Back on board the Diablo, Ula-Not-Ula is throwing her weight around – quite the impressive feat when you are weightless.
So, at this point, I'm sure everyone reading has figured out what the mooners are up to. I wrote in an earlier update about the so-called Kzinti Lesson, which tells us pretty much any sci fi spaceship can double as a weapon of mass destruction under the right conditions. The crazy amounts of energy needed to zip around the stars or a solar system at sci fi speeds can be weaponized or made into a bomb. Or you could ram a space colony – or a planet – at relativistic speeds, with apocalyptic results. And that, of course, is what evil Osprey has in mind here. She and her goons have effectively disabled Nova Dagon's dock defenses and hijacked a long-distance freighter with the intention of using its sci fi rocket engine to cook the entire colony. It's the perfect plan! Well, okay, it was convoluted in parts, but it's working thus far!
And now, the quibbles:
But wait, how do they still have enough fuel to do all that roasting? Don't spaceships only ever carry just enough fuel to get where they're going?
Generally, yeah, and that's a detail I just didn't find scriptworthy. But if you look really close at the fourth panel of page 251, you can actually see the dock crew has some kind of tubes linked up to the Diablo's fuel tanks, which suggests they're being refueled. And whatever kind of sci fi fuel this ship uses, I'm sure it's pretty efficient, so it doesn't need all that much of it to do some interesting people frying.
But if they fire their rocket booster thingees inside the hangar, won't they just propel themselves into the hangar bay doors and go splat? Newton is still a thing, right?
Shhhh! Don't tell anyone about that! Okay, actually, I did think about this, and that's why I included that line on this page about how they're reconfiguring the propulsion system to function basically as a giant laser beam. So it's putting out a ton of energy and heat but not generating very much thrust. Something to do with specific impulse something something technobabble. Whether or not that's physically plausible, I don't really know!
I'm not sure if I've promoted his channel here before, but I'm a big fan of futurist Isaac Arthur's weekly documentaries on Youtube. If you're into that kind of stuff, or want a treasure trove of knowledge for your sci fi worldbuilding, you absolutely must check out his channel, if you haven't already. Last week, he did a video on how we might colonize Neptune, which is right up my alley considering that's where this comic takes place. I'm sure some of his concepts will find their way into these virtual pages very soon; keep an eye out for chandelier cities over Neptune! I also thought it was interesting that the fictional colony ship in the video is named Salacia, which is the dwarf planet where the doomsday machine Rahu was rumored to be hiding in Chapter 2. A neat coincidence. Who knows, maybe Isaac Arthur's a reader?
The next update will see a surprise (or maybe not surprise) character appearance, so you won't want to miss that! See you then!
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