scvn2812

It might be because of traffic, Sol is the capital of the Federation and while we've never seen a great volume of ships in and outbound on screen, one must assume that there is a degree of civilian traffic. Freighters bringing in manufactured goods from other systems, raw materials being dug out of the moons and asteroids and hauled to Utopia Planitia and Earth orbit. The other explanation is that the greater density of random debris in a star system is considered a navigational hazard. It may be harder (not impossible, just harder) to plot a course around debris significant enough to be a threat to the Enterprise while going C or higher. Near Earth orbit is probably fairly clean thanks to the gravitational pull of Earth and the Moon sucking in anything that doesn't have enough momentum to maintain its orbit, so Cochrane wasn't in any more risk than the Apollo astronauts.

I am familiar with that episode, my preference is to assume that the Jaffa in question are doing the dirty work of mining and basically just shoveling raw materials into the Goa'uld equivalent of an Asgard matter converter which extrudes modular components while loyalists do the work of assembling the ship according to a sort of Idiots Guide to Mothership construction which basically reads like "insert crystal A into slot B of hyperspace window generator X." Otherwise it seems at best unwise, at worst suicidal to build a starship using slave labor when if one of any random billion or so things happens to go wrong you (or Yu) could be incinerated by a sudden burst of radiation, have your atoms sprayed across the universe by poorly coordinated inertial dampener, lose pressure in your bedroom... I look forward to your look at Ha'tak scaling. I suspect that it might suffer from Bird of Prey syndrome...

At the beginning of the series, a big deal is made of how ignorant Jaffa are of how Goa'uld technology works. So, as I'm sure it has everyone, this leads to the question: if there are only a handful of Goa'uld per System Lord empire, who builds the technology? We haven't directly seem any evidence of matter conversion technology like that the Asgard use to instantaneously create small items and presumably enables to them to produce the components for starships and then assemble them using a mixture of teleportation and tractor beam technology. On the other hand, a black box with a hole labeled "insert naquada" and a hole on the other end where starship parts are extruded with a "go" button on it is about the feasible set up I can think of that involves slave labor. I have also speculated on the existence of a sub-cult of Jaffa who are "blessed" with more intimate knowledge of how Goa'uld technology works, technomancers if you will, who function as the engineers to support the common foot soldiers who can push buttons and make the guns go boom and maybe even swap some crystals around in a pinch but otherwise have at best a renaissance level education.

I've been thinking about that whole thing with reducing the mass of the moon via subspace bubble in order to move it. Might this be a sort of hint that warp drive involves mass reduction? We also have the E-D cut across the front of a Borg cube in just a few seconds implying significant acceleration, I believe you clocked it at a hundred gees or so? Impulse by itself may simply be using the thrusters on the back of the ship but I've never heard of any sort of mechanism that would prevent using the warp drive to achieve relativistic speeds. In fact if impulse power alone only is sufficient to propel the ship out of space dock at a few dozen meters per second, hundred or so tops, then sublight warp drive use is practically required if going to warp within a star system is considered a bad idea. We don't generally iirc see ships hop out of warp drive in orbit of planets, we usually cut in as they reach orbit, leaving the precise method of travel unclear. We also have the same issue with photon torpedoes. At visual ranges they move at kilometers a second when they're really in a hurry but the USS Phoenix capped a Cardassian ship at around a light second. Same with phasers, you can watch the phaser beam move at slower than light speeds in frame by frame but either by torpedoes or phasers, the Phoenix destroyed a Cardassian ship in real time at around 300k kilometers. I don't think this is the only example of beyond visual range combat either. Depending on your interpretation of the events of Generations, that might be one as well (or Worf was just telling us the amount of time the missile would be within range of ship's weapons.)

