Avatar review thread

[Sarevok]

So unnecessarily breaking the laws of physics in a manner every nerd gets a rage chubby about is preferable to having a bit too much power output? That he actually tried to play lip service to real world physics is a detriment?

No idiot. Venture Stars STL drive is entirely nerd fan service. It is totally impossible for a society as seen in the movie to build and operate. No one cares about how the technobabble works. But in the finest tradition of Star Trek writers Cameron fucked it up by inserting an absurd explanation for how they get to Alpha Centauri so fast. He could have said they have unobtainium powered drives, but no they must have a laser that can burn a planets surface to cinders from lightyears away. They also got so much antimatter lying around each time Venture Star refuels it probably uses more energy than entire history of mankind.

[Sarevok]

A couple of notes on the Avatar starship
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html#avatar

Cameron should have just stuck to a FTL drive. The Venture Stars ludicrous velocity already puts most scifi starships to shame. Now on top of that it can withstand a laser that probably puts out more energy that several thousand nuclear weapons every second. A FTL drive would a have served the story better by not introducing another gigantic plot hole. FTL would have let the characters travel to Alpha Centauri without such a high tech level that the movies entire premise is invalidated.

Why do you think it is a "gigantic plot hole" when the ship is by the given link above, the most plausible sci-fi ship in ages?

The Venture Stars speed is too great. If it took 7000 or even 700 years to reach it's destination it would have been a perfectly believable drive. A STL drive that makes a Federation warp core look like a toy is no better than a handwavium FTL drive because it is equally bullshit. The mechanism does not matter because the performance is way off anything possible. You might as well build 900000 ton armored zepellion battleship and call it realistic because technically helium filled airships float in the air.

[open_sketchbook]

So unnecessarily breaking the laws of physics in a manner every nerd gets a rage chubby about is preferable to having a bit too much power output? That he actually tried to play lip service to real world physics is a detriment?

No idiot. Venture Stars STL drive is entirely nerd fan service. It is totally impossible for a society as seen in the movie to build and operate. No one cares about how the technobabble works. But in the finest tradition of Star Trek writers Cameron fucked it up by inserting an absurd explanation for how they get to Alpha Centauri so fast. He could have said they have unobtainium powered drives, but no they must have a laser that can burn a planets surface to cinders from lightyears away. They also got so much antimatter lying around each time Venture Star refuels it probably uses more energy than entire history of mankind.

We didn't see the society in the movie, fuckwit. We saw a fucking mining base on another planet with 90 year old helicopters! We know shit all about the society itself, except that they can make anti-matter. All things considered, it is not implausible that such a society could generate and expend that much energy using anti-matter and fusion, especially given that they have a room temperature superconductor (which is what the entire fucking movie is about) to get that power where they need it.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

A couple of notes on the Avatar starship
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html#avatar

Cameron should have just stuck to a FTL drive. The Venture Stars ludicrous velocity already puts most scifi starships to shame. Now on top of that it can withstand a laser that probably puts out more energy that several thousand nuclear weapons every second. A FTL drive would a have served the story better by not introducing another gigantic plot hole. FTL would have let the characters travel to Alpha Centauri without such a high tech level that the movies entire premise is invalidated.

The only legitimate complaint I see here is the ship's high maximum velocity. If we assume the ship masses ten million metric tons (assuming that it's a giant cube of styrofoam,) we find that it needs to dispose of 3.594x1026 J of KE in 167.9 days. This works out to a power output of 2.48x1019 W. Assuming that it's a giant cube of aerogel only reduces this by two orders of magnitude. That is to say the ship would require nearly eight million tons of matter and antimatter, and the drive nozzles would be made of . . . well, unobtanium.

[Sarevok]

We didn't see the society in the movie, fuckwit. We saw a fucking mining base on another planet with 90 year old helicopters! We know shit all about the society itself, except that they can make anti-matter. All things considered, it is not implausible that such a society could generate and expend that much energy using anti-matter and fusion, especially given that they have a room temperature superconductor (which is what the entire fucking movie is about) to get that power where they need it.

The standard Avatard fallback - we did not see every square inch of Avatar Earth rendered into Google Earth 3D so critcism is impossible.

