Got nearly twice as many storyboards done for episode 11 today as I did yesterday; just gotta do about the same number tomorrow, and I'll be set for kicking off the first real pages of the episode on Monday. Because this is taking a day longer than I'd have liked, and because yesterday's were not exactly the pick of the litter due to me wanting to avoid spoiling certain things, you get an extra-large batch today, in random order:



#6 (close-up of Proctor's glasses) and the last one are alternate layouts that I'm not going to use. And no that first one isn't Proctor's grampa, it's just him undergoing the g-force of of a rocket launch! Notice how he uses a hair net to stay neat and tidy. >_> And yes, that *is* Mar's nose bending in the foreground in front of him.

Some research I did just for the sake of completeness today turned up some nifty stuff. First, we've got U.S. Air Force surgeon John Stapp, who served as their human test subject for g-force and other acceleration testing in the '40's and '50's. This dude survived the force of 46.2 Gs in one test! Although that was one of his last ones, and left him with permanent damage to his sight. I used this sequence of one Stapp test for reference for g-force distortion of the human face:


image by USAF (source)

Here's the "rocket sled" they strapped him into for these tests:


image by USAF (source)

Looks like some fun, huh? :o Stapp was a trooper, that's for sure.

The other thing I was double-checking was visual effects of near-light-speed travel, although I'm only moving something at a pretty tiny percentage of light speed in episode 11, so the funky distortions of relativity won't really be evident anyway. Still, it's pretty trippy stuff to see demonstrated, for instance in simulated images and movies on these pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

That last one is Carl Sagan from his "Cosmos" series, and it isn't quite accurate, since he covers only Doppler shift and the aberration of light. The aberration of light is the phenomenon of stuff in your peripheral vision actually curving around into your forward view as you approach light speed, so everything--except what's directly behind you--gets compressed into a tunnel in front of you, kind of, because you're catching the photons carrying that data right in your face; the usual analogy is that when you drive faster and faster in the rain, you get more raindrops in the face--so imagine photons are raindrops as we accelerate to light speed.

And while Sagan discusses color changes due to the Doppler effect--something moving very quickly toward you will shift blue, and something moving away will shift red--he doesn't take that to the extremes, where stuff moving toward you close to the speed of light will go all the way to white, apparently (?), and stuff moving away from you close to the speed of light will red shift so much that it goes black. Like, stuff falling into the event horizon of a black hole won't actually just vanish as it crosses that invisible horizon; rather, it will gradually get redder and redder, and fainter and fainter, until it just fades out completely. ... Well, in theory.

Then there's the *really* weird stuff: stuff moving at near-light speed gets compressed in its direction of travel; this is called the Lorentz contraction, which involves a lot of math I don't understand at all. You can't even exactly see it, apparently, because the photons hitting your eye simultaneously weren't necessarily released simultaneously from the moving object, since it's going so darn fast. Supposedly you will still see a sort of contraction effect in many cases, and that is a visual distortion resulting from Lorentz contraction and all that jazz, I think; anyhoo, it's called Terrell rotation, aka the "Penrose-Terrell effect," where your view of the object warps in a very funky way, and generally gets shorter (except that a sphere won't get shorter, since when you rotate a sphere, it's still a sphere), because you're seeing the back part of it nearly simultaneously with the side...or something like that, I dunno. Heck if I'm ever going to try drawing it, though! See that third link above in particular for some 3D-rendered examples of it.

Okay! The storyboards are complete, so on Monday we'll be kicking off episode 11 for real with actual comics. For now I can show you one last bunch of semi-non-spoilery storyboards, although maybe you can tell that there's some significant carnage of some sort or other going down:



There's also another sort of carnage, but I can't show you that yet...you'll just have to wait until whenever we get to the climax of the episode, at whatever point that is in the far-flung future! But at least the beginning isn't far off now.

