i sure hope they have some really good car insurance.
Posts tagged science
ask your mother
wait, sedna has a mother?!
that’s right, apparently sedna actually had a mum back in classic sedna. i’d been meaning to reimagine and redesign her a bit before reintroducing her to the comic, but ended up taking so long most new readers probably just assumed sedna’s dad was a single parent by now. well, here she finally is, looking a tiiiny bit different from before. hope you guys enjoy the next batch of mum comics because they were a blast to write.
(also now i’m wondering if sedna having two loving parents automatically disqualifies her from ever getting a disney tv/movie adaptation.)
sugar rocket
yes, you can make a rocket with nothing more than table sugar and fertiliser. makes sense if you think about it. sugar has a lot of energy, and potassium nitrate has oxygen, which are the main two ingredients you need for a big boom.
if you want to try this at home, maybe consider looking up some more detailed instructions online. don’t get your pyrotechnical advice from a comic strip, kids.
the rocket equation
the rocket equation is the reason we don’t live in the star trek universe. because a rocket has to carry all its fuel, it grows exponentially the further you want it to go.
rocket that goes up a few hundred metres? size of a water bottle.
rocket that goes into orbit? size of a dinosaur.
rocket that goes to the moon and back? size of skyscraper.
if we lived on a smaller planet with weaker gravity (like mars), space travel would be relatively easy. if we lived on a larger planet with stronger gravity (like saturn), space travel would be impossible. instead we live on earth, where space travel is only just possible, but incredibly difficult.
orbit
despite what some hollywood movies where rockets fly up and miraculously start floating around tell you, almost all spaceships and satellites that stay in space are in an orbit. if you’re not orbiting a planet/moon/star you’re probably either flying away from it, or about to crash into it.
another way to think of this is spaceships don’t experience “zero gravity”, but “zero g-force”. right now you are experiencing 1g of g-force, because gravity is pushing you into the ground. if you jumped into the air you would feel 0g of g-force… until you hit the ground.
a spaceship in orbit never hits the ground, so it constantly experiences 0g. essentially it is falling… forever.
rocket fuel
essentially, most rockets use liquid fuel, while most boosters strapped on the side of the rocket use solid fuel (like on the space shuttle). boosters are a cheap way of adding more “boom” to your rocket, but they’re so inefficient you probably don’t want to carry them all the way to space.
there’s also hybrid fuel (solid fuel + liquid oxygen) which i didn’t mention because not a lot of rockets use it, and 4 panels isn’t a lot of real estate. it’s sort of a compromise between the two, and its what virgin galactic use for the spaceshiptwo.
of course “liquid fuel” can mean any one of a whole bunch of very different chemicals (hydrogen, methane, kerosene, etc) but that’s a comic for another day.
rocket science
rocket science is easy. rocket engineering is hard.
sedna & dini’s space agency
yay! rocket comics are back!
so for the next bunch of comics i’m going to attempt to explain rocket science in 4-panel-comic form. which should be a piece of cake, i mean it’s hardly brain surgery, right?
helium-3
helium-3 is theoretically useful for nuclear fusion (instead of fission), a technology which still isn’t yet viable, and even if it becomes so, it might just be cheaper and easier to build a bunch of solar panels and batteries on earth than set up a mining operation on the moon. still, it makes for a neat science fiction concept, which is something i guess.
and yes, technically i just made a sequel to the comic “helium” called “helium-3”. hire me, microsoft.
helium
i hope people don’t expect me to do a comic about every element of the periodic table. chemistry jokes are hard.