In animals (not surprising that it would be forgotten) Servalan is interested in Bucol 2 because of a very fast ship leaving it. think that's the only specific mention, but it's the Phaser principle: if something is usual, you don't talk about it much.
Blake's 7 on Blu-ray!
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Tarrant was supposed to be a lot older than Pacey (the character started out as the Captain, intended for an actor in his fifties), so as he put it, "I did a silly older voice. Now I am the right age, but I have to sound like I thought I would back then."Paging Stephen Pacey, paging Stephen pacey
He sounds like the put on voice used by Tarrant in Gold.
then again Gareth Thomas didn't sound himself either but was recognizable and there were times when the old Blake voice would come through.
Paul Darrow was himself to the end and I really can't remember how Michael Keating sounded.
The point is that since it never had any subsequent plot relevance, the sacrifice that was made to get the drive feels pointless, which exacerbates what a bad episode "Stardrive" already is. They could've omitted the episode entirely and, aside from needing to rewrite one or two sentences, nothing else would've changed.
After all, in the earlier seasons, the Liberator was often running from pursuit ships, but once they had Xenon Base, that became less of a story dynamic, except in "Stardrive" itself. Generally they were already at a destination planet, or on Xenon Base, or moving from one to the other without being pursued, or rendezvousing with ships that had normal propulsion capability.
Really, it was rather artificial how, after taking away all the Liberator's advantages in "Terminal," they contrived to give the characters back their own ship, teleporter, talking computer, and high-speed stardrive before very long at all. So the fact that the high-speed drive wasn't really necessary to the subsequent stories after all makes it feel more gratuitous that they devoted a whole (stupid, campy, unpleasant) episode to acquiring it. It might've been nice to leave them stuck with a slower ship and actually use that fact in the stories. After all, they gained the advantage of a permanent base, so it would've been a reasonable balance to take away the advantage of high speed.
It was an irritation in 81.
As for speed of plot... yep, in Terminal Zen says how long it will take to reach the nearest planet, yet Scorpio reaches Xenon a lot sooner.
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‘When Star Wars came out, one of our directors was close to tears’: how we made Blake’s 7
‘I thought I’d be rushing around doing stunts. But instead, it was all about my tight, sexy outfits. After three episodes, I was thinking, “I hate this big hair!”’
www.theguardian.com
I've watched Orbit a lot of times, in fact as a kid I completely missed that Avon was going to kill Vila, until the VHS copies came out I'd convinced myself that he knew all along how to get them out of it. If there is hesitation there it's brief.
I actually don't have a major issue with Dr Plaxton, as Avon says, she's dead either way. It is different when it's possibly the closest thing he has to a friend since Blake and Cally left/died.
That's one reading of Hostage, it might even be what the writer intended, but it's shaky logic. Even setting aside the fact that Liberator has tangled with three Pursuit Ships many times, is the fact that those ships are several hours away. This isn't a drama where there's only one way into town, Liberator could head off in a million different directions and evade those ships. Admittedly only my head cannon, but I think the pursuit ships were the excuse he needed to stay.
Orac could have said "You and Vila weight approximately seventy kilos" he didn't, he identified Vila, but then Orac's always had it in for Vila, see him drop him in the shit in Moloch for example!
You beat me to it.
I think there are some other moments that, if not explicit, can be implied. Tarrant's escape from Bucol 2 relies presumably on Scorpio being real fast, similarly they escape interceptors in Headhunter and, bit of a stretch I know, but Zukan says the raw materials that need to be brought from Betafarl degrade very quickly and Avon says that won't be a problem.
As you say it isn't like Liberator was going flat out most of the time.
But they hadn't destroyed Liberator with the narrative intent of setting up Series D with a back to basics approach, they destroyed Liberator because they firmly believed Terminal was the last episode.
Once they knew they were making Series D they had to contrive the crew getting back many of the advantages they'd had. Teleport was the most important, if only for ease of storytelling, but if they had a rust-bucket it needed some kind of edge. I don't see having a base as much of an advantage at all, quite the reverse as it pins them to a single location, and what use is having a base to run back to if you can't get there because you can't outrun the bad guys?
