At least it wasn’t Uranus. Those jokes just write themselves. The fact that Neptune is blue definitely helps with the aesthetics.

In the original script draft made a million billion years ago, the engines didn’t rotate and the innards of the ship were designed to be functional on two gravity planes. I ditched that idea in the first revision after realizing what a total pain in the ass it would be in terms of modeling, layout, etceteras. Reworking the outboard engines to rotate 90 ° ventral was ultimately easier, and something I could put off to last week – whereas compensating for bidirectional gravity would have hounded development efforts throughout the book.

Rationalizing how the Daedalus can run at 0.5 gravity thrust with its existing fuel reserves* is a headache preferable to giving in to the typical sci-fi trope of “artificial gravity is Just There, Just Works (especially when the power is cut or the engines are out), and We Don’t Talk About It. Ever.” I’ve seen enough sci-fi – good and bad – to appreciate the movies and shows that make even a token effort to explain or visualize artificial gravity – and to really appreciate it when a show actually makes a serious effort at realism. Yes, I know microgravity is an incredible pain in the ass to fake for even brief periods in live-action sci-fi, but come on. Don’t fucking tell me the Cylons wouldn’t have cut the gravity when they boarded Galactica. :P Nathan Spring‘s bad microgravity hair trumps that entire episode of BSG if for no other reason than Tigh could have at least lip-serviced the idea by line-iteming “artificial gravity” into the list of things the Centurions would go after. Is hollywood that writer-blind to physics?

Rant, rant, rant.

I spend more time thinking about this stuff than Star Trek writers spend inventing treknology that explains away why they haven’t. But I don’t have a special effects budget to worry about – you can do these kinds of things in comics.

Note to self – Replace existing status readouts with am-specific status readout. This has already been manufactured for the next page but is more appropriately introduced here. I’ve already tried photoshop, but getting the perspective right will require rerenders of panels two and seven. Fixed 20080322.

* They’re very, very efficient engines. If the Saturn V rocket could be compared to the Bletchley Park Colossus, then the Daedalus engines would be comprable to a Macbook Pro. Much smaller, uses much less fuel, and much more power. I’d say real-world rocket technology will eventually get there, but we don’t seem to be giving much of a shit when it comes to pushing it forward.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Corrected a continuity error. The Daedalus is now heading for the location it stops at in the next chapter.