Ah, finally back to the great outdoors! It was starting to get stuffy in there, with all those atmospheric gases!
Transcript
Adam: You’re a GMH?
Phoebe: Excuse me!? I’m in the typ genepool with you, twerp!
Clayton: Where do you find these people, boss?
Talita: I’m not in charge of hiring.
Most of the crew has suited up and loaded into the personal transit buggy. Talita fusses with Dominic's suit.
Talita: Dominic, you forgot a helmet latch again.
Dominic: (unintelligible)
Talita: And your radio.
They exit the airlock and go back out into the barren landscape of the junkyard. The protective berm looms to the right, and behind it the launch loop stretches through the sky and disappears over the horizon. The tall plant buildings dwarf the procession of vehicles exiting it, which appear only as a string of lights.
68 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 86”
Guest
the backgrounds in this comic are just beautiful
eden
does talita have a specialized helmet for when she’s growing tusks?
AnaKaye
Ooh, great question!
Adrienne
It looks like front part of the helmet might unscrew, maybe she can add a longer part onto it! Or maybe the period of time she has tusks is short enough that accommodations are unnecessary? I wonder now myself.
JoB
The time the tusks take to actually *grow in* seems to be about a week (whoa, respect!):
https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/667962256720527360/is-it-just-me-or-do-we-only-see-talita-with-fully
I’d guess that she just takes a vacation for that, rather than risking to smack the sensitive velvet into the helmet sides repeatedly.
Otherwise … yeah, I guess they’d *require* a different helmet shape, and I like the idea with the switchable “trunk cup”, but there’s no such thing visible on her EVA suit’s storage rack (previous page) …
JoB
Uhhhh about *two* weeks, matches Terran deer’s antler growth rate better as well. Should’ve used a ruler right away, rather than eyeballing the ratio …
Origamigryphon
Reminder that those are antlers, not tusks! They’re not teeth :3
Phasma Felis
I feel like they’re kinda both? (I know Jay says “antlers,” and rightly so, but still…) Biologically they’re antlers, but if there was an Earth species that had deciduous bone spikes in the same place that boars have tusks, we would probably have called them “tusks.”
Jay Eaton
I’ve seen enough people refer to antlers and horns interchangeably to find it a realistic colloquialism. But “tusks” works until I get ten zillion reader questions asking me why Talita only has tusks in a small fraction of my drawings and does she saw them off or grind them down. However I’m terminology pedant so catch me referring to pea pods as fruit and banana plants as forbs
1616
Awesome art story and all, thanks for making this.
Apollo235
I get the sense that Clayton really does respect Talita, hence calling her boss despite her protests. It reminds me how in season 7 of The Clone Wars, when Ashoka gets put in charge of that battalion and Captain Rex calls her commander despite her saying she’s no longer part of the army.
I think Clayton sees it as “She’s requesting to be called Talita because she’s humble, but she’s in charge so I want to address her properly!”
But to Talita it probably doesn’t feel that way. The character dynamics here are sooo good
evileeyore
It also reinforces to the temps who is in charge. Especially when you have rowdy and insubordinate temps like Adam. Having an old hand call you boss when you might not look like the stereotypical (or expected) boss can force a measure of respect that way from the new guys.
urlocallesbiab
yeah!! it’s like… clayton is a good subortinate (calm, respectful, with a good work ethic), but talita is not a very good boss (she’s a *marvelous* engineer and a wonderful woman, just isn’t really comfortable with being in a position of authority), so their approaches clash a little despite the best intentions from everyone (not as much as adam clashes with everyone else though lol)
Hyratel
Clayton seems like he’d make a good 2iC generally.
Sen
This piles on the bottom left look very steep. At least if it were on earth. I assume lower gravity and the very “grippy” regolith allow for much steeper piles of sand here.
JoB
0.8 g and Dirtball having a *minimal* atmosphere is said to make for somewhat less sharp-edged regolith than on our Moon. *Wet* sand on Earth could form such mounds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose#Of_various_materials
but I suppose that these need some sort of extra stabilization still.
The berm has *even steeper* sides, but it’s a long-term structure, so it might be concrete-coated or somesuch to allow for the shape.
Ruby
She really is babysitting some of these people eh 😅
evileeyore@gmail.com
Waiting for Talita to go Momma Bear for her crew… even if some of them don’t deserve it. Might do the trick to win over the other two who aren’t complete shitheads, like Adam (I think Talita already has Yao won over completely, just by existing – but standing up for her did not hurt either).
