From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written
On Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:58:25 GMT, John Savard wrote:
On YouTube, I saw a trailer for the new Supergirl movie that's coming
up. The star apparently had a role in a sequel to Game of Thrones. In
the first trailer I saw, it looked like she was a brunette instead of a blonde, and I found that a bit shocking, but apparently the character is blonde.
Anyways, my curiosity was piqued by the geometric styling of the craft
in which she came to Earth.
This led me to a web search. I learned that Buckminster Fuller didn't
invent the geodesic dome! Instead, it was invented in the 1920s in
Germany; since the inventor, Walther Bauersfeld, wound up in East
Germany after the war, he was obscure.
But geodesic spheres are made from triangles. The shape I was curious
about was the dual of a geodesic sphere, made from pentagons and
hexagons.
It turns out they have a name too: they're called Goldberg Polyhedra,
after one Michael Goldberg. His papers on the subject were apparently considered so minor, he had to get them published in a Japanese
mathematical journal. In the 1930s, so this is also before Fuller.
I had to look really closely at the video clip to figure out which
Goldberg polyhedron she came to Earth in. But I did manage.
The twelve pentagons were oriented in the opposite direction as they
would be on a dodecahedron, the same direction as on a soccer ball. But
what separates two pentagons that have corners pointing to each other is
not just the line between two hexagons, but a line between to hexagons,
a hexagon, and another line between two hexagons.
So it's the one after the soccer ball in the second batch, the
dodecahedral batch, in the Wikipedia article on Goldberg polyhedra.
John Savard
You should post the link to the trailer in question.
I found three trailers and none of them had anything
revealing the geometry of a spaceship.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2