Prometheu: The Ship

It has been a long time since I have posted a response here. Back then, the discussions had gotten quite boring and nothing very interesting came up. I agree. It is a very interesting and cool ship. It says that big money can buy the best. Unlike the Nostromo, there doesn't appear to be any sort of engineering staff- even though the ship is somewhere around 30 years senior. That is, without taking into account just when exactly the Nostromo was constructed. I presume that this is because the Prometheus is a science ship with a very specialized mission, whereas the Nostromo is a cargo hauler. Hard core spaceship freaks (like myself) could make a career out of delving into all that is mentioned in your post. I enjoyed checking out the Star Trek media concerning the details of the Starship Enterprise. Perhaps somewhere out there, there is (or will be) a book about everything that was conceived- even if not presented- in the film about the starship Prometheus.

The ship seemed to be properly equiped for this extended mission So you think there was any kind of shakedown cruise just to sort things out? It seems more attention was taken to build the Pometheus than selecting some crew members. With all the onboard computer systems you wonder if different programmers than used on the David8 project were used, I sort of wonder how HAL might have taken control of the Prometheus,..and battle David for control of the mission. @aircraftfixer "..quite boring and nothing very interesting came up.." I am sorry you didn't find discussions worthwhile. If you start a thread I suspect there would a great variety of comments , useful comments, would flood in.

When working out the speed of the ship you cant use the s=d/t basic equation, as relativity has to be taken into effect. The distance from earth to LV223 was 3.27x10^14 km then this equates to approximately 34 light years. (extremely close in galactic terms!) Now..as nothing can travel faster than light how can it go 34 light years in under 3 years? In classical terms this would means travelling at 10 times the speed of light, which is impossible. The answer is time and space contraction...ie special relativity. using Einsteins equation , the ratio of contraction = 1/((1-(v/c)^2)^0.5) gives a speed of 0.997c or 99.7% the speed of light. So...an observer from Earth would see the Promethus take 34 years to get to LV223. Whereas the Prometheus crew would see that the distance from Earth to LV223 is only 2.6 light years, as expected due to space contraction as an object travels at speeds close to light.

characteristics of the vessel are somewhat fanciful Prometheus, but are closer to reality, believe it or not. Ion propulsion exists (long) is energy based electricity (much more powerful than the energy generated based fuels. [url=http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ion_engine.svg&page=1]please here![/url] [img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Ion_Engine_Test_Firing_-_GPN-2000-000482.jpg[/img]

The Nostromo: 42 million in adjusted dollars, minus payload, of course. The Prometheus: from what Vickers says, a trillion dollars. But that's for the whole mission, so I'm not sure how much R&D had to go into the whole thing, but it still seems off to me................ 42 million WAS quite a lot of money when Aliens was made though...............

I woinder if Weyland had enough resources ro build a sister ship to Prometheus..or a improved model for another search for immortality? I didn;t check if Weyland Corp is involved in the Military aspect of the human race...but a fully loaded Prometheus warship would be set for additional adventures in the Engineer's worlds. Think of the techological improvements that could be included. It could uncover an even wider influence that what we have seen in the Engineer's world....and that would be quite intersting.

Wow, I would love to see a Warship! The technology on that would be presumably awesome. Now, we see that Shah sends a message to earth "do not come here, there is only death and destruction". One can presume that the message was received and that the human race would take steps to build an inter-stellar war ship. But then again, the reference to Einstein's equations is interesting. Everything we see is in the past, even if only for nano seconds. Therefore, if Prometheus's crew only aged 2yr8mos, then Shah's warning message will take much longer than that (I agree with jonah coors, likely 34 years if the message travels over optics as opposed to radio, which woul take much longer), so the building of a proper military craft will be in significant arrears and may be too late. On the other hand, suppose it is possible to exceed 186,000 MPS. Then Einstein's equations would no longer hold and in "Sci Fi theory" you may be able to approach, let's say, half of 34yrs, or some large percentage of 34yrs such that you approach real time. Of course, this is all fantasy thought here but it would be interesting to play that out in a sequel...the military on earth receives Shah's message over a 34yrs + 2xSpeed of Light channel, hence starts building a Warship 34+17yrs after the Prometheus mission. Or maybe 4xSpeedOfLight, 8xSOL, etc. Yes, a stretch but at least plausible? Or perhaps the scientific mission Prometeus (Weylan Corp) builds the scientific craft we see to travel at a multiple of the speed of light, approaching .25 Real Time, or .5 Real Time, etc. C'mon guys, it is just fantasy but we should be able to contrive a set of equations which supports this notion of travel as a percentage of RT and the sending of messages over a channel which is a multiple of 186,000 MPS. Otherwise, if we are waiting 34+N years for Shah's message to reach earth, Earth may have already launched another craft toward LV-223, hence, her warning is not heeded until potentially many other craft have been launched, doomed to a similar fate as Prometheus (I guess this is true anyway given that this is a prequel to Alien). Anyway, assuming we discover a way to travel as a percentage if RT, imagine how such a Mother ship would look like. There would be Computers which communicate back to earth at a multiple of the speed of light, huge engines, perhaps more than 4, deep sleep units which retard the aging of human cells to near zero, several crews rotating turns in sleep cha mbe rs, perhaps entertainment staff for theatre, arenas for sporting events (perhaps have rotating professional teams getting paid 2x their earth salary), and military units to be launch on military "pods" if you will, which are huge ships in their own right. Computers which learn (similar to the cyborg David), are able to decipher and translate all earthly known languages, decipher unknown languages, and perform administrative, household, ebtertainment, and military tasks. The mother ship is at once a place to live as well as launch military and clandestine misions. Yes, I know, what is allessior smoking!? This is not so outrageous for SciFi fans. We all remember "The Fifth zelement" and how huge and sophisticated the cruise ship was. Fans would be ready to treat the above as plausible because they have already seen precursors to such ships as in 5thE.

