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"

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

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.

Artificial Gravity

(Much of this topic is derived from information in an article on subject on Wikipedia. Not all of Battlestar Wiki's contributors are rocket scientists.)

Of course, it's very practical for humans, who evolved in gravity, to have it aboard their ships. Cinematically, it also makes it much easier to keep production costs down by not having to simulate weightlessness.

That doesn't mean we can let the Colonial Fleet get away with just having artificial gravity without some explanation, especially given Ron D. Moore's realistic science fiction principles of his show. From a science fiction perspective, this has always been the hardest "technology" to explain away in a show. Most shows don't even bother unless the temporary loss of artificial gravity would make a good plot complication.

From what our scientists have theorized here on the real-world Earth, you can generate gravity from several ideas:

Rotation of the spacecraft to generate centrifugal forces within a spacecraft.

Remember the playground merry-go-rounds of your youth? Same principle. In fact, one of the Fleet's ships uses this form of artificial gravity when it feels like it: the Space Park. Viewers can get a good view of this ship in motion when the Fleet leaves Ragnar Anchorage in the Mini-Series.

Keeping the ship at constant acceleration, with the crew standing in the opposite direction of acceleration.

Same principle that every astronaut experiences as their rocket launches into space and accelerates. In this principle, you won't take your hands off the throttle, keeping the ship's engines on at all times.

Place something with a lot of mass within your ship.

This isn't artificial gravity, but the real thing. But there is the matter of the energies required to move your ship, the large gravity well that wants to attract other objects into your ship's general direction, and the shape of your ship. Gravity just works, pulling from every direction, so you would need a round ship to keep from strange changes in gravity aboard a ship. Worst of all, the amount of fuel needed to move a ship with a local mass concentration would be really, really high.

Use tidal forces.

Stretch a tether with a small mass between a large gravity source and the ship you want. Cheap, fuel-free, and reliable. There's the matter of actually being able to travel somewhere besides planetary orbit without losing gravity, however.

Fake gravity by using another classic force, magnetism.

The big term for this is diamagnetism, or, more specificially for this application, diamagnetic levitation. Based on the technologies we've seen in the Re-imagined Series (such as their use of magnetism for landing and launching Vipers)Template:Ref, this principle has the most viability, but it also fraught with huge problems in application.

Everything has a magnetic attraction, but most objects (a human body included) has so little magnetism that we don't really think about it. This principle could be used to force everything in a particular direction. But, first off, using magnets together usually makes objects float between them, not drop, so you have to figure out how to angle things for the proper effect. Scientists here on Earth have actually levitated a frog at a force of 1g (Earth's gravity), but it took a massive amount of cryogeneically frozen hardware to do it, and that was using the magnet to push away from Earth's gravity, not push the object down. Also, high magnetic field concentrations are probably not very healthy] in the long term.

If the writers have to dive back into the old fictionalized bag of tricks, you could consider these fanciful notions for keeping your deck crews on the deck:

Use rotational gravity.

This variation of centrifugal gravity generation has been done in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (the crew compartment inside the Discovery spun) and the venerable TV show "Babylon 5" (the cylindrical space station spun on its longitudinal axis).

Simulate gravity with force fields.

The central spaceship in the TV show "Andromeda" uses "gravity generators". The "Star Trek" saga has a similar idea. This concept seems also to be a slap in the face of realistic SF concepts since it's a completely fanciful concept with no basis in scientific plausibilty at present.

So, there are no definitive answers to this issue, and the concept of artificial gravity in the show has yet to be explained anytime soon by the writers. Maybe a Raptor will lose their gravity on a mission one day in an episode, and the writers will have to have the characters curse about the issue.

Light-speed Travel

The good news is that, from a theoretical point of view, the Re-imagined Series has this covered well by the use of wormhole theory, instead of grandiose methods such as in "Star Trek", through the use of fantastic energies. For more detail on how Jumps work and how the Colonial's manner of apparent faster-than-light travel differs from the more fanciful non-Einsteinian "warp drive" technology in "Star Trek", see the article on Faster Than Light travel.

Why Didn't Colonial Heavy 798 simply Jump to Galactica?

In the Miniseries, the starliner known as Colonial Heavy 798 took its time and traveled 5.5 hours at sublight speeds to get to battlestar Galactica. Why did the starliner take its sweet time? Why didn't they simply Jump to Galactica to save time?

There are several possibilities.

Discomfort. FTL travel is a very disconcerting sensation to most humans. Even trained military staff such as Cally hated the sensation caused by wormhole travel. And, if the Colonies are full of lawyers as the real-world Earth is, think of the litigation created by people who aren't prepared for Jumping, and sue the starliners. Starliners would rather not Jump if they can help it, and probably explicitly warn travelers when they book a Jumping flight.
Scheduling. Galactica's decommissioning ceremonies were for a specific time and date. While Intersun could have created an FTL flight, passengers still need time (mentally or physically) to prepare for their trip. As humans without instantaneous travel ability, we may not realize that such travel may create issues of logistics for passengers (many who are late or procrastinate) who actually anticipate that they will get 5 hours to plan for their event, or to just sleep.
Flight rules or protocol. It may be against Colonial flight protocols for any non-military vessel to Jump to the adjoining space of a Colonial Fleet vessel. This makes the most sense because ships such as battlestars are always on the lookout for a sudden appearance of any ship that approaches them; they are a warship, after all. An incident where Vipers are scrambled from a battlestar after a civilian ship Jumps too closely would be like a Lear Jet flying too closely to a United States aircraft carrier. If Colonial Heavy 798 were to Jump straight to the battlestar, all kinds of alarms would go off in CIC until the battlestar could verify the incoming vessel was friendly. And, given that terrorism existed in the Colonies, even a "friendly" vessel may not be necessarily non-hostile (remember the events of September 11, 2001).

The Tylium Question

Tylium is a curious substance in the universe where the Twelve Colonies resides. Used by both Colonials and their foes, tylium has the properties of a mineral or fossil fuel in as that the substance is mined and refined. Like some fossil fuels, tylium isn't useable until refined. While the ore can't be detonated, its precursor (similar to refined crude oil before its refinement into gasoline and other products) is very explosive. The fuel itself isn't as explosive as precursor, however.

So, is tylium a made-up substance or would it have a counterpart or comparative substance to the elements we know of here on the real-world Earth?

One speculation is that tylium can possibly be similar to Helium-3Template:Ref. Helium-3 is a primordial component in the Earth's crust, is deposited via solar wind on moons and asteroids. But, while helium-3 has potention as an energy source, the amount of energy needed to ignite it (fusion) would be more than the energy it would expel for use as an energy by-product.

There is a problem with this speculation in that helium-3 is a gas, not a mineral or solid element. A tylium counterpart should be a solid, non-radioactive, and likely non-organic substance. Coal would fit the tylium concept were it not a fossil fuel, which would suggest that life forms existed and died on the celestial bodies where the substance is mined. Perhaps another element from the Periodic Table could be a counterpart of tylium.

Sources

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, or in Caprica City.
Template:Note In the Mini-Series, viewers see a preflight checkout and launch of the fighters. For launch, the launch tube uses a magnetic catapult ("magcat") to hurl the Viper out. On landing, either magnetism or some blend of artificial gravity pulls Vipers to rest on the deck of the flight pod. This force doesn't appear to be very strong; note the bouncing that the fighters do as their landing skids hit the landing deck while they retreat to Galactica as it prepares to Jump from Ragnar Anchorage at the conclusion of the Mini-Series.
Template:Note See Wikipedia's article on Helium-3 and this article] by a private firm on the concept.