Fox has announced that they are moving "Dawn of the POTA" to July 11, 2013 from July 18. This is the date that was/is going to have "Fast & Furious 7". After the tragic death of star Paul Walker, whether F&F 7 can keep that date is unsure (Walker had important scenes still to do) but Universal insists they are going to stay there. Whichever date POTA chose, "Fast" was going to be serious competition. "Fast 6" made almost $800 million worldwide last summer. Whether they can mourn and then get it together in time remains to be seen.

  Fun fact: the first "Fast and Furious" movie came out the same summer as POTA2001. Extra credit: What year did POTA2001 come out?

 

 

  http://www.deadline.com/2013/12/fox-shifts-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-release-date/

 

  NECA has tweeted a roughie of their soldier gorilla. Christmas is over. The last week before the Year of the Ape is upon you, NOW!

 

  https://twitter.com/NECA_TOYS/status/415696662213189632/photo/1

 

  They're fairly cheap, about $15 to $25 (depending on the accessories) at places like Toys 'R Us. Probably marked up at comic book and collectible places. Those cheapo Hasbro "Star Wars" figures are $10 now!

  In fact here's a recent one, from the Fox property "Predator":

  http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_073113a.htm

  They also do larger scale but I don't know if "Apes" will get that treatment:

  http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_120613a.htm

From: Dario

Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2013 12:13 PM

To: PotaDG@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [PotaDG] NECA soldier gorilla

 

Does. Anyone have any idea what kind of price range we can expect for these? I am not familiar with NECA although they seem to be fairly reputable from what little I've learned since this release was announced.

Dario

On Dec 25, 2013, at 10:14 PM, "Jeff K." <veetus@...> wrote:

 

  NECA has tweeted a roughie of their soldier gorilla. Christmas is over. The last week before the Year of the Ape is upon you, NOW!

 

  https://twitter.com/NECA_TOYS/status/415696662213189632/photo/1

In my scenario, incidentally, Space Ship Earth [SSE] is shaped like a dirigible with a length [i.e. X-axis] of 240 feet, and a width or 'beam' [both Y-axis and Z-axis] of 160 feet. All plane cutaway views through the X-axis are 3-by-2 ellipses. The YZ plane cutaway is a circle 160 feet in diameter, and all planes parallel to the YZ plane are circles diminishing to the tip of the bow, 120 feet forward of the ship's center, and 120 feet aftward (where the hyperdrive is at). Thus, the shape of SSE is technically a prolate spheroid, with a trusswork that resembles a grid of latitude circles and longitude ellipses, with the bow being the "North Pole" and the stern (aft-most point) being the "South Pole." Inside the "tropical" zone there is a drum-shaped centrifuge 120 feet in diameter and 60 feet wide, with the actual inner "floor" of the spinning centrifuge being about 57.3 feet in radius from the center of the "hub" connecting the NORTH hemispheroid from the SOUTH one, so that the inner surface of the wheel is exactly 360 feet around.

The "arctic" zone surrounding the "north pole" of the bow is a hatch wide enough to cover a cylindrical cavity extending 'vertically' (or 'southerly') down towards the center. This cavity is a zero-gee drydock where a team of ANSA astronaut technicians will eventually construct -- one at a time -- the two ANSA shuttles that we see in PLANET and BENEATH, out of prefabricated parts stored in cargo holds in SSE's "north" hemisphere.

But before they do that, the ANSA shuttle commanded by Virdon launches from Cape Kennedy on 10-03-1971 (12:00:00 EST), rocketing up to Low Earth Orbit ["LEO"] first, then doing a plane-change burn when over the Earth's equator so as to arrive at geosynchronous orbit ["GEO"] altitude. The world will think that they're on a mission to deploy another satellite at GEO (to join the three TRINITY satellites already up there), but their true goal is to get to GEO and then -- with SSE visible from that high altitude vantage point -- to do a 'jump' through hyperspace to the Earth-Moon L2 point's vicinity. They emerge from hyperspace a few hundred miles away from SSE, use ordinary rocket power to close the distance, and then dock their ANSA shuttle inside SSE's docking bay.

