#TSCOSI

[scrawleditalix]

so I, personally, am a huge fan of the Telemachian war rubble. incredible imagery? cool obstacle for our heroes? literal wall of corpses both protecting the heart of human civilization from those who wish to extinguish it and holding it captive to those who wish to exploit it? come on, what more do you want from a set piece?

just, like. a coating of rubble around an entire planet, y'know. that's too much rubble, isn't it? like, planets are really big. just kinda a flashy bit of writers' excess. it's gotta take a stupid, unrealistic number of ships to make a coating of rubble like that happen, right?

Right?

QUESTION ONE: How big is this planet?

Surely, in sci-fi world, the answer to this question is limitless, right? Far be it for me to impinge upon the boundless creativity of the sci-fi writer. That being said, as the local rubble-estimator, I do need to put some bounds on this thing. And the thing is, human bodies do very poorly outside of earth-gravity in the long-term. in the interest of not ruining the musculoskeletal system of every human in the not-so-distant future, we're going to assume that Telemachus has +/- 10% of Earth gravity. And, in the interest of not ruining my own evening, we're assuming that it also has the same density as earth, so the math is straightforward and we can actually answer the question we've set out to answer here. That being said, welcome to Telemachus!

it, uh, doesn't look like much yet, but I promise we will be answering some interesting questions here in the space. well, they're interesting to me, at least. I had fun. And that's what matters!

QUESTION 2: Where is the rubble?

Answer: not in the atmosphere, because the atmosphere would grab the rubble with its grubby little fingers and drag it planetside. The rubble layer must be sitting in the thermosphere, which is where the International Space Station lives. In the thermosphere, there's insufficient atmospheric pressure for anyone to hear you scream, and that is good enough for rubble to continue orbiting the planet indefinitely!

So, where is the thermosphere?

UHHHHHHHH

Okay so, good news. We already know where this is on earth. It's 85km above the surface. And looking through the variables, the only things that aren't constants for our purposes are local gravity (locked and loaded, baby), change in height (that's what we're looking for), and... uh......

Great news! Everything is a constant except for the two things we already have, everybody can breathe super normal air with a molar mass of 0.0289644 kg/mol and super normal barometric pressure on the surface just like on Earth, isn't terraforming fun? And that means we can play my favorite math trick, which is where we throw all of our constants out the window and just form a relational equation with our variables and with g0*dH0=g1*dH1 we are off to the races! Turns out, atmospheric physics is super easy when you just use the earth baseline and scale it by local gravity.

QUESTION 3: How thick is the rubble?

*cracks knuckles*

In S02E03 Deep Breath, the gang traverses the rubble layer surrounding Telemachus in order to evade a government checkpoint where their identity cards will surely fail them. The audio cue for the first flecks of rubble hitting the shields starts at 18:00; the audio cue for the Iris II hitting the atmosphere is at 20:30, which means that if we knew the Iris II's velocity, we would know the rubble thickness. Such a shame there's no way to know how fast they were moving...

Well, except that the landing sequence directly follows (it takes 50 seconds to reach the ground), and there is a limit to how quickly Krejjh is able to decelerate (a sustained 4-5 gs will knock a layperson unconscious, and Violet and Brian both stay conscious to our knowledge) (actually I suspect Brian passed out) (this is besides the point), and we just calculated exactly how far they traveled to reach the ground...

Oh, yeah, baby. It's all coming together.

It is at this juncture that I should mention that in this calculation, I am completely ignoring any movement that is not normal to the planet's surface, which is to say, straight up and down. I do not care if Krejjh is flying in a beautiful arcing spiral, if they are drawing a middle finger in midair, or if they plummet like a bird falling from the sky. This is a wonderful feature of vector math which I love. I only care about the thickness of the rubble layer, and the only acceleration that is important is the vertical component (a human can withstand like, 20-30 gs to the chest if they wear their seatbelt). Therefore, the other velocity components do not matter.

So, the Iris II entered the atmosphere at a speed of...

a flaming 1,100-1,300 mph, assuming that Krejjh decelerated at a moderate 3gs! Assuming that this is the maximum speed they achieve, I went ahead and halved this for their average speed through the debris field, which gives us a field over a hundred kilometers thick! Hell ye- wait, is that ten quintillion cubic meters of rubble layer???

QUESTION 4: How dense is dense?

I'm not going to lie to you, friends. This is where this gets ugly. We're going to do statistics. It will be okay.