Here it is, some scientists are playing with the idea. Ridley should discuss the concepts with these physicists to develop a ficticious set of plausible equations for use in any sequels such that the questions about time for travel are more rationally explained and that the design of ships on sequels are built to reach faster than light speeds and that communications would as well: http://news.discovery.com/space/einstein-math-faster-than-light-121009.html

To this end RS could view the TV series ;Through The Wormhole' THe few episodes I saw certainly presented, as 2010, some advance thinking on time, space travel and life in general I suspect even a few scenes thatr address Weyland's questions It may not be the most accurate show but it scertainly made me aware of how scienteist are trying to explore answers to several questions raised by our movie. THe section on faster than light speed and time/space folding was very nteresting causing me to wonder what was I doing here..or am I really here!

I did see clips from the show and it does explore this question. But as the article I refrence ends with, we just have not experienced or observed travel OR communication, in the observable universe, in excess of 186,000 MPS, and it is therefore ASSUMED to be impossible, as was exceeding the speed of sound at one point in history. However, the human mind can at least "conceive" of travel faster than 186k. That is to say, we can write it down on paper, we can envision it in our minds eye. We could probably write some rudimentary equations that somehow make it plausible, and we can certainly fantasize that it eists in a SciFi series. Space travel and communications are two major areas impacted by speeds in excess og 186k. That is to say, imagine the ship architectures required to move in excess of those speeds. Imagine the communication systems which carry information (data bits) in excess of those speeds. Both technologies would change dramatically as a result and we would have some truly awesome ships on our hands. I think Ridley needs to incorporate some of this thinking into his series, since he is running into the 186k barrier if he does not. As I pointed out, Shah's warning of "only death" at the end Presumeably gets to earth after 34 years given 3.27 x 10^14km, unless the assumption is already made that information travels at the speed of light. Likewise, the ship makes it to LV-223 in only 2yrs8mo. The warning would be late for at least several ships, which may have been launched on rescue missions. We shall see.

I hope this helps... If you visit the Weyland Ind. site it gives you a lot of background. The USCSS Prometheus is the flag ship of the Weyland fleet. It is 20 years old, I think. It was the first of the Prometheus class and is used by Weyland as his "executive jet" of the time, if you like. The Prometheus class is the de facto workhorse star ship of Weyland Industries. The USCSS Prometheus itself is obviously kept up to date etc. clean, refitted but it has NOT been built for this mission. The comment by Vickers for the 1 trillion also includes the sizeable cost of acutally finding LV-223, not just their voyage andhiring the crew etc. Also, be careful in comparing Prometheus and Aliens. RS has stated (I read at this web site) that he said that Prometheus is not Canon. He also distances himself from Aliens in never referring to it I believe. Trying to compare USCSS promethues to Nostromo is like comparing a FedEx twin prop puddle jumper to an Airbus A380. The Nostromo is a dirty little tug pulling fossil fuels.

"..The Prometheus class is the de facto workhorse star ship of Weyland Industries.." From this info it seems thag the prometheus and it's sister ships are a proven transport perfect for this mission. With Old Weyland having everything he values in life on this particular vessel wouldn't make sense that he would have back up star ship allso prepeed ready to go in case any problems occur that would elay the trip? I would not only have a back up ship but a crew ready to take the journey and complete the mission as described at the first crew meeting. If you don't buy that story what about a military equiped ship to ensure a complete domination of LV-223 whenthe Science Ship arrives and starts taking over theat moon. In either case there is too much riding on this trip for Weyland and his company. A back-plan or ship must have been considered and enacted.