Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Diaspora => Topic started by: StarSlayer on February 05, 2010, 08:13:11 pm
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Discussions on impulsive Moms, Robots and of course those awesome Fedoras Go!
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Luciana Carro. Kinda surprised me. I guess she's in the show just because she's a good actress though, and not for any connection to Kat. Looks like the Adama family is going into a tailspin though; little Billy is skipping school and using his gangster uncle as a role model? And now Joseph is calling in a hit? It's actually cool seeing the Adamas being bad asses like that; in BSG, they were more or less heroes. Now we see that the family doesn't have such an illustrious background.
Sister Clarice is still utterly confusing and enigmatic to me. Now we've got some "man behind the curtain" that's apparently giving orders...and that has a different idea of the direction of STO than the good Sister does. Knowing RDM and company, I'm expecting many more questions before we start getting answers, lol.
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I am rather surprised at how ruthless Joesph is becoming. Considering how he seemed to want out as the interface between Ha'la'tha's bribes and the Caprican Justice system in the pilot, he's certainly not being proactive about it now. It will be interesting how far down the rabbit hole of revenge he gets before he realizes he's at the precipice. From the little bit from we got from Adama in HoG I tend to think Joseph stepped back from going over the edge. Plus you don't need a good lighter to win cases if they're all predetermined by mafia money. In addition the "Bronx Tale" angle with little Husker is going to work better if there is a juxtaposition between Joe and Sam. (As a side note I was actually disappointed by the hip hop style music when William went to Sam's. Ha'la'tha seems to have more of a old style mafia/yakuza slant to it then a street gang and some type of traditional Tauron music would have been a better fit in my opinion) I also thought how the police are trying to pin the blame on the Graystones and escape responsibility was a nice touch. I tend to find myself enjoying a lot of the societal fluff they are building into the show, even more so then some of the main plot points.
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All the guys in the Ha'la'tha back room seemed to be younger, so perhaps the hip hop music is a reflection of that. I'd even propose that one of the underlying themes of the show is cultural identity, and that even crime syndicates can lose sight of where they came from.
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Seeing Duck and Kat was a bit of a surprise, good to see them getting work though. I was also surprised at how subtly they slipped in that Sam is gay, like it was just another normal part of life.
Joseph sure is getting badass, and I do hope they kill of that whiney mrs greystone :P
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Seeing Duck and Kat was a bit of a surprise, good to see them getting work though. I was also surprised at how subtly they slipped in that Sam is gay, like it was just another normal part of life.
Joseph sure is getting badass, and I do hope they kill of that whiney mrs greystone :P
Christian Tessier (Duck) was not in Caprica. Luciana Carro (Kat) is the only BSG cast member in Caprica.
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Sure as hell looks like him. Sure it's not just an uncredited role?
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Well, he's not credited in IMDB at least. I'm not even sure where you thought you saw him, I don't remember seeing anyone that looked like him. Luciana I recognized immediately though, lol.
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the guy that says 'I was hungry 20 minutes ago' to willie.
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Still can't get over that intro. It's the tackiest, most god awful thing I've ever seen, with Joseph dropping to his knees with an anguished face in front of a tombstone and Lacie's hair "flying" in the wind (interior shot to boot) being the sleaziest of the lot. Talking about sleaze that sister Clarice character has sufficient quantities of it to make me uncomfortable even watching any scene featuring her. It's probably by design but that has to be the most unlikable character ever. Makes you long for Galactica's airlocks to shoot her out of.
Luckily the show isn't quite as bad as the intro.. yet. Nowhere near BSG but that was expected anyway. One thing that bothers me is how easily they're using contemporary items, it sort of breaks the immersion for me. We're talking about a society that predates this one by over 100,000 years (I forget the exact number but it was a lot higher). People on Caprica driving Jaguars seems like a bit too much of a coincidence to me. They could have at least gotten rid of the Jaguar statuette on the hood. I'm also pretty sure that the society that has FTL space travel wouldn't still be using VHS tapes.
They say details make things great. I really think they should be more careful with these things.
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Just can't help thinking Attia from Rome when Sister Clarice is around. Kat is in Caprica? When? :S
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Can we go find the people who said they wouldn't like Caprica because it would be a soap opera and beat the crap out of them now? :p
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yes.
