Did anyone actually like the ending to nBSG?

[Iosef Cross]

A Battlestar has, about 4-5 times the length of a Nimitz (hence, about 100 times the volume, probably more since a battlestar is fatter than a carrier) and much more advanced technology. If 10% of the ship mass is used for manufacturing facilities, I think that it's operational performance wouldn't suffer much, and that gives 10 times the volume of a Nimitz carrier, just to make vipers.

I find that kind of self sufficiency perfectly reasonable.

Sacrificing 10% of a ship's internal volume to manufacturing doesn't significantly impact its combat performance now? Do tell...

Well, perhaps not at the point of making the manufacture of vipers into something less useful than 10% of the ship's volume.

You think 10 times the volume of a Nimitz carrier is large?

Well, 300 meters per 40 meters tall and 40 meters wide is large? If you have a factory space with a 10 meter tall cellar, that gives 48,000 square meters of factory floor space. You can do a hell lot of manufacturing in that space.

Try housing 25 000 people (the estimated amount of personnel involved in manufacturing of an F-22) and their machinery in that space. Just the final assembly facility for the F-22 clocks in at 4000 square meters...and that literally a place where they put the things together from parts shipped in from all over the country, no real heavy machinery required.

If the Battlestar has 10% of their volume reserved for manufacturing space, that's like 120 times the size of the F-22 final assembly facility. I think that space is not the problem.

In fact, I think that people don't know how large such ships can be: Manhattan has 300 million square feet of office space, that's 30 million square meters or the size of a building 1 km side by side and 30 stories high (120 meters). A single Battlestar has comparable size to that.

[Stofsk]

Internal volume is not the sole problem. As has been pointed out, there are so many factors that go into the manufacture of fighter craft that viper production wouldn't be any less complicated.

Now if they had expanded on this and pointed out how it was a fleet-wide effort, which made use of the better (more advanced) maintenance facilities on the Pegasus vs Galactica, then this would be more plausible. As it stands, they only seemed to think raw materials was the only thing missing from the equation.

[Iosef Cross]

I liked the finale, it had a bit of bad ideas, but they had to wrap everything together in some way.

[PeZook]

Well, perhaps not at the point of making the manufacture of vipers into something less useful than 10% of the ship's volume.

Dude, what?

You said it yourself: 10% of a battlestar is a gigantic volume. You could store tens of thousands of shells and Viper munitions there!

That's some really huge impact on combat performance.

Well, 300 meters per 40 meters tall and 40 meters wide is large? If you have a factory space with a 10 meter tall cellar, that gives 48,000 square meters of factory floor space. You can do a hell lot of manufacturing in that space.

Yes, you could almost fit 1/3rd of an engine production plant in that space

And of course, on Earth, the manufacturing plant doesn't have to house its own material processing plants, employee living spaces, power plants and life support.

If the Battlestar has 10% of their volume reserved for manufacturing space, that's like 120 times the size of the F-22 final assembly facility. I think that space is not the problem.

Did you miss the part where I wrote that it's just the final assembly plant? Pratt&Whitney's engine plants alone have an area of 56 000 square meters ; And they don't even make much of their own materials! For 56 000 square meters you get:

# North Haven, Conn.: The 1,600 employees in this 800,000-square-foot facility make turbine and compressor blades and vanes.
# North Berwick, Me.: Here, 1,500 employees in an 880,000 square-foot facility manufacture blades, vanes, bearing compartments, and stators.

For a comparatively low-performance F-22 engine. No ball bearings, no electronics, no wiring made on-site.

Then you need to add employee living spaces and social rooms like mess halls (because they can't just commute to work from their own places), sanitation and the biggest killer: power generators and life support systems.

So if we take you calculation at face value, we have 480 000 square meters available, probably laid out in several decks. If we assume one factory worker needs a measly three sqquare meters of living space, that's 84 thousand square meters spent on living space alone. You can cut it with stuff like hot-bunking, of course, so we can assume half of this living space is actually needed because two people can use one bunk.

So we're already 1/4 of the way through with just engine manufacturing facilities and the final assembly area. How about a steel mill (it has to be huge: you need lots of different kinds of steel, from turbine blades to reactor vessels)? A composite manufacturing plant? Electronics and avionics facilities? Each one of them can easily be as large as the engine plants (probably much larger), and is essential to manufacturing really primitive atmospheric aircraft, as opposed to transatmospheric high-performance space fighters.

