Strip 208 -- First Seen: 2009-07-01
Escape From Terra is updated with new pages every Monday through Friday.

Launch Alert!

Ready for launch! The Kickstarter campaign to print the next volume of Quantum Vibe: Novo Palermo - Part 1 will take flight in just a couple of weeks on Oct 19th, 2026.

Your reward for backing our campaign starts with a personalized signed copy of the perfect bound printed collection of the online strip. You may also choose the ebook edition, a PDF downloadable from DriveThruComics.

And back by popular demand, coasters, magnets and stickers. Click on the art on the left, to go to our pre-launch page where you can check on updates and sign up for notifications on our campaign.

QV on a short break

QUANTUM VIVE is taking a break for a few weeks, as we prepare for Part 2 of the Novo Palermo story, and also for a Kickstarter campaign for Part 1, which will start in September.

In the meantime, Not-Safe.Space will continue, as a murder mystery begins and the relationship between Eithne and Diana develops in unexpected directions.

Not-Safe.Space is a NSFW strip but more than half the pages are SFW so I've set those to *not* require a Patreon membership. Readers should be able to follow the story without seeing the NSFW pages. If I've done this right.

The Transcript For This Page

Panel 1
Large panel. We see the exterior of the elevator car after it has emerged from the underside of the moon. It is attached to a black ribbon a half centemeter thick and one meter wide, which extends from the moon all the way (about 40 km) down to the surface of the main asteroid (The Little Prince). We're looking at the elevator from a high angle so we see it against a panoramic vista of TLP's surface, which consists of low, rolling hills, colored various mixes of green and brown (it's grasses and short vegetation but we can't resolve that from this altitude). A few fluffy-white clouds are visible at around the 3-5 km level. Here and there are a few very small lakes. We don't see the bottom terminus of the nanotube ribbon in this shot.
Along the side of the car that attaches to the ribbon, there is a mechanism which changes the car's angle relative to the ribbon, which is necessary because as the car descends it is decelerating against its angular momentum, so the bottom points lines up with the orbital vector just below the station, and gradually swings down to point straight at the ground when nearly at bottom.
The elevator itself is box-like but has rounded walls bowed outward. The ceiling and walls are transparent, with the ribbon and the crawling mechanism running along the left side of the car (the side away from us). So we can see Drenkowski and the brothers in the car. There are waist-high hand-rails in the car, and the brothers are clutching them.
TLP is a near-perfect sphere, like Ceres, but much smaller. Ground detail should be about as you would see on Earth from about 35,000 feet (airline cruising altitude) but the curvature of the “ground” should be very strongly pronounced, more as the Earth might look like from about 10,000 miles up.

No dialog.

Panel 2
Looking through the glass wall inside the car, we can see the brothers grasping the hand-rail in the foreground, looking over their shoulders with some embarrassment at Drenkowski standing behind (between) them. He has one hand on his hand-rail and is looking bemused.
Drenkowski: Nothing to be ashamed of.

Drenkowski: Everybody has a strong reaction their first time.

Panel 3
Exterior view of the car again, we still see the car from above as it continues its decent.

Drenkowski (from inside car): I hate to admit it, but I threw up.