Battlestar Destiny

[LeonK]

They have the repair "spider" and now that they have access to the bridge and can run even more diagnostics than before, there is no excuse for weapons arrays to be down and things being inoperative before a battle starts.

The more I think about the repair spider-bot-thingy, the more it irks me. Why not get the thing repairing the the power arrays and relays and whatever else is neccessary so that the ship can re-charge in a sun to 100% power? Also, how slow does the dang thing work? I would have thought we'd hear more mention of it by now in the series, and we haven't. Also, with control of the main bridge, have they not done a system search to see if other repair bots are available? I imagine a ship that huge has gotta have a few hundred, if not a thousand, of them things.

[Nth Chevron]

The repair bot needs to be programmed to repair what we need done, most likely the coding is broken down into separate area's for what needs to be repaired, weapons, hull, power etc etc

Instead of giving it a massive lump of coded instructions why not just give it a few at a time to monitor its activity and check its repairs as we still have no idea how the damn thing works or what else it can do.

N.C

[Nth]

What's that & how would it make a difference?

Kinetic weapons are like guns, missiles, cannons, etc. Anything that flings matter. It would be totally plausible that Destiny's shields would be able to withstand the incredible energy of a star's atmosphere but not be able to deal with kinetic impacts as well.

The more I think about the repair spider-bot-thingy, the more it irks me.

Or why wasn't the thing active since Destiny started? It makes sense when launching an unmanned ship which has on board it bots that can repair it to turn the dumb things on before it launches. They should already be programmed and have been at it for the last million years.

[J-Whitt Remastered]

Kinetic weapons are like guns, missiles, cannons, etc. Anything that flings matter. It would be totally plausible that Destiny's shields would be able to withstand the incredible energy of a star's atmosphere but not be able to deal with kinetic impacts as well.

Photons would be dealing kinetic impacts at much higher rates than missiles, guns, cannons, torpedoes, or whatever else, would they not?

[Buck32]

Mark my words, i'm nearly 100% confident the writers are trying to give us battlestar galactica rebadged:
1. we have a ship looking for Earth
2. we're now fighting machines out to kill us.
3. they're trying, too hard, to give us a soap opera in space.

I hope i'm wrong but something tells me i'm not.

[jelgate]

Your wrong.

Those examples are quite vague not to mention the justification for them really had to stretch the SGU plotlines

[Buck32]

Your wrong.

Those examples are quite vague not to mention the justification for them really had to stretch the SGU plotlines

In your opinion.

[BadOnion]

ridiculous

[tinerin]

I imagine a ship that huge has gotta have a few hundred, if not a thousand, of them things.

Why though? Keep in mind that Destiny was intended to have a full crew of Ancients and theoretically they would have been able to dial between Earth and Destiny pretty easily for supplies. Imagine if Destiny constantly had a full crew of maybe 5-10 thousand Ancients and a virtually unlimited supply of Ancient resources and technology through the stargate. Even with just one repair bot on Destiny, it probably would have spent most of its time in storage somewhere.

[escyos]

Mark my words, i'm nearly 100% confident the writers are trying to give us battlestar galactica rebadged:
1. we have a ship looking for Earth
2. we're now fighting machines out to kill us.
3. they're trying, too hard, to give us a soap opera in space.
I hope i'm wrong but something tells me i'm not.

1. They're not looking for Earth, they know where and how to get to Earth yet they cant.
2. actually they're out to kill anything that comes near them, and their automated drones not sentient machines
3. yes because soap operas have space battles, people dying, suicide, alien squids that burrow through you, spaceships, explosions, big guns, blood and blood spraying, people burning to death, people clawing the skin off their arms, huge monsters, traveling to other planets, drunk abusive commanders......

if thats a soap opera, i guess your not insane.

[Buck32]

Why is it ridiculous? because i don't think SGU is great? because i dare question where it's going and it's plot development? i'm sure a mod will probably swoop down and banish this thread soon anyway due to the fact i'm not an SGU lover, so it doesn't matter anyway.

[Buck32]

is calling me insane allowed moderator??