As an added bonus, try figuring out the power requirements (and thus power production facilities needed) to run all this shit. Actually, I was wrong: you could store millions of rounds for the main guns in those spaces. And spares. And damage control gear. And fire control computers, and viper munitions or just use the space to thicken the armor.

[Sarevok]

If you could manufacture an aerospace fighter using nothing but rocks then you dont need a planet. You can make whatever you want. New cities on asteroids, habitats on airless worlds, new capital warships etc. The Colonial fleet would have absolutely no resource crisis at all if their manufacturing was so advanced.

[Mayabird]

Nitpicks ahoy! (Sorry man, but I couldn't help it.)

The theme of the show is all about war, and the terrible things it makes people do, and how in the end you should love your enemy.

The cylons exterminated a couple billion people. I don't think "loving your enemy" really works here.

Fifty billion, they said at one point. Fifty billion for the total population of the Twelve Colonies, and less than fifty thousand survive to the end.

Remember Adama ad-libbing a speech asking whether or not humans were even worthy to survive?

I blame it on the depression of watching your entire civilization turned into a charnal house.

If I'm thinking of the one he's talking about, this was Adama's speech as Galactica was being decommissioned and he was being cut loose, so the civilization hadn't been destroyed yet but he was still rather gloomy about the whole thing.

[Junghalli]

Well, try fixing that without breaking the entirety of Earth's history as known to the Cylon-Human hybrids running around Earth in 2009.

Instead of 150,000 years ago have them arrive ~10-12,000 years ago. Then their arrival would coincide with the historical beginning of agriculture, and you could say they introduced agriculture to Earth. It would also make the idea that the Colonials influenced historical Earth culture and religions somewhat workable as opposed to basically laughable unless you invoke magic.

[Sarevok]

Darth wong had the best idea to end BSG. The colonials arrive in bronze age greece and become source of their mythology. Add ancient astronaut and nuclear weapons in hindu epics references and you close bsg with tantalizing possibilities that beg a sequel.

[Stravo]

I'm coming in late on this and I totally missed the debates here on the finale but reading through portions of the thread there seem to be two camps:

Giving up the technology was really stupid and made absolutely no sense.

It made sense to me, I liked it.


I know it sounds silly but that's how I read it. For the record I liked the ending and there were tears when Adama sat alone on that hiltop with his dead wife and the music just sealed it for me.

Now, with that in mind, rationally giving up technology to live like cavemen was fucking silly. Flies in the face of all reason and considering the (realistic) bickering for every decision made in the fleet seemed to make no sense to me that no one put up a fight about giving up their technology. Try to talk me into even going camping for one night is a sheer impossibility and you're telling these people to give it all up? Yeah. OK.

HOWEVER as someone who appreciates what the writers were trying to do with nBSG it absolutely makes sense and gives us an amazingly closed circle of a story that embraces one of the key concepts of the series. "This has happened before and it will happen again" It was stated clearly in the early episodes of the series, appeared as part of a choral chant in one episode on the soundtrack and foreshadowed over and over again - hell, the back story of the Final Five is all about that theme. And what is that theme? Man stole the secret of life from the Lords of Kobol and like Prometheus and his fire were cursed ever after. There is a cycle of the creators creating life and being destroyed by it happening throughout the series mythology - including to the Lords of Kobol themselves.

It was intimated that the only way to stop it was break the cycle and breaking cycles in fiction is no easy feat and requires a dramatic change. In this instance the abandonment of all things technological and a return to Eden. Is it a message we as rational scientifically minded people like? No, but does it resonate with some and is a theme that has popped up now and again in human fiction? Sure is.

So, in context of the series itself and its message (remember fellow anti-religious folks this show also heartily declared there is a God at the end of the series too) this climax was true to the spirit of the show and personally satisfying to a fan like me.

Taken in the cold light of reason and such this ending was ridiculous and did not make much sense and when you take into account that one of the big things people liked about this show was how "realistic, gritty and human" this show was then yeah, I can see why there was a backlash. But in the end it was a satisfying ending for me that had its sad moments (Apollo and Starbuck always destined to be apart) and its great ones. (Battle of the Colony)

This was an ending I think you had to watch with heart open and not just your mind, it was not a rational ending per se but more of an emtional one.

By the way some people mentioned that they would have liked to see them arrive in the Bronze Age. That was Moore's original idea, that they arrive during the Trojan War and inspired the Greek pantheon, etc. but he felt that was too Western-centric and wanted a more universal connection to humanity so they went for the current ending.

