So, they can't use the pics the satellite took cos they didn't transmit shot range and magnification. Hang on. We know this is the destination of the UFO. So it follows it would be roughly planet sized ish. And where's the harm in ASSUMING it to be a planet? It doesn't make much difference.
Why doesn't the UFO blast the B142 over the 6 month journey back to the Alien planet?
How come Henderson, heavily opposed to the project, doesn't tease Straker about its failure when they meet at the end?
And why not send another probe out?
I always felt that Strakers assertion that the pics were useless because there was no scale to be very odd. I'm sure that you could tell at least *something* from these pictures and surely in the battle against the aliens any information would be helpful.
Forget the size of the planet, which is irelevant in comparison to discovering the *LOCATION* of their planet! Knowing where the aliens come from is more helpful than knowing if the alien's world is the size of Earth or Mars.
My problem with this ep is...
Are UFOs FTL? If they are, how does the B142 follow it? And even assuming through some quirk of UFO drive it could, how do the images get back to Earth?
On the other hand, if UFOs are sublight, then they MUST be from the Solar System (there are no other solar systems within 0.5 light years).
Also, if UFOs are sublight, but they travel at a large fraction of c, we have the same problem above -- how does the B142 keep up with the UFO?
An analogy would be trying to follow a Formula One racecar with a bicycle.
Oh I dunno, if Alex Yoong was driving it ...
The alien's planet of origin always confused me, especially if that moon-like world, seen at the end credits is supposed to be their world. It can't be Mars, so what is that thing? An planetoid? A giant asteroid?
The UFO's are constantly referred to be travelling at (for example) SOL decimal 183, which I understand is .183 of the speed of light, which would be (I think)16,800 miles per second. At that rate, I've always wondered how fast the interceptors are, and if they could catch up to the aliens.
.183 c is 34,086 miles/sec.
Actually, when SID first tracks the UFOs, they're usually going Sol 8, and in one episode, SID gives the speed in millions of miles per minute or hundreds of millions of miles per hour.
The speed of light is 700,000,000 miles per hour, and about 11.2 million miles per minute.
Whatever SID said for miles, it came out to roughly 8 times the speed of light, so the UFOs approach the Earth-Moon system at eight times the speed of light (Warp 2 in Star Trek terms).
It does seem odd that SID can track something moving that fast, and that the UFOs wouldn't be down to a high sub-light by this time. Even Sol .2 would get them from the Moon's orbit to Earth in only 6.5 seconds! I find it hard to believe that late 1970s-early 1980s technology could build interceptors capable of that flying speed to keep up with the UFOs, and those goofy torpedoes can't be much faster!
I wondered just the other day how fast the moon shuttle takes to cross the distance. Since its engine seems not to glow or otherwise fire a stream of visible rocket burn, I assume it is an electric engine that was developed in some sort of crash program.
Something I have long wondered is why the plane that launches the moon shuttle and recovers it, bothers to land vertically instead of rolling down a runway. It has wheels, after all!
And back to this episode: why didn't they launch the probe with the camera already on board? Seems they just wanted to have an excuse for a space walk to fill up the episode! They might have instead shown how they were going to ride the UFO's "FTL wake" back to its origin.
There... 1 and a half million miles per second - that is 8 x 186,000!
I just got that from my playback of "Invasion UFO", roughly 23 minutes into the movie.
It's an old taping, off of CHCH-TV in the early 1980s, one of the first permanent tapings I ever made.
Some impressive effects in this episode. The shots of the puppet astronauts moving their arms look totally convincing (the music lifted from Journey to the Far Side of the Sun worked beautifully in this scene too). The shot of the probe firing it's rocket to follow the UFO was less successful: the smoke trail looked very unrealistic.
Today's satellites can produce photographic images with resolution and detail much greater than that of the probe. Then again, it's 2005, and not the eighties!
Skydiver seemed to be riding way too high out of the water when it surfaced.
