The exciting return of return of fan favorite bing bong.
Transcript
Chapter 2: Party Guests
SFX: BING BONGIt's 08:00, the tower chime sounds out and morning comes to the unchanging dark side of Ixion-3. The huge protective berm surrounding the even taller launch loop towers over the kilometer wide circle of the habitat dome. Massive rail tracks, building sized cranes, and neatly arranged piles of scrap lie to the right of the small habitable area.
32 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 38”
evileeyore
Aw, bing bong already?
Trees
Ancient Dirtball legends says the Bing Bong has an appropriately huge snooze button but unfortunately the humans can’t reach it and the avians aren’t heavy enough to push it.
zofifi
I love it actually
Gar G
Party guests? Oh this will be fun
(briefly forgot that it was brought up in an earlier page so the first thing that came to mind for me was a bunch of bug ferrets visiting XD)
Arcstone
Do they have any kind of plan in place for meteorite impacts? Like is the dome thick enough for that sorta thing?
dokki
RAILS 🫵
Ruby
Bing bong and shine!
40
God I want to live here
un_pogaz
*maniacal laughter face to the approaching chaos*
Yesterday was the last ordinary day, but at the time, nobody knew it yet.
the Inmara
eef!
Rossignol
eef!
Gnome_artificer
Heck yeah, BING BONG is back!
Guest
Seeing those giant cranes makes me wonder about the gravity situation in Dirtball. Is it much different than earth?
wingedhorror
“World” link in main menu has all sorts of background trivia.
Dirtball is listed as having 0.79g
Guest
Thanks
waterfan2
Actually, those cranes aren’t that much bigger than Earth cranes. The cranes that unload container ships are already at the point where they can unload containers from 50 meters above the pier. That crane looks like it’s about 140-180 meters tall which is doable on Earth. It would be one of the largest cranes on Earth, sure, but doable.
Patteroast
hell yeah bing bong
junkalopes
woagh big crane
bcb
I’m excited for the new chapter!
Claire
Oh, I never realized that the operation was so close to a cliff! Is there some significance? I know that plans to make bases on the moon want to take advantage of craters, so I wonder if this cliff serves a similar purpose…
Mothman
I believe that is the launch loop for the station, basically the thing stuff from space comes in/goes out on. You can read more about it here!: https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Locations/Dirtball
Mothman
oop just realized the page transcript describes it as well: The huge protective berm surrounding the even taller launch loop towers over the kilometer wide circle of the habitat dome.
Claire
Oh, its a *static* lofstrom loop? Ive always seen them depicted with wires, cables, hydraulics, etc. Having a static one on dirtball makes sense, though. Thats cool!
Jay Eaton
It’s an active structure with moving rotors. The details are mostly hidden by the berm and by the sheer scale of the thing. There’s just a tiny chunk of rail section on this page.
Liza
Okay so it is a 12 hour day/night cycle then. I was expecting morning BING BONG to be earlier. Not sure why. I think I knew at some point but forgot, how long avians sleep for. Wait I’m assuming they’re on a 24 hour clock and I think that’s wrong. I’m so confused.
Jay Eaton
Time is really confusing. Dirtball has a 23 hour day and the nights are currently like an hour shorter than the days because it’s late spring and avians are used to very little seasonal variation. It is compromise between the human and avian workers, because humans have a less flexible sleep schedule and avians don’t tolerate extreme changes in daylight hours well. (Avian homeplanet days are 21 hours)
Liza
Thank you! Seems like a fair compromise! I imagine accommodating everyone gets harder and harder the more species are involved. Bug Ferrets do intermittent napping iirc.
Liza
Okay I just checked with the comments on page 21 (where we see a human and avian clock side by side) and Jay says it’s a 23 hour day on dirtball so… 20:00 to 08:00 is 3 + 8 = 11 hour night and thus a 12 hour day. Funky. Sorry for clogging up the comments with my thinking out loud.
eel
Thanks for doing the math so I don’t have to. Despite juggling timezones for 6ish years I am still bamboozled every time.
Greenjoe
Considering the size of the dome, that is a lot of scrap.
SIGSTKFLT
omg. Spacs trains. i’m love.
Trees
Hooray!
I did wonder at some point how they get a bunch of big broken spaceships to the scrapyard and am glad the answer seems to be ‘massive gauge railway’. Just looked back at the pages where Talita finds the Mysterious Ship of Phones and you can see the tracks. I didn’t even notice the first time.
There is just something inherently worth celebrating about trains!