Page 502 – and now, back to our show
Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back! Hope everyone enjoyed all the Christmas stuff! Sorry to kick things off with a page that’s several hours late, but I didn’t really have time to get extra pages done in the midst of all that other stuff. Oh well.
Anyway, this actually ISN’T just me taking care of some nits before they’re picked (well, not entirely) This bit about how the life support works will actually be important, plot wise. Have fun trying to figure out how!
Oh, and guess what? VOTING INCENTIVES ARE FINALLY BACK!
(Historical Notes: Sure enough, there was an awful lot of speculation about how exactly the gravity still worked and why it was somehow prioritized over keeping the lights working. And, as always, that’s not a complaint; this sort of nerdy theorizing remains one of my favorite parts of doing this comic. In particular, some valid points were raised about how functioning lights might help in preventing panic among the passengers better than functioning gravity. My response, which I can’t remember if it made it into an actual comic or not, was that The Cap’n got a really good deal on buying low-power gravity plates in bulk, but couldn’t get a similar deal on lights. I also argued that maintaining ship-wide gravity would make repair work easier, and bringing a portable light source into a dark room would be less disruptive than bringing a portable gravity source into a room where everything was floating around… but that would almost certainly be an after-the-fact justification for going with the less-expensive option.)
There’s actually a pretty simple explanation for the Cap’n’s choice here: A lot of people become severely nauseous when first exposed to zero-g. He didn’t want to have to clean up a ship full of puke. (particularly since we’ve seen from the mad scientist’s arc that he tends to cram the ship well over capacity with passengers when there’s opportunity for profit)
…and the lights are allowed to go out so that, if anybody DOES puke, nobody else can see the mess!