Great, I was starting to get worried. Your comic is great and I would hate to see it being abandoned.

Nice nice nice nice

Thanks ^^

You might want to have a look at the latest blog entry (link on top of the page).

I won't say artist is fine, exactly, but he's active on Discord and not showing signs of burnout. The reason for the hiatus is that he wound up deciding to scrap a several-page scene, which wiped out the buffer.

Awesome news. Just as long as there's been no call ups for anything, thats been my personal worry for the artist after they mentioned it at as a possibility earlier.

Looking forward to seeing this progress. It's still been a good story for me with particularly government and military figures making relatively logical and understandable decisions based on the information they have as opposed to many in the genre that have such people making unreasonable decisions for the sake of plot material.

What are the signs of a burnout?

They disagree on quite a lot of topics, yes.

> how a low-(surface-)grav planet can manage to retain a dense atmosphere in the long run ...

Just look at Titan, which has an atmospheric density so high and gravity so low that flight powered by human muscles should be possible there. Ktak homeworld isn't that extreme though, of course.

Fair point, though I note that Titan being well outside the Sun's habitable zone plays a major role in explaining (as well as we can so far) how it could retain that atmosphere ...

No, I'd say Titan is NOT outside the habitable zone. It's well within the range for various other possible life forms.

Titan's surface temp is almost 200 K below Earth's (-179.2 vs. 14 °C). If that qualifies as "habitable" to the Ktak, Zane won't be wearing an "environmental suit" for his visit but an outright spacecraft!

(On a more serious note, whether Titan is to be considered actually "habitable" might have less to do with the "habitable zone" of the Sun, and more with how the proximity to Saturn influences the conditions there.)

Also we've seen Ktak wandering around the main areas of Dawn without any PPE

You now have me wondering if the Matriarch is going to request leave for her people to access, or even colonize, Titan. Even if it isn't naturally habitable for them it's easily possible their advanced implants and nano-machines might be capable of being tuned to allow survival in much harsher environments. Heck, all those species onboard probably require very different environments from each other for survival and comfort but implants and nanites are already tuned for common comfort in the present environment.

Another, possibly awkward, situation with a pre-space faring race since they wouldn't have control and a degree of authority over the rest of their system. An argument against colonisation of other bodies in the system could be made for pre-space civilisations inhabiting a planet in the same system to avoid them discovering their not alone at some point, but if you're going to reveal yourself anyway, suddenly there's no argument against it and it's an unclaimed celestial body.

Unless its an emergency, I'd personally get back to at least hear the contents of the message they've received and determine if a response or action is urgent.

Please note Lord Eric's comment in this thread; so, we have Raharrs breathing the same atmosphere as humans (on Earth) and Ktak (aboard the Dawn) standing next to them. The only gas present in more than "trace amounts" in the atmospheres of both Earth and Titan is nitrogen, so (Raharrs or) Ktak would have to "breathe" (be crucially dependent on the presence of) either that or "nothing at all" (internal photosynthesis?) for them to find Titan suitable for colonization. I'm not a chemist, but I'd guess that if nitrogen were a good candidate for an alternate biochemistry to consume, sci-fi would have introduced us to "nitrogen breathers" the same way it has presented "methane breathers" ...

Most LtC species are actually breathing more or less the same air in terms of important chemical composition, as it is a major component of whether a planet can or can not host a multicellular carbon-based life. Ratios are fluctuating, obviously, but the gist is more or less the same. Few have toxic gasses in their atmosphere, but those are non-essential junk so they don't suffer from it missing in a "standardized" atmospheric mixture Alliance ships use (just like we don't really care about how little argon or methane there is in the air we breathe).

If they were Nitrogen breathers, Oxygen would likely be highly toxic to them.Nitrogen breathing was used once in , I believe ,

an episode of twilight zone. Man was converted to nitrogen to become an alien to induce nations to work together against a made up threat.