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Stargate Universe
Last night I finally scraped together the two hours to watch the premiere of Stargate Universe. Since the last two series really ran their course and deserved to end, I was skeptical. At first blush it appears that the show is just Atlantis + Voyager, shot in the documentary style that practically every sci-fi show since Firefly uses. But I enjoyed it, and figured we should have a place to discuss it. The TV landscape needs more real, good sci-fi: there's not a lot of it left, even on the moronically renamed Syfy channel. But maybe this one will have a solid season. I just hope that future episodes don't have so many commercials. I couldn't believe how many ads appeared during this thing.
One way to get rid of many of the advertisements is to watch it on Hulu. Granted you have to wait before episoded become available and the entire season of a given show isn't always available, but in general it's a lot better than sitting through lots of useless advertisements.
Justify my text? I'm sorry, but it has no excuse.
as explained in season 1 of SG-1, particles (such as air)are kept from traveling through the event horizon by the cool ancient technology as a way to help protect both ends from the environment on the other side.
I'll have to rewatch it to be sure, but my recollection is that the "safety mechanism" prevented the door from being propped-open (they said "like an elevator")... I don't think they said it had to be a person pressing the button.
On the other hand we know from previous shows that Ancient technology seems to check "who" is pressing buttons. Many pieces of tech require the "Ancient gene" specifically, but it's not too far-fetched to suggest that various controls have to be pressed by an actual person (to prevent, for instance, random pieces of debris pressing important buttons).
At a minimum, it would have been nice for them to mention this possible solution. One of the most amazing things about the Stargate series is how for most problems, they will discuss/try a wide variety of solutions before finally finding the right one. In this sense it's much more like real engineering/science... which is satisfying.
The ship has been flying a lot longer than the Ancients planned. That's because they learned to ascend, and never ended up using the ship.
When they were digging through the supplies which came from Earth, there were Ancient crates right there too. So not only have they not looked all over the ship, but they've not even opened boxes which they've seen.
Good summary. Here are the random thoughts that popped into my head during the premiere:
- That ship traveled the distance of about ~50 galaxies in 10,000 years. According to scientists there's about 3 million LYs between each galaxy, so the ship covered that's 150 million lightyears. FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe. (suspension of disbelief just broke)
O RLY?
The lower bound for the diameter size of the universe is 78 BILLION LYs.
The VISIBLE (observable) universe is a little under 50 (again) BILLION LYs in any direction.
Shakey/bad focus cam was invented to hide really REALLY bad CG or incredibly bad choreographed fight scenes. They did it first on the Borune Supremacy because they did not want to hire real actors or peopel that could actually choreograph a fight. So they shook the hell out of the camera and basicvally did the "I cant use a camera" filming style to hide that the movie actually sucked.
Now everyone uses it because you can spend 1/3rd on your CGI if you shake the hell out of the camera. Several of my friends that do CG on hollywood movies hate it, because they dont get to do their craft, they just do the half assed cheap version with shakey cam. It saves nearly 1/2 on the cost of CG compared to doing it right and having the guys compost it perfectly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Can't believe I'm being this nerdy but everything you mention there is consistent in the show's canon :)
As you push things into the event horizon, they are dematerialised and stored in a buffer in the stargate - so if you stick the staff weapon (or your head) halfway in it's not "there" any more. Once the stargate decides the whole object is inside, it sends the data in the buffer to the other stargate via Sci Fi Awesomeness. It's sorta established that this is *not* instant. When the data gets there, the receiving stargate receives it into the buffer, and once the whole object is in the buffer, rematerialises it out of the event horizon.
So what happens when you shut the gate off depends what stage in this process you are at: if you shut off while a object is partly into the stargate then the bit in the stargate vanishes, no part of it was sent yet (the other half I guess is left in the buffer, but the buffer gets cleared when the gate connection *opens* at least). If you shut off while the 'signal' is in transit between the gates then you get the materialising in space scenario, which rematerialises it without its actual structure (just dumps the fundamental particles back out into 'reality'). Teal'c gets trapped in the buffer because the gate is malfunctioning and is refusing to rematerialise the objects it receives; they have to get him out before anyone else dials into the gate because this will clear the buffer and destroy his stored pattern.
So yah, it basically does transmit each object as a single "packet", but there is a buffering phase inside the stargate at each end to allow this, and the gates don't bother to push partially buffered objects back out if the connection is cut (guess the ancients weren't too big on safety).
They made a big deal out of the ship "waking up" during the opening credits. My guess is that things like life support were shut down until the ship detected someone trying to connect to the gate.
My big complaint about the plot is that any race planning to send an automated ship on a multi-thousand year trip with no crew would surely have built some kind of automated repair system. Where are the little R2D2-equivalents that should be running around patching stuff? Maybe something similar to replicators, but carrying containers of goo that can be turned into spare parts as needed.