We learn in the 4th and 5th ep of S. 1 that the first planet they land on has an unusual elliptic orbit causing alternating temperatures of far above and then far below 100 degrees causing them to leave their campsite.
However in the 6th ep Welcome Stranger and subsequent eps while on Priplanus the weather is just fine. Are we to assume the orbit simply changed. Did IA really think no one would notice or remember between ep.s 5 and 6?
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If by gay you mean no longer a menace but a fruity cowardly flake, not yet another 20 eps or so.
More towards the end of season 1 and no he isn't gay or a chomo, thats just a bad joke IMO.
A good rule of thumb is if its a color ep (S2 and S3) its goofy, nonthreatening Smith.
If its a black and white ep chances are he isn't quite there yet and still a possible threat.
METV just rolled over from the very end of S3 to the beginning of S1 last month.
In my area its on Sat nights after Svengoolie followed by VTBOS. Star Trek and Batman are on earlier.
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Variations in temperature up or down over time is fine, but they established that there was a swing in over 200 degrees total (100 over to 100 under) which occurred within a couple of days. Major West found a branch which was burned and then frozen confirming Professor Robinson's elliptical orbit theory.
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You might be able to get an effect like this if the tilt of the planet's axis was lined up relative to the long axis of the eccentric obit in the right way.
Say, if the north pole of the planet is tilted away from the sun at closest approach. That would make it "winter" in the northern hemisphere of the planet even though the planet was very near the sun. If the Robinsons were within the "artic circle" of the planet (the size of which is dependent on tilt of the axis), the sun would not even come up over the horizon during the depth of "winter," so, despite the proximity of sun, it could be very cold in that region. [It's very cold on the dark side of Mercury, even though it is very close to the Sun. On the other hand, Mercury has no atmosphere to retain and move heat around.]
But the sun is also at one of the nodes of the ellipse, so the planet will whip around it very fast, like a comet. The planet could go through nearly a 180 degrees of orbit in a matter of days at perihelion, so winter would be very brief. If the timing is right, the sun could be very nearby when it edges above the horizon again. Fortunately, the day would be very short, so it might be survivable. In the following days, daylight would last longer, but the sun would quickly recede and become less of a threat.
[These kind of temperature changes could well lead to storms, as seen at the end of "The Hungry Sea."]
As the planet gets further away from the sun for the next half of the year (we actually don't know how long that year is), it will also become more inclined toward the sun, producing longer days. The climate might maintain some kind of livable balance if everything were just right.
Could there be more than 1 sun like in Star Wars on Tatooine?
Its amazing how they always manage to find a planet in the sweet zone to land on which also has an energy source to drill for and the right amount of oxygen and gravity. I would think the odds would be astronomical.
Sharp eyed viewers would notice that in Professor Robinson's diagram the sun of Preplanis was in the center of the elliptical orbit.
Actually the sun would be in one of the focal points of the elliptical orbit and thus off centered in such an elongated orbit.
An object in an elliptical orbit travels slower the farther away from the sun it is and faster the closer to the sun it is. That is one of Kepler's Three laws of Planetary Motion (later explained by Newton's Laws) a new discovery only known for a mere three hundred years by the time Lost in Space was made.
With a very eccentric (elongated) orbit Preplanis should have traveled very slow when it was far from it's sun and very fast when near its sun. So it should have been very, very cold for most of the year, reasonably warm for a few days or weeks while close to its sun, and very, very hot for hours or days in the middle of the warm period when passing closest to the sun.
Probably children as young as Will Robinson did not have to be as precocious as Will to understand and explain that to the creators of Lost in Space. Only precocious nine-year-olds would know that, of course, but they would not have to be as precocious and rare as Will was supposed to be.
Instead Preplanis was reasonably Earth like in temperature for weeks after they cashed, had a rapid severe temperature drop for a few days, and then perhaps a day of super hot temperature when closest to the sun, and then revered to normal Earth like temperatures (except for one or two heat waves) for Earth months or years - the rest of the first season and the first episode of the second season.
So it clearly is a big problem to imagine an orbit for Preplanis that explains the temperatures over the course of a Preplanis year.
Here is a theory I just thought of.
When Preplanis shoots pasts its sun at its closest approach there should be intense tidal forces that trigger earthquakes and volcanoes. The oceans may be heated by undersea volcanic vents much more than Earth's oceans are. The oceans will slowly release that heat to the air over them which will heat up the air over the continents.
As Preplanis moves away from the sun the undersea volcanism will decrease. The oceans will cool and heat the air less. Preplanis will receive less and less light from its sun as it gets father away. But green house gases in its atmosphere will retain most of its heat.
As Preplanis swings back toward its sun it will get more and more light from its sun. that will tend to heat up the planet. But the undersea volcanoes will stop and that will cool the planet faster than it heats up. Eventually frost, snow, and ice will form at night in the coldest regions of the planet. In the morning they will reflect sunlight back into space for a while before melting and evaporating. As the planet slowly cools, more and more of it is covered with reflective ices for longer and longer parts of the day, accelerating the cooling process.
Eventually most of the planet's surface is covered with highly reflective ice all day and the sunlight does little to heat it during the day. The greenhouse gases may precipitate out of the atmosphere, causing the planet to radiate it's heat away during the gight and cool off rapidly.
Fortunately this rapid temperature fall is just a few days before the planet gets closest to its sun and suffers intense tidal forces, causing undersea volcanoes to erupt and heat up the oceans, melting the sea ice and enabling the oceans to absorb heat from the intense sunlight, warming the air and melting the ice on the land and enabling the land to heat up from the intense sunlight. The greenhouse gases return to the atmosphere.
The now warm planet whips around the sun and begins another cycle.
Oops!
I saw "The Hungary Sea" again early this morning, Feb. 27, 2022, and think I might have remembered the orbit describing scene wrong.
This morning I saw Robinson point at a stone near one end of the elliptical orbit and say that the sun of Pripanlus was near one end of the orbit. And that would be correct in the case of such a narrow elliptical orbit. And in my post above, I accused the creators of "The Hungary sea" of putting the sun of Preplanis in the center point of hte elliptical orbit. Maybe I remembered that scene wrong for 56 years.
See https://moviechat.org/tt0058824/Lost-in-Space/621bf01106d73d614661c296/The-Orbit-of-Priplanis-the-First-Season-Planet