Here it is, the set that made me hate tower cranes. Also reminder that the Runaway is considered "small" for an interstellar vessel, a dinky 200 meters long.
Transcript
The building foundation pit hiding the Runaway is abuzz with activity. RC front loaders and dump trucks mill around processing and carrying scrap material. Two tower cranes have been erected next to the Runaway; one holding a vehicle hoist with an RC front loader in it welding part of the spine. Talita is up on a large scaffolding platform that has been erected along the radiator wings, welding near the extension joint. One of the front loaders is on the ground next to the scaffolding, gesticulating excitedly.
Bip: It feels SO GOOD to be back in my servers!
37 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 140”
Pathfinder
I love the details on the solar panels with those upward sweeps, as always great work! The Runaway is so prettttttttty…
Gar G
“One of the front loaders is on the ground next to the scaffolding, gesticulating excitedly.”
I am so glad you have these transcripts XD Never would’ve caught that otherwise
Athelind Llewellyn Long
Wow, finding Talita in this page was like playing Where’s Waldo?
IncompleteMachine
shes got about 78 metres on the USS Discovery (2001: space odyssey) but shes 98 metres short of the TOS USS Enterprise. Nostromo has 134 metres on her, but shes longer than the Millenium Falcon by about 166 metres. honestly though the fairest of those comparisons is the first one since the others have magical handwavium technology in them. compared to IRL spacecraft designs, shes about 89 metres longer than the Saturn V and about twice the length of the Project Orion Battleship design.
Kai
Bloody hell, I can’t wait till large scale, manned space flight is commercially viable. I can’t wait until the day where we have purpose built space ship scrapyards because we’ve built so many.
Peter Jensen
This comment brought to mind one of the notes on the XKCD What-If about “Space Burial” ( https://what-if.xkcd.com/134/ ): Weird that “lots of corpses floating around” is somehow an *optimistic* prediction about the future of space travel.
malmo
Is all of this activity visible from the orbital station? Would grandma polycule find it odd if they saw it or would they assume everything is kosher?
JoB
Hmmm, the polycule’s aboard the *orbital station*, not the skyhook:
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-118/
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The station’s orbit isn’t known (yet?), but given its distance from Dirtball, I’d be surprised if it went out of the system’s ecliptic plane. Which would imply that it never passes *directly above* Dirtball’s poles, and thus Shikaviil Port.
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Of course, since the polycule apparently fine-controls the skyhook’s orbit, too, chances are that they have camera feeds from there, but.
Hunter
Ah, space scale. The ship is the length of two football fields but it’s “small”.
JoB
Well, she *is* smaller than some of my neighbors’ rides. 😛
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293
Zuorai
Is Bip rebuilding themself with the automated vehicles or are the temps around? I always wonder how Bip avoids getting into their frequencies
Did Bip always know how to put themself back together?
Zuorai
Nevermind I just remembered the temps are probably not around because of Idrisah’s schedule, but I’m still interested on Bip’s aerospace engineer knowledge. Is Talita directing them?
JoB
I’m not sure that with the procession of RVs bringing parts from the Vspear vessels and the illumination of the Runaway’s lair
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-137-and-138/
the temps could be anywhere near at the same time and still fail to notice something odd/different going on – short of having put their helmets on rotated 180°. 😉
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(And while *most* of them have questionable qualification, at least Clayton *does* seem able to live up to the “appropriate level of competence” mentioned in his character bio.)
Enai
Talita made a plan about how to make the Runaway spaceworthy again a few comics ago, when her antlers first started growing in
JoB
(Page 129.) Also, Bip seems to agree that Talita knows better than themself:
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-96/
PineCat
I saw a big background and immediately started looking for a secret rat… I have not found it. :,3
Half Phased
As someone who works in the construction industry, seeing that vehicle, suspended from a crane, welding using its manipulators is a real “you should not be doing that, that violates practically all possible health and safety legislation”.
But then again, the contractor is a rogue AI, the employees are the same rogue AI and its associates, the equipment is all stolen and it’s being used to repair a space ship in a dubious legal state…
Scolopendra
[“Shake Hands With Danger” riff plays]
gnome_artificer
Ah, a fellow Safety Third enjoyer.
JoB
And *then* there’s the fact that, at least until Talita joined the fun, the only on-site individual whose “health” and safety legislation could possibly be concerned about was Bip, who is unlikely to suffer much damage even if that front loader were to suicide-jump into the Runaway’s spine from as high as the cranes can get it. :-3
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… thanks to the lack of an (oxygenated) atmosphere and the elaborateness of getting nuclear fusion started, not even if it were to plow into those *fuel tanks* (more or less full of hydrogen/deuterium). =8-U
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I *do* wonder, though, what the difficulty prompting Bip to ask Talita for help could be. Those hinges are obviously within the reach of the cranes, the spot Talita’s currently working on in particular even has a *scaffolding* leading to it, and we’re certainly not talking about fine mechanics that require tweezers and a watchmaker’s magnifier …
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[… he said, fearing that the next page’ll show Talita holding up the radiator’s weight with one hand while welding with the other]
Peter Jensen
Could be she was called to help with a different part, and this is more of a “since I’m already here, what else needs welding” situation.