When Virdon, Burke, and Jones arrive, and the SSE hatch is closed, they float out of their shuttle's gull-wing hatch, dressed not in ANSA flightsuits but in NASA-style helmeted EVA suits, like the ones the Ape-onauts are seen wearing in ESCAPE. Their mission was disguised as a NASA mission, after all, and once they arrive up in the secret ANSA 'mothership' they can give their hosts the 3 bulky EVA-suits and change into their personalized ANSA flight-suits.

After less than a day, Virdon and his two crewmen fly their ANSA shuttle backwards out of the forward docking bay and then, once they are a safe distance away from SSE, aim their shuttle's midline axis towards Alpha Centauri. On 10-04-1971 (07:19:00 EST) they activate their Hasslein-designed hyperdrive, bound for the Alpha Centauri system about 4.38 LY away, such that each moment of SHIP-TIME ["ST"] for them equals 4356.570483 EARTH-TIME ["ET"] moments. That is, their TIME DILATION RATIO ["TDR"] IS 4356.570483. Their velocity, as perceived by the Universe, is 0.493446414c. Their flight-time to the Neutral Point between the stars Alpha Centauri A and B is 8.877670776 ET years = 3242.500005 ET days. At their TDR, they will experience 0.7442781 ST days = 17 hours 51 minutes 45.628 seconds. ETA at Alpha Centauri: 8-19-1980 [19:19:00.432768]. The reason Virdon and his crew don't need a full bathroom on their ship is because their flight-plan involves them spending a little less than 18 hours journeying to their destination… another 18 hours journeying back to Earth… and, in between, perhaps half a day doing micro 'jumps' through hyperspace to reconnoiter the Alpha Centauri system: they'll have been gone from Earth only about 48 hours or so of SHIP-TIME. During that minimal time, the most they'd need to do is urinate maybe half a dozen times, assuming that they had been put on an all-liquid protein diet prior to their Cape Kennedy launch.

Back to SSE. After Virdon's team leaves it, the SSE crew sets about constructing the two ANSA shuttles -- the PLANET and BENEATH ships, which I tend to call "Alfa" and "Bravo" -- as well as setting up the habitats within the now-spinning drum-shaped centrifuge. When the first shuttle is completed, it is flown out of the docking bay, and a team of no more than 4 (out of 30) goes on a "grand tour" of the Solar System, doing micro-jumps through hyperspace to the vicinities of the planets in order to take hundreds of photos (etc), to map their magnetic fields close up, that sort of thing. Each shuttle will be able to zip around the Solar System with the same speed that Virdon's ship has. At just under half the speed of light [i.e. 0.493446414c], it takes about 998 seconds of EARTH-TIME to fly one Astronomical Unit ["AU" = the distance from the Sun to the Earth]. At that speed, they could fly across the diameter of Pluto's orbit, about 80 AU, in about 22 EARTH-TIME hours… but they would experience only about 18 SHIP-TIME seconds. Each AU they travel takes about 0.232 ST seconds. 

Next: Part 3...

Wow, it's been a while, and Yahoo has really messed up these groups with their format 'improvements'… but, what the hell, I'll give it a whirl.

Of late, I have been honing my Scenario so as to make it more simple and sensible. To that end, I've asked myself various questions and tried to figure out reasonable answers. Such as: Given the known EARTH-TIME and SHIP-TIME dates from the opening scenes of PLANET, is it possible to figure out exactly how much SHIP-TIME transpires, from Launch (circa 1-14-1972) to Arrival (11-25-3978)?

A few preliminaries are in order. I define an Earth YEAR as 365.2422 days long, and a MONTH as the fraction 50202/1700 days (i.e. 29.53058824 days). I define a LIGHT-YEAR (LY) as the distance a photon travels through a pure vacuum in exactly 1 year of 365.2422 days.