The entire premise of the film was that unobtainium was extremely valuable and necessary. The Earth was dying due to enviromental degradation. Jake Sully had to make a big choice about humankind and the navi aliens. You can't have that if Avatar Earth is a place post singularity wankers dream about with absurd amounts of energy and matter.

[AniThyng]

So I suppose we'll just have to accept it's bullshit either way.

At least in this case it's a matter of power generation scale, as opposed to bullshit physics (off the top of my head, the only sci-fi FTL drive out there that doesn't rely on magic dimensions is the Star Wars one, and Star Wars power generation is so high end as to run into the exact same complaint about the realism of the power generation capabilites of the civilization)

Btw, the premise of the film was that unobtanium was expensive and appearently necessary to maintain the bottom line of RDA. FUCK, African wars are fueled over the DIAMOND trade. for GEMS. it sure as hell isn't about industrial diamonds. And I defy you to tell me decorative diamonds are necessary for civilization. We attach a ludicrous monetary value on many things - i mean, do you know how many meals I can buy for the price of one blu-ray? And yes I know what the background material says. Far better debaters then I have already dealt with that. And from the film, any normal person would understand RDA is basically in it FOR THE MONEY. (I mentioned this before, but my country has tin mines all over the place as a legacy of when the British Empire played out the real world premise of avatar. Why, we even had the occasional rebellion!. Though you will surely be overjoyed to know that Gunboats and Muskets >> keris and sharp sticks.)

[Sarevok]

Then why the heavy environmental undertones in the plot ? Are you saying Earth is really Coruscant and Cameron did not mean at all that there was serious ecological crisis going on ? I must have watched a different film. Where can I find your copy which has all the environmental preaching deleted ?

[AniThyng]

Then why the heavy environmental undertones in the plot ? Are you saying Earth is really Coruscant and Cameron did not mean at all that there was serious ecological crisis going on ? I must have watched a different film. Where can I find your copy which has all the environmental preaching deleted ?

What about it? It's obviously there to contrast it against the natural beauty of pandora and play up the noble natives aspect and how we love to ruin jungles. It has nothing to do with wether or not civilization is doomed if they had no unobtanium. I mean, hey, did you know London had smog so bad it killed people in the 19th century? Coincidentally around the same time they were busy raping my country? Heck, yeah, it's a dying world. I think most normal people took that in the sense that people use when they derisively refer to your typical urban sprawl as being "dead". I'm not a anti urbanist luddite, but there is a vast gulf between the pityful nature of a small suburban park and a bunch of trees on the roadside and a actual jungle. (caveat: i'm sure NYC's central park is an ecosystem unto itself, hence the disclaimer here.)

[open_sketchbook]

We didn't see the society in the movie, fuckwit. We saw a fucking mining base on another planet with 90 year old helicopters! We know shit all about the society itself, except that they can make anti-matter. All things considered, it is not implausible that such a society could generate and expend that much energy using anti-matter and fusion, especially given that they have a room temperature superconductor (which is what the entire fucking movie is about) to get that power where they need it.

The standard Avatard fallback - we did not see every square inch of Avatar Earth rendered into Google Earth 3D so critcism is impossible.

The entire premise of the film was that unobtainium was extremely valuable and necessary. The Earth was dying due to enviromental degradation. Jake Sully had to make a big choice about humankind and the navi aliens. You can't have that if Avatar Earth is a place post singularity wankers dream about with absurd amounts of energy and matter.

No, we actually didn't see anything on Earth other than the inside of a fucking crematorium. We have absolutely no idea what Earth is like in Avatar except that there are implications that the environment has degraded. That doesn't even necessarily imply that humanity is in any sort of danger! Besides which, the "Dying World" comments came from somebody who has become extremely attached to a very natural world and who spent his time on Earth as a marine and a paraplegic. To his standards and the standards of the locals, being very attuned with the particular biology of their planet, a planet of concrete and steel would be a dead world indeed.

[AniThyng]

We didn't see the society in the movie, fuckwit. We saw a fucking mining base on another planet with 90 year old helicopters! We know shit all about the society itself, except that they can make anti-matter. All things considered, it is not implausible that such a society could generate and expend that much energy using anti-matter and fusion, especially given that they have a room temperature superconductor (which is what the entire fucking movie is about) to get that power where they need it.

