Freefall

I hear their white kale special is great, but it's hard to catch when they serve it.

Sam helps... sorta. (Monday strip)◊

And he needs help. (Wednesday strip)◊

Sam has his priorities straight, thinking of supply lines◊.

Cosmonaut Chow: It's mostly edible!

That's a little more specific (and honest) than I bet anyone cares to admit.

You know, with proper heat transfer, I bet you can put a raw pizza on a railgun, and by the time it reaches its destination, it's fully cooked. That may be edging into mad science... or mad culinary arts, at the very least.

Sounds like an XKCD "what if"

Pretty similar to orbital drop steak. (That doesn't work.)

And I think this pizza wouldn't either - pizza is cooked quickly at constant high heat, while this heat dissipation would be a gradual slope.

To cook something, you have to carefully manage the rate of heat transfer. If you calculate how many joules you need to cook a pizza, then deliver all of that energy at once, you get a cloud of debris instead of a meal.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 1st 2019 at 1:42:38 PM

Linky.

All true, but if you were to tell me that nobody was spending (okay, let's be direct, wasting) time trying to figure out how to overcome all this, I'd laugh. I mean, we live in a world where people actually put in the effort to figure out how to properly tenderize steaks with explosives (and while I can't find the specific link right now, Mythbusters found that the FDA actually has a recommendation on that point). I can guarantee that someone in Freefall has, at the very least, been working on the "cooking steak on a railgun" issue, even if they haven't actually succeeded yet.

Technically, Sam never specified "rail gun cooked pizza." They could cook it first, then deliver it.

Yeah, that'd be easier. Or more likely deliver frozen for them to cook on the ship. But 32 here got the idea of "cooked by the delivery process" from it.

On the other hand, Sam being lazy means he'd probably think "cooked on the way" was a good idea, physics be damned. We already know he's not exactly the proverbial rocket scientist.

@Fighteer's post: this even came up earlier in Freefall.

Sam practices the farewell parade◊.

There seems to be some kind of Noodle Incident here.

I realize that nobody said "railgun-cooked pizza," and Sam may simply thinking of delivering a cooked pizza via railgun. I'm just running with the mad science/culinary arts whim that I'm sure someone in-universe has cooked up.

For yesterday's comic... I'll grant that maybe, just maybe, a balloon was all that was stolen, but the exact nature of the Disaster Dominoes is indeed going to be quite the Noodle Incident.

Hot sauce is no issue for Sam◊

That doesn't surprise me. If I remember my biology correctly, capsaicin-producing plants specifically evolved to produce a substance that only mammals react to, as a mechanism to encourage only birds to eat the fruits in question and spread the seeds. Humans are just kinda crazy sometimes and decide that they like that pain and then decide to speed evolution along by cultivating even higher concentrations of the stuff in the plants.

Given that Sam's biology was described as closer to a lungfish or perhaps an amphibian, it totally figures that capsaicin-based hot sauces wouldn't affect him at all. That said, I bet that there probably is some substance that's fine for the mammals but is incredibly spicy to Sam (I've heard rumors that artificial grape flavoring produces a similar reaction in birds to capsaicin in humans; maybe that works on Sam too).

Also, without a proper aging process, I do have to question just how spicy that stuff could be (or how good it'll taste)... but then, since it was established that spacers are a bit scarce on seasoning, they probably don't care.

Also, freefall causes issues with sinus drainage, making strong tastes to punch through the dulled sense of smell even more desirable. Although spacer-mods like Winston may have some kind of fix for that.

Brain scans◊. Anyone else almost dizzied by just how fast time is suddenly passing in the strip?

I'd ask if some of those places were even possible, but it's already established that Sam doesn't have an internal skeleton to pose such problems, so it's probably not nearly as much of an issue.

Given how much time has been spent on individual moments in earlier strips, this is positively light speed in its movement.

Robots bearing gifts◊, but none for Sam.

Delegated paranoia◊.

This is probably the most thorough tune-up that the Savage Chicken has ever received.