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DannyJC13
DOOP Secretary
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Strange, I've picked up on this too, but never thought about mentioning it.
I think that they are just really close to Earth's atmosphere/gravitational pull. The ships can fly and stuff, but as soon as the engines blow out, they get pulled down by gravity. Same thing happens to Sal's ship.
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transgender nerd under canada
DOOP Ubersecretary
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1:14:18 is where it happens. The Nimbus looks to be somewhere between LEO and Geostationary, so it's reasonable to assume that something so massive would fall towards the Earth. What you're seeing is an angle shot. You're looking straight down (more or less) at the Earth. Anything falling towards it from that height is going to do so in a decaying orbit, ie: not forwards from your POV, but towards the bottom of the screen. The angle shot pans downwards, so we can see this effect in action. From the side it would have looked something like this:
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DonnyJC14
Crustacean
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Tnuk said it all. It is easy!
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DannyJC13
DOOP Secretary
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Tnuk said it all. It is easy!
What the fuck.
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DannyJC13
DOOP Secretary
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It's me!
That means fuck all. Stop playing games.
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DannyJC13
DOOP Secretary
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It's not me, tnuk. I'm not this annoying.
Yeah, yeah, I know what's coming...
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spira
Liquid Emperor
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Ooh, another tnuk-diagram. It makes sense! The detail on the death star is fantastic.
In the movie or the diagram? I noticed that about the diagram and wondered how much time was spent bedazzling the little yellow circle.
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DannyJC13
DOOP Secretary
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This is hilarious, DonnyJC14 is my favourite thing ever.
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Fnord
Starship Captain
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1:14:18 is where it happens. The Nimbus looks to be somewhere between LEO and Geostationary, so it's reasonable to assume that something so massive would fall towards the Earth.
That doesn't match up with your picture, though; the Nimbus should be headed directly towards the center of the Earth, unless it had some remaining momentum. (All the other mass is negligible.) If you liked this thread, you might want to check out Tom Roger's book Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics which talks about why, among other things, you don't want to explode a spaceship in outer space. (He ranks The Core as the movie with the slipperiest grasp of physics and science.)
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transgender nerd under canada
DOOP Ubersecretary
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That doesn't match up with your picture, though; the Nimbus should be headed directly towards the center of the Earth, unless it had some remaining momentum. (All the other mass is negligible.)
The Nimbus falls towards the Earth along a trajectory defined by its direction and velocity at the start of the fall. Since the Earth is moving in the background, this means she's not in Geostationary orbit. Since it's moving slowly, it means that she's close. Nothing on GSO falls directly towards the Earth, because to be at that point, you need to have a certain amount of momentum and hold onto it. Otherwise your orbit decays. The Nimbus is under power until she's holed, therefore she's holding position and has some momentum. It is logical to assume that this momentum is translated along the vector at right-angles to the blast, just like a gyroscope (the arrangement shown is effectively a gyroscopic one). This follows the trajectory described by the falling ship. You'll also note that my diagrammed trajectory is much longer, and more exaggerated than the one shown in the movie... I did this partly to illustrate what's happening more obviously and simply. The Nimbus doesn't actually fall in a shallow arc. It's fairly steep. She's falling directly toward the Earth's centre of gravity (not necessarily the same thing as the centre), but she's also following a course described by her initial momentum and the force applied to her by the blast from the Gold Death Star. I did think about this before posting the picture y'know. It's not perfect, given that there are some assumptions involved. But they are reasonable ones. It's not exactly rigrous, but it's rigorous enough for a comedy sci-fi cartoon movie, IMO.
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Inquisitor Hein
Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #24 on: 10-15-2011 13:37 »
« Last Edit on: 10-15-2011 13:45 »
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Aww that's so cute you called the Nimbus "she". Not many people call ships and trains "she" anymore.
Sorry, ladies, but there's no way I can resist that saying : “Ships are like women.... expensive to rig, and difficult to steer”
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Speedmetal
Poppler
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ROFL at that diagram, the sheer notion that someone took the time to draw some half baked diagram is f'ing hilarious.
I took the time to sign up just to comment on the diagram.....that made my day!
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Tachyon
DOOP Secretary
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Welcome to PEEL, Speedmetal. Stick around: it's an interesting place. And geeky and weird, and you might need a thick skin and a relaxed attitude at first, to be sure, but it is interesting.
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transgender nerd under canada
DOOP Ubersecretary
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ROFL at that diagram, the sheer notion that someone took the time to draw some half baked diagram is f'ing hilarious.
It's a lot easier to explain things via a diagram than it is to make sixteen wall-of-text posts that outline the concepts involved in something every single time the same old questions keep popping up. So I now have quite a range of PEEL diagrams that (hopefully) explain complicated answers as simply as possible, and save me from typing several thousand words only to have somebody reply "what?" or "tl:dr". Here is a selection of the stuff I've made to explain things to PEEL recently. Finally, all my diagrams are at least three quarters and sometimes as much as 95% baked, you obnoxious little fungus.
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coldangel
DOOP Secretary
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In a perfect world, you'd be paid for your posts.
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coldangel
DOOP Secretary
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That'll always be the dream... [/wistful sigh]
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