Finding the Shiny Planets

Hello everyone,

People have been saying very nice things about my internet spaceship screenshots lately so I had this idea that I'd say something about how I end up at the places where they happen ... First up though, every journey has a start and this was how I logged in today :

I'm going to keep the pictures small today cos there are going to be quite a few ... As always, click for bigger. It was nice to see the planet in the background there. The first thing to do is to have a destination in mind ... and I've been using the Kamd site to give me ideas for places to go :

All those extra tabs again :-D Here's a link to Kamd. Pop in your start, drop in your intended destination (Ross 1047 has a planetary base with a buggy racing circuit apparently) and give it your ship's jump range and how far you're prepared to go off the straight course home. 20 jumps is a bit silly but I am taking a scenic route back. The button that says "EDSM Info" will tell you things about interesting places along the way. For this trip, I bypassed the Necropolis Chasm because it didn't look interesting and set a route for the Smokehole.

As you go along the route, you'll jump in at the stars along the way. A quick "honk" of the system discovery scanner and you get an idea of what's there :

Have a peek in the top right. 2 objects is barely anything, so this system saw me looping around the sun for my next hop and not bothering to check out the system any further.

The top right display says that the next system has a G class star, which means it's worth checking out. The game leans a lot on real space astronomy, with models for all of the stellar object types in our galaxy. Most of those will be Main Sequence Stars :

(Image attribution link - this came from the Wiki page)
The main sequence goes from O through to M class stars depending on their luminosity. The O end are the younger and more intense stars (My astronomy might be a bit dodgy here), the M end are stars that are nearing their old age. Saying that though, O will burn fast and bright, M burns slow and dimmer and usually outlast the more keen stars. The vertical scale there is Magnitude, big is higher up. (Best to look at the wiki page !)

What it means for planets is that stars around the middle have a greater chance of having the interesting potentially life bearing planets. Our own star is a class G2V star, which means it's in the middle of the Main Sequence and average size for its luminosity. Our planet happens to be at just about the right distance from the Sun to make conditions on the surface compatible with our kind of life.

The game knows this science too and includes it in the Stellar Forge engine it uses to turn newly discovered star systems into something that makes sense in our universe. I'll pay special attention to F, G and K type stars. Back to our G type star that we dropped in at ! What's there ?

24 objects means that it's worth checking out a bit more. To do this, you use the Full Spectrum Scanner. Think of this as a series of telescopes and sensors that take in the light coming from the objects in the system and from that, the systems can work out whether it's rocky, got metal, made of ice or something more interesting like a gas giant or the much more valuable water and earth like worlds. This owes its inspiration from a real technique called spectroscopy that astronomers use to give a crude (it's the best our instruments can do!) approximation of what planets around other stars are like.

That's what the Full Spectrum Scanner gives you - the thing to look at is the scale near the bottom. It gives you a much better idea of what's there. I have it tuned to Metal Rich bodies there, which are valuable planets to find. If there aren't any Metal Rich, High Metal, Water Worlds, Earth Likes or Ammonia Worlds present, I'll quickly move on. As it happened, this was a reasonable system to find.

One thing I'll look for are moons around planets that I can land on (the planets with the blue half circle around them). It's nice to have something in the sky in shot as well as interesting surface features. As it happened though, this was a series of junk planets (Icy moons aren't worth much) and they were too far out to check out. (The Ls is Light Seconds or distance)

On to the next system, this one only had Icy worlds. I immediately jump on if I find these.

On the other hand, jumping in to see spectral traces around there means stopping is a great idea because water worlds are pretty and shiny (and give good exploration pay out !) ...

... Especially as I was the first one there, which means I get my Commander's name on it ! So far, Elite pilots have found a little over 53 million systems, or 0.0133% of the galaxy.

This would have been a great place to stop and take pictures too, as it's close to where you come in and orbits the water world.

That's what you see if someone else found a place first.

Sometimes "LOTS of objects on scanner" can turn out to be :

Junk. Oh dear. Just icy planets again ... although icy planets can still have nice things to look at if you take the time to scan them all.

Moving swiftly on to another system ... Something that will pop up during scans is that "Refining scan..." in the top right, this means there are interesting surface features to have a look at. The various geysers and volcano things are surface geological features that will get picked up here. Something else of interest there is "Rotational Period : (Tidally Locked)". This means that the same side of the body faces its parent at all times, just like our Moon has a dark side that we can't see directly from Earth.

This is me lining up to have a closer look at my intended destination. Notice how I have the moon targeted and I'm heading straight for it (not for long!). I have the parent body vertically upwards from it. The plan is to circle the moon until the parent body is visible from the surface, it's easier to plan ahead and line up so you don't have to think about finding the parent body again.

So I've done a part orbit around the moon and I've probably got a bit lucky there with how close to the horizon the parent planet is. I'm on final landing approach here, heading for one of those interesting geological surface features. Slightly unfortunate that it's dark, so I turned the night vision feature on. it helps to pick out a good spot to land.

And here we are !

The side of a ship is better to look at than its back end or front end (depends on the ship), so I'll rotate around for a good angle before setting down. Lighting is one to think about too. The ships and SRV buggy both have headlights ... and I'll use those headlights to illuminate ship and SRV.

I'll also hunt for craters, canyons, mountains ... anything that looks interesting as I'm coming in for a landing.

The science bit helps in narrowing down the candidates a bit ... cos the Stellar Forge thing that procedurally generates what you find has the science bit as part of its rules. But sometimes it's just luckily finding something Pretty.

Gas Giants are great places to search around, because they'll often have multiple moons that you can get in to shot. A gas giant with rings is even better ... although those same planetary science rules mean that the moons are all in the same plane as the rings (zero inclination). You don't see a ring, you see a line unless you're really lucky and find a moon on an inclined orbit. The Full Spectrum Scanner will give you a preview of how a planet will look and whether or not it has anything in an inclined orbit around it.

I think that's it for me for this post. If you're an Elite Dangerous pilot reading this, good luck finding the Shiny Pretty Places to take great pictures of ! I hope this post helps you out there.

In the meantime, I'm checking out those hot things there overnight with marshmallows and popcorn :-D.

Stay safe, fly safe, be well ! And keep your eyes open for the Shiny Pretty Things.

Shenanigans and Shiny Things

There are shenanigans afoot in the computing world ...

Also shiny things in the sky :

What's the shenaniganning ?

