Freefall 3: Death Ray Byproducts

[Willie the Duck]

You really know nothing about life on a sailing ship, do y'all?

It seems a pretty big stretch to make that assumption based on what has been said in this thread. I fully stated that the still was hyperbolic extrapolation and that the likely age-of-sail equivalent would be a stored stash, and HorizonWalker was speaking about the more general process of alcohol creation not needing heat.

There is no space not crammed full of gear or supplies before you leave port, there are no vegetables or fruits unless you are in port (in which case you just buy booze from a bumboat) and the only bread is hardtack. And the only water is in casks and closely monitored as it is literally your lifeblood once you're out of sight of land. You do not have the makings for fermentation-based products. And without heat it will take months for the product to be made, which is plenty of time for the daily inspections to find your still. And once it is found, well, at best you get a hundred lashes for sabotaging the ship. If the captain wants to make a point, you get hung without trial and your back pay forfeited to the ship's purser for his general profits).

This is literally the point of discussion. Understanding human behavior and nipping it in the bud before it becomes a problem. That is the why of the rum ration-- so that people don't do anything stupid and that insubordinate actions don't happen in the first place (for example, people didn't have stills in their age-of-sail vessels. You do realize that that is what we were arguing, not the opposite, right?). Risk of serious consequence does not stop people from doing reckless things and that is literally the point people were discussing (with alcohol, and later alcohol pre-engine rooms, being at most tangential side points).

[Razade]

You really know nothing about life on a sailing ship, do y'all? There is no space not crammed full of gear or supplies before you leave port, there are no vegetables or fruits unless you are in port (in which case you just buy booze from a bumboat) and the only bread is hardtack. And the only water is in casks and closely monitored as it is literally your lifeblood once you're out of sight of land. You do not have the makings for fermentation-based products. And without heat it will take months for the product to be made, which is plenty of time for the daily inspections to find your still. And once it is found, well, at best you get a hundred lashes for sabotaging the ship. If the captain wants to make a point, you get hung without trial and your back pay forfeited to the ship's purser for his general profits).

What are you talking about? For someone who is so casually dismissive about people "knowing nothing about life on a sailing ship" you...don't seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to brewing. You don't need a still to make alcohol. You just need yeast (something you're going to have. It's everywhere and you don't need to collect it, it'll collect itself), water (yeah this'll be the hard part) sugars and some kind of carb. Sure. You'd probably want barley or malt, to make it taste good, but your hardtack is going to do you well enough if you crush it up and throw it in the mix. The yeast will love that. It also won't take "months" as you say. Beer takes around two weeks to brew. Shorter if you're not picky on how it tastes. We'll get to that in a second.

Then you just need a jug or some other receptacle in that you can keep as airtight as possible and then you've got the makings of really really crappy booze. But it'll get you drunk. Especially if you throw in all the preserved fruits you can muster (which naval sailing ships absolutely kept). That'll give the yeast more to eat and thus produce more alcohol. It'll still taste like utter death but again. The goal is to get drunk, not taste something good.

If you can make booze in prison (and you can) then you absolutely can make it on a sailing ship. Not only did they do it, they kept rum rations on ships as mentioned because the water would go south quickly and they'd have to use the booze to make it both flavorful and kill the bacteria in the water. Grog was a thing. You're also just totally off base on what sorts of food were kept at sea. You know that ships kept provision logs and we have access to a good number of them? They had all sorts of preserved fruits, cheeses, oatmeal, rye and course flour in their larders.

Not only that. Ships had the ability to brew beer at sea. Here's an excerpt from "A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World Performed in His Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and Adventure"

"It hath been a constant observation, that in long cruizes or distant voyages, the scurvy is never seen whilst the small-beer holds out, at a full allowance; but that when it is all expended, that ailment soon appears. It were therefore to be wished, that this most wholesome beverage could be renewed at sea; but our ships afford not sufficient convenience. The Russians however make a shift to prepare on board, as well as at land, a liquor of a middle quality between wort and small-beer, in the following manner. They take ground-malt and rye-meal in a certain proportion, which they knead into small loaves, and bake in the oven. These they occasionally infuse in a proper quantity of warm water, which begins so soon to ferment, that in the space of twenty-four hours their brewage is completed, in the production of a small, brisk, and acidulous liquor, they call quas, palatable to themselves, and not disagreeable to the taste of strangers"

The author, a one James Cox, mentions that while their ship did not have the provisions to brew beer the Russian ships did. They did it in the same way I suggested they might have without actually having checked for sources of actual historical precedent too. Or near enough. So ya know. A+. I'd be a good Ship's Brewer. Not just because I know the recipe but because I've made beer before.


