Someone explain to me why there was no gianormous shockwave that pretty much flattened everything under the ship?
The ship was still pretty far away from the ground when it jumped away.
However, they did get one thing right: did you notice the air rushing towards where the ship was when it jumped away, because it left a big pocket of void that had to be filled?
Because once you begin violating the laws of physics, (FTL) it’s all too easy to continue. 
What would be the source of the shockwave?
I would assume the shockwave would come from the underside of Galactica (sonic boom) and/or the release of whatever magic allows it to jump away.
Well, I think the Galactica probably would have produced a pretty shattering sonic boom. Though having a city full of people with bleeding eardrums might have been more realistic, I can see how the writers wouldn’t want to deal with universal deafness.
According to the podcast, she jumped into the upper atmosphere and had no ability to manuever; she fell from 100,000Ft to say 200 Ft. V=1/2at^2 and all that. Somebody figure that out and see if she was supersonic.
There will be a test Tuesday.
Just the fact her hull was glowing red would suggest she was supersonic.
But how much physical damage would the sonic boom do?
x=1/2at^2
100,000=1/2(32)t^2
40 = t
x=vt
100000=v40
v=2,500 ft/sec=.47 miles/sec = 1692 mph = mach 2.3
So without air resistance she’s making almost 2.5 times the speed of sound.
I wish Ron would get a math guy better than me.
Can Chronos or somebody check this?
Please forgive me my ignorance of military protocol…what is the difference between warrant officer, commissioned officer and enlisted?
We don’t quite know what value of g to use, anyway.
Wouldn’t Tyrol be a petty officer, not a warrant officer? Oh, what the hell, in that navy a colonel is a carrier XO and a commander outranks a captain.
Enlisted servicemembers are the lowest ranks of the armed forces. When enlisted folk get promoted far enough, they become warrant or non-commissioned officers, meaning they oversee and order others but are not “commission”. Commissioned officers generally go through military training at places like West Point, where they’re taught much more than your average boot camp would. Once graduated, they start out higher in the chain of command than any non-com (ensigns and the like). Commissioned officers are the ones that rise to high rank, like Generals or Admirals.
A non-com can be promoted to commission rank, but to my knowledge that’s rare and quite a difficult feat. Does the concept get on your nerves? It sure as hell rubs me the wrong way, but that’s a discussion for a different thread.
It can get kinda complicated defining a warrant officer. It depends on which country (or planet), and within the country it can depend on which branch of service. A warrant officer in the Navy or Marine Corps might be different than a warrant in the Army.
In very, very simple terms a warrant officer is like an enlisted person but with a lot of experience and/or highly specialized skills so you have to pay them more and treat them like you would an officer. Without being an officer, technically.
You can read more about warrant officers here.
Nor do we know the density of New Caprica’s atmosphere.
However, she wasn’t going anywhere near Mach 2 when she jumped. We could see her. 
I guess the moral of the story is that Ron needs to hire a physics guy.
She didn’t fall anywhere near 200 ft. above ground. The Galactica jumped after falling for maybe 20 seconds. She went from 90,000 to maybe 10,000 feet. Nowhere near Mach 2. Terminal velocity would work out to about 600 mph counting air resistance.
V(t) may be 600mph, but who says she was at rest when she jumped?
Remember, the Bucket is a few thousand feet long. I second the 10k+ height of the jump—only thing wrong was the shockwave hit the ground too soon.
The short answer is there are too many unknowns to calculate the Galactica’s velocity. Consider the glowing heat of reentry. If the Galactica started at a velocity of zero and began freefall, it wouldn’t have enough time to heat the air beneath it to incandescence. But you saw glowing hot gas under Galactica’s belly almost immediately. That tells you right off the bat it was probably moving at a very high mach the moment it jumped in.
Anyway, the formula for free-fall time is t=(2distance/g)^0.5, I believe, assuming zero initial velocity, and no air resistance. I get about 79 sec. from 100,000. As the velocity will be gt, I get about 1724 mph.
Again, the Galactica must have been going way faster than that.
Not necessarily. Here I am with my Battlestar pushing a huge shockwave ahead of it. Said shockwave is being forced through the air by the big old Battlestar.
But suddenly that Battlestar is gone…AND there’s a Battlestar-sized vacuum immediately behind the shockwave.
What’d the shockwave do?
-Joe
I was thinking about reintegration this morning on the way to work (yes, I need to get out more).
We already know there are going to be death squads, and that Tigh is somehow involved, and that it’s not going to be pretty.
But also: There was a pretty bad culture clash between the Pegasus and Galactica crew, and Cain’s abrubt crew reassignments didn’t exactly smooth things over. Shortly after that, New Caprica happened. Now there is no Pegasus. Lee has lost his command. The crews of both Battlestars are now one crew. Many of the erstwhile positions were filled by others (e.g. Helo as XO and tactical opps., Cat as the Galactica CAG, Dualla as the Pegasus XO, etc.) All of these men and women who remained in space, and served with tremendous distinction leading up to and during the rescue, are probably going to feel conflicted if they have to surrender their positions to those who held them before.
Then you’ve got Galactica’s current XO married to a Cylon, who is now an officer of the Colonial forces. I’m sure plenty of New Caprican (twice now) refugees, who probably hate and distrust the Cylons even more than before, if at all possible, with never ever accept Sharon Agathon as one of them. Quite the opposite, I would expect her to be a perpetual target for assasination.
Hell, there’s enough potential for internal strife here just in the military to make the Galactica pop open from all the tension buildup. I wonder how RDM & Co. going to handle it.