Waitasec

[prog]

They had cheap and accurate FTL, but they didn't themselves establish additional sub-colonies all over everywhere? To say nothing of manned exploration and mapping missions in all directions, constantly active?

oh well. (If this gets explained after ep 3 I'll be fine with it.)

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately BSG is not the sort of show that holds up to that sort of scrutiny. Which is why I'll never like it as much as Firefly. But it's fun/compelling if you don't think too hard about it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Firefly can hardly be said to hold up better on the scrut-o-dar. But it was a great show.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Fifrely totally holds up better.

[the-gadgetman.livejournal.com]

Well, given we know little of BSG's timeline, we don't know the dispersal or founding dates of the 12 colonies. Perhaps most of them are offshoots from Caprica, which would explain why Caprica seems to be the center politically and culturally, at least so far.

And I gotta second the comment about Firefly. I grew to really like the show, but it has more than it's share of cringe-worthy moments. Most stuff involving spaceflight, for example, pops me right out of the story due to the implausability (2 passing spaceships taking several minutes to pass? yeah right....)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Firefly is far from perfect, but I take issue with "more than its share". The reavers-slowly-passing thing (and the general notion of interstellar trajectories coming anywhere near each other) was actually the only glaring issue I could think of. The artificial gravity inside the ships is future-tech/suspension-of-disbelief, but at least they actually show it turning off when the power goes out. A lot of the computer displays and hologram stuff is questionable, but really nothing to blink at compared to pretty much every other show (even non-sf shows set in the present day never get computers right!). River's brain-surgery-created powers border on the paranormal, but there's no space aliens, no FTL/teleportation/wormholes, no artificial intelligence, no time machines or parallel universes or holodecks or midichlorians...

But BSG, though. I'm not going to start listing stuff, to avoid spoilers for prog, but there's ridiculousness all over the place. I still enjoy the show a lot, but Firefly set a high standard for actually trying to think things through (not just physics but world-building and backstory) and everything else is a little disappointing.

Unfortunately, the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site doesn't cover either series (not even Serenity). If there's another similar site that does, I'd like to see it.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

It's sci-fi.

Fi.

Fiction.

Calm down. Take a breath. It's a TV show.

And just to quicken the pace of this discussion, I'll bring it all the way around:

"Hitler"

There. We've come to it. Okay? Good.

;)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if it sounded like a breathless rant, but I am calm. I'm just saying I like my fiction better if it makes sense. By the tone of prog's original post, I think he agrees. We just disagree on where Firefly lies on that spectrum.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

And I hope that everyone recognizes my smiley in my post. I'm playing with you as much as you're playing with prog and the_gadgetman. :)

Quite honestly, I can't keep up with BSG enough to consider that I know the story. It's such a fscked up story line and it's so completely soap opera that if I don't watch it religiously, I'll fall behind. And I don't have Tivo, so I can't watch it religiously.

I'll wait to borrow a friends DVD before I get too involved in that much of it.

And heck, so long as BSG or Firefly people don't do something like 'han shot first' - won't we all end up being somewhat happy? :)

Cheers!

[prog.livejournal.com]

You have BitTorrent. (Not a dismissal; it's where I'm getting most of my BSG, since I didn't watch the miniseries and the following two seasons when they were broadcast. And since I'm a cheap bastard.)

[the-gadgetman.livejournal.com]

Not to worry, I never take TV show debates very seriously.... :)

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

well, they never said it was cheap or really that accurate. There was the 'redline' of known jump distances, and they explictly were going "beyond the redline" in terms of safe jumps and knowledge of the world.

i also get the impression that the back story of the society is one in stagnation, and a lack of drive to explore and innovate. And don't forget that the 40 years previous cylon war set them back a lot, and also severely limited their computer capabilities (from fear of infection by the cylons).

But all that aside, I do wish the universe and the motivations for all of the actions of the players were more fully thought out and cohesive. But I enjoy it very much as a character driven "war story" that pulls few punches, rathern than as a Sci-Fi show.

on a similar note, I recently read the Dragon Riders of Pern series again (for the first time since high school), and I found the overall belivability of the universe to be lacking. The world is nearly as big as Earth, yet has small groups of a few thousand people scatted here and there, with what has to be thousands of miles between them. And a total planet-wide population that could not be more than 50-100k people. I can't imagine how any trade and contact would occur with the population being so small, and the distances so large between settlements..

[(Anonymous)]

That's because you aren't factoring in the long-haul taupe dragons, ferrying containers full of klah beans and exotic southern continent vegetables through the between.