One of Talita's eyes is about the size of human fist. Her retinas have very good image resolution. On the visual processing side centaurs are very good at tracking motion, but pretty terrible at parsing variations in dense patterns. Don't ask Talita to pick green beans, she'd miss most of them.
Transcript
Talita puts on a sprayer can backpack and talks to Yao, who is also holding a sprayer.
Talita: Only mark metals today. Big intact chunks.
Dominic: Oh! Oh! Can I take the cutter today?
Talita: Remember not to point it at anyone.
Taltia and Yao walk around, marking different kinds of salvage with paint. Talita gets distracted by the Runaway off in the distance, sit at the base of the berm wall below the launchloop that fills the sky. It's over 20 kilometers away but her enormous eyes can make out enough details on the ship to start making observations about possible repairs.
Text overlay with arrows pointing to different portions of the ship:
- Fuel tanks: empty, may have hidden transport damage.
- Crumpled radiator pair: extensively damaged. Replace structural frames.
- Extendable solar panels: dust abrasion damage.
- Structural spine: appears undamaged?
- Emergency boat intact.
- Puncture in habitat module:
• severed electronics
• replace plating and shielding
• damaged plumbing - Old Whipple shield: may be due for replacement.
85 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 89”
Scolopendra
I love it when artists who normally use well-rationalized ‘cartoony’ styles zap into something more photorealistic for focus. Such a mood.
Zany Selkra
*Spore spaceship creator music plays*
Rubicon Art
Forgive me being stupid; what are they doing? Are they spraying things with water or paint, I’m assuming they’re marking them so that the cutter can come along and chop bits off to reclaim them/take them to the recycling bit?
Also, how does Talita get on with things like soldering and dense, small bits of tech that have wires and delicate parts, if she can’t parse them?
JoB
The page’s transcript confirms that it’s paint. Whether the rest of the team will follow in their footsteps and cut *those* pieces immediately, or do something different elsewhere, remains unclear.
*If* Talita has problems discerning electronic parts she’s working on, I’d guess that she’d just use an illuminated magnifier – just like the RL humans do with the miniaturized electronics of today …
Rubicon Art
Oh I always forget those exist whoops… thank you!
hal9000
if talita’s vision is motion based does that mean the jurassic park don’t move t-rex method works on centaurs? just imagining Talita having a casual conversation with someone wearing stripes and they stop against a patterned background and she turns around like ?? where did they go…
Scolopendra
I’d imagine her vision isn’t “motion-based” so much as it’s very good at tracking motion. Think of the old kung-fu movie of the ace fighter picking a fly out of the air with chopsticks. As for variations in dense patterns–I’m sure the contrast in your example would bother her but it’s more of a ‘needle in a haystack’ thing or finding Waldo.
Lilac
I love how in that fifth panel the launch loop and stuff beside talita extend off outside the panels borders while everything else it contained it makes them feel bigger somehow it’s so awesome…. gaaahh I love comics and their compositions!!!! hell yea!!!!!!!!
Heck
Dang, Talita’s vision being such a high resolution makes me wonder if hd or even 4k monitors seem pixelated to her
Guest
I’m thinking about discerning complex patterns. I want to show Talita a Monet painting and see what she can parse from it.
Jay Eaton
She would be able to see the overall image but have difficulty distinguishing brushstrokes of similar colors, so she would notice less of the stylism. There’s a sort of motion-biased image compression happening in centaur visual processing, partially to make up for the speed efficiency loss from their insane retinal resolution.
1d4Nadg
Probably not, because she has incredible long range but bad short range vision. Her glasses are a trade off to allow her to read text close-by, but I can’t imagine she would prefer ultra vision in close range to ok-tier vision in both close and far range.
After all there is absolutely no need to have such visual acuity that you’d see the individual pixels, especially with her difficulties at parsing informations un dense pattern.
SIGSTKFLT
Talita is entering Master Builder mode
Ruby
“Talita, what do your centaur eyes see?”
