Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

valhovey.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 255 posts

Re: Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

#52

Post by acheron »

tantalor wrote: post #21
nekusar wrote: post #10

It can be summed up as "Ken Meets Jesus", "Ken Goes to Space", "Ken is a bumbling moron", "Ken's first friend". "Ken's White Savior moment" This appears to be the norm for US based scifi now. Glad I'm watching movies like The Wandering Earth and Alienoid instead. It had a good premise. But it also fell apart immediately. Like, they only sent 3 people, 2 whom died on this UBER CRITICAL SAVE THE PLANET idea? And Ryan G…

> White Savior moment ???

It’s a troll. Just flag and move on.

Re: Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

#53

Post by speleo »

dkobia wrote: post #4

Thank you for making this whoever you are. There is a wonderful video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FT-oz9aZU4 that visualizes space travel and time dilation in Hail Mary. What I wished I had immediately after watching it was an interactive stellar chart.

You're welcome! I love that channel so much. Their videos and the blog post I link in the about section/citations on the starmap were inspirations for making this.

Re: Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

#55

Post by Mogzol »

ggreer wrote: post #9

Just FYI the sizes of the planets, stars, and their orbits are not to scale at all. To get an idea of how empty space is, there are 63,360 inches in a mile, and 63,239 astronomical units in a light-year. So if you scaled everything down such that Earth was 1 inch from the Sun, Neptune would be 30 inches away and Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away. If you were using a 4k display and had the Sun and Alpha Centauri vi…

Another comparison: if you count the "solar system" as ending at Neptune's orbit (obviously it extends much further, but just for the sake of comparison), then you could fit ~4465 "solar systems" in between our sun and the closest star, Proxima Centauri.

Re: Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

#56

Post by speleo »

Hi there! This is Val, I made the star chart. There's a little "about" blurb you can open in a modal on the site, but I wanted to mention that this demo uses the amazing GAIA DR3 dataset from ESA. I have a Python script that renders all 1.8+ billion stars into custom images, which is what I used for the skybox. The star positions and colors all use the GAIA data (save for a few bright stars not in the set). The data is amazing, and if you have any interest in doing some fun projects with open data I recommend checking it out: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr3

Re: Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

#58

Post by manmal »

the_af wrote: post #48
api wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even sci-fi writers that try to get this right have a hard time wrapping their heads around it. "It's called space for a reason." When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That i…

> When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That is close. This is noteworthy because The Expanse tried to get this better than other scifi, say Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica,…

The Expanse also was (for me) the first to introduce the concept of a braking burn. Star Wars ships just stop without turning around - can’t unsee it. I think the way X-wing fighters “fly” also wouldn’t work at all, I don’t see any reaction mass coming out the sides.
Post reply on HN