page 1314 – Taking The Quick Way Up
Uh oh, looks like somebody got inspired by the April Fools page to play around with animation again. I don’t normally give away easter eggs like this, but I’m actually not sure if you can just pause an animated PNG in-browser, and this wound up a lot harder to read while in motion than I’d intended, but one of those crawlspaces in between the floors has “Trigger Was Here” graffiti. I’m pretty sure the eagle-eyed among you should be able to catch the OTHER bits without my help.
Anyway, despite what both the complexity of this gimmick and the fact that I was up until after 4 getting it finished, this is actually something of a stop-gap page. I mentioned this elsewhere, but I got weirdly suddenly sick right the frig outta nowhere for a couple days last week, and it badly threw off my work flow on everything. The page I really wanted to do next would have required me to get started drawing it at least a full day earlier than I was physically able to, preferably more. And while the EDITING of this was way more tediously time consuming than usual, the actual drawing was lightning quick, and that’s the part that I most need to be on my a-game to actually do. So here we are.
Hopefully, the aforementioned workflow hiccup won’t get in the way of a fresh TWC Voting Incentive this Friday. I’ve got plenty more to do, there’s literally a half-finished Conventional Wisdom page open in another tab in Clip Studio right behind the one for this page. I ping-ping back and forth between projects a lot, as in “do a page of one thing, then go do a page of another,” but it is RARE for me to literally have two separate comic pages open simultaneously. I must really be playing catch up right now.
EDIT: NEW VOTING INCENTIVE IS UP! It’s late, but it’s up!
I wanted to make a joke about the ship not having enough layers for even one cycle of this, but the graphs on pages 37 & 38 imply that there are probably at least 20 floors, assuming all floors are of consistent height. And we can reasonably assume that the images there were either over-sized to make them visible, undersized due to the full layout not being determined, or both oversized and undersized because the ship’s size fluctuates as needed for the comic’s gags.
Shame.
At the time, I’m pretty sure they were intended to be properly to scale, especially since Layla had only just had some dialog about how SMALL the ship was… but yeah, these days things only make sense if we assume the highlighted spots are significantly oversized. There’s just too many jokes that really depend on the ship being much bigger than originally implied.
That does mean that the number of people who left the Mad Scientist Convention grows every time the ship’s size is implied to be larger.
Actually, I think that the ship would still have more rooms than most hotels even with what we’ve seen.
There was still easily enough room for at least a hundred passenger rooms in those early viewings. We haven’t even seen the entirety of the Observation Deck at once, and what we saw on page 37 is easily enough for five passenger rooms, and that was probably half the room at most. Give the ship the 20 floors I assumed above, take half away for miscellaneous use like vending machine and passenger storage, or the Observation Deck itself, and you have 50 rooms not even a third of the way into the ship. Another 50 on the opposing hallway and you have a minimum of 100 rooms and still only reaching the middle of the ship’s frontal ball.
The only problem with this is the fact that, on page 37, the Recreation Room is shown to be about the same width as the Observation Deck, but the viewpoint we get makes it look much smaller. Then again, the Rec Room is shown to be an oval, so they could have entered the smallest part of the room and there is more than another dozen TV’s in there.
I feel like there’s a joke to be made here that the exact number of rooms on the ship is equal to the result of adding together the main cast’s exact ages.
Is that age in Earth Years, Earth Days, Earth Hours, the equivalent of the planet Trigger and Layla grew up on BEFORE it was moved to be closer to the sun, the equivalent of the planet Trigger and Layla grew up on AFTER it was moved to be closer to the sun, OR the equivalent for whatever planet they last landed on?
I feel like it would be the last one, personally, but what do I know?
oh shoot i didn’t think about how that planet has shorter years now. what does that do with peoples planned vacations, did they come up much sooner than intended, did they lose their booking if they booked on days no longer existing in the year?
Maybe they also spun the planet up so that the days would be proportionately shorter with the same number per year? Which of course caused a host of new even worse problems.
OR just do the simple easy method of artificially reducing their star’s gravity by locally changing the gravitational constant, so that they would orbit in the same amount of time despite being closer. That’s sure not to cause any problems, right?
