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)
I've recently started reading this comic and I have to say that the major isn't as bad as I thought
I expected a less narrow mind, Zelenkov.
Dang, and here I was holding Zelenkov in high regard. But that's several kinds of fucked up. Even if you have an axiomatically "humans only" view of morality, it's a spectacularly bad idea to show that kind of moral disregard for beings that could surely reduce your planet to a faintly radioactive plane of molten glass.
Caught up aaaaand bookmarked!
Hope you'll enjoy what's to come)
Hah. Well, humans are animals, too...
Major Pronin +1 status. Professor Zelenkov -1 status.
Funny thing is, everything before the Major's objection could have been an ethical scientist just getting a little too deep in his work headspace. "Well yeah, it's horrible that our starting point is a bunch of corpses, but that's no reason not to be excited about how much we've learned!"
Reminds me of a scene in the Lost Fleet books. An alien delegation is visiting Earth, and suddenly starts demanding to visit one particular tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Turned out they had brought along the carefully preserved body of a human who had been left dead on their doorstep by a long-ago failed hyperdrive experiment, and wanted to return him to his home. The human characters note with embarassment that their own nations probably wouldn't have been nearly as respectful if the situations were reversed.
On that last paragraph, it may be more the case of treating it as a lost at/to the sea sort of death. Watery graves are generally speaking to be left undisturbed. And even in the case my mind jumps to of diving and lifting enemy wrecks from the seabed, the US did treat it's adversaries with respect and returned them to the sea. (Project Azorian.)
More like "we wouldn't have hesitated to run destructive analyses."
Funeral customs in that verse explicitly did not abandon bodies to the void btw, they were always to be collected and returned to either a life-bearing planet or a star if at all possible. Preserving the body for return to its specific planet of origin when you don't even know if you'll ever contact the civilization that owns it is definitely going above and beyond, though.
Well that's a first. The military regarding the aliens as people rather then the scientists.
That surprised me too. I'd have thought that the scientist would know better, but apparently not.
Given all the scientists with little to no morals that showed up in the last century alone, it shouldn't surprise you.
There's probably also a certain "game recognize game" effect going on here. The alien expedition is kitted out like a military project and the one survivor is acting like a disciplined soldier, so the military guys would naturally afford them a degree of respect as fellow soldiers.
AND the fact they obviously have advanced technology means you might want to play nice.
That's a fair point. I was basing it on my own experience as a science graduate, but after all there's no reason that my experiences would be relevant to him. Ethics aside, I'd have hoped someone who'd spent most of his life studying living beings would recognise the importance of intelligence, but I guess that's really not the part that he focuses on! Sounds like he got so caught up in the details that he forgot to see the bigger picture, and got too used to studying non-human animals.
It is nice to see taht the trope of the callous military isn't being played up to it's maximum potential. A nice little bit of trope subversion.
agreed