I feel quite certain that some trauma professional who happens to read my comic will take me to task over my treatment of Carl in these last couple of pages. 
Well, if you do happen to know better, feel free to correct me in the comments. I most likely won’t be able to change anything in this scene, but it’s all food for thought that I will keep in the back of my brain for the next time something like this comes up! (Which of course it won’t. Galaxion is such a sweet, gentle comic and I would never do something like that to my characters. Muahhaha!)
In case anyone is wondering, I won’t be putting up an extra page this Friday, but I’m going to try really hard to get some fan art up. I’ve actually got a small pile of really cool stuff that I’ve been feeling guilty about not sharing.
And I guess since we’re now into August, I should start advertising my upcoming appearance at the Baltimore Comic Con, August 28-29. I’ve never been to this show before, but I’ve heard great things about it. I’m really looking forward to it!
Now thats something you don’t see every day (Last panel).
Crumpled but intact is quite remarkable, considering how it got there!
The whole treatment of Carl in frames one to four is so inaccurate its untrue!
Everyone knows that you’re meant to give the patient a lolly after you’ve finished examining him!
“You don’t know?!” Carl, Carl, Carl… this is your body we’re talking about. If you don’t know if you have a headache, whom do you suggest we ask, hmm?
How did they manage to land something that has the aerodynamics of a brick?
Fred, ask any F-4 pilot. Put a big enough engine on it and you can fly a brick.
This man speaks the truth.
An even better example is the “Flying Bedstead”, the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, though that was more of a flying spider.
Bricks are fairly aerodynamic. As opposed to, say, glazed doughnuts.
And NO! Putting an engine on a doughnut is a heinous crime in and of itself. Shame on all who try to re-purpose a doughnut for anything other than delicious consumption! (The Galaxion is a snail shape, therefore it is escargot.)
Not to mention hilarious.
and, I realise, they have some sort of gravity generator to keep them all attached to the floors when in space, so the spaceship likely has anti-gravity generators to help with atmospheric manoeuvres.
I don’t know. It might be trivial to create localized gravity so that you don’t float everywhere, but to use an anti-gravity generator to maneuver a ship that big in a “thick” atmosphere would be very inefficient. I would think what little they had in directional thrust is how they moved in the atmosphere. The anti-gravity would be better suited in the vacuum of space: little to no gaseous drag; no external gravity well to retard momentum; less effort to change velocity.
Of course, there’s the Honor Harrington series where people drive anti-gravity vehicles and ships travel through normal space using changes in gravity. But their ships-of-the-line don’t travel in atmospheres. I don’t know.
That was also my assumption, that they use some kind of gravity-creating or changing device. On the previous page they didn’t appear to be too alarmed when the ship had entered the planet’s atmosphere. Although this wouldn’t be a regular or normal thing to do, they might have both thrusting engines and some kind of ground-effect to keep them from really smashing into things.
Still, imagining what this situation would be like for the pilot produced some pretty amazing stuff. That would have been a very scary and dangerous landing!
Paul Hill in “Unconventional Flying Objects” ( http://www.amazon.com/Unconventional-Flying-Objects-Scientific-Analysis/dp/157174027 ) runs some calculations suggesting that if you had sufficiently clever gravity control you could fake up an accelerated airflow that avoids sonic booms.
I’m not sure how if you had enough power and control to come down out of orbit without melting and exploding or leaving a crater the size of Texas, and your crew are anything short of liquidised, why your propulsion system would fail just close enough to the ground and at a low enough speed to get you some minor hull plating scratches and bumps to the head.
Sadly real starships, I suspect, aren’t much likely to crash (while in transit) in such a way as to leave any traceable remains. Because 99.9999% of perfect when you’re travelling at high fractions of the speed of light and pumping several supernovas’ worth of juice into warping the spacetime continuum is still enough energy to make a very large bang, and something as big as an outright drive failure seems like it would involve more than 0.00001% of your output.
But where would SF be without being able to crash spaceships into planets and walk away alive?
So I guess they have a secondary or tertiary landing antigrav system which doesn’t work on the normal drive circuit which is what broke down when the electrical/computer system got fritzed. The hyper-thingy broke, the ordinary gravity drive got them down out of orbit, but the fine-tuning landing jets/fields were offline at the last minute. The equivalent of ‘the Concorde crossed the Atlantic at supersonic speeds and landed fine but the undercarriage was jammed so we’re still stranded’.