The standard Avatard fallback - we did not see every square inch of Avatar Earth rendered into Google Earth 3D so critcism is impossible.

The entire premise of the film was that unobtainium was extremely valuable and necessary. The Earth was dying due to enviromental degradation. Jake Sully had to make a big choice about humankind and the navi aliens. You can't have that if Avatar Earth is a place post singularity wankers dream about with absurd amounts of energy and matter.

No, we actually didn't see anything on Earth other than the inside of a fucking crematorium. We have absolutely no idea what Earth is like in Avatar except that there are implications that the environment has degraded. That doesn't even necessarily imply that humanity is in any sort of danger! Besides which, the "Dying World" comments came from somebody who has become extremely attached to a very natural world and who spent his time on Earth as a marine and a paraplegic. To his standards and the standards of the locals, being very attuned with the particular biology of their planet, a planet of concrete and steel would be a dead world indeed.

Indeed, surely most of us know people who "love nature" and bitch about how "souless" the city is. Like I said above, I have grass outside my house and a tree (or two). That's fine by me, but for someone who lives in a jungle in a traditional wooden hut, this is..well. You know. "dead".

Jake Sully's choice was about wether to do the right thing and stand against corporate greed or not. Why you think it must be about the sheer survival of humanity to make the movie work?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Sarevok, have you followed the links from that page to the rest of the Project Rho site? Specifically the bit that deals with the Valkyrie ultralight starship concept?

I freely admit to despising what I felt to be the heavy- handed preachiness and contrivances of the plot, and reacting against them not least by spending the last half of the movie thinking "aha, at last we have found a use for the Genesis Device", but the ship at least is based on an existing design which has been seriously proposed.

As far as I recall from the promotional material- hell, it should be somewhere (much) further back in the thread, Venture Star's payload was two hundred bodies in hibernation and five hundred tons. The ship doesn't have a solid hull, it's basically a framework- it has the general shape of a long, thin stick, because of the use of shadow shielding it pretty much has to be that shape.

The original (which would have to be pretty much a proof of concept) Valkyrie design is for a small ship capable of accelerating to and back from 92% lightspeed, on a mass ratio of 22. We're still talking about well into the thousands of tons of antimatter, but I don't think the millions.

A 'best-guess' for Venture Star's mass, based on payload, somewhere from five to ten thousand tons, which means a fuel load of at most 110,000 tons of antimatter, 110,000 tons of reaction matter- being only intended to reach 0.7c, I've tried to run the numbers and got nonsense, so I'm going to go away and think about that for a bit- the acceleration being so high pushes the fuel fraction way up.

It's a stretch, it says a lot about Sol at this time that they can manufacture that kind of quantity of antimatter; 40,000 tons a year, assuming twelve ships in the fleet making one full round trip every thirty-six years- 40,000,000 kg, x 9E16= more teratonnage than I trust any of the human characters in the movie with, 860 teratonnes worth of antimatter a year and not far below the sun's total annual energy delivered to Earth.

Shit. Sarevok's got a point. This is a society that is throwing around such enormous amounts of power, heat pollution may be a real problem. At this rate it might be easier to resort to a Shkadov Thruster.

[Nyrath]

The only legitimate complaint I see here is the ship's high maximum velocity. If we assume the ship masses ten million metric tons (assuming that it's a giant cube of styrofoam)

I believe that is a trifle high.

According to the Pandorapedia, the ISV Venture Star has a cargo capacity of only 350 metric tons.

The ship is based on Dr. Pelligrino's and Dr. Powell's Valkyrie design.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... l#valkyrie
This means that every single component is optimized to be as low mass as possible. It is made out of gossamer and soap bubbles.
Instead of putting the engines at the base and constructing the ship on top like a sky scraper, it has the engines at the top and the payload is dragged behind by a cable like a motor-boat and water-skier. This cuts the structural mass to a fraction of the conventional design.

Assuming a beam-core matter-antimatter propulsion system, I calculate that to delta-V up to (or down from) 70%c, the ship will require a mass ratio of about 8.2. This means if you take the dry mass of the starship, the mass of the propellant will be 8.2 times that. In other words, the total ship mass will be 9.2 times the dry mass.