Turns out that some of the manufacturers of motherboards have figured out a way to trick the system in order to allow more wigglyamps to be shoved into processors in order to make them go faster. Beware both the reporting and the conclusions from it ... The theory is that if the software in the motherboard reports one number and that number is too low, the software that governs automatic overclocking goes : I can drive this processor harder !

For this exploit, it's the numbers that do voltage and current. The processor should only be given up to a certain limit there, any higher will make it go too hot ... causing its life to be shortened. I quite liked getting 8 years out of my last processor !

Here's numbers from my machine from just now. The science sums are turned off, so the numbers are for low activity :

(You may need to click for bigger ...)

The crudely drawn arrow points to the suspect line ... Apparently my machine is reporting that the processor is taking about half the power that it is actually taking. (the electrical input power will turn into heat and the heat has to be taken away - too much heat = crash and boom).

I think the sum is coming from the "Core + SoC Power" and "Core PPT" (Package Power Tracking). However, when I read the HWInfo page saying what the Power Reporting Deviation meant, there wasn't enough there to say where it was coming from. Which makes me question its value and relevance.

The other terms there are "Core" - this is the bit that carries out the instructions. There are 6 of these on my processor. "SoC" is System on Chip, it's the bit that connects the cores to the rest of the system. Gotta get the data in to them and the data out of them. This allows the instructions to tell the rest of the system what to do (changing the picture in the graphics card) and allows it to tell the memory and drives to feed it more data.

What do I think this actually means ? Not actually very much unless you trust your system to automatically overclock itself, as processors will do these days. I don't believe in doing that, the automatic overclocking measures are usually intended for when the system isn't doing very much (i.e. marketing numbers) and are meaningless when you're running tasks on all cores, like I do with the BOINC Science Sums.

The more important numbers are the ones for temperature ... and whether the system crashes or not. The computer will crash when either the temperature goes too high and the electronics can't work thermally or when the signals are coming at it too fast and the switching isn't fast enough. Processors are filled with transistors, which are tiny little switches. You can make them switch faster if you brute force more electrons through them.

Oh - I may have almost broken something yesterday evening as well ... I was seeing if I could get more information out of the AMD Ryzen Master program and pressed one too many buttons ...

My processor usually runs at around 50 degrees C on idle. It'll go up to between 70 and 80 degrees C when it's doing science sums (depends on ambient conditions too). I should probably actually fit the aftermarket cooler I have at some point but I'm happy with what the stock Wraith Stealth cooler does.

After clicking a button last night, while it was doing sums, the chip overclocked itself to 1.4V, 4.2GHz ... and the temperatures shot up to 95 degrees C. Oops. And it didn't crash ! I think I may have a pretty good cpu there if it survived that without crashing or other ill effects. It's back down to the normal speeds of 1.1V, 3.6GHz.

The thing that matters with the overclocking is the temperature and whether the machine crashes or not. I'm taking a very dim view of my motherboard maker (who I won't be recommending any more) using this software fiddle but I don't think it actually means very much, unless you trust the automatic overclocking features ... which you should never, ever use. It's not worth it for small, inconsistent gains that shorten the life of the machine.

To the Shiny Things !

Tried putting the kettle on these geysers. The temperature was good but the lack of atmosphere makes the water boil off before the tea brews. There's probably a way around that.

And a higher shot. I made a little error here because in chasing the geological geyser formation, the nebula ended up a bit too high. (If you drive the camera drone thing below the surface, it blacks out the screen)

I did a bit more neutron star boosting along the way, this is the Tea and Medals about to dive in to that jet cone in order to get a boost.

More nebulae :-).

A planetary nebula poking out from behind a gas giant.

 

I did like this one, it's where I stopped on Thursday evening. Good shadows, an eclipse on the gas giant and it looks like they've added in some fogging too over there in the distance.

The nest stop was the Perimeter Nebula.

Today''s travels included the Perimeter Nebula.

Before heading off to the Damselfly nebula. Pretty and blue. The picture at the start of the post was taken at the neutron star inside that nebula.

The last place to visit today was the Child of Time nebula inside the Cloomeia sector. This one is another planetary nebula with ...

Black hole ! This one is a tiddler black hole at just 3 solar masses. The game lets you get right up close, with this one being taken at 25km away. I'll have a natter about spaghettification some time ...

There are benign black holes and rather more malicious black holes. It depends on high big the black hole is, with the smaller ones giving worse spaghettification effects than the big ones. What is spaghettification ? It's a difference in the force between the end of an objects that close to the black hole and the force at the end. When we stand up, there is a tiny difference in the gravity exerts on our toes and our head but it's so small that it doesn't matter. But if you're close enough to a black hole, there starts being a massive difference between the gravity exerted between close and far ... and the object rips apart due to differences in its weight. (Weight = Mass x Gravity with weight being a force)

I'll probably go into that more at a later date when my brain is up to doing the numbers on it. Brain is still not quite where it should be !

Oh and I'm still loving the effects of what happens when you fly away from the black holes. The minimum speed with the hyperdrive on is 30km/s, which lets the lensing effect unfold in a rather pretty way.

Stopping point for the night - nice bit of sun there.

Last one, looking back at the companion star and the black hole will be up in the sky there. Not sure where :-)

That's it for me for tonight !

Stay safe, be well.

Star Wars Advent 2018 Day 6 - I think it's a lamp post

What's behind the door ?

There we go. Front and centre.

Lamp post ? Actually ... looking a bit more (and cheating with a peek through the googles) and it's the Cloud City of Bespin with the red thing being a cloud car.

The Empire Strikes Back is one of those great films, from the set pieces during the Hoth segment of the movie and the trip through Cloud City that was massively enhanced in the special editions. There's a Lego set too ... which I have no intention of getting (it's £200+ and a bit meh)

What are the books for today ?

On the left is one of Isaac Asimov's final novels, Nemesis. The first new colony on an alien world has sent a distress signal and a rescue mission is dispatched using a spaceship with a revolutionary new hyperdrive. At least, that's what I can remember from reading this book a few decades ago. It's been on the list to read again, need to get around to making a dent in that list.

In the middle is The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey. This is from her earlier days, before the Dragonriders of Pern books really took off. It was written as a standalone book, although the Brainship millieu has expanded since then. There have even been novels with guest authors like S.M.Stirling who wrote The City Who Fought, another shell person novel.

