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Topic: Favorite Sci-Fi Series (Read 18610 times)
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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I'd rather have a nontrivial number of ships with horrid textures rather than a battle in which only one ship can be seen at once, but boy is it good-looking!
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Chaotic Evil
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B5 is the only choice for everybody. The best Sci-Fi for now and forever ! The eternal champion of TV series !
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Arne
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Yak!
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I've been checking out Doctor Who lately, and being a huge fan of the Borg, the Daleks (and Robomen) and Cybermen naturally appealed to me. The Sontarans are kinda cool aswell.
I wish there was a serie in the same style, ie. 60's-70's designs and hairstyles, but a lot more immersive and epic. Most Doctor Who episodes are just some guys in 3 different sets, and then there's some evil guys/robots pretending to be an army of 1000. In the end the doctor saves the entire world by blowing up a massive invasion fleet (consisting of 1 ship) by some doubtful and too easy method.
I really wish there was some more 'battle of Endor' scale battles, it doesn't matter if it's just silversprayed papermodels as long as it's a massive battle. One of my favourite scenes from StarWars is the M.Falcon swooshing between the battlecruisers. That would be so cool to paraphrase in a retroish manner.
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Baltar
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I'm not sure how you can call Doctor Who anything but 'epic'. Considering the scale of what transpires and the simple fact that he can go ANYWHERE and to ANYTIME....its just mind bogglingly huge. And the show had an enormous (nearly 30 year) run to boot. I'm not sure where you get off saying "Most Doctor Who episodes are just some guys in 3 different sets" as if that was a minus. Have you watched...well...just about any other sci-fi show? The number of environments in a given episode isn't that high for most shows. Taking the series as a whole Doctor Who takes you to waaaaaay more places than any other show ever produced I'd wager.
As far as other shows in that style, I think you might want to check out Blake's 7. Stylistically it is very reminiscent of Doctor Who but is centered around a galactic struggle against an oppressive goverment. Of course, take this with a grain of salt as Iv'e only seen one episode 
Speaking of retro styles I've longed for a Flash Gordon-esque game, series, or movie for a long time....
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Arne
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Yak!
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Flash Gordon approaching! Launch war rocket AJAX! DIIIIIVE!
Yeah as a whole Dr Who is epic, although whimsical. However, all the episodes I've watched have the 'some ppl in a studio claustrophobia'. The fact that other series share that trait doesn't make it more okay. I dislike it wherever I see it. The Alien movies are the only ones that really got away with it I think.
I think Star Trek manages pretty well to make it seem like there's a community on the ship and a living universe around. Andromeda certainly didn't pull this off. I haven't seen B5 (not broadcasted here).
To remove the feeling of claustrophobia you need to show some planet shots, fleet shots, crowd shots, city shots, and establish environments in general. Dr Who never really did this. They just teleport into a cave and spend 40 minutes running around the same passageways, chased by a rubbersuit guy who is eventually defeated by finding the akilles heel, which incidently also destroys an entire invasion (not shown).
Dr Who is also terribly redundant. There's a lot of silver-ish robot/cyborgs, and they're always, always evil. Apparently the guy who (partially) came up with the Daleks got into an arguement with BBC and BBC had to invent new Daleks, which was the Cybermen, which are a paraphrase of the Daleks really.
The same guy went off to do Blakes 7 I think. I haven't seen it though.
But like I said, I like Dr Who cuz of the retro feel and awesome Daleks.
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ar81
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Call me a retro guy.
Space 1999!!! best series ever.
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Baltar
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You know I've been wanting to see that actually. I remember seeing a few odd eps back when the Sci-Fi channel first started, and I remember laughing at how lame it was. Recently I've heard some favorable comments about it, however....
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alatari
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Geeze let's tear each others throats out...
Well the first Star Trek WAS cheesy but it was part of it's charm. There are times when I watch it now and think "Did I actually LIKE this melodramatic, badly written crap?" The same Dum-dm Dum-dm dramatic music in every episode over and over again. The first season of TNG was even worse than the old series and I refused to watch it till it's third year.
All of the Star Trek Genre has been good-feeling-always-end-the-one-hour-episode-conclusively-don't-pay-any-attention-to-real-science crap but it didn't stop me from loyally watching it. Not to mention that everyone looks human (kudos to Farscape) and speaks the same language of English.
One of the measures of good sci fi is to ask yourself "Do they speak the same language? Can they breathe the same air? Are the rules of science being obeyed thoughout the show?"