[Sarevok]

But the cycle and breaking it was both artificial and forced. The cycle only existed because writters thought it sounded cool at the time. Its like the philosophy in Matrix : Reloaded made up of bunch of deep sounding words pasted togather. Taken as a whole BSGs timeline makes even less sense than star trek.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ooooo that was a low blow I think.

Anyway. Several points. The muppet who brought up the Viper manufacturing? We already sorted this earlier int he thread. We concluded, at length, that it was an assembly plant using stored components on Pegasus and possbly with some aid from the Fleet. We just dont get told this because we are too busy watching Starbuck doing her mano a mano fight with Scar

Second, the finale, whilst nor brilliant, was not the worst I have seen. It managed to wrap up much of not most of the plotlines and answer some old question (Would Lee and Starbuck get together? No. What about Adama and Roslin? Pretty much yes. and so on). Admittedly it was flawed, but I challnge you to find me a series finae that WASNt flawed in some way.

Incidentally, "Daybreak" was much better than, say, "the End of Time" (NuWho) or "What you leave behind" (DS9)

[Sarevok]

Not to beat the dead horse but... If a battlestar has room for enough spare parts to build additional viper squadrons then why not carry additional squadrons instead ? A battlestars fighter complement is downright small compared to its vast size. Why bother wasting space building a fighter when a battlestar could have twice as many vipers ready to fight.

[PeZook]

Not to beat the dead horse but... If a battlestar has room for enough spare parts to build additional viper squadrons then why not carry additional squadrons instead ? A battlestars fighter complement is downright small compared to its vast size. Why bother wasting space building a fighter when a battlestar could have twice as many vipers ready to fight.

There could be many reasons due to circumstances: for example, they could have spare engines stored, but combat losses mean they lack airframes to put them in. Depending on how long battlestars need to operate alone, they very well might have a good supply of advanced components onboard just to service their vipers during normal operations: their engines are really high performance, after all, it's likely their service lives aren't all that great.

So when they lose Vipers, they cannibalize recovered wrecks, try and make the parts they can in machine shops and use their spare parts stores for what they can't make in order to keep the numbers up.

[Sarevok]

Have we ever seen them recover destroyed vipers and rebuild them though ? It is a nice idea and makes sense. But has it happened onscreen ?

[Stofsk]

Have we ever seen them recover destroyed vipers and rebuild them though ? It is a nice idea and makes sense. But has it happened onscreen ?

They built the Phoenix entirely this way.

EDIT- of course, that's now what Roslin was talking about in 'Scar'. Nobody mentioned cannibalising damaged vipers, but manufacture whole new ones out of mined ore.

To a degree, I accept some handwaves, but this was stretching it too far. Either the writers didn't think too hard about it, or they didn't care.

[Skylon]

Have we ever seen them recover destroyed vipers and rebuild them though ? It is a nice idea and makes sense. But has it happened onscreen ?

They built the Phoenix entirely this way.

EDIT- of course, that's now what Roslin was talking about in 'Scar'. Nobody mentioned cannibalising damaged vipers, but manufacture whole new ones out of mined ore.

To a degree, I accept some handwaves, but this was stretching it too far. Either the writers didn't think too hard about it, or they didn't care.

I recall Lee mentioning in season 2 that they had to cannibalize a Raptor in order to fly another one (specifically, during the arc where Baltar, the Chief and Crashdown were stranded on Kobol).

[Sarevok]

Have we ever seen them recover destroyed vipers and rebuild them though ? It is a nice idea and makes sense. But has it happened onscreen ?

They built the Phoenix entirely this way.

EDIT- of course, that's now what Roslin was talking about in 'Scar'. Nobody mentioned cannibalising damaged vipers, but manufacture whole new ones out of mined ore.

To a degree, I accept some handwaves, but this was stretching it too far. Either the writers didn't think too hard about it, or they didn't care.

If the writters replaced mine ore for making fighters with harvesting fuel there would not be a problem. The episodes plot would work just fine regardless.

[Lord Insanity]

Instead of 150,000 years ago have them arrive ~10-12,000 years ago. Then their arrival would coincide with the historical beginning of agriculture, and you could say they introduced agriculture to Earth. It would also make the idea that the Colonials influenced historical Earth culture and religions somewhat workable as opposed to basically laughable unless you invoke magic.

See I would wager most viewers know nothing about the actual archeological time frames involved and just assumed that is what happened in the end. I certainly didn't know any different when I first saw the ending and as a result thought it was awesome that they founded civilization. Well obviously I know better now.

