Sorry this is so late, I hurt my elbow (it's better now) so I had to pause reader question work and grinding out pages for the next chapter. I am well on track to be finished with chapter 9 before the haitus ends, though, so that's good.
From a Terran perspective, all housing in Jovia is high density housing. It's not uncommon for smaller apartments to only have a toilet, living room, and bedrooms; with a shared kitchen space and washrooms (mist showers, laundry, more toilets). Absolute lowest end of the property tax and highest end of the density spectrum are dormitories, which have shared bedrooms with lockers. The apartment Gillie and Idrisah currently live in is HUGE and fancy by their standards; the only thing making it not a "house" in Jovian terminology is the entrance opening to a shared hallway. Gillie's dads are fairly wealthy and have a smaller end "lot house," with "lot" referring to the private outdoor balcony space. The bigger the lot, the higher the property taxes (functionally a kind of rent, paid to the Social Housing Board). Arguably Talita's currently living in a lot house, but that feels like too nice of a thing to call a converted storage shed... the toilet's a separate building, so does that technically make it a dormitory?... but it's a private washroom... she just calls it an apartment.
If you stalk the lore closely, yes, I renamed the cylinder that Idrisah and Gillie grew up in.
Transcript
Angoryt asked: Idrisah and Gillie, if you two are going to move back to Nexus Jovia, have you already managed to get an apartment? Or will you be living with your relatives until you can get a place?
Idrisah: We submitted our SHB app as soon as we knew we were gonna quit. But our current placement is in an apartment block in the Solidarity cylinder… opposite to the Opportunity cylinder our parents and most of our friends live in…
Gillie: Average waitlists for most of the housing in Opportunity is two years, haha.
Idrisah: It’s not actually that long of a trip on the Spokes, but I would prefer to be closer.
Nexus Jovia
- Opportunity District
- Solidarity District
- The Spokes (microgravity train system)
Gillie: Better than staying with my dads. They've got a big house but they like, never leave it. I can’t deal with their neurotic hovering these days.
Idrisah: My parents are alright, but we have way too much stuff to fit it all in their tiny apartment. So we’d have to rent storage space or recycle a lot of nice things.
Image: Apartment layout with two bedrooms, and living room, and a toilet. Shared kitchen and washrooms are down the hall.
Gillie: Storage space is sooo expensive. I've heard of people using their allotted housing as storage while living somewhere else… but if the Social Housing Board catches you doing that, they will penalize you BIG TIME.
61 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 41”
Starling
I want to recommend a potential little UI addition to this webcomic (with mind that there may be simply no time!)
I’m often finding myself wanting to quickly tab only a few pages away, and would love a page navigation menu at the TOP of the comic… or else one that stays fixed in a frame somewhere on the page perhaps (like the home, archive, about, etc). Often find myself having to scroll up, down, up down, while retreading things or comparing some pages!
Another small thing I love is when webcomics have a feature like the ability to skip +5 pages before or after the present page! An example of this is the ‘nofna’ webcomic series. Those stories are longer and without chapters, but I still find myself wishing I could navigate RTTS the same way. I find I reread RTTS in pieces less as a result.
Understand if none of this is in the wishes for the site’s design! Merely thoughts.
Lezzlebit
Agreed that navigation buttons at the top would be awesome
Smooti
How long is the trip with the trains? I’d pictured them as a few minutes round trip in the First Contact comic but I realize I must be very off given the scale of each cylinder.
Or could just be a cultural difference, like how traveling two hours or more to visit family is very common in the States but unheard of in the UK.
Lezzlebit
I think the tram in First Contact and the microgravity spokes trains are different things – I’m pretty sure (correct me if I’m wrong) the tram is just your average city train that goes around the circumference of one cylinder district, and the Spokes transport you to different cylinders. But yeah I wonder how long trips in the spokes are (also I’m super curious what a microgravity train looks like)
1d4-nadg
Each cylinder is a few kilometers wide, so I can’t imagine this would be more than a 20-30km trip. It’s probably like a regional train but in microgravity!
k-bonx
always so delighted when we get to know more about Gillie and Idrisah! <3
(also just letting you know that the 'New' button for navigation seems to be taking me to the next page instead of the latest page!)
