Galactica herself can jump farther than the fleet. Some of the ships in the fleet have to calculate several shorter jumps to rendezvous with the fleet.
If it were just Galactica by herself, which is what Adama originally intended, they probably wouldn’t have had a problem losing the Cylons for a comfortable while.
It was the fastest they could jump. If they could do it faster they wouldn’t have to send the fighters out to buy time every single time.
-Joe
The only other thing that’s even potentially spoiler-ish that I’ll toss out there is that things like staffing, supplies, and other logistical issues do play a part in later episodes. Yeah, if you try to dig too deeply, things aren’t going to quite add up, but I thought BSG did a better job than most at, at the very least, paying some lip service to these matters. Certainly a hell of a lot better than Star Trek: Voyager, which supplied a little bit of the impetus for BSG (in other words, this is Ron Moore’s take on what Voyager should have been.
A lot of stuff isn’t explicitly laid out, but I think there are a few key things to always keep in the back of your mind while you watch this show, particularly the first couple of seasons:
[ul]
[li]Galactica was being decomissioned and turned into a museum when the Cylons attacked (imagine what would have been involved in that process, and what kind of stuff would and would not have been in perfect order).[/li][li]The Cylon attack was a complete surprise; Colonial military readiness was probably not at 100%, even on front line ships.[/li][li]The ships that survived and rendesvoused with Galactica were essentially all in transit somewhere; some of them seem to be equipped for long-term independent operation, but a lot of them probably aren’t (Colonial One is a good example; it’s essentially an airliner)[/li][li]Unlike a lot of military-oriented sci fi, there’s no reason to think that Galactica and her crew are the cream of the crop; in fact, there’s a lot to suggest that everyone aboard is either finishing out their career, just everyday grunts doing their jobs, reservists working off the Colonial equivalent of the G.I. Bill, or screw-ups who’ve got some skills, but aren’t Grade-A military material.[/li][li]Virtually every civilian and military institution that the colonists have known is either completely destroyed, or as close to it as makes no difference. Galactica is the military, and the Secretary of Education is the President. Everything else needs to be rebuilt from scratch or radically re-thought to fit the current circumstances.[/li][li]99% of the human race was just massacred. Humans are an endangered species. Imagine the emotional and psychological toll that would put on a civilization.[/li][/ul]
I can’t remember the last time a television series created a scenario that bleak and hopeless, and then proceeded to examine what people might actually do in that kind of aftermath. No, it’s not 100% “realistic” (whatever that really means in sci fi), but it was a much more brutal and honest examination of human nature under duress than I can remember ever seeing on television before. Ultimately (to me) that’s what the show’s about, and that’s where it produced some of the best television in the recent past.
That’s an important thing to remember when you talk about their exhaustion in 33. Each of these people just lost everyone and everywhere they loved (barring a few exceptions - Adama Sr and Jr, for example) and haven’t had time to mourn yet. Mothers, fathers, children, friends, home, cultures, artwork, music, pets, favorite shirts, that deli sandwich they craved once in a while - all gone, blown away. That’ll sap all your energy even without having to go a week without sleep.
Well, half that, 184.4 million miles. Since the signal travelling back will take as long as the jump takes, and then the cylons will have to jump as well.
It’s a good episode, but I’d never rank it among the best. There’s lots of options and flaws they didn’t really think through with the entire concept, but it did make for good television.
Yeah, one of the things that struck me the most about the early episodes is that you have this woman who has been recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and she barely even has time to process that, with the whole, “I need to get my affairs in order, and how will I tell my family, and what is this going to do to my career, and what sorts of medications will I need to go on?” – and then boom, she’s the President. Of the entire human race. Which suddenly consists of around 50k people.
I was under the impression that jumps are faster than light, nearly instantaneous in fact, so you don’t have to get rid of a factor of 2.
Of course, the Cylons could use a more sophisticated search strategy if the Colonial fleet can jump farther than 33 light minutes. We know that Cylon Raiders are jump capable, so they could
[ol]
[li]Have raiders jump after the colonial fleet does. Place at least one raider within about 30 light minutes of any place the colonial feel could have jumped to.[/li][li]After waiting about 30 minutes for a signal from the Olympic Carrier, all raiders jump back to the Cylon pursuit fleet.[/li][li]The raider(s) who picked up the signal inform everyone of where the colonial fleet is.[/li][li]Cylon fleet jumps in, and attacks the colonial fleet.[/li][/ol]
When the Colonials set up their colony in the nebula it’s detected due to the radiation surge from the nuclear explosion. It’s detected after a year, and the cylons say they were a light year away when they detected it, so it obviously didn’t take them a year to jump there.
[QUOTE=carlb]
I can’t remember the last time a television series created a scenario that bleak and hopeless, and then proceeded to examine what people might actually do in that kind of aftermath. No, it’s not 100% “realistic” (whatever that really means in sci fi), but it was a much more brutal and honest examination of human nature under duress than I can remember ever seeing on television before. Ultimately (to me) that’s what the show’s about, and that’s where it produced some of the best television in the recent past.
[/QUOTE]
I could not have said it better myself. This I believe was the heart of the show and I was sorry they veered off into: the metaphysical, who is the Cylon ( just about everybody) Xena in the box, Starbuck Angel God crap.
They had to defend a sizable fleet of civilian ships without defenses with exactly one warship that was operating with a skeleton crew because it was about to become a tourist trap. I’m not seeing how that’s unrealistic. They had to run with virtually no resources.
