Junghalli wrote:Stofsk wrote:- Minimalism. Earth has only 10 billion people by the mid-23rd century. Mars has only 2 million (!) people after what, 2 centuries of colonisation? Also the number 250K gets repeated like JMS has a love affair with it. B5 has 250K transient population. The largest Narn colony has 250K pop. Kill count for the Earth Minbari war? 250K. SLOPPY WRITING.
The minimalism is in most respects not implausible. Earth's population explosion is levelling off, I would be surprised if it peaks at much higher than ten billion. And my impression of Mars was that the air was still unbreathable, which would make it rather hard to support a large population.
It is the ridiculousness of having 10 billion people on Earth and a mere 2 million on Mars, who we are often told is the EA's biggest colony. Fine if Earths population leveled off. (I would like to know how, but whatever) But if you settle a planet for 200 years why do you only have a smaller population than New Zealand?
Nevermind the fact that B5, a space station that was constructed in a few years, can support 250K population. So the 'air isn't breathable' angle doesn't matter, because no one said they had to live in the Martian sky. They can live in pressure domes for all I care. If B5 the space station can have such a high population for being ~8KM long, and be constructed in so short a time, then why can't Mars have a population in the tens, or hundreds of millions? It is meant to be the second-biggest EA planet.
What's so bad about that? Maybe the Centauri don't breed as fast as humans? Maybe they didn't have a huge population explosion? Maybe they just like to keep their population in check so they can have more room? Three billion people is a perfectly respectable population for a homeworld; Earth had less than one sixth that for most of human history. What do you want, every planet to look like Coruscant?
Not quite like Coruscant, but the Centauri Republic has been around for hundreds of years. Again, like with Earth, I would like to know what happened to all that population.
Fine if there was never a population explosion, or it leveled off. Or if Centauri Prime is the noble's capital and all the plebes live on the colonies (kind of a small section of a modern city being the 'rich suburbs' while everywhere else is poor or middle-class, or if Centauri Prime is the 'Forbidden City' of the Republic). It still strikes me as too little.
The other reason I disliked it was due to the context we were given in the show. Sheridan had to choose where to deploy his fleet, and he chose some unknown planet called 'Coriana 6' because it had 6 billion population, while Centauri Prime had 3 billion. Coriana 6 is never seen, never heard from again, and no Coriana-ian is ever introduced to the show. So how does Sheridan know about them? And why should we as an audience give a shit about them? Meanwhile we have seen Centauri Prime, we know what it is and we know who the Centauri are.
I personally would have found the whole end of the Shadow War taking place in orbit of Centauri Prime to be more fitting than some unknown backwater.