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)
Their cross product convention is the opposite way? Shocking!
what?
They've got the south pole at the top of their map, which implies they view south as the direction the Earth's angular momentum points, which means they view clockwise as the positive direction of rotation, which implies they do cross products the opposite way from us.
I find the Pioneer plaque image of man-and-woman on the left interesting. Was that simply an artist choice or did these guys actually find one of the pioneer space probes?
It's more of an easter egg really, they haven't gotten the Pioneers, humans would've noticed that.
Not necessarily. The Pioneers have been out of power for a bit, so these guys could mess with them and we'd never know. That being said, the possibility of these guys finding a couple of inactive probes beyond the farthest planet of our solar system is kind of slim.
Neat Easter egg, though. :-)
"How do they get anything done?!"
"Apparently, there's a lot of yelling."
So... they're weirded out that Earth has 150 languages... that is interesting.
At least it isn't like a setting I'm working on, in addition to the weirdness of fusion languages like Solmoot or Europask which use a basic structure and -depending on where the person is from- uses a mixture of the various primary languages within that faction...
No, not singular languages, language families. We have thousands of languages but they all related to each other to form somewhere around 147 language families, or so I heard.
Still, it is interesting that they're weirded out.
It would seem other species are more unified, and humanity is uncommonly individualistic. Which might also explain why they underestimated our weaponry, if the baseline tends to be more unified. Fewer cultures would presumably mean less conflict.
Then again, at least they're not in a future-history setting that I'm working on...
Several dozen space warships gunning after them at 5Gs (thanks to their fusion powered water rockets) from all directions, weapons (ranging from electromotive cannons that fling 12kg (or more) iridium-osmium alloy darts at 2km/s at the minimum to missiles of various kinds (including casaba howitzers) to pulse free electron lasers in the X-Ray band to particle beam cannons to B5-style pulse weapons to the odd disintegrator) and all ready to shoot them (and each other) up...
This 'verse have rocket destroyers capable of launching salvos of thousands of nuclear warhead tipped rockets capable of accelerations up to 50G, railguns capable of accelerating few tons of tungsten to a fraction of c, and drones. thousands of drones, each armed with lasers and particle cannons. Hope your point defenses are good. If Alliance doesn't want to fight, doesn't mean they can't.
That is just the Alliance, of course, if you aren't stupid enough to start flexing at Azinarsi, who will just vaporize your entire home solar system with a nicoll-dyson beam in a response.
Taken aback by 142? Wait until you discover the other 6,000
The map being upside-down is a nice touch.