Curona
If Nexus Jovia’s gravity is simulated by centrifugal force, is it weaker, stronger, or the same the higher up in a building you are? I’m far from a physicist, but the tops of tall buildings are technically circling the center of the cylinder shaft at a slower rate than the “ground”, so does that make a difference?
Teod
Higher up is lower g, that’s correct. The central shaft is effectively zero g. But with a large enough cyllinder the difference between nearby floors might not be too big. And those outer cyllinders are, like, kilometers wide, if I recall correctly.
JoB
“Higher up is lower g” actually holds for planet surfaces, too (though moving between poles and equator will likely have a much larger effect). :-3
It is said in AMA 3 that a lap around Idrisah’s home cylinder’s circumference is 19 km, so its diameter is a little more than 6 km.
With floors typically being like 3-3.5 m apart in modern buildings, the apparent gravity can easily differ more between your own head+feet than between your head and the feet of someone on the floor above you …
edenmachine5457
.i think the post date is incorrect? it was SCHEDULED for 1/20 but it was posted later, no?
Mango The Captain
Jay hurt their elbow, so the page had to be delayed
edenmachine5457
.i know the page was delayed, but the post date on this page is different from the delayed point at which it was actually posted. it was scheduled to be posted on 1/20, was posted later, but the post date still says 1/20
JoB
First off, Get (Even) Better Soon!
Storage space on a space station is definitely expensive if it needs to have gravity and/or atmosphere and/or radiation shielding. If not, all you need is a container anchored someplace out of the spaceship lanes and not blocking sunlight to the solar panels – the expensive part would then be to bring it with you in the first place. I wonder, do we have any experience how well paper(?) files, chinaware, wooden(?) furniture etc. etc. would fare over a couple years of hard vacuum … ? (Multipart metal objects would likely be prone to vacuum welding, of course.)
Enai
I don’t think the furniture is real wood. I don’t renember where, but in one of the Q&As Talita says something along the lines of “If you want to flaunt your wealth, just wear real hardwood jewelry (instead of doing whatever the question was about)”. That makes me believe real wood furniture (which is often hardwood) would be to them like having furniture made of solid silver or gold to us, apart from the weight of course.
That said, yeah, I hope Jay’s elbow won’t act up again. I know of too many artists whose careers got derailed by some type of RSI. Fingers crossed!
JoB
That was in <a href="https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-reader-questions-2/"<RQ 2, actually. Yes, I do realize that anything made of real wood will usually¹ cost a pretty penny to have in space – but then again, so would most other materials we use today (like porcelain), too. And there’s got to be some reason for the Touati-Sharpes to haul their belongings along, first to, now back from Dirtball …
¹ [side-eyes edge of habitat’s “park land” marked on pp. 32-33]
JoB
(Sorry about that, my shift key seems to be acting up …)
Enai
Ooh, you mean Dirtball may have a (probably hobbyist, lbr, there just isn’t enough space for a honest-to-god wood industry) carpenter? Or several?
…
hmm, maybe? They sure do have the requisite tools, like saws and lathes and such. Would be an exciting bonus of working there: if you befriend or trade with the right person, you, too can enjoy luxuries wildly out of what was your price range at home! An actual wood chair!
…
and then you notice that functionally, it is still just a chair. Probably somewhat worse than a mass produced one, if our carpenter is self taught 😅 and not good at ergonomics (my father made furniture. Out of 5 cm thick particle board. Why, dad? Why?? That thing can carry a car. It is still just a bench for humans that weigh decidedly less than a ton.)
JoB
> Ooh, you mean Dirtball may have a (probably hobbyist, lbr, there just isn’t
> enough space for a honest-to-god wood industry) carpenter? Or several?
