Interstellar (trailer)

The fact that fuel was a concern doesn't mean they had magic fuel which enabled them to instantly and easily leave a planet with more gravity than Earth in a small ship with the size, speed and agility of a Star Trek shuttlecraft. The fuel needed to leave Earth required massive rockets and fuel tanks and stuff. It takes a LOT of fuel to get into orbit.

Unless they had new, magic fuel they didn't tell us about.

I thought your concern was that if they had the ability to land on a planet's surface and leave it's gravitational pull with the Ranger, why would they need the large rocket?
 

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I thought your concern was that if they had the ability to land on a planet's surface and leave it's gravitational pull with the Ranger, why would they need the large rocket?

Yes. Rockets are large because lots of fuel is needed to put the small important bit at the top into orbit. To put something the size of a Ranger into orbit, they would need a similarly sized rocket with a similar amount of fuel. The only way this wouldn't be the case is if the Ranger has some completely different magic fuel which doesn't require hundreds of tons of it.
 

Yes. Rockets are large because lots of fuel is needed to put the small important bit at the top into orbit. To put something the size of a Ranger into orbit, they would need a similarly sized rocket with a similar amount of fuel. The only way this wouldn't be the case is if the Ranger has some completely different magic fuel which doesn't require hundreds of tons of it.

Maybe it did have some kind of new type of engine that uses anti-matter or some other exotic thing as fuel. While it's possible that they made a mistake, I find it unlikely given the advisers they had and research they did. So I'm gonna go with cinematic effect. Nothing says leaving Earth than leaving it on top of a three million kg rocket.

To be honest, it seems like a pretty trivial point to pick up on. I mean, there are a lot of things that they didn't have to do in such a situation but they did. Why send people down to the surface once you reach the other side of the wormhole? Just send probes, it's a hell of lot safer and doesn't consume nearly enough fuel. Hell, the robots seemed pretty capable. Why send humans to start a colony at all? The answer is that it's a great deal more fun to watch humans go through those things. So what if it's not entirely realistic.
 

To be honest, it seems like a pretty trivial point to pick up on.

It's a movie. It's whole existence is trivial. You can't chat about a movie without being trivial.

Feel free to ignore any posts you don't consider interesting. :)
 



I went to see it with my wife and her best friend, neither of whome are very science-y although they do watch pop-science like Brian Cox vehicles.

We all enjoyed it. They had trouble with the relativity stuff but it didn't get in the way of the film, we just talked about in the car on the way home.

For a film of 165 minutes it never felt too long, which is a pretty good indicator for me. I would agree with the idea that is is a modern spin on things like 2001.
 

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