I'm curious what your credentials are Mr. Demonblud, if that is your real name, on living on a sailing ship. I've brewed beer. Without a still. In an AC controlled apartment. I'd link you to like, a hundred youtube videos demonstrating this point as well but I feel I've already done enough to blow your ship out of the water.

tl;dr - They made beer on sailing ships. Without getting in trouble because they realized how super important it was to the lives of every single crewmember on board. There is historical evidence to this fact.

[Fyraltari]

Is Niomi falling in panel 2?

[Willie the Duck]

What are you talking about? <Snip>.

Razade, thanks for doing what I keep asking people to do when they want to showcase supposed knowledge on forum like these: actually provide it (and/or providing links or bibliographic reference to said material, such that we can independently verify). Given that Rogar didn't bother carefully reading what people had said (such that he excoriated HorizonWalker and myself for holding the exact opposite positions as we had actually stated), I think it safe to say that this was deliberate drivel.

Is Niomi falling in panel 2?

Falling, drifting, controlled careening, there are probably lots of ways to frame it. It does look like she is using her feet and the floor to guide her movement. Regardless, she is moving to the back of the ship, which is on much less than 1 gee of acceleration -- too low for "proper" coffee brewing (which I assume is drip- or perk-). Sam, already at the 'bottom' of the corridor, is using the acceleration to keep him affixed to his seat, and thus is oriented to treat the direction in which the ship is travelling as 'up.' All of this highlights the unusual-for-sci-fi situation where a ship that looks like it was built for artificial gravity is used in a more realistic setting.

[Fyraltari]

Right, I forgot it was less than 1g.

[Razade]

Razade, thanks for doing what I keep asking people to do when they want to showcase supposed knowledge on forum like these: actually provide it (and/or providing links or bibliographic reference to said material, such that we can independently verify). Given that Rogar didn't bother carefully reading what people had said (such that he excoriated HorizonWalker and myself for holding the exact opposite positions as we had actually stated), I think it safe to say that this was deliberate drivel.

I'm still waiting for Mr. Blud to respond. I'd like to know his credentials since they seem suspect in the first place. Claiming there was no fruit or similar (the only bread being hard tack which...it wasn't for instance) makes me think he's never been on a sailing ship. Or at least he's never read a provison's log for a ship in the time that long-distance travel was a thing.

[HorizonWalker]

Mark Stanley: I need to pick up the pace, and tell my stories a lot shorter.

Also Mark Stanley: Let's spend a month learning the very basics of ionizing radiation and the damage it can do, for no reason other than demonstrating and satisfying Sam's curiosity.

[geoduck]

Mark Stanley: I need to pick up the pace, and tell my stories a lot shorter.

Also Mark Stanley: Let's spend a month learning the very basics of ionizing radiation and the damage it can do, for no reason other than demonstrating and satisfying Sam's curiosity.

Eh, the "you'll be fine as long as you stay inside the ship" comment pretty much guarantees he'll have to go outside the ship at some point.

[HorizonWalker]

Eh, the "you'll be fine as long as you stay inside the ship" comment pretty much guarantees he'll have to go outside the ship at some point.

It would, if Mark Stanley were an adept storyteller. He is not. I fully believe that he's just spent a month or so talking about radiation hazards solely because he wanted to talk about radiation for a month, and thought it'd be a fun diversion on the trip.

[Cazero]

You don't get it. The comic is a lure. We've all been tricked into learning something.

[Radar]

In a way, you can tell what kind of educational or vocational background writers have, since they very often build on that or very much indulge in their passion. For example, it would be no surprise to anyone that Tolkien was a linguist. Umberto Eco poured his whole academic background into The Name of The Rose (one of the most amazing things about it was the author's detailed comment on why the whole plot needed to take place exactly there and then due to historical reasons, how he needed to design the library to make the fire possible etc.).

Mark Stanley is a nuclear engineer (as far as I recall). For better or for worse he likes to delve into details about physics, machines and all things related. At the very least I can say he introduces all those pieces of information in a way that works with the characters. The question about radiation would be very much something Sam would ask given the situation and we got actual interaction between him and Florence instead of a dry infodump. Microgravity movement lessons were really fun actually and it is also nice to see that Sam got the hang of it as can be seen in recent strips.

It might be boring for some people, but done right knowledge sharing can be really fun.

[Rockphed]

Add "asking a human to recreate a smell is like asking a blind man to forge a rembrandt" to the awesome quotes from Free Fall list.

Maybe we should actually compile said list.

[gbs5009]

Wow, for a member of a race of scavengers with an cultural disregard for property rights, Sam's a heavy sleeper.

Maybe they can wake him up by trying to lift his wallet.

[Rockphed]

Wow, for a member of a race of scavengers with an cultural disregard for property rights, Sam's a heavy sleeper.

Maybe they can wake him up by trying to lift his wallet.

