Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
So! In this episode, a Wraith hive knows where Atlantis is. They offer a deal to the Atlantis personnel, and if they don't cooperate, the Wraith will broadcast their location to every hive ship in the galaxy. The deal is to develop a weapon for the hive. Then another hive ship shows up so they cloak the city. Then the two hives fight.
Um...Getting a feeling of deja vu here...I mean...really bad deja vu. This related to the writers strike, you think? It's...*so* recycled.
I didn't like the whole seeing the future bullshit, either.
Well, direct onscreen confirmation - Teyla's preggers.
This ep gives me a chance to bring up something I've been thinking about for awhile. The Atlantis cloak must be more sophisticated than a mere invisibility device. If it simply made the city completely transparent, you would see the shape of the bottom of the city in the water. I mean, Atlantis actually floats, right? From those diagrams in the first season it actually looked like there was a huge spike hanging down under the waterline which wasn't there when they took off in season 3. So, where's the displacement of water? It must be actively projecting an image of plain water. But, even if this were the case, water is unstable - there are waves. They'd pass into the cloak in disappear unless the cloak can detect incoming waves and calculate how to project an image of the wave across the cloaking field.
Edit: I demand more Dr. Zalenka!
Registered: Jul 2005
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
"Um...Getting a feeling of deja vu here..."
Well, you are watching season 2 again, apparently... B)
Registered: Nov 1999
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
Well, yes, I meant 4x08...Dunno why I put 2, maybe I was thinking of Heroes.
Edit: Holy God, I just looked - I've been writing 2x for *every thread so far for a fourth season episode* since 4x02. And nobody noticed till now? ...Geez I feel stupid.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Interestingly, this episode was filmed after Robert Picardo guested at my improv comedy show. No sign of it here, dammit!
But Woolsey reveals that standard procedure for travelling to (and from?) Pegasus includes a day's quarantine at Midway station, a new policy following the events of "Tabula Rasa". We'll se the ramifications of this policy later this season.
Also, was the footage of the two hive ships destroying each other recycled? It's not the first time...
posted
Silly question, but what is the big deal about cloaking the city? Sure it leads them vulnerable if someone has an exact fix on their location, but what's to stop them from moving the city under cloak? There must be a mechanism to hold station, so they should be able to slide sideways a few miles.
Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
Uhhh. Huh. I've never even thought of that. Here I was talking about the waves and the ocean and etc. and it never occurred to me... in fact... hang on...brilliant idea here (I say that with a measure of sarcasm) ... why don't they turn the 'anchor' off at all times? There must be a way to steer the city if it's meant to float; even if not they surely could rig one up using the 'anchor' system and engines (or even using the inertial dampers to change the mass of various areas of the city). So then they could circle the planet's oceans constantly. That would mean any ship coming out of hyperspace suddenly to surprise them without cloak would probably have to scan for a few seconds...they could easily get McKay to write a program to automatically activate the shield when it detected a hyperspace exit.
Of course if they had another ZPM or two, they could keep the cloak active at all times and just keep circling the oceans and never be in any real danger...unless somebody carpet-bombed the planet, I guess, but that's what the shield is for
Registered: Jul 2005
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I'm guessing that the cloak either compensates for the city's footprint and makes it looks like there ISN'T a hole in the water where the city is, or else the enemy simply wouldn't be abel to manually find a hole in the ocean. Planets are pretty big, after all.
Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
Yeah, I know it would take months - what's your point? (That sounds blunt, it wasn't meant to be.)
Well, as I said it must compensate for the hole, I'm just saying I wish they'd address it on-air. I think it would be easy to see the hole if they already knew where Atlantis was (as in the second season when they pretended to have been blown up) - they'd already be looking right at the spot.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
So, it's either shields or cloak. Did they borrow some Klingon engineers when installing that system?
Registered: Jul 2002
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
Well, the shield generator and cloak generator (not Atlantis's specifically; I mean the technology) are really the same thing, but 'inverted' ... shields 'face' outwards and cloaks 'face' inwards. So the generator can only be used for one or the other, and the switchover takes several minutes since apparently the Ancients never thought to incorporate it into their design - Dr. McKay set up the procedures for changing Atlantis's shield to a cloak (or the jumpers' cloaks to shields [although they can't be used in combat...too weak]). It all seems a bit contrived to me, but not implausible.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Is anyone else getting tired of seeing those new Atlantis wall panels? They remind me of a mausoleum or some kind of gothic morgue.
Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Better than the relatively mundance blank walls we've been seeing until now. I'm only confused as to why they didn't upgrade the gatrium while they were at it, since they blew up the whole damn thing last year only to have it rebuilt by the replicators. As it is, we see they've fixed the window that exploded into Wier's face, by replacing the exploded parts with normal glass...
Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
I like the new wall panels. But I like dark colors, low lighting, grays, blacks, very deep blues. I've come to learn more people like bright colors than dark, and more people like bright sunny days (urgh) than dim fuzzy overcast ones, but I like what I like
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I thought McKay had written a program to swap between shield and cloak nearly instantly. As back when they were under Wraith Hive fire they swithced from the shield, and as soon as the main blast of that nuke passed, they switched to cloak.
Surely he would have written a code to switch back from the cloak to the shield?
Registered: Oct 2007
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