Anyway, I'd estimate that the total mass (including animatter and propellant) will be far closer to about 10,000 metric tons than it is to one million metric tons.
So figure that both the laser launch system and the on-board antimatter engine will produce approximately 2.2 x 1023 joules in the process of accelerating/decelerating the ship to 70%c. Which is about three orders of magnitude less that your estimate.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The only legitimate complaint I see here is the ship's high maximum velocity. If we assume the ship masses ten million metric tons (assuming that it's a giant cube of styrofoam)

I believe that is a trifle high.

According to the Pandorapedia, the ISV Venture Star has a cargo capacity of only 350 metric tons.

I just took the dimensions of the ship and assumed the ship was mostly empty space. Except for the bits in the propulsion section. So the initial assumptions may be a bit high. If we compact the dimensions such that the cube is a quarter of its original length and a third of its original width (which leaves us with a set of propellant tanks, two antimatter/fusion engines, and everything else crushed neatly into the remaining volume . . . if that cube had the mean density of styrofoam, it'd still mass 831,121 metric tons. In order to get anywhere near 10,000 metric tons, that cube would have to be comprised entirely of aerogel (~16,000 metric tons.) Gossamer and soap bubbles indeed.

Anyway, I'd estimate that the total mass (including animatter and propellant) will be far closer to about 10,000 metric tons than it is to one million metric tons.
So figure that both the laser launch system and the on-board antimatter engine will produce approximately 2.2 x 1023 joules in the process of accelerating/decelerating the ship to 70%c. Which is about three orders of magnitude less that your estimate.

Over the ~168 days the engines would be lit, that number works out to be 1.52x1016 W of power. Or a 'mere' fifteen million gigawatts. Or a 3.6 megaton nuclear device initiating every single second. The entire ship from the engines aft would need to be made from unobtanium, as given square meter of hull at the habitat module would experience over 4.8 gigawatts of irradiation while the engines were on (assuming the drive nozzles were point sources of radiation, and radiated equally in all directions. It would be less, since the output of the drives would be highly directional. And they'd have to be. In order for that same square meter of hull to see the same 1013 W/m2 of irradiation that a spaceship in Earth orbit would see, no more than 1/47,759ths of a percent of the drive output can impinge upon the ship.)

[Simon_Jester]

The only legitimate complaint I see here is the ship's high maximum velocity. If we assume the ship masses ten million metric tons (assuming that it's a giant cube of styrofoam,) we find that it needs to dispose of 3.594x1026 J of KE in 167.9 days. This works out to a power output of 2.48x1019 W. Assuming that it's a giant cube of aerogel only reduces this by two orders of magnitude. That is to say the ship would require nearly eight million tons of matter and antimatter, and the drive nozzles would be made of . . . well, unobtanium.

So... unobtanium nozzles and it needs to carry roughly its own weight in rocket fuel? Yes, it's absurdly huge, but it's comparable to the energy levels I've heard thrown around for Dyson statite-swarm advocates, that sort of thing.

It's not rock-hard science fiction in the sense that we know damn well we'll have built it come the day, but it's within the bounds of sanity. By the standards of the genre it's pretty good; I'm impressed that they had the decency to put radiator fins on myself. It may not be a plausible interstellar spacecraft we could actually build, but at least it looks more like one than, say, the USS Enterprise or the Millenium Falcon does.

The entire premise of the film was that unobtainium was extremely valuable and necessary. The Earth was dying due to enviromental degradation. Jake Sully had to make a big choice about humankind and the navi aliens. You can't have that if Avatar Earth is a place post singularity wankers dream about with absurd amounts of energy and matter.

So... because they're living on a miserably polluted planet, they can't have large amounts of futuristic heavy industry and space infrastructure? How does that make sense again?

Hell, maybe their planet is miserably polluted because they were so careless about building up industrial capability and launching stuff into space. Maybe they said "Screw you EPA, we want solar power satellites and we want them yesterday!" even if that meant that occasionally a heavy-lift booster would explode and drop a few hundred tons of heavy metal and a few thousand or so tons of rocket fuel into the ocean.

[NecronLord]

What the hell is the whining? It's by far the best you're going to get from movies. Probably until such time as we actually have starships.