I would suggest that their planetary repositioning could have resulted in their “year” taking the same amount of time, but I can’t see a way that could work. Either the faster & further away planet would be slingshot away from the star, or the closer & slower planet would be dragged into their sun.
If artificially adjusting the sun, or it’s gravity, was cheap & easy, they wouldn’t have had to push the planet closer to the star in question. Or they would have used means other than “giant rocket push planet”.
As for losing days, it’s LIKELY that there’s an interplanetary universal time thing going on, potentially overseen by a coalition of Nitpickers & clock enthusiasts as an unpaid hobby.
Artificially adjusting gravity is super easy, because very very important madsciency reasons, artificially adjusting light intensity is not, also for very important madsciency reasons, thus moving the planet closer was the best solution. (also, I think giant-rocket-push-planet was artistic license for the wall-of-explanation, even in scifantasy, that wouldn’t work, ’cause most planets rotate)
Realistically (as if that word should ever be said for FoT, or any other scifi) we don’t even know if they have axial tilt/seasons, without which there’s not any reason for a calendar year to be influenced by the time of its trip around the sun, and even with seasons…there’s still not really any good reason. So, yeah, there should be a common universal calendar. And some planets actually use it. But there probably often isn’t. For human typical stupidity politics social reasons, “We aren’t going to use some darn year supposedly based off some backwater planet that is one of the hundreds claiming dubiously to be the “origin of humanity” just because those big planetary systems try to force it on us, we’re going to use our own year, darnit!!” And then half the population, who does business with other worlds, uses the universal calendar anyway, just to confuse things more.
my thought of the rockets is that there was a ring of rockets around the world firing in timed bursts so that there is always thrust pushing the planet towards the sun. coincidently this setup would also allow them to push out if they went in to fast
That seems plausible (in a FOT sense of the word plausible) but it would seem tough for one person to be planned to sabotage dozens or hundreds of rockets in a way that would cause it to fail completely rather than send the planet careening into the void…so I wonder how many other Triggers the anti-warming terrorists had set up who are still toiling away in underground bunkers on Lowelem waiting for the “go” order….
obviously bureaucracy dictates that there is a central location that all the rockets can be controlled from. specifically so someone can rack up a lot of election points by pushing a big red button to set the whole thing off. triggers job wasn’t just to sabotage but to send a message. he was going to rewire the big red button so that all the rockets would fire thrust in the wrong direction launching them all into space instead of moving the planet. this would of course end the political career of who ever managed to wrangle themselves into the position to push the button
@ Ed8 on Adjusting Sun Gravity: I was actually referring to the fact that, if it easy to adjust a sun’s gravity, they could have slightly increased the Sun’s Gravity and used that to pull their planet in towards the sun, before later reducing it to ensure a stable new-orbit. As they went with the “no adjustments or corrections are possible” route, I feel like that just isn’t possible.
@aqua- OK, that does seem like the exact sort of terrible plan politicians would come up with to pump up their own ratings at the cost of vastly increasing the chance of project failure.
@Dairus – That couldn’t work though – the orbit shrinks when you increase the gravity because the planet’s kinetic energy and thus velocity remains constant, so as soon as they reduced it, the planet would move back out to its original position, because velocity would still be constant. So they’d have to leave the new higher gravity permanently on. Which messes up the year again. I think. I’ve already forgotten what the original question was… In any case, the plan was likely chosen based on politicians infighting rather than cost, practicality, feasibility, safety, or potential undesired consequences. In other words, they used rockets because the politicians that were paid off by the rocket building industry won out over the politicians being paid off by the gravity machine industry and the politicians being paid off by industries that would have benefited by other plan options.. so we’re arguing about the wrong thing anyway! Probably why the terrorists wanted to stop them in the first place.
As far as pausing the animated PNG file in-browser – I used to have a plugin that would pause (or at least toggle, not sure it could pause on specific frames) animated gifs, and possibly other animations as well, but changes to Firefox several years ago caused it to stop working, and frustratingly it hasn’t been updated to work with newer versions of Firefox. I haven’t found a good replacement for it.