Grrl Power #1419 – Inquisitor vocare
Sydney just has an inquisitive nature, is all. And she often thinks of obvious questions that no one has bothered asking, because they’re obvious, but sometimes thinks of advanced questions that no one has yet considered, but when she does that, it’s even odds that she’s skipping over intermediary understanding.
Sydney’s rough estimate of the station being “10 miles” from the “surface” of the star stem from her never having been 100,000 kilometers away from an object 12 million kilometers in diameter. The star “looked big” to her. Honestly, the scale of things in space would probably be very difficult to estimate to the untrained eyes. Heck, being in an environment without atmospheric haze would mess people up, and would also make for razor sharp shadows and the surface of that huge moon you’re standing on look like a bad special effect.
I’ve tried to picture what standing at the base of Olympus Mons would look like. Unlike most mountains on Earth, OM isn’t surrounded by other mountains. There’s no real “base” to Everest, just other mountain peaks smashed up against it. But OM more or less pops out of an endless plain, so you could stand at the base and look up to the top, which is ~3x as high as Everest. The other trick to visualizing it is to remember that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, and no moisture, so there wouldn’t be any obscuring clouds, and atmospheric has would be vastly reduced. The other other trick, though, is to remember that OM has roughly the same footprint as Texas. You can’t stand at one end of Texas and see the middle, even assuming no atmospheric perspective, because the Earth curves away from you. The slope of OM does exceed the curvature of Mars’s surface, so while I think you could see the peak while standing at the base, I don’t think it would look as high as you might guess? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure no one has ever taken a photograph from the base, and I also don’t think anyone has made an accurate 3D model of what it might look like.
Imagine a planet the size of Jupiter, only it’s a rocky world that a human could stand on without being crushed somehow. I don’t know, maybe it’s hollow. The Red Spot on Jupiter is larger than the Earth. If humanity had evolved on a planet like that, it’s conceivable that civilization wouldn’t have migrated, what, 4 or 5 times past that Red Spot size up until we invented airplanes, and that’s assuming somewhat favorable environments to explore, and that the Red Spot “Eden Zone” we evolved in wasn’t surrounded by 10,000 miles of desert on every side. It’s a scale that’s honestly really difficult to imagine. I think most people don’t even appreciate how large the Earth is.
Anyway, things in space are big and usually far away until you hop in a ship and then they’re not far away, and then people would be like, “I can’t tell how big that is. It could be a moon, it could be a space station. I need some sensor readings or at least one banana for scale.”
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Sydney should have asked how far away does a vampire need to be from a sun before it doesn’t count as sunlight anymore. Because space is absolutely saturated in light from stars, it’s how we see stars at night, but vampires can go outside at night obviously, so at some point it doesn’t count as sunlight anymore, and a space vampire is in a position to know how far that is.
My guess is that if the vampire is in the same solar system as the star then it is considered sunlight. Light from stars that are outside of the solar system are probably too far away and thus not a problem. (Yes I know this is a vague distance, but there is a distance which is considered inside a solar system) If you are between solar systems there would be no sunlight. The real question is what happens to werewolves on planets that have multiple moons…
maybe they get a super saiyan style power up?
This Hologram is a really good look for Sydney. Especially frame two very cool.
I do often wonder how vampires would deal with space. It depends a lot on whether the sunlight thing is based on a specific wavelength of radiation, in which case they’d probably be gone as soon as they were anywhere unshielded in space (while baseline biologicals would merely get severe radiation poisoning I think?), whereas if the sunlight thing is more “mythical”/symbolic in nature, then it’s unclear whether the light of any other star would bother them at all, or for that matter whether it’s sunlight or just the occurrence of dawn itself, which obviously can’t happen if they aren’t planetside.
As most of you probably know in the year of our lords 2025, the idea of vampires being killed or harmed by sunlight/dawn was introduced in the 1922 film Nosferatu. Just like the idea of werewolves involuntarily transforming under a full moon was introduced in the 1943 film Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.
I think it’s a fun trope to mess around with and come up with your own, setting specific variation of (for any value of “you”).
My space vampires are actually parasitic wormlike creatures (kinda like the Gondii from DCC).
I also really like Garth Nix’ take on space vampires from his short “Infestation”
https://escapepod.org/2009/10/29/ep222-infestation/
Oh and I also love Rob Schrab’s take on werewolf lore from SCUD: Disposable Assassin, in which a werewolf astronaut lands on the moon *and becomes a sentient black hole that eats Venus*.
I suspect that Felix Baumgartner may be one of a very few individuals capable of actually discussing this topic with any degree of authority… he actually got to *see* it happen.
(If you have no idea what I’m talking about… google “Red Bull Stratos”)