1x20 – War Crimes

[Citizen]

Well the gravity thing is what I said .

Inertia is still why you'd end up as a sticky mess on the bulkhead, because your body resists the acceleration due to its inertia. Inertia may not be a force but it is the name of an observable effect, an effect that needs to be counteracted in order to prevent people feeling the effects of acceleration.

In order to get the ship up to speed you don't need to generate a gravity well inside to simultaneously accelerate the crew, but the crew needs it other wise they'll feel the acceleration because of their own inertia. The feeling of gravity is also inertia, inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same, so when using a gravitational field you're introducing opposite acceleration to the crew.

A more correct phrase would be Acceleration and Manoeuvre force effect compensator, but what company is going to market that? People know that feeling the effect of acceleration is something to do with this 'inertia' thing, so saying Inertial Dampener, Inertial Compensator whatever gets the point across perfectly. If they used the more correct Acceleration and Manoeuvre force effect compensator as the parts title you wouldn't be falling off the chair laughing, you be blankly staring at the screen trying to work out what the hell they are on about. I promise you if ever there is a discreet part that can stop you feeling g effects from banking turns or fast acceleration it will have a name along the lines of Inertial Dampener or Compensator.
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Here's How It Might Have Been...
If it doesn't work, I probably fixed it...

[PolarSleuth]

Ack! I was wrong.

This is really where we as an undereducated society get into trouble. There are no primary education classes that describe what happens inside a gravity well or even in an artificial gravity well. Relativity is so poorly understood that everyone excepts the elongation of the starship Enterprise as it jumps into warp. It is a cool effect but it is totally wrong. Combine it with the formation of the wormhole in DS9, and the medium has lead many astray.

I think Melinda Snodgrass, writer and script consultant for ST:TNG, explained it best. Paramount was not interested in stories based on real science. They didn't care about how an artificial gravity well might be generated, or the real effects it would have. None of the real terms sounded "tech" enough. The writers were forbidden to use anything that came out of a scientific journal, research grants, or even theories espoused by the great minds of our day. The writers were forbidden to use names found on the periodic table of elements, alloy names, material engineering processes, or even materials then under research. Paramount had so stymied the flow of writing that the writers just began throwing out imaginary terms until the Paramount executives nodded in agreement. The process was so messed up, the later script bibles encouraged writers to add "<techno babble problem>" and "<techno babble explanation>" instead of submitting something that might be rejected.

"Inertial dampeners" is a term that Paramount accepted. The writers and consultants were then left scratching their heads as to what they could do with this obviously bogus term. To Melinda's surprise and dismay, the public accepted the term without reservation or consideration.

Which in the end leads us back to Firefly. I was amazed at all the things that were done right. Oh, they got somethings wrong. But on the whole, they were right more often than any other Sci-Fi show. I think Joss went out of his way to avoid using terms that his consultants couldn't agree to, such as "inertial dampeners." Instead he used terms as if Serenity were a car. He stated how complex she was without pointing out any given part with a name more specific than "grav boot" and typically more generalized along the lines of "catalyzer." And this is where I was wrong.

In his commentary on the Serenity DVD, Joss talked about how homey he wanted Serenity to be. To that end, Serenity wouldn't have any high fluting terms like "inertial dampener" or any of the ones I suggested. Instead it would sound like all the parts before it, as if it came off a high-tech version of the Model T. And I think that was very deliberate in Joss' mind. He wanted both Mal and Serenity to be creatures somehow stuck out of the time in which they were intended. While another ship might have something so complex, Serenity would be stuck with something "mundane." Something along the lines of a "grav rod." And it would react much like a rod in a car. So the scene might be rewritten along the lines:

[cohnee]

I've completly missed this discussion and to be honest (despite currently doing a mech eng degree) it makes my head hurt a little.