This was a pretty interesting book, posing all sorts of ethical questions in its own gentle way. At the core are the shell people. If I remember right, they had genetic manipulation but for some issues, the genetic damage was too great and would have resulted in a quick death for the little person. However, the central theme of these books is that they are permanently inserted into a life support system that looks after their basic needs. Keeps them sustained, gives them an interface to the outside world, provides them mobility. I vaguely remember a scene where the shell children are racing around in their life support shell buggies.

Happy children, albeit in a metal shell. They are also taught and conditioned to be able to mentally accept connections with computers and other complex electronics and the central character in this book, Helva, is selected to be the brain at the centre of a spaceship.

The crews are a symbiotic relationship of a Brain and a Brawn, with the Brawn being the pilot that the outside world sees while the Brain is hidden behind a protective shell, interfaced with the spaceship. The Brain is effectively the spaceship.

But they're not just computers, Helva develops a taste for music which she uses to refine a voice and become .... the Ship Who Sang. The book itself is a combination of several shorter stories tracking Helva and her interactions with the people who travel on her ship and her brawns.

A pretty good book. Recommended.

Last one for today is Voyagers by Ben Bova. He's an author that I read a lot of in my teenage years. He doesn't have quite the same hold on my attention now though. Other authors write far stronger stories.

Anyway ... in this one, the Solar System has a visitor. An object entering our sphere of attention and ... slowing. The object comes within close enough range of Earth but ... wouldn't be sticking around. Can they reach it and examine its secrets before it is lost to the void forever ?

There are 2 more books in the series ...

That's it for today ! I've been struggling for the past couple of days with a sore fuzzy head but should be good for a bit of travel tomorrow. Hopefully. There are going to be 3 people from the Lovely Gaming People on the right (Enter Elysium, Maggie Krohn and FuzzyFreaks) plus a few more who I've enjoyed watching.

Should be an excellent trip.

Book 4 - Abaddon's Gate

More of the Expanse !

It's quite a big series now. I think 7 books have been released and there are two more to come. I've just finished book 3.

I've really enjoyed the series so far. It's an excellent examination of future space politics, technology, warfare, culture and above all, keeps it about the characters.

And there are space bars too.

I wasn't quite so impressed with Abaddon's Gate as I was with the first two books though. Hopefully it wasn't a sign of the series running out of steam and I'll definitely be returning to this series soon.

The problem with it is that it goes on too long. The book tells of one catastrophe following another. Which is ok, some books work really well like that. But there comes a point where you think there should be no more and that the story should be wrapped up. Adding yet another twist in makes the book outstay its welcome.

And that's the feeling I got with this one. Maybe lose 50 pages from it.

Or that could be my bug addled mind not having the patience for it this time around.

What's next ? Dunno yet. We'll see. I need to read some of my Waterways World magazines at some point too. I have those in mind for filling one of the 52 book slots. But I did want to talk about the physics of these books and why they work.

This series doesn't indulge in inertial compensators like most scifi. It has an excellent engine .... but that's it. Acceleration is acceleration and too much of it is deadly. How deadly ?

We're constantly subjected to a downwards acceleration force of 9.81m/s/s. Call it 1g. We feel the world hauling down on us, we're used to it, we kinda need it sometimes too. I just took a swig from my drink, that 1g keeps the drink in the glass until its time has come.

When we're in the car, every acceleration is a fraction of a G ... despite what it feels like if you have a crazy driver. Working the numbers .... 0 to 60 mph (100kph to make it easy) in 5 seconds works out to a steady 5.56 m/s/s or just over half a G.

Spacecraft go at much higher G accelerations during the early launch and then settle down in the later stages. Peeking at some Saturn V Apollo stats :
Liftoff - 1.25g, ramping up to a max of 3.9g just before Stage 1 shut off;
The Space Shuttle peaked at about 3g;
Soyuz is under 4g.

And a lot of that is so that they don't break the people. Equipment can typically be subjected to much higher accelerations. So if you have something unmanned, it can be thrashed more. We'll come back to that.

In the Expanse, the people are subject to similar g limits depending on where they come from. Earthers are more sturdy due to being used to 1g. Mars are still quite sturdy, if I remember right Mars has 0.6g. The Belters grow up in typically 0.3g or lower so if they don't have muscle and bone supplements, they literally can't go to Earth or they will die, muscles, bones and heart crushed by the gravity. But they can withstand acceleration for a shorter duration.

But ... they can also juice up with steroids and antinausea drugs to withstand that acceleration up to maybe 15g before blood vessels start exploding in their heads. One of the core threads of Abaddon's Gate is a Slow Zone, where they have a maximum speed ... and are dead stopped when they exceed that. As in ... (quick mental math) 120m/s/s or 12g minimum without juice or acceleration crash couches. OUCH.

What does that equate to in, say, Star Trek ? Let's go to another scifi universe first ... The Honorverse talks about up to 500g, with inertial compensators to stop the crew becoming embedded in the bulkheads when they step on the gas.

Let's start with Warp 1 or lightspeed in Star Trek ... Light speed is 299,792,458 m/s.

We'll be generous and say they take 10 seconds to get there ... And then divide by 10 again for 1g = 9.81m/s.

Answer - Warp 1 from stop to c in 10 seconds is .... 3,000,000 g. 3 million g.

Squish !

The Expanse is a smaller universe so far to the point that I've read but they make it make a huge amount of sense. Another bit of silliness is the amount of energy required. The Kinetic Energy equation is 0.5 x Mass x Velocity x Velocity. So that's 0.5 x Mass (Enterprise D was 4.5m tonnes) x 300 million squared. That's a lot of zeroes. I gotta work this out now :-)

Kinetic Energy of Enterprise D at Warp 1 = 0.5 x 4,500,000 x 300,000,000 x 300,000,000 =
202,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 kJ (tonnes to kg conversion balanced by J to kJ conversion)
That would be a lot of GigaWatts to get the ship to warp speed.

And I'm now looking forward to reading more Expanse ! Maybe Rogue One Catalyst first though.

PS Still bugged, so I'll keep the physics book back a little bit.

Beaming Up

This might be the last post I can write for a while.

Yep. They've come to take me away.

That sounds wrong. It's actually a totally willing departure. You see, I appear to have attracted attention from up there. Yep. Up there, in the sky and beyond.

This means I think I've figured out where those hits come from where the country of origin isn't defined. Because there is no country of origin ! They told me that they've been reading what I've written about space, about piloting, about engineering and they think I have potential. Perhaps they are harvesting others too ?

