Aeroprism wrote:What was the purpose of the copilot again, besides being a pointless victim of the maniacal Wren?
Given that I can't honestly expect a reader to know how to fly a spaceship (no training), I went ahead and let you ride along anyway- the objective was to make the reader a character in the story, which the jury's still out on whether I failed or not.
Aeroprism wrote:At first, I kept asking myself "Why the [censored] would they shoot missiles at a test flight?? Then I remembered: because space flight is still forbidden by Motherbrain.
Unfortunately, the missile didn't hit, otherwise you would've seen that it was a training warhead. The USAF normally doesn't fire training missiles since they have that miniature jet used in a James Bond movie to simulate it instead(It's a lot cheaper since the jet's owner enjoys flying it with them), but they do exist, and I think that it's in the nature of most of those pilots to play with each other to keep their skills sharp.
As for Mother Brain's ban on spaceflight... you're getting a little ahead of the plot, so I'm not gonna say how that comes into play, but I would remind you that it was enacted after the crash that orphaned Rolf, so it's only about 10 years old when PSII began.