Airskin magic?

Nice that they can inflate the airskin to equivalent of about 3 km altitude on Earth.  I wonder what it says about 8-ball that the air isn't leaking between the hull and the "shell", or through the shell?  The hypothesis given on how 8-ball formed should have left the interior pretty much solid ice, but for the ship to crunch through implies some empty space underneath (at the least, ice with some empty space between crystals, making it compressible -- effectively "vaccuum snow").  But if there's space under the shell, shouldn't the air leak through the breach into the compression space(s) under the shell, even if the rest of the shell is continuous enough to be airtight (unlikely, when it's sintered out of carbon dust, essentially an aerogel made of vacuum welded soot)?

Nice that they can inflate the airskin to equivalent of about 3 km altitude on Earth.  I wonder what it says about 8-ball that the air isn't leaking between the hull and the "shell", or through the shell?...

Were you under the impression that the local crust wasn't sealed with... airskin? 

What about heat issues? There is a heat generating ship inside, we probably get varied solar input -- won't that altogether cause some significant changes in temperature of the air (risking burns and frostbite to people exposed directly to it) and significant pressure changes? Burns and frostbite might be an exaggeration, as there is next to none convection there and (probably, this is my intuition only) less heat transfer to air due to low pressure, but it can interfere with suit temperature controls.

I'm also somewhat curious how do they deal with pollution under airskin -- various evaporating liquids from the ship, gases venting from it, moisture -- probably they use water evaporators (or sweat evaporation through suit) for suit cooling (one hour of suit operation would use up on the order of 100g of water for cooling of body heat alone). Probably they won't have any moisture problems, as the amount they can generate is limited by their water supply, but I would be concerned about small amount of propellants making it into the atmosphere under airskin, unless they use heated neutral gas for that.

By the way, the amount of air in there is truly massive -- I figured >10tons if at near-Earth temperature, decreasing linearly with temperature.

Nice that they can inflate the airskin to equivalent of about 3 km altitude on Earth.  I wonder what it says about 8-ball that the air isn't leaking between the hull and the "shell", or through the shell?  The hypothesis given on how 8-ball formed should have left the interior pretty much solid ice, but for the ship to crunch through implies some empty space underneath (at the least, ice with some empty space between crystals, making it compressible -- effectively "vaccuum snow").  But if there's space under the shell, shouldn't the air leak through the breach into the compression space(s) under the shell, even if the rest of the shell is continuous enough to be airtight (unlikely, when it's sintered out of carbon dust, essentially an aerogel made of vacuum welded soot)?

Because this comic depicts the future, and a none-too-pleasant one at that, one must assume "sufficiently advanced technology."

Just because it seems like magic, or maybe a not fully enough explained SFX, doesnt mean it isnt.

In comparison, can you enjoy watching/reading Mobile Suit Gundam without knowing the intricacies of an ultra-compact Minovsky-catalyzed fusion reactor?
or perhaps without knowing whether a Zaku II's thrusters are chemical or thermo-nuclear rockets?

I would say that one can, and most do.  Just like this comic.

Wow, what a bunch of spam that was!   

What puzzles me is that if the material in the outermost shell is used to seal the ground underneath the tents, why wouldn't the outermost shell have been what was constructed first?

To me, that's a much simpler objection than the ones raised so far.