How Battlestar Galactica beat Trek babble

[Sabre]

The Register article

Interview No guns firing beams of light. No photon torpedoes. And, sorry, no aliens – menacing or otherwise. The "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica that concluded last year couldn't have been further from its 1970s namesake – or from what most of us think of as sci-fi.

In fact, the science and technology in the award-winning show – the story of survivors of a human civilization fleeing a nuclear holocaust unleashed by machines and now searching for a new home called Earth – couldn't have been more hidden or more familiar in some cases.

What we got was guns firing lead bullets, battleships hurling nuclear missiles at each other, and a space vessel - Galactica - that was more mauled aircraft carrier than sleek ship.

The reason? BSG creator and executive producer Ronald D. Moore ruled that there would be no technobabble - no sciency-sounding words or theories that sci-fi geeks typically feed on.

Moore has written for Star Trek Voyager, and he believed that story development in the series had been hindered by the sort of Roddenberrian nonsense that was used to explain how the original USS Enterprise worked. The result: BSG was barely science fiction - at least to purists.

At the same time, Moore hired a science adviser - Kevin Grazier - who works on NASA Jet Propulsion Labs' Cassini mission to explore Saturn's system, has six university degrees in science and computing to his name, and packs a background in naval aeronautics under his belt. Moore wasn't messing around when it came to getting the "facts" right.

Grazier's job was to help keep the technology and science real and credible - even when there were some massive leaps. Grazier didn't just make sure that there was a reason for what we saw - bullets instead of lasers - but also that when the science bit did break into the open, it was more mind-blowing than the writers could have conceived - such as when the humans discover their mechanical Cylon persecutors have evolved to look human.

Grazier – whose new book The Science of Battlestar Galactica finally puts geeks out of their misery by explaining the "hows", "whys", and "what ifs" – is blunt in explaining BSG's success. BSG, he says, was not a technology show.

What I think is kind of interesting about this article is that they are missing something: While a lot of Star Trek "babble" might seem that way, it has actually lead to a lot of real scientific breakthroughs! Think about the electronic eyes that are enabling people to see and the hollow deck. I think BSG might have aimed too low, but I really should not be presumptuous since I have not watched that show, only read this article.

[Mr Kleen]

BSG was a fantastic show up until the last few episodes (and that horrible, horrible last episode).
This debate is one for the pub.

[complacent]

pretty cool. i like it when creators put a lot of effort into making the whole project credible.