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

Author's comment:

Alliance's shuttles are very robust.

(This is a dupe to fix the page count being misaligned due to the spread, just move along please!)



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evonix (transfer from Disqus)

The next button is broken on this page

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Darth_Biomech

Thanks for noticing, fixed it!

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Quieteyes (transfer from Disqus)

First off, GREAT spread. This looks really cool! Second, I can easily see this being mistaken for a secret military vehicle of some sort ("aliens" would NOT be my first thought upon seeing this). Third, it says something about the structural integrity that it survived a missile hit (a detail currently unknown by our heroes) and crashing into the ground mostly intact.

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Carefulrogue (transfer from Disqus)

Surviving a missile I'm less surprised by, rather the fact it survived hitting the ground relatively intact. But yeah, it's close enough to human engineering that I could easily see it being mistaken for a US, Chinese, or Russian classified project.

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Garth MindFeather (transfer from Disqus)

i realize this was drawn long before the incident i'm about to cite, but this certainly gives me vibes of when Iran shot down that Ukrainian passenger plane with a couple missiles.

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Dreadogastus (transfer from Disqus)

good thing that landing shuttle was good old-fashioned chemical rocket. A nuclear power source would make the area quite unhealthy. Uh.. that isn't a hydrazine fueled rocket?. I hope.

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Darth_Biomech

You surely don't think that some primitive chemical rocket could make a trip from Jupiter to Earth in a week, right?

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Dreadogastus (transfer from Disqus)

An excellent point. That leaves me trying to swallow the shuttle being shot down with no radioactive contamination or 5-kiloton explosion.

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Darth_Biomech

There are other ways of propulsion besides a chemical rocket and a nuclear engine... Especially in sci-fi...

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Aldis Ozols (transfer from Disqus)

It could be powered by fusion technology. The reaction would stop as soon as the reactor was destroyed, and there would be little if any radiation.

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Lord Eric (transfer from Disqus)

I've been doing a little research on fusion reactors lately. They actually contain astonishingly little energy at any one time. In current experimental tokamak reactors, the worst accidents that have ever happened ("major disruptions" that channel the entire plasma content straight into the wall) can just barely burn a hole in the inner vessel, and the hole doesn't even leak radioactives. Fusion reactors have inherent process safety.

If the reactor was directly hit, the neutron-activated plasma-facing materials might be exposed, but even that is miles less dangerous than you'd see in a well-designed fission reactor, much less a melted-down one. And the shuttle was hit forward, in the crew compartment, where the reactor is unlikely to be.

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Lord Eric (transfer from Disqus)

According to the sidebar, and Gharr's earlier comment that he'd be back in ~12 days, the shuttle was pulling at least 1g acceleration the whole way. That's a delta-v expenditure so massive that lifting off from Earth (a task that costs chemical rockets 95%+ of their mass in fuel and fuel tankage) would add less than 2% to the one-way cost, and the shuttle's mass appears to be mostly non-fuel. Exhaust velocity (assuming the shuttle's main propulsion is a reaction drive at all) must be absolutely insane, and powering it would require *at least* fusion power.

Mind you, insane exhaust velocities *are* possible with fusion. The fusion-powered Caplan Thruster achieves exhaust velocities of over .01c using less than half of its power output, although there are both health and stealth issues with a drive system that spews oxygen-14.

And of course, DB's replies elsewhere in this thread drop the implication that the shuttle's main drives might not use rocketry in the first place. There was an exhaust plume when it separated from the Dawn, but that might have just been a maneuvering thruster.

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Norman Prather (transfer from Disqus)

First contact gone spectacularly bad.






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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.