I forgot one more thing:
When Admiral Cain explains how the Pegasus escaped destruction, she says they made a “blind jump.” If the operation of jump drives was as simple as just entering the coordinates and going, wouldn’t that imply that just turning on the drive wouldn’t send you anywhere at all? That’s not what happens, so I tend to think there’s a bit more to it.
Jumping into a planet is a real possibility if you’re planning on jumping in close to a planet, which is why Boomer cursed Gaeta for plotting a jump so close to a planet. I don’t see as it’s got much to do with the planet’s gravity. If I throw a dart and want to hit just outside the bull’s eye, there’s a good chance I could hit the bull’s eye. Oops, inside a mountain.
I don’t know what Admiral Cain meant by “blind jump” but I’m guessing it still requires specific coordinates. Sorta like in the miniseries when Adama told Gaeta to make a jump, “beyond the redline.”
I don’t see how you can just fire up the FTL engines and say “jump.” It was probably more like, pick some random coordinates and jump there. But why would that pull them into the nearest gravity well? If that were so, then it would be impossible to jump in close to a planet and actually end up where you want, because the large gravity well would pull you off-course. I just don’t see planets & stars as huge space-time suck-points, as far as BSG FTL travel is concerned.
These guys managed to get nine Raptors to all jump into Caprica’s atmosphere, and they all managed to maintain their relative spacing amongst themselves which to me implies if you get the coordinates right, you end up exactly where you want. Enter the wrong coordinates, you still end up exactly where you told the FTL engine to take you. How can you be pulled off-course just because you got the coordinates wrong?
And yes, I know it’s just a show, and Ron Moore isn’t big on science.
And by this I mean, how would the FTL computer/engine know you got the coordinates wrong, and therefore, “oh, I guess I’ll just veer off towards some random gravity well.”
I’m fairly confident that the redline was simply that humanity KNEW with great certainty all the big stuff you might actually land inside within a specifc radius. Outside that particular well-mapped radius? Well, here’s hoping we don’t die instantly.
I imagine that Cain did pretty much the same thing.
You’re being way too picky. What you’re arguing against is Scupper’s attempt at rationalizing how things work. Sure, you’ve blown out of the water an idea that he/she whipped out as a best guess.
That doesn’t change the fact that his (enough of this he/she crap) point is that YOU don’t know how BSG’s FTL works. Neither does Scupper, and neither do I. It’s quite possible that Moore doesn’t know either.
So, either way, coming up with “It’s impossible for it work that way” really isn’t going to get you anywhere unless you can point to where it’s already been contradicted in the show.
Particularly when the writer said that it was LUCK. Luck that they hit the one in a zillion of landing in front of a habitable planet because someone mis-heard or mis-typed a set of coordinates.
-Joe
Of course I don’t know how it works. I remember way back at the beginning of the series, Ron Moore described how he kinda sorta imagined how the FTL works, and he used the analogy of taking a piece of paper, imaging that as space, placing a dot on two of the corners, and instead of traveling across the whole sheet of paper, their FTL technology was more like folding the paper such that the two dots touched each other. So you don’t have to travel across space, you just take an instantaneous short cut from point A to point B.
But hey, if he want’s to write if off as “luck” what can I do? Well, I’ll tell you what I can do - I can nit-pick. :mad: 
Basically, I think it’s not just a simple 3-point coordinate system that you enter into the FTL drive. It’s some kind of algorithm or non-static formula that has pretty sensitive parameters. The calculations are apparently time-sensitive, since they do not have any sort of “Jump Chart” that has pre-defined points for them to jump to.
The Pegasus’s “Blind Jump,” coordinates or no, is seen by Adama as very risky. If the possible destination points of a random jump were evenly spread throughout a sphere the size of the range of the drive, then a Blind Jump would hardly be risky at all, would it?
It doesn’t require any science, only examination of the only evidence we have (the events depicted in the show itself) and a basic understanding of levdrakon’s original point, which is that it’s really unlikely that this would happen by accident.
The fact that it couldn’t really happen by accident if all the destinations of a bad jump were equally likely logically suggests that they are not equally likely. Since the characters in the show are quite vocal about their fear of this very possibility and the only result of a “bad jump” that we have seen appeared within spitting distance of an earth-sized body, it would seem to me that there is some bias in the mix here that weights any error heavily toward gravity wells.
Yes, this is rationalization, but you’re talking to someone who once tried to rationalize the timelines of all three Terminator movies, which is an order of magnitude sillier than this.
As I said, my problem with calculating a jump is that it implies some knowledge of what’s there, which implies some Trekian FTL sensors.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not Trek bashing, I’d rather see more DS9 eps that BG, but I digress and attract rotten fruit.
Maybe it’s probablity. Quantum mechanics writ large, if you will. That would explain lengthy calculations that increase as the distance of the jump increases.
Give that there are x solar systems, y asteroids, z black holes, w random masses and each has a probability of being in such and such a place and some path or folding of space has to be calculated to avoid the possibility of hitting one.
If the spoilers I have read are true, he isn’t kidding! Not one little bit.
I knew, but had a moment of total panic as I read that and realized I hadn’t checked whether it runs an extra half hour or starts early. WHEW!