Author notes

224 - House Cleaning

El Cid

on June 11, 2018

It may be a fair assumption that “a new car” is code for “a bullet in the back of the head.” The Governor's in a hurry; she has a magazine cover to be photographed for.

This whole Evil Governor scene was just an elaborate setup for some exposition, which you'll get on the next page. And also I plan on posting the first new installment of Insertion Burn, the ongoing animated series that nobody asked for, but everybody's getting. So tune in for all that! Or do it out of pity. I'll take either.





A few pages ago, I made a feeble attempt to understand the physics of how birds can fly for long periods inside an O'neill cylinder style rotating space colony. It was a disaster, so I had to send this question up the ladder to Gman, the unofficial official science consultant for this comic.

After considering the problem, Gman told me he was highly confident that birds should be able to fly inside an O'neill cylinder just like they do here on Earth, without any complications. Unfortunately, his explanations as to why this is were somewhat generic descriptions of how ballistic trajectories work inside a centrifuge… which is all stuff I already knew… and did not address the special circumstances which concerned me about bird flight. I tried to prod him for a bit more, but he seemed pretty satisfied that he's already explained it to me and I'm just not getting it. It's likely that I wasn't doing a very good job framing the question correctly, and I eventually had to throw in the towel and move on, sadly.



With that door closed, I turned to the next best thing: Internet randos. I was able to find a handful of forums where this question was discussed, and in all of them, they seemed highly confident that birds should be able to fly just fine… but they had different explanations than Gman's. He was talking more about relative motion, whereas most of these forum posters are talking about air currents. So now, I'm REALLY confused!

So my last hope was to go deep undercover. Posing under the pseudonym 'Janet,' I created a thread on Stackexchange, which is some sort of crowdsolving site for inquisitive eggheads. And I received a whopping two responses. Both of them were highly confident that birds should be able to fly just fine, and had their own explanation, based on air friction.



So, what is the scientific consensus on birds flying inside a spinning space station? Apparently, everyone is highly confident that birds should be able to fly just fine… even though there's no agreement on how or why this is. Personally, I didn't find any of the explanations to be terribly convincing, but I'll allow for the fact that I'm not a hardcore physicist and so maybe I'm in over my head this time. So I am officially closing the books on this bird investigation. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's been resolved… but I've had all the bird talk I can stomach at this point. Moving on!