Actually I wouldn't call it harvesting. I'm currently in the orientation centre (they're letting me compose this message as a preparation for what I'll write later) where they are preparing my simulacrum. That's a lifesize replica which will be left behind in my place here. There will be an instantaneous link (don't ask me about the science ... yet ! It's one of the things I fully intend to learn) that means I will be able to talk to people on Earth through a kind of telepresence. So if you talk to me and I seem a little distant, my simulacrum is looking for instructions from me, the one and only original.

How come this is happening now ? Apparently there is trouble coming and they need a few of us humble Earthlings to help keep this trouble at bay. We have a certain ... inspiration ? that will help in their war against the coming threat. They won't tell us what this threat is yet. Come on ! We're not scared ! (Perhaps that's the real reason why they want us on board). They have mentioned the phrase "Cybo-Homo Arcturan Variant" and that these unruly creatures are a threat to all.

I do keep hearing another phrase over and over : "Never give up, never surrender" and the main person we've been liasing with is Grabthar, Hammer of Rigel. That's a great phrase.

They aren't sending us off to the front just yet. We need orientation. To learn what we're getting into. To get us up to speed with the technology. The ways and means of doing things in the Federation. The food ! It's replicated out of pattern. They say it's all the healthy components that make up the diet we need but it doesn't taste healthy. It tastes glorious and in my experience, if it's healthy it's supposed to be yuk.

How can we understand people ?

We got jabbed by these little guys shortly after being beamed up and not long after that, we could understand our alien colleagues. It's going to be strange getting used to the variety of races up here.

This all sounds like I've been abducted doesn't it ? Kinda yeah.

This was all my own choice, although it will hurt to leave a certain few very special people behind. Maybe in the second wave they can come too ? That would be awesome. It would expand the team. Honestly, I just heard the word "SPACESHIP!" and I was gone.

 

After all, everything is awesome if you're part of a team.

Being brought on board for two things I love dearly was just a bonus. That'd be the engineering that makes these things go and the chance to be pilot. That's what they saw from keeping an eye on me. Someone who would be able to understand the machines, to keep them going, to be that balanced person with a viewpoint that picks people up when they're struggling. To have second specialisations as pilot and trained observer. That's really useful when things get dangerous. Have a crew end up stranded on a planetoid because your one pilot had a mischief happen ? Tragedy. Oh, I was evaluated for a more martial role supporting their stormtrooper corps but they thought I was a little short.

They also want me looking after what they affectionately refer to as Cogs. You wouldn't believe it but these adorable bits of fur are a mix of cat and dog, genetically engineered from specimens taken from our world over a hundred years ago. They combine the loyalty of our cats and dogs, the vigilance of dogs, the cleverness of cats and have the canine and feline parts of their nature acting together in harmony unknown on this planet. Miracles.

I think they added some rabbit too for the improved hearing.

They have massive advances in medical technology too. They can replace my dodgy hip and shoulder with totally organic replacements. That means the replacements are as good as new and work with your body so as to become a part of it. The veterans who spoke with us about it referred to the process as becoming "Whole Again" as the new part is grown from a genetic Marker and reintroduced to replace useless or missing limbs. Magic.

The engineering is something else too ! There are backup panels to control the machines but the main method is through mind power. Through direct neural interface. I had a little try (need training to manage the sensory input load) and as a pilot, it's like you become the ship. Your eyes are the sensors, in all spectra. Your arms and feet are the thrusters. Your circulatory system becomes the power, air, fluids that keep the ship going.

Yet the technology is a mix of organic and mechanical. Cyborg if you will. That's so that the systems can repair themselves and survive without power when necessary. Organic is supplemented by the machine, the machine is repaired by the organic.

What's that ! I hear sirens as the FIF Iceangel (Federation Induction Frigate or FIFI as the crew call her) is being called to alert and Grabthar is waving urgently. Gotta go !

See you around the galaxy!

On A Journey

Actually 2 journeys, plus that big long one we call life.

But we'll leave that life one for the philosophers for now.

Mix of very little game (I hope I don't digress!), a bit of real astronomy, a bit of theoretical Stuff and some actual real life travel gripe ...

Game ?

You'll know I've been on that Internet Spaceship game a bit too much. It so pretty. In its own way. So many pretty sparkly objects and gaps that an active imagination can fill in. Right now, my imaginary Starship Commander is propping up one of the bars in Hutton Orbital in the Alpha Centauri system after an epic journey to get there. It's supposed to be a resting time while waiting for Hutton Orbital Mugs to be made, hopefully so his dodgy right wrist recovers and gets less painful.

Too much time gripping the joystick me thinks.

Perhaps he should be drinking with a straw to not pick up those heavy glasses with the bad arm ? All the better to empty the glass quicker and make it lighter. I think my Imaginary Spaceship Commander might be an alcoholic and making up for me barely drinking alcohol at all.

Where is this Hutton Orbital and why has it become such a theme with Elite pilots ?

It's situated in the Alpha Centauri star system. Here's a link to lots of stuff on Wiki about it. At 4.2 light years distant, it's the closest star system to our own and is actually 3 stars linked together by their mutual gravitational attraction. (Detailed info in the link). The first two stars are designated Alpha Centauri A and ... you guessed it ... Alpha Centauri B. They vary in distance apart, closest approach is the same distance as Saturn to our Sun, farthest distance is Pluto.

The two stars are fairly Sol like. Our Sun is a Type G2V star right slap in the middle of the "Main Sequence" almost all stars go through in its life. That means there are millions or billions of years before it turns red, gets huge, eats the Earth and then dims, collapses and explodes into a nova, spreading the elements it has created into the cosmos to become the building blocks of more life. Alpha Centauri A is a G2V as well, B is a K1V which places it a bit further along on the main sequence. The 1/2V refer to the temperature relative to our sun and the V means they are main sequence stars. The actual characteristics are tied by laws of physics.

What's that mean ? It's highly unlikely any planets would form in a system like that. The interplanetary Stuff that organises itself in rings and then coagulates together is pulled apart by the influence of the two suns. It would never form a ring and therefore never form a planet. At least that's what I assume from my limited knowledge of astronomy. There's a cracking series by Prof Brian Cox that explains all this, I think it was Wonders Of The Solar System. Hopefully understandable by us mere mortals.

