page 1475 – Oooopening
A lot of weird artist-y bits in this one. For one thing, this was ORIGINALLY supposed to be the big, climactic panel for the previous comic, but fitting everything into a single page just wasn’t gonna work. For another, I had considered putting some extra doodles of the characters’ faces in, just so I’d have something to connect the speech bubbles to.. but then I decided the dialog was distinct enough that any reader who’d been paying attention would be able to work out who was saying what just from reading it… And now that I look at the finished draft,I actually wish I HAD gone ahead and thrown in the faces, just to fill in some of the extra space. Yeah, attempting to cram this visual into an already crowded comic wouldn’t have worked, but I think this page may err in the opposite direction and give the door a little TOO much room to breathe.
…or maybe I’m just cranky from being awake too long while working on FRIDAY’S page, which I shall queue up as soon as I finish posting his one. Cos, man, if you think I’ve got some artist ramblings to make about THIS page…
I dunno, it’s not that big – probably about the right size for the Exposition to dock, which would be typical of the passenger liners shuttling boarding colonists to the colony ship. There probably are smaller private docking bays for the VIP private ships and they just don’t have the access code to open those, they got the generic General Public Entrance.
Personally, I think it’s probably about big enough for 20 Expositions to enter in a single line, while having an Exposition-sized gap or two between each of them for maneuverability.
There’s a really smart-alecky quip to be made here where the size of the opening in relation to the measurements of The Exposition is equal to some kind of equation combining the ages of various characters… but I’m not good enough at math to word it in a way that would make the joke land.
The Exposition, as shown in calculations I posted a long time ago based on comparisons of it next to known objects, despite the fact numbers and measurements do not exist in the Blitziverse, is about 300M in length, roughly the same dimensions as the original Star Trek Enterprise, or the actual USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, albeit with greater volume due to its shape. The USS Hamburger is maybe 3M at the most. In the authentic photo above, it is approximately 1/70th of the width of the opening, but we’ll allow for perspective and optical distortions and assume its a bit closer to us than the other ship and generously claim it’s 1/140th, which makes the opening about 0.42km wide, which would fit the Exposition with plenty of safety margin in case Blip, an unlicensed $15 pal-in-a-box, was doing the driving, but not enough for 2 Expositions side-by-side.
This also matches with the previous picture showing the tiny half km opening on the big ship which would make the big ship about 50km in diameter, which also seems about right for the city depicted inside it (assuming skyscrapers built with future materials are a lot taller than current ones). Thus making it about the size where it might easily be mistaken by an amateur for a small moon when approaching it, not that any seasoned space pilot would likely make such a mistake.
Since everything matches up perfectly, it must be right!