ARGHHH.
Okay, that's what my first reaction to reading this thread was. Okay, let's deal with the many mistakes made in this thread.
The Romulan Republic wrote:tezunegari wrote:I never really became a fan of Andromeda but I admit the premise of it was (and still is) good. What I never got arround were the many continuation errors and "the-stupidity-that-is-Dylan-Hunt".
Same here. Again, I'm unsure weather this idea is even worth it, but this is similar to my thinking. The premise has potential, we just have to ditch 95 percent of the previous attempt.
No, you just have to ditch everything after "Bunker Hill".
In the pilot Harper creates Romy. A humanoid and physical Avatar for the Andromeda AI. (She's even anatomically correct
)
How did Harper built her when he only arrived a few hours ago? He is a genius engineer i give him that, but why not state that the physical Avater was to be installed but the Nietzschean attack prevented that and Harper completed her. That alone would be an accomplishment.
Okay, first of all,
Rommie wasn't created in the pilot, it was the third episode. Secondly, Harper did not built her when he only arrived a few hours ago. It took him at least one day of work in the Maru and he mainly modified an existing maintenance bot. Also, Andromeda had opted herself not to have an avatar. It is always the choice of the ship to have an avatar or not, as in this case. Furthermore, given that Andromeda had been in service for several years and that installing an avatar is easy and takes only a few seconds makes that idea completely unrealistic. You do not understand how capable and scary AIs in the Dromverse really are. Andromeda was one of the earlies XMC-cruisers to be completed, the tenth in her class, so having them not install the new avatar makes no sense.
Plus, Tyr destroyed all bots.
Then it was said Romy was the first of her kind and that Andromeda had to rely on holographic avatars and monitors.
Wrong, that was never said in the show. Or at least not in the canon run. Avatars are a lost technology in many places after the fall, maybe you mean that.
But then they find the Pax Magellanic (I think), the gold collector's Edition of the same class as Andromeda and that ship was full of humanoid avatars with the ships AI posing as the acting Captain... and humping Dylan Hunt... with candle light diner... sure...
Don't think I ever saw that. Fortunately. That's Voyager levels of suckage by the sound of it.
It was actually one of the better episodes and a very scary example of what happens when an AI gets crazy. And it was nowhere near the case of what the quote makes it out to be. Actually, what happened was that the AI had engaged in an affair with her captain, went schizophrenic and tried to replace that captain with Hunt. In the end she committed suicide by cop.
And of course the Andromeda could be crewed by six people. A ship that originally had a crew of over 4000... yes of course it's possible in SciFi. If they had at least given a statement that Andromeda is operating at a severely lower efficiency than normal...
But it is always shown. Example - a mere destroyer sized ship gets them into a lot of trouble in "D minus zero", Tyr has to pilot the slipfighters by hand - causing the ship to almost been blown up by a less-capable opponent in Banks of the Lethe etc. Plus, Harper has to run maintenance all the time.
Well its a highly automated ship. I'd perhaps try to rationalize it as most of the crew being marines/fighter pilots, not actually critical to running the ship. Or hell, just change the numbers.
No, the numbers make sense. Anyway, here is what Andromeda herself had to say about the matter:
I am accustomed to traveling with a complement of 4,132 crew members, including officers and enlisted.
Due to the current unusual circumstances, most of the posts and assignments are being handled by my own droids and bots. It's not the most comfortable way of functioning, but it's perfectly adequate.
Due to the fighter numbers, I wager at least half of the crew complement were actually involved in carrier operations, intelligence, lancers, scientists etc. The XMC class is a command ship first and foremost, warship second.
The slipstream-engine is another nitpick for me. I agree that the idea of the drive is good but the fact that you need a biological pilot because they can feel the route within the slipstream?! Even that was countered with that one episode where Andromeda returned from a black-ops with her crew concerning the World-ship before Kevin Sorbo became her Captain.
No, it took her one blind jump and then over a year she drifted until she was found.
About the Trance/sun-god... if that aspect of the show is to be kept, apply rules when she can go nova on the enemy. Or make it like the regeneration of the Doctor. If she does use her powers it will change her. It doesn't have to be her appearance, a change in personality would be a good challenge for the writers... imagine good little Trance turn into FemTyr
and then into a Harper-wannabe. One could use that for comedy relief and everyone would know that she did something with her powers... but not what.
Oh God no. You don't get the character at all. First, using S1 and S2, Trance can not go nova on anyone. She is an avatar, the best she can do is manipulate time. Not go Nova on anyone.
It actually is reminiscent of the Doctor, come to think of it. And the changing personalities idea is interesting as well. Something that couldn't really be done on a TV show maybe, but easy to pull off in a written fanfic. Another one to file under possible ideas to use.
Do it, but please don't call it Andromeda fanfic then, because it is so far removed from the original idea it isn't Trance anymore.
Another bad thing in the original was the fact that once Hunt was able to recreate the Commonwealth A) he declined the position as Triumvir (spelling?) and B) they had nearly instantanious the ability to built High Guard ships. So if the reboot-Andromeda ever gets a new Commonwealth... please make them salvage and repair old High guard ships with new ships being built at a very slow pace as the technology had been lost for nearly 300 years. Including the limitation of Nova-Bombs to the Andromeda and a few salvaged ships. And even then those old High Guard ships should be very low in numbers, maybe even only on per fleet as a command ship. And some of them being used for reverse engineering.
Declining the position made no sense and was never the intention of the original writers. And why wouldn't they get the ability to built High Guard ships? The Perseid for example built massive fleets before the reunification, why wouldn't they be able to do that anymore? You seem to have a very minimalistic view of the Dromverse. This is an universe where fleets number in the thousands.
All good suggestions. Though Hunt declining Triumvir could be seen as entirely in-character for someone who is both stubbornly idealistic (at least early on), and not experienced in politics.
Actually, he is both. Declining Triumvir makes no sense and if he wasn't experienced in politics, he would not have been the captain of the flagship of the Commonwealth in the first place, since it mainly is used to show the flag.
And it would be a good idea to remove the Kevin-Sorbo-centric writing of the later seasons. I always disliked how Sorbo/Hunt was always right and never screwed up. And when he screwed up it was just part of his plan...
Well Sorbo has no say in my writing, so its no problem.
Symptomatic of the latter seasons, in S1 and S2 he screwed up quite often. Do I have to list the many times Rommie or Tyr or Beka or Trance had to save his sorry ass? In Season 1, he got himself captured/nearly killed at least a dozen of times.
If my memory serves me, basically before the big bang, there was "heaven", which was the singularity. Everything was ordered and together and dull. Trance was part of a group of extraplanar entities or somesuch that opposed "heaven", and caused the big bang to occur, and she became a solar avatar. She described the bad evil things that are trying to suck the world back together again as "love" (because the black holes are trying to pull everything back together again, towards "heaven"), basically, I think and that she was essentially, yeah, a devil. It was all kinda silly, but I still liked the sound of it more than the shit that followed after Wolfe left the show. Super-advanced godly "aliens" are a fairly common trope in sci-fi, and while not particularly original, Wolfe was good enough at writing plot-driven stories that I have no doubt it would have turned out well.