The thing that I’m curious about is what the effects would be of firing an air-cooled automatic weapon in a vacuum. How long would it take, say, an M-16 or an AK-47 to overheat in those circumstances?
If Vera was gas-operated, that is, a weapon that uses the expanding gases of the burning/burnt propellant to cycle the action, multiple shots should present no problem.
The gas tube that bleeds expanding gas off and cycles a gas-operated firearm is typically somewhere along the length of the barrel, and I’d thinkthere would be enough energy in that to cycle the action. I could be wrong, though.
A straight recoil operated weapon may be more problematic.
Thinking it over though, it occurs to me that I might just have those two backwards; in a vacuum, the gas may expand too quickly, given any outlet, to properly cycle the action. It may depend upon whether the initial impetus of the gas pulse alone is sufficient to cycle the action or not.
Whereas a recoil operated weapon would rely only upon the explosive force of the combusting propellant.
IIRC, Jayne only fires one shot at the emitters; he then fires 3 or 4 at he control cabin, fracturing it’s window enough for differential pressure to blow it outward, sucking the bad guys out unprotected into vacuum.
See, I think Adam Baldwin’s portrayal of Jayne is a damn fine piece of acting. On paper, he ought to be despicable: he’s a violent oaf, a thug, a brute, a bully, a thief, a lecher and even a traitor , and yet as he’s played he’s weirdly likable, even sympathetic. One of the minor highlights of the show is the rapport that develops between him and Shepherd Book, which is totally underplayed yet completely convincing.
I’ve never fired one myself (maybe we can get the opinion of someone more knowledgeable?) but I’d expect that you could get at minimum ten or fifteen shots- these guns are designed to fire many shots quickly, and even air-cooling won’t do much in a two-second span. I’m sure there barrel would hold up plenty long enough, but I’ll cede that there may be more sensitive parts concealed in Vera’s innards that might overheat rapidly- I wouldn’t know myself.
Is there any clue how close they are to a star at this point? If it’s too close, stellar radiation might be too much for any of Vera’s sensitive equipment, though that would seem to require just shielding, and Jayne specifically says “air”.
I think it’s convincing because it’s underplayed- Whedon lets the relationship speak for itself in short scenes and references, rather than be overt about it, and so the viewer sees it as a reality of life, not a cheesy plot point.
Generally speaking, I trust a parent to know what his kid can or cannot handle. In this thread, Dr. Who was suggested as a baseline for what What Exit?'s kids can handle, so I compared the stuff that a parent might object to in one, to stuff a parent might object to in another, because that’s explicitly the subject of the OP here. I’m not interested in arguing with a parent about what’s right for thier kid, because how would I know? I don’t know the kid, I don’t know what he can or cannot handle. If What Exit? says Firefly is too much for his kid, then that’s his call. If Hentor the Barbarian says that Call of Duty is okay for his kid, then that, too, is his call, and its not the place of some guy on the internet who’s never so much as seen the kid to question that decision.
I have a friend who thought it was OK to let his 3 year old son watch hardcore pornography on his computer. He felt it was OK for his kid and wouldn’t hurt him, so I guess that we should just accept his judgement since it’s his kid? I told him it was fucked up, I don’t know if I influenced his decision to let his kid watch bangbus videos with him, but I don’t think I was wrong to say something, even though I wasn’t aware of any negative affects it had on his personality.
BTW, the kid is 6 now and seems relatively normal, but who knows how something like that might affect him further down the line? I saw the scene in the Omen where the guy gets impaled on the pointy thing falling off the church and I don’t think it caused any immediate nightmares for me, but for years the image kept coming back to me and when I was older, I used to catch guppies out of the fishpond in our garden and recreate the scene with cactus needles. I think certain things are too dangerous to take chances with that way, just because your kid doesn’t appear distressed to see people getting chopped to pieces, throats cut, and brains blown out, doesn’t mean it won’t affect them.
Meant to add that I saw the disturbing scene from The Omen when I was about 6 or so, I was 11 when I started torturing small animals in a similar fashion.
That would raise some warning bells for me, too, as my understanding is that an interest in sex at that young an age can be a warning sign of sexual abuse. And if your friend watching explicit pornography with his young son, that is seriously fucked up. But the problem there isn’t with the porn, it’s with the parent inappropriately including his child in his sexual activities. If that’s what’s happening, you should very seriously consider contacting child protective services.
So, you see a scary movie, and five years later, you start torturing small animals? That seems like an extremly tenuous chain of cause and effect. I saw a lot of similarly scary and gory movies when I was a kid, and I’ve never hurt an animal larger than a housefly. Although, who knows? Maybe I’ll turn into an ax murderer next week because I saw Alien when I was four.
“Who knows what could happen?!” isn’t a rational argument, it’s emotional scaremongering.
If you like Kaylee, you’ll enjoy “Shindig”. There are a few scenes in that one where she gets to bask in the center of attention, and her smile, normally about a meter wide, goes up to about 150 cm.
Though I’m still a bit disappointed that there weren’t any strawberries on the buffet table.
I tortured animals in a fashion pretty much identical to a scene that haunted me after being exposed to it way too early. I doubt I’d ever get the idea to shove prickly-pear needles through guppies mouths and out by their tails and then standing them up in the dirt without that influence. I’m pretty confident that early exposure to violent media affected me in a negative way. I was pretty unsheltered and a lot of my hang-ups and obsessions today can be traced back to stuff I saw as a kid. Fortunately, most of it wasn’t of the extreme violent nature and I outgrew the torturing small animals phase.