Hyratel
She’s way more ‘Camp Counselor’, wrangling this gaggle of poorly-trained temps
Viashino_wizard
Even for someone who grew up on Earth where GMHs are pretty rare, Adam seems shockingly lacking in basic knowledge.
wingedhorror
Speaking as a current resident of Earth, it doesn’t seem that shocking. Harhar.
AnaKaye
I always chuckle at Talita’s helmet having the appearance of horse’s ears, even though Talita herself does not have ears of that type. I’ve noticed that the humans’ helmets have a singular protrusion that is similar in shape, so is there any in-story explanation for the double protrusions on Talita’s?
Darth Biomech
I think those are headlamps?
JoB
Yup: https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-6/
I guess the fact that there are *two* of them is due to her wanting more light than a single one can provide – bc centaurs tend to the far-sighted side, move at serious speed, yadda yadda, compared to humans. Talita made that suit herself, so it’s not an attempt at giving her a cutesy-horsey look, *unless* she leans that way herself. 😉
Hyratel
also a bit of pinhole camera effect: the more light you have, the smaller the aperture (iris) can be, and the longer the useful depth-of-focus at a given focus distance and the smoother the falloff to out-of-focus. more light would translate to tighter iris, reducing the focal work needed at a given distance even with correction, leading to reduced eyestrain in general
zaratustra
Like the cat-car in Stand Still, Stay Silent
buam
No wonder Talita doesn’t like being a manager! Even good interns are a lot of work to mentor/train, but this lot? Oof.
Quadrell
Dominic keeps making mistakes with their suit and its freaking me out. You don’t mess around with the vacuum of space! Also, I love the way you’ve drawn the loop. I really get an impression of how MASSIVE it is.
Do the suits have any in-built pressurization checking things? Like, something that would go off if it wasn’t sealed. Talita had a panel on hers that looked like it changed channels on a radio, but I dunno whatever doohickeys they got going on.
JoB
*Small* leaks you’ll get alerted to by the system called “the guy inside” – unless he’s that NASA pilot (what was his name again?) who feared that control would abort his high-altitude jet mission if he reported the problem, and *ignored* the pain in his hand inside the punctured glove. *Or* the resident Dominic walking out without a working radio link, of course.
Leaks that’ll fully expose you to hard vacuum faster than you can jump back into the airlock are another matter, but there’s little beyond monitoring the latches for proper closure (like Talita does here) the suit’s systems could do to raise the alarm any sooner. You have to put sizeable trust into the tests done on the suits while they’re *not* in use.
IIUC astronauts routinely have a *second* person *looking* at the seals from the outside to verify they’re properly closed before EVA, too.
Kai
Holy crap for some reason in my head the launch loop was always that big hill to the right of the habitation dome. I didn’t realise it was actually that BIG.
Jay Eaton
Yeah that hill is the berm wall protecting the habitat from possible rotor failure inside the launch loop, the loop is 80 km tall and 2700km long.
40
That is terrifying that you need a mountain-sized shield incase of failure
Phlosioneer
With extremely low gravity and the need to excavate all the ground under the habitat for foundation, it’s probably less “we need this mountain of rock, nothing else will stop it” and more “we have tons of rock to dispose of, let’s reuse it as a wall”. Then the thickness is mostly determined by what’s stable for a pile of rock, not how thick it needs to be. levies are similar; they’re far thicker at the base than necessary to hold back water.
JoB
Actually you might *need* a lot *more* than that …
(Abridged version: What comes down onto the loop are hastily strung-together packets of spaceship scrap – remember that the Runaway was said to be an *exception* in the materials they get. If the packaging *fails* before the thing has slowed down much, you get a shrapnel cloud at about orbital speed – after all, the speed the loop is running at is said to be sufficient to keep it lifted off the surface. Given the location (at one of Dirtball’s poles) of the station, that cloud will be on a *polar* orbit and fly over the habitat on *every* turn. What’s Dirtball’s minimum orbital period, twenty minutes or so? That’s the time you’ll have to get everyone into a space suit or the bunkers to have them protected for the cloud passing overhead the habitat the *SECOND* time …)
Sevoris
This launch loop is basically one giant, strangely shaped flywheel. We never calculated how much energy is stored in the entire structure, but it‘s at a nuclear weapons scale.