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maybe they just wanted tell us, by the videotape, that the police is not so good equipt as they should be. they even had no computers in their office and greystone got a one-wheeled buttler...maybe they offer us a universe full of differences...
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maybe they just wanted tell us, by the videotape, that the police is not so good equipt as they should be. they even had no computers in their office and greystone got a one-wheeled buttler...maybe they offer us a universe full of differences...
Or maybe they're too lazy and cheap so they're using existing stuff :P
We are talking about a society that is technologically centuries ahead of our own. That's like saying that a badly equipped police force today would be using horse carriages. They're just pushing the "all this has happened before and will happen again" thing too far. The odds of a society being brought back to the stone age, merging with a primitive humanoid culture, slowly evolving back up and then inventing things that look exactly the same as they did 150000 years ago are astronomical. Yea the colonials would have had some magnetic storage media and drive around in internal combustion engine cars at some point of their development. But VHS and Jaguars? Hell no. Even if we put aside the fact that a society that is centuries ahead of us and has FTL space travel still using magnetic tapes is utterly ridiculous, those things shouldn't just be reused existing items. It's supposed to be another planet and another culture. They're not offering us a universe of differences, rather a universe of been there, done that - "hey I had that item from a sci fi show as a kid before it became obsolete" :P
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There seems to be an assumption that technology advances at a uniform rate
that a species with star ships should have advanced medical technology
or that a species with FTL would have something better than magnetic tape?
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maybe they just wanted tell us, by the videotape, that the police is not so good equipt as they should be. they even had no computers in their office and greystone got a one-wheeled buttler...maybe they offer us a universe full of differences...
Or maybe they're too lazy and cheap so they're using existing stuff :P
We are talking about a society that is technologically centuries ahead of our own. That's like saying that a badly equipped police force today would be using horse carriages. They're just pushing the "all this has happened before and will happen again" thing too far. The odds of a society being brought back to the stone age, merging with a primitive humanoid culture, slowly evolving back up and then inventing things that look exactly the same as they did 150000 years ago are astronomical. Yea the colonials would have had some magnetic storage media and drive around in internal combustion engine cars at some point of their development. But VHS and Jaguars? Hell no. Even if we put aside the fact that a society that is centuries ahead of us and has FTL space travel still using magnetic tapes is utterly ridiculous, those things shouldn't just be reused existing items. It's supposed to be another planet and another culture. They're not offering us a universe of differences, rather a universe of been there, done that - "hey I had that item from a sci fi show as a kid before it became obsolete" :P
The usage of items we can associate with is nothing new in the BSG universe. They did that in the original show; didn't it bother you to see Kara driving around in a HMMWV, and marines using P90's and G36K's? Yes, it is cheaper to use unmodified props like that. It does also feed into the notion of "all this has happened before", which was really a central theme of BSG, and in extent Caprica as well. To say that it's an unacceptable notion purely because of the probability that it would happen is to be more cynical than this show allows. It's science fiction, with equal parts science and fiction; sometimes you need to have suspension of disbelief, or at least an acceptance of a premise for the sake of the story. So, my advice would be to try not to get so hung up on the props, because that's not what this show is about. It's about story and people and choices, not the cars they drive or the brand of shaving cream they use.
As an aside, I wouldn't say that the technology we see in Caprica is so much more advanced than ours. Are we close to FTL? No, not really. But other technology, such as any window in a house serving as a video screen, or paper that can display computer images...these things aren't so far away. In the podcast for the previous episode, David Eick even says that in many ways they were trying to create a futuristic society that wasn't actually that far removed, and that relied on technologies that our own science is on the cusp of making a reality.
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We still use old, outdated technologies all the time - magnetic tape is one of the most cost-effective storage techniques for large amounts of data. We use incandescent lightbulbs, and vinyl records for music in some cases. Most power stations (even nuclear) are essentially steam-driven. With examples like this, I think it's plausible that a mix of 'old' and 'new' technologies could coexist in a society like that on Caprica.
I think it's a good juxtaposition with how the Colonies were portrayed on BSG. We were told Galactica was 'old-school' but weren't really shown what that was in comparison to, apart from some characteristics about Pegasus and the Viper Mk VII.
Fleshing out the civilian lifestyle is also interesting. The hedonism on Caprica certainly makes comments by Head Six about sins, etc seem less like propaganda.