“They’re thrusting their engines as if fleeing from Ohwitiil’s screaming. They’re taking the quantum phone to Jovia!”
waterfan2
Those Uruk-Hai really are amazingly advanced orcs. They got to space and immediately started pillaging.
JoB
… I wondered for a moment how you can “point” a circular saw at the end of a heavy-duty arm (parallelogram frame?) at someone, but that’s *Dominic* we’re talking about …
(OK, there’s the possibility of the blade *coming off*. School physics teachers here are under strict orders to even hold measly siren disks so that they rotate *away* from the class. Mine *did* have the disk come off once in earlier years, harmlessly-ish bouncing off the floor and into the wall thanks to that rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_disk
Now, about the turbine wheel my mom’s boss had stress-tested a bit *beyond* the regulation requirements … they added a *bunker* to conduct the testing *within* to the premises shortly after …)
Phasma Felis
I was thinking it was a laser/plasma cutter rather than a saw.
IRL cutoff wheels can shatter when they wear out, sending shrapnel out along the plane of the wheel (except for the guard at the back), so you don’t want to put your head above or in front of a running one. Probably not what Talita’s thinking of, though.
JoB
I’m under the impression that we have *seen* this “cutter”, though:
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-4/
(Now that I think of it, how *would* a jet of plasma – or, for that matter, water – behave minus (almost all of the) surrounding atmosphere? Would it tend to *spread out* more than on Earth? To the point of being useless as a cutting implement?)
A
Special interest: Activated
Trees
Space travel seems so gosh darn inefficient. Just look at how much of the ship is required to propel and operate a comparatively tiny inhabited capsule.
Moving stuff through space seems like the logistical equivalent of having to eat your breakfast one cornflake at a time.
un_pogaz
put the meme “Always has been”
Apollo235
Good ol tyranny of the rocket equation
gigithebear
considering centaur vision, i wonder if any prey animals developed a defense mechanism where they have crazy detailed patterning to blend into their environments and they just- stay as still as possible.
Peter Jensen
Almost certainly, since that’s very much a thing that happens on Earth with thousands of species. And not just prey species, ambush predators too.
Peter Jensen
Looks like Bip successfully nerd-sniped Talita!
Agatha
Everyone’s mentioning eagle eyes but I think Talita has better long-distance vision than literally any other animal on planet fucking earth. I think the farthest an eagle can see clearly is 5km?
Rad Internet Stranger
SHE CAN SEE THAT FAR?! No wonder Centaurs have terrible up close vision if they see like an eagle does
io!
she’s thinking about it.
Gleditsia
Posts that make you look at your fist and go :O
dokki
I did the same thing!!!!!
un_pogaz
Jesus CHRIST!
As centaurs have incredible far-sightedness, I had asked in the AMA if Talita was able to see and possibly recognize people on the other side of the O’Neil cylinder in which she grew up. I have my answer: easily. She’s got fucking eagle eyes.
Jay Eaton
Mmmmmostly. Looking up at people moving overheard, she would not see specific features on them, and have difficulty spotting people who aren’t moving, especially if they are over a low-contrast or densely patterned background. Still outperforms any other sophont, though (at the cost of having difficulty reading dense text even with reading glasses…)
Apollo235
So what’s the shield for? If interstellar travel is done by wormhole then I wouldn’t imagine it gets going fast enough that a dedicated shield is necessary, but of course I don’t know how of delta/v the ship has and how fast it gets going for interplanetary transfers, nor the average density of space junk in RTTS. Could it for aero-breaking around destination planets?
Apollo235
Sorry for double-commenting but I had more thoughts about aero-breaking. The shield looks a bit small for protecting the whole ship during aero-breaking, but since it’s so blunt, it could create a large enough bow-shock to protect the radiators and solar panels. Keeping the diameter small is good for saving mass, so the engineers would likely engineer it to create a bow-shock like I described
Claire
Even if you have wormholes connecting systems, you’ll need to get up to speed to get around the system. Remember, getting to Dirtball is a bit over a two-week travel. That’s enough time to get to a decent speed where a forward-facing shield is a good idea. Plus rogue micrometeorites are always a concern. When you’re accelerating, you can ensure more hit you at the front.
