Latest blog post: An unforseen hiatus. (2023-01-02)

Author's comment:

Due to certain events, I'm not entirely comfortable continuing to develop the military side of the story, but, as the saying goes, "you can't throw words out of the song".

So the show must go on.

New SpiderForest Comics - Finding Keys to New Worlds

Brothers
Brothers - A Postmaster's job is never done, especially with routes this deadly!
KEYSPACE: A Winged Tale
KEYSPACE: A Winged Tale - Kids with wings for hair journey into an underground lab to look for a missing scientist.
Sao and the Glow of Memories
Sao and the Glow of Memories - A fantasy story about the power of memory, community, love, and revolution!
Moxie
Moxie - Cat ears, airships, and hot cups of tea!

Comic transcript


*roar of a car engine.*

Major: Finally they show up.


Poll: Page transcripts

This site has the functionality to add transcripts for the comic pages, but I've been neglecting that. But are they even needed currently?

No, I don't need them.
46%
Yes, dialogues only.
28%
Yes, describing everything on the page.
26%

80 people have voted




Add Comment

* Required information
30000
Powered by Commentics

Comments (10)

Avatar
Regular
dr pepper (transfer from Disqus)

It's an alternate timeline, so-- alternate Russia.

Avatar
New
disqus_V3nJnKOhhC (transfer from Disqus)

Failure to criticize governmental idiocy insures it's continuance. MOCK the bastards!

Avatar
Regular
Greg C (Silence Echoes) (transfer from Disqus)

It's an unfortunate factor, but this was already in motion.

I will also say this, usually in these kinds of tales the Military are usually hungry warmongers who think they can fight the aliens effectively, how you've made your characters as people trying to avoid a war scenario has been a breath of fresh air.

Avatar
Regular
JoB (transfer from Disqus)

... setup in the first panel immediately made me think of this ... X-D

Avatar
Senior
Lord Eric (transfer from Disqus)

I am more than a little surprised there's no fence, especially considering they've already had one escape attempt, and that they know there's someone out there who may be highly motivated to tamper with their operation.

[Finally] they show up

Avatar
Senior
Darth_Biomech

It's an internal checkpoint, but I see where you coming from.

Avatar
New
SeanMcTiernan (transfer from Disqus)

Actually, that's not odd. While they are keeping containment, I'd highly doubt that the alien was taken to a Top Secret site to begin with.

For one, there just aren't that many to start with, and are usually confined to muchore secure areas than some rand spot out in the sticks

They do have a fence, as good of one as they needed for regular operations... Which this decidedly is not.

Avatar
Senior
Darth_Biomech

She was not in fact, it was built on top of the crash site, because it is too risky moving something as big as the shuttle.

Avatar
New
Takedown275 (transfer from Disqus)

Additionally, at least in the US, fences at secure government facilities are usually only meant to keep people from seeing inside the compound. In fact a lot of US government facilities don't have fences at all, but high berms so as to seem innocuous.

Avatar
Regular
Mark Linimon (transfer from Disqus)

yeah, two Ls






Share this comic



TRIVIA
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.