[Nyrath]

The entire ship from the engines aft would need to be made from unobtanium, as given square meter of hull at the habitat module would experience over 4.8 gigawatts of irradiation while the engines were on (assuming the drive nozzles were point sources of radiation, and radiated equally in all directions....)

Actually only 1.92 gigawatts, if your calculations are accurate.

Proton-Antiproton annihilation produces, on the average, 1.5 positive pi-mesons, 1.5 negative pi-mesons, and 2.0 neutral pi-mesons. The neutral pi-mesons immediately decay into gamma rays. 2.0 out of 5.0 is 40%, 40% of 4.8 gigawatts is 1.92 gigawatts.

The charged pi-mesons are at such a velocity that they fly about 1.85 kilometers before decaying into gamma rays and neutrinos. The neutrinos are harmless. The gamma rays are not, but the decay point is some distance behind the ship. A distance of 350 meters plus the distance between the nose of the ship and the point in the engine where the initial reaction occurs.

1.92 gigawatts is still a huge amount, but as you say, there must be some way this is being directionalized.

[Anguirus]

So the moral of this story is, the harder you try to have a plausible starship that still allows the plot of your movie to work, the more people will bitch and moan.

Handwaving "implausible power generation" is infinitely preferable to handwaving "fucking magic," and we eat the latter shit up like chocolate crack. (Ref. the name of this fucking website).

Gods.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

It's actually worse than that.

Using Atomic Rocket's calculator for the mass ratio of a relativistic rocket, I ended up with a mass ratio (multiple of times it's own mass in fuel the ship needs to carry) for a sustained acceleration of one point five g for point nine two years, brachistocrone, of ninety. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but...

Even on a 0.7c, eight point two, that's still a lot of antimatter; and in any case, that's a red herring. The ship has to accelerate down from and back up to 0.7c, so would it be excessively wrong to, in practise, square that? Needing the fuel to decelerate the fuel to accelerate again, and all.

That would be a mass ratio over sixty- seven, then, and, well, I can see why they store the passengers in cryo; they probably don't want them breathing carelessly around a mass of antimatter thirty-three times the dry weight of the ship.

Multiplying that by the requirement for the entire cycler fleet, never mind what other interstellar exploration might be going on, and we're looking at several percent of the surface of the face of the Earth in solar panel area to drive the antimatter makers. Possibly far more, considering the likely efficiency of the solar panels and the antimatter plant.

In fact, who needs lasers? The only question would be whether it would be more efficient to build a giant battery of lasers, or the actuators for the solar mirrors so that they could be pointed on to propel Venture Star.

A society that can throw that much power and mass around does not have material problems. It may have all sorts of other problems, not least whoever got elbowed out of the way to make room for this (Hi, we have to strip your continent back to the...well, actually, we'll be mining down to the mantle. Open cast, in case you were wondering. Sorry about the inconvenience) and, I don't know, maybe they tried some kind of environmental remediation project and Yellowstone blew or some such.

In terms of industrial feasibility, I don't see how a straightforward (hah) Daedalus drive would be any less of a project than the antimatter production systems and the power sources for them would be. Probably far less, in fact.

How far away would the capabilities be, the millions of square miles of solar panel and their power output- are we talking about 'strip the Venusian atmosphere back to sensible pressure' levels of power output here? Use the lasers to thaw Mars, blow the excess atmosphere off and cool down Venus? There could be so much more to that universe than we were ever shown.

Basically, we're objecting to Chekhov's Dyson Sphere. The existence of that ship should have consequences that were nowhere to be seen in the rest of the movie.

[Nyrath]

It's actually worse than that.

Using Atomic Rocket's calculator for the mass ratio of a relativistic rocket, I ended up with a mass ratio (multiple of times it's own mass in fuel the ship needs to carry) for a sustained acceleration of one point five g for point nine two years, brachistocrone, of ninety. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but...

Even on a 0.7c, eight point two, that's still a lot of antimatter; and in any case, that's a red herring. The ship has to accelerate down from and back up to 0.7c, so would it be excessively wrong to, in practise, square that? Needing the fuel to decelerate the fuel to accelerate again, and all.

According to the Pandorapedia, antimatter and propellant is available at Alpha Centauri.

