Come along Starbock.
I can imagine the reporters being sought after by people in the fleet. What else do the people have to do but try and get information. It would be along the lines of when a hurricane is coming and people board up and watch the news non-stop. Your stuck in a bad situation so every little bit of info is welcome.
An excellent point and well taken.
The only fault I can find is that we are dealing with television rather than reality.
Given that Ron Moore is writing it, I may in the future stand corrected in finding fault.
I agree with TLR in regards to this. It makes sense to parcel out a reporter to a each ship or two, and shuttle them in to Imperial One and Galactica for press conferences and the like. Each reporter can focus on things that are directly relevant to the population they’re reporting to - if Some Ship is experiencing a bit more tension and political unrest, the reporter from there would want to focus on the upcoming elections. If Some Other Ship is having fuel issues, because of, say, a leaky FTL drive, that population probably wants to hear about the fuel search. It also makes sense because by shuttling a bunch of reporters in rather than broadcasting they can maintain tighter radio discipline.
You gotta figure that they aren’t printing the stories on hard copy, so I imagine they’re probably uploading them to some sort of server that feeds news to the ships. I’d imagine those articles authored by ‘local’ reporters would be the lead stories their own ships.
Pure conjecture, mind you, but it fairly easily justifies the large pool of reporters. Besides, like LTR mentioned, there is no economy to speak of anymore, but the reporters can serve a useful role while working in their area of expertise (or lack thereof, as the case may be.)
Sorry about that. Hell, I liked the models. Antiquited or not, I got a kick out of the WW2 style tactical board.
Aaaarrrggghh!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.
BTW, something that’s been bugging me and I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet:
During the battle, the 1st viper force finds themselves outnumbered and outgunned, so they begin fleeing to the carrier. Adama mentions they have no reserve fighters, and baltar starts freaking out.
Doesn’t the Galactica have AAA mounts all over it? We saw them putting on a big show during the escape from the ammo depot in the miniseries. So why couldn’t they use some of that to put some flak around the fighters? Are they conserving ammo? Or are they out of ammo(they were going through it like crazy at the end of the miniseries)?
I believe somebody mentioned this in the last episode…
Er, “Mentioned this in regard to the last episode”, when the cylon tries to ram the ship.
I don’t think it’s been pointed out yet, but this week’s episode was #10. So the thread title (1.9) should actually be 1.10. Don’t know if it’s worth asking a mod to change, but it caused me momentary confusion when I went to the official website to download the commentary and it was labeled episode 110.
Well, I’m quite embarassed. The comment I referenced and attributed to The Long Road was actually made by Althea. Although TLR expanded and added to the thrust of her comment, I should give credit where credit is due.
What’s embarassing is that I even went back to fix my stupid typos and didn’t catch it.
What’s really embarassing is that Althea is my wife, and she called me on it while we were both sitting in our office Doping.
:smack:
Sorry, honey!
I blame the dog.
Back on topic here - in response to this:
Ammo is actually going to be a real problem. Those Vipers dump an awful lot of lead downrange, and the AAA has got to be even worse. I have a hard time believing that a ship undergoing a decomissioning ceremony would have full magazines. I can buy that maybe there’s a mandated minimum ammo load that all ships of the line are required to maintain while in active service, but there’s no way those magazines would have been loaded to the hilt like they would in an active Battestar.
So I would expect that they would have to address this at some point. And I find it highly doubtful that they just happen to have an ammunition factory ship around. A machine shop could turn out casings, but firing caps? Powder? You’d need a true ammo production facility to turn out even a minimum load, given the amount of ammo they burn through in a firefight.
In the miniseries, Starbuck says, “Stay the frack out of Galactica’s firing solution!” I don’t think the AA fire is accurate enough to hit the Raiders while missing the Vipers, especially considering both groups of fighters would be dodging like mad.
This episode reminded me not of the Battle of Britain but of Allied attacks on the Ploesti refinery complex in Romania.
One of the deleted scenes on the miniseries DVD showed Adama ceremoniously ejecting and detonating the Galactica’s ordnance. Clearly they still had some left though, so it sounds like you nailed it on the head.
If it is caseless ammo, all they need to produce would be charges and bullets. Still pretty unlikely, but…My guess is that at some point, they find either a distant outpost and stock up, or a stray freighter that was carrying a load of ammunition. They are also going to be running out of Raptors, and if they want a good season 2, they’ll need more.
And don’t forget, our current ships have some pretty damned deep ammo bunkers; The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers now in service have a Mk.45 5" gun with a capacity of 500 rounds, and fires those at a rate of about 1 every 3 seconds, giving it something like 25 minutes of firing.
I would guess that a crazy high-tech gee-whiz SPACE GUN of the future doesn’t need that much a charge, since you don’t have to deal with any (much) air resistance, and no (well, little) ballistic trajectory to worry about. Or something like that, so the rounds can be quite small, be they caseless or traditional.
Oh ya, death to Starbuck.
The Galactica stocked up on ammunition at Ragnar Anchorage in the miniseries. That’s why it went there: Ragnar was a munitions depot.
And to pick a nit, it was Apollo who told his squad, “And for frack’s sake, stay out of Galactica’s firing solution.” Sage advice, too.
It is true that news would seem to be one of the few ways to pass time.
I am just waiting for them to have an episode revolving around someone that is one of the few “haves” in the fleet that is living in luxury, while most are barely surviving. I say this as they did some episodes like this in the orginal.
Oh great , now all we need is a Teddy Bear with Adama’s name on it ,lol
Declan
Depends on the age of the ship , in the original series they grabbed anything that could fly and stuffed as many people on it as the life support could handle. The new series, only ships with an FTL capability survived, and the vessel with the von neuman ring might be a couple of hundred years old , with an FTL bolted on as an aftermarket upgrade.
Declan
Now that you say that, of course. They’re cool for a while, maybe even a good long while. But eventually, they’re fracked.
Are they are able to backtrack and retrace their steps from their FTL jumps? Are they adrift in the universe, or can they find their way back to the Caprica system if need be? We’ve discussed Helo almost definitely not being able to find them, but what about the other way around? Can they eventually, should circumstances permit, launch a counter-attack on the Cylon-occupied territories?
The reason I ask is that I’m wondering why the Colonial Navy didn’t create a series of rally points with massive ammo, fuel and ration stockpiles at various co-ordinates throughout the system and galaxy. I got the impression that Ragnar wasn’t really that far out of the Caprica system. You’ve got FTL drive, you might as well use it to the utmost of its strategic and tactical advantage - spread out those dumps as far and wide as your FTL drives can handle, and keep the existence of most and the location of all of them on a serious need to know basis.
Hell, that’s where I’d have parked the mothballed ships, especially outmoded Vipers and other combat craft. Better to have a large scattered reserve fleet that the enemy knows nothing about than a whole bunch of scrap metal and some museum pieces. As we’ve seen the Mark II’s (I think that’s the right model) are still flyable. It like the original F-16. Still a damn powerful weapon, just not as powerful as it once was against more modern military technology.
I forgot about Ragnar.
We know that the Cylons hacked the defense computers, thanks to Baltar’s lust fueled carelessness. It’s not unreasonable to assume that they knew of any such depots, especially since one of the spy models was found at the Ragnar depot. Also, in “33” the fleet is furiously jumping further and further away past the “Red Line”, way the hell out into uncharted space, barely staying alive and ahead of the Cylons. The number of jumps was in the hundreds I believe. Maybe the fleet could find its way back to colonial space in peacetime, but right now the risk would be astronomical, and there’s no way to know if anything is even left to find.