… nnnoooo, I don’t think that the Dirtball admins would be willing to put up with full-sized park trees vanishing at a higher rate than one every decade or so, which wouldn’t suffice for even a single “carpenter” to reach any level other than “amateur” IMHO. :-3 The existence of that park just goes to prove that it’s not all-out prohibitive to have real wood available (grown) in outer space. You’d still have to scale it up to get anything that merits terms like “industry”.
> (my father made furniture. Out of 5 cm thick particle board. Why, dad?
> Why?? That thing can carry a car. It is still just a bench for humans that
> weigh decidedly less than a ton.)
So? Do you have an idea what weight those pallets are rated for? :-3 The micro-PC hardware we made into appliances came with IIRC 200+ boxed and stacked onto each, and even our el-cheapo pallet truck had but a lopsided grin for that … the manufacturer refrained from stacking them higher than that only because they would’ve become too likely to tip over …
Enai
Those pallets still have thinner planks on top than what my father used for the seat for the bench. In other words: that bench comfortably beats a pallet for weight rating. It also weighs more, I just bet, and doesn’t give you splinters. He did know how to use a wood planer and a sander, even though his favorite materials for furniture building were this and 2-by-4’s. My childhood bed has those in lieu of the slats usually used to put a mattress on. Not very soft, but sturdy… And decidedly not what anyone would use for furniture that knew anything about carpentry.
Scyphi
NASA actually has done several tests exposing various samples of materials to hard vacuum for set periods of time and seeing how they fared afterwards. Look up the Long Duration Exposure Facility and the Materials International Space Station Experiment to see what I mean.
NASA typically focuses on materials they fully EXPECT would receive regular hard vacuum exposure during use, i.e. many things that’d go into spaceship/space station building, so I don’t know if they’ve tested some of the things you’re asking about SPECIFICALLY, but I’m sure they’ve learned enough to make a good educated guess of what to expect.
My own gut instinct would suggest they probably wouldn’t fare all that well.
JoB
Thanks for the pointers, but as far as I can tell in a short browsing session, at least the MISSE results have now gone into the not-exactly-public MAPTIS database – the original materialsinspace.nasa.gov website is defunct.
> NASA typically focuses on materials they fully EXPECT would
> receive regular hard vacuum exposure during use, i.e. many
> things that’d go into spaceship/space station building, so I
> don’t know if they’ve tested some of the things you’re asking
> about SPECIFICALLY
Here’s to hope that NASA did foresee LignoSat, then. 😉
(And both porcelain and the Space Shuttle’s heat shield tiles fall under “ceramics”, though that’s certainly a wide field …)
Curona
I see plants depicted in the image of the lot houses and that got me thinking. How is lighting handled in a cylinder shaped habitat? Is that light bright enough to grow plants? And, if the living space is on the inside walls of the tube, where does the light come from? Is there a shaft or beam down the center that provides light?
Also, does Nexus Jovia have bing-bong too, or do they get simulated sunrises and sunsets?
JoB
> does Nexus Jovia have bing-bong too, or do
> they get simulated sunrises and sunsets?
a) about “Bing Bong” the light cycle:
In a large space habitat, there’s not much reason to have a “night” in the first place, as there are positions – anything even remotely related to life support or controlling the incessant space traffic, for starters – that you’d want to stay manned 24/7. (Running an ISS with only a couple people on board, or even Shikaviil with its current staff of 75, with an additional division into shifts would probably result in too-small teams, so.) Nexus Jovia could do with offset night cycles for each cylinder, but I note that the plan of Idrisahs parents’ flat doesn’t show windows, nor would having/adding some in(to) the remaining, possibly-building-facade wall result in good lighting for the flat as a whole.
