Bonus artwork:
Transcript
Anonymous asked: Hey Bip! I'd like to know more about your electrowetting displays. Other than displaying your avatar on them, what else do you and your crew use them for?
Bip: Mostly they're used to customize living spaces, making walls any color or pattern the occupant likes. They can also can used to as an "infinite screen,"
though their resolution is not high enough to be a perfect replacement for an OLED display. It's also part of my vessel emergency systems. Alerts flash the color of the entire wall and display text information to inform and assist occupants.
Wall text: STELLAR FLARE. PROCEED TO FLOOR 4 SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.
Rad Internet Stranger asked: Hello Bip, how do you see?? I’m so curious lol
Bip: Cameras.
Bip's avatar stares at the reader blankly.
Bip: Wait, you wanted to know where all of them are?? They're so obvious though...
Anonymous asked: Bip, are you the villain of this story?
Bip: Of course. Who else could it possibly be?
81 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 29”
halley
incredible shirt thank you. very weird to see bip in a shirt
The Opossum Witch
not me realizing electrowetting displays are real only after this update… god thats so dope
IncompleteMachine
EWDs on this scale are an innovation, especially if they’re also touch sensitive, but most all of the tech in RTTS is grounded in some kind of IRL science, including the wormholes and quantum computers (though those are by far the most exotic and controversial)
Boxthing
God I love Bip and their sass… XD
kaittzie
trick question, the real villain is Talita’s sense of self
hessian
sobbing (both jokefully and sadfully)
JoB
So “floor 4” double-serves as the ship’s radiation shelter. Logical choice, after all, Bip cannot move their servers anyplace else to prevent those mainframes getting fried. And it explains the extra thick outer wall of that level … extra thick wall, there’s just a normal floor “below” and I don’t think that a Whipple shield (“roof”) is much good against radiation. Does that mean that the ship will have to turn its side towards the flare to make the server room into an effective radiation shelter – thus plainly exposing everything else to it? Including the ship’s equivalent of a living, breathing, toastable ag farm to keep the crew fed … ?
izimb
Given that there are torch drives and wormholes, I feel a hybrid shielding (EM/plasma & solid) isn’t out of the question. I seem to recall that (without checking in the archive) the ship has been active in the vicinity of Jupiter in its operational history – as far as I know, Jupiter’s magnetosphere is a giant particle accelerator in its own right with comparable particle energies vs. a solar flare (but much higher flux). If the Runaway took shortcuts within the system (as a torch ship could), possibly dipping deeper towards Jupiter than others, I feel it could be very well-equipped for a solar flare.
OTOH, I feel Bip, deep inside, is a stone-cold rocket-person, playing fast and loose with those safety factors. Can Centaurs maybe stand a little higher dose per mass than other sophonts?
JoB
Hm, the Jupiter-sailin’ part must be hidden deeper than I’ve dug into the lore myself …
I’m getting mixed signals about what the RttSverse can or cannot do with energy fields. On one hand, the Runaway is much smaller than what hard sci-fi says torchships should be like (with the real big shielding sitting between the torch engines and the habitat, at a steep angle to reflect part of the radiation instead of absorbing it), which suggests that there is some kind of novel radiation shielding available. But on the other hand, the engines themselves have visible skeleton “nozzle” structures because the actual nozzles are magnetic fields that supposedly need the coils that those skeletons really are to erect …
> Can Centaurs maybe stand a little higher dose per mass than other sophonts?
Unknown. And the Runaway is human built, so either there is some sufficient (for a certain pair of future crew as well) shielding we just cannot see, or Bip really has been playing it fast and loose with the centaur crew …
Pathfinder
I wouldn’t put some modifications past the previous crew, they definitely weren’t afraid to change up a lot of the interior.
izimb
I went back through the comic and yeah, you’re right, it was me misremembering – the only info we get is that the vessel is registered at Jovia, we get a website with some generic information about that. Maybe I mistook Talita’s search terms for results in terms of Jovian operational history and that morphed into knowledge the ship operated in the Jupiter system. Sorry about that.
I myself am a big fan of the hard sci-fi angle but I also think that story & universe take precedence – still, it’s fun to have an in-universe explanation for some things, not necessarily physically accurate. All of the cutaway drawings, interiors and the annotated shots of the ship (when Talita looked at it from kms away) were lovely – to me, it’s a character as well.
