have a few 3 question from 1 actually, and I will attempt to be as succinct as possible. They are somewhat involved given my impression that you have thought out the world and matters of Drive to a rather full degree, so I will understand if they are of the kind that you re not prepared for simply offhand.

When Nosh and Skitter/Steve are broken out of prison, the Pinch drive is described in terms of spatial displacement, "nature abhors a vacuum" and the oft overlooked corollary that it is not fond of the sudden and precipitous absence of one s well. But if pinch drive operates in a manner involving spacial displacement or distortion, a mechanism based on, by one method or another, moving the in between out of the beginning and end of a journey, then how do the following three things track from that:

1. When distorting space, one is not traveling at relativistic or trans light speeds. One does not increase speed at all. So why is there a speed governor built into the drive mechanism? It does not actually produce momentum, simply an effect that can be taken advantage of.

2. Pinching space, or distorting it, is like taking 5 sheets of paper, putting them in a line, writing beginning on one, end on the other, and drawing a line across the other three from the first to the last, then declaring you have pinched space and removing the three in the middle and putting the sheet marked beginning next to the sheet marked end so the lines match up. While the first Emperors metaphor is pt, and akin to those most commonly used, his and mine fail to convey the important part in that nearly all of the hazards and such in the space in between, are like the distance, temporarily erased for the traveler. Unless the Drive operates on a fundamentally different mechanism, how then can something like micro meteors and the like be a concern? Would they not be, from the relative perspective of the pinched traveler, non existent until the drive was off?

3. Considering the assumed nature of the drive, how would the pursuit between the Makers and the Machito work, in a purely physical sense, are the chasing post pinch, pre pinch, or in some kind of inter-pinch pocket reality that the the drive, because of its special nature allows access to unlike a hypothetical "magic button" space distortion device?

I'm not, let's say great, on gauging the appropriate place and time to ask what, so if this is too much question, or the wrong place for these kind of questions, please delete them so they won't clutter up the thread visually or intimidate into silence anyone who is better at this than I am.