Author notes

011 - Triton

El Cid

on June 5, 2015

I won't be posting these boring Fact Cards too often, but since this page marks a definitive change of locale, I figured this wasn't entirely uncalled for. If you want to learn more about Triton, visit Wikipedia, which is where I lifted most of these facts from.
 

 
Triton is the largest moon of Neptune, and the seventh largest moon in the solar system (after Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Luna, and Europa). It has a very thin nitrogen atmosphere and is one of the few moons known to be geologically active.
 
Triton is believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt and was at some point captured by Neptune's gravity. As such, it may offer a useful preview of what we can expect to find on other transneptunian objects (Pluto, Eris, etc.). Triton contains about 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of water ice in its mantle, roughly 2.5 times as much water as can be found on Earth's surface. Though the surface of Triton is cold enough to freeze the gases we breathe into dust, there may be subterranean liquid oceans kept warm by the decay of radioactive elements in Triton's core.
 

 
The Triton of this comic is largely unchanged from the Triton we currently know and love/show total ambivalence toward. It's not terraformed, at least on the surface. The habitats are built deep underground, where they're shielded from radiation, and this particular one is submerged in a vast artificially heated ocean.
 
###TECH NOTES###
 
So what's with all the flying weirdos? Well, when I was forming a concept for a Triton-based society, the biggest and most obvious thing I had to struggle with was just how the low gravity was going to affect the way people live and move about. It pretty quickly occurred to me that, given how little you'd weigh there, it would be much easier to fly on Triton than it is here on Earth. The physics and the math of it is beyond me, so I consulted my science expert GMan003 from Comic Fury and he calculated that, with pair of 1 meter long wings, staying airborne on Triton would be about as much work as swimming is here on Earth. With powered flying gizmos like what you see here, the energy needed is almost trivial. So… yeah. Flying moon orgy. Dig it.
 
Sorry that this post turned out more wordy than my usual; a lot of information to dump. Next update, we'll take a whimsical look at the dynamics of certain gooey bodily fluids under moon gravity. Yay, fun.