Septemberdale
Or, perhaps it simply matters less because they have more mass, so if radiation does give them cancer, there’s more time to detect it and remove it before it causes major problems? Even a humongous beastie of a sophont is still made out of fairly-unremarkable-sized cells.
JoB
Cancer is not exactly the main concern in acute radiation sickness (that you’d want to avoid by running to a bunker NOW NOW NOW) …
jdeltia
i mean, who says the whipple shield (which i just learned about, i was wondering what the shield thing was for) can’t have radiation shielding? or that actually impossible in its construction?
JoB
Anything that has mass will provide some radiation shielding, so a Whipple shield certainly does, too. However, Whipple shields are designed to require less mass than a massive shield protecting against the same kind of micrometeorites, by letting the debris spread over a larger area before it hits the next layer. Radiation / particles don’t do that – or at least not often enough to let a medical x-ray machine do the same experiments the LHC was built for …
… so, if the Runaway’s Whipple shield was designed to deal with not-so-micro-meteorites, maaaaaybe, but …
(Rule of thumb from my civil protection days: “1 m of ferroconcrete = 3 m of soil cover” (in terms of radiation shielding). And we built with a multiple of that.)
Varyon
Radiation protection is largely a function of the sheer amount of mass in the way, so a shield system designed to minimize the amount of mass needed (which, as noted, is exactly what the Whipple design does) probably isn’t going to offer much in the way of protection when it comes to ionizing radiation. That said, magnetic shielding can also help protect against radiation (Earth’s magnetosphere is a big part of what keeps it habitable), so I wonder if having active electromagnets in the Whipple layers could work differently from just using the same mass of electromagnet in one layer. Well, if such a setup would actually help protect a ship, that is – at that size, any magnetic shielding you can can manage may well amount to nothing (Earth’s magnetosphere is massive, the shielding a ship can manage is going to be be absolutely miniscule by comparison, and we still rely a decent amount on our atmosphere to protect us). Said electromagnets would probably be a pain to maintain as well, considering Whipple shields are largely meant to be ablative in nature.
JoB
Well, we do learn on this page that the ship’s crew occasionally is required to seek shelter. Compare that to how Earthbound humans fared in, as the probably worst example, the Carrington Event …
Synthaphone
Earthbound humans also had to have their souls transferred into robotic bodies in order to withstand and fight back against Giygas
Doug
The “roof” shield is full of water, among other things, it’s likely the most effective radiation shield on the entire vessel, with the possible exclusion of the radiation shield skirt above the engines.
blythe
living with bip (or any agi honestly) sounds like hell from a privacy perspective. nonzero chance of there being creepo stalker ais out there.
Origamigryphon
That is a good question, you should be able to request private time should the need arise
jdeltia
if the cameras are truly that obvious, black electrical tape is always an option…
Claire
Tape won’t stop microphones. Visual privacy isn’t the only kind of privacy.
JoB
[looks panting and panicking over shoulder]
[sees nothing except the pipeline overhead]
Crow
they’re so evil i love that for them
Scyphi
Given Bip’s duplicitous nature, I’m now half-expecting the comic to go on and prove that Bip is, in fact, NOT the story’s villain. Because, c’mon, it’d totally be like Bip to claim to be something he’s not JUST to be a troll.
Adrienne
They not he, and I’m pretty sure the Bip villainy bit is purely a joke
Scyphi
Whoops, slip of the tongue! I know very well Bip’s a they, not a he, so much so I had very much made it a point to try and remember that throughout writing that comment…but obviously I missed a spot. :p
Arcstone
So I’m guessing the resolution is on the side of shit enough you wouldn’t use the walls for a full marathon of the lord of the rings movies, but they’re great for watching youtube either really late at night, or early in the morning, and you don’t wanna move your head.
Tumorhead
WE LOVE YOU BIP!!
Gar G
I love how Bip just openly admits to being a villain XD
thegriffin88
Maulu, what happened to your legs?
Unless that’s super major spoilers.