They have songs to sing while looting. I am impressed at how well they sleep.

[Cazero]

Apparently, their hearing is very selective while asleep.

[gbs5009]

Apparently, their hearing is very selective while asleep.

Yep. Looks like I was on the right track, but Florence was a little nicer in her execution.

[Fyraltari]

I am a bit confused by the reasonning here.

If Niomi starts talking at t=0, stops at t=30 and starts again at t=60, her speech will reach her interlocutor at t=15 to t=45 who will then start to talk between t=45 to t=75 but that speech will reach Niomi at t=60 just as she is starting to talk again.

How is that convienent? Am I missing something?

[Rogar Demonblud]

She's setting it up so you wait for a moment to make sure the person on the other end has finished what they're saying. The lag is a separate issue.

[Fyraltari]

wouldn’t it just be more conviennent to say ‘over’ when you’re done so that the other knows they can speak and everybody just waits for the other to be done?

[Rogar Demonblud]

It would, if "over" wasn't a ridiculously common word.

But you would get lines like:

"What's the vector, Victor?"
"Roger, Roger."
"Oveur, over."

Personally, I'd probably use something like End of Line, but then I grew up at a time where Tron was one of the best sci-fi movies available.

[Fyraltari]

It would, if "over" wasn't a ridiculously common word.

But you would get lines like:

"What's the vector, Victor?"
"Roger, Roger."
"Oveur, over."

Personally, I'd probably use something like End of Line, but then I grew up at a time where Tron was one of the best sci-fi movies available.

In French it’s ‘à vous/toi’ meaning ‘your turn’ or sometimes ‘over’ which isn’t a common word in French since, you know, it’s an English word.

[DavidSh]

I am a bit confused by the reasonning here.

If Niomi starts talking at t=0, stops at t=30 and starts again at t=60, her speech will reach her interlocutor at t=15 to t=45 who will then start to talk between t=45 to t=75 but that speech will reach Niomi at t=60 just as she is starting to talk again.

How is that convienent? Am I missing something?

Indeed, what you predicted is what actually happened. I think Niomi just made an error. The rule for complete utilization of the channel is for each party to talk for the one-way time (15s), and then listen for the same amount of time. The results may take some getting used to, because what you hear when you listen came from someone who hasn't yet heard what you just said.

Or the cartoonist made an error, and is unsuccessfully trying to present the case where the child starts responding as soon as the child hears the parent speak.

[Rockphed]

I am always amused by the ways that Florence goes out of her way to enforce her position in civilization. The chopsticks are one. Not drinking in front of other people is another.

[TaRix]

Heh. My workplace is like Niomi's "old employers", as well as our third-party technicians, and probably management.

[Rogar Demonblud]

I haven't even heard of a company or institution that does things the way Florence does. Surely she is a superior being and the sooner we put her in charge, the better.

[Cazero]

Wait. There are people who buy redundancy in their systems, and then just wait for every redundant part to also break before starting repairs? That's not just laziness, that's throwing money away.

[Rockphed]

Wait. There are people who buy redundancy in their systems, and then just wait for every redundant part to also break before starting repairs? That's not just laziness, that's throwing money away.

Electronics sometimes work that way. You might have 5 or 6 extra input ports and just swap inputs around if something breaks. If enough break to drop the system below acceptable performance you replace a much bigger section all at once. This is not really the same as what Florence and Niomi are doing. I'm not even sure what a packing leak is.

[Rogar Demonblud]

"Packing" is what you put around a system with fluid to absorb any small, occasional leaks (say, from a joint flexing slightly under a pressure change), usually things like steam lines. This was one of the original uses for Asbestos, BTW. If you have a leak big enough to make it through the packing, well, it's messy to fix, but you have to because it generally signals bigger problems, starting with a serious loss in efficiency.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Wait. There are people who buy redundancy in their systems, and then just wait for every redundant part to also break before starting repairs? That's not just laziness, that's throwing money away.

Depends on how you're looking at it, what the goals for that redundancy were. If your goal is to be able to continue working unimpeded when something breaks, thus saving money, then yeah, waiting for everything to break is a terrible plan. If your goal is to save money on repairs, though, it makes more sense to wait for the back-ups to break, too, so they can be repaired at the same time - theoretically doubling how long you went without a break for a relatively minor increase in repair costs. Which one's a better idea depends on a lot of things, including how disruptive getting repairs done is, how expensive the parts are relative to the cost of labor for repair, and how bad it would be if whatever it is stops working for a time.

On a spaceship, dealing with a critical system that can be easily and non-disruptively repaired, Florence's approach is absolutely the right one, though.

[Rockphed]

On a spaceship, dealing with a critical system that can be easily and non-disruptively repaired, Florence's approach is absolutely the right one, though.

Not least because their major enemy on this trip is boredom.