The moral is if you want to do interstellar travel, even to the closest star in the sky, you need more than your average space ship.īut wait! Sci-fi has the answer right? Warp Drive! Wormholes! We are saved! Wait.
Voyager 1 isn’t headed toward Alpha Centauri but if it was, at its current velocity (17 km/s) it would take another 77,000 years to get there. It takes months to years for our probes to make it to other planets, and Voyager 1 you’ll recall has been flying for over 30 years now and is only just about to go into interstellar space. As you might recall from my other posts, space travel is really frakking hard and space is really frakking huge. In the movie humans travel to and from Pandora, a fictional Earth-like moon orbiting a gas giant (Polyphemus, also technically fictional, though not impossible) in the Alpha Centauri star system which is the closest star system to ours ranging about 4.37 light years away (1.34 parsecs for astronomy buffs or anyway that prefers that unit). Mmm… where do I start? Well let’s get some background first. It is likely the novelization of Avatar devoted more than a page to the ship but when the rest of it is still about Na’vi, misrepresented human interests, and Jake Sully’s poor life choices I haven’t bothered to read it to find out.īeauty shot, I use this as my Google+ and Twitter header images because shiny. Why is that such a crime? Because James Cameron doesn’t half-ass the details, and therefore this ship is designed with all the intent of actually using it for an interstellar mission in reality (assuming Pandora and Unobtanium actually existed, more on that later).
Such a crime to deny the ship the true time it deserved to be shown off. There are quite a few, but besides some concept renderings it is all stills from the literally 30 seconds of screen time the ship has in the movie. The header image of this blog is a concept render of the ship that appeared in Avatar, but not the only picture of it. So, as you have probably figured out by now, this is the post about the ISV Venture Star I promised a while back. As South Park put it, James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron, now if only he could raise the bar in reality as in that episode… Part of this is Cameron doesn’t half-ass things (story aside, but the series isn’t done I suppose so I’ll wait and see what the sequels bring), and his brother is an aerospace engineer too so that helps. It is the details that make his movies shine. I found the story of James Cameron’s Avatar to be highly derivative.
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