Obviously, the answer to the OP is yes. Because what makes a movie work is not the science – it’s the story. Good story and good characters trumps so-so science every day of the week.
Now if you’re talking about purely “hard” SF TV, the show that did the best job of staying entirely within known scientific fact was Star Cops.
But judging on whether an SF show is good or bad solely on the basis on how accurate it is is like judging a mystery on what type of hat the detective wears.
Hmmm . . . And that brilliant concept only lasted one season?
:rolleyes:
Look, space opera can be good, but it’s still space opera. We’re discussing hard SF here. And hard SF has a value which space opera lacks, and I hope I don’t need to explain to you what it is.
Why? Suspending a mammal’s animation isn’t so far away that we can’t foresee its use. Suspended animation is pretty safe ground for even the hardest SF authors, IMHO. An interstellar war can take place STL as long as you’re willing to wait a long time for deployment. Of course, actual engagement would necessarily take place close to a star, so it’s sort of a home- or away-game situation, I guess.
With that said, I’d watch it. Some of my favorite parts of Battlestar Galactica are the ‘Newtonian’ physics that the starfighters use, I think they’ve done a decent job making it look cool. The Galactica itself isn’t much for following those rules, though. I mean, if you got nuked in zero-g, I’d think it would push your ship around a little. As would firing hundreds of flak cannons simultaneously on one side of the ship. :dubious:
It isn’t incredible, just implausible. As BrainGlutton points out, “goodness” comes from stories and characters, not technologies. If the scenario is implausible, the story and characters are going to have a hard time being plausible either.
I already excepted jump travel from the realm of possibility, and given BSG props for the rest. They do need jump travel or there’s no story line, and that’s certainly a small enough price to pay.
Why? Why not? We don’t yet know that artificial gravity cannot be created, not the way we know FTL or backwards time travel cannot be created.
The thing is, I doubt most real space battles would take place on a human time frame. You’re manuevaring in minimum delta-V orbits for months or years, trying to detect the enemy, when you detect the enemy you fire weapons, and either you hit and they die in milliseconds or you miss.
Well, there could be drama in this. But a real life space battle would have to play more like a submarine movie rather than a fighter plane movie.
But it’s the slower-than-light propulsion I was talking about. Both the Colonial and the Cylon ships – just like ST and SW ships – appear to move around without expelling reaction mass. That’s the big limiting factor in space propulsion. At present, space travel consists of giving the spaceship one big push in the desired direction, and then letting it drift in free-fall until it gets there. We can’t build a constant-boost space drive because there’s no practical way to carry that much fuel/reaction-mass on board the ship with you. There are theoretical ways around that – e.g., the Bussard Ramjet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet) – but BSG doesn’t appear to use any of them; they just have spaceships that seem to have solved the problem in a black-box way.
AFAIK, nobody has even a theoretical line on manipulating gravity without using an actual gravity-generating mass (which presents its own problems). “Gravitons” might be manipulated, somehow, but they are theoretical and, as yet, undetected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
S.M. Stirling’s Drakon opens in the 25th Century – five centuries after the Final War between the Domination of the Draka and the Alliance for Democracy, which the Draka won, but the Alliance won the local battles in the Asteroid Belt and gained enough time to send a colonization ship (bearing suspended-animation colonists and frozen embryos or cell samples of most Earth life-forms) to the recently discovered planet of Samothrace in another star system. The Draka and the Samothracians remain enemies, and are in race to plant the most colonies in the immediate stellar neighborhood, but, given the distances involved – “Interstellar war was just as preposterous as interstellar government” – they never actually fight, not until FTL technology is developed (at the beginning of the story).
Re the above: Stirling (speaking through the musings of the protagonist/villain, Gewndolyn Ingolfsson), notes (pre-FTL), “In theory it was possible to destroy planets from an interstellar distance, though not to conquer them. Nobody had ever thought it worthwhile, when preparations were easy to spot and retaliation in kind just as easy.”
Not even as many episodes as Firefly, tragically.
That’s the problem with interplanetary war. All you have to do is drop a rock on the enemy planet and the whole point of the war goes away. How do you have a war with someone who can drop dinosaur-killers on Earth any time they like?
BAD BBC! BAD!
Haven’t read the book, but I’ll answer the substance of the quote.
The assumption that preparations would be easy to spot is presumably qualified in the book, though in a true STL universe that’s going to be nonsense. C is the maximum speed anything may travel, including information. If I build and launch interstellar weapons in less than the time it takes light to travel from my location of preparation to the target’s location, my preparations cannot be detected prior to completion.
In other words: they might know I’ve thrown a punch before it hits them, but they **can’t ** know in time to stop me from swinging my fist.
Don’t start an interstellar war
It has no helpful uses
When people ask you, “What’s it for?”
You’ll only make excuses
If thirty trillion folks get hurt
You’ll go to bed with no dessert!
Don’t start an interstellar war
– From “Never Set the Cat on Fire” by Frank Hayes. Pegasus Awards - Frank Hayes