Or as I told my brother tonight.
Set a fragile dainty little coffee cup on the floor. Now kick it. Chances are it went a short distance but has no real damage. Now, turn and kick your sheetrock wall. Notice the hole? The massive house didn’t move out of the way did it?
No kidding! Chief was at the point where he was laughing at the ruins of Earth at the end of 4.0. Now what! He’s lost Nick and Boomer just used him big time.
The good news is that BSG’s already done suicide recently with Dee, hopefully the Chief will do something else. Or will be talked out of it somehow.
I like this comparison better.
Yeah. Hopefully he’ll die in a way more useful than Dee. He also seems to have an inner core of strength that she didn’t ever have- I can’t see him simply giving up in that sense.
Speaking of Nicky, it wasn’t directly addressed but I got the sense that Chief was able to work so much because he wasn’t taking care of him anymore. That surprises me. Regardless of the paternity and his feelings for Cally, he has been Nicky’s dad and Hotdog hasn’t and isn’t prepared to be. It leaves me with mixed feelings. And does that mean that Nicky and Hotdog are now living together in their own compartment?
Oh Gods, you’re probably right!
That was my theory, and it’s making me a bit mad. I know Chief has a lot on his plate, but this “Oh, I’m not the father? Eh, I don’t care anymore” gives me no respect for the man. It also gives me no respect for the writers, who seem to think that a paternity can really destroy true parental love that has been built over two years. Kara didn’t stop loving Kacey just because she found out that she was Julia’s child.
Although, I love Hot Dog for being responsible and caring…what a good guy. 
Yes, this has been bothering me too. Last week I thought it might be referred to, but nothing. I think it’s a thread that will be dropped.
It still doesn’t work. The cork works better because cork is less likely to break, but you can’t compare drywall to porcelain, and even if you do, the same force that would merely move a coffee cup (specifcally a dainty one) surely doesn’t put a hole in your wall.
I find it hard to believe that in space, where things are mostly weightless, that a raptor/viper group is merely pushed away when a much better-protected vessel is coming apart. You could argue that there is more structural damage to Galactica, and I’m sure there is, but still; a damaged Galactica hull has to be thicker and more resilient than a Raptor, doesn’t it?
Well, weight != mass, but in either case it seems the smaller object should take the brunt of the “collision.”
Okay, I was just re-watching the ep, and when Starbuck and HeadDad are finally together at the piano, and he’s noodling-
It’s the opening fanfare of the original series score! lol!
ba-BAAAHH, ba-Bah-baah BA-baaah!
I want more, but I don’t want to run out of BSG! Waaaah!
What we do know, and as chief has stated, the major problem with the structure soundness of Galatica is in her bones and the cracks in the supporting structures was easy enough to repair (even though corners were cut).
Think of a brand new tin can. It is engineered to serve a purpose and as you start to apply pressure that pressure is distributed around the can equally. Apply enough pressure the can will eventually fail but only once it exceeds it’s design limits.
Now take that same tin can and put it out in the backyard. After a few months the surface structure will start to fail to the point that you could find a spot on the surface and push your finger through very easily. Apply any pressure and the entire can could collapse even though the flaw seems insignificant.
It’s called a Cascading failure and is not as uncommon as one might think no matter how resilient the construction. An entire walkway can fail because someone forgot to include a 25-cent washer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
In the case of the damage caused the damage was not just in the area where the Raptor jumped but cascaded all the way up to the CIC.
As for the Raptor and Viper one could argue they were not affected based on the engineered purpose of design. Both are design to handle high g-loads and the case of the Raptor the need to survive the load of FTL travel.
Personally I think that enough information was given in the episode that supports the idea of the level of damage and the danger it represents with out having to go into the finer details.
It’s all about the inertia. Sure, neither a Raptor nor the Galactica weigh anything in space … but it’s a felgercarb-load harder to get the Galactica to move than it is the Raptor.
Since the Raptor is capable of executing fairly high-g maneuvers, we must assume it’s durable enough to “ride” the jump-drive shockwave. Additionally, the Raptor is small enough that the shockwave affects it as a whole rather than a sharp, specific impact. Put simply, the Raptor is small enough and durable enough in comparison to the jump shock to “surf” the wave.
