Jump to content

For All Mankind (spoilers)


SpaceChampion
 Share

Recommended Posts

I already ranted about season 2 (in the Watched thread, I think). Yes, they did some very good stuff in the end, but for me, it doesn't make up for all the soapy content/ contrived melodrama instead of good drama that came before.

I was close to quitting, but will probably give season 3 a chance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
11 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Just started watching.  Really enjoying it.  I have a silly question… why do people smoke so much on Ronald D. Moore’s shows?

Rebooted BSG, Caprica, For All Mankind, everyone, smokes like bloody chimneys.

Can't speak for the smoking, but you sure are in for a treat. This is right up there as one of the best new shows around. Enjoy. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Can't speak for the smoking, but you sure are in for a treat. This is right up there as one of the best new shows around. Enjoy. 

 

I’m up to mid season 2.  The alt-history is very plausible if a tad too neat for my taste (the further from the change the more different the timeline should be).  At this point the average tech (laptops, cordless phones) seems to be about a Decade ahead of my memories of the mid-80s.

The characters are well drawn and three dimensional.  I do see where the Karen/Danny story is going and that seems pretty overly melodramatic.

I’ll finish this weekend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

No.

 

I didn’t think so.  They’d have had to have new External fuel tanks to have that kind of range.

The characters were much deeper and better realized in the second season.  They felt more one note in the first season.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pathfinder is described as a “nuclear shuttle” but what did it use for propellant?  The reactor is a fine way to power the ship but you still need reaction mass to make the ship go from point A to point B, don’t you?

Edited by Ser Scot A Ellison
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Binged this. Season 1 was fantastic. Season 2 ... had some melodrama problems (KAAAAAAREN!!!! And also Aleida's straight-out-of-a-telenovela story isn't doing it for me) , and the science of it all became increasingly loopy (the idea of the Buran all by itself "blockading" the moon was a trifle silly, space shuttles going to lunar orbit is a big stretch). Fantastic last pair of episodes, though, and gut-wrenching ending:

Spoiler

Bye Bob. :(

On 7/25/2021 at 2:48 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Pathfinder is described as a “nuclear shuttle” but what did it use for propellant?  The reactor is a fine way to power the ship but you still need reaction mass to make the ship go from point A to point B, don’t you?

They reference the NERVA engine, which was a nuclear thermal rocket design that NASA worked on for a couple of decades. The propellant in the NERVA designs and prototypes was liquid hydrogen which would also help to cool the reactor.

Realistically, no way that this shuttle could get from a high-altitude single stage launch all the way to lunar orbit. The show does some real handwaving.

Edited by Ran
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think I'd broadly agree with that. Season 1 is extremely scientifically and technically accurate (though I wish they'd spent some more time explaining how Apollo 11 survived its rough-as-shit landing), so the problems in Season 2 are a lot more glaring. Not to mention unnecessary. They mention upgraded Apollos are still flying, so either they or Sea Dragon-launched vehicles could be used to get to the moon, and Columbia-class shuttles can be used exclusively in Earth orbit, as in reality (Pathfinder being "nuclear-powered" we can give more wriggle-room to, but they could have had it using a Sea Dragon or an upgraded Saturn-style launch vehicle to give it the impetus needed to reach the moon).

The character arcs I think are pretty decent overall, though they do flounder a little with trying to find Karen something to do. They also have a big problem with character ages. Karen and Ed are childhood sweethearts, so presumably the same age, but Joel Kinnaman is half a decade older than Shantel VanSanten and, if anything, looks older (VanSanten is only 36 now, so presumably was 35 when they shot Season 2). We know Ed fought in the Korea War, so they both must have been born in 1930 or so. Them being ~43 in Season 1 was fine, but them being ~53 in Season 2 with zero effort made to make them look that age is pretty silly. Also, Casey W. Johnson who plays Danny is in his early twenties, so the potentially interesting 35-ish-year age-gap between him and Karen doesn't land at all when the difference between the actor ages is around 10 years, maybe a bit more. Ed and Karen will be ~65 in Season 3, so I hope they do try to sell that (although if they do some realistic ageing on them, it could look quite jarring).

Predictions for Season 3:

