Wrote out the episode 9 script today, huzzah. As I mentioned before, we'll have some characters who haven't been around for an episode or two in this one, as might be indicated by this sample line:

"That long-nosed son of a--"

Hm! What else did I do today... Ah, on the A* forum, I engaged in lots of ridiculous speculation about gravity being a manifestation of vacuum energy's negative pressure, and I embedded NASA's cool video of the first images returned from their spanky new Solar Dynamics Observatory.

I also whipped up the final version of episode 8's button for the episode list page; it came out looking like this:

Some squiggly storyboards for the upcoming episode:



Got to thinking about acceleration speeds in A*, like, I kind of wish I'd shown Vero being pushed back in his seat when he took off into the magnetic field at the end of the last episode. On the other hand that might have interfered with what else I wanted him to be showing, so eh. But from there I got to thinking about acceleration speeds for these spacecraft and travel times and so forth, and got kind of paranoid about it--the numbers maybe not working out when tolerable accelerations for the human body are considered, I mean--but after doing some double-checking I've reassured myself that yep if I assume my travel distances are on the light days / weeks range, and travel times in the months-ish range, then that more or less works out okay.

And I did find this Space Math page, with a nice handy calculator for figuring out actual relativistic travel times, should I ever need to get that specific (hopefully not, it's so much easier when I don't have to give numbers ;), as well as some other potentially useful calculator functions; don't really need that Schwarzschild radius calculator for black holes, though, 'cause you just rough it as 3 km (radius) per solar mass, and you're pretty darn close.

The non-relativistic parts of the rocket calculations come from what's known as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and if you take a look at the math there you'll see why I wanted to find a program to do it for me. ;)

As for the relativistic side of the equation, I came across some of that on a page called The Relativistic Rocket; I wouldn't bother linking it because who really wants to try doing that math...but it does have some nifty descriptions of what the observer in a near light speed rocket would see, and gritty details of the concerns of near-light-speed space flight, such as "After only a few years of 1g acceleration even the cosmic background radiation is Doppler shifted into a lethal heat bath hot enough to melt all known materials." Well! So maybe don't go quite that fast. :P

And just a few other things I stumbled across: Could NASA Get to Pluto Faster is an interesting polemic by a space industry dude talking about how you've got to switch to nuclear propulsion if you want manned space missions farther out than, say, Mars--and he goes on kind of a suspicious jaunt about how the Russians will have some kind of science-fictiony-sounding super advanced nuclear rockets by 2050 or something; and then the StarTravel page shows what certainly looks like an impressive (not free) program for calculating some rather sophisticated space flight paths around our solar system, as well as graphs of relativistic space flight. You'd think the program's target group would be pretty limited: science-minded people who really need specific numbers but can't calculate them themselves...oh wait that's hard science-fiction writers! :o

Finished the episode 9 storyboards! That means regular episode 9 comics will start tomorrow (Tuesday). :D Here's a randomized selection of some of the more presentable of the 65 or so storyboard doodles I made today for the episode:



And a quote not from the episode!

A trip to the moon
On nuclear wings
Just one of those things

- Louis Prima


And a thingy to click to visit the new page of my weekend fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant:

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 1
• A* Episode 9, Page 2
• A* Episode 9, Page 3

Long distance communication at A* distances--farther apart than, say, a light minute--has to be monologue rather than dialogue. There will be a few rather long-range transmissions in episode 9, and at first I was worried about how to do them, since the receiver can't give immediate feedback to the transmitter, but then I figured maybe I could turn it to my advantage... So although this beginning will start to seem nonlinear at a certain point, it really isn't, thanks to my buddy the speed of light. You'll get it once you see it, I think--as long as you remember Mar's first line. ;)

Added 6 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 4
• A* Episode 9, Page 5
• A* Episode 9, Page 6
• A* Episode 9, Page 7
• A* Episode 9, Page 8
• A* Episode 9, Page 9

Man I was on a Mar & Proctor roll today!

Added 4 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 10
• A* Episode 9, Page 11
• A* Episode 9, Page 12
• A* Episode 9, Page 13

Random space factoid I came across today, which everyone else who would care probably already knows: each of the former Beatles got an asteroid named after them in the mid-80's. There's 4147 Lennon, 4148 McCartney, 4149 Harrison, and 4150 Starr. Harrison's is the "farthest out"--from the Sun. Hah. Whereas the Rolling Stones all have to share a single asteroid, 19383 Rolling Stones. And there are other rockers with asteroids named after them, too. And, for that matter, there are loads and loads of asteroids named after people; I wonder what Freud would make of 4342 Freud, for instance.

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 14
• A* Episode 9, Page 15
• A* Episode 9, Page 16

Darn those stuffed shirts on the board! Ooooooh they just burn me up.

I may be up super late/early working on another comic of mine since some form of inspiration appears to have struck, but if I am I'll tell you about it on Monday! Or you could just keep an eye on my other comics, if you want to cheat. :P Then again I might just send inspiration to the Devil and go to sleep instead. But speaking of Monday, this Mar/Proctor convo should be wrapping up about then.

Added 4 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 17
• A* Episode 9, Page 18
• A* Episode 9, Page 19
• A* Episode 9, Page 20

For some reason I ended up drawing pretty much all weekend. :o

First, I got some silly joke ideas that provided sufficient inspiration to update my gag comic, One Off (I added two but I wouldn't go to the previous one, it's even worse ;)).

Then my weekly fairy tale The Princess and the Giant got its weekly update, which you can check out via this handy dandy teaser:



And then a goofy Matrix conspiracy theory was stuck in my head, leading inevitably to this:



The full explanation is on its deviantART page. I'm also sticking it over in the "lasso drawing" A* forum thread for safekeeping.

And then it occurred to me that if you scramble the letters in the A* domain name, smbhax, you can get, uh, "masbhx," which is *so* close to "Matrix" that it's just eeeeerie! And then I realized I should get some sleep. =p

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 21
• A* Episode 9, Page 22
• A* Episode 9, Page 23

For some reason I keep putting Fizer in a lot of gray; I ended up bringing five gray layers in for that last one there, as opposed to the two or three I've been using. Hm... This could all end up taking a lot of time. I do like being able to get little skin highlights like that, though.

Added 4 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 24
• A* Episode 9, Page 25
• A* Episode 9, Page 26
• A* Episode 9, Page 27

Since Mar's the best boss in the Galactic Center I couldn't resist making a motivational poster out of his charismatic speech on page 25:



For future reference, you can find it in the episode 9 gallery, which is linked from the episode list page (just sayin', 'cause it's been a while; this is the first gallery piece since going to the larger format at the start of episode 8; in fact, I had to upgrade the gallery script to be able to skip past episodes without gallery entries :P).