They do at least make them work for their advantages rather than handing everything to them on a plate.
There's a big dollop of nostalgia involved but Stardrive's a bit of a guilty pleasure, terrible but with some wonderful bits. Camp is, after all, a big part of what makes Blakes 7, Blakes 7 after all, at least for those of us who've been fans a long time.
Yeah, but Paul Darrow makes the most of that moment. It's clear he's wrestling with it.
The problem is that it has no later relevance, so it feels gratuitously mean-spirited to write the story that way to begin with. Also that everyone is out of character. In Series C, despite Darrow becoming the top-billed character, it was crystal-clear that Avon was not in charge; the crew debated every decision and Avon was frequently outvoted. But "Stardrive" was written as if Avon were an absolute martinet and the others just meekly did what he told them even if they disagreed.
Plus it's got space bikers in clown makeup and gigantic mohawks. It's at Lost in Space season 2 levels of camp.
It's not "one reading," it's explicitly stated in dialogue. I gave you a link to the transcript, but if you can't be bothered to read it yourself, here are the relevant parts:
AVON: Can you plot courses to keep out of the range of any known spaceship manned by the Federation?
ORAC: The battle and navigation computers can handle that perfectly adequately.
AVON: I asked if YOU could.
ORAC: Of course, should it be necessary.
AVON: Failing that, we are powerful enough to resist all but an attack by three Federation pursuit ships at once.
...
AVON: Therefore I do not need Blake, I do not need any of the others ...
ORAC: Is that a question?
AVON: ... I do not need anybody at all.
Then later:
AVON: How many pursuit ships in Flotilla Thirteen?
ZEN: Three pursuit ships.
[Avon laughs]
With a crew. Avon's question is if Zen and Orac can do it without a crew. That's the whole point, that he needs a crew to evade three ships.
Maybe, but you're still wrong to say he didn't want to be alone with Zen and Orac. That's your own speculation with zero basis in the actual dialogue.
I assume you mean "each weigh," because together they'd obviously mass at least twice that.
Vila is a bit shorter than Avon, though, so it stands to reason that he's closer to 70 kg than Avon is. Orac's answer can be sufficiently explained as simple computer literalism.
Orac treats everyone with equal contempt, except Avon, perhaps.
Although I found it interesting how often in Series D Orac told the others that they should figure out a problem for themselves using the information available to them. Superficially, that could've been just his usual "Don't bother me with your petty problems, I have my own priorities" attitude, but sometimes it almost feels like a teacher challenging his pupils to exercise and improve their own mental skills.
Minor issues. My point is that if "Stardrive" had never been made, the other episodes would've been pretty much unchanged with at most a couple of lines changed here and there.
As for the "Warlord" example, I've already mentioned that there are plenty of instances of supposedly slow Federation ships making journeys as fast as or faster than the Liberator. Like Servalan and Travis beating the Liberator to Ensor's planet in "Orac" even though the Liberator had a headstart. It's pointless to cite "evidence" about ships' relative speed in a universe where everything travels at the speed of plot.
I'm not so sure about that, since Scorpio could land on planets when the Liberator couldn't. There are several instances throughout the season of the ship touching down instead of teleport being used. The main reason Star Trek had the transporter was because it was deemed too expensive to shoot FX footage of the Enterprise or a shuttlecraft landing on different planets. Obviously B7's early seasons would've had trouble with that too even if the Liberator had been a landing-capable design. But Series D was a quantum leap in the quality of the miniature FX, and sequences of Scorpio landing and taking off wouldn't have been much more difficult than the other impressive miniature sequences they shot.
Naturally some of the stories would've had to be written differently without teleporters, but that's what could've made it an interesting challenge both for the writers and the characters to learn to get by without the usual advantages of teleportation.
Although I don't mind the teleporter thing too much, really, because at least "Rescue" established that Dorian had a prior interest in the Liberator crew and had specifically sought them out. So it made sense that he'd want to replicate their teleport capability. It would've been far more contrived if they'd just run into someone with a teleporter by sheer coincidence.
If you think about it, though, Scorpio is basically the Millennium Falcon with the proportions of a Star Destroyer. The Falcon had certain advantages, but it didn't need a teleporter.
