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 (10)
I wonder how much data they gathered on Sol and the solar system before setting out, and how far away they gathered it from. If the nearest star system where the Alliance maintains observatories is more than a couple hundred light-years away, they would be outside our radio shell, but unless they were a lot further away than that, they would probably still be able to count our planets.
Well, the Expeditionary fleet is more than 3000 lightyears away from the nearest outpost, and there is no pre-meditated course plots. Each fleet's commander decides by themselves the next star system to jump towards when they're done surveying the current one. There's no need to extensively survey the star before jumping in, since it's always easier and plain simpler to just jump in and see everything directly, the only thing necessary is to determine the ecliptic plane to not run into a planet by accident (Or, rather, to add another three or four zeroes after the comma in the fraction of percent of chances of that happening, for the safety's sake), and for certain types of stars to check if they aren't expected to, say, blow up anytime soon. Would be bad to jump out into a nova's shockwave, amirite?
Ah, that explains the "are there planets?" attitude. Is Sol actually outside the borders of the Alliance, or is the Alliance itself just THAT thinly spread?
Fun fact: on certain specific radio frequencies, Earth is far brighter than the Sun. Those frequencies being the ones used by ballistic missile early-warning radars (hi Major!) and to a lesser extent television carrier signals. Source
BTW, I believe you mean, "A.U." (i.e. Astronomical Unit) rather than "A.E." The former is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (approximately 93 million miles). I do not know what "A.E." would be.
28 AU's would put it just inside Neptune's average orbit (about 30 AU's).
Looks like a minor translation slip. A.E. is the same abbreviation in Russian.
So how did we get from the situation in the opening pages to this well organized fleet? You have my attention Darth Biomech.
What do you mean?
First sentence means... I am interested in your story. The second sentence means I am enjoying your story.
Also I missed the "narration" that said this page was happening a month earlier.