Back from LA with Honorverse move news

waddles for desert wrote:Abigail is a rich princess in a future where even Grayson tech is in advance of our own.

There is a program for my iPad that tells me where to point it to find a planet or star or the ISS. And, when I point it in a particular direction, it identifies the objects in the field of view for me.

I imagine that Abigail might have access to a decent set of star gazing binoculars with similar technology.

Indeed. A Steadholder so inclined could probably afford a dedicated balcony with virtual displays that worked the same way. An interesting way to show the primitive Graysons in comparison to us.

Darn it! You beat me to it.

I perused HotQ to refresh my memory of how distant the battle was from Gtayson. It seems as if it was about 1 AU away. Assuming that Abby has a telescope comparable to my 12" Celestron, she could watch the battle without difficulty. From SFtS, we get a sense of how wealthy a Steadholder is. Abby's daddy is certainly a Billionair and might even qualify as a Trillionair depending on how much of the steading assets would be counted as personal wealth. I can't imagine that a stead holder would have any difficulty buying such an instrument for his young daughter

Let the makeup folks worry about prolong. Look how much younger so many actors and actresses look in their 40s and 50s.

Scuffles wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:Prolong is going to be a problem and — at present — Evergreen is definitely planning on keeping it. Finding an actress in her 20s with the gravitas to play a starship captain in her mid-40s is going to be a nontrivial challenge. And it will also be a nontrivial challenge to do the number of movies they're hoping for without the aging of the characters becoming a factor. Like a lot of things in life, the best you can do is the best you can do, and that's what Evergreen intends to do. The very best they can.

Prolong was one of the other things I was wondering about for sure. It seems that you're going to have to find at least a handful of fairly young actors / actresses to get across the point of just how young some prolong recipients can look at times.

Major urban areas? Everyone lives under a dome (I hate Stephen King), nobody lives in the "woods" and if folks were to be moved away from the Steadings, they'd end up being crowded together under some farm dome, one that is not out in orbit. So what would that accomplish. kzt, you are so often spot on that that post just amazed me.

kzt wrote:If I was running Grayson at the point I'd be going to a global blackout and getting people away from the major urban areas.

No grayson city was under a dome nor where there domed farms during the battle. It was not until Flag in exile that the first city and farms got them due to Honor.

wholf359 wrote:No grayson city was under a dome nor where there domed farms during the battle. It was not until Flag in exile that the first city and farms got them due to Honor.

Actually there were domes, just not any very large ones IIRC Protectors Palace and Harrington House were under domes. But no cities or farms.

saber964 wrote:

wholf359 wrote:No grayson city was under a dome nor where there domed farms during the battle. It was not until Flag in exile that the first city and farms got them due to Honor.

Actually there were domes, just not any very large ones IIRC Protectors Palace and Harrington House were under domes. But no cities or farms.

Since Honor didn't become a Steadholder until the end of HotQ, nothing was domed, not even Protector's Palace. Harrington City was the first city domed, and that wasn't until FiE. Also, Adam Garreck devised the farm domes in FiE. three books after HotQ.

rdt wrote:Major urban areas? Everyone lives under a dome (I hate Stephen King), nobody lives in the "woods" and if folks were to be moved away from the Steadings, they'd end up being crowded together under some farm dome, one that is not out in orbit. So what would that accomplish. kzt, you are so often spot on that that post just amazed me.

kzt wrote:If I was running Grayson at the point I'd be going to a global blackout and getting people away from the major urban areas.

Point - there were no farm domes until years later, and most individual homes were not under domes either. Large public buildings were under individual domes, but individual homes were simply hermetically sealed rather than being domed. Doming didn't come until the foundation of Sky Domes years later.

Not that I disagree with your main point, though

rdt wrote:Major urban areas? Everyone lives under a dome (I hate Stephen King), nobody lives in the "woods" and if folks were to be moved away from the Steadings, they'd end up being crowded together under some farm dome, one that is not out in orbit. So what would that accomplish. kzt, you are so often spot on that that post just amazed me.

kzt wrote:If I was running Grayson at the point I'd be going to a global blackout and getting people away from the major urban areas.

While everyone appreciated what the Fearless was doing, it was obvious to everyone in a position of authority that Fearless was almost certainly going to lose. Their hope of rescue was dependent on the RMN getting a battle squadron there. Which should have taken at least 3 days longer than it actually did.

You can more likely survive being in a somewhat toxic environment with the kind of protective gear everyone on Grayson has than you can survive being within a few KM of a megaton range nuke or KE strike.

You turn off all the lights to make it harder for the barbarians to target the urban areas.

JohnRoth wrote:In this case, the eye can be modeled by a camera. IIRC, the way it works is that the eye fixates on one point for a number of milliseconds, then it shifts to another point in a motion called a saccade, which lasts for a number of milliseconds. Effectively, the brain integrates a number of still pictures. This is why movies work - the brain is simply doing what it does naturally in integrating a series of stills. The fact that we see things moving smoothly is an illusion constructed by the brain's visual processing.

So if the flash occurs while the eye is fixated, it'll appear as a flash, while if it occurs during a saccade it'll be effectively invisible.

Psychologists that study vision exploit this in all kinds of amusing ways, using eye tracking gizmos and ultra-fast refresh screens that they can repaint while the eye is in motion and hence not recording what's happening. Fun.

Yeah, I know that, but that doesn't answer the question. The other feature of a camera is that it adds together all the photons that hit it during a certain period of time, and if the total is large enough, a black spot appears on the film. But the critical question is: how long is the eye integrating photons before signaling the brain what it sees? It may very well be the amount of time that the eye is fixated on a spot. But how long is that? I'm fairly sure it is much longer than 100 milliseconds. Without knowing this, it is impossible to model the light integration of the eye.

Actually, it is more complicated than that for human vision. There is a minimum time period in which an image must exist before the mind consciously sees it. This is what causes subliminal stimuli. So we can assume that the flash must be visible (i.e. bright enough) for at least the subliminal threshold time. But I have not been able to find a source which gives an actual threshold value for a flash like this. If anyone here can give any pointers, it would be helpful.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consc ... dings.html

This is due to the well-studied phenomenon of visible persistence. When we are shown a brief visual stimulus, the resulting visual experience is typically a good deal longer than the stimulus itself: e.g., the visible persistence of a single 1 msec flash can vary between 100 msec and 400 msec, depending on the type of flash and the adaptive state of the eye.[44]
....
With the eye, perception is less delicate. Two sparks, made to fall beside each other in rapid succession on the centre of the retina, ceased to be recognized as successive by Exner when their interval fell below 0.044 second [44msec] (1890: 613)
...
These 19th century figures have largely survived the test of time. Pockett (2003) recently attempted to replicate Exner's findings using contemporary equipment. When shown two 1 msec flashes of LED light in succession her subjects only began to see two flashes (rather than one) when the illuminations were separated by at least 45–50 msec – very much in line with Exner's results.