Star Trek

[Buster's Uncle]

Should I ban myself?  I guess I could get sisko to ban me.


Did you see my proposal in this thread a few months ago about how they ought to release edited versions of old WHO serials, cut down to something reasonable for pacing?

[Buster's Uncle]

About Doctor Who - if the Beebe would hire a good writer, good video editor and good sound mixer, there's a mint to be made going through all the intact stories of the old show and editing them down to the length the story wanted to be, sans the pointless/boring running around that didn't advance the plot and served only to pad that sucker out to 4-6 episodes when 2 would have done. 

It's something I've noticed time and again, even when watching the good ones with the 4th Doctor and Romanna - over half is always boring filler.  (Mylochka and I watched Castrovalva last night, which was deadly bad for the first half it took to even get to the eponymous locality, then suddenly became not-terrible once TristanDoctor hit town.) I'm not advocating something like Star Trek Remastered with fixing the special effects to so-so results.  You'd still be stuck with the old scripts, old performances, much of the old sets, and all the costumes.  But good stories and bad alike could all benefit from tighter pacing and getting to the good parts a lot faster.

The BBC could make a mint selling DVDs of the old show to the same fans all over again, and have something much more likely to appeal to new fans and curious fans of the current version.  This is something even you or I could do crudely on the computer with something like Windows Movie Maker, provided only the will, the patience, and some good story-telling skills - and I wish some fans would, in hopes of the right people at the beebe seeing it on YouTube and getting inspired.

I'd really like to see a Good Parts version of Castrovalva, you see...

[JarlWolf]

My theory on Star Trek travel is they use the gravity of celestial bodies to transport themselves, sort of like a slingshot effect and then a sort of "pong" style thing with gravity, using planets, stars and other bodies as relay points. Because in nearly every episode of Star Trek they are near SOME form of celestial body, and if they aren't they are generally having an issue.

[Buster's Uncle]

WHO is probably too big and diffuse for Make Sense Game to work - but I'll award five internets to anyone who can satisfactorily work out and explain how Space: 1999 was even faintly possible...

(I think a wizard did it.)

[Buster's Uncle]

[Green1]

WHO is probably too big and diffuse for Make Sense Game to work - but I'll award five internets to anyone who can satisfactorily work out and explain how Space: 1999 was even faintly possible...

(I think a wizard did it.)

Maybe we should explain for the younger ones, BU.

The premise of Space:1999 was that the moon left Earth orbit and became it's own planet. That is not that bad. Thre are things that can knock moons out of orbit and the Moon IS traveling AWAY at 1 cm a year.

The way the story has it is that nuclear waste from Earth stored in mass bulk on a part of the Moon blew up. The explosion rocketed the Moon out of orbit with inhabitants of a moonbase still on the Moon.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes, and my point is that in just the first episode, the Moon is knocked of into space, and on the way out of the solar system Moonbase Alpha sees a newscast from Earth about the tidal disaster caused by the Moon leaving. 

Yeah.  Something well over half the human race and closer to 90% of the broadcast news facilities are situated on a coast, and if that happened to the Moon, they'd most all be dead in hours.  Alpha might catch a local newscast from Colorado, and it would be all Armageddon, not widespread disaster.  This is assuming it's traveling, at that point, slow enough for speed of light transmissions to catch up, slow enough that doppler effects don't screw up the frequency too bad for the communications system to adjust.

And at the beginning of the second hour, the Moon arrives in a new solar system, having traveled FTL, and dawdles there long enough for some Eagle flights and an adventure...

[Geo]

Yeah.  Something well over half the human race and closer to 90% of the broadcast news facilities are situated on a coast, and if that happened to the Moon, they'd most all be dead in hours.  Alpha might catch a local newscast from Colorado, and it would be all Armageddon, not widespread disaster.  This is assuming it's traveling, at that point, slow enough for speed of light transmissions to catch up, slow enough that doppler effects don't screw up the frequency too bad for the communications system to adjust.

- The broadcast would most likely be satellite-enhanced, not coming from Earth's surface directly.
- I don't remember if searises were mentioned as the disaster. It could as well be that lots of harbors became less accessible because tides are lower. For instance, the Schelde river here in the lowlands can only carry huge container ships during high tide. Economic rather then natural disaster thus.
- Alpha would always be able to catch speed of light transmissions. It is matter, so always traveling slightly slower then electromagnitic signals.
- descrambling a signal (if strong enough) only needs a good doppler filter to make it intelligable. The newscast becoming garbled while the Alpha crew was watching only means they crossed a signal strength boundary when it was received.

And at the beginning of the second hour, the Moon arrives in a new solar system, having traveled FTL, and dawdles there long enough for some Eagle flights and an adventure...

Blame "the story is larger then real physics" syndrome here.

[Buster's Uncle]

But the studio was on Earth, probably within 20 miles of a sea coast, and ain't there to film the show no more.

You're not even talking sensible physics about what would happen if the Moon's pull suddenly vanished.  All the high and low tides in the world would suddenly seek a new equilibrium, i.e., God's Own Apocalyptic Tidal Wave happens in every body of water on Earth large enough to have tides.  Which would travel hundreds of miles inland up the major rivers.  -Good for your career, if you work in TV news in Denver or Ulan Bator.

You'd be one of the dead, along with everyone in Belgium.

Incidentally, most every fault on Earth just had the biggest earthquake it could.  This occurred to me when I was 11.  The entire Pacific rim is uninhabitable for hundreds of years because of the volcanoes.  And the ash cloud ruins the environment everywhere in the whole world for at least ten years.

And if the Moon didn't move away from Earth exactly straight out, all the water got a sideways twist, making it a lot worse.  We're talking easily three-four billion dead in weeks, assuming current population levels.

-And it gets better.  Where did the push come from?  The side of the Moon away from Earth.  The Moon got a lot closer to Earth on its way out.  On top of how THAT would exacerbate the effects on Earth, it's a bad day to be in LEO, the trojan  points, or anywhere nearby.

Earth: 1999 would be a possibility for a post-apocalyptic spin-off...

-Finally, the Moon inexplicably travels at varying velocities even in that one episode, so Alpha would NOT always be able to do anything.  Koening and crew don't die of old age between episodes, so FTL between stars, not so much while near them.  This is the fundamental WTF of the show, BTW.

The newscast alone doesn't work, because that wasn't a guy at some mountainous inland station reporting the end of the world.  At the most top-crack, professional operation imaginable, there'd be people constantly handing the anchor bulletins, and a thinly-veiled atmosphere of near-hysteria - at best.  I've worked professionally as a journalist, and have a degree in broadcasting, for what appeal to authority that's worth.

[Mylochka]

Here's a Steampunk version of Uhura that I created for one of my pals...

[Unorthodox]

Steampunk Trek.  That's something would be fun to see all the way around. 

Nice take on the uniform, too. 

[Buster's Uncle]

She's got a lot more Steampunk Trek.  She's having a bad day, but I'll try to see that there's more - I believe this isn't the first SteamTrek art she's posted in this thread, though.

[Unorthodox]

I'm not a frequent inhabitor of this thread, though.  Mostly when I see she posted last.   

[Buster's Uncle]

I just had a quick glance at all her posts, and I look to be wrong.  Mylochka has a lot more SteamTrek to show, though, and I'll get on nagging encouraging her to share right away.  It's pretty awesome stuff.

[Mylochka]

The other steamtrek pictures are on my other computer, but here's another green lady picture I've not posted here...