In my scenario, the reason that Taylor's destination (the "New Earth" system) is exactly 320 LY from our Solar System is because the person who creates it uses a 'heavenly' analog to our British system of units: just as there are 320 rods per mile (one rod being equal to 16.5 feet, or 198 inches), so too is one "galactic mile" equal to 320 light-years. Incidentally, the distance from the vicinity of Earth (and New Earth) to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy -- in my POTA scenario -- turns out to be 80 "galactic" miles, or 25,600 light-years. In other words, one light-year is the galactic equivalent of a rod for figuring out interstellar distances.

We know, from PLANET's opening scene, that Taylor launched from Cape Kennedy either on 1-14-1972 or possibly 1-15-1972, if the launch was at midnight (presumably EST, Eastern Standard Time, which is the Time Zone for Florida). In my POTA scenario, the launch is exactly at midnight, when 1-14-1972 ends and 1-15-1972 begins. The ship in which Taylor, Landon and Dodge -- but not Stewart!!! -- launch is the 3-seater with the gull-wing port-side hatch, the ship that later splashes down in the southeastern corner of sector Alpha-Charlie… the ESCAPE ship, the one the President says was commanded by Colonel Taylor.

In my scenario, the ANSA 'mothership' -- Space Ship Earth [hereafter abbreviated SSE] -- is "warp-launched" from its construction site on Howland Island on 9-27-1971 (12:15 EST) straight upwards, when its location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the Equator is in alignment with the centers of the Sun and the Earth. It zips up to the Sun-Earth L2 libration point which, at that instant, is 935,224 miles above the Earth's center and 93,176,297 miles from the Sun's center, a vertical 'jump' distance of 931,260 miles, almost exactly 5 Light-Seconds. It takes about 10 ET seconds for SSE to cover that distance, equivalent to about 7 milliseconds of SHIP-TIME, at SSE's Time Dilation Ratio (more on that in a bit).

Once at the Sun-Earth L2 point, SSE uses rocket thrusters to move away from the surrounding crater's worth of debris that had been gouged out of the ground by the hyperdrive's spheroidal warpfield. They also yaw around so that they're aimed 343.72 degrees to starboard, aligned now with the Earth-Moon L2 libration point, which is where SSE will remain prior to the beginning of the interstellar trip to the New Earth system. The Moon reaches its First Quarter position at 12:17 EST, so SSE has about 2 minutes to yaw around. At that moment, the Moon's center is 237,348 miles from the Earth's center, and the Earth-Moon L2 point is 273,152 miles from Earth's center, some 35,804 miles above the Moon's center, over the Farside. If you use the Pythagorean Theorem, then SSE makes its second "jump" through hyperspace from the Sun-Earth L2 point to the Earth-Moon L2 point along the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose two shorter sides are 935,224 miles long and 273,152 miles long, respectively; that hypotenuse length turns out to be 974,297.6677 miles long. It takes SSE about 10.6 ET seconds (i.e. 7.476 ST milliseconds) to 'jump' that distance.

Thus, SSE is able to hide above the Moon's far side, away from the prying eyes of the Soviets. The only way to see anything perched at the Earth-Moon L2 point is to have a trio of geosynchronous satellites orbiting 26,199 miles from the Earth's center, above the equator, in a triangular formation 120 degrees apart from each other; from such a vantage point, at least one of these three "Trinity" satellites are able to see beyond the edge of the Moon's near-side, at any given time.

So, SSE spends 110 days (plus about 11 hours 43 minutes) situated at the Earth-Moon L2 point, prior to the launch of the 3-seat ANSA shuttle carrying Taylor, Landon and Dodge. The other 30 members of the SSE crew left Earth when it launched from Howland Island -- including the lovely Lt. Stewart, Brent, and his 'skipper' Maddox, along with his wife and two daughters.

Next -- Part 2...