Apollo235
My understanding as a hobbyist (KSP, Expanse, sci-fi forums, etc) is that shields like that only become necessary at relativistic speeds, and you don’t need to get *that* fast for in-system travel. But whatever the reason it looks cool!
Argon
From what I understand, the Runaway is a class of ships called “torchships,” which are made for carrying small numbers of passengers at high speed. It goes a lot faster than a normal passenger or freighter ship, which may be why it needs a shield.
Claire
Its entirely possible that you’ve answered your own question! :3c
Michi
No, Whipple shields are used at orbital speeds, single to low double digit km/s. At relativistic speeds you’d need different shielding.
JoB
@Argon: Since reading some more of Jay’s blog nerd-sniped me into visiting https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ for uuhhh *part* of last night, let me try to answer that one:
By definition, a “torch drive” is a spacecraft propulsion that’s a) a reaction drive (a.k.a. “a rocket”, i.e., propelling the ship by its reaction to some propellant mass ejected in the opposite direction) and b) somehow able to give a sustained thrust of 0.3 g or more. *Hard* sci-fi nicknames that a “torch” because if you do some off-the-cuff math, as it zips away from a planet, its brightness in its sky should rival the sun’s. With such a drive, you can go minimal-travel-time trajectories starting anytime you want, as opposed to waiting for launch windows and doing planet swing-bys and whatnot *our* weak-ish real world rocket engines force us to do.
Space travel in RttS is said to essentially take a standard time of two weeks, as long as you start from a place that can establish a wormhole; passing through that is essentially instantaneous, one week on each side is for the spacecraft’s engines to travel between wormhole and the actual start/destination. However, one week is *not* enough to reach *relativistic* speeds even with a torch drive – LtC gives that as the travel time to go from Jupiter to Earth with 1 g of (de)accel, which commenters seem to confirm (shame on me, didn’t do the math myself).
FWIW, if you take the analysis of torchships (under the laws of physics as *we* know them) some further, you get that they’re WMDs on a civilization-killer level even *without* any explicit armament, off *both* ends (kinetic bombardment one way, irradiating the surface the other), so Talita’s getaway party should *not* try “sneaking off” Dirtball sans using either loop+skyhook or a hefty dose of handwavium. :-3
Pathfinder
Enhance!
Phlosioneer
I bet she tells bip “I’ll repair your ship but then you’re on your own”. That seems like a completely reasonable middle ground, a fun/interesting project, and relatively low risk.
Then I bet they slowly convince Talita to join them.
Yay
SHE CAN SEE THAT FAR????
Hi
She can see them with her eyebarls
Fallingfeather
I wish this comment section had a thumbs up function lmao
Adrienne
Me too… ➡️💬🔁❤️
JoB
Well, there are U+1F44D 👍 *and* U+1F592 🖒 …
waterfan2
To all those people thinking that tragedy could happen: that would shut down EVERYTHING, and Talita would get a LOT of attention for having someone die while she was supervisor. It’s much better for Adam to be fired for mere incompetence. Like spraying one of the others head-to-toe with the paint.
The Hollymonster
I hope nobody dies or gets seriously hurt, but I do suspect someone’s about to have a Big Scare. Hopefully it’s just Adam getting yelled at by three meters of supervisor.
tiramisu
love this engineers. the liter
Doubloon
“AND STOP LOOKIN’ AT ME WITH THEM BIG OLD EYES!”
