I’ve been a huge science fiction fan since childhood, but one franchise that has oddly not attracted my interest until now is Battlestar Galactica. Specifically, I’m talking about the series that aired from 2003-09.
When that series was ongoing, I tried watching a few episodes but just couldn’t get into it. For some reason, the quasi-documentary nature of how the show was filmed put me off. I also didn’t watch the show from the first episode onward, so each time I sat down and gave it a try, I had no clue who the characters were or what the plot arc was about.
Last night I had nothing to do and discovered Battlestar Galactica was available to me through Hulu. I watched the very first episode, and this time around was gripped.
For those of you who don’t know, Battlestar Galactica is about a space war between humans and their robots, called “Cylons” (SAI-lahns). The technology depicted in the show is much more advanced than our own (i.e. – there are giant spaceships, faster than light travel, and bipedal robots), and the events take place in a different part of our galaxy. The humans are descended from people who came from Earth, but for some reason, Earth’s location has been lost to history. Forty years before the events depicted in the series, the Cylons–who were servant robots–violently revolted against their human masters and flew away in space ships to found their own worlds. During the first episode of the series, the Cylons return for unexplained reasons and stage a massive sneak attack (meaning this is the Second Human-Cylon war) that destroys the human planets and the human space fleet. Of the handful of surviving human space ships, the most powerful is an aircraft carrier called the Battlestar Galactica, commanded by an older man named “Adama.” Disorganized, demoralized and grievously wounded, the remaining humans have to find a way to survive against overwhelming odds.
For reasons I’ll describe in much greater detail in future blog posts, I think the vision of a future where humans explore the galaxy in faster-than-light space ships and still do tasks like flying fighter planes and fixing plumbing leaks with wrenches will never come to pass. So at the most basic level, I think Battlestar Galactica is an inaccurate depiction of what our future might look like. But one thing that really stuck out to me as silly was the use of old-fashioned radar screens on the bridge of the Battlestar Galactica. Here’s a screenshot of the bridge:
And a tight shot of one of the “radar screens” (and yes, before anyone complains, I’m sure they’re actually making use of more advanced sensor technology than solely radar):
There’s a basic problem here: 2-dimensional screen displays are terrible at depicting 3-dimensional space. 2D displays are fine when you’re dealing with 2D environments, such as in naval warfare, where your surface ship is in the middle of a basically flat, featureless plain and uses its radar to locate other surface ships also on the plain. But in space, the ships are free to move in any direction and to approach each other from any vector, making useless any conceptualization of space as being planar, or of there being an “up” or “down.” Trying to “square the circle” by thinking like that will just get you into trouble, particularly if you’re in a fast-paced space battle with a smart enemy that has figured out what your spatial-thinking biases and limitations are (“Battlestar Galactica returns fire fast when we attack it from the front, back, left, and right, but it returns fire slowly and misses a lot when we attack from the top or bottom.”). The time spent looking at a flattened visual depiction of the space around you and then mentally calculating what the elevations and depressions of other ships are and then trying to synthesize it all into some global picture of where everything is and how it’s all moving around will cost you dearly in an actual space battle.
The best approach will instead be to show space ship commanders accurate, 3D representations of their surroundings. I’ve seen this depicted well in other sci-fi. For example, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebel command ship’s bridge had a hologram of the Death Star, which the commanders presumably used for real-time monitoring of that vessel and their own fighters that were attacking it. Using a more zoomed-out view, the Rebel commander could have used holograms to track the progress of the broader space battle and to see the locations of all ships, in 3D space.
Babylon 5 and Ender’s Game also depicted another approach: Making the bridge’s interior one, giant, 360 degree wraparound screen that displayed live video footage from outside the ship.
And Star Trek Deep Space Nine depicted the same visioning capabilities for ship commanders, but delivered via augmented reality glasses instead of wall screens (a smart use of a limited TV show budget).
All of these visioning technologies are hands-down better than using 2D radar screens to try and see what’s happening outside your space ship. And considering the overall level of technology present in the Battlestar Galactica (Faster than light engine? Enough said.), I don’t see why the ship couldn’t have also had one or all of these other devices on its bridge. Maybe someone on the show’s creative team just didn’t think things through enough, maybe they did but didn’t have the budget for anything but small computer screens, or maybe they were deliberately trying to make the ship look old-fashioned (but again, the result is nonsensical).
This silliness gets taken a step farther when Adama announces that he’s taking the Battlestar Galactica to a remote outpost to regroup against the Cylons, and to chart a course there, he unrolls a paper star map on the big table in the middle of the bridge and starts drawing on it with rulers and crayons. Sigh. I realize Adama’s “thing” is that he’s a grizzled old guy who doesn’t like technology, but this is taking it too far. Typing the desired coordinates into the ship’s computer would instantly spit out a more efficient and accurate course than he ever plot using old-time mariner’s tools.
I think that whenever we actually do have space ships of similar size and sophistication to the Battlestar Galactica, their bridges won’t look anything like they do on the TV show. Just for the sake of redundancy, I think there might be small, 2D sensor screens and even paper star maps shoved off to the side somewhere, but they’ll only be used in emergency situations where all the better technology has broken. The notion of a space battle being managed by an old human man who likes to look at screens and draw lines on paper will be laughable. In reality, the ship’s systems–including its weapons systems–would probably be entirely automated, and the best captains and fighter pilots would all be machines. The old guys would die fast.