Patrick Michael Tilton

1-04-2014

By the time Taylor (with Dodge and Landon) launch from Cape Kennedy at Midnight on 1-14/15-1972, the crew of SSE will have prepared the 'mothership' for their interstellar trip, as well as having surveyed the entire Solar System doing planet-to-planet microjumps lasting mere seconds of SHIP-TIME each jump. As Virdon did before, Taylor launches from Cape Kennedy -- though at Midnight rather than at Noon -- up to LEO, doing a plane-change burn when they reach a position over the Equator (near the western coast of Africa) and then, in LEO above the Equator, they do a burn that puts them on an elliptical transfer orbit up to GEO… again, pretending that they are a NASA mission to fix the GEO-satellite that Virdon's team allegedly deployed up there.

But, once they get up to that altitude, they also do a micro-jump over to the vicinity of SSE hiding at the Earth-Moon L2 point. As Virdon did, Taylor docks his "Charlie" shuttle in the same docking bay under SSE's "north pole"/"arctic" zone hatch -- shuttles Alfa and Bravo now being docked at docking ports in the "southern" hemisphere portion, similar to the way that the small shuttle "pod" in STAR TREK: The Motion Picture docks to the side of the Enterprise, when Scotty shuttles Kirk over to the refitted ship. The ANSA shuttles have a short cylindrical indentation on the 'belly' just aft of the rear bulkhead of the cabin, where the hibernating astronauts' feet are. The door in that rear bulkhead leads to an airlock, with the access hatch in its 'floor' leading to one of several docking port/airlocks of SSE.

Incidentally, Brent and Maddox couldn't get out of Bravo shuttle through that primary hatch, due to the fact that the ship -- when it landed -- flopped forwards onto its 'belly'… thus necessitating that Brent crawls out of the same forward "escape" hatch that Taylor and Crew used when Alfa splashed down in Dead Lake.

In my POTA scenario, then, Taylor (with Dodge and Landon) get over to SSE about 6 hours after they launched from Cape Kennedy, since it takes a little less than an hour for them to get up to LEO and, after the plane change, about 5 hours 17 minutes to fly up the half-ellipse transfer orbit to GEO. Their ANSA shuttle ["Charlie"] remains docked -- nosecone-first -- in the docking bay, since it does not have a 'belly' docking hatch like Alfa and Bravo shuttles. In my scenario, Taylor and his 2 fellow crewmen, just like Virdon with his crew, wore NASA-style EVA suits when they launched at Cape Kennedy; they change into ANSA flightsuits once they get up to SSE.

In my scenario, just as Virdon launched at Noon and later began its voyage to Alpha Centauri when there was a Sun-Earth-Moon alignment [i.e. it was a Full Moon], in contrast Taylor launches at Midnight and SSE begins its interstellar voyage to New Earth when there is a Sun-Moon-Earth alignment [i.e. when it is a New Moon]. Thus, the beginning of the actual hyperspatial journey is on the date 1-16-1972 (5:52:00 EST), about 8 minutes shy of 30 hours after their Cape Kennedy launch.

But, the TIME DILATION RATIO [TDR] of SSE is not as high as that of a single ANSA shuttle, since SSE is much more massive than an ANSA shuttle. Incidentally, my design for the ANSA shuttles have it that they are 79 feet in length from the tip of the nosecone to the plane of the bottoms of the 3 landing-pads; prior to landing, there is also a 2-foot-thick heatshield below the landing pads, so that the complete length of a shuttle is 81 feet. Contrast that shuttle length with the overall X-axis length of SSE, at 240 feet; the tip of the docked shuttles' nosecones extend no farther forward than the YZ-axes plane.

The TDR of SSE is less than the 4356.570483 TDR of the ANSA shuttles. The 'mothership' has a TDR of 1417.468235. At that rate, SSE experiences 30 ST minutes during the same time it takes for the Moon to make an average lunation around the Earth (i.e. 29.53058824 days). Thus, multiplying 29.53… by 48 gives you 1417.468235 ET moments per ST moment. Mind you, the Moon's phases average out to 29.53… days per lunation, but the actual alignments fluctuate around that average period.

