Last month (which does rather imply that I actually get these out monthly), we said that for Tech Blog 9, we’d be going to our boards. Let’s get to it:

Question: What are those little ration bars the crew is eating in the miniseries?

With space, or the lack of it, being what it is on a battlestar, the ration bars -- or MRCs (meals ready to consume) -- were developed. They are compact, full of vitamins and nutrients, but not particularly known as pleasing to the palette -- quite the opposite, in fact. To elaborate upon this, among the cultures of the 12 Colonies, Capricans are known to be the least picky about their food, and will eat almost anything. The taste of MRCs is so widely-loathed that men and women of the Fleet insist that MRC stands for "Meals Rejected by Capricans".

Since the destruction of the 12 Colonies, humans have found methods for the continued production of MRCs, using the most widely-available source of proteins and nutrients…

OMG! MRCs are PEOPLE!


Question: I also have a food question. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote a simple outline for achieving spaceflight and colonizing space.

Sadly, nobody in the Colonial Fleet reads Russian.

One of those steps was establishing spacebased (on ships, or on colonies) food production and severing dependence on food supply from Earth.

I see we are at cross-purposes. The Colonials would LIKE a food supply from Earth (if, for no other reason, see previous topic re: MRCs).

This problem is a recognized priority of NASA and its international counterparts. Knowing what we know today about hydroponics, if the colonials have solved most of their energy problems (except Tylium), shouldn't the colonials be able to mine all the volatiles they need to conduct food producton anywhere they have sufficient space and materials? Shouldn't this be a way of life for them? Granted, much of their way of life was destroyed - few gardners left, no seed=no food.

Now WHY would you want to go through all that trouble, when the Fleet can grow scads of yummy and nutritious algae?


Question: 1 [sic] thing i wood [sic] like to know will we see any of the old vipers like the mk3. AND DUS [sic] ANY 1 [sic] HAVE some blueprints of the viper new or old as i need tham [sic] for a kit i have.

Iz th@ suppozd 2 b english?


Question: Why does the Galactica have a 'ribbed' appearance?

For HER pleasure.


Question: Assume you have the Battlestar Galactica jump drive technology, and assume what you need to about it. Could you then relatively easily design a method of time travel to the past?

Given that kind of latitude, I will assume "yes".


Question: What would happen if you accelerate to 0.99C and then hit the jump drive?

Then you’d NEED to have developed that time travel jump technology, because you’d be nine years older than dirt by the time you got to speed. Have you have any idea how long it would take to accelerate a battlestar to 0.99c with the sublight engines alone? See last month’s Tech Blog regarding back-of-the-envelope calculations; see also this link.


Question: Was Boomer's shutdown of the Cylon task force a feat of luck or a one-time opportunity?

"Both" would be a possible answer here. It’s certainly not either/or.


Question: One would think that a society with so much technology, that employs computer viruses as an offensive weapon, would have had the foresight to install an anti-virus system on their own hardware to prevent such an attack.

Perhaps they did, however…

Between Operation Desert Storm and the ongoing war in Iraq, it was discovered that, contrary to several UN Resolutions, Russia had sold GPS jammers to Iraq, presumably to deny the US military the tactical use of GPS. These GPS jammers were subsequently destroyed by GPS-guided munitions. So the moral of that story is that sometimes, especially in battle, the best laid plans of mice and Cylons...

Question: How does artificial gravity work on Battlestar Galactica?

If I knew that, I’d have a date in Stockholm.


Question: If a Colonial ship ever loses power, should everyone go flying?

Not if everybody stands really still.


Question: Given that the Colonials have artificial gravity, should we expect they have artificial anti-gravity too?)

Is there such a thing as natural anti-gravity?


Happy Aerilon Fool’s Day!

Obviously, this month I was given the latitude to answer questions in the spirit of the season. While those that I answered WERE, in fact, submitted to the Tech Blog, they were not recent, and all date back to the Tech Blog’s previous online home. I hope everybody who was an object of this month’s levity have a sense of humor — especially since, in some cases, I did in fact answer their questions. For Tech Blog 10, we provide less tongue-in-cheek answers for questions more recently submitted to our CinemaSpy forum.