Science in the Re-imagined Series
The re-imagined Series thrives on concentration of its story and the characters that develop it, rather than attempting to awe its audience by futuristic technology. Nevertheless, Battlestar Galactica is still a science-fiction program and attempts to adhere to Einsteinian, Euclidian and Newtonian principles as we know them here on the real-world Earth when ships, characters, and events require a particular physical result in, say, a space battle or during travel.
This article summarizes or notes information about scientific objects and events in the Mini-Series and regular series and attempts to draw more information, cite problems or contraditions, or conclusions of the scientiic principles revealed as part of the series' plot. In short, this article analyzes Battlestar Galactica's "technobabble" and determines how much of it is accurate, interesting, or just plain made-up.
Why Gaeta Will Never be "Spock"[edit]
The writers intentionally avoid having characters discuss in depth any super-technical particulars in the Regular Series. This is logical in that, if the characters know that they can or cannot reach a particular location (they can see their own displays), there's no practical reason for the characters to discuss it amongst themselves (and therefore to us); it would be meaningless dialogue in a show that is heavily supported by the personalities of the characters (and is limited in time to tell viewers a story). The iracible Colonel Tigh would look at Lieutenant Gaeta as if he grew a third eye in his forehead if Gaeta started to spout off the precise distances and time necessary for Galactica to travel from place to place. Talking about such minutae in BSG is just not in character.
Still, the show gives us clues about the solar system of the Twelve Colonies to note some interesting facts.
Distances and Speeds in the Mini-Series[edit]
- Battlestar Galactica was approximately 335,540,340 miles from one of the Colonies, ostensibly Caprica, at the start of the Mini-Series.
- To reach this number, we needed clues from Billy Keikeya, onboard Colonial Heavy 798, enroute to the battlestar for its decommissioning ceremony. In the Mini-Series, Billy tells Laura Roslin that he had sent a copy of her ceremony speech to President Adar for review, but warns that there is a time delay of 30 minutes between Galactica and (ostensibly) Adar's location. Adar's actual location was never specified in the show, but we may make an educated presumption that the President resided on Caprica as that appeared to be the seat of the Colonial Government Template:Ref.
- We know that Battlestar Galactica's universe sticks to the same speed of light constant as real-world Earth (and the universe, of course): 186,282 miles per second. If President Adar sent a wireless message from Caprica to Galactica in an attempt to correct Roslin's speech, how long would it take the message to get there? Billy gives this answer: 30 minutes. This gives the answer we need if we use the equation that distance=speed x time:
- (3 x 10^8) (the speed of light in meters/sec) x 1800 (number of seconds in 30 minutes) = 5.4 x 10^11 meters
- Simplfied, the wireless message travels over 335.5 million miles in 30 minutes to Galactica.
- Colonial Heavy 798 is travelling at a sublight speed of over 61,000,000 miles per hour to get to Galactica for the decommissioning ceremony.
- Right after Billy Keikeya's conversation to Laura Roslin on her speech, we overhear the captain of Colonial Heavy 798 on the public address intercom of the starliner, telling the passengers how long their trip to Galactica will take: 5.5 hours. Assuming that the starliner has just left the neighboring space of Caprica and has reached its cruising speed, and given that we know Galactica's distance from Caprica, we can determine Colonial Heavy 798's cruising speed with the same formula as above, now adjusted to calculate speed:
- 540000000000 (the speed of light in meters/sec) / 19800 (the number of seconds in 5.5 hours) =
- 27272727.28 meters/sec
- While Colonial Heavy 798 is making a very serious clip across space at 61, 009, 090 miles per hour on its sublight engines, this is only approximately 11 percent of the speed of light, so passenger liners do well in getting from place to place, or colony to colony. To give a real-world comparison, Colonial Heavy 798 could fly from our sun to the Earth in about 90 minutes. The light from the sun takes only 8 minutes to arrive on the Earth's surface.
Sources[edit]
Template:Note In an early draft of the Mini-Series script, Laura speaks by wireless to "Jack", a fellow secretary or government official. Jack tells Laura of the devastation of Caprica City and Adar's speculated whereabouts and actions. The aired Mini-Series has this scene and does not give Jack's location, but the early draft indicates that Jack is very close to Caprica City.