| Orbit Jet | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | 1954 |
| Information | |
| Affiliation | Office of Space Affairs Earth |
| General characteristics | |
| Registry | XV-2 |
| Armaments | Missiles |
| Defences | Cloaking device |
| Propulsion | Rocket engines |
| Chassis | Winged V-2-shaped tail-sitter |
The Orbit Jet was a fictional spaceship in the 1954 TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger . It strongly resembled a V-2 rocket in overall form, with a very prominent exhaust plume when flying, but had wings in addition to tail fins (even its radio call sign, "XV-2" relates it to that seminal World War II design). There were references in the dialog to the engines being "atomic". The Orbit Jet had a crew of two (pilot and copilot), but often had three or four others on board depending on the mission and destination. It often flew from Earth to inhabited moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which it seemed to reach in hours or days of time within the story.
A spacecraft is a vehicle or machine designed to fly in outer space. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, Earth observation, meteorology, navigation, space colonization, planetary exploration, and transportation of humans and cargo. All spacecraft except single-stage-to-orbit vehicles cannot get into space on their own, and require a launch vehicle.
Rocky Jones, Space Ranger is an American science fiction television serial originally broadcast in syndication from February to November 1954. The show lasted for only two seasons and, though syndicated sporadically, dropped into obscurity. Because it was recorded on film rather than being broadcast live as were most other TV space operas of the day, it has survived in reasonably good condition. The film format also allowed more elaborate special effects and sets, exterior scenes, and much better continuity.
The V-2, technical name Aggregat 4 (A4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a "vengeance weapon", assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first man-made object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.
Later in the series, another ship, the Silver Moon, was used, but it appeared almost identical to the Orbit Jet.
The Orbit Jet introduced many features that would become standard equipment on later TV and movie spaceships:
- An electronic viewscreen (instead of a simple window or porthole)
- A fantastically complicated control panel (without an airplane-styled control wheel or stick)
- Power doors opening side-to-side as one approaches
- Subspace radio (the "Astrophone") that allowed instantaneous communications over interplanetary distances
- Artificial gravity as an explained feature and plot element
- Tractor beams
- Personal communicators (very similar to the pen communicators used later on The Man From U.N.C.L.E.)
- A cloaking device that rendered the ship invisible.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is an American spy-fiction television series produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television and first broadcast on NBC. It follows secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who work for a secret international counterespionage and law-enforcement agency called U.N.C.L.E. The series premiered on September 22, 1964, completing its run on January 15, 1968. The series led the spy-fiction craze on television, and by 1966 there were nearly a dozen imitators. Several episodes were successfully released to theaters as B movies or double features. There was also a spin-off series, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., novel and comic book series, and merchandising.
Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. However, it can also be a functional technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components. Since 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement, have been available, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO.
