Damn, Not liking this one bit.

Great story so far.

ok this im just wating to see a few facehuggers pop out of somewhere

This isnt looking good.

But look at the hose that's snaking over and under various panels! Look at the panel layout! Look at the- um.... well, I DID have fun doing the layouts. I hope I was able convey a search / exploration feeling here without any words.

hm it looks good but for a more dead apperance I suggest gettin rid of the pupils or at least makin em smaller. thats just me though.

It's been an area I've been playing with. Make them too small and they end up zombies. Make them too big and they look over sensitive. I know they should really have exploded eyeballs or something, but that's a bit of grossness I don't want to have in a comic that is meant to be PG-13.

ug yeah exploded would be unneseccary, I think just a blank gaze settles it. (nods)

How about making them lighter, like they're glazed over?

Like that idea..... maybe harder to convey clearly in this medium, but possible idea nonetheless.

Oh, yeah.... Great to see more Scavengers on the move........ and in better condition that their neighbours!

Death by Vacuum... not a pleasant way to die... even though it reportedly is quick

Define quick? Tests indicate it can take 30 seconds or more before the subject passes out, with death occurring after about 4 minutes. Those 30 seconds would seem like an eternity.

If it was explosive decompression, you are exposed to the cold of space (average measurable temperature of space, from current instruments, is about -455 Fahrenheit). The -455 Fahrenheit comes from using the Max Plank’s black body radiation law, or just "Black Body Radiation."

I think you'd be flash frozen, before your blood boils from the change in pressure (from 14 pounds/square inch to zero).

Nope. Doesn't work that way. Thermal inertia would prevent that from occurring, because the only way to lose temperature in space is through radiation. There is no other method as there's nothing to conduct or convect heat away. Your body would take some time to lose that much heat from its mass. Oh, eventually you will reach that point, but not before you're long dead from asphyxiation. It is quite possible for the human body to survive short exposures to pure space...and by short, I mean less than 30 seconds.

That's going to be a LONG 30 seconds.

Still expexting to see Necromorphs or Xenomorphs or some kinda alienmorphs ;P

Tense work, nicely done.

I don't know your intended plot, but a creepy twist would be if they were all (well, all they find) dead before the decompression.

I really hope that this isn't the ultimate fate of the Roomies crew. The second and last panels made me think of Flinthoof and that fox that RM was sleeping with...

Flint and Codrus wouldn't do anything that would cause such a catastrophe, so I guess it's look-alikes after all.

I was thinking that last guy was making me think of Flinthoof.

Wonder if *anyone* on the ship was in full gear.

explosive decompression can do really nasty things to unprotected people i suspect it would be much more...."messy" but you do a fair job of conveying that without it becoming a frozen gore-fest. if there are survivors they would have to have been sealed somewhere, but then there is the little problem of power. environmental systems tends to need that stuff. not looking good for their chances. be interesting to find out what they were smuggling.
moar please
--Rick

I would have thought the incident in the previous issue would have caused the explosive decompression being mentioned by a few others here. these furs should have been aerosoled.you'd find splatter an not a lot else.
if it was non explosive decompression, then they should have been having these horrible faces of pain as they died.
there may yet be furs in airtight cabins to be found. that and the mystery of what the fast object that caused all this was. or at least whom.

-Winterbeast

Why "horrible faces of pain" for a non-explosive decompression? The human body has no trigger for airlessness, and there is no pain from lack of oxygen. You just get very sleepy and pass out, never to wake up. That's what happened to Paine Stewart and others aboard his private jet. The cabin pressurization system malfunctioned, and there was no alarm to alert them to that fact. Everyone just fell asleep then passed out, with the plane continuing to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

From all that I've read here, I have to wonder: how much hard data exists on explosive decompression (i.e., instant exposure to vacuum) and exposure to near-absolute-zero cold? No insults or condescension intended, but I suspect that a lot of the opinions here are informed by SF literature, TV, & movies.

At some point, something happened, and there was somebody there to observe and record or film it. Even more likely in the old USSR, who were ballsy enough to do such experiments on live specimens (of any and/or all species).

Gradual loss of pressure people pretty much just fall asleep and never realize what happened. One of the early Soviet cosmonauts died that way from a small leak in the door seal. Just a couple years ago the PLAN lost the entire crew of one of their submarines to an atmospheric malfunction.

Data from rapid depressurization accidents in aircraft, submarines and divers show people are able to move and function more or less for up to a minute at very high altitudes. Then they lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. The rule of thumb in aviation is you have about 30 seconds to try to save your own life before you are unable to act in a coherent fashion.
It is a painful process, from what I have read, with ruptured eardrums, abdominal pain from trapped gases in the stomach and bowel, chest pain from lung ruptures if you tried to hold your breath. If the pressure drop is great enough and fast enough, more or less instant bruises over your entire skin from ruptured blood vessels. Eyes probably pop out too, but I haven't seen any data on that.

The human body is mostly solid and liquid, which doesn't change volume with pressure changes. But the body also has pockets of gases inside, mostly in the digestive system, lungs, ears, nose, sinuses and throat. Those will expand in the pressure drop pretty much instantly. Gases that are in solution in the body fluids will also start to come out of solution. In divers that decompress too fast, this brings on the bends, but the onset of the bends takes several minutes, so this would not come into play in this sort of event.

The liquids that make up the body will also start to boil in the low pressure, I'm not sure if this would manifest rapidly enough to be a factor in that first 30 seconds. This boiling of the water in the body would also be the primary means of heat leaving the body in the short term aftermath of the incident, once the liquids on the surface of the body have boiled enough to have the remaining liquid freeze, the primary means of heat loss would be from radiation, which is much slower, and dependent on localized conditions.

So, you would hear the air rushing out from your nice warm spaceship into the vacuum outside. This would be noisy, any loose objects would be blown towards the leak by the air movement. For a short time, fog would form from the water vapor in the air condensing from the pressure drop cooling the air. The pain in your ears and sinuses would be acute and get worse when your eardrums rupture. You would be farting and burping uncontrollably as the gases in your digestive system expand in the lower pressure. Depending on how recently you have used the bathroom, you may also be having an involuntary evacuation of your bowel and bladder. This would be distracting at best and incapacitating at worse. Your vision would be obscured as your tears start to boil in the vacuum, more tears being sucked from your tear ducts by the pressure loss. The air in your lungs will be roaring out of your mouth and nose and the pain as your insides try to expand into the near vacuum of your lungs would also be pretty bad.
So, near blinded, distracted by all the antics of the gases and fluids of your body reacting to the loss of pressure, you have about thirty seconds to do something. Otherwise your are gonna die painfully in about a minute. Good luck.

Russia wasn't the only one to experiment with live specimens. There's actually a fair amount of work done on high-altitude and space decompression by both the U.S. Air Force and NASA. (Most of this work was done in the 50's and 60's, before the PC movement made such experiments on animals morally reprehensible.) The Air Force was particularly interested in this work for their HALO (high-altitude, low opening) parachute jumps, where they'd leave the plane at altitudes above 40,000 feet and not open chutes until very close to the ground.

Geoffrey Landis, a scientist at NASA's John Glenn Research Center in Ohio has a very good breakdown on decompression research along with citations and so forth. You can read his page here:

http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

Not a pleasant way to die, if there is one.