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 (13)
I like the design of the Dawn a lot. However, I wonder how a tall building would work inside a spinning habitat. What forces would the occupants experience, moving to a higher floor?
Higher floors would experience lower gravity. Walking with the spin would slightly increase the apparent force of gravity, while walking against the spin would reduce it. Dropped or thrown objects would follow curving paths due to Coriolis forces. Since the floors of the buildings are flat instead of cylinder sections, gravity would also tend to pull things toward their east and west edges, especially on upper floors.
Also, because the cylinder is rotating around its long axis and contains flexible objects, it wants to shift its axis and rotate end-over-end instead, which exerts a crosswise torque on the whole ship that has to be counteracted somehow.
The cylinder is both tapered at the ends, and have a separate system, using water reserves of the ship, that spins in the opposite direction (well, pumps water, to be more technical) to counteract the spin force the cylinder excretes on the ship's non-rotating frame (In addition, the mass of the "flexible objects", the atmosphere, is insignificant in comparison to the rest of the drum). It's a quite complex and self-correcting system, which, combined with the size, explains why there isn't many ships of that class around.
The flexible objects I was thinking about was all those trees, but a counter-rotating mass would do the trick. One of the other proposals I've seen for stabilizing a spin-gee cylinder was to just have a linked pair of cylinders with opposite rotations.
Thanks!
Upper parts of the building are a mix of technical floors and rooms that make use of the reduced but non-zero gravity. As to what you would experience, well, depends on the speed. I once rode on an elevator that descended very fast. It was... an interesting experience. Sort of almost falling.
Thank you everyone for the interesting discussion.
Maybe, a large volume of water (eventually in three phase equilibrium, liquid water, ice, and vapor) could also act as a "thermal flywheel" for environmental control.
There are few science-fiction web comics that I know of, which stick with "hard" (realistic) science. Recently on Freefall by Mark Stanley, the protagonists are visiting a spinning space station. (Hint: check which way the station is rotating before pouring yourself a cup of coffee!)
Just kick the door down.
Ooh ooh, is this the scene where Zane gets The Bombshell dropped on him? I can't wait!
Zane, I like you, but leaving Ahshu in the dark like that isn't going to help keep the big secret under wraps. Especially since all she did was act a little impulsive.
Also, is the one week timeskip a 7 day skip or a 12 day skip?
I think he done that to prevent further outbursts on potentially divisive topics, rather than keep any secrets.
Unless noted otherwise, time (and everything else) is in earth units.
Is the Dawn captained by Zane himself, or by a flag captain who reports to him?
Dawn itself has the operational crew with a separate captain, yes.
Curse my speed reading skills