I'm so excited about this show, I dream of it in my sleep. That said, I have a complaint about the latest FOUNDATION trailer.
In the Exclusive Trailer Breakdown published by IGN, David Goyer says that a space elevator "is literally an elevator that stretches something like, 26 miles into space, out into orbit", which is a very reasonable description of what a space elevator should be. However, in the trailer there is a shot of the space elevator stretching out several hundred thousand miles, if not over a million miles, away from Trantor. It stretches so far away that you can see the entire sphere of the planet below the elevator.
Now, I understand how a shot can be metaphorical, like the one in which Spock watches the destruction of Vulcan with the naked eye from the surface of Delta Vega in JJ Abrams' Star Trek (2009), but I sincerely hope FOUNDATION steers clear from metaphorical shots like that.
I really hope this ridiculous shot gets edited out from the final cut of whichever episode it appears in. Of course, an exception to this would be if this space elevator actually stretches all the way up to a stationary moon of Trantor, or something of the sort, in which case the shot would actually make sense.
I hope David Goyer reads this!
Cheers!
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Space Elevators Should Not Extend That Far!
Space Elevators Should Not Extend That Far!
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For details on how a space elevator would work and could be built, I recommend reading "The fountains of paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke.
We don't know the mass of Trantor, but if density is similar to Earth we can estimate it as roughly 30% of Earth (correct me if I'm wrong). And a Trantor day is 1.08 Galactic Standard days, that I think we can assume are Earth days. And if all my calculations are correct, that would mean that geosync orbit would be about 70% of the Earth's geosync orbit. So yes, that would be very high, and since Trantor's radius is roughly 2/3 of the Earth's, that view where the planet looks very small seems about right.