Some interesting stuff I came across while researching for episode 7!

- In 1997, while Americans were on-board, a supply ship crashed into the Spektr module of the Russian Mir space station, damaging solar panels and puncturing the hull; this was the first puncture of a manned orbiting craft. Spektr is the module on the right in this 1998 photo, and you can see the crunched solar panel:


(image by NASA)

The Russians made several attempts to find the puncture, but couldn't, so they just had to leave the module unmanned for the rest of Mir's life. Mir was intentionally de-orbited in 2001, after nearly 10 years in service; it broke up in the atmosphere over Fiji:




- The Russians had a pretty nice space program, though! While we were jet-setting around with flying to the Moon, and then cruising around in shuttles once in a while, they were establishing space stations, with convoys of regular supply ships and everything.

- But it wasn't all just supply ships! Back in the early 70's in the good ol' Cold War days, they put some ships up there--calling them supply ships--that actually had machine guns on them! One of these military Almaz ships test fired its 23 mm cannon, and successfully destroyed a dummy satellite.

- One of the regular "Salyut" supply ships / station modules, Salyut 6, was deorbited in 1982 after five years in service because mold was taking over the living quarters! I for one welcome our space mold overlords!

- Another type of ship / module, Kvant-1, had trouble docking with Mir in '87 because a trash bag was stuck in the docking port!

- Russian ships mostly dock by autopilot, but we hotshot Americans don't hold with that and tend to do things manually.

- The list of spacewalks is interesting, because a lot of it is records of problems with suit heating systems, malfunctioning tools, and other types of snafus that you don't always hear much about.

- How much artificial gravity you can get by rotating a space station of different sizes can be calculated by a pretty simple formula. Apparently you don't want to go for much gravity on a station/ship with a small rotation radius, because you'd have to spin it real fast (above 2 rotations per minute), generating a nausea-inducing Coriolis effect (ie feeling like things are moving all curvy and weird) that nobody would enjoy too much. Also, with a small radius and fast spin, centrifugal force would make your feet feel much heavier than your head--because the feet are moving around a lot while the head is much nearer the center of rotation and thus not moving much--which wouldn't be very fun, either.

Got the script for episode 7 written today. Should be a pretty exciting episode, with lots of action, the arrival of the long-awaited Captain Fizer, and some Vero/Selenis head games. Whee!

This episode marks the beginning of what'll be an acceleration of the storyline; in fact I had a surprise brainstorming session a few weeks ago, and came up with the full ending for Vero's story, which previously had existed to a large degree only in sort of nebulous and vague general plot ideas. Vero's story will go through chapter 10 (OMG spoilers!), at which point we'll be perfectly set up for the next story, which I think has the potential to be even cooler. So Vero has four chapters left to tell the rest of his story, and I am going to put the poor guy through ever-increasing stages of hell. Muwahaha! :D

So anyway, whereas it took him two episodes (1 and 2) to blow through a space station before, in episode 7 (OMG more spoilers) he'll do it in one. There's progress for you!

But I also want to accelerate things in a much simpler way, namely that of getting you the daily comics for each episode at a faster rate; since moving to the daily comic format, the episodes (5 and 6) have taken three months each to complete, and I would like to get that down closer to two months. I've been averaging about 2.5 daily comics per day, and I want to get that closer to 4 per day. Which means I just really have to concentrate on the drawing--and taking what I've learned about what works and what doesn't for the animation, so that I'm not wasting time drawing things that I won't actually use, or that won't be effective. I'm not sure how much more drawing I can get in on a daily basis than I have been, but we'll see. Hopefully this increased focus will mean at least a few more comics coming to you each week than you've been getting.

So there, how many webcomics tell you they're going to try to *increase* the number of comics you get per week? Doesn't happen very often that I've seen! (Hm maybe there's a reason for that... Nahhhh, I'm sure this'll work just dandy. =p)

~~~~~~~~~

And it is now 11:59 PM...

12:00 AM! Woohoo! Merry Christmas! Look for some A* Christmas cards this evening, probably at my usual very late hour. ;)

~~~~~~~~~

Oh! And I was going to leak you a fun line from the episode 7 script. Here goes:

"I don't want your thanks, Fizer. I want this over with and your men off my station before you start a goddamn riot."

Aaaand Happy Holidays!

Its a well known fact that Homer Simpson was responsible for that incident.



You mean Buran? As far as I'm aware, there was only one unmanned mission before it got cancelled for budgetary reasons. The real shame is that it was destroyed by a hangar collapse in Kazakhstan due to a lack of maintenence. I always liked the way it looked... if a NASA shuttle had an evil twin, it'd be Buran.

Episode 7 and the future of A* sounds exciting. Looking forward to it. Oh, and have a happy holiday!

Oh no, I just meant Americans cruising around in their own space shuttles. Thanks for mentioning Buran, though! That was one of the browser tabs I had open when I was typing up the funky Russian space stuff I found, and...well heck I don't know what happened to the tab, I probably just closed it accidentally. It certainly did have a rough time of it, but it's pretty impressive that they got it into orbit and back in a pinpoint landing all without manned control.

Got a batch of storyboards for episode 7 done today: 56 so far! A selection:







As you can clearly see, in this episode, Vero becomes Neo.

Okay, maybe not exactly. Zero-g would help if you were trying to do a good Neo impression, though! And actually it isn't zero-g, because even though being in orbit (which is where this takes place) gives the appearance of weightlessness, you're still under the gravitational influence of whatever you're orbiting, so there *is* gravity--but you're effectively weightless because you're in free-fall: orbit is kind of just falling in a circle!

Well isn't that fun. Should get the rest of the episode 7 storyboards doodled up tomorrow, so prepare for more messy sketches and incredible revelations!

Got the remaining 60 storyboards doodled out today, so that means actual episode 7 comics will start tomorrow! How exciting!

But where would be the fun if I didn't spoil things by leaking a few storyboards. Today we seem to have A* characters doing impressions of Old Snake, Jack Skellington, and Trinity. :p











~~~~~~~~~~

If that isn't enough amazing stuff for you, go check out io9's pick of the top 100 comic covers from the last decade. Lots of nifty designs in there!

It's already 2010 in some parts of the world, so Happy New Year! :D

And A* episode 7 kicks off, too!

Added 6 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 7, Daily 1
• A* Episode 7, Daily 2
• A* Episode 7, Daily 3
• A* Episode 7, Daily 4
• A* Episode 7, Daily 5
• A* Episode 7, Daily 6

Happy new year braves!!! (almost in italy!!)

Yay! \o/

Ooh I'd better go update the copyright notices to "2010." =o

Added 6 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 7, Daily 7
• A* Episode 7, Daily 8
• A* Episode 7, Daily 9
• A* Episode 7, Daily 10
• A* Episode 7, Daily 11
• A* Episode 7, Daily 12