Looked at your photo. That looks much more like what I was familiar with. Almost certainly is that. What would seal the deal is not the airburst but a photo of the effect clouds a few seconds after the wedges hit the ground.

I keep seeing this term brought up, and I must have missed the reference. All I can think of is The Prisoner. Is that right, or is there something else being referred to by this slang-meme?

I can't read your piece from my current (work) location, but I will when I get home. I appreciate the explanation; I was getting it in context but I was wondering about the specifics of the reference.

RMP can speak for himself of course and far better than I, but in my short tenure as an officer it was drilled into me that when you're in uniform or out and speaking to the media, you're representing the military whether you mean to or not, and therefore you should STFU on anything that goes beyond you, and let those assigned to do that, do that.

The issue of what being in uniform "means" while off-base/post is kind of nuanced and so I can't offer you much short illumination on that. I would say that in the example you gave, if the servicemembers were not assigned explicitly as liasons to address you on the topics requested, they're not by definition speaking for their branch beyond their scope of responsibility.

This topic is a troll favorite. Clearly Elephantman is in bed already. I'm surprised that every post on the thread already isn't by him.

Honestly, guys. Haven't you been exposed to literally years of this guy, more than enough to recognize him on first post? Granted, he went through what, four-plus screen names in the last week alone? Do not feed, kthxbai.

And you have to imagine that Tigh is well and truly pissed about that at this point.

Is the repeated complaint, just voiced in different words, that any given show isn’t hewing to somebody’s own personal estimation of what “hard” science is or should be depicted, or what’s probable or not in their eyes.

Seriously, how do you view ANY work of fiction on those criteria without your head just asploding? Do you simply not get that this is not the criteria by which this kind of thing should be evaluated? How do you even sit through works of full-on fantasy when applying this criteria?

Like…suppose the Large Hadron Collider, or any other research facility you care to name, reveals the way to FTL drive next week. Do you seriously think you’re going to be FTL-ing back and forth to work a few years from now? Are handheld weapons going to suddenly be firing FTL rounds, or instantly be pew pew lazorz?

And so does a work of science fiction become a total failure specifically because all of its technology isn’t at the same apparent level you think it should be? When you watched Aliens, were you driven into an apoplectic fit because the guns were firing bullets, 400 years from now? Were you driven into despair by Dune, where guys wearing energy shields are fighting with KNIVES?

Try the following thought experiment, the next time you find yourself frustrated by this kind of “inconsistency” or “unrealism” : Imagine that the tech pieces of the show were written specifically for you without any constraint on budget or marketability, and all this shit about the scientific or technical or probable details that you think is so important was thoroughly addressed. There’s no sound in space, full Newtonian physics are displayed, phones don’t have cords, paper has corners, whatever. No end of technical exposition is used so that it is all totally hyper-“realistic” and 100% “believable” for you. Which would be easy to do in the abstract, would it not. Most viewers who voice this do in fact say, “It would work like X” or “it should have been shown like Y” or “it can’t be for scientific reason Z”, so they obviously do have some concept of how they themselves would change it to fit their own cognitive framework.

Now that you’ve got your own personal show that’s perfect on every technical detail, ask yourself this: does that now have any fucking thing to do with whether or not it’s any good. Does this change the dialogue, the characters, the plot, the thematic exploration? Hell no it doesn’t.

You’ve got to wrap your head around the whole idea of allegory and suspension of disbelief to have any enjoyment of this genre. If you can’t, you’ll be far better off by avoiding it altogether, because you’ll never be happy. Either that or enroll in film school and make your own work that does feature these qualities, and see how far that actually goes. At a guess, not terribly far.

…

Babylon 5 is in no danger of being, on balance, the best space opera to ever hit TV, no doubt. B5 is one of the few shows (if not the only) on American TV that actually had a planned arc and termination, and a central vision that got realized (mostly) as planned over its run. Most other shows are clearly making shit up from week to week just to stay on the air, and Galactica is no real exception to the way that works. I keep waiting for HBO or the like to bring a Wire/Deadwood/6FU quality-level show with the same kind of longer vision as B5 to the tube, but it just doesn’t seem even remotely rumored at this point.