The upshot of it, though, is that after the first full day of the voyage, which began at 5:52:00 EST on 1-16-1972, the Earth -- i.e. the Universe -- aged 48 months, that first day ending with a SHIP-TIME of 5:52:00 EST on 1-17-1972, with an EARTH-TIME of 12-04-1975 [04:34:19]. The events of ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES transpired in late November of 1973, before Taylor and the rest of the crew of Space Ship Earth had experienced one full day of their "18 months" long trip.

It just so happens that with their TDR, where 30 ST minutes equals one ET month, they can travel about 0.623 light-years in one ST day. In fact -- and this, I find, worked out beautifully -- it takes them exactly 130 ST days to travel exactly 81 light-years. Multiplying 130 by 48 gives us a rate of 6240 ET months per 81 LY.

In my POTA scenario, then, they spend the first 130 days of SHIP-TIME flying out towards the New Earth system, and then they come to a full stop, having reached a distance of exactly 81 LY from Earth. They were aimed at almost the exact spot where they expected the New Earth system to be created: at 5h 30m (Right Ascension) on the Celestial Equator, the spot where the line connecting the three Belt Stars of Orion cross the Zero Degree Declination, exactly 320 LY from the Sun.

When they come to that Full Stop, the dates on the chronometers are:

EARTH-TIME 7-22-2476 (02:45:39), rounded to the nearest ET second;

SHIP-TIME 5-25-1972 (05:52:00).

They spend exactly one hour of non-dilated time at that Full Stop position, so that the clocks click ahead to:

ET 7-22-2476 (03:45:39)

ST 5-25-1972 (06:52:00)

and then resume their journey through hyperspace, with 239 LY to go before they reach a distance from Earth of 320 LY. Since it took them exactly 130 ST days to travel 81 LY, it should take them another 383.5802469 ST days to travel 239 LY more, equivalent to 543712.8157 ET days. Adding those ST and ET durations to the last set of clock readings gives us the dates when they turn off the Drive upon arrival at the spot located 320 LY away from Earth along their initial (and almost-perfect) trajectory:

ET 3-11-3965 (23:20:13)

ST 6-12-1973 (20:47:33)

If they had been aimed perfectly towards their destination, they would have reached it on the 11th of March, 3965… but, they were aimed just slightly off of perfect, by less than a single arc-degree, in fact. The upshot of that is they have to cover a distance of about 2.2 LY perpendicular to their initial trajectory. It's like aiming for the exact center of a dartboard from a distance of 320 inches (i.e. 26 ft 8 in) and having the dart land 2.2 inches off-center.

When everybody went into hibernation -- excepting the 'caretakers' who would remain awake to monitor the Drive (etc), meaning Maddox and his family -- it was with the expectation that some (i.e. the big shots) would be awakened when the ET clock read 3-11-3965, upon arrival at the "almost there" location 320 LY away from Earth along their nearly perfect trajectory. It would take another 3 days 12 hours 46 minutes  of SHIP-TIME to travel that ~2.2 LY distance, equivalent to about 5,006-to-5,007 days of EARTH-TIME, after they've yawed 90 degrees around, so as to be aimed at the New Earth system, a procedure that I'm having them spend a mere 10 minutes achieving.

In my POTA scenario, Taylor expected to be awakened on 3-11-3965, prior to the last small jump through hyperspace, spending the last 3½ days of SHIP-TIME awake prior to their arrival, when the EARTH-TIME clock would have clicked forwards from 3-11-3965 to 11-25-3978. When Taylor awakens, he sees -- as do we in the audience -- that the EARTH-TIME clock reads 11-25-3978, the date he expected to see if he was not awakened for the last leg of the trip, upon arrival at their New Earth destination.

