About
Same block. Further from it.
Rocket Cats is what happened when the Brooklyn Cats stopped looking down the street and started looking up.
It starts on a stoop in Bed-Stuy
There is a block in Bedford-Stuyvesant where a specific set of cats have a specific set of arrangements. RyCat moves through it like he owns it. Lobster Cat settles anything that needs settling, all twenty-two pounds of him. C-Train hears a problem three stops before it arrives. The Plug can get you a thing that is not supposed to be gettable, and nobody asks how.
That block is a real place you can walk. It has stoops and storefronts and a subway that goes somewhere, and the cats on it have somewhere to be. It was the whole world, and it was enough.
Then somebody looked up
Nobody on the block set out to build a space programme. It assembled itself out of cats who already had the job. If you can keep a building’s power on you can keep a ship’s power on. If you can read a room in half a second you can read a planet nobody has classified. If you can hear a train coming through concrete, you can hear a signal through a hundred million kilometres of nothing.
So the postings went out and everyone got the version of their own job that happens further away. Bonny teaches orientation and mobility by day and runs a pharmacy by night, which turns out to be the exact job description for keeping a crew alive between planets. Static plots every transfer burn and lets somebody else read it out loud, because the name on the flight plan was never the point.
Nobody becomes a different cat in space
This is the part that matters, and it is the rule the whole thing is built on. A rocket does not give anyone a personality transplant. Lobster Cat in a hardsuit is Lobster Cat. Skitz is not assigned to the mission and is aboard the mission anyway, and the review board has stopped writing it up.
The programme runs on a procedure written by Bandit, who is not here to run it. His red bow tie sits on the console at the front of mission control and the room is named for him, and the crew still asks what he would have called on a go/no-go. There is a window on the observation deck that belongs to Luna. The light stays on there. Nobody has ever suggested otherwise.
What you can actually do
Two halves of one place. In the block you walk Bed-Stuy on foot, drive it, go underground, get up on the roofs, and talk to whoever is out. In launch control you pick a destination off a real solar-system map, fly the transfer yourself, charge the approach computer and put the legs down.
The bodies are the real ones at their real distances, measured in AU. The inner planets, their moons, and a run of asteroids will let you land. The gas giants will not — you get an orbit and a very good look, which is the honest answer for a world with no surface to stand on. Reach Neptune and the interstellar drive calibrates, and after that the distances stop being measured in AU at all.
Two of the crew fly blind
ByteCat is large, fluffy, blind, and the best systems mind on the programme. He flies by instrument and by memory, which past Mars is the only way anyone flies at all, because the light is an hour late and nothing you can see is current. PixelCat laid out the cockpit by touch and travel, and is the reason every control on the ship can be found without looking at it.
Neither of them is a lesson. They are just the two cats you would want on that ship, and the ship is better designed because they were there first.
Where it came from
Rocket Cats is a spinoff of Brooklyn Cats, and it runs on the same engine that renders that block — which is why the streets feel like the streets, and why the cast came over intact instead of being redrawn for a new genre. Same crew. Same block. A great deal further from it.