1 Spanners: We've been contracted to do a planetary survey and find usable new worlds.
1 Serron, Paris, Iki Piki: Cool!
2 GM: Best of all, I've made my own random planetary system tables, based on real astrophysics!
3 [caption]: Weeks later...
3 {outside of the ship, showing a rocky, grey planet in the background}
3 Serron: Man, this is the hundredth tide-locked airless rockball orbiting an M-dwarf we've found in a row!
4 Iki Piki: You forgot that system with the uninhabitable gas giant with no interesting features whatsoever.

Thanks to Constantine Thomas for lending me his CPU cycles to render panel 3 with POV-Ray. The image took 46 minutes and 55 seconds to render at 320 by 240 pixels. The full image is shown here at that size:

My geriatric Pentium II took over two hours to partially render the same scene, getting only 60% of the way through it. I need faster hardware!

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2012-02-16 Rerun commentary: Pentium II... wait... that means I've only upgraded my computer once since 2003.

No wonder I'm starting to feel a bit behind the times. I bet a current-day home machine in a relatively standard configuration could render that image in a minute or two.