[geddarkstorm]

Your analogy is flawed. You are comparing spreading out of a momentary force to the absorption of a huge constant force. Unless the drone weapons have a magnitude higher energy density than a star's atmosphere (millions of degrees kelvin fractional speeds of light) what we see doesn't make sense.

It would have been better for the writers to have used kinetic weapons fire since that would eliminate any real comparisons between the two.

Well... no, actually. It's completely reasonable that the Destiny's shields can handle a star and not do so well against the drone weapons, for two reasons:

1) A star's energy is heat (electromagnetic waves). There is some drag, and thus frictional forces, but to such a smaller degree we can ignore them. Now, it's concievable the Destiny's shields are designed in such a way that they can handle electromagnetic radiation with ease. It's like how different grades of steel handle different stresses differently. High temperature steel can handle the inside of a fusion reactor where normal steel would melt. While normal steel can handle the high compression and tensile forces of being in a bridge that would immediately snap the more brittle high temperature steel. They are both types of steel, but they can absorb different pressures orders of magnitude differently.

If Destiny's shields are tuned to deal with the types of energy and -frequencies- of waves it'll encounter in a star, it may be, therefore, extremely susceptible to other types of energy. We have no idea what the drone's weapons are, nor even what the Destiny's are.

2) How force, pressure, energy and power work. A star gives off massive amounts of energy, yes, but for any given area of a star, it has a lot less POWER than you'd think, because the ENERGY DENSITY is low. A star is obscenely huge, and the full output of a star is averaged over the entirety of its size. So in reality, the small area the Destiny represents is only going to be exposed a very small fraction of that energy and power. This is why, with femtosecond lasers, we can deliver more power to a small area than the output of the sun!

Let me give another example. You can dive many meters under the ocean, to where you have hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch applied on you, yet you'll be completely fine (the only danger to the human body is having pressure suddenly relieved, not applied, over its entirety. This has to do with how fluids are incompressible, thus we are too being mostly fluid). However, a knife will slice through you like butter when only orders of magnitude less amounts of force (energy) is applied than the entire ocean was giving while you were doing that dive. Why? Because the force of the knife's edge is being applied over an extremely small area; and while the compressive and tensile strength of the entire body can take large amounts of PSI, any given SMALL AREA of the body has greatly reduced strength.

Tap your arm with a finger; you don't cut and are completely fine. Now tap your arm with the same force but using a needle. Yeah, get my point yet?

Destiny is in the same situation. Having the energy of a vanishingly small section of a star applied over its (almost) entire surface area is far easier for the shields to handle, than a much smaller amount of energy that's applied over an even smaller amount of area. The total energy density and power of the drone shots can, for that reason alone, well exceed anything a star could ever do; simply because the shot is concentrated at a small spot.

Again, this is how lasers work in the real world. This is why kilowatt lasers can heat things above the temperature of the sun. The sun sure as heck outputs more than a kilowatt! But it's the amount of AREA that an energy/force is applied to, and the amount of time (power) that the energy is applied for that determines the amount of stress an object actually experiences. Remember, power = energy/time. Even a small amount of energy given over a small amount of time can be as POWERFUL as orders of magnitude more energy that's given over orders of magnitude more time. So, it's actually very easy to exceed the sun itself in POWER, with our current technology (many fusion experiments have used this principle, and so too does the LHC in its experiments to recreate the big bang)!

[sgc]

Is it just me, or has anyone else been thinking that so far destiny is getting its ass kicked in almost every space battle its been in. They get saved every time by jumping into FTL or in this case the seeder ship leading them into the star. I know its like a million years old and that can be taken into count for some it of but come on, this was supposed to be an all powerful ancient ship that was sent out to discover the secrets of the universe, shouldn't it have won a fight or two by now, not just get out by the skin of its teeth.
Not asking for destiny to dominate every battle but i think we need one or two lopsided wins just to show how powerful it really is.

Exactly. It was an Ancient ship sent to explore the universe and find the signal; not to go into battle left and right. Now, Destiny is obviously designed to withstand that, because the Ancients did everything they could to make sure Destiny would last millions of years.

[Replicator Todd]

I fail to see and grow tiresome of these BSG to SGU comparisons. The two shows have very different storylines and characters.