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Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

Lyric Proof Vest posted:

cahptin she cannae take any more shiteposts
Eject the post core.

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Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
its probably more limited by the actual physical requirements to reject the core, rather than a break in control linkage from the bridge. If they used a design they kept the core isolated from engineering it could probably be more modular and easier to eject with a manually trigged explosive charge or something.

with a core like on most tng era ships its just kinda sitting there in engineering so how the heck do you get that out quickly without having to also get rid of chunks of engineering and maybe some other stuff??

ex: in the new movies they just used big tanks of beer for the core and they were easily ejected like missiles.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

above all else i would like a big hug from leonard nimoy. i bet he gives the best old man hugs. :unsmith:

someone needs to make sure his voice is preserved for all time

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

mr_jim posted:

i really hope armin shimerman is a cool dude.

everything i've ever read about him says hes a big trek fan who loved his role and is a great guy irl

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
jj trek is great.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
kurtzman and orci are pretty good and i think both they and jj understand how to make a good trek adventure film. it wont be spergy at all, but it will be enjoyable.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

johndis posted:

oh so basically the complete opposite of ur posting ahahahahhhaha fkn owned

:sweatdrop:

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
ds9 is still watchable today because the production quality was so good. b5, not so much.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
g'kar and londo own tho.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
the ferengi eps rule, for the most part. idk why u hatin'.

the worst eps are meridian and move along home.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

mr_jim posted:

The Magnificent Ferengi wasn't good, but at least it had Iggy Pop.

what... thats like the second best one next to house of quark.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
i was thinking bout the holo doc and year of hell and im thinking hmmm maybe i should watch voyager b/c i havent seen it in years and years, maybe its not so bad and then i remember neelix.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

HYMEN.SYS posted:

Remember when Janeway killed Tuvix off, essentially committing murder and genocide all at the same time? And how Tuvix was actually a far better character than Neelix or Tuvok?

i dont rmember any of this because i think i stopped watchin voyager part way through cause it was so bad

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

johndis posted:

lmao im watching the roadrunner/wiley e coyote farscape episode right now. has anyone else seen this? wtf is going on

farscape fuckin owns. claudia black owns

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
its kind of hard to sperg out about farscape b/c the universe wasnt as huge as trek or sg1

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
yea its like how the only good parts of SGU have sg1/sga characters

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
i mean what the hell, i thought tom paris got kicked out of the academy? how did he get on voyager?

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
although goddamn jolene blalock is hot as hell

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
star trek: elite force video game was really good though

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
why didnt they just call up wesley and the traveller.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
they put ro laren in BSG as essentially what janeway was supposed to be and she was real good (despite bsg being mostly pretty bad)

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
i thought that the last ep of enterprise was a troll star trek

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

johndis posted:

mmmmmmmmmnope

i tried to rewatch it and found i really didnt care for most of the characters. I think the plot managed to force everything forward. then season 3 was the worst thing since voyager and it was pretty much over.

the thing i got most out of BSG was that the first cylon war seemed way more interesting than the current timeline.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
and then they did caprica, which was just so loving bad. it was hilarious because theres all these lovely posters in tv/iv at the time going on and on about how it was soooo deep and the themes were soooo subtle and that it didnt deserve to be cancelled.

they did manage a few good characters and some good actors but the story was just loving awful awful awful.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

Kirk posted:

how can you not love watching a guy that's basically the internet

barclay is basically me which owned.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
andy dick was good in news radio (the best sitcom of all time)

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

mr_jim posted:

her episodes on DS9 were better, but mostly because of Odo.


yep

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
the first time i read dune i litterally could not put it down and carried it with me in a cargo pocket everywhere i went. reading at all downtime.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

golgo13sf posted:

Matt Smith owns, Karen Gillen owns. Quick, someone distract Cidrick



:swoon:

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
same but all females everywhere

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
so falling skies is pretty disapointing.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

Inverse Icarus posted:

really?

i think it's pretty alright. i mean it's dumb as hell that the white supremacist convict is also a chef, but whatever.

*noah whyle is surprised by an alien and trapped under its powerful arms*

alien: whoa ho ho! look who pinned the protagonist!!

noah: *struggles for life*

alien: heh, no really hows my breath? check it out i could probably eat ur head!

noah: *glances at shotgun in desperation*

alien: oooooo. well i'll just wait till you get that.

