Official nBSG Map

[Sionnach Glic]

Ta-da!

It's an interesting set up. Reminds me a bit of Firefly's Versel with a bunch of star systems orbiting around one another.

[Graham Kennedy]

Okay, that is one weird setup.

[Mark]

Thats my new background!

[Foxfyre]

Odd but I think it was a nod to the original series

[Mark]

I've got this as my backdrop on my desktop, so I can try and decipher it........what the fuck? I don't get it.

[Graham Kennedy]

It's a quadruple star system.

You know that things can orbit an object like a star. Well there doesn't have to be a single object that you orbit. From far enough outside you can look at a group of objects as a unified whole and orbit their common center of gravity.

A slightly odder case is that two objects can orbit their own common center of gravity. Imagine two stars a hundred million km apart, of the same size and mass. Their center of gravity would be half way between, and both stars could orbit around that point - essentially orbiting one another.

That's what is happening here. Look at the middle diagram. The two stars at the bottom are orbiting their own mutual center of gravity.

Then off in the distance there's another two stars doing the same thing, orbiting their center of gravity.

The kicker is, if we then zoom out again, we can do the same thing over again - treat each of those pairs as yet another single object, orbiting their common center.

So what you end up with is four stars, all orbiting one another. All four have their own solar system. The distances involved are huge - each pair of stars is about twice as far apart as we are from Pluto, and the two pairs are more than 150 times that distance apart. So if you are standing on any colony the other star in your pair would just be a particularly bright star in the sky, whilst the other pair wouldn't look much different from any other star.

From a story point of view, what it means is that you have no less than four solar systems which, in astronomical terms, are right on top of one another. It lets you have a bunch of inhabitable planets close together without cramming them all into one system.

[Mark]

I always wondered about that. After all, what are the odd that there would be 12 earth like worlds in ONE system?

[Graham Kennedy]

Exactly. Firefly had the same issue, and oh my did the fans argue over it. With 10+ inhabitable worlds I always assumed as a matter of course that they had FTL and the glowy ass end of the Serenity was it's FTL drive. After all without FTL how would you even get to this new system after Earth was "used up"? And yet some lines in the show, especially opening narrations, talked of "we found a new system" or something. They said all sorts of planets and moons were terraformed, but even that is a hell of a stretch and terraforming a world only to dump farmers with horses on it makes no fricken sense.

Somebody sat down and put a lot of thought into that BSG map. The distances are carefully chosen - at 10% c crossing from one star to it's pair is about a week, going between pairs about 18 months. So it's just right that some ships have no FTL and spend their time in one system or going between one pair of stars, and Galactica can spend many years without ever needing to go above sublight... and yet the distance between the pairs is enough that many colonial ships would need FTL to avoid that long trip.

I only wish I'd thought of it!

[Tsukiyumi]

They said all sorts of planets and moons were terraformed, but even that is a hell of a stretch and terraforming a world only to dump farmers with horses on it makes no fricken sense.

Makes perfect sense. You get desperate poor folks to do the work of cultivating and mining and raising livestock that people on the "civilized" planets can exploit. You spend practically nothing on the setup (besides the terraforming, which would need to be done eventually anyways), and any return is a massive profit.

If the people die, there are always more desperate, poor people to take their place.

Sounds familiar from somewhere, but I can't quite place it...

[Graham Kennedy]

Surely doesn't. Terraforming takes huge technology and resources, especially if you want to do it fast. To spend that, only to then create a backwards and primitive society there, and then put your cities on another planet? It would be like the Europeans colonised America with farmers but never built any significant towns or cities there because they already had them in Europe. Only in this case the colonisation effort would be a thousand times more expensive. The show is essentially claiming they paid for the terraforming of a planet with grain exports!

[Deepcrush]

The show is essentially claiming they paid for the terraforming of a planet with grain exports!

The show didn't claim anything that I recall. When they left the Earth that Was, they came to the new region of space and the worlds already terraformed. Why or how or when was never discussed.

[Tsukiyumi]

No, they mentioned that they terraformed them after they arrived, but they did all of them at once.

With limited population to work with, most of the planets then sat empty for generations before they were settled, and the majority of the settlers paid their own way, with whatever equipment they could afford. Thus the horses and shovels, etc. The planets the Alliance colonized directly seem to be highly developed technological metropolis'.

[Graham Kennedy]

The show is essentially claiming they paid for the terraforming of a planet with grain exports!

The show didn't claim anything that I recall. When they left the Earth that Was, they came to the new region of space and the worlds already terraformed. Why or how or when was never discussed.

What they show in River's classroom is that they went to the new system and terraformed the planets when they got there. They didn't say why they did them all, but what they showed was that they spent the money/resources to terraform planets, and oftentimes the return on the investment was that dirt-poor farmers got to live there and grow crops. It's utterly illogical.

With limited population to work with, most of the planets then sat empty for generations before they were settled, and the majority of the settlers paid their own way, with whatever equipment they could afford. Thus the horses and shovels, etc. The planets the Alliance colonized directly seem to be highly developed technological metropolis'.

If there's so little population when they arrive, then it's rather pointless to terraform all those worlds to begin with. Why not terraform one and settle that, then terraform others only when your increasing population requires it?

[Deepcrush]

Maybe they just figured that if they could do it, they should. If they don't have a reason to wait then moving ahead isn't a problem.

[Graham Kennedy]

Govenrments don't tend to spend huge amounts of resources doing things just for the fun of it. And if terraforming whole planets is something so easy to them that they can blow it off as no big deal, then having even the poorest people in society living as we saw becomes even more absurd.

Still a great show, though.