How much of that volume is empty air?

The field of war rubble is described to us as dense. But that is not what makes it near-impregnable. If there is the physical space to pick your way through a static field of rubble, anybody could do that. What is dangerous, is that the rubble is orbiting, wrapped and writhing around the choking planet in a deadly Gordian knot. (I fucking love the Telemachus war rubble. Have I said how much I love the Telemachus war rubble?)

Now, if we pay close attention to the audio of Krejjh piloting through the rubble, we can hear large chunks of rubble zip past with a signature pitch-shift. This is the doppler effect causing sound (which doesn't travel in a vacuum but I'll forgive that) to be higher pitched as the rubble moves towards us and lower pitched as it moves away. Using these pitches, we can estimate the speed of the rubble--

yeah, okay, or we can just use the super simple stable orbital velocity equation that we already have all of the numbers for. if we were feeling lame.

So, imagine you're crossing the street at a brisk jog and a car is approaching at like 40mph from around a blind corner and also the street is hundreds of lanes with hundreds of cars whipping around a blind corner and also you are a ship that is parked across like ten lanes at a time. But hey, you can do a cool kick flip. So there's that, at least.

How many cars actually need to be on the road before it's "too dense" to traverse?

Luckily, there is a highly accurate, well-tested simulation we can consult.

The entire rubble field can be conceptualized as a series of orbital "lanes", containing a certain spacing of pieces of rubble, which cumulatively defines the density of the entire field. There exists a spacing by which it is possible, but difficult to get through. For example, in the image above, if there are 3 car tiles per 14 tile lane, the density of the entire street is 21%.

This spacing determines the frequency at which rubble crosses in front of the ship, on average. So, we're going to have to do some statistics. If you know how to do statistics, feel free to come at me, because I am pretty sure I did this stupid.

Alright, here's the game plan: we are going to define a space in front of the Iris II, designated as the Reaction Space, and we are going to designate a desired frequency of Reaction Events in that space. This is super arbitrary and has a huge impact on the final number! No pressure. So, let's give Krejjh one and a half seconds to react to the debris in front of the ship. If you've ever had a dog run in front of your car, this is scary as shit -- but hey, nobody said crossing the Telemachian rubble field was easy, and the ship did get hit a couple of times. Knowing the speed of the Iris, this gives us a physical distance in front of the ship which rubble may cross. Multiply that by the height of the ship- let's say 10 meters, there don't seem to be multiple floors- and we have bounded a certain number of orbital lanes through which the Iris is imminently about to cross. We'll call the average piece of rubble 5 by 5 meters, and therefore an orbital lane is about 25 square meters of space.

Each orbital lane represents an opportunity for a Reaction Event, which is to say one or more pieces of rubble entering the flight path of the Iris II, forcing Krejjh to maneuver to an open space (see Frogger above). Because statistics is an exercise in twisting your brain in circles like squeezing a wet wash cloth, in order to define how frequently Reaction Events occur, we must instead define how often they do not occur. The Reaction Space must be empty a certain amount of the time, or else there is literally nowhere to maneuver to- the space is literally impermeable. So, consulting the more difficult levels of Frogger, we are going to say the Reaction Space is empty 50% of the time. This means that every 1.5 seconds, there is a 50% chance that Krejjh has to pull some pants-shitting evasive maneuvers. This strikes me as acceptably challenging.

Now, each orbital lane does not have a 50% chance of spitting out a piece of rubble; rather, each lane has a very small chance of spitting out a piece of rubble and cumulatively, across hundreds of lanes, there is a 50% chance of one or more of them spitting out a piece of rubble within the selected timeframe. 50% = x raised to the number of orbital lanes, so a little bit of exponent math and we find that each lane has a 99.9% chance of being empty during a given second and a half.

Given a probability for an event over a certain time period, we are now able to calculate the return period of a given piece of rubble, which is to say, the average amount of time between events. Return periods are typically used to measure the probability of 100-year storms on a given year. Fun fact: There is a 37% chance that no 100-year storms will occur during a 100-year period, but there is also a 26% chance that there are 2 or more 100-year storms that occur over a 100-year period. Isn't statistics fun?

Using the average timing between pieces of rubble, we can determine the average spacing between pieces of rubble and therefore determine the density of the rubble field.

QUESTION 5: How many ships is that?

Alright, then. Here's the million dollar question: how many ships were destroyed to create the rubble field?

