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 (5)
One of the trivia notes says that FTL communication is impossible. Is this strictly true, or is there just no other form of FTL communication than FTL transit, which is possible?
There's also another trivia note saying that only two classes of ship can generate artificial gravity. Is that true artificial gravity which requires some kind of futuristic tech, or do they just have rotating sections that simulate it through centrifugal force (and I'm a physics major, so I'm allowed to call it that).
FTL transit. At top speed it can go 16,000 c (because according to two other notes, Alliance space is 16,000 ly long, and it takes a year to traverse that with a good hyperdrive.)
And, well, one of the two classes that have deck gravity is Dawn-class motherships, aka Zane's flagship that has that giant spin-gee cylinder.
The only way to get information to another star system in a timely manner is to bring it with you on your spaceship, yeah.
"True" artificial gravity requires some truly black magic levels of muckering with the laws of reality, so even Azinarsi can't do that. Some of the structures of the Ancients though do possess ability to warp gravity without having mass or energy for that (as far as researchers can tell, at least), so the "classic" artificial gravity is technically possible in the setting.
Dawn and Lake are the ones that generate gravity by spinning, but that tidbit might change if the future, actually, if I'll need a new spaceship for the worldbuilding or plot purposes.
And thanks for all the comments!
new findings suggest that action at a distance is 10,000 to 15,000 times the speed of light. One physicist has stated that is the low end of what they believe possible. After all they are a more advanced society and we certainly don't have all the answers.
tense_walk.mp3