(They do actually think there's a planet around Alpha Centauri B, which shows how much I know)

So - no planets, no reason to go there ? Not quite. There's a third star in the system, called Proxima Centauri. It's 0.22 light years away from A and B. It's a red dwarf star class M6, which means it's small, dim and almost at the end of the main sequence. If a planet was around it, the planet would be pretty cold unless it was very close.

With current telescope technology, we can't refine our knowledge much past seeing the 3 stars even on a system as close as Alpha Centauri. We think there might be an exoplanet around AC B but it's too close to the star to be of any use (way too hot, hotter than Venus).

This is where the game comes in. For a game like Elite to be succesful, it has to have life. It needs population. It needs a galactic economy for traders to lose themselves in. It needs things to see, places to go. In the case of Alpha Centauri, they've placed a nearly dead planet called Eden around Proxima Centauri and there is a starport called Hutton Orbital in the skies above it.

Here it is, with my heavily armed trading Python the "Mel and Sue ..."

So there is life there, in the virtual domain at least.

If you make the trip to get there ... Hutton Orbital is 0.22 light years away from where you drop into the system. The game has its own form of warp drive to lessen the time taken to get to places. It barely takes any time to get from the entry point to stations maybe 100 to 10,000 light seconds away. This one is 80 light days or 6.9 million light seconds away. That takes 90 minutes to get there ... During which you're not doing very much. Apart from going to the shops for dinner bits, making dinner, having dinner, getting dessert, quick nap, facebook and twitter daily update.

So not many people go there. It's become a hotbed of activity over the weekend though, there is a Community Goal that involves taking scrap all the way to this station. Enough scrap and they make a new Rare Item (something in limited quantities that can only be bought in one place) to be sold here. It'll be the Hutton Orbital Mug.

I want one.

I want one in real life. Come on Frontier ! Make it happen !

So my in game personality is propping up the bar there because I really don't want to make that trip twice to pick up the reward for doing one trip. That suits me fine because the RSI tendencies in my wrist have been waking up with the stick time. (Boo hiss). Maybe I need to play some Shooty Game, that's been good therapy for it in the past. I also have Rendezvous With Rama to read and I've discovered an iPad game called Motorsport Manager which I've been enjoying.

I mentioned real life journeys didn't I ...

They're digging up the roads again. And this time is beyond insanity ... The plan is to make a new Metro Bus route, which will go very close to my place. Why they can't use the existing road system, I dunno. But they're doing widening works which for the short term, will cause havoc. Bristol has a few very strategic routes and exits to the motorways. If one of those routes or the motorway gets clogged, the result is massive gridlock as people get stuck in the traffic, as the traffic stretches back and blocks other strategic junctions, as people use alternate routes.

The other part of the insanity is that they've chosen to do this now, at the start of the school term, instead of starting it off in the school holiday. This is important because the traffic increases exponentially with parents doing the school run. I got into work at about normal time today but that's mostly because I used a Really Alternate Rarely Used Route. Actually never used this one before, won't do again. I went through a station which has extremely aggressive speed bumps.

Yep. Bit of madness from the Bristol city road planners again. We've got used to that over the years. They are actively hostile to road users, whether that be 2 wheel, 4 wheel or truck. You could say democracy has failed us there. We vote for the people making these decisions but if there are no sensible people to vote for, then democracy cannot choose a good leader.

Gripe. Whinge.

I came home by the normal route tonight, which actually went ok. But coming out of the area I live, the traffic was still mental. It all funnels into one big roundabout, which can't efficiently get everyone out of the area.

Virtual Life becomes more fun than Real Life again. Even if the trip in Virtual Life is 90 minutes watching a distance counter click down.

Hopefully tomorrow's trip into work will be better as people avoid the bottlenecks. I can't cos I'm in the middle of them. I won't be doing the virtual trip for a bit, I want to wait for that Community Goal to complete, then I'll have my pilot collect the reward and be out of there. Still a bit burned out on the Internet Spaceships though from the explore trip, although there are Spaceship Commanders coming out of the woodwork at work.

And I really must not continue the virtual journey that a character called Etherice (Iceangel was taken - boo hiss) started yesterday. Yep. I have an active WoW account again, even if it is a free trial 10 day period.

Testing

So I now have a new keyboard ...

The pooter fair was a bit ... poo. I'm used to the big fairs that used to run in Lincoln and another one, more local, that ran in Whitchurch. They'd have a big sports hall filled with vendors selling all sorts of shiny kit. Old pooters, bits for new pooters, junk, accessories for phones, unlock your phone on the spot people, games, dvds (usually pirate), bluray selling people. Those kind of vendors. I even saw a G4 Powerbook Mac on sale ... Definitely a relic now, although still usable if you could find the software for it.

Lots.

The new Bristol ones are a fraction of the size. Still worth going to if you want those bits of junk without having to pay the extravagant prices you can pay but ... a fraction of the choice available from the old fairs. And mentioning prices, I saw a GeForce960 graphics card there which may have been interesting ... however :

Price at first glance was £115. Price online starts at £160, so you think ... BARGAIN ! And then you see the thin circle turning the 1 into a £195. Oh dear. Perhaps the prices aren't quite as competitive. To be fair, the margins on online sellers like Novatech, Dabs, Scan, Overclockers UK are so thin that it's incredibly tough to compete. The advantage you get at the pooter fair is being able to take away the posting and packaging fees and hassle of having to be in when they deliver. It's why Novatech was my vendor of choice for bits for so long, they were just down the road, a short car drive away. The disadvantage with pooter fairs is the guarantee, I doubt whether any of the tech you buy at one would have a guarantee as soon as you walk out the door.

So no stuff at the fair today so what am I testing ?

I have a fairly shiny (ok, it's matt black so not shiny at all in the literal sense) Turtle Beach Impact 100 keyboard. It's not a mechanical keyboard but it feels ... reassuringly heavy. As in something that'll hopefully be reliable for a good few years. Needs testing.

And that involves this post - hurrah ! I've been struggling for ideas for posts lately, I've been needing the idea that becomes the genesis of your typical Wall Of Text (with occasional picture). And I don't think you want to be reading that many about what I'm doing in the games. The virtual worlds are interesting to me and cathartic in an escapism kind of way but ... it's quite personal ? The experience is mine, it's tough to transfer the sense of wonder that comes from seeing a massive starfield and ...

The eye of a supermassive black hole ... That's the virtual representation of Sagittarius A*, the engine at the centre of our galaxy. Theory says that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole, this is my Asp ship about 60 light seconds away from ours. That's about as close as I wanted to get ... Some people go in closer and it could have been a quick shortcut for getting back to base.

