I probably should technically make this a "Deleted Scene," because it references stuff that happened in the Deleted Scene… but I'm sorta coming to realize that I never should have left any of that stuff out to begin with. So… I guess I'm retroactively undeleted those pages. I can do that, right? No? Well, I'm still gonna.
Hey, what's this? A bonus animation? Well, if you've been following the author's notes (and I can't blame you if you haven't), then you know that for a while now me and Windows 8.1 have not been getting along… but our rocky relationship may be turning a corner now. I seem to have reached a point now where everything's running smoothly, in fact much more smoothly than on my old machine, so that means more productivity in the weeks to come. I should soon have my buffer back where it needs to be, and may even be able to start doing cool bonus stuff again on a semi-regular basis. All this page needs now is a science blurb.
Ooh, wait… I think I feel one coming on… no, false alarm.
Never mind, here it is.
###SCIENCE BLURB: How Far Away Is Mars?
It's one of the first things every space opera nerd does, and it's also one of the first things we get wrong. So your Captain Space Guy character needs to fly from Earth to Mars? Well, how far away is that, and how long will it take? No prob. Earth is about 150 million km from the Sun, and Mars is about 225 million, so Mars is about 75 million km away from the Earth. That's so easy.
Except it so isn't.
Oddly enough, rocket science is hard. Everything's constantly in motion in space, so depending on when you leave Earth, Mars *could* be as little as 75 million km away… or it could be on the other side of the sun, 375 million km away. And either way, it takes a long time to get to Mars, so by the time you get there, Mars will be somewhere further along on its orbit than where it was when you launched. So you're aiming for where it *will be* in the future, not where it is. Aaaand also keep in mind that you won't be traveling in a straight line; you'll be taking a curved ballistic trajectory… so in other words, you should probably keep it as vague as possible when you write about Captain Space Guy's journey. Because even the seemingly obvious stuff is a headache.
Mission planners at NASA use computer generated graphs called pork chop plots to decide when is the best time to launch a space mission (the best launch window). I'm too much of a lazy bastard to do anything like that, but I do use a solar system simulator as a "cheat sheet" for those rare occasions when I need to know how far away one planet is from another. That sounds pretty pointless, but it actually came in handy on this page. In the last panel, Abby was originally supposed to say "Pluto" instead of "Uranus," because Pluto is closer to Neptune than Uranus is… except it isn't. When I looked at my handy dandy cheat sheet, Pluto is so far from Neptune at the time this comic takes place that it wouldn't get Abby's signal until well after all the eight major planets. So I saved myself from a major flub… even if nobody but me would have noticed.
Oh, and when does this comic take place, you ask? In the future, of course! :P
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