Doctor Who

[jack]

OK, so seriously, someone designed a ship with:

1. A room in the middle of the shop full of lava

2. A corridor connecting the other end of the ship to the emergency engines with thirty doors, each controlled by a general knowledge question

3. A large digital countdown reading "seconds until impacting sun"

And people actually flew on this sucker? Words fail me.

The setup is actually fairly good. Doomed spacecraft, fine. Living sun, implausible but cool. Tension wracked grimy crewpeople. The idea of a real time episode is actually pretty good.

Somehow it's not really that interesting though.

There's a few absurdities that you can't exactly pin on *this* episode because they're staples of the genre, but nonetheless make me grind my teeth when the rest of the episode doesn't hold my attention.

1. Maybe the doctor could fix everything by going back in time afterwards. In fact, that's pretty much ALWAYS my objection. I do know it doesn't work like that (and there's a decent but not exactly watertight rationalisation thereof).

2. Seconds until impacting a sun. Riiiight. It was my impression that the upper surfaces of suns were gaseous, and hence diffuse, leaving no rigidly defined boundary outside of which you were not broiled (COME ON PEOPLE, MERCURY IS BOILED, AND THAT'S NOT INSIDE THE SUN, RIGHT?), and inside of which you died instantly. Only if you're going insanely fast would your death not depend how long you spent in the vicinity (with closer heating you up quicker), right?

3. And if you ARE falling toward a sun, you're probably going at some speed, you'd think. And if I recall correctly, TURNING ROUND ISN'T AS EASY AS THAT. You're going pretty fast, you have to cancel out that momentum AGAINST gravity. Lifting off a planet is pretty gruelling, a sun is A LOT BIGGER (tm).

4. Of course, it helps if you can slingshot, and use your momentum to help you. That works if (a) you're far enough out to steer round the sun or (b) you can deploy wings to bank. Except that B DOESN'T WORK BECAUSE YOU'RE IN A VACUUM! If you're not in a vacuum you're DEAD IN THE SUN. The most advanced spacecraft in the universe is a box for a reason WINGS DON'T HELP.

5. What else?

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

#3 It's unlikely that you'll be heading directly for the sun; merely being on a decaying orbital trajectory is ample to cause an unfortunate human-fusion interaction. You don't need all that much power to break out of such a path.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It was full of lava because that's where they routed all the super hot gasses (presumably because they're near the sun?) into. No good explanation was given as to why they weren't routed into space. Maybe normally the do something with the hot gasses in there when cooling whatever bits of the ship get hot, and so it's just in a situation when you're near the sun that it's bad to do so. Afterall nothing useful was in there except the TARDIS which they couldn't have predicted would be there.

The falling in to the sun thing was kind of annoying. I assume that being inside the photosphere of a star is much worse than being outside of it. They did half try to explain that the shields were failing as they got closer to the sun, and ... oh I give up.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Also, in the future space ships don't obey Newtonian laws. Haven't you played Tie Fighter?

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Tie Fighter is less strange than later games in the series, in which your fighter turns fastest when at one-third throttle.

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

I love TIE fighter, no matter how much I have to ignore the fact that in the Star Wars universe there is obviously friction in space.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh well, maybe it's friction against, um, aether.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Confirmed, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suspect, by Timothy Zahn, who had Wedge Antilles use his X-Wing's "aetheric rudder" making a particularly tight turn in a space combat.

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I'm sure that happened quite a few times in the X-Wing series.

TIE fighter is great - I'd really really like to see that re-made, possibly with an online mode.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. That makes sense. It's about the only rationalisation possible. (And hey, I don't *really* object to it in the first place, no-one can get everything right.)

In fact, it explains a lot. An aether sort of fucks with relativity, too, right? Which explains why they can go faster than light without paradoxes, right?

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

No, that's in the past: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If you read 'impact' as technobabble for 'the point beyond which we won't be able to escape' [from a head-on collision course, an orbit decaying due to friction with the outer atmosphere of the sun, an elliptical orbit with a narrow bit that's too narrow, whatever] then it makes more sense. As The Impossible Planet showed though, Dr Who's writers don't understand the first thing about orbits [despite living on a planet which relies on said first thing twice].

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

OK, that mostly makes sense. Though it *looks* like they're falling straight into the sun :) And it still seems suspiciously *precise* :)

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

Did anyone mention the Roche Limit last time we discussed that?

[miriammoules.livejournal.com]

2. The doors were supposed to open and close (c.f. "Impossible Planet") but the over-ride had kicked in. The GK questions were set by random crew n years back.

3. Impact warnings are now standard in cars/satnav. It's not too much of an extension to have it on a space ship.

I'm assuming a living "sun" has different properties, including being able to reverse magnetic field or something, kicking away the ship.

And I'm assuming "impact" = hitting the point of no return.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry, I dramatised some things in the rant. That somewhat makes sense.

OK, impact warnings. But if you're impacting something solid, you'd probably use radar of some description, right? I suspect that doesn't work on suns, so you need something specific, and I really that by the time you're close enough to need it you've NOTICED you're diving into a sun.

But Jack, weren't they stealing fuel from the Sun? Wasn't that the point?

I can't remember if that was that ship or not. But "illegal sun-scoop" doesn't sound like something I want on my ship either. I mean, did they just go the whole hog and call it "Icarus"?

[miriammoules.livejournal.com]

*bangs head on keyboard*

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Uh, sorry? What?

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

Have you seriously never heard of a Ram Scoop?

Harvesting a sun or gas giant for fuel for either fusion or propellant has been a pretty standard concept in sci-fi for a while now.

Impact warnings: They were performing a risky fly-by when their engine gave out causing them to enter an unstable orbit which would cause them to plummet into the sun. The solid thing they were going to impact was presumably a rather unpleasant outer layer of the sun which a simple course correction could cause them to avoid. My only problem with the concept in the episode was the lack of pretty diagram on the "You are about to die a horribly fiery death in: x minutes and y seconds" display, which would have been nice.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

No, no, yes, I'm generally aware of the concept (though I admit not the details). In hard sci-fi I might try it.

Since in this solar system the sun came to life, possessed the crew to burn each other alive and drive the ship into the sun I stand by my statement that I'd rather not :)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

It was my impression that the upper surfaces of suns were gaseous,

Really? It was my impression that it's a plasma.

and hence diffuse, leaving no rigidly defined boundary

Much of the sun is a pretty good vacuum, yes. Not the core...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I nearly said that, I wasn't sure it would help. And I wasn't certain off the top of my head, so I reckoned "gaseous" could cover both in a "generally wispy way" :)

Much of the sun is a pretty good vacuum, yes. Not the core...

Oh yes. But you have to be trying really hard to crash into the core of the sun, I do not think that was their primary problem :)

Cheapest pharmacy - dont miss it!

[(Anonymous)]

MESSAGE