It's incredible the effects that have been put in to the game, the attention to detail. The black hole itself is ... somewhere there in the middle. One reason you can't see the centre is that the matter on the edge, the Event Horizon, is subject to such extreme time slow down that it is still collapsing ... The comment I put with the Facebook pic was "I think it's staring back at me". Stare long enough into the Abyss and the Abyss will stare back. A (in?)famous philosopher said something like that.

You can't see into the black hole, because the light doesn't come out. That's why it's called a "black" hole, because it has so much gravity attraction that even light cannot escape. But ... light will bend around it. On the left of the pic is the Milky Way ribbon (probably shouldn't be there !), which has bent around the black hole instead of being straight. As you fly around the hole, the stars appear to move as in a globe around it. You can see a lozenge pattern, which is reflected and refracted light.

It's an outstandingly pretty effect. Perhaps that's part of our sense of : This Is Insanely Dangerous, Therefore It Is Beautiful. I've known some people like that. The animal kingdom has it, certain plants definitely have it in a "Eat me, die and become my compost" kind of way.

Here's a bit more from Wiki about Black Holes. Astronomy is fascinating isn't it ? There were a couple of fantastic Stargate SG-1 episodes which tackled black holes too. Of an excellent series, these were some of its highlights.

Back to reality ... Sun's come out !

Part of today's plan had me thinking about going out for more Shaun hunting. Some ... medium? rain made me think twice about that but you also have ... People on bank holidays. People are fine. Lots of people together, not so much.

People online are a bit like that as well. If you met them in a social situtation, they'd probably be ok. But one thing that turns me off the online gaming with other people is the Pulling Legs Off Spiders tendency. You know, where people think they should be behaving very abnormally to others just because they can. The internet troll who thinks it's ok to be an absolute beast to other people.

There's one of those in Elite at the moment, they first got in touch as "Thargoid_Scarab", now they're known as "Officer Sphincter". Who would use that name ? What's silly is that this person has paid £40 for an account in order to be using the game. Their first (and last) message to me was "Ahoy fag". How offensive is that ? I didn't reply but gave them about half an hour to come up with something ... that someone would actually say without expectations of being punched. But they didn't, so I blocked them. And they've been trying to become friends numerous times since.

I think I may actually know this person. It could be a colleague who has just bought the game. If so, I'll be having words on Tuesday. There are many meanings for "Fag" and they are all bad. If that's what this colleague really thinks of me, then ... I'm unlikely to be helping him very much in the future unless an apology is forthcoming.

There's only one way to deal with Internet Trolls - and that's to give them no attention. Don't feed their egos. I don't think it's the colleague but we'll see what he does on Tuesday. If he says nothing, I'll assume it's an internet troll who knows me by my commander's name, it's an online name I've used for 10 years now and there were a few trolls who caused me hassle in Warcraft. I'll then report said player to the devs and ... they'll probably lose that £40 account.

Being nasty doesn't get you anywhere in the end. It's not just games. The internet gives people a place where they can be mean without much fear of repercussions. You see similar behavious on the roads where drive extremely dangerously and then make out like it's your fault when you give them a "You nearly hit me !" hoot. Cyclists are especially bad for that.

Perhaps this is why I like to disappear into the single player games ? Because they're an alternate world that's subject to known rules and there are none of the people who were never told off for pulling the legs off defenseless critters.

Be good to people.

Oh and the keyboard is feeling pretty nice.

Bring Him Home

I've been reading again. Hurrah !

Ok, so how come I've been away from reading ? There's a few reasons actually ...

I'm usually reading a lot at work, so when I get home I don't really want to be expending that much mental energy. I'm wanting to relax, cool the brain down and generally be lazy to regenerate that mental energy.

Pain in my wrists. Too much computering and a few too many awkward falls in the cricket have led to wrist pain, mostly RSI, that isn't going away. It's manageable through things like wrist supports and I don't need pain pills but still, holding those books up puts strain on those sore wrists.

And I didn't want to wreck my books. It's only fairly recently that my forearms have gotten so much more intact. They're not healed yet but they're getting there. Before, I'd have a big chance of getting blood on the books. To be avoided ...

But I have managed to get one new book read this week. One reason for that is using the iPad as an ebook reader (via the Kindle app). Firstly the app, I'm pleased with it. The text is easily readable to my eyes (which are in need of new glasses) and I can rest the iPad in my lap without having to tension my wrists holding the book open. Win. I'll definitely get more ebooks to feed the iPad with.

What's the book ?

There's huge potential for spoilers here which may take the shine off a highly enjoyable book but I'll try to avoid those.

It's Andy Weir's first book and I became aware of it after watching the trailer before Terminator Genesys. I REALLY want to watch this film now. I was super impressed with the trailer and the book has just amplified that interest tenfold.

What's it about ?

A massive storm has led to the abandonment of a mission to Mars but on the way to the escape vehicle, the crew of 6 loses a man. Or so they think ... The star of the show, Mark Watney, is left stranded on Mars with little hope of escape and a fraction of the supplies to let him hold out until rescue can come.

But he digs in and figures out how to survive on a hostile world. Along the way, drama, heroics, silliness, humour, comedy, excitement, surprise and more than a few genuine What The Hell ? moments.

It's an excellent book and it had me laughing, giggling and chortling away for page after page. It has that genuine One More Chapter Before Bed pull. The science is top notch, although sometimes the plot is helped by things going fairly deliberately wrong. The alternative to that would be a plain sailing route where all of the ideas worked perfectly. Where's the fun in that ! :-) Some of the more hysterical moments are our boy's reaction and solution to when things go wrong.

It's a cracker and I hope they squeeze even a fraction of its quality into the movie.

Why do we have to wait until October though ! That's way too long to wait. From just reading the book, I think it'll be my film of the year. Perhaps I'm putting too much expectation on and am doomed to be disappointed ? I hope not. If the film is naff, I'll just read the book again and that'll remind me of the chuckles.

Chuckles are awesome.

As are books. And I need to get reading more of them. They are food for the mind. I've been entertained by The Martian and I've learned a few things in there too. I hope Andy Weir comes out with more books.

