The proprietor displays an astonishing level of patience. Must have a lot of practice with this sort of thing due to the proximity to benighted Evergreen College.
Private Sector Arms in Olympia, Washington, looks like they have some neato stuff on the walls.
It would be entertaining if the end result of this interaction was that their sales go up.
There’s a spaceship on the screen. It is therefore a nerd-priority to determine *everything* about it, starting with “just how big is it?” Of course this exercise could be quickly negated by a simple mention of length on screen or off. But lacking that, we can logic ourselves into a rough estimate.
First up, the internet provides two photos that show canon illustrations of the ship, diagrams that appear on display screen on the bridge of the Orville:
The first shows an inboard profile of the main hull with the engine loops; the second shows a top view of the whole ship with a closer view of the cross-section of the main hull. For scaling purposes, that cross section is what we’re after. however, it must be noted right up front that the cross section, canon and used repeatedly on-screen as it is… is WRONG. it must be an earlier iteration of the designs, since there are some meaningful detail differences. The bridge, for starters, is shown further aft that it actually is. And there are lounge “bumps” fore and aft that do not appear on the final design. So it *may* turn out that the interior arrangement could be equally erroneous. However, at this time this is what we got.
Also note that the full side-view marries the 2D-drafted interior profile with what looks like 3D rendered engine loops… loops that are shown not square side-on. So, that’s also less than entirely helpful. but again… it’s what there is to work with.
OK, so how to use these images to determine scale? “The Orville” clearly hearkens back to TNG-era Trek for much of the styling. But the Orville is not a major capital ship like the Enterprise was, but a smaller vessel… like Treks Voyager. Fortunately Voyager has been well defined. There are a large number of “master systems display” inboard profile diagrams of the Voyager to pick from, including this one:
The Voyager MSD clearly shows the decks. The Orville “MSD” also shows its decks:
It’s by no means certain that the Orville uses the same spacing between decks that Voyager did… but again, it’s the best assumption that can be made at this time. So, the thing to do is to take the decks of the known-quantity-Voyager and scale the decks of the Orville to line up, like this:
Once you’ve scaled the Orville diagrams to match the deck-scale of the Voyager diagram, everything lines up looking like this:
And what this results in is the Orville being *really* close in length to the Voyager… 337 meters for the Orville, 345 meters for Voyager. I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the shows producers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s an in-joke here that the Orville is supposed to be exactly the same length as Voyager.
So for now, and until I see something better, I’m going with a length of 337 meters for Orville. Given the lack of a “secondary hull” the Orville thus seems to have substantially less internal volume than Voyager, so probably a smaller crew. But interestingly the Orville is *much* faster than Voyager. In the episode “Pria” it is claimed that Orville can fly at 10 light years per hour. If it was suddenly dumped 70,000 light years from home as Voyager was, it could fly home in 7,000 hours… 291 days. “The Orville” could thus copy the “ST:V” model by having the ship tossed to the other side of the galaxy – say, a season finale – and could wrap things up entirely within the next season. When the Orville gets back to Earth, rather than being met with celebrations, it’s met with “where the hell have you been? You’re late.”
Sanity check – a comparisons of the lounges and shuttlecraft between the two ships:
Looks about right.
A new potentially Earth-like exoplanet has been announced, Ross 128 b. It’s 10.89 light years away (12th closest star system to Earth), the planet masses about 1.35 Earths and is in the inner edge of the habitable zone, getting about 1.38 time the solar radiation as Earth. Ross 128 is a red dwarf, so:
1: the”year” is only 9.86 days
2: The planet very probably doesn’t have a moon due to the close distance to the star
3: The planet is probably tidally locked, or in some rotational resonance
Fortunately, Ross 128 is a very quiet and well-behaved red dwarf, unlike Proxima Centauri which is constantly having massive flares. So while Proxima b almost certainly has long since had any atmosphere stripped away, Ross 128b, if it had an atmosphere, has a good chance of still having it.
