Latest blog post: Redraw of chapter 1 is happening (2024-05-11)

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New

Nautilus friend :)

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Senior

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.

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Senior

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?

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Senior

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?

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Senior

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

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Visitor

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).

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Regular

Looks like a minor translation slip. A.E. is the same abbreviation in Russian.

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Visitor

So how did we get from the situation in the opening pages to this well organized fleet? You have my attention Darth Biomech.

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Senior

What do you mean?

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Visitor

First sentence means... I am interested in your story. The second sentence means I am enjoying your story.

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Visitor

Also I missed the "narration" that said this page was happening a month earlier.






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The author is against any kind of application of AI to his artwork.

TRIVIA
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.