If they have a cycle, the number of lamps they’d have to use for it should allow for an effectively gradual change even if the individual lamps only allow a bang-bang control, so that likely is a design choice. Simulating the “early/late ‘sun’ is low in the ‘sky’, unlike at noon” would prove rather difficult, though. :-3
b) about “Bing Bong” the term/chime:
The Dirtball habitat has no place further than 500 m from the central clock tower, whereas the Nexus Jovia cylinder Idrisah grew up in has a diameter of 6 km (see AMA 3), plus whatever distance you can get from whatever “central point” in the other dimension. If they have a central signal (instead of just synchronized clocks with individually-set alarms), they’d need to have it distributed to a number of actual noisemaking gadgets. Which makes it trivial to make it sound like Big Space Ben in one place, “early assembly line factories’ style workers-callin’ steam whistle” in another, That Music Piece Your Neighbors Hate™ in a third, or even a muezzin call¹. So, I’m pretty sure that it would neither sound like, nor be called “Bing Bong” there.
¹ Disclaimer: I have no idea what time-of-day muezzin calls are supposed to happen, other than complaints of (one being) “too dang early” from people spending a vacation where they’re actually done at city-spanning volume. I doubt that one’d be properly timed for an actual go-to-bed call, at least.
Teod
I don’t think there’s any point in having an audible signal in Jovia. On Dirtball everyone works for the same company with synchronized schedules, so bing bong makes sense. But Jovia is a city, housing a lot of people working all kinds of jobs at different times.
On the other hand, they probably have a more complicated light system than just an on/off on everything at once. I imagine a bright light source traveling along the central axis over the course of the day to simulate movement of the sun across the sky, and then a dim nightlight going the other way. So you don’t have a bing bong at fixed times, but you can still always get a sense of what time it is just by looking up.
Curona
What I meant by Bing-Bong was if they have central lights are they all shut off at once for the nighttime, or is it a more gradual dimming over time to full dark, like a sunset.
Thisfox
Also, humans are happier and healthier with cycles in their day and night. We are told that’s why seasonal depression happens, when people live too far into the poles of our world, and get considerably less daylight in winter. I’m not saying every space station would have a day and night cycle sorted, but I predict that any run without a cycle will make humans not very functional for very long. Lights on all day and all night is a torture, for us, after all.
The sound of bing bong is cute, and all, but not necessary. The awake/asleep cycle it represents is.
Corbin
Grew up in Alaska! For optimal residential health, Nexus Jovia would HAVE to have regular day/night cycles. Even if it’s not a lack of sunlight, the constant light would still mess with people mentally. Since the flats have windows, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to ‘shut out’ sunlight at bedtime. I think the Alaskan summers of my childhood are a big factor in why my sleep cycle tends to be so messed up. Aside from this instance, in which I’m up at 6 am because my digestive issues decided to digestive issue. That, and in Talita’s Teenage Heartbreak, you can see it’s night!
Cartoon dinosaur
Is nexus jovia particularly crowded? Because humans do not breed unless relatively comfortable. And if most of jovia is so crowded that having a private bathrooms a luxury I cant imagine they maintain there current population.
my thought process was that with there current tech, building larger habitats would be cheaper. like cheap enough people could be living comfortably in space and not … that.
also, how do centaur Space stations look? are there any with a sizable population yet? if not why?
Jay Eaton
Lol, you wanna tell me more about human breeding behaviors?
I think someone’s idea of “comfortable” is tied to the culture they grew up in. People in Jovia are more used to using public utilities and living in smaller spaces than most people living somewhere with functionally infinite cheap air, light, and dirt. The city in its earlier days as a Martian-controlled mining outpost had far worse overcrowding than modern Jovia, and kids were still happening, because there were permanent residents capable of conceiving.
Cartoon dinosaur
well, I have watched a lot of documentary’s abought the current population crisis in japan and south Korea (and the rest of the first world) and my take away from them is in a stressful environment such as excessive work expectations, over crowded and a busy lifestyles mean birth rates fall below replacement levels. (I’m not an expert, that’s just my conclusions) and nexus jovia gives me the impression of that kind of life.
are there any centaur space stations yet?
Chase Wanderstar
That’s more to do with work expectations in those cultures being significantly more than elsewhere in the world, I think. If people don’t have much free time, they mostly don’t form lasting relationships.