  • Danny and Kelly will be astronauts (dur). One or both will be Gulf War veterans, assuming the Gulf War has taken place.
  • Aleida will be in a more senior role at NASA and being groomed as Margo's replacement.
  • Ellen is President of the United States or considering a run as a Republican in 1996. Her sexuality will come out and will be her Monica Lewinsky moment.
  • The USSR still exists, but is now taking part as a joint partner in spaceflight missions (or, conversely, it has fallen as in reality and Russia and the USA are cooperating enthusiastically). Margo and Sergei are involved and Margo is releasing classified information to Sergei to be "helpful," but is unaware of how much info is leaking to the Russians, sparking security concerns at NASA leading to her removal (maybe some kind of analogue to Von Braun's fate in Season 1).
  • Ooh, the USSR's collapse is stopped by closer cooperation with economically-booming China, leading to an allied China-Russia space programme in competition with the USA.
  • Jamestown is properly huge by this point, full-scale lunar mining is going on and the operation may be even more international.
  • Molly will have lost some vision, but been saved by new medical advancements.
  • In the alt-timeline, Kurt Cobain will still be alive. If it comes up, it'd be interesting if John Smith was still alive and about to lead a somewhat-more-traditionalist Labour Party to victory in the 1997 UK General Election, with Blair and Brown still being deputies.
  • The Hubble Space Telescope and maybe an earlier-than-in-reality International Space Station will both be up and running.
  • The main storyline is about the first manned mission to Mars (with one of Danny and Kelly as a crewmember, or both). As with the Season 1 finale moment not actually being reached until more than halfway through Season 2, we'll actually backtrack to months before the landing and pick it up there (some reports that Season 3 will start in 1994, rather than 1995 where the Season 2 final shot takes place).
  • Karen and Ed will be divorced, and Karen will have remarried to whatshisface who married Tracy last season.
  • The transition to Season 4 will be Green Day's "American Idiot" and the season will pick up around 2004-05 with the space programme being adversely impacted by the War on Terror.
Edited by Werthead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I enjoyed both seasons but hope they get back to more realistic space travel in Season 3.

Bollocks to that. I want my freakin' warp drives!

p.s. Love this show.

Edited by Spockydog
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Bollocks to that. I want my freakin' warp drives!

p.s. Love this show.

As currently conceived “Warp Drive” would need a significant portion of the lifetime output of a star’s energy to work for a short time.  That means we need to be close to a “Class 2” civilization to make one “Warp Drive” work.  We’ve got a very long way to go.

Edited by Ser Scot A Ellison
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Season 3 will be even vaguer on how things work and that "nuclear drive" will do a lot of heavy lifting handwaving. They've already said that Pathfinder is capable of getting to Mars (!) by itself, which it clearly would not be in real life.

They're clearly not going full BSG and I doubt we'll get FTL, but I assume the endpoint of Season 7 (or 6, since they admitted they basically dropped the story arc for Season 3 and are doing the Season 4 storyline early) will be the launch of the first interstellar ship, or at least probe. That'll still be pretty advanced for the 2020s/2030s though.

ETA: NASA had a feasibility study on sending shuttles to the moon in 1991 and concluded it was 1) possible but 2) pointless. The shuttle would have to carry the EFT all the way into orbit, which is fine, which would then have to be completely refuelled from scratch, as the shuttle would need every ounce of fuel to get into lunar orbit. A major complication is that the shuttle would then need a massive breaking burn on the way back to slow it down to make an orbital insertion at a low enough speed that the shuttle wouldn't just explode the second it hit the atmosphere. The transit times would also be pretty slow (five days there and five days back, as opposed to three with Apollo).

Also a fun fact: the Soviet Buran's rocket boosters were more sophisticated than the shuttles, and didn't even use O-rings and were overall much safer than the US version, so the Challenger problem would have never come up with them.

Edited by Werthead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
On 10/1/2021 at 4:54 PM, Werthead said:

ETA: NASA had a feasibility study on sending shuttles to the moon in 1991 and concluded it was 1) possible but 2) pointless. The shuttle would have to carry the EFT all the way into orbit, which is fine, which would then have to be completely refuelled from scratch, as the shuttle would need every ounce of fuel to get into lunar orbit. A major complication is that the shuttle would then need a massive breaking burn on the way back to slow it down to make an orbital insertion at a low enough speed that the shuttle wouldn't just explode the second it hit the atmosphere. The transit times would also be pretty slow (five days there and five days back, as opposed to three with Apollo).

That's not hugely different from what SpaceX intends with it's Starship / Super Heavy.  The important difference is in the economics and preparation time between launches.  The massive number of people it takes to ready a shuttle for launch, and the many months between launches is the main thing preventing quick refuelling, as a EFT in orbit would boil off hydrogen much quicker than than Starship would boil off methane.  Plus if refuelling one tank from several other tanks, the latter are expended since they have no landing engines.  Just impossibly expensive.

SpaceX intends to loft a fuel depot that it can be filled in days from many tanker Starships, before sending up a crew or cargo Starship to refill and send off to the moon.  Can do it with about 5 tanker Starships for a trip to Mars, but as many as 14 for going to the moon if your payload is about 150 tons.  Less than that eases the fuelling requirements and most likely the first few missions won't be that heavy.  Moon's lack of atmosphere makes it more complex and expensive to get to than Mars.

Infuriating is that the Space Committee in Congress banned NASA from even talking about fuel depots back when they rejected the Obama Admin's original plans for technology development (fuel depots, landers, and a bunch of other necessary things) in favour of the unnecessary white elephant SLS rocket.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...