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I might even accept magnetic storage media as being so reliable it was kept around for security purposes, but it would have been nice if it wasn't identical to VHS in every way. Could have at least chamfered some edges away. And yes, Kara driving around in a Humvee bothered me as well, though not as much (will get to that later). Like I said I can see them using this sort of technology level, but things that look identical break the immersion for me. A magnetic tape that looks differently but is still obviously a magnetic tape or a car that looks almost like one of "ours" but can't exactly place it would still work withing the confines of "all this has happened before and will happen again". There is such a thing as being too literal.
And simply saying that a society can move ahead faster in some areas of technology and slower in others is true but only works to some degree to explain this away. Science areas aren't completely isolated from each other; a breakthrough in some area will likely have some effect on another. History has also shown that there is no gradual and constant advance of science - it will go ahead slower in some areas and faster in others until a big breakthrough is made, after which things skyrocket in all areas and tend to make up for the differences. So you can't exactly go be all advanced in medicine and forget about computers because things tend to be related, and at some point one needs the other to move forward.
That said, seems to me we're centuries away from any sort of proper sublight space travel. Yes we can launch stuff in orbit and send probes further but we can't exactly hop on a passenger liner and go swing around saturn, can we? Not even mentioning FTL because right now we're not even sure if we'll ever be able to do anything like that.
Basically what I'm saying is that a society that has all that and uses VHS seems disproportionate to me. Yes, if you really want to like the show you'll find a way to make yourself think it's all perfectly believable - there's nothing stronger in this world then a fan made reality bubble - but I'm still saying they should probably look out for these things more. At least redesign the magnetic storage media and get rid of the Jaguar statuette from the hood so things aren't 100% identical. This bothered me less in BSG because it wasn't in the spotlight as much - you'd shortly see an existing car, truck or weapon but then you'd be back to battlestars, Vipers, FTL and such. But in Caprica they're jamming a lot of that stuff in our faces and we've only seen 3 episodes so far. I wouldn't even say anything it was a low budget thing, but otherwise Caprica looks pretty damn great, making these cheapo excursions to 1980s seem all the less believable to me.
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There are just too many props that are instantly recognisable as real items, G90 and SA80 rifles are bad enough, but Hummers, Jags, Citroen DS and Smart Cars are just crass props (though the Jag and DS are beautiful cars in the real world). If you're going to use real items and not custom props, they need to eb something rare enough not to be recognised as from our society.
While the technologies developped by any soiety will eventually coincide, the chances of exact design being matched is inconcievably low. I know they have a budget to watch, but they are losing credibility.
The storyline is OK so far (we are an episode behind in the UK) and the Cylon prototype design and effects are great. I don't like the Mrs Greystone character either, but maybe we're not meant to, just as we were meant to dislike Tigh during BSG's first season. The titile sequence is awful, though - it almost seems like they copied Eureka's, which at least had the benefit of being tongue-in-cheek for a semi-comedy light fantasy programme.
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While the technologies developped by any soiety will eventually coincide, the chances of exact design being matched is inconcievably low. I know they have a budget to watch, but they are losing credibility.
That's my point exactly. To be clear, I don't find this reason enough to either hate or love the show, it's just something that I see as a mistake and find the show would be more believable without.
As for mrs. Graystone character, I'm not sure why but she's actually one of my favorite characters in the show. For some reason I can't stand either Zoe or Lacey. Not to mention that sister Clarice character.. ack.
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#You do know that, given budget constraints, it's easier to pick bits and pieces of technology off the shelves than to go to the trouble of having your art department design these things?
Just saying that, while these things might be immersion breakers for you, for me, they actually enhance the "ten minutes into the future" thing the show is going for.
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Depends on what you're redesigning and how smart are you in doing it. Even real cars can be modified to look unique and fit a sci fi setting better for not that big a cost. A custom made bsg-ish magnetic tape would cost a few hundred $ at most assuming you already have an art department that handles the props.
Also, colonizing 12 worlds (most of which would require terraforming, as I doubt there's a single star system that contains 12 planets of equal or almost equal gravitational and atmospheric conditions), having developed civilian and military space travel, and being able to perform instant FTL jumps is hardly 10 minutes into the future.
