No plumbing/filtration system?

[thekillman]

i'm pretty good at science and chemistry and i have no clue how to filter all kinds of stuff out of it. i mean, Young wasn't just saying ammonia. pretty much everything toxic to humanity was in that water.

also, if the waterfall comes from a moutain then the water is clean, but if under the lake, there's contaminated soil, the water in the ground WILL be toxic. besides, the air was toxic, so it was probably the snow that put down the toxic layer.

it is better to gather 200 litres or so (well, i guess it was more, but maybe a few hundred liters max) then it could have sustained some people indefinately (because it's a closed system). better than everyone dying

[BrianD]

Honestly who knows what's going on here. I can tell you I've seen some make shift filtration units but without the basic ingredients it doesn't exactly do much of anything. I think with how big Destiny is it's hard to have an understanding just how everything works. Not to mention there are still areas of the ship that can't be accessed. Perhaps once we get all the elements covered we'll see some faster plot formation in the show.

[Jericho]

With respect to the rather odd range of level of the technology on Destiny, with the somewhat primitive air scrubbers on one end and the awesome shields and such on the other, here's a possibility. The primitive systems, what if they are backups, not main systems. It could be that the main air recycling system is one of those systems they can't access and perhaps its damaged or cut off from the parts of the ship they are in. Maybe that huge room with the hull breach they found when they were exploring was actually an arboretum of some sort that had enough plant life to support the crew.

One thing that I have to keep reminding myself about is that even though we have been watching SGU for over a month now, they have only been there for a few days. The fact that they have been able to do this much is rather impressive.

[morrismike]

i'm pretty good at science and chemistry and i have no clue how to filter all kinds of stuff out of it. i mean, Young wasn't just saying ammonia. pretty much everything toxic to humanity was in that water.

also, if the waterfall comes from a moutain then the water is clean, but if under the lake, there's contaminated soil, the water in the ground WILL be toxic. besides, the air was toxic, so it was probably the snow that put down the toxic layer.

it is better to gather 200 litres or so (well, i guess it was more, but maybe a few hundred liters max) then it could have sustained some people indefinately (because it's a closed system). better than everyone dying

Ammonia has an unnatural affinity for water. Absorbed ammonia disassociates making room for more ammonia to get dissolved. Any atmosphere with ammonia will result in every drop of water on that planet being tainted.

There are many ways to purify water. Reverse Osmosis using a membrane (which they don't have the capability to make) and water pressure to force pure water out of solution. Distallation is simple but wouldn't strip all the ammonia. Demineralizer resin (they don't have capability to make) is organic and would be long gone after a few decades - this is problematic anyway as nitric acid and pottasium hydroxide are needed to recharge the resin beads for reuse. The best bet is to make a distallation plant in the short term and start working on making RO membranes (perhaps use the stones to bring on people as teachers). With any luck the engineers on board have qualified people at the their disposal.

[Carlos-Curitiba]

As far I know, Destiny was without any living being for centuries. Considering this the water recycle and purify system was set aside because it was not important when beings was not inside the ship. Now that it has a crew, the crew need to learn how to use the device and maybe restore it. It stored 90.000 liters of whater, but I presume the recycle system deteriored due of no use during centuries.

The stargate on board takes a lot of wather to convert in steam when the sargate is turned on/off. You can see a steam jet on each side of it. It shold be steam, I presume!

[Joey]

I'm sure as the ship opens up over the course of the season, we'll discover a wonderful water filtration system (kind of like what NASA uses to filter wastewater, sweat and urine into potable water), a proper sickbay, a bridge, a petting zoo and a non formulaic plot.

[Control_Chair]

Yes, people on board may have known about the theory of recharging power cells with solar energy, but had any of them seen it happen first hand? No. Had they heard about it happening anywhere besides within the pages of a science fiction novel? No. They didn't know that the Ancients had that kind of technology because it hadn't been seen before.

True, but who is the big Sci fi geek on the ship?...Eli. I was surprised that he didn't twig why the ship put itself on a deliberate collision course with the sun, epically when one character (can’t remember her name) said the chances on the dropping out of FTL on the edge of a solar system are extremely small, then the ship carried out an air braking manoeuvre in a gas giant and wound up on an accidental collision course with the sun! The chances of those things happening by accident have to be what several million to 1.

Apart from that I am loving SGU so far.

[garhkal]

p.s. Save the "it's old" excuse because collecting energy from a star worked fine and destiny would of had no reason to use this system until needed everything on this damn ship can't be broken except for the amazing shields and faster the light travel the two most advanced things.

It did not work all that well. Remember we are only at around 40%.. So i can not fault them for saying the oldness has rendered the filtration system not working.

Copy that. If the main computer has locked the crew out of the primary systems (I think Rush mentioned that), getting to the waste recycling system manually, especially if they don't know exactly how the damn thing works, would be horribly problematic--and messy.

Plus it might be impossible to do without intricate knowledge of how they had it working in the first place.

a.) why does the ship know some things about itself (like a lack of power) while in other instances it has to be "told" (by Rush in "Air") that there is a problem? It should have internal sensors to alert folks that there is an issue, no?

Why? Since it was made as an unmanned vessle, power IS a requirement for it, while air and water are not. So it stands to reason that it would know instinctivly when to drop out to refuel, but has to be told it is low on CO2 scrubber fuel.

why can't it be told that the crew need to get back to Earth? Other than it would make for a short series...

Navigation controlls are out. Air is an emergency, getting back home is not. Also by the time it made it back assuming it has traveled 40-50% of the time while using the other time for research of the planets the other ships seeded, that still gives a couple of hundred thousand years of travel time to get back home. Can we survive that long?? NO!

[Avenger]

True, but who is the big Sci fi geek on the ship?...Eli. I was surprised that he didn't twig why the ship put itself on a deliberate collision course with the sun, epically when one character (can’t remember her name) said the chances on the dropping out of FTL on the edge of a solar system are extremely small, then the ship carried out an air braking manoeuvre in a gas giant and wound up on an accidental collision course with the sun! The chances of those things happening by accident have to be what several million to 1.

Apart from that I am loving SGU so far.

Well, the ship could have been destroying itself so that no one else could get their hands on it for all they knew.

[Lord Hurin]

True, but who is the big Sci fi geek on the ship?...Eli. I was surprised that he didn't twig why the ship put itself on a deliberate collision course with the sun, epically when one character (can’t remember her name) said the chances on the dropping out of FTL on the edge of a solar system are extremely small, then the ship carried out an air braking manoeuvre in a gas giant and wound up on an accidental collision course with the sun! The chances of those things happening by accident have to be what several million to 1.

Apart from that I am loving SGU so far.

Hmmm... Eli seems to be more of a "soft sci-fi" fan. He likes things like Star Wars, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, etc where the "science" part of the science fiction comes from the story taking place in space, etc. These types of stories rarely if ever explain the actual science behind the technology, either because they figure it would bore the audience or because the tech is so advanced and "unknown" that it wouldn't have any bearing on today's knowledge.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sun recharging theory seems to come from more "hard sci-fi" roots, like Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc.

It was also explained in the episode that they figured the course for the sun was due to the ship screwing up calculations from not having enough power.

I think Rush and maybe a couple others (Brody perhaps?) may have suspected what was going on, but didn't want to get any hopes up until they knew for sure.