They've already done so twice, the first when the plot started with Gharr ( & Nea) surviving the crash landing on earth. The second time when Zane landed (successfully) and met with the general.

But there will be a lot more landings and interactions, I'm guessing at the U.N. General Assembly building in New York.

I guess Protagistan's government COULD ask Gharr to appear... But it'd likely be more disruptive than helpful.

This gives people the chance to hear it from their fellow human leaders and digest and process it through the media for a few weeks before the ship appears in orbit and then re-assess and process just the presence of the ship before maybe some recorded/transmitted communications followed by a shuttle visit and communications in person.

Gharr might accelerate belief but since he can in no way represent the Alliance he'd have to note any answers he gives as just his beliefs or opinions and if he had to explain his whole ordeal with the covert operation, shot down, killed Raharr and exile, it would likely do more to distract, confuse and "disrupt" than help.

The last time we saw Gharr, he was aboard the Dawn. I don't think that there's a sufficient reason to ship him back into exile (on Earth) faster than by arrival of the Dawn in Earth's orbit.

(If a smaller ship actually can make the trip faster than the Dawn itself. Which might well be; Kas' cruiser made the trip under constant one-gee acceleration, but I don't think that the trees, buildings etc. inside the Dawn's centrifugal habitat would take all to well to an additional lateral one-gee force!)

Was it truly last time, tho?

... whoops. So he did arrive back on Earth ahead of the Dawn ... which supports the theory that that ship has to stay below the one gee of thrust that Kas' cruiser uses for (non-emergency) in-system travel ...

Dan & Gharr could beat them to it : Podcast !!

the first alien to appear live on the news will always be remembered as the first , even if alternate facts turn up later.

Further to that, suppliers of bottled water are struggling to keep up with demand as many seek fluoride free hydration, accusing tap water of warping minds and making the population docile to suggestion.

certainly a better brand than "Nosreme"..And I think that Gnusmas is the TV on Dan´s wall by the way

Should we expect St. Nick, or Stallman? :-P

Eel Gnoy-Eaj, obviously.

"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Gnusmas, is in fact, GNU/Smas, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Smas.

Smas is not a television system unto itself, but rather another display component of a fully functioning GNU home entertainment system, made useful by the GNU remotes, menu utilities, and vital firmware components comprising a full SmartTV platform as defined by HDMI-CEC.

Many viewers watch a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Smas, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Smas, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Smas is the display kernel: the panel in the system that allocates the photons and pixels to the other components that you watch. The display is an essential part of a television system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete home entertainment environment. Smas is normally used in combination with the GNU system: the whole system is basically GNU with Smas added, or GNU/Smas. All the so-called Smas televisions are really distributions of GNU/Smas!"

(Sorry for boiling a lake to have the chat ai slop generator help me translate the gnu/linux copypasta into the tv world, yes this is just Samsung mirrored)

USGS et. al.: [send cancellation of previously issued earthquake alert]

Well, it is almost 5 kilometers long and orbits at a 400-500 km-high orbit. Unless I did my calcs wrong, this is approximately how big it should be.

Dawn: 5 km long, 500 km from viewer ==> 1:100

Moon: 3,500 km diameter, 400,000 km from viewer ==> 1:114

Looks correct to me.

I like how you also have the two images change from the Dawn approaching the Moon to appearing in front of it in only those two frames, showing just how fast it would likely appear to be travelling across the sky at an altitude of 400-500km (around 30 minutes to orbit the entire Earth).

It would be fast I think...Due to its mass and low orbit it needs quite some pedal to maintain its altitude. Dunno if the mass has been stated somewhere in the info on this comic but someone would find the JoB entertaining to calculate ?

Wink Wink

Using an online calculator it didn't seem to think that the mass would matter all that much. I ran the calculation against 1kg and 3 million metric tons, both resulted in a speed of 28.234km/s at 500km orbit from Earth.

Ran the same calculation for something the weight of the Earth orbiting itself and then it gave me 39.93km/s so Mass does factor in, but not enough to notice.

Note: Based the Dawn's weight at 3 million tons on the weight of the largest tanker (Seawise Giant) at about 450m, multiplied by 10 and just added on 400,000t but you could make it 6 million tons and it wouldn't matter.

I've estimated Dawn's mass to be somewhere around 2.2 billion tonnes.

The calculator only raised the necessary speed to 29.235km/s when the mass reached 62 Quadrillion tonnes

Provided it picked a gap in the LEO satellite orbits, I'm sure it wouldn't need to worry a lot about additional speed causing it to move differently to satellites at the same orbit.

We wouldn't have *a* geostationary orbit or well-defined "escape velocities" for each celestial object if orbital speeds depended on the mass of the satellite.

... well, short of a satellite so massive that it and the planet actually orbit a common center of mass outside both, of course ... :-3

Also, it shows that, while the Dawn would have had her aft pointed forward so as to decelerate for orbit insertion initially, she's apparently pointing her bow into the orbit now; ready to blast out of orbit and away from the planet if anything unsavory happens.

I wonder what orientation the military ships of the fleet have picked. "Engines pointing away from the planet, so that they can counter the recoil of the main guns firing at the surface" would be a rather unfriendly sign ...

Calculations relative to Luna are correct. Anything mile long or bigger woudl be easily viewable from the ground at that height.

But the moon is about three times bigger than it would normally be - unless special camera tricks or anime-lenses are being used. :P

Yeah, the Dawn would be about half a degree wide (arc length) at that altitude, similar to the moon, or less when its axis isn't parallel to the ground. And I think the moon's apparent size relative to buildings in the foreground varies a great deal, depending on how close the viewer is to the building. A news camera could easily zoom in and out from a distance.

Indeed. The moon is about the same size, relative to the Capitol, in this photo - and a wee tad bigger in this one ...

(Though I admit that the in-comic TV cam must have stood a lot closer to the building than the RL NASA photographer, to get that upward angle.)

Caliphate....Right...I would be more concerned about the stock-market!

Company's like SpaceX, BlueOrigin, Virgin galactic etc. would fold in a fraction of a second....

Also....400 to 500km? That´s a LEO orbit..Lets hope they dont ram the international space-station or other including stuff that does "not exist".

But does anyway.

Then why worry about what happens to their orbital assets?

The ISS should be safe (80+ km below the Dawn); actually, the ship could help the station, if the gravitational pull from "above" saves the ISS an orbital boost or two. (... nah, I don't think that the Dawn is heavy enough to do that.)

The data received from GRACE-FO might start to look mighty interesting, though.

"Then why worry about what happens to their orbital assets? "

If your pension is invested in them as stocks, then.....One would worry =)

I always though objects in LEO orbit would slowly decent until the object starts brushing against the upper layer of atmospheric gases and then things comes down rather quickly ? But hey, if it takes the Dawn 50 years to get there I´m sure they have left long before then.

however, maybe the Dawn will have an effect on our tidal-pattern =)

Low-Earth Orbit isn't quite in a vacuum, so yes, the super-thin atmosphere at that altitude causes drag that adds up over time. But I reckon a ship that has no trouble traveling all over the solar system wouldn't have any trouble keeping its orbit from decaying for a while.