Like the humanoid Cylons. Legions of clones with superhuman physiques indistinguishable from humans without highly sophisticated testing. Some of them are brainwashed into having near perfect human identities, while still acting on their orders, Manchurian Candidate style. They also are somehow connected, so that if a unit is killed, its conciousness can be transferred to a new body.
Or the Raiders. A biological brain in a fighter capable of taking out trained human pilots is still pretty damn impressive, even if Starbuck can take them on a dozen at a time.
Or hell, if it’s true, the thing in Baltar’s head, connecting him to Six and the other Cylons. Assuming he’s not just nuts, which, as of Season One (no spoilers! I watch on DVD!) I can’t just yet.
My mistake, I agree with you on that count – and about DS9. I thought you were discussing the new BSG and Firefly – for which people seem to think one is better than the other, when in fact they are both well done (I has me preference, but that doesn’t mean I think there is a clearly superior winner).
My apologies to you and others. [Emily Loutella]Never mind[/Emily Loutella]
There’s no indication that they do in Firefly, either. There is an indication that Jayne thinks that guns need oxygen to work, but I wouldn’t exactly take Jayne’s word for anything in physics. We don’t actually see Vera stop firing once the suit is breached.
And I still maintain that their medical tech isn’t too far advanced beyond ours. Simon isn’t really able to use targeted drug therapy against River’s brain damage. He can try, and he occassionally hits on something that eases some of the symptoms for a little while, but none of it is what you might call a cure. As for re-attaching an ear, well, surgeons can do that right now. You’ll probably get some scarring at the point of attachment, but with an ear, who’s going to notice? There is whatever the Feds did to River in the first place, but one must wonder how much of that was actually knowing what they’re doing, versus just lucky bumbling around combined with her natural abilities.
Part of the problem with BSG is Ron Moore purposely shuns a lot of the little details that one would expect a society with FTL spaceships to have, while Firefly gently includes them.
Sure, the settlers on the fringe worlds of Firefly make do with 19th & 20th century technology, but then you’ll see someone reading a newspaper with embedded video on it. Or you’ll run across someone smuggling his sister in some sort of stasis cargo device, or a hover-car, or a floating city.
We never see things on Galactica that suggest anything beyond 1990s technology, other than the spaceships and the Cylons themselves.
I still maintain that without air around the gun, it would overheat and sieze after a while. That said, I don’t know how guns in the Firefly universe are made (perhaps the gun parts magically don’t expand due to heat, who knows?) nor do I know even how long a typical late 20th century assault rifle would be able to fire in a vacuum before this would become an issue.
But I would take his word for the best ways to hurt or kill something in a variety of different elements. The man names his guns. After women. I think he knows how to operate them just about as well as anyone else on the ship. Plus, Mal and Zoe, both professional soldiers, don’t disagree with him, and set him up with that spacesuit thing so that Vera would work. Even if we accept that Jayne is incompetent in every area, violence included, the two veterans of a space war would probably know different. Besides all of that, Jayne says he needs a specific piece of equipment to fire his gun in a vacuum. If Jayne’s talking out his ass, why does that piece of equipment exsist?
I like Raguleader’s explanation. I’m going with that one.
Here’s my BS explanation: Vera is a long-range gun. Like a sniper rifle. It needs air around it because it senses barometric pressure and wind and auto-corrects the bullet. A vacuum screws it up. The air pressure goes to zero, and the processor does a divide by zero and crashes.
[spoiler]On the episode where the fellow got his organs scooped out and replaced with synthetics, Simon notes how hard the scars were to detect. And that was for the “gutting” surgery, which couldn’t have taken place more than a couple of weeks previously.
It’s also the episode that featured a drug, bought on the black market, that put a man into a form of suspended animation closely resembling death for more than a week, with no apparent ill effects.
Joss Whedon has said somewhere (I think it was on the DVD commentary track) that someone told them a gun would need air to fire and so they added that scene in an attempt to add realism! :smack: By the time they realized the information was wrong it was too late to change anything so they just went with “well, for some reason this particular type of gun does need air”.
They had guns on the set, some of which were revolvers that didn’t require any modification to fire blanks. What they didn’t have out of the presumably dozens of people working that day was anybody with the foggiest clue how those guns worked. That’s dangerous as hell.
Aren’t they supposed to have armorers to keep track of the guns on movie and TV sets? Surely anybody qualified to be an armorer would know that gun propellants are self oxidizing.
I don’t think you need to worry. First of all, while they certainly had people knowledgable in firearms on the set when they were filming with any real guns, they probably didn’t have those people around when they were writing the script. Or, for that matter, when they submitted the script to their science fact checker, and he (not knowing about guns, apparently), said that guns wouldn’t fire in a vacuum. By the time the armorer shows up, they’re on the set with a finished script, shooting film. Any veteran Hollywood armorer is almost certainly used to filmmakers not giving a shit about presenting an accurate picture of firearm use, so why would they bother offering an unsolicited correction, when they’d expect from previous experience to be totally ignored? It’s the armorer’s job to make sure the shoot is safe, not realistic. Besides which, in the scene in question, the only gun present was Vera, which so far as I know is not a real-world rifle, but something vaguely futurey looking the prop department whipped up. Would the armorer even have been on set when they shot that scene, if the only weapon involved was a wholly non-functional prop?
Last of all, even if that were a real gun, and the armorer were present, and they asked him if a gun would fire in a vacuum… would he necessarily know? Where does one get training on the operation of firearms in a vacuum? Are there a lot of air-tight firing ranges out there? I don’t know much about guns, but is a knowledge of the properties of the chemical propellents in a bullet a necessary component of gun safety?
Well, it’s chemistry, but that’s not his field of speciality. His field of specialty is firearms (with emphasis on safety). He may know that the bullet fires because the firing pin strikes the primer, but he may not know how the innards of the bullet work beyond “It goes bang and the bullet shoots out the barrel” which is pretty much all of the chemistry equation you’d need to know when using a gun. Everything else is just keeping the guns clean, keeping live ammo away from the guns, and keeping the actors and crew from doing anything stupid.