*noah regains the shotgun and shoots the alien in teh leg*

alien: goddamn there goes one of my 10 or so legs. im just gonna let you keep doing whatever and not kill you or run away

*noah shoots other leg*

alien: well drat, i give up. take me to ur leader.

Thats an irl scene from the show. They needed to capture an alien as a plot point and instead of sending the racist hunter guy who knows how to track and trap them or sending out a group to capture one (risking valuable and scarce human lives in the process) they let one jump noah whiled in a sewer and then just give up.


The aliens are just kinda lazy too b/c they put these kids in this mind control devices but when the kids get taken by humans they dont bother to track them and just send in a nuke.

Its supposed to be a tale of humanity's struggle against an overwhelming alien force, but so far there really aint much struggle.

Also there was a litterally 5 minute ad for some skateboard thing in the first ep.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
buy dune, library the foundation series, buy the biggest consolidated collection of asimov short stories you can find. I also liked some of larry niven's short stories, but he was a litte more out there. library starship troopers because its full of engineer porn.

idk theres probably others i cant think of right now

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
also the kids probably drive teh walkers (that swhy they two legs) and they gonna figure out a way to get the harness of noah wileys kid and then use it disguise him to sneak a bomb onto some alien ship or w/e those tower things are.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
"Wait it out" by Larry Niven

Night on pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.

Something wrong there. Pluto's rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.

It should have stopped.

I wonder if I may have made a mistake.

The planet's small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.

I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes...

The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.

It figures.

Have I made a mistake? It won't kill me if I have. It could drive me mad though.

I don't feel mad. I don't feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.

Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.

Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.

**********

Pluto was not the most distant planet It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun - and to Earth - as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.

And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet We'd spent a year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated each other. We didn't. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.

But - just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-tested hardware I don't think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft. Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low thrust over long periods of time. The ion motor on our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth's, you land on dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat shields and the braking power of the atmosphere. For landing on the gas giants - but who would want to?

The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count. Responsiveness and maneuverability count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will always have an atmosphere for braking,

Pluto didn't.

For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.

And we had it. But we didn't trust it.

Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit He griped about that, of course. He'd started that back at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be aboard the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications to Earth, and to fire the bombs that would solve Pluto's one genuine mystery.

We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that mass? The planet's a dozen times as dense as it has any right to be. We could have solved that with the bombs, the same way they solved the mystery of the makeup of the Earth, sometime in the last century. They mapped the patterns of earthquake ripples moving through the Earth's bulk. But those ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa eruption. On Pluto the bombs would have done it better.

A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of mountain. I wonder if they'll know the answers, when my vigil ends.

**********

The sky jumps and steadies, and -

I'm looking east, out over the plain where we landed the ship. The plain and the mountains behind seem to be sinking like Atlantis: an illusion created by the flowing stars. We slide endlessly down the black sky, Jerome and I and the mired ship.

The Nerva-K behaved perfectly. We hovered for several minutes to melt our way through various layers of frozen gases and get ourselves something solid to land on. Condensing volatiles steamed around us and boiled below, so that we settled in a soft white glow of fog lit by the hydrogen flame.

Black wet ground appeared below the curve of the landing skirt. I let the ship drop carefully, carefully... and we touched.

It took us an hour to cheek the ship and get ready to go outside. But who would be first? This was no idle matter. Pluto would be the solar system's last outpost for most of future history, and the statue to the first man on Pluto would probably remain untarnished forever.

Jerome won the toss. All for the sake of a turning coin, Jerome's would be the first name in the history books... I remember the grin I forced! I wish I could force one now. He was laughing and talking of marble statues as he went through the lock.

There's irony in that, if you like that sort of thing. I was screwing down my helmet when Jerome started shouting obscenities into the helmet mike. I cut the checklist short and followed him out.

One look told it all.

The black wet dirt beneath our landing skirt had been dirty ice, water ice mixed haphazardly with lighter gases and ordinary rock. The heat draining out of the Nerva jet had melted that ice. The rocks within the ice had sunk, and so had the landing vehicle, so that when the water froze again it was halfway up the hull. Our landing craft was sunk solid in the ice.

We could have done some exploring before we tried to move the ship. When we called Sammy he suggested doing just that. But Sammy was up there in the Earth-return vehicle, and we were down here with our landing vehicle mired in the ice of another world.

We were terrified. Until we got clear we would be good for nothing, and we both knew it.