I've been thinking about that whole thing with reducing the mass of the moon via subspace bubble in order to move it. Might this be a sort of hint that warp drive involves mass reduction? We also have the E-D cut across the front of a Borg cube in just a few seconds implying significant acceleration, I believe you clocked it at a hundred gees or so? Impulse by itself may simply be using the thrusters on the back of the ship but I've never heard of any sort of mechanism that would prevent using the warp drive to achieve relativistic speeds. In fact if impulse power alone only is sufficient to propel the ship out of space dock at a few dozen meters per second, hundred or so tops, then sublight warp drive use is practically required if going to warp within a star system is considered a bad idea. We don't generally iirc see ships hop out of warp drive in orbit of planets, we usually cut in as they reach orbit, leaving the precise method of travel unclear. We also have the same issue with photon torpedoes. At visual ranges they move at kilometers a second when they're really in a hurry but the USS Phoenix capped a Cardassian ship at around a light second. Same with phasers, you can watch the phaser beam move at slower than light speeds in frame by frame but either by torpedoes or phasers, the Phoenix destroyed a Cardassian ship in real time at around 300k kilometers. I don't think this is the only example of beyond visual range combat either. Depending on your interpretation of the events of Generations, that might be one as well (or Worf was just telling us the amount of time the missile would be within range of ship's weapons.)

Cue the squinty eyed Fry meme: Not sure if fan dance demeans Uhura or is liberating. O.o

I just finished reading the book today and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reminded me of Game of Thrones in a way. One thing I definitely appreciated was it's accessibility. It wasn't necessary to have an in depth knowledge of the rest of the expanded universe to understand the book, although there are references to books I haven't read that do tie in to the novel in non critical ways. This is a major plus for me as I have for some time been very picky about what Star Wars books I read. Luceno, Stover and Zahn are my top tier but I will give others a chance now and then. I like the way the Sith are presented. They are complex characters who are still vaguely relatable as people. Given that they can successfully hide in plain site, one would expect them to at least be functioning psychopaths. I liked the presentation of Sidious and Plagueis, they have an interesting fun house mirror version of the master and apprentice relationship with a small bit of genuine camaraderie amidst the cruelty. There are a lot of good parallels to the movies as well in the story telling that seem like genuine foreshadowing and exploration of common themes rather than retelling the same old stories with little twists. The only thing that really bugged me is that this book really could have used a character list just to help keep track of who was who within the various conspiracies. There are a lot of plans within plans and a lot of unfamiliar and not especially memorable names in this book and you almost need to take notes. Although admittedly, intricate political intrigue is something I have a hard time following. I recommend this for anyone looking for an interesting perspective on Palpatine, his rise to power and the Sith.

Why? What's the difference? Its a show about exploration. Everything taking place in a 10,000 light year bubble is still a ridiculously huge playground for the powers that be to run around in. At the rate we're discovering extra solar planets there could be literally billions of planets and perhaps millions of Earth like worlds in that bubble. The Vulcans could have colonized a new planet every year for the 2,000 years or so they've had deep space flight capability and still not claimed much of the real estate available in that region. What does having access to the entire galaxy add to the series?

To this day I still don't really know how I feel about that. I recognize that they wanted to start off the series in a dramatic way to show that the Vong are Serious Business, that there will be Consequences to this arc and up to that point the trilogy characters, except for a few minor ones, had managed to get away with adventure after adventure without their lives being seriously altered or even anyone's luck running out. I think it was a good death overall but it seems like too much of a publicity stunt. I suspect that the powers that be recognized even at that point that the readers were getting tired of trilogy after trilogy of Really Important Stuff You'll Never Hear About Again but the Vong war was really the end of my love affair with Star Wars EU. It got to the point where there was nothing to read anymore that could be appreciated on its own. I have a poor eye for plot holes unless they're so bad you could fly a Death Star through them, so issues like dramatic power differences in characters and ships from story to story didn't really bother me - still don't really - Plagueis does many things right and a few wrong in that regard but it didn't affect my appreciation for the book significantly - but I got tired of jumping into the middle of character arcs of people I had never read about before with no effort to even summarize who they were, what was happening to them and why I should care. Its like watching the pilot for Battlestar Galactica 2k3 and then tuning in at the climax of all that final five stuff....except instead of one series progressing linearly, its half a dozen series and two dozen or so one shots that are all over the timeline. I've reached that point as well with other series where the author(s) just assume you remember a minor character from five books back who is now important. I have a friend who worships Honor Harrington and I quit after the end of the second Haven-Manticore war, its just so far removed from the original premise that drew me in and I can't bring myself to care about any of the dozen or so characters being explored besides the title character - herself becoming increasingly unlikable as she progresses from a character who - in gaming terms - just seems to have taken flaws for the extra experience to boost her already min maxed abilities - nor even about the political and strategic changes to the setting.

What I've read of NJO makes me inclined to skip those, too many characters from books I didn't read or didn't like taking too many pages away from more familiar characters.