The first commander of B5 I hated and it seemed the first season was B-movie stuff but it improved steadily unlike Andromeda which started excellent (a whole lot like Blakes 7 thoughout) and sadly deteriorated to Hercules' Ego and Input...
Majel Roddenberry's guest starred on an episode of B5 where she was a psychic representing her dead husband and she stated that her husband would have approved. The way she said it wasn't just in character. It appeared she was giving her approval to the show for her dead husband Gene Roddenberry.
Andromeda was so possibly the best series ever made in science fiction but then what happened to the epic tale? Makes me cry to this day...
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Deus Siddis
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"Not to mention that everyone looks human (kudos to Farscape)"
Indeed, I have seen some many cheesy "humanoids" in various sci-fi series and movies, that the sight of my own homo sapien form in the mirror wells up buckets of repressed pain.
However, I don't see why you think Farscape is any better. I've never watched it, but in the commercials I've seen, there's two normal humans, a blue human, a weird harry human, and a puppet (a bad puppet).
"Andromeda was so possibly the best series ever made in science fiction but then what happened to the epic tale?"
Is that they show with captain jercules, where everybody is armed with flashlights? The ship isn't very cool, either. Only the Enterprise D is uglier.
Seriously though, if you don't what human aliens, then games are your ticket. Most don't use actors and actresses anyway.
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alatari
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You forgot to mention the pilot of Moya which was not humanoid.
And Rigel the puppet was supposed to seem like a muppet because it was Jim Henson's company doing him. There were many guest aliens that were cool and unusual and really...
come on how many sentient species are even going to resemble humans even a little bit? Or that we are the highest evolutionary form in the universe.
Pretty pompous.
Andromeda's first season had some of the coolest sci fi from modern day writers. Any other sci fi series have earth as slave planet, or have cyber-jacked characters, recognize that human biologics are waaaayyyyy to slow to operate a ship (for the most part), allow that human eugenics is very realistic possibility and egads that greed will be limited to the Ferengi and humans will give up on commerce and money... geeze be realistic.
Roddenberry was laughed at by much of his contemporaries for those concepts...
I'm saying that the sci fi in the Star Trek series didn't get to the point of any realism till Enterprise and then they still had to put the technically impossible beaming technology in that early part of humans climb to the stars too...
The amount of energy created by converting one person's mass is so enormously huge that they would be working with eneriges to rival a sun. Otherwise the only other way to transport someone is to deconstruct atom by atom and hope you have the same elements available at the other end to rebuild a human. Then you would need to restart their heart and everyone would wonder if their souls came along. Never covered the missing souls of transporters victums in any ST episode TMK...
Did I say I hated crappy science in my scifi???
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Arne
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For example, the computing-encoding of the entire contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th (the number one followed by 28 zeroes) kilobytes of computer storage capacity. It would take 100 quintillion of the world's best commercially available hard drives "to store the encoded information of just one human being."
Also, "it will take more than 2,400 times the present age of the universe (about 13 billion years) to access this amount of data" from the computers, Davis writes. And "to heat up and dematerialize one human being would require . .. the energy equivalent of 330 one-megaton thermonuclear bombs."
Even though the sun's energy output is small compared to its huge size, it turns out energy on an enormous scale by Earth's standards, some 10 million megatons of energy per second.
In thermonuclear terms, the Sun generates about 90 billion megatons a second.
The Sun's energy output is about equal to 77 billion megatons every second.
Like any furnace, sometimes [the sun is] temperamental, unleashing explosions with the power of a billion one-megaton nuclear bombs,
Well, kinda hard to find consistant information here. Not quite the power of the entire sun anyways, if we are to trust the first quote. Of course you can always say that the energy consumption for a lightbulb is equal to that of the entire sun... for a very short period of time.
Opening a wormhole might require a shitload of energy though (well, depends on the size and duration I guess). This kinda stuff is probably reserved for Type III civilizations.
I wouldn't be surprised if anatomy similar to that of humans is out there. The human configuration makes a lot of sense for this type of environment atleast. If I were to construct something different, I would probably go for a tentacled thing with radar/sonar/magnetic sensory. Tentacles are great cuz the skin is soft enough to grip and feel, and a radar sense could measure distance, something which we need two eyes and lots of experience to do.
It wouldn't take very long for humans to populate the entire galaxy though, or the entire universe. Of course spacetime being kinda tricky, it would seem like ages here on earth, but only a lifetime for the travelers. I read somewhere that any point in the entire universe can be reached within a crew lifetime (using a 1G acc force ship).
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