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SyFy Channel's Ascention Mini Series
sorceress21269
Posts: 577Member
Sort of a rant here but why do production companies and networks insist on insulting the intelligence of scifi fandom?
An interstellar mission launched in the 60's?? Ummmmm yeah I don't think so. There was so much about deep space flight's effects on humans we simply had no understanding of back then let alone the engineering, mechanics, energy requirements etc etc that it was simply impossible. Apollo just got lucky to have been as successful of a program that it was frankly. I mean we can't even figure out how to keep astronauts alive with any certainty on a trip to Mars yet let alone to another solar system. One day I certainly think we will do this but for the SyFy channel to present us starving for quality scifi with adequate suspension of disbelief fans this nonsense is aggravating.
Yes I know its just TV entertainment but its bad TV entertainment. With so many scifi universes from literary works that would make utterly fantastic films or TV series to choose from I just don't get why they insist on feeding us this crap.
An interstellar mission launched in the 60's?? Ummmmm yeah I don't think so. There was so much about deep space flight's effects on humans we simply had no understanding of back then let alone the engineering, mechanics, energy requirements etc etc that it was simply impossible. Apollo just got lucky to have been as successful of a program that it was frankly. I mean we can't even figure out how to keep astronauts alive with any certainty on a trip to Mars yet let alone to another solar system. One day I certainly think we will do this but for the SyFy channel to present us starving for quality scifi with adequate suspension of disbelief fans this nonsense is aggravating.
Yes I know its just TV entertainment but its bad TV entertainment. With so many scifi universes from literary works that would make utterly fantastic films or TV series to choose from I just don't get why they insist on feeding us this crap.
Post edited by sorceress21 on
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Yeah, really. I get that pro wrestling is fiction, but science fiction? I don't think so.
well do tell my friend. I didn't watch it so how did they explain it away? Alien help? Or let me guess... They just thought they were on a ship vs really being on one..?
Anyway, it was like a cross between Galactica (the new one) Peyton Place, In the Heat of the Night, and about one third to one half of Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" bit.
@Sorceress: I'm going to use a spoiler tag, for those people who may have the show on their DVR and are looking forward to watching it.
Unfortunately, this was hinted at in the dialog way too early on for my taste. The guy who is heading the experiment seems to know exactly what is going on with the crew, which wouldn't be possible if they were in space. Also, I noticed early on that they were only showing the "ship" from the front, which is unusual for Sci-Fi. Then, that is confirmed through later conversations and when the entire ship is asleep riding through a "radiation storm," when you see people up and moving in modern Hazmat suits. Then, they finally had a "big reveal," which should have been no surprise to nobody. That was my least favorite part of it, how they didn't even bother maintaining the illusion for the viewers that it was really in space for very long.
The other thing I don't like about it is that the people running the experiment are manipulating it. They're not just watching to see how it goes, they're messing around with things aboard the ship. This creates unexplained things for the crew, which will affect the results of the experiment.
No doubt. I was looking away from the screen just before it happened. I felt "a disturbance in the Force" and looked up in time to see the scene.
That and the hollow, uninteresting characters and generally boring plot of it all are why I won't be tuning in.
From what I understand, Syfy was filming this to be a series, but decided it was lame and halted production. Then they decided that, rather than throw all of the money they spent on it down the drain, they'd release it as a "mini series." And, if it does well, they'll go back to developing it as a series. Personally, I hope it doesn't do well. After seeing that first part, I can see why they decided to stop production on it.
Sadly predictable...Interesting concept. Too bad the show wasn't better.
NERVA could do 1g easy, but the fuel use would be prohibitive. Nuclear electric couldn't get the specific impulse high enough for 1g, but it could sustain what it could do quite effectively.
Ultimately, you did hit on the big one tho ... life support. We haven't figured out how to do that without regular resupply, yet. And even the manned Mars mission's going to need it, let alone anything more ambitious. Heck, it's one reason I'm pretty sure we don't have a Secret Moon Base (tm) to fight off alien invaders! We don't have nearly the space lift capacity (or schedule) to keep them supplied in Tang and Space Wheaties -- which DO go great together, by the way!
true but with 1 exception, and it's a pretty insane exception. A concept called Medusa http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#medusa lets you smooth out the acceleration a bit by letting of the blasts many hundreds of metres ahead of the ship, but just behind a large sail you have hung up infront of the site where they go off. The sail is hurled forwards and if the tensile structures connecting the sail to the front of your ship are slightly elastic then this smoothes the acceleration of your ship whilst the sail still accelerates in a pulsed way. You hope that the tether is long enough that by the time your capsule passes through the site of a previous blast the debris has dissipated. You might also call the NSWR concept a pulsed drive, it could certainly do 1g, it is described if you scroll up from the medusa section on the page i have linked to.
"Nuclear electric couldn't get the specific impulse high enough for 1g, but it could sustain what it could do quite effectively."
Specific impulse is just the exhaust velocity divided by 9.81, it does not control how much thrust can be given but rather how long thrust can be run for before the fuel runs dry. Nuclear electric rockets could have problems with thrust being too low for a 1 g acceleration, because thye have such a good specific impulse. For a given power input to an engine the faster it ejects each particle of reaction mass (it's exhaust velocity, which relates to it's specific impulse and delta V) the less mass it can eject at once (which is a significant factor in how much thrust it can give and hence how fast it can accelerate). You are right that nuclear electric (basically an ion or VASIMR drive with a powerful nuclear reactor rather than feeble solar panels) might struggle to give enough thrust (though if you have a powerful enough reactor it should be possible) but the reason you give for this is the wrong "way round".
"We don't have nearly the space lift capacity"
ABSOLUTELY!! That's the other big problem. The space shuttle should have provided the technology to make space access easy, certainly some of it's original phase A concepts were two stage craft with the orbiter as the second stage and the first stage being a supersonic aircraft to launch it from. These shuttles would have been a bit smaller than the one which was eventually setled on but they would have been: cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, been more reliable, had a quicker turnaround time between missions. As it was though the shuttle design which eventually went into use was the least ambitious one, the one which required th least leaps to be made during development but paid for making development easier by giving a far less effective vehicle with higher costs over long term usage. Currently the best project developing a decent space launch system is skylon, this would be a full SSTO spaceplane landing and launching horizontally like a plane and then switching it's engine mode from jets to rockets at high altitude.
Wise choice. Some of us weren't so wise and actually hung in for the entire first episode.