He wrote that and Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, the latter I strongly recommend for anyone who feels like exploring the gap in Anakin's character arc from ROTS to ANH. Luceno excels at naturally developing characters and accepting and building off of the themes of the movies rather than rewriting his favorite stories and changing the names around.

It's well worth it, Luceno has always been a very consistent writer and he draws excellent parallels to the modern world, building on George's rather blunt analogies and adding some nuance. There's a few eye rollers like Naboo plasma being a stand in for oil and a repetition of the million man army for a galactic war stuff, but on the whole it's pretty solid.

The phrase I saw was "being wound down" so they aren't going to leave it without resolving some of the unfinished story arcs. 5 years is a good run, generally best to go not much more than that or a show risks getting stale or creatively bankrupt.

Or perhaps the mimic silver goo from Voyager. Elementals from fantasy are suddenly seeming microscopically less fantastic.

Something that occurred to me when talking about the Earth - Minbari war and its surprisingly small number of casualties for a major interstellar war, we always seem to default to World War 2 for our analogies of how war ought to work in the future. If it were fought like World War 2, then we ought to expect loss of life to run into the millions, even billions as starships carpet nuke planets that decline to surrender (it gets worse when you realize the Minbari originally started out wanting to eradicate humanity.) On the other hand, if it were fought more like the wars of the late 20th and 21st century so far with extreme care for avoiding civilian loss of life on a significant scale, then there is no reason for huge body counts except in the case of major disruptions of supply lines for interdependent star nations such as those who depend on dedicated agricultural colonies or primitive colonies that cannot synthesize their own advanced medicines. If anything, the cleaner war is, the easier it seems for nations to make the argument to go to war. So all those border skirmishes in Star Trek and Babylon 5 that never escalate into full scale wars would make more sense. I was also thinking that the geography of Star Trek would make much more sense if we dropped the pretense that the star nations of the Alpha and Beta quadrants have neat, clearly established borders rather than having core territories and then far flung outposts spread across the quadrants in much the same way the Imperial powers of the age of sail had global empires and warred at home in Europe, the New World, Asia and Africa.

Do it yourself assault rifle parts and bongs. 3D printing, boldly going where Cheech, Chong and the Terminator have gone before....

Back it up a sec dude, one of the biggest problems with having a conversation on the internet is judging tone. Can't two guys have a difference of opinion about what a major war is without assuming its "heated?" Well, okay, war is a touchy subject so maybe that's a bad example. Anyway, mostly what I wanted to do was give some context. Skimming a wiki is one thing and unfortunately that one thing is often missing context. So if any of that helped make the Earth - Minbari war make a bit more sense when compared to the slaughter you've described previously for Gundam, cool. If anyone else has anything they'd like to add or correct me on, jump on in. As I said, it might make a fun Gynasium topic. Okay back to your original point: scale. Yes, it is a "small" war by most standards. Heck, the Death Star by itself represents a greater loss of life than the Earth - Minbari war. Although context is exactly what's missing from the Earth - Minbari war. We know many humans considered it a very traumatic event and in the made for tv movie that covered it, everyone was convinced the twilight of the human race was at hand until the Minbari surrendered. We know little of how it was fought though. We do see a couple of soldiers brawling but no montages of cities burning, space colonies being opened like tin cans etc. On the other hand, maybe the writers did know what they were doing as they did present a faction of humans a decade later who swaggered about and seemed to actually think they'd progressed enough that if the war were fought all over again, they'd win. (Take my word for it, the odds were still bad, if slightly less so.) Here's the rub, are the authors underestimating how bad an interstellar conflict would be or are we projected our favorite meme, World War 2, onto these science fiction universes? There's this idea in fandom that if a war isn't a total war, fought with everything a civilization has and without restriction, its not realistic. I'm not sure I buy into that idea. If anything it seems the first decade of the 21st century has shown that regard for life isn't the same as lack of interest in war. If anything, it seems that the less bloodshed is directly involved in fighting, especially for civilians, the easier and easier it is to justify wars. I think we should rethink how we look at war in science fiction instead of automatically jumping to the World War 2 meme. I think its interesting to take the modern world and use it as the template for understanding scifi. In some cases I think it helps to explain inconsistencies like the absence of total wars or a lack of huge set piece battles in settings where grandiose brawls ought to be possible. Its not a perfect analogy, it may not even be a less bad analogy than World War 2 or the Age of Sail but its interesting. Now that I think about it, we really seem to be on our way to a Dune model of war, minus the lasguns and personal shields. So far.

