“Range” is 217 meters. I’m assuming that’s the distance to the closest part of the other ship. Or maybe the average. No, it would be the closest part. The point of this system is probably to avoid collisions.

Speaking of collisions—217 meters is a ridiculously small distance compared to the size of a solar system. There’s no way this is a coincidence. That ship positioned itself here on purpose because I’m here.

Another reading, “Angular width,” is 35.44 degrees. Okay, some basic math should handle this.

I bring up the Utility panel on the main screen and launch the calculator app. Something 217 meters away is occupying 35.44 degrees of the view. Presuming the radar can see in all 360 degrees (it would be a pretty cruddy radar if it couldn’t)…I type some numbers into the calculator to do an ARCTAN operation, and:

The ship is 139 meters long. Roughly.

I bring the Astrophage panel up on another screen. The little map there shows that the Hail Mary is just 47 meters long. So yeah. The alien ship is three times the size of mine. There’s just no way Earth sent something that big.

And the shape. What is up with that shape? I turn my attention back to the Petrovascope (which is now just acting as a camera).

The center of the ship is diamond-shaped—a rhombus. Well, I guess it’s an octahedron, really. Looks like it has eight faces, each triangular. That part alone is about the size of my ship.

The diamond is connected by three thick rods (I don’t know what else to call them) to a wide trapezoidal base. That looks like it might be the rear. And in front of the diamond is a narrow stalk (just making up terms at this point) that has four flat panels attached parallel to the main ship axis. Maybe solar panels? The stalk continues forward to a pyramid-shaped nose cone. Nose pyramid, I guess.

Every part of the hull is flat. Even the “rods” have flat faces.

Why would anyone do that? Flat panels are a terrible idea. I don’t know anything about who made this, but presumably they need some kind of atmosphere inside, right? Huge, flat panels are awful at that.

Maybe this is just a probe and not an actual ship. Maybe there’s no atmosphere inside because there’s nothing alive inside. I might be looking at an alien artifact instead of a ship.

Still the most exciting moment in human history.

So it’s Astrophage-powered. That was the steady Petrova-frequency glow I saw earlier. Interesting that they have the same propulsion tech as we do. But considering it’s the best energy-storage medium possible, that’s not a surprise. When European mariners first came across Asian mariners, no one was surprised they both used sails.