The mission profile is:

Mission Profile: 0.46 year initial acceleration @ 1.5 g to reach 0.7 c; 5.83 years cruise @ 0.7 c; 0.46 year deceleration; 1 year loiter in orbit around Pandora; 0.46 year acceleration @ 1.5 g to 0.7 c for return trip; 5.83 years cruise; 0.46 year final deceleration @ 1.5 g to go into orbit around Earth.

The initial 0.46 year acceleration is by laser lightsail. The 0.46 year deceleration is by on-board antimatter rocket.
The ship then re-fuels at Alpha Centauri.
The next 0.46 year acceleration is by on-board antimatter rocket. The final 0.46 year deceleration is by laser lightsail.

As I said previously, with a beam-core antimatter rocket, you can do 0.7 c with a mass ratio of 8.2

[Nyrath]

The gamma rays are not, but the decay point is some distance behind the ship. A distance of 350 meters plus the distance between the nose of the ship and the point in the engine where the initial reaction occurs.

Doing some measurements on an image of the ship, the point in the engine where the initial reaction is about 750 meters from the nose. So the decay point would be a bit more than one kilometer behind the ship.

[Nyrath]

1.92 gigawatts is still a huge amount, but as you say, there must be some way this is being directionalized.

Flogging this dead horse until it is a bloody smear on the pavement, I did some measurements on an image of the ship.

From the engine tips, the habitat module subtends an angle of about seven degrees. To shield the module, you need a plate of tungsten or something dense that casts a gamma-ray shadow over the module. The closer it is to the reaction site, the smaller it can be. (Actually it will probably be more like a cylindrical plug than a plate, that is, taller than its diameter). For instance, if the shadow shield was only ten meters from the reaction, it would have to be four meters in diameter in order to shadow the habitat module.

[Guardsman Bass]

We didn't see the society in the movie, fuckwit. We saw a fucking mining base on another planet with 90 year old helicopters! We know shit all about the society itself, except that they can make anti-matter. All things considered, it is not implausible that such a society could generate and expend that much energy using anti-matter and fusion, especially given that they have a room temperature superconductor (which is what the entire fucking movie is about) to get that power where they need it.

The standard Avatard fallback - we did not see every square inch of Avatar Earth rendered into Google Earth 3D so critcism is impossible.

Don't strawman our position, you fucking twit. We really see very little of what human society is like back home in the movie, and the book only gives hints as to what it's like other than that the Earth is an over-populated, over-polluted waste dump. One of those hints was that by the time of the movie, humanity has pretty extensive presence in the rest of the home solar system, and what we see in the movie is that they have the ability to mass-manufacture anti-matter for their starships. That's the type of civilization that could be throwing around enough energy to build a high-velocity, laser-propulsion system.

The entire premise of the film was that unobtainium was extremely valuable and necessary. The Earth was dying due to enviromental degradation. Jake Sully had to make a big choice about humankind and the navi aliens. You can't have that if Avatar Earth is a place post singularity wankers dream about with absurd amounts of energy and matter.

It was necessary for their bloody train system, and so they could build better starships. The secondary material specifically describes how they had starships and an extensive, advanced civilization before unobtainium - it's just that the former had to be really fucking huge by comparison to the later ones. In other words, they can survive without unobtainium, just like human civilization could survive in the long-term without oil - it's just really, really useful.

Handwaving "implausible power generation" is infinitely preferable to handwaving "fucking magic," and we eat the latter shit up like chocolate crack.

Exactly. Hence why I pointed out the "potentially plausible" aspect of the laser-propulsion - this is not bad compared to how sci-fi movies usually do with regards to space travel.

So... because they're living on a miserably polluted planet, they can't have large amounts of futuristic heavy industry and space infrastructure? How does that make sense again?

Exactly. The secondary material even describes (or at least hints at) them having an extensive off-world presence and travel within their own solar system, although most of humanity still seems to be stuck on Earth.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Well, I thought I had it wrong, and I was right about that at least (self deprecating )

On the other hand, doesn't this mean that there have to be antimatter production facilities in the Alpha Centauri system? On site refuelling of a beam core antimatter pion drive doesn't seem very feasible otherwise, really- and that means two things, first that there's a significant human industrial presence in the system in general, not just on Pandora-

and that the "bomb the stone age people back to the stone age" faction has all the bomb making material it could ever need or want right there to hand. Even if we go with a ten thousand ton ship with 82,000 tons of fuel, presumably half of which is antimatter, they must still be turning out forty-one thousand tons over the time between cycle ships.