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Depends on what you're redesigning and how smart are you in doing it. Even real cars can be modified to look unique and fit a sci fi setting better for not that big a cost. A custom made bsg-ish magnetic tape would cost a few hundred $ at most assuming you already have an art department that handles the props.
Also, colonizing 12 worlds (most of which would require terraforming, as I doubt there's a single star system that contains 12 planets of equal or almost equal gravitational and atmospheric conditions), having developed civilian and military space travel, and being able to perform instant FTL jumps is hardly 10 minutes into the future.
Though it depends on if they technologically regressed. They might have had the technology to terraform and colonize before they left Kobol and lost it after they landed. Not to mention the 12 Colonies aren't exactly a Federation utopia, there's a lot of nationalism and bigotry and I get the impression, that while Caprica might be on the cutting edge some of the other planets are probably dirt poor and underdeveloped. While the Graystones might have a pad out of Sharper Image the everyday folk might not have access to all the fancy tech. Not to mention over in the States we don't have Citroens, they can roll on all the Astra Diesels, Peugeots or whatever else and they look alien to us :D
Tough to be honest I am a little in the middle it did break continuity for a second for me when they pulled out the Betamax but overall I haven't been to miffed. I mean Adama's quarters on Galactica are like condensed a national history museum. Heck maybe we are just genetically predisposed to build HMMWVs and Roman Legionary Helmets
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Just to clarify, the twelve colonies are spread across 3 star systems. Also, despite the fact they have spaceships (and have had them for thousands of years), they are really only a couple decades in front of us, not centuries.
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the twelve colonies are spread across 3 star systems.
Wikipedia quotes RDM saying they're all in the one system - although implausible - as a nod to the original series. The link to the original source seems to have been eaten by the SciFi/SyFy website being rejiggered.
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Good. Let's hope they never find it again. :p
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The plan states that 'the twelve colonies of the 3 suns have been something something'.
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Oh gosh :p What takes precedent when it's canon vs word of god? :lol:
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Canon, cause god must have been drunk when he said they were all in the same system. :p
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You do realize that the colonies can be around 3 stars and still all be in the same system? It's called a trinary system, would have been a lot larger then our own but still technically one system.
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Trinary systems, generally do not have that many planets, let alone habitable ones.
The habitable zone of any star system is rather narrow; adding more suns into the mix will not increase it.
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I'm pretty sure you can't find a single system anywhere with all 12 planets in the goldilocks zone. They would need to have terraformed most of them. As for planet counts, well.. depends on a definition of a planet (mind you they never said all 12 colonies are planets - some could be on planetoids, big built-on asteroids or huge space installation. I think Jane Espensen of Caprica even hinted towards something like that recently). A trinary system may not have 12 habitable planets or 12 planets at all but it's gravitational field could capture a lot of stuff. Not to mention a single gas giant could easily have like 60+ moons, some of which could be colonies.. The main thing here is that not necessarily all colonies fit the astronomical definition of a planet. When you take that into account 12 colonies stop sounding so implausible.
Here's what battlestar wiki has to say:
The Twelve Colonies of Kobol are located in the star system Cyrannus.
During the Cylon attack one Hybrid indicates that the Colonies orbit three stars (The Plan). It is also known that at least some of the Colonies share their orbits (Caprica Pilot, TV version).
While Elosha stated that the Tribes settled onto "twelve worlds", the exact definition of "world" remains ambiguous. Although the Colonies are defined as independent, habitable celestial bodies, it is not known, whether they only include major planets or other astronomical objects such as moons, minor planets or even asteroids.
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Colonies_%28RDM%29
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I think that the 12 colonies are full planets, but there is probably other smaller colonies on moons and such. Troy was one such 'colony'.
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I have never seen anything that suggests three insependent systems - I must ahve missed something. I had just assumed the 12 colonies were a mixture of a few planets and several habitable moons orbiting them, just as in Firefly.
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One of the things I have trouble swallowing is that Tamara Adama exists 'at all.' It's really frustrating and it doesn't make any sense.
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One of the things I have trouble swallowing is that Tamara Adama exists 'at all.' It's really frustrating and it doesn't make any sense.
Care to elaborate why?
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One of the things I have trouble swallowing is that Tamara Adama exists 'at all.' It's really frustrating and it doesn't make any sense.
Care to elaborate why?
How do you get an entire person full of their memories without access to said memories? It's been a while since I watched the pilot but isn't the whole process consist of looking at glorified dental records?
