The Peter Streicker Theory

Peter Streicker <momar@home.com> submitted a couple of interesting graphics to the Marathon's Story page on July 28th. These images touched off a firestorm of debate on the Story page... and led Peter to follow up with some interesting calculations. When we requested these files, Peter told us "I'm flattered that you'd ask for my pictures, you can have them with my blessing! I just sent in a physics/camera rotation test to the story page as well." We've taken the liberty of reformatting his text a bit to improve readability. All images with a border can be clicked on to reach higher-resolution versions, for ease of reading of annotations. Enjoy!

Proportional Modeling Scene Overview
After reading what people had to say and realizing that it could also be the space cheerio, I decided to conduct a test. In my favourite 3D program I modeled the planets and two rings over the control room picture. Then I used a frame from the movie where the planet was visible and moved the camera away from the planet and then the moon until they each matched the movie's planet's size.


Then I changed to an overhead view and drew a circle around the planets at the same distance that the camera would have been to see the planet being the size in the movie. Proportional Orbits


Now if we are looking at either the planet or the moon, it HAS to be from one of those camera orbits. As it turns out The demented space cheerio is along one of the camera orbits while the giant ring does not. We are definately looking at the Gas Giant/Star from the Cheerio at the Lagrangian Point.

This makes me think that James Lanfear, Chris Butcher and Martin Thorne are correct in their theories about the outside ring being a close-up of the cheerio.

But I did however notice something else that bugged me. While Watching the movie I noticed the position of the planet in relation to the ring. As you can see in Ring Axis:

Ring Axis





Ring Axis 2 the planet is beside you, not behind the ring like it should be. So the ring is rotating along the wrong axis.

Both the controlroom and my limited grasp of physics tells me that the ring should be horizontal between the two planets, not vertical like it seems in the movie...

Also, You wrote "'The construct encircles a star...' Oh well... ;-)", I was just wondering why you took Sharky Extreme's blurb over CNN Interactive, who said it was a gas giant. I suppose I'm not really an authority on outer space but it looks like a gas giant to me, and while watching the movie over and over, in addition to Joshua Inglima noticed the sun was beside and behind the ring. I think that the sun is the star in which the planet, moon, and halo orbits, or that it's the binary star.

Vale

Back to the Theories page

Intellectual © halo.bungie.org, 1999, 2000