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 (9)
I do agree that prisoner of war isn't really the right classification here, but it's not exactly a situation that fits easily into normal categories.
Well, the trope subversion of the military and scientist perspectives is very deep I see.
Towards the Major's point, I think it's prudent to treat the prisoner in the "of war" sense, because, they did attack them, and there was blood shed, property destroyed, and so forth. And it's clear that they come from an advanced spacefaring power. If that culture is also advanced in a civic and social sense, they are likely to value the treatment of their people decently well, given the sort of aggressive contact they're in. That will be a boon in brokering latter developments if further contact is to be had. Some reparations likely demanded, but overall not too much beyond that.
Even if the aliens were hostile, it would either be over very quickly, or take some significant time to mobilize forces, properly scout the enemy, and plan an invasion, or get forces in place to glass the world thoroughly. In which case, they have time to break through with their prisoner and develop a means of communication, and study the implants and other technologies they have to figure out how they work. It's not like humanity could easily integrate any learned technology or secret overnight. Production of advanced alien materials would need the planetwide proliferation of tools to work them. And that will also take time.
So really, there is no need to rush. You either will have the time to glean many interesting secrets, or you'll be dead. Unethically treating the prisoners is more of a risk than not, and may inhibit your learning of this secrets.
"I has placed these restrictions"?
so it's better to try [to] avoid touching them
large pieces of the carcasses, [such as/particularly] torsos
were attempts at establishing [] contact [successful]
I [] placed [those] restrictions
I can't wait to hear what his suggestions were. He may go down to -2 status.
People tend to think a guy like that (the scientist) is really
horrible, but usually, with that type, if he found out that humans had
been dropped in a situation like this (the prisoner) and were mistreated
in the kinds of ways he's been suggesting, he would be fine with it...
the *science* of it is what drives him. In fact, if the aliens in the
flip-scenario *didn't* do the kinds of things he's talking about, he
might well have exactly the same kind of exasperation with those aliens
as he is expressing here.
Or he's just horrible. Horrible people are not remotely in short supply, of course.
Nah, he outright said that he just doesn't think nonhumans deserve the same ethical considerations.
I'm not sure your scenario is any better anyway. A bad person who sees nothing wrong with having their target direct the same bad attitudes back at them is still a bad person, even if they are appreciably different from a bad person who expects immunity for themselves.
Thats sounds a lot like what a vivisector would say doc