Why should it be bloody if the Minbari hadn't started their pogrom to wipe out humanity yet? As I said, 250,000 persons would account for 250 first rate capital ships or a greater number of mixed dreadnoughts, cruisers and corvettes. Babylon 5, despite attempts to inflate its numbers from some corners, is not a universe with terribly large fleet counts. The biggest on screen battles involved maybe hundreds of observable ships with thousands implied by JMS approved media of dubious canon status. An Omega class destroyer is as large as a Star Destroyer but even more so than the Star Destroyer is basically implied to be mostly machine with the human presence very small by comparison - around 1500 was the largest crew size ever mentioned for such a vessel iirc versus the ~40,000 of an ISD per reference material. In setting, the Earth Alliance is technologically outclassed by many of its neighbors but enjoys an extremely robust economy and industrial sector so it takes the Yamato approach: super sized warships that use sheer immensity to tangle with smaller, more sophisticated foes on equal footing. This being one reason why their fleet, while made of big ships, is fairly small by scifi standards. Given that each setting more or less sets an arbitrary, hidden "cost" of interstellar warships that determines how vast or diminutive fleets are going to be, I see no reason why B5's Earth / Minbari war should be considered unrealistic. If anything, the smaller the fleets and the destruction, the closer it is to the limits of energy production and engineering as we currently understand them the series is and thus the more realistic. Also take into consideration that most militaries that place a premium on having the best equipment on the planet are facing a death spiral where the cost of procuring new equipment to replace the old is skyrocketing, I see no reason why B5's militaries, even on a war footing, shouldn't still be very small by our standards. The lack of civilian casualties from the colonial battles is something of a plot hole given the Minbari's stated war aim was to utterly wipe out humanity but apparently this was not something they were prepared to do until they had fully and completely neutralized humanity as a military threat. Some of the Minbari leaders such as Delenn were having second thoughts and may also have been working to delay any holocausts until a way of ending the war could be found. Its worth noting that in setting, beam weapons are not very effective orbital bombardment weapons. They're cumbersome to aim and when they are used for ground strike, they don't do tremendous damage. Towards the end of the series, the Centauri homeworld was bombarded by a joint Narn - Drazi fleet and the damage was comparable to Iraq war footage but not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Most ships are not equipped with missiles, so they lack a means of delivering nuclear weapons to a planet. A technical readout declared that a Minbari warcruiser did carry nuclear weapons but political or religious reasons may have prevented their wide spread use in the Earth - Minbari war. The religious and building castes were stuck in a war they didn't want anymore but couldn't get out of without a severe upheaval in Minbari society but may have tied the hands of the warriors. The how and why of the war being so bloodless (relatively speaking) might make a good mental gymnasium topic. I suggest moving it there since it is, kind of, sort of a plot hole. The Iraq / Afghanistan wars and global war on terror were paid for in red ink before the recession kicked the legs out from under the economy. So war, even for a rich country fighting thousands of miles from home, still incurs collateral damage, if not precisely in ways we're used to thinking of. Also, in addition to the thousands dead, there have been tens of thousands wounded, many of whom permanently disabled, so again, a war doesn't need a large body count to lay a very large human and financial cost at the feet of those fighting it.

