Talita is wearing a fall arrest harness. If she tumbled off the scaffolding, the FAS harness would prevent her from dying in a bloody splat, but still hurt like hell when it caught her. This also isn't an ideal setup because it works best with an uninterrupted rail for the clip to slide along.
Transcript
A closeup shows the welding arc melting a round pool of aluminum that Talita is carefully dipping the filler rod into.
SFX: bzzzzzzzzzz
Talita: That's because the equipment you're using was designed for demolition, not repair.
Bip: I'm very lucky to have your help!
Talita looks up from the work and the black on her helmet window fades again. Her cheeks bristle shyly.
Talita: Uh, sure.
Talita starts walking back to the freight elevator, rolling her welding machine with her and detaching and reattaching her FAS harness clip along the railing of the scaffolding where the vertical poles interrupt the horizontal bar. Taking the elevator down to the base, she walks up next to the front loader and begins taking off her over-suit welding gloves and apron.
Talita: Ok, try extending your radiators.
12 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 142”
FyreNWater
Look at that smooth weld job Talita’s doing! A fat, happy caterpillar!
mdhughes
One of my favorite things in watching NASA spacewalks is the slow, cautious, evaluate, clip, move, clip process. Nobody rushes, they talk out the problem first, because falling into space and deorbiting is not recommended. Talita’s just on a dirtball but still not a safe place to fall.
Mr. Son
I’m surprised this isn’t a situation where there needs to be two clips so one is clipped while the other is moved. Though I guess this isn’t one of those situations where the chance of being ripped off the scaffolding in between moving the clips is unacceptably high. Not like there’s a lot of high winds out here, or you’re trying to move on scaffolding that is also moving.
Vinemaple
Oh, to have an unbroken rail to clip onto! The jobs I’ve done have always required me to find my own places to clip my harness to. But I’ve seen line handlers at a canal lock using fall arrest harnesses with special hooks that somehow skip past the pylons that support the safety line they’re clipped to, I would love to find out how that works!
Ruby
Safety first, always.
Momo
oohh i love safety yes yes
Nobody
noticed this new update during a reread when i accidentally skipped forward 😛 exciting!
love how talita’s all flustered
Sevoris
Delightful details of personal safety procedures. I love this comic for having space for things like this.
Pathfinder
Remember kids, even when helping repair a (allegedly) pirate vessel, always follow OSHA standards!
I can imagine her suit has enough built in hard points to stop serious immediate suspension trauma, given how it links and all the stuff it has to carry.
Kataratakaran
three points of contact YEAH!! (and also she’d have to replace everything, and generate so many incident reports if she fell so good on her even if its annoying ❤️)
tbh tho, idk if that rail would hold all of her indefinitely, at least hooked to the top. I think most anchor points are located on the middle or bottom of rails (closer to the connection points). idk what the weight threshold of that rail is, but i hope whoever engineered it took Big Alien into account at the time. also have to wonder how her exocurrent lungs would handle suspension trauma. I imagine it would get very hard to breathe very quickly.
Varyon
It’s probably designed so running a large piece of equipment into it at modest velocity won’t tear it off, so considering she’s much less dense than steel (although not by as much as a typical centaur – Talita’s an absolutely shredded specimen), I think it would be able to handle her, even with clipping to the top (where I think lever action would multiply the force of impact on the attachment points when the line pulls taut). She probably wouldn’t be cleared to work up there if it were unable to arrest her fall. Not that she’s working under any official capacity here – like the remotes, her job is demolition of the ships that come in, not repair – but I’d imagine she’d be a lot more nervous if she wasn’t allowed up there in the first place.
As for breathing… maybe her suit is set up to be able to force air through her lungs in a situation where she can’t breathe on her own? Or it’s just a hazard of being a centaur in space; part of why she’s letting Bip pilot the remotes without complaint may be that she wants a backup available to bail her out if something like that happens (normally she’d have other crew with her during her exoatmospheric jaunts).
DasGanon
Space PPE: It’s very important.