The corresponding SHIP-TIME date that Taylor would expect to see -- which he did see, but which we in the audience did not see -- is 6-16-1973. So, when Taylor tells Landon, "I read the clocks," he's specifying that he saw both readings -- the ET clock [11-25-3978] and the ST clock [6-16-1973]. The total elapsed SHIP-TIME of the journey would be 130 days (Earth-Moon L2 point in a straight-line hyperspace jump towards their Destination, exactly 81 LY outward) + 1 hour (at a Full Stop, with the two clocks now ticking at the same rate) + 383 days 13 hours 55 minutes 33⅓ seconds (from Full Stop location, resuming journey along the same trajectory, towards the next Full Stop location 239 LY away, i.e. 320 LY from Earth) + 10 minutes (at the second Full Stop location, where they re-aim SSE towards the New Earth system, 90 degrees perpendicular from their current location) + 3 days 12 hours 45 minutes 36 seconds (plus less than 61 seconds, to traverse the ~2.2 LY distance to the New Earth system… those "61 seconds" referring to the amount of SHIP-TIME it takes to cover the full 24 hours of the ET date 11-25-3978), a grand total of 517.1597222 ST days = 517d 3h 50m (+ < 61s).

Landon deduces that they had been away from Earth "for 18 months"… but if they launched from Cape Kennedy at the very start of 1-15-1972, the date 6-16-1973 seems to be only 17 months and 1 day later -- but that's assuming that Landon's referring to the calendar months, rather than the number of actual lunations (where one lunation is about 29.53 days long). By that reckoning, they've been gone for 1d 5h 52m (from Launch until the start of their first leg of the interstellar journey, at the Sun-Moon-Earth alignment) plus 517d 3h 50m (the three "warping" phases of their trip, plus the two Full Stop phases in-between), or 518d 9h 42m total (not to mention the time spent during re-entry and splashdown), or 518.4041666… ST days. Dividing 518.4041666… days by 29.53058823 days per lunation = 17.55482019 lunations, which (rounded to the nearest whole number) is indeed "eighteen months."

That's it for now. I cut-and-pasted a single text into these three smaller chunks for those of you who can't stand it when I post overly-lengthy messages. 

Oh, and Happy New Year! I say this as my neck of the woods is getting its ass kicked with lousy winter weather...

Patrick Tilton

1-04-2014

Nope. When I click on either link, it says: "You must log in to continue"...

--- In PotaDG@yahoogroups.com, mlccougar@... wrote:
>
> That's just a sign that you're supposed to avoid Facebook...
>
>
>
> a message dated 1/8/2014 1:16:01 PM Central Standard Time,
> patrickmichaeltilton@... writes:
>
> > Nope. When I click on either link, it says: "You must log in to
> > continue"...
> >
> >
> >
> >
>

image-62186.jpeg

Correction! It seems that my POTA PHENOMENON group does still exist... I just didn't know it because my list of Yahoo Groups on the left-hand column doesn't list it. I have to go into the "All My Groups" page, which does include it. 

Ugh. On the right-hand column there's a box that says: "Welcome to the new Yahoo Groups. We've improved your Yahoo Groups experience." Well, I call BULLSHIT on that! I preferred the previous version, and wish they would have given us the option to stay the same, rather than have these dubious "improvements" forced on us.

Grumble grumble... 

Goddamn it, but I swear I feel like Grumpy Cat looks!

Patrick

Wow can't wait for your project! Good luck everyone!

On Jan 16, 2014 7:51 PM, <mlccougar@...> wrote:

This is great news... I do wish all involved good luck with this project...

Keep us updated!







In a message dated 1/16/2014 8:48:57 PM Central Standard Time, smwhitty@... writes:

Exciting news – my friend Miklangelo (Aussie musician) is with Amanda Palmer today (musician) who is Neil Gaiman's (comic, book writer, writer of new Dr Who scripts, novelist etc) wife and they are discussing whether Neil Gaiman can get on board a new 3 part comic book series based on the TV Show (sorry to fans of Going Home but we will be starting from scratch!) which we hope to have Neil Foster illustrate. If this goes ahead, we will actually be planning for it to inspire a 12-13 episode reboot of the TV Show so we will be forward planning a whole lot of new stories.