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 (17)
He’s a conspiracy theorist. He DOESNT comprehend what he’s spewing out, but he THINKS he does.
Or perhaps they need a trace element that's poisonous to you, or vice versa, or one of the common energy storage molecules in their world happens to react with an essential molecule in your biochemistry, or . . .
Mirrored biochemistry. As in The Right Hand of Dextra by David J. Lake...
I LOVE the first panel here! It's a really clever way to show how Gharr can't understand what they're saying, but still allows us, the human readers, to know what the humans are saying.
Thanks! I am trying to get creative whenever the opportunity arises. ^^
I second this motion, it's absolutely lovely
Does the Alliance include any (non-machine) species that can't breathe our atmosphere? Unearthly pressures or temperatures, weird atmospheric chemistries, being made of exotic states of matter, that sort of thing?
They only that were found so far are Smi'Tar and Ziort. One is flat out incompatible with the living conditions of other species (unless you love to live inside the Chernobyl's nuclear powerplant), the other is admittedly very exotic (basically a sentient cloud of lightning living in the interstellar space) and accepted to enter the Alliance. Other than that, the laws of physics and more importantly chemistry make unusual alien life an order of magnitude less likely to appear. Oxygen, carbon and water offer unsurpassed advantages that no other chemical mix can provide, all having some sort of serious issue.
So oxygen breathers will dominate the probability charts of sapient life, in my opinion.
<facepalm> While that water is probably safe, Gharr should probably have checked for trace elements that might not be too good for him. You really don't want to find out too late that the locals have (for example) a high tolerance for dissolved arsenic, or water-borne bacteria.
In this case, he better hope chlorine is good for him.
If a being were that sensitive it would have ceased to exist. most life on earth has proven adaptable to change to continue to exist. Take a look at the various extremes that humans have adapted to on our own planet.
"No, no telephone calls, no internet, we should go in a total dark mode. We will be discovered instantly." Unflipped the text for those interested.
Heck, even being native to a planet is no guarantee you can eat the food. I have a friend we often describe as "allergic to everything under the sun and he doesn't like mushrooms."
Even much of what we do eat is not necessarily good for us, we've just adapted and discovered via trial and error over a hundred thousand years into eating whatever won't immediately kill or incapacitate us.
And of course radically altered various plants and animals via selective breeding to be more edible for us.
Someone's read their Roger Zelazny?
... It's a decent way of guessing, come on!