Everything has both advantages and disadvantages. The point is that they'd be different advantages and disadvantages, which would allow for fresher storytelling. I'm looking at this from a writer's perspective, and a viewer's perspective. Trying something different would've been interesting. And to a writer, creating difficulties and problems for the characters is the whole point.
Of course, having a permanent base had obvious advantages to the production crew, because it meant they could do bottle episodes on the standing sets.
I'm surprised to hear that, because the impression I always had is that it was appreciated for being darker and more serious than its contemporaries. The campy episodes feel like a regression to the mean of the period's SFTV, falling short of what the series aspired to be.
Struck me with Mission to Destiny they need to get the doo-hickey to Destiny right smart and the Liberate trundles along at standard by by 6.
Thought maybe that was the most efficient speed to get there in decent time with out draining power reserves too badly.
Sure there was at least one other episode where they didn't exactly hurry but needed to.
That said even with the Liberator's speed there were some long flight times such as in Breakdown.
My 'Behind the Scenes' book comes with a partial cutaway of the Scorpio, and, while no dimensions are given, based on the proportions, this ship is no bigger than a World War II picket destroyer or a regular destroyer, with most of the ship taken up by engineering, storage, and Slave's computer core. Vila was right in 'Rescue' when he said only the flight deck was pressurized during flight, there's no other habitable space onboard the ship.
Yeah I'd never imagined Scorpio was that big really, and I'd always imagined most of it would be cargo holds.
I wonder if some internal corridors can be pressurised because Avon and Tarrant reach the main drive section ok in Stardrive? Unless the engines are right behind the flight deck of course.
Yeah it is odd because we know if can go way faster than Standard by 6. Maybe it puts too much strain on the engines but they never explicitly say that.
Think standard by 10 was the Liberator's maximum given in Harvest of Kairos (or maybe it was 12 - it's not an episode with high repeat viewing value).
I think every section can be pressurized if it needs to be. They just normally aren't during spaceflight, I suppose to conserve air. Also perhaps as meteorite shielding, since if an evacuated section is hulled, there's no air to transmit the shock and heat of the impact to the rest of the ship, so the damage is minimized.
It was 12.
Speed
Speed was occasionally an issue during the travels of the Liberator and Scorpio. Travel between star systems was a routine fact of life for most of the cultures Blake and his followers encountered. The vast majority of starships employed some variety of FTL (faster-than-light) drive, for example...
Don't know how accurate but I definitely have Standard by 12 in my head
Just checked, in Hostage they increase speed to standard by 12. There's an oblique reference to them losing control if they hit standard by 20 in Breakdown, but that's not necessarily them hitting 20 under their own power because they're being affected by the gravity spiral.
confirmed from Harvest of Kairos when Avon uses the sopron and Zen reports a craft as capable of standard by 12.2.
That pretty much confirms it then
When I was looking around last night I did see someone who'd tried to do the maths with regard to correlating Standard By and Time Distort but I don't think there are many examples where standard by and TD are used at the same time, usually when Liberator is in combat with pursuit ships who have personality Feds on board (or at least Federation personal with speaking roles! Hence Duel and Hostage.
Based on the very scant information this suggests that while Scorpio may be faster than most other ships it probably isn't Liberator fast, but there isn't really enough information to be certain and as has been said ships in B7, like Trek et al, tend to move at the speed of plot. I think there was some internal consistency at least, you never got something stupid like Liberator doing standard by 50 or Scorpio doing TD 300 or anything like that.
Talking of Scorpio it always surprised me a little just what poor condition it's in. I don't have a problem with Dorian choosing a relatively inconspicuous kind of ship, and whether the salvage man cover is just for our heroes' benefit or something he uses all the time it would make sense for a man who clearly doesn't want to arouse anyone's curiosity, but given he was working on teleport, built the base, the guns and Slave, it seems odd that he didn't imbue his rickety old planet hopper with some tricks up its sleeve in terms of its speed and armament.
Again maybe he didn't want to be boarded and have the Federation ask questions about his super engines, but if he's that worried why have an advanced flight computer, impressive guns and a teleport bay? (and even if you don't know what it is you'd realise it wasn't standard.)
