Talk:2712: Gravity

Whatever image is supposed to be in the center isn't showing up for me! D: Tried on both Safari and Chrome but it gives me the little broken picture icon. Hopefully it's fixed soon! (The comic's been up for about 10 minutes going by when the bot updated this page.) 172.70.126.117 22:28, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

The center image is trying to load this link, but there's nothing there: https://xkcd.com/tile/ship1/ship_gliding_2x.png. I hope that gets fixed soon. The "ship" seems to rotate a bit unpredictably over time. At first I thought it was responding to my mouse movements, but I don't think so anymore. Orion205 (talk) 22:34, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, the center image is controlled by the javascript, of course: https://xkcd.com/2712/comic.js. So this is some sort of interactive comic? Orion205 (talk) 22:36, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Okay, left/right arrow keys seem to control the rotation. I'll check back in later in hopes of seeing the ship so I have some idea what the point of it all is. Orion205 (talk) 22:39, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

And now it's working. You fly a little spaceship around the little planet. Luckily you have shields if you slam into the ground too hard. Orion205 (talk) 22:43, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Catch the cannonball for a spaceship upgrade. Also, not so easy to find a stable orbit around this little planet. Orion205 (talk) 22:49, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

You can transform the ship into a different (seems faster to me) one by running into the last cannon ball. 108.162.241.249

Rough summary: The comic is an interactive space flight game, starting landed on an origin planet. The planet is static, and the player starts in a ship controlled by WASD or Directional keys. The ship can go up and down, and rotate left and right. Game simulates orbits and gravity, making navigation tricky. Around the player ship there are dots which indicate nearby planets - there are numurous planets, each with what seem to be drawings related to the What If book. Within the browser, planets are loaded in PNG format by chunk, names formatted as "planet_0_0" with numbers incrementing as grid co-ordinates. Planets and objects found: "origin" "europa", "road", "b612". NOTE: Several hazards exist, such as a field of black holes - if flown into, the ship can become stuck if let to be pulled close to the surface, locking in place.

In addition to Europa, the space road, and B-612, there is the "Edge of the Universe" (complete with Milliways restaurant nearby), a... tree (which is extremely hard to land on), a planet populated by the characters from Dinosaur Comics (and the main cast of Jurassic Park), the USS Enterprice (NCC 1701-C), and likely quite a bit more. Orbital mechanics make it tough to land on the smaller targets. 172.71.254.46 23:07, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

I went out a long ways away, and eventually found The Great Attractor. It attracts really hard. I couldn't leave the surface. (I wasn't able to leave the center of Europa either, though, so, not saying much.) There are also some terrifying black holes (a binary system?), though something's weird about their gravity; you kinda bounce off of them a quarter screen away or so? 108.162.216.77 23:10, 16 December 2022 (UTC)