Author notes

158 - Star-crossed

El Cid

on June 7, 2017

And here we meet Una and Sergei, two corners of a less-than-harmonious love triangle. I kept telling myself I would come back at some point and try to rewrite the dialogue to make it more “snappy,” but I ran out of time. This still works, anyway. It's not bad. I'll try to remember to post some character flashcards on the next update. Not that you really need to get too attached to any of these people…

One of the naughty pictures Ula pulled up in panel 3 may look sort of familiar to you if you've been following this all the way since Chapter 1. It may remind of you of that Jetta-Manu flashback sex scene. That's because it's a panel from a deleted page that was never posted originally. As you may have noticed, the link icons on the left hand side of the page have changed recently. That's because I've added a new bonus section for Deleted Scenes and other outtakes that never made it into the comic. There are only two deleted scenes up there currently, but I should be adding more stuff over time.





In the first panel, Ula mentions that they've been traveling for 30 days. So, how much distance can one of these sci fi spaceships cover in 30 days? Where could they possibly be traveling from?

At first, that may sound like a stupid question. After all, we're used to the starship Enterprise crossing galactic distances at warp speed, and Han Solo skipping from one star system to the next in the blink of an eye. Thirty days is FOREVER for a sci fi spacecraft to get where it's going!

But there is no warp drive in this comic's universe, and the solar system is incredibly vast. Light from the sun takes 5.3 hours to reach Pluto. That's at light speed! These are not trivial distances. Also worth keeping in mind, I mentioned in one of my first ever science blurbs that even if we had the technology, you probably wouldn't be allowed legally to just zip around the solar system at super crazy high speeds, because even a small spacecraft traveling a significant fraction of light speed would cause more damage than the worst nuclear weapon imaginable if it accidentally crashed into a planet.



So, with all that in mind, how fast is this puppy moving? I'll spare you the gory details, but figuring that out required multiple visits to Project Rho (my favorite resource for this sort of thing) and some spreadsheet magic. As far as I can tell, it's not unreasonable to say a ship like this might have delta-v somewhere in the range of 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers per second.

What is delta-v? I went over that in an earlier blurb, so I won't go into it again in detail here. Suffice it to say that if you divide the delta-v in half, you've got roughly the maximum cruising speed of your spacecraft. That's a super-simplified explanation, but it'll do. So the freighter can do something like 1,000 to 1,250 kilometers per second. That sounds crazy fast, and it is; that's a bit shy of a respectable half of one percent the speed of light! But it's within the realm of being not so stupid fast that they'd ban it.

How much distance can you cover in thirty days at 1,250 kilometers per second? At that speed, you can cross one astronomical unit in just under a day and a half. An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun (about 150 million kilometers). So in thirty days, you could cross about 22 astronomical units. So, since their destination is Triton, these guys could have embarked from as deep into the solar system as Saturn's orbit, or as far out as the edge of the local Kuiper Belt region.

None of that had anything whatsoever to do with the story, but I just thought it was an interesting tangent.