Ross 128 is also an old star, meaning lots of hydrogen and helium and little else. Which *may*mean that the planetary system *may* also be low in the heavier metals. So even though Ross 128 b is more massive than Earth, if it doesn’t have as heavy of a nickel-iron core, the bulk density could be far lower and the surface gravity could be Earthlike. But without a metal core the chances of a magnetosphere are greatly reduced, especially if it only rotates every 9.86 days. Without a magnetosphere, the atmosphere has undoubtedly suffered and the surface will be badly irradiated.
“Salvator Mundi” was sold at auction in London in 1958 for a whopping £45.
It’s not in great shape. For centuries it was not known to be a da Vinci, and apparently some of the attempts to clean it were less than stellar. Still, someone thought it was worth the better part of half a *billion* dollars.
Some neato features: the face is in “soft focus,” while the hands are clearly in focus. The crystal orb shows a number of internal flaws. But I don’t know about the view *through* the orb; I would think that the hand and cloth behind it would be far more distorted. This might indicate that the artist – presumed to be Leonardo da Vinci, and boy howdy won’t the buyer be annoyed if it turns to to not actually be a da Vinci – didn’t actually have a true crystal ball at the time and was just guessing about how it would distort the image.
A while ago an ebay seller had a display model of a maneuverable re-entry vehicle, a warhead for an ICBM.There was apparently no documentation to go with it, so details are pretty much utterly lacking. Still, it does look reasonably likely to have been a “real” display model built by or for the USAF or a defense contractor. It’s simple… a cone with four sides shaved off with four added flaps for control. This basic geometry has been popular for maneuverable warhead concepts for decades; McDonnell-Douglas used a similar shape (explicitly stated as having been derived from their maneuverable MIRV studies) for their Delta Clipper SSTO, and an even closer shape for their X-33 and follow-on concepts.
A meteor flashed over Phoenix, Arizona and lit up the sky last night.
Something BRILLIANT just flew across the Phoenix sky around 8:30 this evening! Check out what our Phoenix City Cam captured! Look to the right of this screen……#Meteor #Citycam #PHX pic.twitter.com/T3Zys30gXR
— City of Phoenix, AZ (@CityofPhoenixAZ) November 15, 2017
Did anyone else see this tonight in Phoenix, AZ? #meteor ? pic.twitter.com/SeJlZaP9tW
— LRC (@LRonanC) November 15, 2017
Loud boom heard around 2PM suspected to be a sonic boom.
If this was Russia there’d already be a thousand dashcam videos of whatever it was.
Want. Want. WANT. WANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANT,
I’m a boring man, I admit if. I’d love for someone to (legally) give me a supercar… because I could sell it and pay off my mortgage. The idea of such cars is appealing, but the reality is that you have *lot* of power packed into a small volume that has relatively low mass, meaning that it accelerates *really* fast. Which sounds cool till you realize that you’re not running on rails and that the world is not set up to allow you to drive unimpeded. So… I prefer simpler, more rational cars. Something with good gas mileage, a good safety rating, fair amount of cargo space, a ring mount and good grippy tires is really all I need.
Especially after watching this video of supercars (largely Lambos, if i read them correctly) being driven by fookin morons.
The BBC website has an autoplay video covering a recent “Flat Earth Society” convention in North Carolina. It certainly seems to have been better attended than it should have been. But the perpetual question about flat-Earthers is: how many of them are actual believer, how many of them are there as a lark, how many of them are outright pretending to believe? Flat Earth is such a patently ludicrous notion that it seems like it would be reasonable to suggest that most people who claim to buy into it really don’t. But then you look at the vast spectrum of stupid that humans glom onto with a passion and… yeah, I suppose there really can be that many people who actually think the Earth is a flat disk.
As with most conspiracy theories, I doubt that most true believing Flat Earthers could be logicked or evidenced out of their belief. And the harder you try, the harder they’ll dig in their heels. It provides them a sense of wonder coupled with a sense of “I’m one of the *special* people because I know *The* *Truth.*” Such a feeling cannot be reliably countered with “No, you’re not.”