Unfortunately, the Galactica is NOT. Sure, it’s durable enough. All the damage and creaking aside, the Bucket took nuke hits and atmospheric reentry not too long ago. Unfortunately, she’s so BIG that the jump shock impacts only a small area rather than the hull as a whole. The atmosphere ride - whole hull. The nukes - big chunk of the hull. Instead, in this case only a portion of the ship tried to move … the REST of it resisted as only a kilometer-plus long hunk of nuclear-resistant alloy can. So, she buckled.
As to the idea of using jump-drive warheads on missiles? Well … a nuke doesn’t have to be in skin contact to do damage. Sure, in space it’s gotta be REAL close, but not the mere meters away that the Raptor was. And, good as the Cylon(s) jump drives are … and we know they’re both long ranged and freakishly accurate … they can’t cycle that fast. Well, not unless they’re a) on a base ship that’s b) commanded by a panicked hybrid! Sure, we’ve seen them cycle pretty quick (esp. re: the recon raids the Cylon raider did on the fleet in the miniseries) but, come on, INSIDE the flak perimeter?
What surprises me is that no-one’s come up with a way to use jump drives to drop a raider or just a frakkin’ crowbar for that matter inside an enemy ship. Solid object materializes inside solid object? Laws of physics say that is a Bad Thing.
… This excessively long post considering the physical and realistic limitations of a fictional engine that subscribes to the “fast as the speed of plot” method of technological development has been brought to you by the Okuda College of Theoretical Design, Handwavium - the Random Particle of the Week for the first week in March, and viewers like you …
Frankie, Sanderlee, FASCINATING posts. Just loads of fun to read. Thanks!
Okay, I’ll have a crack at it. First of all, it’s only ships “left behind” by a nearby jumping ship that can get damaged. Somehow the jumping ship is protected from shock… a “jump bubble” or “jump envelope”? I know nobody has suggested otherwise, but I like to get my postulates out of the way.
Now then… when a ship jumps, it creates an instantaneous change in the shape of space-time, which is the same as gravitation. This creates a rippling gravitational differential, proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the jumping ship. In other words, objects 20 meters away will receive 1/4 the disturbance of objects 10 meters away. Heck, maybe it even creates a burst of gravitons, which would be essentially the same effect.
Now a raptor is small… maybe 4 meters long. So there’s not such a difference in the force applied between the front and the back of it. But Galactica is huge. There are presumably long structural elements, which would receive a varying force along the length of them, causing stress.
What I’m trying to get at is that it’s a difference in stress along the length of something that causes the damage. If you apply a force evenly along a stick. it’s okay. But if you apply much more force to one end than the other, it will bend and, possibly, break.
Now, I’m no engineer, but it makes a kind of sense to me, in ret-con physics world, anyway…
Actually a very sound theory and in some way provable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV8MF-440xg
By the way it’s not smoke you see but water.
How does a torpedo take out a ship this large?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_torpedoes_work
The torpedo is actually being detonated about 10 meters below the ship and pre-loads the displacement of the water. If the torpedoed had actually struck the ship it would have done less damage.
So to kind of look at the damage to Galacticafrom a different perspective it was not caused by an explosion per say but rather an implosion caused by the void left behind by the Raptor.
Cool thing is you don’t have to prove damage by gas expansion, as there is no air to expand in the first place, but rather cause and effect of a large object leaving a void in space.
Seems some people slept through their physics class/es. ;p
Therefore, we are all just going around and around when some people don’t understand the basic fundamentals of mass and inertia.
Besides, this was right next to where the water tanks blew out. Still is probably weakened from that.
Not everyone took physics.
And almost nobody took fictional physics…
Did anyone notice that when Starbuck first goes over to the piano and is looking up at Head-Dad, how young she looks? It is like she is a little kid the way they shot or lit her or something. Really young.
Does anyone have the sheet music for what Starbuck was playing? I want to learn it on the penny whistle and freak people at work out…
I suspect it will merely due to time constraints, and because I don’t think Chief will be with us much longer. If there were more time and Chief found a way to recover, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t return to Nicky. He’s too fundamentally decent a person not to. I believe in the Chief.
I did not take physics, except for watching the entire 4 disc DVD set of the Elegant Universe but I find that it provides enough of a grounding that I get fictional physics in a very rudimentary way.
Man, I wanted to take physics. My school even had a physics-for-humanities majors course called Einstein’s Century, but it wasn’t offered during the year that I had time to fulfill my science requirements.