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

One Dollar Sale Continues!

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Kickstarter Success!

The Not-Safe-Space 2 Kickstarter Campaign has ended successfully. Thanks to all who pledged!

Now we get to wait 2 weeks while Kickstarter transmits the funds, and Scott can order the books, and send surveys to backers to get current e-mail addresses for the .PDF versions and mailing addresses for the physical books.

All of this should show up in June.

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.