I wonder why I can't remember the fear.

We did have one chance. The landing vehicle was de signed to move about on Pluto's surface; and so she had a skirt instead of landing jacks. Half a gravity of thrust would have given us a ground effect, safer and cheaper than using the ship like a ballistic missile. The landing skirt must have trapped gas underneath when the ship sank, leaving the Nerva-K engine in a bubble cavity. We could melt our way out.

I know we were as careful as two territied men could be. The heat rose in the Nerva-K, agonizingly slow. In flight there would have been a coolant effect as cold hydrogen fuel ran through the pile. We couldn't use that. But the environment of the motor was terribly cold. The two factors might compensate, or -

Suddenly dials went wild. Something had cracked from the savage temperature differential. Jerome used the damper rods without effect. Maybe they'd melted. Maybe wiring had cracked, or resistors had become superconductors in the cold. Maybe the pile - but it doesn't matter now.

I wonder why I can't remember the fear. Sunlight -

**********

And a logy, dreamy feeling. I'm conscious again. The same stars rise in formation over the same dark mountains,

Something heavy is nosing up against me. I feel its weight against my back and the backs of my legs. What is it? Why am I not terrified?

It slides around in front of me, questing. It looks like a huge amoeba, shapeless and translucent, with darker bodies showing within it. I'd guess it's about my own weight

Life on Pluto! But how? Superfluids? Helium II contaminated by complex molecules? In that case the beast had best get moving; it will need shade come sunrise. Sunside temperature on Pluto is all of 50° Absolute.

No, come back! It's leaving, flowing down toward the splash crater. Did my thoughts send it away? Nonsense, It probably didn't like the taste of me. It must be terribly slow, that I can watch it move. The beast is still visible, blurred because I can't look directly at it, moving downhill toward the landing vehicle and the tiny statue to the first man to die on Pluto.

After the fiasco with the Nerva-K, one of us had to go down and see how much damage had been done. That meant tunneling down with the flame of a jet backpack then crawling under the landing skirt We didn't talk about the implications. We were probably dead. The man who went down into the bubble cavity was even more probably dead; but what of it? Dead is dead.

I feel no guilt. I'd have gone myself if I'd lost the toss. The Nerva-K had spewed fused bits of the fission pile all over the bubble cavity. We were trapped for good. Rather, I was trapped, and Jerome was dead. The bubble cavity was a hell of radiation.

Jerome bad been swearing softly as he went in. He came out perfectly silent He'd used up all the good words on lighter matters, I think.

I remember I was crying, partly from grief and partly from fear. I remember that I kept my voice steady in spite of it Jerome never knew. What he guessed is his own affair. He told me the situation, he told me good- bye, and then he strode out onto the ice and took off his helmet. A fuzzy white ball engulfed his head, exploded outward, then settled to the ground in microscopic snowflakes.

But all that seems infinitely remote. Jerome stands out there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto. A frost of recondensed moisture conceals his expression.

Sunrise. I hope the amoeba -

**********

That was wild. The sun stood poised for an instant, a white point-source between twin peaks. Then it streaked upward-and the spinning sky jolted to a stop. No wonder I didn't catch it before. It happened so fast.

A horrible thought. What has happened to me could have happened to Jerome! I wonder -

There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he couldn't get down to me. I couldn't get up. The life system was in good order, but sooner or later I would freeze to death or run out of air.

I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking ice and soil samples, analyzing them, delivering the data to Sammy via laser beam; delivering also high-minded last messages, and feeling sorry for myself. On my trips outside I kept passing Jerome's statue. For a corpse, and one which has not been prettified by the post-surgical skills of an embalmer, he looks drat good. His frost-dusted skin is indistinguishable from marble, and his eyes are lifted toward the stars in poignant yearning. Each time I passed him I wondered how I would look when my turn came.

"You've got to find an oxygen layer," Sammy kept saying.

"Why?"

"To keep you alive! Sooner or later they'll send a rescue ship. You can't give up now!"

I'd already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no such layer as Sammy kept hoping for. There were

veins of oxygen mixed with other things, like veins of gold ore in rock. Too little, too finely distributed.

"Then use the water ice! That's only poetic justice, isn't it? You can get the oxygen out by electrolysis!"

But a rescue ship would take years. They'd have to build it from scratch, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and heat takes power. I had only the batteries.