AnormalADN
ok but how does Bip expect her to fix all that without anyone noticing/suspecting anything
Feather
Honestly, I don’t think that would be that much of a problem. Seems like Dirtball is a pretty small operation, there’s not that many people who actually work directly with the scrap, and Talita manages everyone who does. There’s a lot of junk spaceships around that could presumably be cannibalised for spares, and all the equipment is already set up for AI remote control. Would anyone even notice if Talita “went to have a look around some of the new scrap shipment to plan what she’s doing with the temps” and took some equipment full of Bip along with her? She might even be able to honestly say that she thinks it’s repairable and would be far more valuable that way than scrapped, and openly work on it.
evileeyore
The only person outside her crew of temps and Clayton (and Clayton is still new enough he’s asking questions out here) that would notice would have been Calcery, and Call just shipped off world.
So as long as she is discrete, she can easily get teh power reconnected and from there Blip could handle most of the rest using Cal’s equipment. Aside from Talita’s expertise and occasionally any delicate work or work that needs finesse (which those tractors wouldn’t be capable of).
I mean, Talita is the yard boss, in those salvage fields she’s the boss, so if she tells her team, “You guys go do x, y, and z, I’ve got intricate dismantling to do on one of the intake ships”, they’d just nod and do their jobs.
And the company is probably grooming Clayton as the next most experienced to become a team leader to run a back-up/other shift team.
Greenjoe
Over 20km away?
That is some very impressive vision.
Peter Jensen
At least the lack of appreciable atmosphere stops it from being a complete blur at that distance. But yeah, great resolution. Now, it’s been mentioned somewhere that her helmet visor corrects for her natural farsightedness, so now I’m wondering if this is like a progressive lens situation, because otherwise it would also degrade her far vision a bit.
AnaKaye
My guess is that by this far in the (relative to us) future, that visor is probably a “smart” visor that can alter focus based on the command of its wearer, and those commands are likely issued by minute movements of the eye.
TotallySomebody
Christ Talita 😭 Ya got EAGLE EYES!!!
Kage
that’s a nifty way of discreetely checking things out. if nobody else in your immediate environment is another centaur, at least
creetur
oufgh, her big ol eyeballs..
Jokes aside, I love how this page looks. Might be the extreme, detailed close up of her eye or the little mental notes she has for repairing The Runaway/Bip’s ship body, not sure yet, but it makes my brain happy.
Bruce Mickelson
What do the cargo containers look like for a ship like this? Talita’s engineer mind is beginning to solve problems!
JoB
And where would they get attached in the first place? *Towing* them along (as they get blasted by the engine exhaust) should be right out …
OK, the *phones* fit into the habitat easy enough, but as far as for cargo *willingly* trusted to them … >;->
Harold_Canyon
Containers could be attached to the structural spine, but looking at the size of the escape ship it’s likely that any cargo just goes in the forward section. Even a cargo rocket isn’t going to carry a large amount of cargo compared to its size. You have to remember that, in space travel, what matters is Delta V, which is a function of the ship’s mass fraction, fuel mass divided by total mass. Every kilo of cargo affects that. A cargo ship on earth may carry multiple times it’s empty weight in cargo, but if you tried to load a rocket down like that you’d demolish your mass fraction and Tsiolkovsky would dance on your grave.
JoB
Sounds legit. Trying such a stunt *would* probably place my grave underneath *his*! 😉
PineCat
What colors can she see? Sorry if this was answered somewhere before! ^^;
creetur
Near infrared to green I believe? I could be very wrong, but that’s what I remember from what Jay had on their Tumblr.
JoB
Dunno about IR, but yes, their optical range is shifted a bit to the longer wavelengths when compared to humans.
https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/677949142908174336/avian-aliens-can-see-uv-light-centaurs-and-bug
Septemberdale
That’s Bugferrets, I thought.
JoB
Bug ferrets actually have *extra “eyes”* to perceive IR, somewhat analog to some Earth snakes’ pit organs.
Claire
Wait- the size of a human fist?
Oh, Talita’s got the Traffic Light effect going on. Looks “normal” sized at height- then when its eye-level you realize its HUGE
Solidago