I think we can find problems with television shows if we tried hard enough. For me (despite not actually having served myself) it's inaccurate depictions of the military or action in general. For example, Zoe's forward roll in War Crimes and the fact that senior members of the crew always went down in away missions in Star Trek (WHY!?! couldn't they invent a lower ranking chacter who could go first!). More recently in BSG when Starbuck lead the Marine rescue party in 'Bastille Day' (No I haven't yet caught up with S2) I was wondering why? Surely you don't risk one of your few remaining pilots in a high risk hostage rescue mission, blah blah.

There's many more, but in the end it doesn't part because so long as the story is good, Mal could be called Daisy and a pink flora dress for all care.
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[Citizen]

[cohnee]

Ahh well the USMC does do this sort of. All their personnel are trained infantry men (and women) and then they go on to be fighter pilots. The idea is that everyone can pick up a rifle and fight.
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[You]

[A Literate Engineer]

I don't think Zoe having a "forward role" is unusual. She was just a private, after all, and if she's good at being a scout, makes sense to put her there. Especially if you go with the Civil War parallelity-analysis and take into the fact all 1800s army formations had forward skirmishers...

The paragraph's long enough that the sudden realization you said War Stories and I'm thinking of The Message means it won't be erased. Yeah, the forward roll in War Stories is pretty lame.

As for pilots and special forces... your marines have got to get there somehow, so you've got to send a pilot, although yeah, it probably doesn't make the greatest amount of sense for the pilot to stick around. Especially outside of their flying thingy.

That was one of the things I loved about Airwolf. Sure, Stringfellow'd dabble in James Bond nonsense, but when it came down to it, he was pretty much useless outside the helicopter. Unless you wanted a brooding cello player to woo women. But I digress.
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I'm so crazy! Also, I can kill you with my brain.

[Citizen]

Pilots don't fight in Marine roles. They'll be given combat training, after all they may be forced to eject over enemy terrotory, and a pilot is an expensive resource that takes a lot of time to 'create'. The main reason for supplying parachutes and ejection seats in aircraft has little to do with saving the pilots life, and more to do with ensuring you can get them back in order to put them in another plane and send them back up. It's a lot quicker and easier to build a new plane than it is to train a new pilot.

For this reason you simply do not waste valuable resources as 'cannon fodder'. Marine operations are high risk, they're force in readiness and invariably the first force into a combat zone. It makes no military sense whatsoever to put them on the ground with a rifle.

The reason S:AaB did it is because they wanted to show dog fights and ground combat without having too many characters, but it makes no military sense.

I did have the idea of having a similar show, about an interstellar war, but to show different aspects of the conflict you have concurrent 'spin-offs'. So a series from the POV of Marines, and one from the POV of the Navy/Air Force, with the episodes showing the same events from the different POV.
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Here's How It Might Have Been...
If it doesn't work, I probably fixed it...

[cohnee]

SPAM!
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[pizmobeach]

Seems like a pretty lame drug to be schilling for:

Fioricet, a strong, non-narcotic pain reliever and relaxant, is prescribed for the relief of tension headache symptoms caused by muscle contractions in the head, neck, and shoulder area. It combines a sedative barbiturate (butalbital), a non-aspirin pain reliever (acetaminophen), and caffeine.

I must be missing it's abusive, *fun* side.
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[yancy]

no he figured out our weakness! If he posts a long list of SPAM in a little-read thread from months ago, no one will ever suspect that it's SPAM! Because obviously that's part of the discussion of the episode, if it's in the reply thread.
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[fritztheknife]

Just finished reading War Crimes. Again a very good story. As someone said before, you expect Mal to be the one to want revenge and Zoe to be the one to shrug it off. So Zoe shooting the guy in the end was a nice plot twist.
I also liked River's crazyness. Specially the way she crept up behind Mal in the beginning. That is her way.
Jayne and Wash's humour come through in a good way.

I don't really mind about the inertial damperners term. As long as it is clear that something is wrong with Serenity, that it endangers the crew and that it needs to get fixed.

All in all again a story that stayed close to the characters, their language and the overall feel of the series.

Well done!
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"Do you see the man hanging out from the spaceship with the really big gun?"

Mal - Safe

[Mengstrom]

Thanks for the nice comments!