But His Skeleton Is Backwards

I could keep fiddling with this for months and months if I don't stop myself, so here's me doing that; Rodhocetus is now finished, even without much of a skin pattern, but she and her background have since gained some coherence imo. That being said, here also are she and her background separated out

Only 9 HOURS left on the Runaway to the Stars Kickstarter!

We hit our final stretch goal! While the RttS book will be available online and in stores after the campaign, the two add-on zines are exclusive to the Kickstarter. The AMA zine compiles all three (1, 2, 3) of the oldest character askblog sessions into a single fancy book, and the fountain pen zine compiles a bunch of drawings that I've mostly only published on my Patreon (or not at all) featuring worldbuilding and character art. (Also, fear not, the Reader Questions that have been posting on the webcomic site in between book chapters will be included in the main graphic novel)

For information on how to add these zines to your pledge, check out this campaign update.

Thank you again for overfunding the book by an order of magnitude! I am blown away by the support, and very excited to tell more stories in this universe!

Less than 48 hours remain on the Runaway to the Stars Kickstarter! C'mon Talita, put your back into it!

Help us reach our last stretch goal and support a strange slice-of-life webcomic about about a bunch of scifi outcasts becoming friends! And maybe also stealing company property and assisting a criminal!

There is one week left on the Runaway to the Stars Kickstarter! If you wanted to get in, remember to do it soon!

The campaign hit two stretch goals already, one for a cover upgrade and one for an add-on compilation book of the three character AMA zines! (The Reader Questions on the comic website are to included in the main graphic novel.)

The next stretch goal is for a fancy full color zine of a bunch of my ink and fountain pen artworks, like these:

Firstly, the Equirectangular elevation maps with and without the color gradient layer, and tectonic plate map. This color gradient marks sea level, of course, and while there are inland areas that are *also* below that elevation, I have yet to determine which of those basins have lakes and seas therein, and how their shorelines compare; *that* will be seen once I figure out the climate : ) As for the Plate map, most of the smaller, oblong plates without any rift boundaries represent island chains or continent fragments that accreted onto larger landmasses; discretely marking those was helpful for placing and shaping the mountain ranges.

Next, the Poles-Centered Perspective maps, made possible with Photopea's Polar Coordinates tool. The planet's Southern hemisphere, centered on the south pole, is seen at left, and its Northern hemisphere is seen at right. Like the previous set of three, this set includes the color elevation map, greyscale elevation map, and solid color tectonic plates.

Last of all, the basis for the planet's current appearance: it's tectonic history! These gifs, in six frames, cover about 200 million years of continental drift, starting with the breakup of two Supercontinents, and was primarily achieved in Blender. This isn't my first time trying to reconstruct a tectonic history, but it *is* my first time doing so this quickly and efficiently, thanks to the process I developed here using this planet's continents as a test case.

Half a year later, and here's a compilation of climate map sequences for Phase Two of the Centaur Alien Homeplanet commission, for @jayrockin's Runaway to the Stars worldbuilding project. Here, also, are links to the reddit post for this video, and to the associated gallery of high-resolution static maps.

Firstly, the Equirectangular elevation maps with and without the color gradient layer, and tectonic plate map. This color gradient marks sea level, of course, and while there are inland areas that are *also* below that elevation, I have yet to determine which of those basins have lakes and seas therein, and how their shorelines compare; *that* will be seen once I figure out the climate : ) As for the Plate map, most of the smaller, oblong plates without any rift boundaries represent island chains or continent fragments that accreted onto larger landmasses; discretely marking those was helpful for placing and shaping the mountain ranges.

Next, the Poles-Centered Perspective maps, made possible with Photopea's Polar Coordinates tool. The planet's Southern hemisphere, centered on the south pole, is seen at left, and its Northern hemisphere is seen at right. Like the previous set of three, this set includes the color elevation map, greyscale elevation map, and solid color tectonic plates.

Last of all, the basis for the planet's current appearance: it's tectonic history! These gifs, in six frames, cover about 200 million years of continental drift, starting with the breakup of two Supercontinents, and was primarily achieved in Blender. This isn't my first time trying to reconstruct a tectonic history, but it *is* my first time doing so this quickly and efficiently, thanks to the process I developed here using this planet's continents as a test case.

Half a year later, and here's a compilation of climate map sequences for Phase Two of the Centaur Alien Homeplanet commission, for @jayrockin's Runaway to the Stars worldbuilding project. Here, also, are links to the reddit post for this video, and to the associated gallery of high-resolution static maps.

Firstly, the Equirectangular elevation maps with and without the color gradient layer, and tectonic plate map. This color gradient marks sea level, of course, and while there are inland areas that are *also* below that elevation, I have yet to determine which of those basins have lakes and seas therein, and how their shorelines compare; *that* will be seen once I figure out the climate : ) As for the Plate map, most of the smaller, oblong plates without any rift boundaries represent island chains or continent fragments that accreted onto larger landmasses; discretely marking those was helpful for placing and shaping the mountain ranges.

