Friday-Friday! Hope you have a great weekend planned. Or in store (for those who do not plan).
nothing new here that i recall. Went to a group of writing friends last night and we talked shop and ate vegan cupcakes. Good times.
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Being in charge is not as powerful or easy as it may seem to the lower ranks.
Take care of your people (fed, rested, etc.), don’t let anybody else yell at ’em (after all, that’s YOUR job!) and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs. Leadership 101, MCI (paraphrased)…
And no cabin.
@pbarnrob: USAF-OCS is pretty much the same. Also, lead by example (i.e. never ask a subordinate to do anything you aren’t willing to demonstrate how you want it done first).
Great story so far, liked spacetrawler better, just the fact that there is more story this one is moving a bit slow. Any chance we can see the whole ship?
keep up the great writing and lookuing forward to seeing what happens
Thanks, Peter! And yes, this story is a bit slower and more like a “short story” (it will only be running one year). The next project will be faster and more in the vein of Spacetrawler (it is already in full development, with pages sketched and everything).
The full ship was shown at launch, way back here.
Still trying to wrap my mind around “vegan cupcake”.
OK, so… soy milk: is that it?
Cupcakes often have eggs, milk and butter in them. Plus butter in the frosting.
When baking you can use a variety of non-daity “milks,” a butter alternative (in this case, coconut oil), and a different binder (egg substitute, flax, tapioca, etc). For frosting, I think it was with peanut butter (instead of butter) and chocolate and sugar.
Well, let’s just hope that it was VEGAN peanut butter, made with nuts that were freshly ground, preferably harvested from a local farmer.
BTW, did you ever have any luck using avocado as your fat/shortening in making your pie crust?
That was a while ago. Hrm. Yeah, I’m pretty sure the crust came out pretty well. I think I preferred it with sweet pies rather than savory if I recall.
Grammar on this page confuses me mightily for some reason. Is that “with” supposed to be there in panel 2, bubble 1? And something seems missing from the second bubble in panel 3, but I can’t tell what… (Actually, that might just be me. But I’m pretty sure that “with” is extraneous.)
Good eye, @Stewart! I just changed “with” to “some” in panel 2, and “the” to “any” in panel 3.
I keep telling people that being a boss is too much like work.
I have issues with the second panel dialogue, specifically with “…it will keep hope.”. My internal editor wants it to be ‘keep up hope’, but you kept up morale in the first panel. My second suggestion is to ‘keep hope alive.’. My third suggestion is to ignore me. But it is bothering me enough to write this down.
@Herandar, excellent point. I will ponder it. I’m sleepy now though. Thinking is not easy :-/
Okay-okay! Fixed! 🙂
hm…this story is going to last a year. we are about 1/2 way through the year. the ship just passed turnaround, so it’s halfway to its destination.
….i’m not seeing a happy outcome, here.
unless this is like “Lost”, and they are all already dead, so when they reach the aliens, they actually reach Heaven – right?
“Happy or unhappy” didn’t occur to me. “Interesting” hopefully. But knowing my writing, you know I’m wicked enough to go either way. 🙂
So they’re going to fly 13.3 billion light years in ONE year of ship time? By the time they return (in earth time) the earth will be 26.6 billion years older than when they left (due to gravitational time dilation and the second postulate of special relativity). Someone REALLY wanted to get rid of them. Cheaper to simply shoot them. And the odds of that civilization existing in 13.3 billion earth-years is moot, as is there even being a Solar System of Sol to come back to in 26.6 billion earth-years.
…wait, 13.3 BILLION?! Is that what was actually said? Because… why would aliens that freaking far away who don’t want us near them call attention to themselves?
Something does not add up here.
Adding: seriously, that would be like a third of the way across the observable universe. This is not a quick round trip to the Large Magellanic Cloud to bring back the Cosmo DNA. This is ridiculous.
How fast are they going? Such tremendous amounts of time unless they are goining many times faster than the Speed of Light it won’t matter what they find. One wonders why the mission was sent at all unless the time is far less than it appears. As in years instead of epochs.
Actually being in charge of a group is a whole lot less fun than most people lower down think. Particularly if you try to do a good job of it.
The mentioned galaxy, if you look it up, is the furthest observable galaxy in the universe. About 13.3 billion light years away. So I am wondering how they made contact since our very first light speed signals won’t get there for, like, ANOTHER 13.3 BILLION YEARS (we’ve only been making readable signals for about .00000007 billion years now). Even Starship Enterprise could not make it there in less than a million years at full warp.
In 26 billion years our solar system will not be recognizable. Our star will vaporize our atmosphere in a little over 1.1 billion years. In 3.5 billion years the earth will be a bald, hot rock much like Mercury with no life on the surface. In 6 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, expand, and eat up the first three planets, including earth. Within a hundred million years of max expansion as a red giant, the sun will nova, blow off the outer layers, likely destroy the rest of the planets and all things like comets and rocks out to the Oort cloud (about 5 trillion miles out), then collapse into a white dwarf, essentially a giant diamond the size of the earth, and gradually cool off for the next trillion years.
So no way they’re gonna ever come back to earth, anyway.
But, then, if you can suspend belief to enjoy anthropomorphic bears, vultures, dogs, pudu and other assorted creatures down to troglodytes, who, when dressed in human clothes pass unnoticed as humans; stretching the laws of nature, physics and quantum mechanics all out of shape isn’t that far of a reach. 😉
-WP
@WarPig – Inserting real Physics in SciFi is depressing!
I´m sure they have got a unicorn-faerieblood-driven time-dilation-negation device stowed away somewhere aboard.
Otherwise it wouldnt make sense for a government to invest into this, anyway.
They normally cant even invest in things further away than one or two legislative periods.
Imagine somone in Parliament defending it: “Our world and race might be long extinct by the time the expedition gets there, but it will nonetheless be a scientific breakthrough well worth a tenth of our GNP! Plus we get rid of those douches.”
@War Pig, I don’t think our sun is big enough to nova. Swell into red giant phase, yes, not a problem. But actually exploding requires more mass than our sun holds. I’m afraid that after expanding, it will start cooling, then eventually collapse into a white dwarf.
There are no relativity effect. I should put that in the strip, but it was mentioned in the Higgs Drive description:
Further tests demonstrated that the HtNEI distorted the actual fabric of “dimension alpha” in such a way that the space in front of the HtNEI was pleated (for want of the actual mathematical term) in such a way that the clipper only interacted with a small fraction of the actual distance between origin and its terminus. FTL travel, without apparent relativity effects, was a side-effect of the function of the HtNEI.