This satellite is orbiting at 490 miles up. Isn't a normal satellite orbit 22,000 miles up?
Anyone else get a Dr. Evil vibe when Straker was asking for a measely $1 million for this project?
NASA facilities sure look a lot different than any pictures I've ever seen.
"SOL minus 8.35".
How do you travel at a negative Speed Of Light?
The numbers on that computer screen grid seemed to be completely random. Shouldn't grid numbering have some semblance of order?
The thing about scale did seem ridiculous, but then again the guy who was telling Straker that the pics were useless without scale was the same guy who wanted funding for his pet project. Can we say conflict of interest here? (Chances are he probably sabotaged the camera not to record the scale.)
This satellite is orbiting at 490 miles up. Isn't a normal satellite orbit 22,000 miles up?
No. Satellites have various orbits.
22000 miles is GEO or Geosynchronous Earth Orbit. It's very useful for communications satellites, as they remain stationary above a single point (relative to earth).
LEO or Low Earth Orbit is pretty much anything below that. In particular from about 100-600 miles. Most space missions are at about 120 miles or so. I think Hubble is at about 400 miles.
Help! Someone seems to have stolen one of my 't's!!!
Of course the NASA facilities look different, the launch pad was another superb bit of model work from Derek Meddings and his special effects gang!
Re:Satellite orbits
Spy satellites, in the 1960's (when UFO was concieved) used far lower orbits than 490 miles altitude to take their pictures...
(One common orbit for U.S satellites of the period, was 195 Miles altitude).
As for the magnification issue, you could work it out given the focal length of the lens, the size of the film frame, the resolution of the film stock in question & the orbit it's placed in...
(A typical pre-1970 camera of this type
(Hycon LG-77) had a focal length of 66 ins, & the flim frame size was 4&1/2 ins square. Given a final orbit of 100 miles (160 km) & a film resolution of 200 lines/mm, the camera could image a object 2 feet in diameter...)
Some time ago I was reading a thing on Nemesis, the alleged object that orbits our solar system and causes extinctions when it comes too close every 26 million years or so.
One theory was that it was a very weak red dwarf star that hasn't been discovered yet.
Maybe the alien's planet orbits this dying star? It could explain the time factor in this episode.
This episode establishes that interceptors are FTL. At one point, they are instructed to accelerate to SOL 1.127.
The UFO is described as travelling between SOL 8.37 and 8.39.
While the Andersons are fairly forward looking, with a woman in command of Moonbase, the late '60s sexism shows through when Straker attempts to encourage Lt. Ellis.
The "whole planet" pictures didn't look like the moon-like world the B142 was capturing.
If I'm not mistaken, the pictures of the alien planet are identical to the shots of Earth taken during the teaser.
Strange pronounciation of a word by a NASA technician.
'Telemetry' was pronounced, 'Tela-meet-tree' instead of 'Tel-lem-met-tree'.
What use is the scientist's macro-vision camera? So what if you can blow up a piece of pollen to make it look like a building-- SHADO is fighting an enemy from outer space, not inner space.
When Straker is describing his mission plan over the Moonbase P.A. system, there's two shots of a pair of Interceptor pilots sitting in one of the domes listening. I'm positive that the one on the left is a pre-Jon Pertwee/Doctor Who era John Levene, a.k.a. Sargeant Benton.
This would have been filmed after his first episodes with Patrick Troughton, and just before (or during) his first full season alongside Pertwee as the UNIT soldier.
Much has been said, and rightly so, of John Dykstra's amazing special effects work in 'Star Wars', where the ships are chunky, not-so-sleek, not-so-clean, but as far as I'm concerned it was Derek Meddings who paved the way for others later on. He did it in other shows for Gerry Anderson, but the burnt, dusty, worn-out hull of the Lunar Module, showing previous Earth entry scars, is evident here, and a nice show of realism.
I'm positive that the one on the left is a pre-Jon Pertwee/Doctor Who era John Levene
It was him.
His Wikipedia article includes his role on this episode.