Strip 708 -- First Seen: 2011-05-23
Escape From Terra is updated with new pages every Monday through Friday.

QV on a short break

QUANTUM VIVE is taking a break for a few weeks, as we prepare for Part 2 of the Novo Palermo story, and also for a Kickstarter campaign for Part 1, which will start in September.

In the meantime, Not-Safe.Space will continue, as a murder mystery begins and the relationship between Eithne and Diana develops in unexpected directions.

Not-Safe.Space is a NSFW strip but more than half the pages are SFW so I've set those to *not* require a Patreon membership. Readers should be able to follow the story without seeing the NSFW pages. If I've done this right.

Kickstarter successful and closed

The Kickstarter campaign for Not-Safe.Space Chapter 3 concluded successfully on April 21, and Scott extended the time allowed for late pledges until May 19.

Books have been ordered from the printer and Scott will be spending the next week or so setting up and sending the PDF files to those who asked for them.

(There are still six of you who have not responded to the survey asking for e-mail and snail-mail addresses, he'll do the best he can.)

Thanks to all for supporting this Kickstarter!

The Transcript For This Page

Panel 1
Tall, skinny panel. Babbette and Reggie are riding in another tube train, holding hands and leaning into one another the way couples in love do. They're whispering and suppressing giggles, completely wrapped up in each other. We'll see them in the bottom of the panel as the upper half will be taken up with the caption.
Caption: As Babbette and Reggie traveled to the aerospaceport, unbidden images, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile echos of the night's experiences made them smile and whisper provocatively to each other.
Panel 2
Large panel. Babbette and Reggie are standing before a large, curved window which affords them the view of their spaceliner, the Variable Star. Now moored to a rocky out-cropping, it fills the sky from nearly overhead to nearly the horizon. The ship is a giant airship shaped like the letter V, with 2000-meter-long arms. The angle of the vertex is only 45 degrees so the V has something of a swept-back look. The control decks and access corridors are internal to the arms. The arms are flattened a bit, top-to bottom, so that a cross-section of each is 120 meters high and 180 meters wide.
Almost half-way down the length of each arm from the vertex there is a third 'arm' which looks like a series of giant tuna cans lined up end to end and pulled taught on a giant milkshake straw. The cans are 30 meters in cross-section and contain cabins and other living areas for the passengers and service staff. The cans swivel with the acceleration of the ship so that their floors are always oriented downward. (This row would actually make the ship more like a giant 'A,' although the cross-bar is a lot narrower than the arms.)
Nearer the ends of the arms is another brace, a simple lattice-work spanning the gap between the V-legs, which contains an assemblage of standard hydrogen-burner and low-thrust ion engines. Closest to each end are an assemblage of fins for stabilization and steering in atmosphere.
There is a tall, enclosed, mobile escalator currently docked with the nearest soup-can, through which passengers are embarking.
Caption: When they arrived at the port they were overwhelmed by the magnitude of Variable Star, the ship that would be taking them to Venus.
Caption: Though high-performance, pure burners dominated the orbit-to-orbit market, V-ships were the preferred atmosphere-to-atmosphere craft.