Author notes

264 - Cutting In

El Cid

on Oct. 26, 2018

I was going to title this page 'Disarmed,' but I already used that one back in Chapter 2, for similar punny purposes. It's nothing to be proud of when dismemberment is a common enough feature in your webcomic that it factors into multiple page titles.

Sometimes you have well-laid plans for how you want a panel to be put together, and it plays out beautifully in your head, but then reality jumps in and reminds you it was a stupid idea all along. That's what happened in that second panel. So, I wanted a big sinister closeup shot of the rocket boosters (or whatever they are) as they get ready to blast fiery apocalypse into the hapless colony interior. And melted onto the outside of one of the glowing hot boosters is the charred skeletal remains of one of the luckless dockworkers who collided with the ship during its earlier destruction spree. There's just one problem: Scale. If I zoom in close enough on the ship that you can see the skeleton, then you can't really make out the boosters. And if I zoom out to show the boosters, then you can barely make out the skeleton. So, the panel still works narrative-wise, but you need to look really close to make out that the spindly dark shape splayed out across one of the boosters is in fact a human skeleton. It's the best I could do!

AUTHOR'S NOTE

* Technically, from her bio, Captain Savage was born in colonial Martian territory. How that squares with her referring to herself as a 'Transneptunian,' I dunno, but I liked the line so I used it. Maybe it's just a popular expression among the Kuiper Belt pirates and roughnecks she's been hanging out with?



By the by, I'm going to go ahead and recycle this Youtube clip below. In case you're wondering why the back of the Diablo is all red and glowing like that, it's not for some technobabble sci fi reason. It's because rockets build up a lot of heat when you fire them for prolonged periods. This is exacerbated when you're in space and there's little or no air to cool your spacecraft. The heat just keeps building up. Here's a Youtube video of a rocket test firing that demonstrates just how hot these things get.



To help get rid of all that excess heat, ships like the Diablo have extensive radiator arrays which dissipate heat away from the main body of the ship. When they get hot, they glow. Normally, they'd be fully extended, but because they're inside a hangar, they're all tucked in, which means they're not doing much to help with the heat. So, the Diablo is rapidly heating up. We'll see more of this in the pages to come.



The Drunk Duck Awards have all been handed out now, but acceptance speeches and concession speeches are still trickling in, along with bonus extras. You can catch Transneptunian's acceptance speech (featuring Ronald from Lego Space, Belinda Brandon from Belle's Best, and Jerrie from Jerrie) here (https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Drunk_Duck_Awards_2018/5582945/)



That's all for today! See ya next week!