Your mission for today

[james_davis_nicoll]

Design a starship with 1950s and early 1960s level technology.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Just crib from Flash Gordon.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

You're worried about that, when they left this nugget in there:

"as they approach the point of no return"

What a what now? They've been underway for 50 years. I'm fairly sure they passed that point some time before...

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

See The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet et seq.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me to wonder if the producers of that show are intelligent enough to make it all a fake -- it's actually a fallout shelter.

Yes, I would consider that more intelligent than the stated premise.

(Apparently I am very cynical and bitter today.)

[(Anonymous)]

This is reminding me of that "Alternative Three" pseudo-documentary from the 1970s...

See here: [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alternative+three+documentary]

FWIIW,

TSM_in_Toronto

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

So the premise of the show is that contrary to the moon hoax conspiracy theorists, the US had far better rockets and far better space tech than they ever let on, and there was a huge conspiracy to cover up the fact they they were so very good at putting stuff into space a full 5 years before Apollo got off the ground?

Or else the real secret is that they used Area 51 alien magic wand tech.

And that's just the problem of getting such a ship up off the ground into orbit with 1960-ish rockets. Never mind keeping the humans on board alive for a century of flight time.

Although, if the US really had the power to launch such a mission in 1960 (figuring 3 years to assemble and fuel\supply the starship), then the missile gap definitely never existed.

Given that this is from Syfy, I will read reviews of the first episode before deciding whether to watch it or not.

One last thing:

Helfer played the seductive cylon Six in Syfy’s acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot. Here she’ll play a beautiful, manipulative and dangerous character named “Viondra Denniger,”

So, having played a beautiful, manipulative, and dangerous robot, now she's playing a beautiful, manipulative, and dangerous human. Nah, there's no typecasting going on here.

add to the mission

[redbird]

"and get it into orbit and on its way out of the solar system without anyone noticing."

Specifically, without the Soviets finding out in time to sabotage things, or anyone else finding out and publicizing the launch. (We can handwave the missing persons problem by assuming that Big Government Agency is willing to fake some deaths and blame them on car crashes, house fires that aren't investigated closely enough to show that the house was empty at the time, etc. But you can't use that to hide the launch.)

Alternatively, what are the odds that the writers are clever enough to make this a piece of the plot, that some fraction of the colonists are Communist sleeper agents, either biding their time or spreading propaganda, so the U.S. has actually funded the attempted creation of a workers' paradise in another solar system?

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

A starship that might actually get live people to another star in 100 years? That's... a bit of a challenge. We have only the barest clue *today* how to go about building a self-contained structure that could get live people to a spot it never moved from, 100 years later.

So even "it's all a hoax, it's really a glorified fallout shelter" isn't all that plausible.

"It's secretly an alien zoo ship" would actually be the most believable for me.

But then I'm very far from the target audience.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Dean Drive, of course - John W. Campbell was right, Dean really did develop a reactionless drive, and the CIA used all its resources to discredit the technology to cover up the secret colonisation of the stars.

[avram]

Asbestos insulation everywhere. Also lots of lead paint, which at least provides a bit of extra radiation shielding.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Aha! I knew the premise reminded me of something I'd read - Voyage from Yesteryear by James P. Hogan.

[malada.livejournal.com]

At the bottom of the page:

Update: Syfy orders third Sharknado movie

Enough said.

-m

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the chances are that this will actually look like the ship was launched in '63. I suspect either there will be a bunch of stuff that looks too old, or a bunch of stuff that looks like it came from the '70s or later.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

This being a relativistic universe, the FTL ship is also, of course, a time machine. So they have it because it came back from the future.