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 (12)
Hello,
I just wanted to express my appreciation. I found the comic a few days ago (how ever did I miss it for so long!), I just went through the archives and the Wiki. This is some remarkable word building you did! I also like how you managed to make your aliens, well... alien.
Added to my reading list, will come back in January. I wish you well for the holidays! And please watch out for COVID-19 - nasty bug!
Thank you so much! I appreciate that!
Alright, so it's post 2013. That's an interesting time datapoint.
[experts] are saying
entered the [atmosphere]
[AUTHOR'S] COMMENT
The military needed to say something, but they might be painting themselves into a corner PR-wise. Besides the obvious, they're claiming the capability to shoot down a meteor "nearly as large" as the Chelyabinsk one, which weighed 11,000 tons and mass for mass carried ~40 times as much kinetic energy as TNT can produce.
Enjoy your vacation. I for one would definitely take a scheduled hiatus over a spotty update schedule and/or author burnout.
Oh my, that's a lot of really stupid typos, thanks >_<
Now "atmosphere" has a new typo.
Oh and one I missed earlier:
science fiction [nonsense]
And one more thing I forgot because it's not exactly a typo: Space rocks are "meteoroids" in space, "meteors" while they're entering atmo, and "meteorites" after they've hit the ground. So the news anchor should be saying "meteor" here (assuming he himself has done his homework).
Such a claim wouldn't get past certain folks in certain corners of the internet that are heavily discredited, like 4Chan, but for most people the scale of such things is not well comprehended.
It's certain though that some onlookers will come by, and the story will have to develop some new mutations to survive nosy people, and not just the people hiding alien lifeforms on their couch. I'd expect claims of radiation, aftereffects and so on, real concerns for sure, but something the present idiots probably doesn't believe in.
Depending on the year, it's possible the military would have had some sort of technology in place, since there have been near misses with interstellar objects, of which the referenced event is one, and I have found via sources such as InfoWars (don't even start) an incident dating back to 2013 of allegations the Russians may have used their air defense systems to intercept a meteorite, though the Russians denied the claim publicly. With enough ordnance, you can perhaps actually do something to alter an incoming object, but the size and mass of such objects makes it difficult to do so. Bunker busters or better type ordance would be required to effectively intercept an object like this, if I had to guess.
Scifi is great.
Chelyabinsk was estimated to be a 20M object with a 0.64 MT areal burst. The Barringer crater meteor in Arizona was estimated to be a 50M iron object with a 10 MT ground impact. Chixalub by comparison was a 10 KM object and impacted with 80 Million MT of energy. It would take a good lead time and a lot of energy to stop or alter some of these objects.
Well fortunately, unlike missiles, jets, or other manmade objections, rocks don't jink or fly in otherwise erratic patterns to evade. Sure, they have a lot of velocity behind them, but they're far more predictable than anything our defense systems are designed to stop. And hey, if one doesn't do it, the next ten or so might. Or, at the very least, reduce it's velocity, and reduce or transform the kinetic power of the impact.
We don't know the IC year though. It's entirely possible this is some capability that is entirely reasonable with the military tech on hand. Or they're lying through their teeth, or it's theoretically something they could do, but haven't because that's typically not something needed to be done, or they hadn't the equipment in place yet.
There are options here besides blanket skepticism and doubt that it could happen at all. It's just an engineering problem after all.
With enough of a lead time (read: years), an Earth-crossing asteroid could be deflected with a relatively small amount of energy, by landing some sort of nuclear or solar-electric engine on the object and applying force to gradually bend its course away from the intercept vector. Or if the asteroid has a spin, it could conceivably be dug into and weakened (or its spin accelerated) to the point where it breaks into multiple diverging objects, none of which are on the original course. Ofc for a rock (let alone a metallic object) measured in kilometers, a "relatively small amount" of energy is still huge.
I personally support developing intercept technology of the install-an-engine variety, because I think bigger than just deflecting a dangerous asteroid. Once the engine is in place, you could start thinking about steering it into an actual Earth orbit, ready to host a space mining operation. Landing equipment on an asteroid is definitely possible, the Japanese have already done it and even gotten samples back.
"Install an engine" wouldn't work on rubble-pile asteroids, it's like pushing a sand castle.
I expect that putting an asteroid into Earth orbit would meet immense political resistance; putting it in orbit around the Moon or at L4 or L5 seems more likely.