I also don't understand how a person can exist and be self aware on a private server somewhere but... it's just a show.
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One of the things I have trouble swallowing is that Tamara Adama exists 'at all.' It's really frustrating and it doesn't make any sense.
Care to elaborate why?
How do you get an entire person full of their memories without access to said memories? It's been a while since I watched the pilot but isn't the whole process consist of looking at glorified dental records?
I also don't understand how a person can exist and be self aware on a private server somewhere but... it's just a show.
The way that it's explained I believed is that the AI is basically an algorithm that recreates personality and memories based on the digital "footprint" that a person leaves over the course of their life. It's assumed that on Caprica, technology and digital records are even more prevailent than they are in our lives, so a person leaves a pretty big data trail.
As for how a person can be self aware on a computer server...well, it's not actually that person. It's just a very good copy. It's basically a self aware computer program. And a computer program can certainly operate without a person around...when you leave your computer on, plenty of programs continue to run in the background. So why not an AI?
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Good point I like your explanation, it's not completely satisfying to me but I'll give it another shot. But then again it still doesn't make sense to me how a teenage girl managed to "crack" the code on artificial intelligence. Her father still can't figure it out and he has a "cognitive processor."
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As pointed out in the show the issue wasn't computing power. The issue was getting all the information needed in order to make an AI work. The solution wasn't to try to code it all in (which is the mistake Daniel Greystone was making) but to build a program to that would spider across the web reading every trace of that person from the web and then take a best guess at what algorithm would be needed to do that.
Remember this is a world where they have the tech to make the holoband so there must be a hell of a lot of data out there to grab.
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As pointed out in the show the issue wasn't computing power. The issue was getting all the information needed in order to make an AI work. The solution wasn't to try to code it all in (which is the mistake Daniel Greystone was making) but to build a program to that would spider across the web reading every trace of that person from the web and then take a best guess at what algorithm would be needed to do that.
Remember this is a world where they have the tech to make the holoband so there must be a hell of a lot of data out there to grab.
Hmm... Ok I feel a lot better about the show now that I can see the tech better. I was real bummed out about the show because I just couldn't buy it. Anyway, thanks Angreifer and Kara for putting the show's tech into a more laymen viewpoint for me.
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Holobands, intelligent robots, and VHS tapes. Ok, I'll shut up now :P
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Holobands, intelligent robots, and VHS tapes. Ok, I'll shut up now :P
Yeah I know they should have gone with Betamax :drevil:
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Holobands, intelligent robots, and VHS tapes. Ok, I'll shut up now :P
I hate to beat a dead horse, but I just recently listened to the podcast for this episode, and David Eick said they were intentionally trying to make the GDD (I think it's called that) look severely underfunded; he didn't specifically explain the VHS tape, but it would fit in with the image of a government agency that had basically been ignored until suddenly there's a terrorist attack and they're needed.
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Yeah I know they should have gone with Betamax :drevil:
Yes they should have. But since "all this has happened before and all this will happen again" is the prevalent theme, I guess in the colonies Beta lost to VHS despite being better too :)
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On top of that while technology is pretty advanced in the Colonies I think the distribution is kind of low. Caprica is arguably the most advanced and powerful colony and Graystone is probably at a Bill Gates level of wealth so he has a lot of fancy tech and robot butlers. Joseph, a lawyer I'll wager around middle class, doesn't have any of that stuff and Lacey who is lower class probably even less. I actually tend to think if they play it right, it would be an interesting development if over the course of the show the Colonies see a large increase in the availability of technology (especially cylon driven tech) as well as a dependence on AI driven labor and equipment. When war breaks out it would be a lot more brutal if the Colonies' Military, Economic and Industrial strength has become part and parcel Cylon. Nothing like waking up to find your toaster ovens, car factories and fighter jets have decided to wipe you out.
Besides, if you want odd check out the motorcycle at Lacey's with the sideways mounted V-twin.
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Yeah I know they should have gone with Betamax :drevil:
Yes they should have. But since "all this has happened before and all this will happen again" is the prevalent theme, I guess in the colonies Beta lost to VHS despite being better too :)
Betamax was higher resolution. It lost due to Sony's marketing department. :p
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So I guess Sony's incompetent in the colonies as well...