Stargate Universe S2E17 "Common Descent"

[CaptainChewbacca]

The Modern English might be a result of the Kino footage.

Good point; I hadn't thought of that.

Really good point. If we had video footage of 'biblical' prophets using figures of speech, we'd probably use them all the time. Like when the kid said 'awesome'.

[Adrian McNair]

The Modern English might be a result of the Kino footage.

That makes a great deal of sense. If their descendants could turn personnel logs into "The Testament" then it's not much of a stretch that the database of Kino footage is considered to be the holiest thing on the planet. Or maybe the Kino database is The Testament. Maybe I'm needlessly splitting the two things up. In hindsight this is so obvious that I regret making that slight criticism.

[CaptJodan]

That second clip...

Dial down the power, good.

Sixty percent? Wha?

I'm not sure what exactly you're "wha?" about, but here's mine.

Space guns seem to always be so much less effective on the ground than in space against a ship or its shields. 6 drones fire at Destiny, and holy shit the entire ship sparks (they really should have toned this down a bit. It's up to Star Trek levels of absurdity). A drone fires at the planet and a grenade seems more powerful. The same effect here, I guess. To be fair, they used one of the less powerful 3 guns rather than the larger one slung underneath that we've seen only fire once.

When you want to do ground bombardment right in the SG universe, always go for a nuke.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Firing a weapon through an atmosphere isn't a trivial thing. You lose a LOT of energy in the 10-15 miles of air whatever you're firing has to go through before it hits the ground.

[Themightytom]

It makes sense that the gates may not be made from standard materials. There's no guarantee that naquida is a plentiful resource out where Destiny is, maybe the seed ships have to use other materials. That the gates just don't have the range of MW gates may be partly due to these substandard materials. You just can't channel that amount of energy into them.

I agree, Orlin's little Ghetto gate did it's job but could have been easily destroyed, same with the Tolan's Chap'PVC"Ai.

I made that last name up. I'm really thinking it will go viral.

Another aspect of Destiny that I noticed this episode that has also had a pretty solid trend on throughout the series is that the Destiny's sensors seem pretty sub par for most Stargate ships. Either no one was manning the consoles when the Destiny was attacked, or it took till people saw the ships visually before the sensors picked them up. Destiny also didn't seem to alert the crew of movement when they first met the drones in the debris field.

I noticed that, but I am wondering if the drones have some kind of stealth mode that they abandon once they turn on their weapons systems. Destiny can see them once they are attacking, we've seen little dots representing their position.

Or nobody was manning the sensors, or thought to hit the alarm to tell the ship in general they were under attack. I was watching very closely to see if the shields were up when the first drones attacked but the fire didn't reach the ship before the cut scene.

They didn't seem to detect the drone mothership on this episode till it was right on top of them. They didn't try scanning the planet themselves, they had to rely on the shuttle for intel, which had to descend into the planet before it could get accurate readings. All and all, Destiny's sensors haven't impressed me.

Well they said it was "coming into range"
It's possible Destiny's sensor range is damaged too. If i were a drone I'd

So were the purple plants discussed at the begining of the episode being used as dildos, or am I just sick?

You're just sick. I'm guessing you could use them to get high or make booze or something.

Actually I thought that was the implicit suggestion given the glances too. I was wondering what the hell the producers were going for with that.

[Celador]

So were the purple plants discussed at the begining of the episode being used as dildos, or am I just sick?

I thought that the intended implication was that they were either an aphrodisiac or a treatment for erectile dysfunction (because they're purple, of course). Or maybe this is a stealthy response to concerns among fans about the lack of contraception aboard Destiny?

[JME2]

The additional Kino footage next week should also be interesting.

Call me paranoid, but I can't help but wonder if the alternate Rush was completely truthful...

[Ahriman238]

I had a real problem with the episode in that the 'dilemna' felt really forced, in the way that only happens when the obvious solution is overlooked. Destiny has a stargate, so it doesn't really matter if the stargate on Novus works or not. They could fly to the Novus, dial the colony planet to say wheter Novus was there or not, and if it was start bringing them through the gate and shipping them down with the shuttle. If, seems to be the case, Novus was abandoned and lifeless, they could just say so and move one, no life-support wasted carrying extra people. Instead they act like Desiny would be abandoning them and offering only the thin hope that they may repair the novus gate. I realize it became a moot point with the drone attack and the ordered shutdown of gate activity, but it really drags down an episode when artificial crises like this happen, just like it dragged down Seizure.

[Bladed_Crescent]

The flaw in that plan lies in the shuttle; it can only carry a handful of people at a time and there were so many colonists that simply a week of transporting them would deplete Destiny's food and life support stores. That's likely hundreds, possibly (though I'd guess unlikely) thousands of people, depending on the size of the other settlements and the plant's original population. Plus their cargo - these people have been living on their colony for thirty years, while they may understand the necessity of leaving everything behind for a ride on Destiny, gating in is likely to provoke a different reaction. i.e. 'why can't I have all my stuff? It's not going to be taking up space on your ship and without it, all we'll have is the clothes on our back!'

That's a lot of shuttle trips. Let's do some rough (i.e. ass-pull) numbers: Let's say there are 1,000 people on the colony world, scattered all over the various settlements.

10 people + cargo, 1 hour per round-trip. 100 hours. Running nonstop flights, that's 5 days spent just shuttling people down to the surface, 5 days in which Destiny is vulnerable to drone attack and endangering Novus as well.

If we reduce the number of colonists or people crammed into each shuttle, then than number goes down (and if the time for each shuttle flight is longer than an hour, it'll go up), but you're still looking at a couple days minimum, days which Destiny is still risking attack all that time, since at that point, they weren't sure if/how the drones were tracking them.

Edited for population sizes.

[Alyeska]

There were at most three hundred people on the colony. The main colony was said to have a hundred people with "A couple other settlements". Couple is two. Rough estimation, 300 people. Shuttle has enough light support for something like 15 people for several hours. So for the time to get from orbit to planet is even quicker.

[NecronLord]

It's not going to be an hour per trip.

Destiny is capable of accellerating at a hundred gravities, low end, and her shuttle must be able to do close to that from its various appearances, though it is slower. Let's say 30 Gs for the shuttle.

At that speed it can power directly (fuck this pansy orbits shit) to geostationary orbit in eleven and a half minutes, and come to a relative stop with an object there.

Far far less if Destiny is in LEO or something, which would be more reasonable (fuel is essentially free to Destiny, so it doesn't need to worry much about what orbit it's in) it's just over a minute's flight time.

The shuttle has twelve passenger seats.

First trip down delivers some guys to coordinate the locals. Plus three crew on the shuttle.

Three hundred locals, batches of twelve, twenty five trips. Two shuttles.

• Five minutes to load shuttle
• One minute to orbit
• One minute to dock with Destiny
• Five minutes to offload passengers
• One minute to get down again
• One minute to land.

Given that the shuttle seems to have to worry about atmospheric resistance and such, it's gonna be more than that, but a round trip could be fifteen or twenty minutes easily, including the loading and unloading. Remember, while the locals are waiting, they can be packing their stuff to go in the shuttle.

We've thirteen trips needed (the second shuttle will handle twelve of them plus one to take Destiny's people back) by twenty minutes and we're looking at on the order of four hours twenty minutes, more if we account for the necessary water, tea, toilet, etc breaks for the pilots.

Shit's going to happen, but it's easily doable inside six hours.