Its not just a question of explosion

Television, Movies Games and Books BSG-2003
#1

The FTL jump bent space of part of the ship’s hull (and the oxygen, beams, etc behind it) - Remember Cally spying on the Final five meeting? A lot of the infrastructure is hollow on the inside, but pressurized. Think of the jump distortion creating a pressure wave that flows through the inside of the ship, stressing the cracked beams, slamming equipment together, rupturing pipes/cables/conduits - Its actually much worse than a missle hit on armor (as armor is generally designed to either burn away or deflect the explosive impact) - the FTL jump distortion actually partially occurred IN the armor and INTO the ship.

Anyways, not sure if someone brought that up but that’s how I justified it in my mind that the jump did such horrible amounts of damage (and not just a single instance in time’s worth of damage like a missle hit, damage that seemed to take about half a minute to flow through the ship)

</rant>

#2

I won’t even bring up that the entire Tillium ship jumped while a Raptor was almost on it without any significant damage to either.

Oh, wait. I just did.

#3

It could be that they are very compact, and hardened to be flying through atmosphere, flak, extended combat, that they could survive such a distortion. Since they are such small vessels, you saw them get buffeted; its like the difference between a baseball hitting a tin can versus hitting a car - the tin can will go flying but the car will get a dent in its side panel.

My original response (which I prefer over the above):
Yeah but Raptors and Vipers are awesome-er!

#4

I think the impact with the Galactica caused Boomer’s Raptor to leak plot-onium, which is very combustable.

#5

Yeah, it reacted with the unobtanium and now they have to go set off nukes in the middle of the earth and most of the crew will die off in overly exaggerated unfortunate circumstances even though you don’t really care about them in the first place and then some nerd will use Windows 98 with an OS9 theme and Pong to tell everyone about it.

Man, its fun to make fun of “The Core” - deliciously cheese-tastic

#6

Maybe the path the Raptor jumped was through the Galactica. The tilium ship jumped away from the Raptors in a path that did not intersect them. After all, they do have to “calculate” a jump, maybe its so what we saw doesn’t happen. We know next to nothing about FTL, so it hard to say, and I don’t expect to get any more of an explanation.

#7

the vipers around it were throw about due to the spatial distortion. They did not connect to ship in any way, so they were not severely damaged. Boomer’s ship collided as it jumped so the distortion was inside the Galactica, as has been mentioned, and much more destructive.

#8

Maybe it has to do with the size difference between the ships.
When the tyllium ship jumped, we saw the vipers and raptor get thrown around, but they were smaller and not rigid to their surroundings.
Galacticas hull was much larger than the Raptor and stationary, so the force of the jump caused a hull breach?

It makes sense to me…
>>

#9

there’s a lot of ways to rationalize why the Tillium ship jumping away didn’t damage the raptor. For one, Tillium ship is large and what ever field its jump drive created encompassed the entire raptor. Where as when the raptor jumped near Galactica, the field crssed into Galactica.

We know nothing about something that doesn’t exist, it can be however they want to explain it.

However, if by jumping close to the ship could cause structural damage, why bother with nukes when it comes to capital ship combat? why not just send missles of FLT drives and jump?

You will say they need to get close first, well so does a nuke. Nuke needs to make impact, and that’s as close as you could get. Besides, you jump away an FTL missle and it can be reused. A nuke is gone forever.

You can even jump the FLT missle close to the ship, steer right up next to it and jump away, that is if you can’ jump the damned thing right into the ship in the first place.

By allowing FLT to do damage getting up close to something, I think there’s a can of worms when it comes to what has been established waiting to be opened. But I guess the story is more important than the details.

#10

As cool as both moments were, this has been bugging the craaaap out of me. The only thing close to an explanation I’ve got is that the pressure wave next to the Galactica had nowhere to go but into the ship, while the raptor and two vipers had a lot of empty space to be flung through.

It’s similar to a Dateline episode I just saw (I know…Dateline…:rolleyes:), where they were investigating the crash of the Concorde. They concluded that a fuel tank which was hit by a piece of flying tire had to have been 100% full in order to rupture the way it did. If it was even slightly empty, then the pressure wave caused by the debris’ impact would have dissipated inside the empty space of the fuel tank. But fully loaded, the force of the impact had nowhere to go except the walls of the tank. The wave burst the tank open, spewing fuel, which caught on fire, which eventually led to the crash.

That is my extremely amateur, non-scientist theory anyway.

P.S. I think this is the only episode of BSG where we heard something use anything like the word “spatial disruption”. It was kinda weird.

#11

Right. Spouse was guessing somethings similar - that the ‘path’ of Boomer’s raptor went through the Galactica and that was why it was so badly damaged. [Evidently the past few weeks spouse has become almost as interested in Galactica as I am ;)]

#12

Allow me to explain via interprative dance… but no really.
Red = spatial distortions caused by the jump:

Yes I know there was no planet, that’s the default map. BACKOFF! SHRRRRINK GUN!

That’s basically how I explain why the galactica went “OW!” and the raptor just went “wheeee!”

#13

Considering that Galactica is a little more massive and bulky than a Viper which would cause it to be harder to jostle in the same way that the Vipers and Raptor were, that would explain the damage. It couldn’t be completely moved out of the way so the only thing left to move were the individual parts of the Galactica. Since they moved independent of the rest of the battlestar which had more mass they disconnected from the remaining structure, causing the leakage of atmosphere and possibly some random cylon and Figurski.

RIP Figurski.

#14

Yeah, I those diagrams show what I was trying to say - thanks Konrad!

#15

However, if by jumping close to the ship could cause structural damage, why bother with nukes when it comes to capital ship combat? why not just send missles of FLT drives and jump?

You will say they need to get close first, well so does a nuke. Nuke needs to make impact, and that’s as close as you could get. Besides, you jump away an FTL missle and it can be reused. A nuke is gone forever.

Colonial FTL is nowhere near fast enough or accurate enough for this. The Cylon FTL, while having a faster recharge rate then the colonial, is still probably not fast enough to jump right next to a battlestar, then make another jump before it can be shot down.

Battlestar’s are designed to shoot down missles, but somtimes they get through. Since we finally saw an FTL drive, we know it is fairly large, probably too small to fit inside a missle, even for my Cylon(z). They could try using Raiders, but again, when was the last time you saw a Raider get right up next to a Battlestar?

Thats my story and I’m sticking with it.

#16

wait, wait, wait; how much weight does something have in space? also, if you hit a tin can with a baseball, sure, it gets sent flying, but also with a huge dent in it. i’ll buy that raptors are hardier, but vipers don’t add up to me. i do think it’s plot-onium, because nothing else is consistent, no matter how much or little we know about fictional FTL jump drives.

#17

Read the rest of the thread, it gets explained quite a bit better further on. :wink:

#18

Also, isn’t this section very near where the water tanks were blown up?

#19

The Cylon raiders have FLT, Raptors have FTL. So I don’t think FLT have to be big. Since it was the Raptor’s FLT that caused structural damage to the cap ship, it doesn’t have to be a big FLT to do damage either.

Cylon Raiders and Raptors are bigger than missiles, since they carry the missiles, but they don’t that much bigger, especially the raiders.

Raiders and Raptors are built to hold people, missiles and cargo.

If an FTL missile is built just for that purpose, it will be a lot smaller.

#20

I agree. It would seem that FTL drives are very powerful weapons.