I got the impression that they were barely making the jumps as it was. Didn’t they lose a couple ships (not just the Olympic Carrier) because they couldn’t calculate and distribute and plug in the new coordinates in time? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but from memory it sure didn’t seem like they had any time to spare at all.
All this “skeleton crew” stuff is just desperate retconning. There is no actual mention by anyone of being short crewed. Yes they were about to be decommissioned.
I just watched “Water” and it was good, really liked it. I know you are going to start getting the impression I am math obsessed but what the hell is up with the water usage? An early scene has Adama explaining they have several years worth of water. Then within minutes they lose 60% and suddenly they have water “for six days”. OK it doesn’t matter for the story and the ep as a whole is great but WTF? Mrs P and I just looked at each other and said “Bwuh?” and had to replay the scenes several times to make sure we weren’t mishearing.
Are the writers just seriously math/continuity challenged or what?
There’s no retconning involved. You are correct that at no point do they actually say “Well can’t have separate shifts because we just don’t have enough people. See, if you look over here at this chart, it shows that we have 2,356 people but we need blah blah blah.” It’s all about show, not tell. Like showing a whole bunch of Viper pilots getting killed in the miniseries. And showing how the Galactica is practically already a museum (like the fact that no one noticed a Cylon device because they assumed it was part of the museum.) And in fact there will be an episode coming up that’s about how they don’t have enough people. Or is 5 episodes in already a retcon?
I will admit that was a little sloppy. I think what they were saying that Galactica on it’s own, since they recycle everything, can go several years without refilling. But since they’ve got all these other ships needing water that causes them to run out so quickly.
A lot of season four was strange, but I liked the finale. After all . . .
It’s not as if Six hadn’t been saying “God sent me” to Gaius all along.
Also, Dean Stockwell!
If you listen to some of Moore’s podcasts, he says he always wanted to do exactly that - show, not tell. I remember one time, after the dradis wasn’t able to find a missing Viper, he said something like “If this was Star Trek, I’d have had to write 30 seconds of techno-babble dialog to explain why they couldn’t find the other ship. Here, you already know why.”
Not buying it. All they needed was one line to say at the commencement “most of the crew have been sent home.” No long exposition is needed. Further, a key point of the ep is that both the FTL calculating guy and the comms woman are desperately sleep deprived. OK, being short full flight crew I can understand. There were a lot killed. But on the whole shortstaffed ship, there is one guy who can do the FTL calcs, and one woman who can run comms? Really? What were they doing just before the day of the attacks? Was the comms woman working 24 hours a day or did the whole ship just have no one on comms for 16 hours a day while she was off duty?
Face it, they needed desperately tired for the plot and so they had everyone working continuously even though that isn’t realistic.
No way. They are completely relaxed about water at the time Adama explains to the Pres that they have years worth even with the other ships refilling from BG. And on your theory, even before the sabotage they had only 15 days of water!
Or maybe the other communications officers had other tasks to do? Dualla was mainly just working on coordinating the jumps for all the ships.
It was Moore getting out of a corner.
And Stockwell ended well, too. :rolleyes:
Don’t they say in the mini that Galactica hadn’t used an FTL jump since the previous Cylon war? I thought it made sense that this crew had little to no idea how to plot these jumps, and found it very obvious that those who did know what they were doing were few & far between.
The ship (and Commander) was being retired. One of the flight decks was a museum. The best pilot is an insubordinate head case. The second in command is a drunk. If you get mad over the ‘retconning’ of being short staffed (after the entire flight crew was killed, plus 100 or so crewmen vented out by Tigh) I wonder what levels of realism you find acceptable on a Sci-Fi show. Dee is a capable comm officer. Why have more than one on a ship that is literally meant to be going nowhere. The ‘active’ duty of the ship was ceremonial…this was shown & explained in the mini series.
Short of a narrator explaining that this wasn’t a great crew, I don’t know how much plainly they could have made it.
IMHO, “33” was a masterpiece. Short staffed, desperate, stims, unknowable enemy, tough choices…it was freakin brilliant-and very consistent with the facts given in the mini series.
Now if you want to ask where all the smokes & booze come from in later episodes, I’ll understand.
“Show, don’t tell” is actually a feature, not a bug. Most well-crafted stories/TV/movies will do this. If you’d rather be hit with the clue-by-four than dealing with subtlety, you’ll probably want to focus more on Michael Bay movies than BSG. You really need someone to tell you that an all-over-but-the-shouting decommissioning no longer required a full crew? You really can’t figure that out on your own from the context you were very thoroughly given? Pretty much the only thing they had left to do was do the museum dedication ceremony. One of the launch bays had already been converted to a gift shop – why would they keep that second complement of pilots just sitting around doing nothing?
Why would a stationary museum need comms and FTL 24 hours a day? Adama was dealing with marketing and press guys, who work during the day, not at 2am. You can also presume that even when off-duty, if such opportunity presented itself, under such circumstances it would be exceedingly difficult to sleep.
The episodes are 42 minutes long. If they spoon-fed you everything, line by line, regardless of whether it was important to the story, it would add several minutes to the run time. Personally I’d rather they cut the unimportant details (is there a second comms officer? Perhaps, offscreen, on-duty 3 hours before we join them, but I really only care about this one, so why waste time on that?) that can be reasonably figured out by your average intelligent person, than cut away things that are vital to understanding the plot.
It seems like you’ve already decided to hate the show, so why are you still watching?