1 Iki Piki: So Paris, what sort of gun is that?
1 Paris: Double bolt-action personal emag railgun firing 32mm hypersonic smart slugs.
2 Paris: Custom job. Cost me a year's income, but it's worth it. Any pirates try to board this ship, and this baby will turn them into soup.
3 Spanners: Er, you do realise that if you fire that thing in here, you'll turn the hull into Swiss cheese and we'll all die horribly, don't you?
4 Iki Piki: Look on the bright side. You could always beat them to death with it.

Thanks to Glen Barnett for the gag.

I would have liked to have Paris rattle off weapon specs like:

Double bolt-action personal emag railgun firing 32mm gyro-stabilised smart slugs at hypersonic velocities, 120 rounds per second, switchable to shaped-charge ammo for maximum armour penetration using gestalt AI feedback, with laser sighting and IR target tracking, palm-print recognition system, over-and-under particle beam blasters with disintegration capability, and integral tac-nuke grenade launcher.

but that wouldn't nearly fit in the speech bubbles.

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2012-05-21 Rerun commentary: I was sitting here looking at this strip, wondering what I could write about it, and my eyes fell on that rather odd bright ring in the window in panel 1, between Paris and Iki Piki.

Then I spent a minute thinking, "What the heck is that?"

Then I realised the webcam I used to shoot these photos was dark blue, with a bright yellow ring around the lens. Ye, that's a reflection of the camera in the window.

Oh my, and I just noticed the windows are sideways! Wow. This is clearly not the bridge of their ship then. It must be some other room where the windows are mounted at 90° to the way they are installed on the bridge. Cool.