Michale.....

Hey, all I remember was that the blood was purple! And that it was a cool effect to show the blood floating as spheres (droplets) in the air, and then fall to the deck suddenly as the gravity was restored.

But you also need to turn in your phaser for a week -- they were walking on the outside of the Enterprise using magnetic boots, not gravity plating, weren't they?

:-)

-CW

Chris, Chris, Chris....

Michale shakes his head sadly

>But Star Trek has their "gravity plating"
>(which they used to good effect in one of
>the movies, the zero-G assassiation scene,
>forget which movie it was).

That was Star Trek VI THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, probably one of the BEST Trek Movies of all time..

You are hereby suspended from wearing a TREKKER tag for 1 week and may the gods have mercy on your soul!!

For the record, it was on a KLINGON ship and, as everyone OBVIOUSLY knows, Klingon technology is highly inferior... :^/

You can also refer to STAR TREK VIII, FIRST CONTACT for an interesting take on this.. They actually had Picard, Worf and "Hawk" (A really good actor from the series TRAVELER and the movie TIMELINE) walking on the outside of the Enterprise-("there are lots more letters in the alphabet")-E and even walking upside down...

Michale.....

You're right. I almost included this one, truth be told. I would have put it as "the ship's gotta SPIN if you stick to the floor" or some such.

But Star Trek has their "gravity plating" (which they used to good effect in one of the movies, the zero-G assassiation scene, forget which movie it was). If you posit that (1) we still don't understand why gravity works, and hunt for the elusive "gravitron"; and (2) breakthroughs are possible -- then you can project that we might solve the problem some day. Maybe.

But only INSIDE the ship. You are right about that. Once you don a space suit and exit the ship, you should float.

I do understand that it's expensive to do, though, which is a mitigating factor, and also that when you do it half-assed, the result looks pretty cheesy. See David Bowie's music video for "Major Tom" for an example of the cheesiest zero-G you've ever seen.

Anyway, thanks for commenting!

-CW

How many times do we see zero-gee outside the airlock door while there's always one full Earth-gee just a few inches inside the hull of a spaceship?

I know F/X and set design people here in LA, and they point out that zero-gee scenes can astronomically increase the cost of a movie. You have to string actors up on wires, and/or do lots of CGI for the effect (or, as Ron Howard did on APOLLO 13, build a spaceship set inside a vomit-comet and take your actors and film crew on a weightless joyride).

One convenient but lame way to cover this is to have a character blurt something like: "Thank Zod we've got one of those artificial gravity machines!" This provided some of the only meaningful techno-babble on the various incarnations of STAR TREK, for example.

The 1990s syndicated TV show BABYLON 5 had Earth spaceships (and the titular space station) utilizing a centrifugal spin to generate gravity. Sure, they encountered many alien races with magic gravity machines, but it was nice to see a show where, even in the far future, we humans are still subject to laws of physics.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml

Michale......

There are a few more comments about this article on another blog which may interest you. Check it out.

-CW

I admit I may be wrong about 2001, I wrote that from memory. But in one of the longshots... I believe it was the first longshot of Discovery (the first time you see the Jupiter mission ship)... you see the stately ship moving through space, and I believe you can hear the engines rumbling.

I remember it because I was so disappointed. You are correct, though, the rest of the movie is extremely accurate. When Poole and Bowman are in space suits, you (correctly) only hear them breathing, nothing more. Arthur C. Clarke had a lot to do with the making of this movie (the movie was done before the book was finished, if I remember correctly), which is why they actually paid attention to the scientific aspects.

But I fully admit I could be wrong about the engine noise. I'll have to rent it and see it again.

Also, I had forgotten about the Close Encounters shot. You're right -- they didn't make a big deal out of it, but the people had not aged. Good example!!

fstanley, Jonathon is right, wormholes are theoretically possible (I think Hawking is a big fan of them), but getting a space ship through them would likely be impossible, due to the crushing gravity effects.

Jonathon also points out the "magic computer" fallacy which is used EVERYWHERE, not just in strictly sci-fi movies. The mistake that bugs me no end is that on screen NOBODY EVER USES A MOUSE! The computer whiz turns to the computer, starts typing madly (clickety clickety click!) and the computer then forecasts the winner of the World Series (or whatever). But nobody ever touches a mouse, because it doesn't make a cool sound effect. Grrr!!

Michale -

I actually wrote this after finishing watching the first season of the new BSG. You are right, they try more than most do -- I love watching the ships precess and flip around. But they still get two things wrong -- the Vipers are ALWAYS blasting (falling into the "if the engines aren't on, the ship must not be moving" trap), and yes, I did see several U-turns during the first season. They just couldn't help themselves, I guess...

Anyway, thanks to all for commenting. Live long and prosper. May the force be with you.

-CW

The likelihood of aliens having 2 eyes, 2 hands and walking upright are pretty slim. I suppose this might be tough to get around since 4 armed actors demand higher pay. On the upside, visiting aliens can shop for clothes at the mall.

Off topic, but to this day, I always laugh at those cop shows where they desperately try to keep the bad guy talking on the phone in an attempt to trace the call. Maybe the new warrantless wiretapping laws were really all about letting Hollywood law enforcement use caller ID like everybody else.

I'll do a cartoon about that someday, maybe saturmday.

Now with 2001 I have never heard any sound in space in it and I've seen it well over twenty times. There is music when the ships are seen from outside and engine noise when inside. But when Poole is floating free in space there is no noise - nada. And when Bowman ejects himself into the airlock not a sound is heard until air once again enters the chamber.

As for time-dilation this is portrayed in Close Encounters as the pilots from flight 19 exit the mother ship after having been taken over thiry years prior yet they are not thirty years older.

And fstanley, a theoretical wormhole would allow you to jump from one locale to another but Dr. Hawking has surmised that any wormhole in existence would not be large enough to accommodate much more than a proton. It would not be a large swirling whirlpool locked into a specific postion.

Michale,

Good to see you're still a regular poster here.

Oh, and one more thing. I can't stand it when filmmakers make computers perform extraordinary functions far beyond their programming capabilities. Case in point - Star Trek IV where Scotty sits down at a computer that can't have more than a 500 mb harddrive and surely no keyboard/graphic interface and quickly designs an animated model of transparent aluminum. Uh huh, yeah. Computer, oh computer - a keyboard, how quaint.

Jonathan Lapper
http://cinemastyles.blogspot.com

The new Battlestar Galactica has some space scenes that are really killer... It's like you say.. There isn't hardly any sound.. And the way their ships fly it's like they are really in space.. The flip in all sorts of vectors and still travel in the same line until such time as they hit their thrusters to move in a different direction..

Now, in the later episodes, they seem to have gotten away from this, but the early episodes of the new BSG really stand out as far as how they depict space..

As much as it pains me to say it (I have a personal beef with Ron Moore, one of the producers of BSG. It's a long story..) I have to admit that he has done some pretty incredible things with BSG..

If you are not following it now, I highly recommend you catch a few of the early episodes.. I think you will be as impressed as I was..

Just let me close tonight by also pointing out that (if my memory doesn't fail me here) there was a series called "The Stainless Steel Rat" that also addressed the issue of time vis a vis interplanetary war...

But if you read many of the Star Trek novels (I know they are not canon, but they still have a lot of good info) the concept of Warp Drive addresses the Einsteinian conflict of space/time... I would recommend THE FINAL FRONTIER and FEDERATION for more info on that...

Anyways.. Hasta :D

Michale.....

I'm with you all the way on this one! What I want to know is when they show "worm holes" in the movies where you can jump from point A to point X in the blink of an eye - is that accurate according to our science today?

...Stan