We will base this estimate off of the biggest modern fighter jet I could find with a 2-minute google search (I cannot overstate to you, dear reader, how little I care about fighter jets), so we're basing these ships off of the SU-35. Now, given that I have zero interest in caressing the delicate curvature of the Fighter Jet in the hopes of earning its trust and learning its True Volume, I'm going to estimate it as a cylinder with a diameter equivalent to the SU-35's height and assume the wings probably fit crammed up in the space there somehow. This gives us a volume of 587m^3, which makes the number of ships perpetually encircling Telemachus.......

Now, listen. This is an unrealistic number of ships. I do not believe that 70 billion people were killed in a single battle.

However.

When I set out on this estimate, I was willing to believe that 5 or so billion were. Between casualties on both sides, maybe a space station or two being destroyed, who knows, maybe they had a space trebuchet? This is only an order of magnitude away from a potentially reasonable number.

QUESTION 6: How Far Can I Stretch These Numbers?

Let's massage these numbers a bit and see what we can do.

First, let's round up the ship volume just a bit-- they're in space, maybe the FTL engine needs a bit of extra room. Let's call it 650m^3.

Then, we can start fiddling with the rubble frequency. Let's say the Iris II is 15 meters tall (it is a space yacht. maybe the ceilings are tall?) and then crank the reaction space up to 2 seconds (which means rubble can pass up to 2 seconds away, but it is still able to be anywhere nearer). And let's say the average piece of rubble is 4 meters across, not 5. Turn the the event frequency down to a 40% chance every 3 seconds, we can get this thing down to around 7 billion ships.

So, in conclusion: the Telemachus space debris ring is officially potentially reasonable! 🎉🎉🎉

Always remember, kids: number fudging is a proud, time-honored tradition when I do it, and a disgusting twisting of the nature of truth itself when anyone I don't like does it.

[iriscasefiles]

Now Hiring

Are you an extremely reliable, organized person who could use a little extra cash and currently has some bandwidth to pick up work? Do you have an ear for picking out great performances from several takes and a working knowledge of audio editing? Can you execute high quality work on a reasonably fast turn-around?

I'm currently looking for someone to sift through cast recordings of Starship Iris season 3, choose takes of each line, and cut those takes together into a vocal cut for our sound designer to work from. Pay would be $350 per episode, for 3 episodes (one of the three has most of the takes already chosen and notated on the script; that one would be more just about assembly). Prior experience doing this kind of thing would be a huge plus!

If you're interested and qualified, please email iriscasefiles at gmail with "Audio editor" somewhere in the subject line. Deadline is this noon this Sunday, the 15th of December 2024.

Signal boosts appreciated!

[littleacebee]

The only thing I have to say for myself is: Songs in podcasts my beloveds <3

IDs in alt text and under the cut

[ID: Front cover of a zine. In the middle of the page there is big red heart with text in it: „Songs in podcasts my beloveds”.

Page 1. Text saying: „I love songs in podcasts! They are so cool and great and amazing and wonderful and fun and fabulous and excellent and brilliant”

Page 2. On the top of the page there is text: „Me when there is song in podcast:”. Below there are three doodles of a person. First is singing dramatically, other two are dancing. There are colourful musical notes around.

Page 3. Text saying: „Some of my fav songs from podcasts with honest and totally not biased rating:

„Die Berliner Luft” from The Amelia Project - 10/10

Songs from Roguemaker - 10/10

Theme song from Night Shift - 10/10

„Magistrate’s daughter” Travelling light - 10/10”

Page 4. Text saying: „Musical episode of Mission rejected - 10/10

Folks songs in Camlann - 10/10

Songs from The Strange Case of Starship Iris - 10/10

„It’s all made up!” from Victoriocity - 10/10

Musical episode of The Bright Sessions - 10/10

Song in the last episode of Trice Forgotten - 10/10”

Page 5. Text saying: „”Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” from Midnight Burger - 10/10

Songs from Re: Dracula - 10/10

Cabaret Night at Cosmic Lounge from Stellar Firma - 69/10

Theme song from Dark Ages - 10/10

Songs from Welcome to the Brass Eagle - 10/10

The Ballad of Anne & Mary 1000/10”

Page 6. At the top of the page there is text saying: „”To be an Undertaker” from Wooden Overcoats - 100000000000000000000000/10”. Below there is doodle of a person playing on a mandolin.

