A Note on the Saturday Sci-fi Story

Hi, the first two comics in this series are pretty interesting, I wish you luck.

The spaceship looks a lot like a dolphin, was that the intent?

Also, any ship traveling at high velocity would have to have some type of protection against tiny bits of matter. On star trek they have navigation shields (which come on automatically when the ship is moving) and a deflector which sends out an energy pulse that shoves matter aside like a big snow plow.

This alien ship would have to have something like that that failed for this to happen.

(Terry Pratchett said the audience will swallow a huge lie, but choke on a little fib. Aliens, no problem - alien ship being brought down by tiny chunk of matter, big problem.)

Yeah.....I have to agree with Turk on this one. There is no way that any vessel moving through space is going to do so without some form of defense against debris - even worse, moving faster than the speed of light would make any intersection with any kind of matter (and the few atoms out there in space would suddenly become akin to hitting a solid wall of concrete at those speeds) a mutually annihilating experience. We might be lucky and get to see an extremely elongated string of plasma after this meeting..... ;)

Oh, and this is with handwavium turned on so that we don't question how physical laws and principles are being breached/bypassed. That's the big lies we can live with. :)

Suspension of disbelief around superluminary "speeds" aside...the question of the ship's operation will be central to the story. So I'm glad it's perked your interest!

Okay, I hate to geek out on everyone, but...

Everyone's forgetting a basic problem with the rock. Assuming it is roughly spherical, a diameter of 50mm gives it a volume of about 65 cubic centimeters. Water's density is 1g/cc, so we'll be lazy and just double that, giving the rock a mass of, oh, let's round off and say 150 grams or roughly a third of a pound.

Essentially, then, you've got a rock that is four times the diameter of a fifty caliber bullet and three times the mass travelling at relativistic velocities. It would leave a hole in the space ship about ten times the size of the space ship, and you could see the light show from Cleveland.

So figure the "drive field" (always a useful phrase) attenuates the velocity of objects in its path as a side effect. The ship also has an automatic defense mechanism for destroying the objects after they've been slowed by the field, but our intrepid-but-not-the-fizziest-soda-in-the-sixpack alien didn't know to turn it on.

Therefore, the ship is only hit by a rock travelling at bullet velocities, not one with enough kenetic energy to destroy a small moon.

Science fiction writer. Bam.

Uhhh yeah I don't have any geekiness to offer...

BUT

I like the strip so far (I'm not even a sci-fi fan), but I was wondering if the strip would look better if there were more contrast between the blue and the white? I like the color, but it looks a bit "soft", and in all honesty, I wouldn't want my eyes straining to read this thing through a whole book.

Then again, it could just be my monitor.

Just a suggestion, though, please don't hate me.

As far as the blue goes, it's a technique I'm fiddling with, and am not 100% on yet. My hope is to have refined the look in a few months, and retroactively fix the experimental earlier files. Or, barring that, switch to the more conventional grayscale. Bur I'd like to try the blue first, if for no other reason than artistic curiousity.

As for the impossibility of the physics we've seen, my one request is that you let the story play out a bit. All we know is that we have a ship whose operation hasn't been explained, and a pilot who barely knows how to operate it. As tempted as I am to explain how the ship operates to calm the enthusiastic hearts among us, this will be a big part of the story...so let it unfold in the coming months/years.

Some of the physics might be a little (a lot) off, but the ideas behind this still intrigue the hell out of me. There's already a lot of unanswered questions, and I especially like how the thing assumes you know more than you do about the world the story is taking place in. It lends it a more authoritative and genuine air.

Personally I also like the blue. I can't explain why, I just really do, and it seems a shame to think it could be later rendered in grey-scale.

...to paraphrase, "A cartoon about geeks, for geeks, by a geek" - or something like that.

It is good to see you reaching back to your roots!

This, truly, is the funniest strip I have seen.

On the topic of "readers will make huge leaps of faith but stumble over tiny things that are off", the one thing that I stumbled over when reading this was... the description of the rock as "50 mm". Being European, and using metric constantly, I would never, ever describe anything as "50 mm" - I would always say "5 cm". It's a tiny detail, yet it made me stumble and go go "wait, what?"

Please note, I am not mentioning this as an actual problem with the writing - that would be ridiculous, it's such a tiny detail - but rather in the sense of "isn't it funny what miniscule things the human mind catches on while reading about humanoid lizards flying faster-than-light spaceships?"

I liked this comic better back when it was about the video games...oh wait, nevermind, wrong strip.

Just kidding, I'm actually enjoying these new Saturday Sci-Fi strips and look forward to seeing how this develops. And I really like the blue. It's a nice way to make the Saturdays stand out from the regular strips.

As for physics, I spent decades accepting "Heisenberg Compensators" I think I can be patient for a few weeks and see how this turns out.

Keep it up Dave.

Dave, if you're wondering how to make the bluescale a bit more defined (I agree, it is a bit hard on the eyes right now, especially for us older geeks), check out Karl Kerschl's work at http://www.abominable.cc/ He uses a sort of greenscale (with black) and makes it work wonderfully. Go back several weeks (or even to the beginning) and look it over.

Okay, champ. I love your comic and do so since a long time. Alas for some reason unknown to me I can't do anything with your new Saturday series (other than the old Saturday series about the lizard's space travel, or was it Sunday's?).

If I had visited this site on one of the last two Saturdays for the first time, I am pretty sure you would not get my/your daily click from Austria. It would have scared me off.

Since this storyline is so different (not only from drawing style, but also not funny nor witty, at least to me) than the usual "Sheldons" it is maybe a good idea to put them under an other category, like Kurtz does with his Ding!.

Just my two and a half coppers. :)