(Told you I was tearing apart this and your Tumblr to get my griffin headcanon going)
Origamigryphon
You have to ask questions via the Google document! But to answer your question: https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/683481904485384192/homeplanet-centaur-characters-from-a-short-story
Rad Internet Stranger
IT ME
Paroxysmall
something happens and you turn to make direct eye contact with Bip like you’re on The Office
forthebit
Bip must LOVE those AI glasses.
florence
omnipresent bip. theyre always watching. bip is wathcing you
Hubert
Obviously the villain is the devilish criminal CHEEVWUT
JoB
[three sign up as a
crewspacewoman on the Runaway so as to escape from the crime boss’ lair]cabbage
I know bips avatar is a bug ferret which are like 6 feet long but i always imagine them being like 1 inch long irl
JoB
… let me guess, you’re reading this on a cell phone screen?
[flips back to the fold between pages 205 and 206 to see a Bipatar four times the size of Talita]
[… not to forget that Bips actual “body” is the entire ship …]
godspeed
I am reading this comic on my phone and I am absolutely on the same boat.
I remember thinking, uh BIP lorge, when looking at the last story pages… But the feeling of them being more of the devil side of a cartoon conscience never fades for me personally, lol.
BIP is smol, sitting on my shoulders, whispering me high-key foolish things into my ear, that eventually turn into tempting ideas.
halley
in my mind palace bip is hot dog sized
Tentament
Kind of crazy that Bip perceives the world like an early Resident Evil game with fixed cameras everywhere (when not in an avatar like the worms).
ryn
omg this is such a great way of imagining it
godspeed
But what if BIP uses 360° cameras onboard? It’s more like a fisheye lens view then I guess?
I assume that BIP could piece together different camera streams into a coherent picture if needed and calculating capacity can manage/ the camera feeds work for it, just like our brain does.
Lilac
If this were a musical bip would have the awesomest villain song
Gar G
Omg yes
Eux
i love bip. fantastic. also this would solve so many of my decoration problems if i could just change the color with an electrowet wall. the world would be my oyster…..
Vinemaple
I notice Bip gets almost all the kid-coded questions… or is just that Jay finds it more fun to answer those kinds of questions when they’re directed at Bip?
And, yes, Bip, point our attention to the OBVIOUS cameras… A clever plan, exactly the kind of thinking I’d expect from a sapient AI whose primary interest is the social dynamics of organic sophonts!
Finally, does it feel to anyone else like Jay, who now has an enormous database of reader questions to mine, has started to use character AMAs like auxiliary lore pages, answering certain questions right before or after they become relevant to the plot?
Anna Hladíková
What do you mean by kid-coded?
Adrienne
Kid-coded questions… about electrowetting displays, what jail is like, what crimes they’ve committed, if they have a sense of touch, if they’re grieving their previous crew, and what the work they do on the Runaway is?
Fallingfeather
I think it’s partially a matter of they don’t want to answer anything deeper than that (well, sort of, I know they’re a fictional character, lol). They’re pretty closed off emotionally and don’t seem to want to talk about their past crew, so things asking about their inner turmoil or personal history keeps getting “What are you, a cop?” style answers, which is funny once but probably not repeatedly lol.
Jay Eaton
Lol Bip gets a lot of questions I can’t reply to because they’re either spoilers, Bip would not answer it, or both. People sent a lot of asks about their former crew and Bip absolutely doesn’t want to talk about it. The ones where they get to be a condescending little bastard are more likely to get a reply.
JoB
> The ones where they get to be a condescending
> little bastard are more likely to get a reply.
Hmmmm I think I can see where this is going, reader-relations-wise … :-3
EnchantressEmily
From what we’ve seen of Bip in the comic so far, I don’t know that I’d call them a villain. A manipulator, sure, and secretive about their motives, but not villainous as such.
JoB
… well, this sure explains why the former crew wanted to have furniture added into the habitat, and why Bip would want it removed … I mean, the self-proclaimed villain just told us that there are lots of cameras (instead of just enough to allow them to see for as long as the occupants agree to that) …
creatureofthelaboratory
well i suspect that the former crew also wanted to use the furniture as furniture, but the point about Bip wanting it removed certainly stands
Zuorai
Everyone say we love you Bip
1d4-nadg
We love you bip
furubatsu
We love you Bip
jdeltia
we love you bip
Lettuce Vervain
We love you Bip
Adrienne
We love you Bip
Rose
We love you Bip
Undercooked Mothman
We love you Bip
Payphone Call
We love you Bip
forthebit
We love you Bip
bryn
We love you Bip
Vinemaple
We love you, Bip
Imp!
We love you Bip!!!!
Mobi-gg
Never change Bip <3