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It’s a solar sail ship. I think it’s particularly appropriate for people who are focused on moving outward rather than looking inward, that their ships can most easily be pushed further from the sun, and moving back inwards takes time and skill.
↓ Transcript
Splash page of the inky blackness of space. Stars shine brightly over the surface of a dark, muddy sphere of the dwarf planet. A small solar sail ship unfurls its sails to catch the distant light of a sun that can only be identified as the brightest star in a uniform starscape. Narrator: "With a ship, I was truly free to go where I pleased."
I know absolutely nothing about solar sails, although it sounds like they might operate on some vaguely similar basis as normal wind-y sails? But in any event, it looks really, really cool!
My favorite parts of this comic are the thought and characterizations/characters and their motivations and relationships and complexities, and how they respond to the situations they and their world are in – and how the situation their world is in parallels some situations in our world and helps us think about possible responses and solutions – *but* the art and the thought that has gone into the worldbuilding, costuming, everything, is also amazing.
Thanks!!
Solar sails are a theoretical way of moving a ship around that is, very much, similar to how regular sails work. The solar wind is the constant output of high-energy photons from the sun, which should be enough to push on a big enough sail on a small enough ship. It’s also been suggested that you could push a solar sail with planet-based lasers, but then you have to somehow power the lasers without taking advantage of all that free solar power. My favourite thing about solar sails though is that they look cool.
The limitation of solar sails on space ships compared to air sails on water ships is that you don’t have the water to push against. So while you can go sideways, going towards your radiation source is nearly impossible. (What you can do is to slow down your orbital speed, and then gravity takes over and pulls you in.)
Ah. Hmm. That’s going to be a problem for what I wrote for the next few pages.