These trivia bits are generated randomly.
Raharrs are warm-blooded creatures and are accustomed to temperature range a bit warmer than Earth's.
"Dawn" class mothership and "Lake" class tankers are the only spacecraft in the Exploration fleet that can create artificial gravity while not under acceleration.
If a space ship accelerates at the same rate as it would in a free-fall under Earth's gravity (Otherwise known as "1G acceleration"), it can reach Jupiter from Earth in just under 6 days. It would need to flip in the middle of the travel, to start decelerating and enter the planet's orbit.
Insectoids in a lot of ways are the weird ones among the Alliance members. Besides having a completely unpronounceable name of the species, they have dextero amino acid biochemistry, which makes their food and biosphere to be inedible by the rest of the Alliance, and vice versa.
The names of every species of the Alliance (besides Insectoids) are words taken directly from their respective native languages that they use to refer to themselves. They all have same translation:
"a human".
Azinarsi relationship to death is different from the rest of the civilizations of the Alliance: they do not care about it. Death would mean loss of information and experience gathered by that instance of a person's mind, though, and these two things are about the only valuables for an Uploaded mind, so Azinarsi try to avoid it when possible.
A lot of backgrounds and other elements in the comic are actually 3d models. It helps reduce the time each page takes to make.
Raharrs descended from the evolutionary branch that can be described as "apelike cats" by their evolutionary niche. Although initially carnivorous and solitary, they were forced to become omnivorous and form persistent packs during the latest of the rare ice ages of their homeworld, approximately 30 million years ago.
It takes more than a year to cross the Alliance space even with the fastest FTL drive.
Prior to becoming a webcomic, Leaving The Cradle was initially developed as a modification for Source engine, back in 2007. It was vastly different back then, much closer to the usual space opera look and feel, and the plot had nothing in common with the webcomic version, sharing only exactly two characters and nothing else.
Many homeworlds of the respective species are still divided into countries, but freshly established colonies on other planets are almost always monolithic and basically independent, since they sprawled from a single initial outpost, and time lag involved due to interstellar distances making remote management of the colony from a homeworld to be ineffective and frustrating at best.
There's no way to communicate faster than light. If you want to send your message to another solar system, your best bet is to use a courier spaceship. It can take even a month for it to finally reach the destination, but it still beats sending it as a transmission and expecting it to arrive decades or thousands of years later.
So far there hasn't been a single instance of a massive interstellar war. Due to the vastness of space, there's no territorial or economic gain from it. The presence of armed spaceships is still warranted for keeping space travel safe and for peacekeeping or policing missions since unexpected events or rogue states can still happen and might require force as a solution.
The Alliance space stretches for an impressive 16 thousand light years along the longest axis, and contains approximately twelve billion star systems. Despite that, 99.99% of those star systems weren't explored even by an automatic mapping drone yet, and the borders of the Alliance space are defined mostly by the reach of spaceships from the nearest colony or space station.
Comments (30)
Oh cool, showing off all the news stealth equipment...
Why!? I am so confused.
I just want to say. This halloween "prank" is amazing. well thought out, well executed and shows off the amazing artwork behind the characters. I would love to get the backgrounds as they are in a high resolution download if available. (made this comment on the wrong post. )
*snort* "Behind the characters"! I see what you did there...
A third party chimes in.
Were it done by earth's visitors, they would not vanish their own people- but leave all the hardware for humanity to find. and the TV shows that out of area, mankind yet lives.
WARNING: there is a plot complication approaching.
Uh... checking back in... what's with the lack of... entities?
Some kind of interesting change, the header under the comic name has 'everybody is gone', and in every single comic page every person is gone, with the sole exceptions being the hand of a body in one page, the xray scans in a couple, and the shadow on this last page.
It is both an eerie, but also very interesting change that's occurred to every page, as not only can the backgrounds be fully seen (which are very nice), but why was it done?
A question that hopefully will be answered when the comic resumes on the 1st.
Bodies are still in the morgue back on July 19
so, publishing once a quarter?
The comic will return on November 1st, it's currently on a hiatus.
Hey! It's not April fools!
Yeah, its Halloween
Oh noes! I caught up!
The general is so far probably the most reasonable character in this comic on the Human's side.
Also, cool bit with the one shoed soldier.
Hah, didn't even notice.
When an alert goes off, you get to your station immediately. There have been numerous instances in WW2 where US sailors were literally in their underwear when general quarters sounded.
Oh. yes, i know that happens. I was just commenting on seeing it acknowledged in the comic.
Yeah... As I understand it, sometimes, not even in underwear. You get caught in the shower, there really isn't time to throw on clothes...
General definitely earning his pay. And Nea should appreciate this show of discipline.
Pronin is a major, not a general.
And he's trying to make up for the humans screw up...
I suppose we don't need a complete translation to get "ok, there is no other option here."
I think it's "Well, here I arrive."
Though google translate isn't exactly precise.
For me, it roughly translates to "I hope this is enough."
Or maybe just "Well, that didn't work."
I got "Hope that's enough."
If that's an accurate translation, I wonder if actually escaping might have been just a stretch goal, and Nea's real goal here was to get detected by the Alliance spysat.
Phew, relatively peaceful and controlled resolution.
Everyone on the base must know the basics of the situation. Though I suspect no one has a list of procedures yet for "what to do when shooting down alien craft, and what classification to assign elements of that incident."
True, but there was always the possibility of Nea doing something unmanageably dumb. Or unmanageably successful. Or someone screwing up.