People have been raising families in small homes for a very long time. After all, there was a point in prehistory where the only dwellings humans knew how to make were huts made of tree bark, leather, and animal bones, and humanity survived that.
hidinginyoshed
i mean in your comment you just described multiple factors that contribute towards the trend of japan and korea’s population decline, high work expectations, overcrowding busy lives (i would also argue high costs of living and economic woes). we know that nexus jovia has a high population density, but we don’t know if it has all the other factors found in japan and korea. therefore why should we expect that the situation of countries here and now can be applied one to one to a fictional one
Jay Eaton
I don’t think Jovia looks like what you are picturing. It isn’t economically or culturally that similar to modern Japan or South Korea.
In modern liberal capitalist countries, people are often deeply disincentivized from starting families because they cannot afford to take the financial risk (lack of paid parental leave, low pay, high rent) or suffer the loss of independence and career reputational blow (women disproportionately being pressured to quit their career to handle childcare, which gives them a huge gap in their work history and makes it financially difficult to leave their partner if things go sour). If you want people to voluntarily start families, it helps if it doesn’t threaten to bankrupt or entrap them.
In Jovia, getting enough housing space to start a family is an issue, but it’s also the primary issue. Broadly speaking, having kids in Jovia is cheaper and easier than a modern liberal capitalist country because of their UBI, publicly owned and distributed basic amenities, and abundance of third spaces. Historically Jovia has had baby booms every time a new station expansion is built, followed by baby busts as the expansion is filled out. Idrisah was born during the tail end of the seventh expansion’s baby boom, and right now Jovia’s in another population lull.
There are some centaurs in space stations, but no centaur-made space stations.
1d4-nadg
Y’know personally I’d prefer have shared showers and kitchen (with a regular cleaning service) than less space in my cramped appartement. Cooking together is a great way to know your neighboors too!
I think it’s mostly because I grew up with such amenities, so as Jay said, it boils down to culture.
Ave Zancuda
It just came to my mind, as somebody comfortable with living in the same place, in this future somebody could gasp on surprise when asking me if I never thought on traveling to another planet/notorious space station.
Thanks our lovely cast jobs we have an amazing view of what is working “abroad”, or simply not quite home. But for Billions of humans and Sophonts out there they never knew nor quite miss the idea of leaving the immediate place they born into
Vinemaple
In all honesty, I think “sometime during the week” or even “when it gets done” is perfectly fine for AMAs or other filler content during a hiatus. You’re tryin to catch up and/or rest up, after all!
Also in all honesty, I think “same space station, but in the farthest possible location within that station” is juuuust about right for living near parents or family that one’s not actually estranged from.
galmetallic
It is worth noting that said space station is something like 100 km across. Even not taking into account the third dimension, that’s significantly larger than Rhode Island.
Fallingfeather
Makes sense that they have government owned housing in space- capitalism exists, but I imagine you CANNOT let a homelessness issue develop in places with such minimal space. They’d literally have nowhere to go. (Not that it should be a thing here either, but I imagine homelessness happening in a space station is even more unfeasible.)
Vinemaple
It’s also satisfying to hear that the apartments on Dirtball are luxuriously big: that’s probably a recruiting tool, and they have the space. Recently, for a few of my own projects, I’ve been trying to design micro-SRO apartments based on the micro-staterooms aboard a tall ship I once worked on, Japanese capsule hotels (which I see made it into the anime Planetes), the cabinet bed in Wuthering Heights, and those horrible bunk bed/cage things people in Kowloon live in.
mdhughes
There’s an SF story by Dean Ing, “Down & Out on Ellfive Prime”, about just that. Turns out you need a certain amount of slack in your station ecosystem, and people can live in that slack, and they learn useful skills.
