Help me love Spaceships

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Well for a start, that's not how you say it. You say, "We'll be in engagement range in 8 minutes." The reason why the turns are ten minutes apart, is because you are so far apart and moving so fast that that you have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes". And the way you can make 5 to 10 minutes tense is by dealing a little interpersonal drama into it. Ever watch Balance of Terror? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH7unYCdv6w 52 minute show representing hours of time in the story. During that 52 minutes, each ship opens fire twice. So what did they do for the rest of the time? They argued about whether this would trigger an all out war and whether they could even hope to win against the new weapons. They accused each other of being spies. They mourned their dead. They did damage control. They dealt with a little matter of a toxic coolant leak.

Actually I rather like that sort of thing. The idea of sitting in a wonderful artificial environment where all your needs are met, you can communicate with your friends, at the push of a button, and the atmosphere is like that of an office or a library has a delightful tension with the knowledge that the place you are living in is threatened, enemies might destroy it, pirates or patrolmen might come stomping aboard, or eldritch horrors curse you with a Fate Worse Than Death. The tension between the normality and almost domestic intimacy; and the danger has a thrill of it's own. For one thing the whole idea allows you to pretend you are doing that when you are just sitting at your computer.

For that sort of thing I rather took to the second episode of Andromeda. Or maybe it was the third, and it depends on how you count two part pilots anyway. Andromeda for one thing has niftier gadgets then TOS.