Shepard is showing Ronon how to surf when an ominous fin appears... cue the Jaws music and cut to commercial.
Return from commercial: Ronon and Shepard are running through the woods. Ronon is griping about the fact his gun isn't waterproof and he had to leave it on the beach when he swam out to help fight off the shark-thing.
Flashback:
Which turns out to be the cherished pet of some very angry mermaids (with legs, webbed toes, etc: the results of a breeding experiment to shield humans from the Wraith), with very sharp tridents and an amazing ability to hold grudges...
End Flashback.
And at that moment they fall into a concealed tiger trap, set by furry forest dwellers to capture aggressive mermaids.
And the hits just keep on coming... 43 minutes of hair-raising dodging and weaving, punctuated with the odd thirty seconds of gasping for breath.
Ronon gets his gun back, they activate the StarGate and jump through, followed by several of those very sharp tridents.
When asked how the vacation went, Ronon and Shepard look at each other. Shepard says "It was fine. Sun, Sand, some surfing. What's not to like?"
Ronon grunts, "yeah, fine".
What about those tridents?
Shepard: "Oh, just a misunderstanding".
END
My biggest problem with Brain Storm was, literally, the storm. I'll give the writers a pass on the 'shipping, and assume that they were a little pissed at Atlantis only lasting half as long as SG1 did.
But honestly, the science here was whacko. Matter Bridges are fine, no problem there. Alternate Universes? A sure thing, from my point of view.
It's the idea that a sudden release of a tiny amount of cold air would create a tornado. That's infantile in it's stupidity.
If you're going to venture into technobabble territory, STAY there.
Don't stray back into the realm of normal physics and then mess it up, it makes you look stupid, and demeans all Science Fiction in the process.
Deserts get very cold at night, and you'll never see tornadoes then... the only time you WILL see a dust devil is during the heat of the day.
And when the containment field goes down, you see a rush of air whooshing upward. Uh, no. Cold air doesn't rise. It just sits there.
IF the cold spot was at absolute zero, you'd see air moving DOWN toward the cold spot as the warmer air outside cooled. But there wouldn't be any great speed to that process.
To put this in perspective: the Vehicle Assembly Building NASA uses is actually big enough to have it's own weather. I understand it occasionally rains indoors. No tornadoes though.
Now the VAB is LARGE. Many times larger than the desert facility.
So, no, just having cool 32 degree air in that tiny volume would NOT create any change in the weather.
If the writers just HAD to have tornadoes, they could have said the matter bridge was malfunctioning and creating exotic particle feedback.
The idea of vacuum energy does hold for this. Virtual particles are supposed to form and decay constantly. If that balance was altered even in the slightest amount, the field created by the matter bridge could create ionizing particles in the atmosphere above the heat sink.
Harmless to humans. But quite capable of causing a storm to form if there was enough moisture, dust and heat energy in the air mass.
The ionized particles would cause water droplets to condense. Add in some more technobabble about the heat sink's effects propagating straight upward and you've got your storm.
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Alien Jellyfish
Date: 2009-04-25 06:47 pm (UTC)Shepard is showing Ronon how to surf when an ominous fin appears... cue the Jaws music and cut to commercial.
Return from commercial: Ronon and Shepard are running through the woods. Ronon is griping about the fact his gun isn't waterproof and he had to leave it on the beach when he swam out to help fight off the shark-thing.
Flashback:
Which turns out to be the cherished pet of some very angry mermaids (with legs, webbed toes, etc: the results of a breeding experiment to shield humans from the Wraith), with very sharp tridents and an amazing ability to hold grudges...
End Flashback.
And at that moment they fall into a concealed tiger trap, set by furry forest dwellers to capture aggressive mermaids.
And the hits just keep on coming... 43 minutes of hair-raising dodging and weaving, punctuated with the odd thirty seconds of gasping for breath.
Ronon gets his gun back, they activate the StarGate and jump through, followed by several of those very sharp tridents.
When asked how the vacation went, Ronon and Shepard look at each other. Shepard says "It was fine. Sun, Sand, some surfing. What's not to like?"
Ronon grunts, "yeah, fine".
What about those tridents?
Shepard: "Oh, just a misunderstanding".
END
My biggest problem with Brain Storm was, literally, the storm. I'll give the writers a pass on the 'shipping, and assume that they were a little pissed at Atlantis only lasting half as long as SG1 did.
But honestly, the science here was whacko. Matter Bridges are fine, no problem there. Alternate Universes? A sure thing, from my point of view.
It's the idea that a sudden release of a tiny amount of cold air would create a tornado. That's infantile in it's stupidity.
If you're going to venture into technobabble territory, STAY there.
Don't stray back into the realm of normal physics and then mess it up, it makes you look stupid, and demeans all Science Fiction in the process.
Deserts get very cold at night, and you'll never see tornadoes then... the only time you WILL see a dust devil is during the heat of the day.
And when the containment field goes down, you see a rush of air whooshing upward. Uh, no. Cold air doesn't rise. It just sits there.
IF the cold spot was at absolute zero, you'd see air moving DOWN toward the cold spot as the warmer air outside cooled. But there wouldn't be any great speed to that process.
To put this in perspective: the Vehicle Assembly Building NASA uses is actually big enough to have it's own weather. I understand it occasionally rains indoors. No tornadoes though.
Now the VAB is LARGE. Many times larger than the desert facility.
So, no, just having cool 32 degree air in that tiny volume would NOT create any change in the weather.
If the writers just HAD to have tornadoes, they could have said the matter bridge was malfunctioning and creating exotic particle feedback.
The idea of vacuum energy does hold for this. Virtual particles are supposed to form and decay constantly. If that balance was altered even in the slightest amount, the field created by the matter bridge could create ionizing particles in the atmosphere above the heat sink.
Harmless to humans. But quite capable of causing a storm to form if there was enough moisture, dust and heat energy in the air mass.
The ionized particles would cause water droplets to condense. Add in some more technobabble about the heat sink's effects propagating straight upward and you've got your storm.