Jay Eaton
Jovia is a market socialist economy, they have plenty of societal bogeymen but capital being privately owned isn’t one of them. But yeah, homelessness and thousands of empty rentals are more expensive than housing people right now in real cities, and it’s especially true when every cubic meter of habitable space is being maintained by active life support systems. Rather than having problems with unaffordable empty housing, Jovia struggles more with providing enough available housing and keeping down waitlist times. The wait can get much, much worse than two years.
Lilac
Huh, interesting about the housing (from the author commentary)…. I’m currently in a college dorm room so not too different lol, and its like okayish, but number one things I miss bad right now are privacy (No hate to my roommate they’re cool i just miss Privacy) and warm weather (it is very where i am right now…) so I guess i just hope they’d have super good soundproof walls? I dunno.. I imagine they keep it warm weather in nexus jovia, but maybe they simulate the seasons or something, or there’s like areas designated for cold and areas designated for warm? I don’t know, maybe I’m too Planet Life Brained
Teod
I want to know all cylinder names. I also understand that it’s a totally pointless information that probably doesn’t exist.
Origamigryphon
I dub one “Ingenuity”
Trees
I hear the rent is lowest in the Seasick District, where they accidentally installed the cylinder axis slightly off-centre. It’s also, for some reason, the location of the 24hr duelling-bagpipes and clog-dance battle arena.
Ave Zancuda
I’d like to name another one Gearwheel
Jay Eaton
One of the seventh expansion cylinders is in fact named Ingenuity lol
Lezzlebit
Man, it sucks that they’re struggling with getting comfortable housing in Nexus Jovia that’s close to their friends. It’s too bad they can’t… they can’t… run…. a… away……. it’s too bad they… they can’t……………………. ah, I shan’t say it
Jay Eaton
it couldn’t be………
LeBonk
Always nice to see collectively-owned and -managed housing systems.
I’m really curious how multiple rotating cylinders can all still be connected with a built-in transportation system between them
Varyon
Assuming the individual cylinders rotate, I note the “corners” of the Spoke seem to be at or very near the dead center of each cylinder. Assuming this is just a rough map and they’re all actually dead-center, that makes things pretty easy – the cylinders rotate on an axle of sorts that is connected directly to the corner of the Spoke. So you just have to reach the axle and then you’re in the zero-G Spoke and can travel around as needed.
petra
wondering if gillie’s dad’s living space illustration is similar to the dense vertically built neighbourhoods in chongqing, it gives me the same vibe
Cugz Arui
space housing sounds like a pain and a half. though honestly im surprised the smaller apartments even have a kitchen and that the living room and bedroom are separate. ive known someone on earth who had one continuous room with a bed region and kitchen region (both pretty small). the only other room was a bathroom which tbf did look a decent size
JoB
> honestly im surprised the smaller apartments even have a kitchen
Multi-sophont cohabitation may play a role in that. With the strict biochemistry incompatibility stated for RttS, having kitchens and toilets (the ins and outs of people’s bowels …) shared would take extra effort – unless you go the route of having things turn single-species at some mid-level (like, per building), of course.
Chase Wanderstar
Yeah, but Nexus Jovia is in the Sol system. Probably not many aliens going that far from home, into a place where the infrastructure is definitely mostly or entirely built with humans in mind, long-term.
SpaceDragon
There is actually specific infrastructure built in areas of Nexus Jovia for other sophont species, at least from what I remember from the Lore pages. Pretty sure it exists for at least Bug Ferrets and Avians, and I’d imagine Centaurs at this point as well, even if it is less expansive.
Jay Eaton
There are many degrees of apartments with different degrees of private space in Jovia. Idrisah’s parent’s downsized after their daughter moved out, this apartment is smaller than the median (which would have a mist shower and a kitchenette). Her parents are very outgoing and spend a lot of time out of the apartment in third spaces/community spaces, so it works for them. Their building has one shared kitchen and washroom for each floor.
Cugz Arui
i…i am the first comment?
Madame Thunderbone
Are you sure we should be 2016 YouTube “First”-ing a webcomic?
Genko
Yes ^w^
Vinemaple
Yes, you were, and welcome to the community!