[Captain Piett]

Have we ever seen them recover destroyed vipers and rebuild them though ? It is a nice idea and makes sense. But has it happened onscreen ?

They built the Phoenix entirely this way.

EDIT- of course, that's now what Roslin was talking about in 'Scar'. Nobody mentioned cannibalising damaged vipers, but manufacture whole new ones out of mined ore.

To a degree, I accept some handwaves, but this was stretching it too far. Either the writers didn't think too hard about it, or they didn't care.

IIRC the Viper manufacturing facilities were on Pegasus, so they were long gone by Daybreak.

[Omega18]

See a pattern? We're looking at a gulf of at least a hundred thousand years where things we would consider fundamental and basic, even in a Luddite society, do not exist. That means that every last scrap of culture, of music, of thought, of learning, of everything was utterly erased, and fast too, before anything could spread. And if they had been successful things would have spread, but they didn't and had to wait tens of thousands of years to be reinvented. Things like the lack of bows and arrows are most damning because in hunter-gatherer terms, the advantage bows give over other forms of hunting like spears are huge, and you don't need a large advantage to become dominant. The Neanderthals were believed to have been driven to extinction by a 3% difference in reproductive success in comparison to the Cro-Magnons that would have been their contemporaries, and the Cro-Mags probably did not have bows, as mentioned above. Even with just the shirts on their backs, the Colonials would have carried with them knowledge they would have considered primitive and basic that would have been revolutionary 150,000 years ago.

If anything you're still understating the case here.

Even the very basic detail of modern medicine regarding cleaning and defecting wounds would be relevant. In fact, since its not that hard to ferment things to produce alcohol, they should have been able to effectively disenfect wounds, which should give them a major advantage over the other humans living a hunter gatherer lifestyle.

We're not just talking about bows and arrow either, even if you ignore the agriculture issue. (It should be noted that the Atatl to aid spear throwing only appeared around 15,000 BC or perhaps a little earlier historically.) I've seen figures suggesting nets were invented around 30,000 BC, but nets and similar traps used for fishing were apparently closer to 10,000 B.C. The point is use of fishing nets gives a massive advantage over trying to just use a speer to catch fish by comparison. NBSG humans should have been able to gain knowledge of when various fish such as salmon spawned, and have used their netting techniques and the like to catch a massive number of them, which is conjunction with food preservation techniques should have given them a further survival edge. Another big notable detail is snares to catch small game perhaps appeared around 40,000 BC or less, and effectively diversified the hunting base of those using them without them having to expend a huge amount of effort. (Trying to catch small mammals and birds with spears is very likely to be futile, and even with bows it can be quite tricky.) Humans using these technologies will considerably out compete human groups not using them.

Assuming NBSG survival to any degree in anything resembling survival in about the same area, barring a somehow systemic decision not to obtain such technology, at a minimum copper and probably bronze working technology should have been rediscovered quite quickly. Spearheads, arrowheads, and axes made out of these substances provides some huge advantages over stone tools which among other things become far more easily broken. Once this technology was known, it was not the sort of thing that would be lost given the advantages it provided. Copper began to be used around 5,500 BC at the earliest by current estimates historically.

The point is while the idea doesn't make any sense since the NBSG humans should have survived in significant numbers given the advantages they had, the only way to try to explain their lack of at least technological impact is to assume basically everyone other than Hera almost immediately died.

[Kuroji]

(Here I created an account because I had an urge to write a fanfic and post it somewhere, instead I get drawn into a critique of the end of nBSG...)

Anything... anything that they could have preserved of their civilization would have been of insane value to the preservation of the very concept of civilization, let alone the development of a new one. Any number of things that most people would consider trivial... proper bathing practices? Washing your hands (even if it's just before you eat)? Let alone creation and adoption of anything beyond the most simple tools. These are simple things that you don't even need language to teach -- one can learn by doing, so even if your entire species gets wiped out by native disease in a decade, the indigenous culture can go 'oh hey, my food doesn't taste as much like dirt'.

Actually, come to think of it, there may be all of one thing that was kept, considering they appeared about a hundred fifty millenia ago; cooking meat before eating it. That, itself, was an insanely useful thing to humanity's development down the line. That is, assuming that anthropologists are off by a hundred thousand years on when people started cooking their food... but on the other hand, they could have helped introduce stone tools. And there is the possibility that the indigenous humans killed the Colonials, took Hera, and went 'oh hey, these clothes are pretty snazzy' as that might put things at about the right point.

