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 (8)
I had that near same light from panel 5 in a previous house.
I wonder if Raharrs find going down stairs difficult with their back facing ankles. I imagine they would have to keep their lower legs very straight as they come down. It's likely make all the worse by them being larger than humans and probably needing wider stairs to begin with.
The other option they have is to go completely public themselves. Live stream or figure out a way to encourage one or more camera crews to the same location and let Gharr talk it out. Doesn't mean the military might not arrest them all but at the very least everyone across the country/world is going to be aware and chasing the authorities for updates on their situation... Of course, this is all in the idea of their perspective of a military thats out to get them.
The other problem with that scenario is if Gharr is still intending to hold to the laws on contact and minimise disclosure of himself and the alliance.
Well, the alternative is to descend like us humans do with ladders - backwards.
We did see a Raharrian outside stair with a rather human-ish inclination in the center panel of page 167, though. (No, I did not look through all the pages showing the interior of their spacecraft. The matriarch might well have insisted on her hall having one, for the occasional showy entrance, but then it wouldn't be sized for Raharr use, either.)
I see stairs in the control room but when I found a panel with Zane coming down them they seem quite large and possibly more shallow between each step than human steps would normally be.
I can certainly see how they can use stairs by simply keeping the lower leg straight. It just seems like it would be more awkward. Larger steps with less drop between them like those in the control centre seem built for the Raharr though. Similar to how all the chairs have an off-centre connection between base and back to allow for tails.
I can see them using ramp slopes. The backwards lean of their lower legs and wide toes could make them easy to descend.
Now that I've had a moment ...
... you're referring to page 83, I suppose?
IMHO that pair of stairs - depicted rather often - has fluctuated a bit between "perfectly human pitch" (e.g., page 7) and "a bit more gentle" (48), as well as between "human tread depth" (83) and "looks adapted to Raharr step length, but not more" (82 1st panel). They consistently have humans' preferred number of eight steps in a row, though. It's the pair of stairs in the center panel of p. 82 that has a much lower inclination ...
Considering I literally haven't touched those stairs once since I modeled them in 2017, reading this is kind of fascinating. =D
I suspected that you'd say something like that. :-3 Maybe my mistake is that I'm taking the (non-modeled) characters for size comparisons ... ?
Gharr:
"Is that pizza still warm?"
"What *is* it with you humans and stairs!?"