I've been thinking back to the 2 Mars books by Ben Bova too. I enjoyed those however ... the first of those is dominated by a crisis that lasts for well over 100 pages before they figure it out. The crisis well outlasts its welcome and becomes annoying. In The Martian, the crises happen, are well described, you get the impression of how life threatening they are and then the solution is enacted. The crises in The Martian are dealt with in interesting ways, which also means they don't drag back the narrative. Oh and some of those crisis solutions are so mad they draw out the Mad Scientist tag.

I'd thoroughly recommend this book. But ... I need more !

Chuck me your (fiction please !) recommendations :-).

If you go to the cricket wear your helmet

Oops. Started typing, thought I'd better add a spoiler warning. Now how many words do I need to add at the top I wonder ...

Just seen the end of the England vs New Zealand cricket. Great day for it, the game was a day night game which ... has finished in sunshine.

Yep ! The sun occasionally shines in GB ! Perhaps not on Thursday, that's when I toddle off to Lords to watch the IST20 games.

It's been a good day's watching of the cricket. Lots of incident, lots going on, England got themselves into a very strong position quite quickly after an early setback. And ... highest score ever posted by England, first time 400 has been scored in a one day over here.

Add to that, a very successful return to England colours for legspinner Adil Rashid. Not only a match winning performance with the ball, he crafted out a wonderful supporting innings with the bat too. Hurrah for sticking it to the detractors and showing us what he could do. He was there all through the West Indies tour as well but didn't play, mostly due to our current Test captain and the as-then coach being muppets.

Yep. 408 scored today with a "BOOM !" from me pretty much every time our boys hit it into the crowd and a "Good Shot Sir !" for most of the fours. Great game for the England boys, New Zealand played pretty well too actually but fell way short with the game ending in a bit of a rush with lots of wickets.

It's distracted me away from :

That's my Diamondback Explorer looking at the galactic core from maybe 25,000 light years out. The starfield is definitely bigger as I've got 3000ly closer to it. That's only 1/9th of the distance. And one thing I'm impressed with in the game is that the starfield gets more prominent as you go away from a star. The brightness of the star suppresses the starfield.

I've been promised sights like the neutron star fields and the black holes. You know what a black hole is right ? Get too close and nothing escapes, not even light, because the gravitational attraction is so much that it pulls everything in.

A neutron star is different. It's formed from the remnant of a star that's gone through the most violent of explosions, a supernova. What's left is maybe 2 times the mass of our sun, in a space only 12-13km across. Here's the wiki info about them.

The basic building blocks of everything (to the atomic level ! it gets weird beyond that) are protons, electrons and neutrons. (Deletes long boring spiel about basic atomic chemisty, you ain't interested in that). Neutrons are mostly inert particles and in a neutron star, there's a massive number of them that collapse in on themselves to become the smallest thing they can become without becoming a black hole.

So you have something massing twice the mass of our sun, in that ball 12-13km across. In comparison, our sun is almost 1.4 million km in diameter. You're getting the idea that a neutron star might be something very dangerous to get close to. Not just that, you might not see them due to them being so smal, unless they are gamma or x-ray pulsars which are also, horrendously unhealthy if you're in the neighbourhood.

The way the game is set up, it has a procedurally generated (translation - guessed at but consistent for everyone) map of our galaxy. It's based on what we know, up to a point. There's only so much our astronomers can see. There's also made up clusters for areas like the starting cluster from the original game. There's a ring of these neutron stars modelled in the game, not just are they dangerous but if you go too far in, you run out of fuel and can't get out. You can only refuel from certain types of star, definitely not from a neutron star.

And then there's the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy.

The game implements black hole lensing effects (where the light beams bend around the black hole) and I'm looking forward to seeing how those appear. Not for a while though, I still have 24000 light years to travel in my little ship.

It has a name by the way : Searching For The Larks

There's a meaning behind that name, I'm curious to see if anyone will guess it ... I may have to get the new Imperial Courier ship :

The Diamondback is small and highly useful but it isn't what you could call "Pretty". Bit too angular. And I know a few small, very gorgeous people who I'd like to name a ship after.

But there's me disappearing into a game world instead of doing stuff in the real world. Perhaps a few busy days ahead :

Wednesday - off to Cheltenham to get a niggle on the car looked at. It's asking for maintenance to be done, which should have been done at the service (someone's missed an electronic tickbox). I'll also look around Cheltenham for Shinies because ... why not ! Shinies are good.
And then it's back here to watch San Andreas which could be ... bad and pretty amusing.
I also need more snacks for :
Thursday - Lords for the cricket ! After flirting with looking at the train, I'm going to take the car. It means more time travelling but I should be able to watch more of the games without being limited by offpeak travel times. It's almost £70 difference between starting at 8am and starting at 9am. That's daylight robbery.

Saturday and Sunday - Le Mans 24 hours. Looking forward to this, there's always a story that develops throughout the race. Sometimes cars get totally rebuilt and carry on to the end. I haven't looked at the entry list yet but I hope there will be a few Brit cars to cheer on.

And more cricket on the telly too.

Ok, have rambled on enough for tonight (including way too much science than I can justify !). Last pic ?

Hope the racing at the weekend is safe but fast and that no one gets hurt this year.

Little Interstellar Breakdown

Before I dive into the main bit (shredding Interstellar's sciency bits), a couple of other things to natter about :

I use the word "Little" as a description for some people. I hope they don't mind ! I see it as a valid descriptor meaning that they're shorter than I am. Nothing more than that, nothing less. And I think "Little Lady" has a certain ring to it too. That said, "big girl" also has a certain ring to it but I'm not going to be using that. A lot of ladies are sensitive about their size, which cuts out "big" and other ladies will get the dagger eyes out if you call them a "girl".

It's a little strange that I find one descriptor ok but others to be anathema. I hope the little ladies don't object to me using that descriptor. I personally attach it to "elfin", "cute", "dainty" and a few other descriptors that mean nice things. Conversely, calling a lady "big" when you just mean "she's taller" will lead to a slapping ...

Forget descriptors - all ladies have their own special beauty, no matter what size or shape they are.

Second and this is where I put SPOILER WARNING ! Read past this and I'll be putting in spoilers for Interstellar ... Christopher Nolan is guilty of a lot of crimes against science but he's no Michael Bay. I wanted to see the Turtles movie but avoided it because all reports say it's an abomination. Like the accursed Transformers movies.

Despite all the faults, I really enjoyed Interstellar. There's the people who appreciate the story and there's the people who will throw things at the screen due to the dodgy science. I'm somewhere between the two. I really enjoyed the movie but there was a little part of me screaming inside (it wasn't quite dead yet after Michael Bay killed Transformers).