But also, even if you are trying to avoid being noticed, you could at least keep the ship running. Scorpio seems to be on its last legs and, as we'll discover, it's already using its backup precision guidance system?
Was Dorian too busy working on the teleport and/or indulging all those vices to do a bit of routine maintenance?
One other thought about Dorian, clearly in Rescue he expected to find Liberator in orbit of Terminal, so I wonder what his original plan was
Again maybe he didn't want to be boarded and have the Federation ask questions about his super engines, but if he's that worried why have an advanced flight computer, impressive guns and a teleport bay? (and even if you don't know what it is you'd realise it wasn't standard.)
But also, even if you are trying to avoid being noticed, you could at least keep the ship running. Scorpio seems to be on its last legs and, as we'll discover, it's already using its backup precision guidance system?
Was Dorian too busy working on the teleport and/or indulging all those vices to do a bit of routine maintenance?
One other thought about Dorian, clearly in Rescue he expected to find Liberator in orbit of Terminal, so I wonder what his original plan was
for luring the crew back to Xenon and down into the basement?
Looking over the transcript, there's no indication of Scorpio having any problems in the first three episodes, aside from a temporary communications malfunction in the teleport transceiver bracelets, which are part of a recently installed system, and the thing you mentioned about using the backup guidance system at the beginning of "Stardrive." Then the ship is badly damaged in the asteroid impact in "Stardrive." Perhaps its later problems are the aftereffects of that damage and the subsequent battle damage, which the new crew would not have been able to repair as completely as Dorian could.
Maybe the primary precision guidance system was offline because Dorian cannibalized some of its parts for the teleporter and hadn't gotten around to replacing them yet.
Is Slave really all that advanced? Sure, he's programmed with a groveling personality, but that's just superficial; you can easily program a present-day game character or chatbot to simulate a personality, without any actual thought or intelligence behind it. It reveals nothing about the computer's actual complexity or power. Talking computers were uncommon in the B7 universe, but Gambit from "Games" was capable of it, and that was a conventional computer that Belkov had customized heavily over the years for his recreational purposes. The Federation judgment computer in "Trial" had a voice, though the one in Blake's trial in "The Way Back" did not. Either way, though, if they were capable of deciding guilt or innocence in criminal cases, it stands to reason that they had some capacity for understanding abstract concepts and making judgments based on ambiguous data. So they'd have to be pretty advanced AIs even without voices.
Looking over the transcripts, I can't find any instances of Slave doing anything particularly impressive. Aside from the obsequious groveling and apologizing, it didn't do much of anything beyond reporting sensor readings and ship status, computing courses on request, and announcing incoming communications. Indeed, Slave made a point of declaring that thought and judgment were beyond its "humble capabilities." The one time it made anything resembling a creative suggestion was in "Stardrive" when it said it couldn't raise the force wall around the whole ship as requested, but could create a bubble around the breached section. The only time it showed initiative was in "Blake" when it sounded the alert to get the crew's attention after Orac told it to be silent.
Also, the clip guns don't really seem that advanced per se; what Dayna finds so impressive is the range of different interchangeable ammo types they have, though that rarely comes up over the season. It's a neat trick, but it doesn't strike me as requiring a huge level of technological advancement. True, Dayna said she never quite got it right when she tried to build one, but she came close. It seems like it's more a matter of precision than advancement, figuring out how to integrate so many different, known ammo types into a single weapon that could handle all of them. The difference between Dayna and Dorian may simply have been that Dorian had a hell of a lot more time to work out the bugs.
The idea behind the clip guns in real life, of course, was simply to create gun props that were easier to work with than the Liberator wand weapon props that had to be plugged into the battery belts to light up. So they come up with simple, non-powered props where the "advanced" gimmick is that you can swap out the ammo clips, making them far simpler to build and use. (Although it always seemed to me that the actors had a hard time inserting them into those weird metal holsters, which were also way too noisy.) They had Dayna extol their advancement in dialogue to cover for the fact that they were so much more basic in real life.
be all friendly and ask them to come down for a drink? Simple often works best.
Perhaps a bigger question how would Dorian know the Liberator was going to Terminal?