It also means they have to be able to establish facilities like that at interstellar distance, which means a Von Neumann swarm to build it on site or a very large interstellar transport, to all practical intents and purposes a colony ship, to bring it.

This just makes a nonsense of large slices of the action in the movie, and of what was supposed to happen afterwards. The background and the foreground are just so far out of synch with each other it ceases to make sense to me- "polluted earth" does not hold together in view of that immense a capability to get things done.

To be honest I'd rather throw away the foreground. I couldn't care less about the sanctimonious super-smurfs; nuke them all and be done with it. To do what they do, Avatar Earth is post- Singularity. I don't see any way to avoid either having earth- sized solar panels supplying all the energy the species could ever want, or fusion reactor farms that look as if the Krell from Forbidden Planet had been unusually busy.

[Anguirus]

Basically, we're objecting to Chekhov's Dyson Sphere. The existence of that ship should have consequences that were nowhere to be seen in the rest of the movie.

Such as? The movie's about Pandora, and it's already a three-hour long epic that revolutionized visual effects. Let's stop poring over incidental material like that stupid book and just see if the sequel is an Empire Strikes Back or a Matrix Revolutions.

So...why again do FTL and/or time-hopping civilizations get a free pass? Unless you have a hard time with SOD with all of Cameron's other science-fiction, not to mention Star Trek (routinely power-limited in their plots) and ANY of such civilizations in which the limitations of power generation have proven a factor in plots, up to and including Star Wars (in which, incidentally, civilizations with catapult artillery twice hold their own against galactic troops and do a damn sight better than the Na'Vi do against a few machine guns).

Never mind that there are clearly reasons in the film universe other than "lack of power generation" that Pandora doesn't get bombed to smithereens (here's a tissue by the way).

Any insinuation that Cameron has claimed that his film is realistic is also false. He's admitted to making the Na'Vi anthropomorphic so that the story can work; undoubtedly, the speed of the Venture Star is another such necessary contrivance. However, he then went the extra mile and designed something that looks like a starship that could actually fly, rather than saying "ok, this shuttle? It can go to hyperspace! And it has GUNS on it!"

All you've really done is affirm that a hard science fiction film that involves interstellar travel is impossible. Also, that the harder one gets, the less it will satisfy you.

(Chekhov's Dyson Sphere indeed. We're talking about a ship that can fart its way to Alpha Centauri in six years and if one little thing goes wrong its passengers never wake up.)

[Anguirus]

Basically, we're objecting to Chekhov's Dyson Sphere. The existence of that ship should have consequences that were nowhere to be seen in the rest of the movie.

Such as? The movie's about Pandora, and it's already a three-hour long epic that revolutionized visual effects. Let's stop poring over incidental material like that stupid book and just see if the sequel is an Empire Strikes Back or a Matrix Revolutions.

So...why again do FTL and/or time-hopping civilizations get a free pass? Unless you have a hard time with SOD with all of Cameron's other science-fiction, not to mention Star Trek (routinely power-limited in their plots) and ANY of such civilizations in which the limitations of power generation have proven a factor in plots, up to and including Star Wars (in which, incidentally, civilizations with catapult artillery twice hold their own against galactic troops and do a damn sight better than the Na'Vi do against a few machine guns).

Never mind that there are clearly reasons in the film universe other than "lack of power generation" that Pandora doesn't get bombed to smithereens (here's a tissue by the way).

Any insinuation that Cameron has claimed that his film is realistic is also false. He's admitted to making the Na'Vi anthropomorphic so that the story can work; undoubtedly, the speed of the Venture Star is another such necessary contrivance. However, he then went the extra mile and designed something that looks like a starship that could actually fly, rather than saying "ok, this shuttle? It can go to hyperspace! And it has GUNS on it!"

All you've really done is affirm that a hard science fiction film that involves interstellar travel is impossible. Also, that the harder one gets, the less it will satisfy you.

(Chekhov's Dyson Sphere indeed. We're talking about a ship that can fart its way to Alpha Centauri in six years and if one little thing goes wrong its passengers never wake up.)