Sooner or later I'd run out of power. Sammy couldn't see this. He was more desperate than I was. I didn't run out of last messages; I stopped sending them because they were driving Sammy crazy.

I passed Jerome's statue one tiine too many, and an idea came.

This is what comes of not wanting to die.

In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million corpses lie frozen in vaults surrounded by liquid nitrogen. Half a million dead men wait for an earthy resurrection, on the day medical science discovers how to unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was killing each one of them, how to cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell walls all through their brains and bodies.

Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They were dying.

I was dying.

A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If I moved fast, I could get out of my suit in that time. Without that insulation to protect me, Pluto's black night would suck warmth from my body in seconds. At 50° Absolute, I'd stay in frozen storage until one version or another of the Day of Resurrection.

Sunlight -

**********

- And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so singularly tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking in the wrong direction.

I hope it got to cover.

I'm looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripheral vision the ship looks unchanged and undamaged.

My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of black rock, poised in my slivered underwear, looking eternally out at the horizon. Before the cold touched my brain I found a last moment in which to assume a heroic stance. Go east, young man. Wouldn't you know I'd get my directions mixed? But the fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I was moving in terrible haste.

Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He'll tell them where I am.

Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains and the splash plain and Jerome and I sink endlessly beneath the sky.

My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Pluto's night makes that look torrid, after the 50° Absolute heat of day seeps away into space.

A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the temperature too high, switching me off like a damned machine at every day. But at night my nervous system becomes a superconductor. Currents flow; thoughts flow; sensations flow. Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of Pluto's rotation flash by in what feels like fifteen minutes. At that rate I can wait it out.

I stand as a statue and a viewpoint No wonder I can't get emotional about anything. Water is a rock here, and my glands are contoured ice within me. But I feel sensations: the pull of gravity, the pain in my ears, the tug of vacuum over every square inch of my body. The vacuum will not boil my blood. But the tensions are frozen into the ice of me, and my nerves tell me so.I feel the wind whistling from my lips; like an exhalation of cigarette smoke.

This is what comes of not wanting to die. What a joke if I got my wish.

Do you suppose they'll find me? Pluto's small for a planet. For a place to get lost in, a small planet is all too large. But there's the ship.

Though it seems to be covered with frost. Vaporized gases recondensed on the hull. Gray-white on gray- white, a lump on a dish of refrozen ice. I could stand here forever waiting for them to pick my ship from its surroundings.

Stop that.

Sunlight -

Stars rolling up the sky. The same patterns, endlessly rolling up from the same points. Does Jerome's corpse live the same half-life I live now? He should have stripped, as I did. My God! I wish I'd thought to wipe the ice from his eyes!

I wish that superfluid blob would come back.

drat. It's cold.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

axolotl farmer posted:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote rules for writing stories. this is the one that Asimov fails:

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I like Asimov as a human being, and I enjoy his non-fiction, but they guy couldn't write characters at all.

he had some interesting idea, but I ended up not giving a poo poo about any of the people or robots in any of the books I read.

I think asimov is one of the few people to whom that rule doesnt apply. In many cases it probably serves him better. I mean in foundation you jump across time and space like 50 times throughout the series so spending time on developing characters in each seems like a waste when it should be spent on the "character" that matters: the universe and its canon. Thats where he excels beyond many other writers and what defines his science fiction. The exploration of ideas instead of characters.

idk i really, really liked his style

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
i vaguely remember some story (idk if it was a short or not) but it was about being on mars in these presurized cloth or plastic or something domes. And they kept getting ripped and the people inside had to go patch them. And there was something about the martian dust being really thick and i guess covering parts of the domes (where the rips were?) And something about there might be martiains moving around in the dust ripping the domes but thats about all i can remember. idk how much of that is even part of the story but i remember it freaking me out as a kid.

sci fi is kewl

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
ask in the star trek thred in tv/iv

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
thats probably one of the reasons bsg got so bad. there were alot of plots where they shoehorned in retarded poo poo that wouldnt actually be a problem given their level of technology. So they ended up with a bunch of shity plots that didnt belong in the universe because RDM is pretty bad if you give him full control of a thing.

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Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
season 3 was terrible and season 4 was just boring. i think there were a few good eps maybe but most of them got reset.

also just try to go watch it from start to finish again, i couldnt b/c the characters suck so bad. when the plot took a nose dive there was nothing left to keep it afloat.

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