[Gramzamber]

Call me a cynic, but the entire situation seems to me to be engineered to maintain the cycle, not break it.
What's the best way to repeat your mistakes? Forget all about them of course. This is why the concept utterly fails if you try to reason it by saying "oh they're breaking the cycle!".

That's bullshit. Sure the abandonment of all technology will halt the development of AI for eons, but when subsequent generations who aren't luddite back-to-nature wankers advance again, and they've forgotten all about the lessons YOU learned because YOU didn't preserve them then they're going to make the same mistakes too.
Well if you subscribe to the theory that the development of AI will inevitably lead to a robot apocalypse, which I personally don't, but regardless you've made damn sure that future generations won't have ANY reason for caution because they don't know what happened in the past.

From a rational or storytelling point of view, the only way it makes sense to me is that "god"/angels/superbeings whatever the hell they are are the masterminds of an ultra long-term sinister plan to keep humans in this cycle of destruction. Perhaps the old keep humans from advancing to their level trope, or to forcibly advance them through some sort of large scale social Darwinism.
Yes yes, I know it isn't the writer's intention to make "god"/angels the sinister bad guys with a horrific plan to maintain a cycle of genocide but that's how it comes off to me as because that is how horrible the ending is.

[Kuroji]

Call me a cynic, but the entire situation seems to me to be engineered to maintain the cycle, not break it.
What's the best way to repeat your mistakes? Forget all about them of course. This is why the concept utterly fails if you try to reason it by saying "oh they're breaking the cycle!".

That's bullshit. Sure the abandonment of all technology will halt the development of AI for eons, but when subsequent generations who aren't luddite back-to-nature wankers advance again, and they've forgotten all about the lessons YOU learned because YOU didn't preserve them then they're going to make the same mistakes too.
Well if you subscribe to the theory that the development of AI will inevitably lead to a robot apocalypse, which I personally don't, but regardless you've made damn sure that future generations won't have ANY reason for caution because they don't know what happened in the past.

From a rational or storytelling point of view, the only way it makes sense to me is that "god"/angels/superbeings whatever the hell they are are the masterminds of an ultra long-term sinister plan to keep humans in this cycle of destruction. Perhaps the old keep humans from advancing to their level trope, or to forcibly advance them through some sort of large scale social Darwinism.
Yes yes, I know it isn't the writer's intention to make "god"/angels the sinister bad guys with a horrific plan to maintain a cycle of genocide but that's how it comes off to me as because that is how horrible the ending is.

Exactly the problem. There are two very easy ways that you could keep this sort of situation from happening all over again, honestly. But I think you're absolutely right -- whether it's a deity or some other outside force that's manipulating the whole situation, it seems to be perpetuating the cycle of destruction.

In the past, you had your first uprising on Kobol, and the people of the Twelve Colonies buggered off for whatever system or systems they ended up inhabiting (some quasi-canon material says they were all in a single system, I bet any astronomer who saw it would have an aneurysm). Everyone who didn't leave Kobol initially ends up having to go to Earth due to whatever war rendered it utterly inhabitable (and I wonder whether this also involved Cylons but I don't recall offhand)... and on Earth the Cylons rose up again and ended up killing off humanity. And then the Cylons rose up against themselves on Earth, and there were all of five survivors. Then the Cylons with the Twelve Colonies rise up and approximately one millionth of their original number manages to escape to another Earth outright, and lay low for at least... what, a hundred fifty thousand years, after throwing away every last bit of their civilization.

Two very easy, very simple ways to prevent this from happening again. Which obviously were never thought of by the survivors, sadly... if they'd just pulled their collective head out of their collective ass, they probably could have thought of them fairly easily.

Option one... have your idiotic society realize that slavery against any sentient being, whether it's made of flesh or silicon, is immoral and unacceptable.

Option two? Take the Dune approach. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.

[Gramzamber]

The irony is Colonial society already embraced many fundamental rights, like racial and gender equality.
Yes there was still tension between the colonies themselves, particularily religious, but I think I'd take that over Athenian democracy, where only white men could vote.
Isn't that the kind of thing you want to preserve in order to make a less destructive society? Oh no let's blame everything on technology and culture! Clearly the lessons of not enslaving sentient beings have no bearing on any of this!

[Iosef Cross]

Obs. In Ancient Athens there wasn't any concept of "white men", only citizens could vote, i.e. sons of Athenian citizens born in Athens.