That said, that much energy can‘t discharge at once. The structure would “deflate”. But the rotors inside are going several kilometers per second and have significant mass…
(That said, the actual design as a lot of redundancy, so the failure of a single rotor shouldn‘t cause all other rotors to also begin throwing momentum cables around)
Aren‘t megastructures cool? 🙂
tyrone the miner
Now I got Adam sussed! He is actually a Time-traveler from the Stupid Ages, he fell through a Einstein-Rosen tunnel while attending a Cross Burning party with his sugar top friends in South Carolina back in 1960 and now tries to blend in. So technically he has improved….A lot. Keep improving though, miles to go.
feesh
when is it MY turn for talita to lean down in front of me and gently fix my helmet
Hare-There
Oooooh I have a feeling something bad’s going to happen to the crew..
JoB
… in charge of UNhiring, perchance … ?
I’ve read up on Tumblr and ran into the info that in RttS, humans are considered the oozy ones …
(… of course, now that I want to link to it, I can’t find the post again …)
… in a similar vein ……. are Demodex folliculorum still a thing … ?
Liza
Cheevwut is in charge of hiring, right? They maybe need to up their standards a little.
Claire
With hiring candidates like this, maybe Cheev could be talked into hiring Bip, eh?
Liza
oh my god Cheev and Bip, I would love to see that interaction. The amount of fucks given would veer into the negative.
hal9000
skimmer avians like them kinda have a thing about GMH though due to their own religious beliefs that all other avian types come from skimmers, as part of a divine punishment to divide the species. so they kinda see humans dividing themselves as recreation of a punishment from god, and thus blasphemous
Phlosioneer
I’m sure there’s anti-discrimination laws in this setting. With all the accommodations, signage, and lore, it seems like a pretty heavily regulated society. Which is understandable in space.
evileeyore
It’s two weeks one way to work in a salvage yard, in a hab with minimal entertainment outside of media (no night clubs, parks, amusement parks, beaches, etc)… so unless the pay is super great they are limited to the weirdoes (like me) who’d enjoy that place or the bottom scrapings of the barrel (ie the weirdoes who //can’t// fit in elsewhere because they’re danger prone, like Dominic, or are anti-social like Adam).
This means all the old hands there are going to weirdoes (like me) who enjoy the relative solitary nature and not “busy night life” of the place.
JoB
> amusement parks
… I’m pretty sure that there are *some* humans who’d look at that launch loop and go “oooh, they got a rollercoaster!?” …
zaratustra
Adam gives me the impression that it was this or military service for him.
Athelind Llewellyn Long
He gives me the impression that he peaked in high school after The Big Game.
Trees
LÖÖP
Rubicon Art
Is Talita looking up or down in the second panel there? I cannot figure out which bit is her pupil 😡 My eyes are just getting mildly baffled by a shadow I think.
1d4Nadg
She is looking up. The bit that have you confused under the eye is her second eylid (or at least I assume that’s what is confusing you)
Rubicon Art
AHHHH I can see it now!! Thank u
Hi
Put the liter in charge of hiring !!!!
JoB
… took me WAY too long to realize that that likely was “Talita” before your spellwrecker did its thing …
Guest
Clayton seems chill tho. In an apathetic way.
Lilac
At least Clayton seems Not Terrible
hal9000
concept of GMH lore and discrimination explained to reader: done! adam you have served your narrative purpose i hope you fall in a crater now.
Jack
Adam seems very punchable
Greenjoe
How did Dominic pass his EVA cert when he keeps making mistakes like this… Also if there’s a spot for Talita on that buggy or if she is on foot alongside it.
evileeyore
Where there would be a bench seat for another four passengers, it’s removed and Tali get’s the whole space for herself (and uses it!).
Amanda/OwlBear
are those two always like that, or just because they’ve been drinking
Anna
It’d be funny if they were drinking together. Ohwitiil and Cheevwut vibes.
evileeyore
I’m sure they were… but I think Adam and Dominic end up being the besties in goofing off on the job.
Teod
Ah, so it’s a Launch Loop. It kinda looked like a space elevator at first. Makes more sense with the ixion logo too.
Phlosioneer
There’s a page that goes into detail about dirtball’s launch loop… somewhere. I can’t remember where 🙁
Amanda/OwlBear
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Locations/Dirtball
Claire
JEEZ Adam, why are you LIKE this! First the angle grinder sass, now this!
Adrienne
Dominic is me 😭 And THAT’S why I would never get a job in space.