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On a side-note, does anyone watch Prison Break? Now that's a clever show - lots of plot twists. Mind you I hope they don't spin it out too long, unless they REALLY have good ideas for a third season.
I wish I had Sci-Fi on my cable. I have seen BSG a few times. And really enjoyed it. Not recently however.
But what I still don't get is why are there no BVR weapons in fighter to fighter combat.
Because BVR combat is not as intersting as dogfighting, at least to portray on the screen. It is something i've tried to get around many times myself... trying to make up a believable reason why future space combat would be done very much like gun dogfighting... couldn't come up with a realistic reason. The best i could do was get complete radar stealth, but damn laws of thermodynamics prevented me from achieving thermal stealth. Plus, even if the craft would get to gun range, i couldn't think of a reason why the guns wouldn't be fully automated and just swivel around in their turrets gunning in whichever direction. Ideally for film/tv purposes, it'd be fixed guns forward on the craft with pilot pressing the trigger for firing. But the logic behind that just doesn't exist in year 2205 or whatever.
Because BVR combat is not as intersting as dogfighting, at least to portray on the screen. It is something i've tried to get around many times myself... trying to make up a believable reason why future space combat would be done very much like gun dogfighting... couldn't come up with a realistic reason. The best i could do was get complete radar stealth, but damn laws of thermodynamics prevented me from achieving thermal stealth. Plus, even if the craft would get to gun range, i couldn't think of a reason why the guns wouldn't be fully automated and just swivel around in their turrets gunning in whichever direction. Ideally for film/tv purposes, it'd be fixed guns forward on the craft with pilot pressing the trigger for firing. But the logic behind that just doesn't exist in year 2205 or whatever.
You can purchase (or rent) the first 2 seasons of BSG on DVDs, and download the 3rd season episodes via Apple iTunes store:
The pilot to this series, the biggest budgeted (US$7 million) pilot ever up to that time, was originally released theatrically in Canada, Western Europe and Japan in July 1978 in an edited 125-minute version. (See Saga of a Star World for information on the pilot).
On September 17, 1978, the uncut 148-minute pilot premiered on ABC to spectacular Nielsen Ratings (attracting 65 million viewers). Two-thirds of the way through the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a special report of the signing of the Camp David Accords at the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. After the ceremony, ABC resumed the broadcast at the point where it was interrupted.
In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (the producers of Battlestar Galactica) for plagiarism, claiming it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from their 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot "drones") and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1940's. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 1980 as being "without merit".
As the series progressed, the ratings began to decline, even though the show still consistently won its coveted Sunday evening timeslot. Although each episode had a budget of about $1 million, the show reused so many special effects shots due to budgetary constraints that many critics derided it as "overplayed into tedium."
In mid-April 1979, ABC executives cancelled the still strongly-rated show. Some sources indicate that the million-dollar-per-episode cost led to the show's demise. Others believe that it was a failed attempt by ABC to position its hit comedy Mork & Mindy into a more lucrative timeslot. (The ratings for Mork plummeted far below what they had been for Battlestar Galactica.) The cancellation led to viewer outrage, protests outside ABC studios, and even contributed to the suicide of Eddie Seidel, a 15-year-old boy in Saint Paul, Minnesota who had become obsessed with the program. [1] On May 18, 1979, the theatrical version of the pilot was released in U.S. theaters.
ABC executives have noted that the problem lay not in Galactica, but in the time slot. The four or five shows that filled that slot after the cancellation of Battlestar Galactica never reached the ratings achieved by the series.