it’s. um. it’s been a while.
this year has… not been very good for me. i suspect it hasn’t been very good for a lot of us. panel one of this page was drawn in january, maybe a couple of days before inauguration day. and then i basically just downed tools and didn’t work on it at all for months and months, until this week.
iothera means a lot to me and i want to get back to working on it at some appreciable pace. please bear with me as i try to get to that place
and thank you so much to everyone who’s encouraged me to get back to doing these, and waited. it means the world to me. it really does.
no interesting news post today, i am finishing this comic at 5:30 AM and my brain shut off some twenty minutes ago
After exhaustive analysis of the data sent back by Tenma-2B about the exoplanet designated Tau Clepsydrae VII, it was determined that the planet, being an ice giant nearly twenty times the mass of Iothera and atmospheric pressures that can reach nearly a hundred thousand Iothera atmospheres, probably wasn’t a very nice place for a manned landing attempt.
this page is dedicated to the memory of the mars climate orbiter, taken before its time by a unit conversion error. good night, sweet mars prince.
Valeria I was a rushed Restored Empire effort to catch up with the Kyokanese Tenma FTL missions. And in a certain technical sense, it was the most successful FTL mission of all time, since it (presumably) was sent further from Iothera than any other man-made object in history. Unfortunately, it has absolutely no way of orienting itself towards Iothera (or towards wherever Iothera will in however long it takes a radio signal to travel however many lightyears it is between Valeria I and Iotherea) and transmitting its location or status.
Since then, the Restored Empire brought in Robert Cross to clean house in their FTL program, and the result was the Royal Tau Clepsydrae Orbiter’s successful jump to a stable orbit around Tau Clepsydrae and a knighthood for Sir Robert. Unfortunately, by that point the Kyokanese Space Ministry had already sent several Tenma-2 probes into orbits around TC’s individual planets, and a year later a stream of invaluable mapping and climate data about exoplanets was flowing back to the Ministry, making the prospect of a manned mission much more realistic. As a reward for her key role in the development of the first two Tenma probes, Dr. Kiyohara Takako was placed in charge of putting together a proposal for a manned Tenma-3 spacecraft, and solving the thorny issue of doing so without killing its crew, which is the trickiest part of any manned spaceflight, really.
Sir Robert Cross has since departed Iothera for the Restored Empire’s top-secret research facilities on Luna Minor, where he is leading Kestrel Project, which is definitely an effort to plan a manned FTL mission, and not some other thing that is not an FTL drive.
hey, some of takako’s students look a bit……. familiar.
………
(panel one: a ghost story, astral aves; panel five: altered frontier; three good comics that all start with A you should definitely read!!!!)