MEANWHILE…

I wasn’t trying to be lazy when it came to drawing the inside of their ships. I was actually thinking about my lack of visionary futurism when it comes to designing stuff that I stick in the comic, like an alien spacecraft with heavy, loud, slow hydraulics on their cargo door. Partially that’s just because if I just draw a panel opening up, and Sydney’s not there to wonder aloud how it works, then it just looks like I drew a lazy door with no apparent mechanism. Which, to be fair, is the case some of the time. But if she’s there acting as the drive train of an exposition engine, then someone can say some futuristic shit about magnets or force fields or manipulating the Higgs Field or some such.

In the case of these ships, I thought it’d be cool if the pilots are held in an antigravity field, and the entirety of the interior of the cockpit was basically a holodeck. So it’s like a 360 view canopy with floating UI so you can slide your altimeter to the side if it’s in the way. Or… really, minimize it, because you wouldn’t need an altimeter in a spaceship most of the time.

Actually, I thought of the idea of a spaceship with the entire interior being handled via holodeck technology quite a while ago. Obviously the reason it never happened in an episode of Star Trek was because holodecks have a cascading chance of failure. It’s probably like 0.01% for any given time you step into one, but a 100% chance that something will definitely eventually fuck up. You couldn’t take a ship into battle if every time the ship brushed against a piece of space dust, the navigation panel disappeared and dumped the ensign manning it onto a featureless black grid.

Still, if you could bring the reliability up to 99+% even when you’re getting fucked up with space bombs, (and physical controls to fall back on when everything still inevitably fails) something like that would solve all the ergonomic issues I was talking about a few pages back. Like how nice cars have user settings, so you don’t have to fuck with the rear view mirror and the seat position every time your wife/husband/anyone-who’s-a-different-height-than-you drives your car, you could have a massively diverse crew manning all your stations. Your helm could be manned (personed? sapiented?) by a pixie on one shift, then a Marileth could sapient it on the second shift, then a tarantula with jellyfish for limbs who can only see in the ultraviolet spectrum could take graveyard shift, and they just wave their primary manipulation appendage over the DNA reader and their preset station pop into existence.

I just had to joke about a tarantula with jellyfish arms on the post for the previous comic. I guess he wasn’t that hard to draw, though tentacles get tedious real quick. I do think the cop pants are funny, though I guess technically it’s a skirt, since tarantulas have basically just one butt cheek.

And yes. The fungus lady has breasts. It’s my comic. I get to draw that if I want. If it makes you feel any better, just assume they can shape their bodies how they like as they mature, and they know that growing boobs gets them free drinks in bars from other species. Or fermented compost or whatever they drink.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!