Next, the Poles-Centered Perspective maps, made possible with Photopea's Polar Coordinates tool. The planet's Southern hemisphere, centered on the south pole, is seen at left, and its Northern hemisphere is seen at right. Like the previous set of three, this set includes the color elevation map, greyscale elevation map, and solid color tectonic plates.

Last of all, the basis for the planet's current appearance: it's tectonic history! These gifs, in six frames, cover about 200 million years of continental drift, starting with the breakup of two Supercontinents, and was primarily achieved in Blender. This isn't my first time trying to reconstruct a tectonic history, but it *is* my first time doing so this quickly and efficiently, thanks to the process I developed here using this planet's continents as a test case.

Half a year later, and here's a compilation of climate map sequences for Phase Two of the Centaur Alien Homeplanet commission, for @jayrockin's Runaway to the Stars worldbuilding project. Here, also, are links to the reddit post for this video, and to the associated gallery of high-resolution static maps.

Firstly, the Equirectangular elevation maps with and without the color gradient layer, and tectonic plate map. This color gradient marks sea level, of course, and while there are inland areas that are *also* below that elevation, I have yet to determine which of those basins have lakes and seas therein, and how their shorelines compare; *that* will be seen once I figure out the climate : ) As for the Plate map, most of the smaller, oblong plates without any rift boundaries represent island chains or continent fragments that accreted onto larger landmasses; discretely marking those was helpful for placing and shaping the mountain ranges.

Next, the Poles-Centered Perspective maps, made possible with Photopea's Polar Coordinates tool. The planet's Southern hemisphere, centered on the south pole, is seen at left, and its Northern hemisphere is seen at right. Like the previous set of three, this set includes the color elevation map, greyscale elevation map, and solid color tectonic plates.

Last of all, the basis for the planet's current appearance: it's tectonic history! These gifs, in six frames, cover about 200 million years of continental drift, starting with the breakup of two Supercontinents, and was primarily achieved in Blender. This isn't my first time trying to reconstruct a tectonic history, but it *is* my first time doing so this quickly and efficiently, thanks to the process I developed here using this planet's continents as a test case.

Half a year later, and here's a compilation of climate map sequences for Phase Two of the Centaur Alien Homeplanet commission, for @jayrockin's Runaway to the Stars worldbuilding project. Here, also, are links to the reddit post for this video, and to the associated gallery of high-resolution static maps.

Hi. Runaway to the Stars (the comic I've been posting) will be funding its print run on Kickstarter this April. Click the link to get an email alert when it goes live.

This is a map based on the Cassini scenario from xkcd’s What if? series and takes place during southern hemisphere summer. My primary reference for this map was a climate model run by Nikolai Hersfeldt in ExoPlaSim and explored in his blog Worldbuilding Pasta. For anyone curious, I used Gimp, Photopea, Qgis, Gprojector, and Wilbur to create this map. Feel free to use this map for anything you like as long you give credit. The heightmap and individual layers are available upon request.

In my interpretation of this scenario, the change occurred sometime before the start of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age and the subsequent glaciation of Antarctica. As a result, the Laurentide ice sheet never formed, giving what would have been Canada and the Northern United States radically different geography. In the absence of Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes, there exists the Bell and St. Lawrence rivers. Prior to the onset of the Pleistocene glaciations, the Paleo Bell river may have drained an area larger than the Amazon basin and it survives to the modern day on Cassini Earth, forming a delta at the mouth of what would have been the Hudson Strait. Cassini Earth’s major ice sheets are thin and limited to the highlands of Tibet and the Andes, causing sea level to be around 70-76 meters higher, with some extra contribution from water displaced by uplifted regions and thermal expansion caused by higher average global temperatures. 

The Pacific Northwest is now both the hottest and driest place on the continent. However, the windward side of the Northern Rocky Mountains manage to capture some precipitation, supporting cloud forests and grasslands. Greenland and Iceland are almost entirely blanketed by tropical rainforests, though Greenland’s thins out to savanna and even a small patch of scrubland in the rain shadow of its highlands. The presence of North America and Eurasia directly to the north and south of the tropical Arctic Ocean forms a particularly strong monsoon pattern as Nikolai mentions in his blog, causing much of Canada to be drier than expected. Although Eastern Canada is dominated by savanna and scrubland, the Bell River is able to supply water across much of it and floods during the summer monsoon. The south east of the continent has a broadly similar climate, just flipped north to south. Quebec and New England are subtropical, the Midwest is still continental, and the Southern United States is subarctic and shrouded in conifers. Northern California is drier while the south is still predominantly Mediterranean. Baja California and Western Mexico resemble the old Pacific Northwest. Baja California receives the brunt of precipitation like our coastal Washington while partially insulating much of the Sonoran desert region. The Mexican highlands are now capped in ice sheets surrounded by mild tundra. During the winter, sea ice connects the islands of the Caribbean to one another as well as to Central America. 

Resources:

Climate Mini-Exploration: Checking Randall Munroe's Work

A new global ice sheet reconstruction for the past 80,000 years

GIS dataset of high-resolution rebound surfaces and ice-free paleotopography of glaciated North America since the LGM based on the ICE-xG (VMy) models' predictions

Earth2014: 1 arc-min shape, topography, bedrock and ice-sheet models