When's the last time any Western nation fought a war in which casualties were higher than single digit thousands? We've been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for in excess of ten years. They are the most costly in lives, treasure, morale, geopolitical stability, military hardware and virtually every other measure of war for the United States and its coalition partners in a generation. The wars are contentious, the public is exhausted, the cost is skyrocketing, it is being argued that the world's lone superpower has all but been broken by these conflicts and yet in a generation scholars will be looking back and looking only at the body count and arguing that the generations who lived through these conflicts are all a bunch of whiners with no sense of scale. Compared to WW2 or even the civilian body count of the War on Terror (extreme and I mean EXTREME calculations put the toll on civilian life from the internal strife of Iraq and Afghanistan from all measures: deprivation, starvation, general break down of civilization, lack of law and order, damage to infrastructure and direct killing - at over a million lives) the Earth - Minbari war is not terribly impressive. However, lets put that into perspective. The Minbari waltzed into Earth space, lost only one battle on record - not counting the one at which they surrendered after they'd already technically won - and killed 250,000 people in just a couple years, presumably most of them Earth Force but also likely some civilians caught in the line of fire. An Omega class crew is pegged anywhere from 800 to over a thousand in some cases. A Nova (a direct predecessor to the Omega) docked with Babylon 5 with an entire brigade (iirc) aboard. Let's say the average Earth Alliance ship has a thousand crewmen aboard. (Hyperions undoubtedly carry much less but Novas are older than Omegas and could be significantly less automated) That's 250 ships of the line equivalents destroyed. If this was modern Earth, that would be more than 2/3rds of the United States navy. Wiped out with only four known enemy capital ship losses (the Black Star, the Black Star's escorts off screen and the Sharlin that was rammed by a Nova in the war montage.) That's 63:1 odds based on a very, very miserly look at canon. Find me a people that wouldn't call a 63 to 1 loss ratio after 3 years of fighting with the war ending with enemy warships defacto in control of Earth orbital space "a devastating war." I'm pretty sure the Taliban and the Iraqi warlords aren't really thrilled about the dozens to one loss ratios they've endured over the last decade and one could argue they're winning the strategic war even though they lose tactically more than they win. Lives lost in absolute numbers is not the only measure of how traumatic or costly a war is.

I really should pay more attention to biology, I never realized that there had been so much upheaval in the 7 years or so since I've had a biology class.

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope If you haven't read this before, this is a beautiful work that both highlights and seals the plot holes and inconsistencies between the two trilogies. The short premise: R2 knew everything, kept that knowledge, was one of the first rebel operatives and used C3PO as a decoy and excuse to mingle in the centers of the power in the galaxy. Chewbacca was one of the first recruits into rebellion and likewise was able to set up Han Solo with a ship unique in its speed and capabilities for its size and used him as R2D2 used C3PO, except his mission area was the seedy underbelly of the galaxy where he could contact information brokers, couriers and rebel cells and pass information back and forth.

Something called MixiDJ was bundled with something seemingly benign I downloaded from CNet and has made itself virtually impossible to remove. I've uninstalled the listing for it in programs but its deleted all the other search engines in the quick search bar in Waterfox and Chrome and disabled the restore default settings button in the manage search engines tab on Waterfox.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/stealth-pilots-coughing/ This article describes the human toll of flying a high performance craft. The mixture of the forces endured while breathing oxygen rich gasses and wearing a G suit are causing breathing issues with Raptor pilots. It would seem that without medical advancements or engineering improvements to the suits pilots wear to resist g forces, we are nearing the limits of human endurance for piloted aircraft. This is one huge advantage that inertial dampening provides over those who don't have it. It's worth noting that Earth Alliance starship crews don't wear g suits in combat which implies they don't normally experience high enough g forces to black out in battle. A more physically robust species or a race like the Minbari who has inertial dampening doesn't need much of an acceleration advantage to be dangerous. Being able to out turn a less capable ship to mask a damaged section or present fresh guns can be decisive.

Presumably in either case, detailed if exceptionally protected, instructions exist for assembling the parts extruded from any matter converters the Goa'uld possess (an application of ring technology in the same way that the Asgard use their teleportion technology to produce machined objects and Star Trek's replicators?) but the theory that would be required to do anything more than inserting module A into slot B and hit the On button would be almost utterly absent among the Jaffa. The Jaffa nation, in the absence of an engineering caste, will likely need several generations before they have a large enough academic base to compete with Earth and other Milky Way nations in actually refining and improving what they have. Meanwhile as Earth sifts through all the assorted goodies they've looted from the Goa'uld, Asgard and Ancients they will likely lap the Jaffa before they put together a Jaffa DARPA. The good news is that since Goa'uld tech seems to be about as simple to maintain as swapping out modular components, you only need a fraction of the engineers of any merit designing and testing new hardware since matter conversion technology would allow any prototypes to be rapidly constructed and tested. Although building something of any decent quality requires more skills than just inserting module A into slot B, new designs would require new skill sets for Jaffa assembly crews to have a decent failure rate. A good analogy would be building iPhones. Workers who only know their part of the assembly process can still make mistakes as they move from working on one model to a newer model.

Nessus then, I believe that was one of the other planets in the hypothetical system they worked out. That was one of the most intelligently designed games. A lot of effort went into the design of the system and how the alignments of the moons, planets and suns would effect the climate and the weather patterns.