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 1
• A* Episode 11, Page 2
• A* Episode 11, Page 3

Woohoo episode 11 kick-off!

~~~~~~~~~

I ran across a BBC article / news segment about the opening of the runway at "the world's first spaceport" last week; this is Virgin group billionaire Sir Richard Branson's operating center for his "SpaceShip" shuttle in New Mexico, "Spaceport America" (Branson himself is British; too bad he didn't go with "SpacePort Brittania!"). The craft will be hauled up to 50,000 feet by a more conventional aircraft (still kinda funky twin fuselage design there), from which point it boosts on its own to 62 miles up; in the three-hour round-trip up and back, passengers who ponied up £127,000 will enjoy 5 minutes of weightlessness. Steep! Also, make sure you go before you leave, because the SpaceShip has no bathroom.

In a way, calling it the "first spaceport" isn't exactly fair, since the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan has supported commercial rocket launches for a long time now, and I think even NASA has launched commercial stuff--corporate satellites or something, maybe? well I don't know--in their shuttles from Cape Canaveral. Didn't they also have a paying passenger or two in a widely publicized thing a few years back, anyway? Buuuut I suppose there hasn't been a facility dedicated to taking paying customers up there, so maybe we'll allow it.

The other quibble with the title is that 62 miles up is only in the lower part of the thermosphere, still part of Earth's atmosphere, albeit a very low-pressure one; the International Space Station is way higher--200 miles up--and even that's still the thermosphere.

(Hm well I suppose I stand corrected on that point: a bunch of people consider 100 km, or 62 miles, the "edge of space" (the BBC even used that specific phrase in their video), dubbed the Kármán line after the Hungarian-American engineer by that name who figured that it was the maximum altitude at which you could hope to get any aeronautical lift in an aircraft. Interestingly, the US still holds to an old and rather arbitrary "they went at least 50 miles up" yardstick for deciding who is and is not an official astronaut.)

Oh and I suppose I was also thinking that it isn't much of a port, considering that its traffic won't actually be traveling and stopping at a distant destination--although I'm sure they'd love to have a commercial station up there they could dock with. Maybe that's the next big step once they get the flying up there part down.

The craft is pretty small and slender, and I was surprised at first that it doesn't need any big disposable boosters or fuel tanks, but in addition to the relatively low "space" flight ceiling, I guess it doesn't have any real cargo it has to lift, aside from passengers. If they ever do get to the space station stage they might need something with a bit more muscle.

It does seem rather presumptuous to call it a spaceport, but perhaps there's more in the works that will give that name more credibility. ( ? )
Personally, from my science-fiction background a spaceport should have thundering rockets that go very far away, but you've got to start somewhere.

If they could make it to the ISS, that would be different, but what they offer so far is a glorified E ticket ride for people with far too much disposable cash, and I'm trying not to hate them.

EDIT: Almost forgot- ep11 in fine form! Page 2 really slams !

Thanks! I'm always a little antsy about pages with lots of fine detail rather than something big and obvious, but I'm glad this one worked out. :)

Guh I've been riding this hangover from that all-nighter up coding the little top news blurb thingy over the weekend... Gotta get my schedule back at least a little closer to daylight. Probably only going to manage one page today (or rather, in the wee hours of tomorrow, but what else is new? ;).

now THATS an opener!@!@!!#!#!!##!!@!@!@!! best first two pages ever.

Hah! :) Well, hold onto your shorts, it's going to get a little wilder than that here pretty soon.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 11, Page 4

I was so woozy from working over the weekend yesterday that when I was signing all the prints I made for the upcoming show, I signed two of them upside-down. :o In fairness to myself, one of them had an upside-down person in it, so... *cough* Anyway it's a good thing my dad urged me to print two of each. >_>

When we were at the art supply store--to buy frames; we needed way more than they had ;P--I found their pen section, and was somewhat surprised to find myself drooling over all the fancy brush pens they have these days--those are the big sort of tapering felt nib pens that a lot of other webcomic people use for inking their strips, and that a lot of superhero comic people seem to use for quick drawings done for visitors at conventions. They're so neat...but I work entirely digitally, so why do I want one so badly? So I resisted...but I was able to justify buying a few metallic silver Pitt pens for signing the prints; they're much nicer than the Sharpies I had. But apparently they have this writing-upside-down glitch...

Gosh this column needs some more art in it... Oh hey look, here's a preliminary version of a free postcard I'm thinking of handing out at the show:



What ya think? The text (name, web site, etc) would be on the left side. The head is actually from an A* storyboard sketch--a quickie, but it somehow seemed to come out pretty nice--and then I added in a bit of body to fill out a bit more of the card. Here's a larger and slightly cropped version.

I like the picture - the lines suggest movement.....cool.

No Matrix inspired prints for the show?