Soooo ...

Going to the black hole water planet first. Why ? With the time dilation there'd be no way to coordinate planetside with orbit. And it's a short lived solution due to the impending It's Gonna Get Sucked Into The Black Hole !!! thing.

Not anticipating conditions on the water planet. We have our tides due to the presence of our moon, so it stands to reason that a water planet next to a honking great big black hole is going to have tides too. Big tides. Not mentioning the lack of anticipation of the effect of time dilation on the scientist who landed.

The Ranger craft. I liked these as a concept. They're a lifting body aircraft which looked good in the movie and made sense from the science point of view. But ... when they take off in one from Earth, it needs our biggest rocket to date (a Saturn V) to lift it to orbit. Yet on the new planets, it suddenly becomes Single Stage To Orbit and can get there on its own. This is despite the water planet being 130% the gravity of Earth.

The whole causality thing. Who put the wormhole there, who brought the astronauts and T.A.R.S. into 3d space. Causality is pretty nuts.

One way wormhole when it comes to communications ? Very convenient from a plot point of view.

The Blight - it feeds on Nitrogen right ? So it should be metabolising the Nitrogen into something different. Possibly NOx compounds or NH compounds. Either way, the Nitrogen component of the air should reduce right ? Mind you, NOx compounds and NH (Ammonia) compounds are also really nasty. But ... it did seem like the Blight was more a bio-terminator targeting the staple food crops.

The airlock blowout - holy carp that was dangerous. You would have thought those claw things wouldn't operate only as a lock, they'd assist with the mating process joining both sides together. Or perhaps that was the bit disabled with the autodocking.

Distillery - they land a distillery on the ice planet. What happened to it ?

Ice clouds - what's holding them up ?

Choosing the second planet. I think I'd have prioritised the planet with a breathable atmosphere over one with a poisonous atmosphere but then again ... engineering the plot again.

I think that's enough for now ...

The thing to remember though, is that if you can keep that little voice inside quiet that's begging to scream out at the inconsistencies and the bad science, this is still a remarkable movie on all sorts of levels. The visuals are incredible and I loved the characters. So much that when Mr Cooper bursts into tears listening to the messages, I'm almost ready to blub too (that's not the bit that got me).

I'll still get the bluray when it comes out, will probably get the soundtrack if it dips to an acceptable price. But I'll be gagging that little scientist voice to stop it spoiling the story.

Movies of 2013 - Elysium

We were blessed with quite a few decent movies in 2013. I'm watching one of them at the moment - Elysium.

What is it ? It's a scifi spectacular based in the year 2154. Human society has been split in two, the majority live on Earth. An apparently post apocalyptic Earth with Los Angeles in ruins. The minority live in an orbiting space habitat called Elysium where they enjoy the benefits of hyper advanced technology. Things like being able to cure Leukaemia in minutes by effectively taking the body apart and putting it back together again the right way.

I'll try and avoid too many spoilers but here's the major characters :

Lead protagonist - Max. Who lives on Earth but dreams of reaching Elysium. He experiences a factory accident which irradiates him with a dose that will be lethal in 5 days. Desperate times indeed ... The desperate measure is an exo suit that gives him super strength to counteract the radiation sickness.

With Max is Frey, who gives Max another very good reason for wanting to get up to Elysium.

Jodie Foster plays a megalomaniac defense secretary who is prepared to do anything necessary to protect Elysium.

Sharlto Copley (the breakthrough star of District 9) plays a wonderfully psychotic mercenary for hire who is Jodie Foster's muscle. And by wonderfully psychotic, that's definitely an understatement.

You have other characters in there as well but they take a second place to the leads and the technology the writers get to play with.

It starts with the space station - Elysium. There's a lot done right here. If you've read the Ringworld books, that series has a massive ring in space orbiting a sun. It gradually spins, which keeps the air in. This time, it's a much smaller station that is about 19 minutes travel time from Earth.

Aside - it's not "centrifugal" force. That's a fallacy invented to explain something without any true understanding of what's going on. The BBC commentators in the Winter Olympics used it a lot in the bobsleigh coverage. The ball being spun on the rope doesn't fly away due to mythical centrifugal force, it goes round in a circle due to centripetal force exerted by the rope. It's similar with the air in a ringworld. The atmosphere wants to carry straight on outwards but is kept inside by the surface and high walls.

The average movie viewer doesn't care about that though - it's the visuals that count and they're top notch.

Aside 2 - although they don't mention it in the movie, there's a series of Lagrange points up in space. They're the places where things stay where they're put. I'm assuming the Elysium habitat is at one of the L4 or L5 (between Earth and Moon - see link for more) points. Reason ? It's in the same place in the sky. This is another sign of how they were clever, it's presenting something complex in a simple way. People who know the orbital mechanics thing recognise it but ... the average movie viewer isn't interested.

Exo suits - these are coming. Perhaps not as gruesomely as in the movie (think chop shop but with a human having things screwed into him) but they're on their way. Hopefully soon too because an exo suit, full or partial, will be an amazing way of getting our amputees their mobility back. The trick is to make the movement natural and precise and it's that precision which will be the tough part of the pie. We'll need to precision that lets us close fingers on an egg, without breaking the shell.

The progression from that is AI controlled droids - these guys are Nasty.

Using the brain as a memory store. I dunno the stats on this but we don't use much of the space in our brains. Elysium sees data being stored in our heads. I think this is coming too, although the interface will need work. Nasty copy protection here ;-).

The medical tech - this is the true miracle. Will it be possible in 140 years ? I hope so.

Should you watch Elysium ? Hell yeah. It's a great movie. There's enough action and explosions in there to keep most movie watchers happy. And the science in there keeps the scifi geekster happy too. Although there are bad points that we won't mention too much :

The engines on the spaceships. Ok, it is 140 years in the future ? Plausible ? Maybe.
Shooting down shuttles in a manner that will pepper the habitat with debris - ouch.
Having a handheld launcher capable of shooting down shuttles in orbit - want one.
Using computer speak from now (assembler language and BIOS screens) - make something else up !

Apart from that, it has pretty much everything : Great story, amazing visuals, science fiction that makes a lot of sense, excellent characters.

Well worth catching. I think I wrote about it around August when it was in cinemas, I just finished watching on Bluray and it still holds up. It's not the best movie of last year, Gravity was better. Need to buy that.