BTW, my friend wasn’t “including his child in his sexual activities”, at least as far as I know. He wasn’t jerking off in front of him, I found out about it when I was at his house and he was doing the “Hey, check this site out” thing with me. He pulled up a video from bangbus, and his kid was standing there watching. I said something about it, and he said he didn’t think it would hurt his kid to watch it, and then joked that his son liked seeing the naked ladies.
Really, how is it worse for a child to see a woman sucking a dick than to see a man get impaled from head to toe in a horror movie, or to see characters in an in-game cinematic get theri throats cut? I’d think that it’s a pretty common occurence for young children to see sexual acts by walking in on their parents unexpectedly, and it probably wouldn’t be as traumatic as walking in on an execution.
Thanks Miller, overall, I find the show racier and significantly more violent than Dr. Who. The morals are also far more questionable. I think it is especially the last portion that decided me on not letting the kids watch it yet. My son is too much of an imitator. If one kid acts up, he follows suit and often takes it to a louder level quickly. I just do not think he is ready for this.
As it was, I had to put up with him wandering around the house, yelling “EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE” for several weeks with Dr. Who. The aforementioned Gas Mask episode had him scared in a way I consider correct. I am overjoyed that a well-done piece of goreless horror could affect him to watching the show peeking out through his fingers. Blink actually got him peering over the back of the love seat. Damn it, but that is how Dr. Who was meant to be watched by little ones. Awesome!
As to games, I keep an eye on what he plays. If the violence gets too high, really anything beyond Pokemon, I think it is still too much for 7 year old. I had a very positive experience playing Disney Toontown with him this year. We ran two characters up to a good strong level. The game was very positive in my opinion. I think the game actually proved very useful in teaching him teamwork.
I try to be careful with my son, it is only with a lot of work from my wife and some for me, that we have kept him on grade level and caught up in his schoolwork. Emotionally he was several years behind his classmates and it was affecting his class work and got him sent to the principals office far too often last year. He even got tossed out of a summer camp the year before, towards the end of summer. So, I always try to be careful in what he watches. The kids were watching “My Name is Earl” with us, but the show keeps getting racier and first my son and now even my daughter are not watching it anymore. This was easy as we DVR it and then watch it after they are asleep.
I saw that one it was a fun episode. But, I should explain, I like her, as she is a very believable to me, old fashion crusty engineer. Doesn’t matter if the character was a crusty old salt, a middle-age uber-geek* or a cute young woman, I find her believable as an engineer. Morena has hot thoroughly and overwhelmingly won. Kaylee is barely the cute girl next door compared to her. Her smile is very nice, but I just really like the character.
T.O. Welcome to the Board and all, but that was an awful lot of TMI for a Café thread.
Jim
- Scotty was pretty much a middle-age uber-geek, remember the “The Trouble with Tribbles” when he gets confined to quarters and he tells the Captain, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’ll give me a chance to catch up on my technical journals.”
And if you hadn’t seen that particular movie, maybe you’d have invented some other way of torturing small animals. Or maybe watching violent movies did mess you up, and your parents should have been paying better attention to you. I did say that not all kids are able to handle violent media, and parents should of course be aware of what their kid is watching, and how their kids are reacting to it. All that aside, the end result in your case is a bunch of dead fish. Big deal.
That’s a much different situation than I got out of your first post. With the additional details you’ve provided, I agree with your friend.
Well, yes. Exactly. So what were you giving your friend grief for?
Well, I wasn’t referring so much to the business with the dress, as to the scene with her surrounded by a gaggle of guys talking about motors. “Oh, the A5312? That’s just the old A5072, but they put it in a new casing and thought nobody would notice.” She’s in her element, and by golly, she’s enjoying it.
One other note about her engineering, though: It’s not miraculous, like Scotty’s is. Sometimes, something just breaks, and you can’t fix it. As you’ll see soon enough.
[TEASER] And if your engineer keeps bugging you about paying to replace the compression coil, you might wanna listen to her instead of insisting she keeps patching it up: it’ll save a lot of grief later… [/TEASER]
Ah, that scene, that did bring a smile to my face. Gotcha.
Actually, it’s not the compression coil that blows. It’s the catalyzer.
ETA: In the next episode, on Ariel, Wash finds a catalyzer when they are going through the dump. In disgust, he chucks it away - and it hits the vehicle they end up using as the ambulance for the heist.
Hey, please don’t post spoilers in a thread started by someone that did not see all the Eps yet. I am only up to #8.
Allowing a three-yr-old to see watch extreme violence or porn, even briefly, is completely inappropriate. I might call it abuse. Particularly when the father jokes that the kid “likes seeing the naked ladies” which indicates repeated exposure.
For my own children, I’m more worried about violence on TV than sex - I wouldn’t object to them seeing any of Firefly’s sexual content, for example. But that’s a far cry from hardcore porn.
How about the violence and moral ambiguity?
I think all three together is a little much for the average 7 year old and I am not taking a chance with my 7 year old.
That wasn’t a spoiler. BTW - Ariel is considered by some to be the best episode they made. You will enjoy it - under pain of death!