The Magic FTL Jump
Ok, maybe I’m thick –it is a bit late. I’m hoping one of you awesomefree thinkerswill tell me I missed it or have my thinking backwards. In order to get to the planet they had to do this whole big jumping maneuver with pilots dying and ships getting lost. How did they get out of the star cluster with no raptor escort and a bunch of people on board that will most certainly die if they are traveling in an unshielded ship? This is a bit puzzling.
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The radiation barrier was only between them and the algae planet, not completely surrounding it.
they jumped in the other direction? think of the star cluster as a door; going through the door was the hard part. now that they’re outside the door, they can go anywhere; their mailbox, their parking space, the drug store… and of the four basestars, zero went chasing them.
Listen to RDM’s podcast for The Passage. He talks about not wanting to have to redo the process of going through that radiation… your answer is found there. I’ve given it already though. 🙂
Originally, RDM said he was going to have the planet be -in- the star cluster, like in a spot where the planet would be safe or something. However, he went on to say that later episodes would make that impossible, without creating another “passage” like episode. So he needed to make the starfield too big to go around (at least for the humans), but not so big that they had to face it again.
Personally, I wanted to see the star field in the background shots of the planet. *shrug*
Oh, and am I the only one who came in this thread expecting to talk about how the fleet has FTL and made Cylons, but everything else seems to be modern-day tech or lower? I almost wonder if this is like a Fading Suns style universe, where the tech of the ancients is mostly forgotten, or proscribed due to the cylon threat.
Yeah Athenor, I was expecting the same thing. Since Audra’s question has been answered I’ll risk going off topic. One of the things I like about the show is they only put enough super advanced technology as the story requires. The fact that almost everything isn’t that far beyond us gives the show a look that is distinct from anything else I’ve seen. We’ve all seen the shows with the lasers, blue aliens and robots as comic relief. I love the fact that the BSG world isn’t that different from our own if for no other reason than it’s aesetically different from what’s come before it. Aside from that I could easily see the back story going along the lines that they’ve lost advances during all the ‘all this has happened before and will happen again’. If you burn down the library of Alexandria you still keep a few things but most is lost.
Hey, this place thrives on off topic. (Although once again, it’s Sean’s threads that wander. Weird that.)
What you have to remember is that a lot of Colonial tech was a reaction to the first Cylon war. Apparently, they had a lot of setbacks b/c the Cylon/s/z were able to exploit technical bugs. So ships of Galactica’s age were intentionally retro. Remeber that scene very early in the minseries of Doral pointing out the ‘quaint’ features of Galactica? As the Cylon/s/z threat receded they readopted higher, but more vulnerable, tech, leaving themselves open to the C/s/z again.
Historically, the past 60 years of human life have gone way beyond the normal rate of technological advancement. We’ve been pumping out technology like crazy. Some of the most important inventions of human history have been created recently. Apparently the Colonials are at a slow rate of advancement.
One of the things that confuses me are the old swords on Adama’s walls. It definitely says something about his character, but did the ancients fight with swords while they could travel across the stars ftl? I remember the swords in the miniseries. are they still there?
They gave us the explanation in the miniseries, guys. It’s the same reason why Galactica is so low-tech compared to other battlestars.
Technology reached a point so advanced that it was extraordinarily dangerous. The colonials had no choice but to scale back development and in some cases revert to earlier forms of it. The topic of renewing normal development was still being debated when the Cylons wiped out the twelve colonies and sent the remnants of humanity running.
Come on, you guys already knew this stuff. You’ve just forgotten it. 😉
Hahaha Yeah guys of course I remember Doral giving the tour and pointing out the low tech aspects of Galactica. I was watching some other scifi last week and it just struck me how the two true gods of the BSG universe, RDM and David Eick, managed to create a show that is so visually different than anything else in the genre. The only other thing that comes to mind is Blade Runner. The fact that it’s dark, dirty and shot documentary style is one of the reasons I love this show so much. Instead of wowing us with the unfamiliar, we’ve got a reality we can relate to that wows us with great writing. It’s not too much of a stretch to plop yourself down into their world because it’s a lot like our own. Now I’ve got to go check if the knuckle-draggers have got my bird back in the rotation.
hey atkins what if we just started watching in season 3
Very off track: I think Cally would disagree with you on the the FTL jumps being magical. Go back and watch the miniseries for a little reminder. It’s apparantly a very sickening feeling. The camera does this weird thing where it looks like everything gets really far away all the sudden with several characters like her and Baltar. We know from Cally saying “I hate this part” and the Chief once telling her to hold onto her lunch that she, and certainly others, get physically ill from a jump. I imagine it’s something like a plane taking off when it’s at what feels like a 75 degree angle up, but only a few hundred times worse. I really do hate that part.
13, yeah, that’s apparently the case for some people. I think that was a holdover from RDM’s original idea that the ships would ‘fold’ in and out of FTL. That was ditched b/c they couldn’t come up with a good VFX for it. (That zoom effect is called a rack focus, btw.)
I think it’s gone the way of Stargate’s description of passing through the stargates as being very cold and disorienting. It’s basically dropped, probably with the rationale that ‘they got used to it.’
BoxytheBoxed, that’s true. I hadn’t thought of that, considering only that the posters are generally pretty knowledgeable of the series as a whole. My mistake.
A rack focus, so that’s what it’s called. I’ve always thought that’s one of the most fascinating little camera tricks out there and I think it does a wonderful job of conveying that sickening feeling. But you’re right about them getting used to it since they do it so much now and probably never did it in the past other than to make sure their FTL drives still worked.
minor point but that camera effect is actually called a “push/pull” where they’re have the camera set up on dolly tracks and push it towards the subject while zooming out at the same time (or vice versa) which makes the subject/character stay the same size but the background seem the change perspective. A rack focus is just having the camera focus on one of the image like something close to you and then focus to something farther away.
Ahhh…so thats how they did that. How totally old-school special effect that must be! Probably pre-dates CGI by more than a hundred years. Very nice. That little line that Cally has in the mini is when I fell madly in love with her 🙂