Enai
Or its a “the remote controlled vehicles have no welding equipment of the particular type needed for this particular seam” situation or the part that needs welded is not accessible if you do not have sufficiently mobile arms or…
And I don’t think Talita would hold something up with one hand while welding it with the other. Sounds extremely unsafe, especially in the (mostly) vacuum of Dirtball’s atmosphere. If she drops the thingy she’s holding up and gets injured enough to need help getting back into the dome, her space suit may also spring a leak and it is extremely doubtful that anybody could reach her before her oxygen runs out.
Enai
I love a good contraption. And the Runaway’s extensible solar sails are excellent examples. One imagines them going whirrr-chunk, but of course in the vacuum of space they won’t make a sound at all. Love that you gave the telescope extenders those little stepwise reductions in diameter. Generally, all those details are *chef’s kiss* superb.
JoB
> in the vacuum of space they won’t make a sound at all
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I’m afraid that you’re underestimating how well *solid*-borne sounds travel. :-3
(As events ranging from some neighbor of mine firing up their percussion drill to my region’s invention of “eggs”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clouth_Gummiwerke#Postwar
will happily demonstrate.)
godspeed
Dat jute kölsche Ei.
This wasn’t the place I expected to learn something about Cologne’s history tbh.
JoB
Wammer esu vill Tellere op dr Stroß hät
https://www.strassenausstatter.de/produkt/verkehrslenkung/fahrbahnschwellen/koelner-teller/geschwindigkeitshemmer-koelner-teller/
bruch mer och jet ze müffele für drop ze dun. >;->
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(Though one has to admire how the (singular) *Niehler* Ei tries to solve the problem by sheer scale … 😉 )
Enai
Huh. Today I learned where the dampening doohickeys for the tram come from. Neat!
Enai
Yes, but I’m looking at the spaceship from outside, aren’t I? I can’t hear *shit* when those solar sails (or panels? Can’t tell) extend. Can’t hear the Fzzt of electric welding either. Oh, and I imagine electric welding just got harder: no atmosphere, no visible arcing. Just invisible electrons, zipping around. Well, I suppose the welded material glows, at least.
space_vermin_64
They’re actually radiator panels, they dump waste heat from the fusion drive into space via infrared radiation so it doesn’t melt itself
JoB
I’d guess (not having seen any welding being done in space) that the metal getting welded would not just glow (effect extending an inch or so from where the arc hits) but also send send sparks flying (material having minuscule glowing bits cracked off in an even smaller area) … at least in the RttSverse, even a circular saw did so back on page 4:
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-4/
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Yes, *we* certainly wouldn’t hear much of either. (Remember, Dirtball has a *minimal* atmosphere; also, regolith isn’t a solid conducting sounds well/far.) Since the panels aren’t getting extended here and now (the lower ones would crack as they hit the ground, wouldn’t they?), I thought you were referring to normal operation (with the ship in space, and a crew *inside*) …
JoB
> They’re actually radiator panels
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The triangular thingies Talita’s working on are radiators (supposedly new ones:
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-89/
sure good that the Vspear ships are “small” as well, eh? 😉 ), but with the reference to “telescope extenders” / “when [they] extend”, I’d guess that Enai *was* talking about the (currently folded) solar panels.
Enai
@JoB: I was actually referring to a scene that hasn’t happened yet but I’m sure will, and in movies goes like this:
We see the spaceship from some distance away, *hear* the hum of her engines and see her extending/retracting some appendage or other with metallic sounds. I love those SFX! I hate that in space you wouldn’t actually hear them from the vantage point of the camera. So the SFX that I love take me out of the immersion right that instant and unceremoniously dump me in the reality that movie people don’t know anything about physics and operate by the Rule Of Cool.
I was clumsily expressing that I appreciate that this comic goes to great lengths to avoid this, as evidenced by the lack of sound effects on this page, which would be quite a noisy scene in a denser atmosphere.
AnormalADN
Hats off to you Jay for making such backgrounds in your comic
Kayjack
The little raised arms on the RC unit is so good lol
JoB
[snaps fingers like to say “hey! Look here! That’s *me* talking!”, momentarily forgetting that there’s no atmosphere to carry *either* sound to us]
TheExaminer
Back at the start of the comic, iirc, Calceri was talking with speech bubbles that pointed to Talita’s tablet, despite the fact that the voice was presumably coming through her EVA suit’s intercom. So it’s very possible that that speech bubble doesn’t represent an audible sound, but rather a short-range radio broadcast.
JoB
I’m pretty sure that the speech bubble’s tail is there for *our* benefit, to draw our attention to the front loader Bip chose to add gesticulation with. 😉 Which does *not* coincide with Bip themself (the servers are atop the habitat, well below the frame from our POV), the transmitter/antenna they’re using to broadcast the exclamation, *or* the receiver/speaker anyone biological would hear it coming out of. *And* happens to be behind Talitas back *and* underneath the platform she’s loafed on in the first place …
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“*Highly* illogical!” [/Spock]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RABLYqnjEIE