Page 7. There is a doodle of a person holding a big sign with text: „You should add song to your podcast!”. At the bottom of the page there is text saying: „#fiction podcast zine event”. End ID]

[abortedfetusgummy]

[pineshrikes]

tscosi wip 💫 i had the thought that this show deserves a mass effect-style cool sci-fi poster and then my pen slipped

[nanoeggroll]

kiss the captain!!!!

[procyon-podcast-network]

Merch store moving to Dashery!

hey folks, just a quick heads' up to say that Procyon's merch store has moved, to procyonpodcastnetwork.dashery.com. the shopping experience (and products) should be the same, but the shows you support through merch sales will get a larger share of the profits than we did before.

and as we approach the ides of march and the weather in the northern hemisphere starts to show some sign of sun, this feels like a great time to invest in a Hot Frog Summer tank top. just sayin'.

love, jess

[oswaldpettyeyeart]

Please please please listen to The Strange Case Of Starship Iris its so so great. These are just initial design notes for my favorite asian people....

[a-side-character]

I love when a woman is a Captain

[soph-the-podcast-nerd]

Finally finished my starship iris art!

[scrawleditalix]

I recorded a cover of @iriscasefiles "Fear for the Storm" and I am pretty pleased with how it came out. It's been a long while since I've played piano so I kept the instrumental pretty stripped down. Hope y'all enjoy ^-^

[iriscasefiles]

New Merch Design!

Hey folks, looking for a gift for someone in your life who enjoys Starship Iris, or possibly a lil gift for yourself? (We've all been there, I won't judge.) Consider paying a visit to our merch store, where you can find our newest "Fear For The Storm" design not just on an assortment of different cuts and colors of T-shirts but also hoodies, tank tops, stickers, coffee mugs, pillows, and cloth tapestries (?!?), among others. Better yet, for all of today (1st of December, 2024) there is a pretty nice discount. Any purchase will help the Procyon Podcast Network suite of shows continue to fund ourselves.

Happy December, and remember: "The old stars are of no importance, they're not what I navigate by!"

[bekaterrier]

Hello friends! Thinking about the upcoming holidays? Looking for a meaningful handmade gift? Just love podcasts? Why not get a handmade podcast-inspired bracelet!

For the next four weeks (until Dec 4th), I'm running a little promo just for y'all: get 10% off with promo code POD10 (or click the link below). I have over 40 podcast-inspired bracelets listed, so come check them out!

[aclickbaittitle]

What do Fiction Podcasts have to say about the future?

Whenever you write a story set years from now, how you construct the world around it creates a new way to see the future, a fictional image to a reality we could be headed towards.

Fiction podcasts love to play within the sci-fi genre, and the thousands of audio dramas they have given us new pictures of what our world could look like in the next century (or a few years closer).

In this article I want to analyze the settings in the following shows: Hello from the Hallowoods, Desperado and The Strange Case of Starship Iris.

Hello From the Hallowoods

Hello From the Hallowoods welcomes us to a world ravaged by black rains and capitalism’s greed. After a natural (but man-made) disaster involving acid rain and flooding the world’s successions gave birth to two different types of beings: those who prefer to dream in a company’s “Prime Dream” and those who stay awake to continue living.

Even though the world is post-apocalyptic on paper, it never feels like it. Rather it is enchanted, there are woods where gods, revenants, devils, giants and zombies fall in love with themselves and with each other, places where community is found.

This, I attribute this to the fact that most characters don’t lament a nebulous “end of the world”, since this is the world they have always been living in and they are going to make the best of it: find family, friends, lovers, build homes and destroy bigots.

You leave the world of Hello From the Hallowoods knowing that even a doomed world is worthy of being awake for.

Desperado Podcast

Desperado Podcast also takes us to a world that was looted, but this time mainly by religious colonialism. 

Neo-colionalism has made itself tangible through genocides and direct targeting to believers that worship other than the “Old man in the Sky”.  In its first episode a community in México which revere La Catrina (a goddess in the show inspired by a popular figure in mexican art) is wiped out by the crusaders. 

From there our protagonist Elio is the sole survivor of his people, however all is not lost as he teams up with Talia (the chosen of Baron Samedi) and Shinji (whom I believe is a death kami?).

Elio now literally carries the memories of his community as the vessel for her goddess. Likewise in Desperado, the magic of the characters is the legacy their ancestors gave them, and it is what keeps them alive in the violent world. 

