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 (26)
Just wait till Ahshu hears about the TimeCube.
...hang on here, "some incident nearby"??? Quantum knows exactly where the crash site is, and Google Maps will tell him that N is right nearby!
I suppose he might be talking about the military's search for the Three Musketeers, but even then, it seems like he would have mentioned that connection.
Also I have concerns about that tail fin right next to those chair wheels. Seems likely to end in tears, or whatever the raharr equivalent is. Cool detail with the chair's back-stem being offset to make room for the tail, though.
You have enough spatial awareness to not drive over your toes with chair, would be weird if raharrs wouldn't be aware of their tails. Though yeah, sometimes it happens.
I wonder what limits exist on the AI we're seeing as such, based on what we're being told. Is it merely a limit of bandwidth, or do they not have any way to create a child process of itself to function semi-independently in the human network, surviving off some stolen processing power?
While the bandwith between the thing they used to connect to the internet and their spaceship may be near-infinite, you have to remember that they are still limited by the internet itself. I also doubt that a self-conscious AI wold even be able to function inside our networks. You have to remember that while their technology is vastly more andvanced, right now they are essentially just using our primitive computers.
You're right; and AIs of LTC aren't software-based. Quantum won't be able to upload himself even in the Alliance's network.
So Quantum is less artificial intelligence and more artificial brain then?
Is there a difference though?
Quabtum being an artificial brain would imply he himself is somehow tied to a physical object, whereas if he were an AI inhabiting a dedicated machine, it would imply that he can somehow transfer or copy his being into a totally different compatible machine.
Even without trying to migrate his own psyche, it does seem like Quantum should be able to write bots to do some of the work without waiting for speed-of-light lag though, even if the bots aren't very bright.
Then again, we're only seeing the results. Maybe that's exactly what he is doing, and his complaint is that he can't write more sophisticated ones or manage them more closely.
Their fleet is flittering around Jupiter AFAWK, which is at 5-5.5 AU from the Sun, so, less than an hour of signal lag from Earth. That's vital if you want to RC a spacecraft over the distance, but for bulk data transfer, signal strength+dispersion is more of a concern.
Signal lag definitely does show its ugly face if you try to follow hyperlinks, though.
Only if the prefetching is done from all the way behind the RTT, like our browsers do it.
[invites the fleet to do a "case study" presentation at the next IPNSIG meeting]
Time lag for one. The poorly integrated and disjointed nature of the infonet on this planet makes it difficult even for we dirtlings to do things. with one little game I get regular DC's, often buffering even with text pages. It's something a fractured people like ours does. Easy to beat, hard to reconnoiter before you leap. And one always examines the prey before you scream and leap.
Ah, looks like I was right about Nea's real goal with that breakout attempt.
I'm real interested in what could be more important than a solid reason to believe there's a survivor, though. My top three guesses are intel specifically about Gharr, Gharr's falsified report to Zane, or something to do with the fleet's classified mission.