More like putting everything into reverse to avoid a collision with the ground at too high a speed and then landing in the softest possible way. ANY landing on a planet by a ship like this that was probably never intended to do that you could actually walk away from would be regarded as the kind of stuff that would be put in textbooks just to show that it was possible…
Pilot, sore from many slaps on the back and hugs from happy crew, goes to nearest pub and gets totally swakked. Convinced he is very, very lucky for amazing landing. Also for finding a pub so close by.
You are all missing the simplest solution for the spaceship-looks-like-a-brick quandry:
magic space elves.
The crew keeps them in captivity under the floorboards, where they run around at night, screaming their horrible cries. Why do you think nobody’s in a hurry to sign up for these deep-space missions?
Look at page 102 to see the full extent of the damage. Looks like a little too much forward momentum as the ship hit the ground.
With page 102, I’d have to say they were not travelling all that fast. To sustain the seemingly minor structural damage shown on that page the ship would have to have been moving very slowly in relation to the planet (probably travelling in the direction of the rotation), hit their reverse thrust or anti-gravity generators, and pray that they’ve slowed down enough to crash land without shredding the ship apart. I’m reminded of the Pitch Black opening sequence with the crash landing.
Then again, this is a comic.
Most of what trauma professionals do to a patient these days simply boils down to compensating for lack of knowledge by assuming the worst possible case and treating the patient using that assumption until they can get the patient somewhere that they can find out more. I think we can assume that the handheld scanners they’re using here are probably giving the medics the equivalent of a whole hospital full of advanced scanner equipment as currently available — so they have a lot of on hand, immediate knowledge of the particular patient’s condition, and will only use what measures they really need, saving a lot of messing about.
I’m with Hardware on this one; this is a low speed crash. It looks more like most of the damage came from the weight and mass of the spaceship hitting the ground heavily than the speed of the spaceship slamming into the ground. Spaceships go fast, and if this thing had really been travelling, there’d be a bigger crater and less wreckage, as the forces involved would have basically disintegrated the ship under even moderate speed (which, for a spaceship, is pretty darn fast; the runway at Kennedy for the shuttle landings, a much smaller brick, is 15,000 ft). To me, this looks like they landed a ship that really wasn’t supposed to land on terra firma, and they did it pretty well.
And Tara: as a trauma professional (EMT-B), I actually find nothing wrong with this sequence, aside from some details that would have slowed the story down. And besides, it’s a memory, so you can always say that Carl was just a little hazy on the details at the time, and thought it took a much shorter time than it did.
Coming out of their jump and into normal space where they were on a collision-course with the planet called for quick action.
If the jump engines put the ship at a velocity independent of the Galaxy, they had about 1.3 million miles an hour in one direction (the velocity of our galaxy) and also around 500,000 miles an hour due to its rotation speed to make up for, plus the velocity of the local star and the orbiting speed of the planet and its rotation.
To land their ship intact they had to match all those velocities until their relative velocity was zero!!!
This makes landing a jet plane (brick) on an aircraft carrier (postage stamp) a piece of cake, by comparison.
I’m sorry.
As HardWearJunkie has said several times, This is ONLY a webcomic.
Even though the facts are true about those speeds involved, it really interferes with the enjoyment of reading this story to actually expect it to be completely based in our physical Universe.
Its Tara’s Universe, and she can do whatever she wants with it !
Here’s my take on it:
The ship has a gravity cancellation field around it. This is either a result or a requirement of the on-board gravity. With this working, a ship won’t accelerate due to gravity. Thus, it could “fall” (i.e. fly closer to the planet surface) very slowly if it wanted. Of course, if the gravity field fails at any point in the descent then all bets are off (hello brick).
However, there is still the problem of the ship’s and planet’s vectors (speed and direction). I’m assuming the ship can travel at high sub-light speeds to go between planets within a solar system in a reasonable time. I have to assume that the ship can normally change it’s vector relatively quickly if it needed to (maneuverability is a requirement amongst military vessels). Lifeboats, OTOH, would have very limited maneuverability.
So, the Hiawatha suddenly appears not too far from the planet with not matching vectors. The difference is enough that abandoning ship would get them killed (the lifeboats wouldn’t be able to get away from the planet’s path). The ship’s sub-light engines are not at full capacity (and could go at any minute), but the captain hopes to be able to match vectors before the planet runs into them. For the most part, the captain succeeds. It’s possible the anti-gravity failed just before landing (that’s why the captain didn’t order everybody to lifeboats once the vectors were closely matched).
I love it when you guys figure out the science stuff for me!
I’ll also point out that the Contact Team had what must have been a very similar discussion back when they first saw the Hiawatha. And Carl was “out” for major portions of the event.