Though if we are ever to worry that our protagonist could fall into its clutches, the structure of the world soothes our preoccupations. You see, it is the characters within the story that are narrating their own experiences to the audience so we know that after all the pain, they ended up safe.

What Desperado tells us about the future is that, even with the ongoing genocides, white-washing of our culture, and neo-colonialism in general we will end up victorious in the end, and that our history will be forever within our memory.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

The Strange Case of Starship Iris, is the most sci-fi audio drama out of the bunch. It follows the crew of the Rumour, a smuggler's ship, as they try to uncover the dark secrets of the Federation and evade persecution.

As with the other two properties, the future is not an easy world, but our characters are making the most of it.

In a post-war galaxy, the crew of the Rumour is smuggling space-ship parts, medicine, and erotic magazines until they find a help alarm coming from the Starship Iris and rescue biologist Violet Liu. From there they are involved in a mystery which, if the truth comes to life, they could be charged with treason against the Intergalactic Republic. 

Throughout the two seasons of the podcast, Violet Liu and company heal together the scars that the war and its result: the Intergalactic Republic left them. They fight against the government not only through robberies, infiltration, and coordinated efforts with rebel groups but also by eating latkes, drinking, singing shanties, and getting gay jewish married.

To conclude

if queer podcasts are telling us something about the future, it is that it may be equally messed up as the present but that queer, disabled people of color will exist beyond the end of the world and that even in the bleakest of futures we will continue to love and thrive.

[worldgonewrongpod]

Hey y'all- we have officially launched World Gone Wrong! It would mean a ton to me if you would go check out this show- we've have been pouring our heart and soul into it over the past six months.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or you can search "world gone wrong" wherever you listen to podcasts. MOST IMPORTANTLY- go tell your friends to listen, if you think they'd like the show~ The show is an unapologetic response to the feeling of "every day there is a new disaster"- except in this fictionalized version, the disasters we're dealing with are werewolves, alien body snatchers, time distortions, etc- basically every episode of The X-Files and Supernatural happening at the same time. It's also a celebration of the importance of deep, connected friendships- something we feel doesn't get enough prominence in media. The show stars Michael Turrentine and Hilary Williams- and the first chapter was written by Jessica Best (@idiopathicsmile), and produced and created by Eleanor Hyde and Jeffrey Nils Gardner (@euripidesredux) ~ We're so ABSURDLY lucky to get to work with these wonderful artists- it's been an absolute joy so far. ALSO- we're throwing a party to celebrate! Saturday, April 6 at 8pm! Whiskey Girl Tavern in Andersonville- we'll have the band who played our theme song (Olivia and the Lovers) doing a set, and we'd love to see you!

No cover, good times! Link for rsvp/reminders here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/world-gone-wrong-launch-party-tickets-856416874927?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl

[idiopathicsmile]

audio dramas i've written for, rated solely on the basis of how well the most commonly shortened version of their name reflects the content of the show

Unwell: a Midwestern Gothic Mystery — I've never seen this one rendered as UMGM, always just 'Unwell,' but I'm including that as a technicality. I think it may take a season or two for the realization to kick in what a good name "Unwell" is, but it will eventually hit you. I'm gonna say 9/10, at this point who isn't a little unwell?

The Strange Case of Starship Iris — most frequently shortened to TSCOSI, which at least I pronounce kind of like "teas cozy." There is very occasionally tea in the show, and I know some listeners describe the overall effect as cozy! For me, the worldbuilding is a little too grim to work as a comfort listen, but absolutely no shade. 6/10, the differences between us make the world a more colorful and interesting place.

Keep It Steady — KIS, pronounced in my head like "kiss." The show is nominally a rom-com. There are not, like, a ton of kisses thus far because gay fake-dating in a conservative high school in 2005 doesn't really lend itself to that, but there have been some, and friends, I have it on good authority there might be more. 8/10, don't stop believing ;)

World Gone Wrong — this one is generally shortened to "WGW." Listen. I have a confession to make. The whole time I've worked on this show under this title, I have always pronounced its initialism in my head as "wugga woo." I don't know how or why this started. It literally doesn't save you a single syllable. I just did a quick web search, to make sure "wugga" doesn't mean anything objectionable, and one of the first things that came up was a minor monster from the Muppet Show named Hugga Wugga. Honestly, I think that degree of chaos doesn't not-fit the world of the show. 7/10, can't stop won't stop